Just Finished Reading....

Tim Egan's, The Worst Hard Time, a chronical of the American Dust Bowl of the 30's.  About 30 years ago I had an elderly visiting teaching companion who had lived through those days on the high plains.  I appreciated Egan's efforts to tell the story through the eyes and voices of people who lived this nightmare.  When I complain about gray skies, at least my gray skies dropped rain, not silt.  My gray skies nourish the plants, instead of killing them.                   

The story begins with a grassland that was home to 470 native species.  "In the spring, the carpet flowered amid the green, and as wind blew, it looked like music on the ground."  (p. 19)  My part of Kansas was  not plowed so heavily as the dustbowl of western Kansas, Eastern Colorado, and the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles.  Still I grew up loving the way the wheat moves in the wind, the shape of the hills formed by great seas and plenty of sky with blue days and milky way nights.  Today some conservation efforts aim at the native grass lands and they are a pleasure to roam.

All that empty land looked like a great way to make money to speculators and dreamers.  It looked like a great place to make a home to displaced Germans from Russia.  It became a place where only the truly tenacious survived the near decade of wind and drought.  Those who stayed remember dusters filled with more than just dust.  They were cold in the winter, they were charged with static electricity, they weighed down roofs to the point of collapse and filled lungs and stomachs of animals and people with grit.  People died of  "dust pneumonia."  They lived for years without income and bottled Russian Thistle (aka tumbleweed) so they would have something to put in their bellies.  They tried to entice animals into eating the thistle by salting it.

"They knew black dust came from Kansas, red from eastern Oklahoma, a yellow-orange from Texas" (p. 175)   No one wanted to go outside, to get lost, to get scoured, perhaps blinded by the grit.  They were warned not to go out, but inside wasn't much better.  The wind sifted the dust through the smallest of cracks.  Wet towels placed at the doors soon became muddied.  It could be dark at mid-day.

The grass wasn't the only thing disturbed by the effects of men plowing the earth.  Rabbits and grasshoppers thrived and became pests.  The human population nose-dived as people abandoned the farms the banks and the drought were claiming.  A feeling of hopelessness blanketed those who stayed.  Some stayed because they had no means of going anywhere else.  All for them seemed lost.  Even strong men and women would cry behind the barns hoping for privacy in their despair.

It was worth reading.