Lessons in Sustainable Living from the Grapes of Wrath: A Reading and Writing Journal (Entry 1: This Valley is Me)

This valley is me, and I am this valley.  Lately, it hasn't been doing so well and neither have I.  Skies have been gritty, a haze of humidity and grime smudging the horizon, rust-tinted snowy peaks rising out of the smoke.  Inversion, they call it.  They treat it as a natural phenomenon, but my history here goes back far too long to buy that.  Skies once were clear, and it was not unusual to be able to see peaks 75 miles away. Now the haze hangs around for days, even weeks, between storms.  It's like living along the Wasatch Front without the city.  Spill over--that's what it is--like the rust colored air that hangs over the Mojave because of Los Angeles.

Scripture describe such times:  

And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.  (Revelation 9:2)

Whether this is smoke of biblical proportions or not doesn't matter as much to me as that it hangs around and distorts views I once saw so clearly.  Regardless of whether or not it is a sign of the second coming, it is a sign of sickness--an environment crying out for redemption, much like the landscape recorded in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath:

A gentle wind followed the rain clouds, driving them on northward, a wind that softly clashed the drying corn. A day went by and the wind increased, steady, unbroken by gusts. The dust from the roads fluffed up and spread out and fell on the weeds beside the fields, and fell into the fields a little way. Now the wind grew strong and hard and it worked at the rain crust in the corn fields. Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away. The wind grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke. The corn threshed the wind and made a dry, rushing sound. The finest dust did not settle back to earth now, but disappeared into the darkening sky.

Like Exodus, the Grapes of Wrath is an epic--of loss, of wandering, of survival,and of dignity.  I believe it is also a blueprint for sustainable living, and in this series of posts, I wish to explore the lessons it teaches in sustainability.  Not only is it a masterpiece of literature, it is a field guide for a better way of life.