Like a Turtle
by Miriam Scott
Hello booklovers, this is Miriam Scott from Amarillo Texas for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
Today I want to introduce John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I have to tell you; it’s been a long time since I read this essential and unfortunately timeless book. So long ago that I read it in German, my first language. Not only is the original better, as it always is, but this time, now I live really close to Oklahoma, where the book begins.
Steinbeck writes about the impact the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression had on the people. I saw the exhibit “From Boom to Bust” when the wonderfully curated Panhandle-Plains Museum in Canyon Texas was still open. This exhibit displayed the experience of the dust bowl in an engaging style. The sense of exhausting desperation during this relentless drought and dust storms stayed with me.
So, reading The Grapes of Wrath is different this time.
For example, I can hear the accent of the protagonist Tommy Joad when I read it, making this story come more to life more for me. His story begins when he asks a truck driver for a ride. By describing Joad’s clothing, demeanor and finally conversation with the trucker, we learn that he was just released from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary called McAlester. He is heading home, to his family’s farm.
At least, that is the plan. In the next chapter, appearing at random, we read about the struggle of a turtle trying to make its way west in the dusty landscape that claws, and scrapes, and blocks the way. But the turtle stoically keeps on its slow path west. That is until in the next chapter Tommy Joad leaves the truck and heads home on foot, sees the turtle, catches and captures it.
What at first appears to be a random side story line, is in fact a brilliant form of foreshadowing the events of Joad’s story. In the Grapes of Wrath, life claws, and scrapes at Joad and his family. Their path is filled with stumbling blocks. And like the turtle they, too head west, stoically staying the course.
But life catches up with them, too.
Tune in again next time as we find out if the turtle or the Joads escape their struggles.
Until then, this was Miriam Scott for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
Miriam Scott was born in a small town called Mechernich in western Germany. In 2000, she met her future husband, a Marine security guard at the American embassy. They married in Colorado in 2002 and moved to Amarillo, Texas in 2005. A member of St Andrew's Episcopal Church in Amarillo, Miriam was ordained to the priesthood in May of 2021, and just as she finished a bachelor’s in social work WTAMU where her internship was with the Potter County Sheriff department in the inmate program.
