Saturday, August 13, 2011

A Steinbeck Summer

Each summer, I try to read a classic novel that I’ve never gotten around to reading. This year, I decided on The Grapes of Wrath. I’ve always considered myself a big fan of John Steinbeck, but I decided that I could no longer make such a claim without reading his most famous book. Now it’s true that the best-known chronicle of life in the Great Depression doesn’t exactly make for typical beach-reading. But then again, the summer of 2011 is not your typical summer.

Our government leaders point fingers at one another while millions of workers search for jobs. Our retirement accounts sit in peril while the Dow Jones industrial average loops up and down like a Six Flags roller coaster. Foreclosed homes and defaulted mortgages pile up like stacks of broken beach chairs and umbrellas beside a garbage can in the sand. Vital programs created to help those in need are tossed aside like old paperbacks, while tax incentives to help the wealthy are preserved like Kindles inside tight leather covers.

It’s a summer that sounds and looks a lot like the America depicted in John Steinbeck’s novel. Steinbeck writes of giant farms that grossly underpay migrant workers, of banks that corrupt our economy out of greed, and – most importantly – of individuals who somehow survive all of this by constantly helping one another, even when that help puts their own lives at risk. More than 70 years after Steinbeck’s novel, it’s very easy to find Americans pointing fingers at one another in 2011. What’s much harder is finding leaders like Ma Joad, Tom Joad and Jim Casy, who lived and worked with an eye toward equality, brotherhood and fairness.

The economic, social and political connections can clearly be made between The Grapes of Wrath and this American summer. Yet, as I read this novel, I also found myself making a personal connection of a different sort. Throughout the book, there is a constant contrast between the visual beauty of the American land and the appalling sight of struggle and suffering. As difficult as it can be to read of death and destruction in the midst of economic peril, Steinbeck makes sure we also know that this country has not lost its aesthetic beauty. Not by a long shot.

“The spring,” he writes, “is beautiful in California. Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea. Then the first tendrils of the grapes, swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks. The full green hills are round and soft as breasts. And on the level vegetable lands are the mile-long rows of pale green lettuce and the spindly little cauliflowers, the gray-green unearthly artichoke plants. And then the leaves break out on the trees, and the petals drop from the fruit trees and carpet the earth with pink and white. The centers of the blossoms swell and grow and color: cherries and apples, peaches and pears, figs which close the flower in the fruit. All California quickens with produce, and the fruit grows heavy, and the limbs bend gradually under the fruit …”

As I read this novel, I sat in a beach chair overlooking a shimmering ocean, dotted by white sailboats, gray dolphins and foamy waves. Later on, while walking the beach with my family one evening, white ghost crabs popped out of little holes in the sand all around us. As my wife and I took a friend out for a kayak ride a few days later, we watched migratory birds fly above us to the comfort of marshland, and we felt the refreshing kiss of water on our hands and feet.

It’s the time of year in which many of us take more time than usual to notice the astounding beauty of whatever slice of America we call home for the summer, or for the week. We walk beneath the lamplights on a cobblestone street, or watch the half-moon as it glistens off the waves, or feel the caress of a mid-August breeze while licking our soft-serve cone. Wherever we are in America, that beauty is always around us, with the same kind of mystical comfort present in Tom Joad’s promise to forever be with his mom in the final pages of The Grapes of Wrath: “I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look.”

In the 72 years since John Steinbeck published his most famous novel, there has been no solution to the differing agendas of rich and poor Americans. That is most definitely a work in progress. But those words Steinbeck shared with us about the American pastoral still ring true as we look out upon the countryside, the seascape, and the rolling hills of 21st-century America. If we could all find a way to work together as effectively as this natural world does, we might just make it through. All of us. Your land; my land: you and me.

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