guest post by Erin Blakemore and Sandra Hume
So we had this whole dialogue planned out for this section. Fire, devastation, uplift. The End. Easy, right?
Yeah, not so much. The end of The First Four Years is pretty much as problematic and enigmatic as the book itself.
Sample exchange:
Erin: This section reads like a nightmare. How on earth will we write about this?
Sandra: God, I hate this. It has always made me sad. I have no idea what the hell we are supposed to say.
And that was our conversation before the floods.
See, we both live in Colorado. On Wednesday, September 11, something went wrong. Our usually dry state started raining and kept on raining. Storm clouds parked themselves over Boulder County and the surrounding mountains, cities, and farmlands…and they didn’t leave. It kept on raining through Sunday.
Erin lives in central Boulder, where she could hear the flood sirens and ambulances. Social media became increasingly desperate. Thousands of people lost power. There was a new sound in town—the sudden rushing of a creek that’s usually a trickle. Sandra lives in Fort Collins, where the Poudre River rose and rose, closing bridges and essentially dividing the town. Farmland and stock outside city limits was ravaged by river water that had completely changed its course. People died. Cut off from civilization, fellow Coloradans had to be airlifted to safety. Their homes and their lives are irreparably destroyed.
So…back to TFFY. The clinical, pragmatic tone of the final section still reads like a nightmare. Fire. Wind. The in-case-of-flood fire list. That strangled outpouring of emotion—among the strongest emotion ever conveyed in the series. Laura screams and sobs and it’s primal. It’s scary. It’s the futile wail of someone who has been overpowered by the elements, by Mother Nature herself.
That’s only the beginning, of course. Now that there is nothing left, there’s no choice but to rebuild. More hard work. Days and nights of privation and hard labor.
Was farming a success? What can we rely on for sure? What good is hard work when it all can be washed away in an instant? What’s left?
For Laura, it’s her family and her optimism and her grit. It’s the bread plate that reminds her that they’ll never be without daily bread, somehow. It’s the decades that remain for her and Almanzo and Rose. It’s the mystery of the unresolved.
Somehow, stripped of her possessions, her meager successes, her innocence, Laura ends the book on an up note. “It would be a fight to win out in this business of farming, but strangely she felt her spirit rising for the struggle.” Could there be a better way to close out a series of struggles? We’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.