Seattlest Book Club: The Worst Hard Time
Seattlest has been through our fair share of earthquakes, and while Jonathan Raban's book Surveillance gave us a quivering reminder of the Nisqually quake, we understood the optimism inherent in his ending. Seattle is still there; shaken, likely forever changed, but still there. We know quakes can be insanely devastating, but they don't scare us nearly as much as what we discovered in grad school in central Illinois: tornadoes and wind storms. The first time we set foot in the plains outside Champaign-Urbana, we were gripped with a paralyzing terror that we would simply float up off the planet, untethered by mountains, water...hell, even a small hill would have helped. Our brain would conjure far-off mountain ranges from cloud formations, and we would engage in the explicit delusion that they were indeed there, comforting us with their solidity, mass, and means of escaping the never ending flatness. We lasted a mere three and a half years there, and ran screaming back to the West Coast.
The first few sentences of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time:The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl brought the terror of our Midwestern stint back with alarming clarity:
On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there. It scares them because the land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in its immensity. It scares them because they feel lost, with nothing to cling to, disoriented. Not a tree, anywhere. Not a slice of shade. Not a river dancing away, life in its blood. Not a bump of high ground to break the horizon, give some perspective, spell the monotone of flatness. It scares them because they wonder what is next.
That one paragraph scared the shit out of Seattlest. More than any horror tome could ever achieve. It is a fitting start for a story of human struggle with no exodus, what happens to those who didn't have the means to leave when human intervention brings nature back upon us like a wind-borne pack of furies. Sound familiar? Yes, we thought so too.
We'll be back on Friday with first impressions, please join us. You can pick up discounted copies via the Seattlest Book Club at Bailey Coy Books in Capitol Hill, and Santoro's Books in Greenwood.
