The biblically minded will undoubtedly be put in mind of the Book of Job while reading “The Worst Hard Time.” The women and men who lived on the Great Plains covering portions of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and New Mexico during the 1930s suffered relentless discomfort, poverty, illness and, sometimes, premature death because of a substance rarely thought of as deadly: dust.
Timothy Egan, a New York Times reporter who lives in Seattle, knew little about the Dust Bowl when he began his research and so aimed to interview today’s few elderly survivors before they died of old age. Who better to educate him?
“This part of the country was like another planet to me,” Egan said. “I’m a son of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up with wraparound green, water everywhere, and a horizon always interrupted by mountains.”
Just as it is difficult to describe mountains to those who have never lived among them or the Grand Canyon to those who have never peered into its depths, it is difficult to describe what a place like Dalhart, Texas, in the state’s Panhandle, looks like to somebody who has never passed through. “Desolate” is an obvious word but not quite adequate.
A couple of passages from Egan’s introduction come close:
“On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after lights go out and no one else is there. It scares them because the land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in its immensity. It scares them because they feel lost, with nothing to cling to, disoriented. Not a tree, anywhere. Not a slice of shade. Not a river dancing away, life in its blood. Not a bump of high ground to break the horizon, give some perspective, spell the monotone of flatness. It scares them because they wonder what is next.”
Or, phrased another way by Egan, “Throughout the Great Plains, a visitor passes more nothing than something. Or so it seems. An hour goes by on the same straight line and then up pops a town on a map – Twitty, Texas, or Inavale, Neb. The town has slipped away, dying at some point without funeral or proper burial.”
Until after the Civil War, the Great Plains in the six states gave sustenance to American Indian tribes, which respected the tall grass covering the millions of acres and hunted bison for food without destroying the population. But Caucasians arrived as part of the nation’s westward expansion. For the most part, the whites did not treat the land well, plowing under the grasses to plant and harvest wheat, killing the bison until they nearly died out. No federal or state environmental laws slowed those hardy, innovative settlers.
But all that hardiness and innovation led to environmental disaster. The Great Plains could no longer stand the inevitable combination of extreme drought and strong winds. So, when the inevitable arrived during the 1930s, the denuded acres turned to dust. The dust invaded homes and the lungs of the people living in those homes. The migration westward, chronicled so memorably by novelist John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath,” began.
Egan decided to focus not on the Okies who left but on those who stayed. He concentrates on a small number of families with survivors who can fill in the details of life and death in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. One of them is Ike Osteen, nearly 90 when Egan located him in Baca County, Colo. In 1934, Osteen, one of nine children living close to starvation, experienced the dust storm to top all dust storms. As he told Egan, cattle suffocated, horses went insane, children contracted the sometimes-fatal dust pneumonia, and a hug could knock someone down because the static electricity from the storm carried such force.
Egan also tells the saga of scientists and politicians who tried to help by giving those who stayed incentives to restore the grasslands. So, wise conservationists, mostly outsiders, dot the book. They might be called heroes for preaching against the mantra of exploiting the land.
As for the longtime residents who remained, it is difficult to know whether they should be considered heroes for their perseverance, fools for playing roles in depleting the land that had sustained previous generations, or something in between. Is Job of the Bible a hero? Did he suffer pestilence unjustly? Or did he bring it upon himself by sinning? Similar questions can be asked about the Dust Bowl residents of the 1930s. Egan poses them skillfully, then lays out the evidence through painstaking research and memorable prose. “The Worst Hard Time” is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction.
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