engleză
On June 30th, 1908, something exploded above the Siberian forest near the Stony Tunguska River, flattening 830 square miles of trees and producing a shockwave that circled the Earth twice. No crater was ever found. No meteorite. The cause remains, officially, unexplained.
Thirty-nine years later, in a high valley in the North Cascades of Washington State, a community of forty people faces a more immediate crisis: a Seattle developer wants to build a ski resort on the mountain above them, and his blueprints require the removal of the windmill that has stood on the summit since 1910.
The windmill has no reasonable explanation. It faces east, away from the prevailing wind. It turns in all weather, in all winds, faster in storms and slower in calms but never still. The copper cables running from its base into the rock below are locked behind a door that only one man in the valley has ever opened. And that man - compact, dark-bearded, possessed of the particular stillness of someone who has thought carefully about everything he says before he says it - has been in the valley for thirty-eight years and appears, to anyone paying attention, not to have aged.
What happens in the summer of 1947 is this: the secret has to come out. Not all at once and not without care - the man who has been keeping it has learned something, in nearly four decades among these particular people, about the difference between a secret and a responsibility, and about the right way to pass a responsibility to the people who will need to carry it next. The windmill's story is told in a room full of neighbors, to people who have earned the telling, in the forty minutes that change everything.
And then the vote is cast, and the developer reconsiders, and the valley slowly empties anyway - not because of anything dramatic, but because that is what valleys do - and the windmill turns on through the departures, through the seasons, through the decades, maintained by a chain of people whose names and faces change while the work remains the same.
Windmill is a novel in eight chapters that moves from the founding of a mining community in 1897 to a forward observation bay somewhere above the ecliptic in a year it declines to specify. It is a science fiction novel that does not announce itself as one until the last ten pages. It is a Pacific Northwest novel, deeply rooted in the geology and history and Indigenous knowledge of Whatcom County, Washington. It is a novel about a small group of people trusted with an enormous thing, and about what ordinary people are capable of when someone has the faith to tell them the truth and ask for their help.
The Tunguska event happened. Gary Campbell was real - a prospector who lived for decades in a cabin at the Twin Lakes Road junction and died in 1985, struck by a vehicle while hitchhiking to Glacier for groceries, aged ninety-six. Twin Lakes is real. The road is still one of the worst in Whatcom County.
