DUKES FANS
“…history is that old woman
Sitting in a doorstep
eating
lemons”
Le Roi Jones
I don’t know exactly when I fell
in love with history, but it has been a major interest of mine for decades. I
do remember memorizing the Presidents AND Vice-Presidents of the United States
in order in third grade and knowing the start and end dates of a ton of wars. I
was a reader and super-curious; I asked a lot of, “How “and “Why” questions
that drove my parents and teachers crazy. So it seems inevitable that I
would love and later teach US and World History.
By junior high I was beyond the
dates and famous people. I was looking for connections and cause and effect
that linked events. I was growing in the depth of my questions and of my
reading, And then, somewhere in high school, what history meant really
hit me: HIS- STORY. STORY! That was what made it all come together for me. I
became interested in the interactions between people and history. Yes, big
events and theories were important. Major players on the historical arena
mattered. But what really drew me in were the stories. How did big events affect
common people? How did common people affect events? What did it mean to be a
‘worker” at a certain time and in a certain place? What was it like to be a
12-year-old girl in a certain part of the world at a certain time? What do
farmers really do?? I needed to know those stories and more.
I say all of this because I am
thoroughly engrossed in a wonderfully written and moving book called, The
Worst Hard Time; The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust
Bowl.” Written by journalist Timothy Egan, it is an in-depth look at the
people who stayed in the Great Plains even as nature seemed to turn on the
human species. I knew a little about the Dust Bowl and I knew some things about
the Great Depression: I have read several historical books and historical
novels about that time period. Many of us who were “folkies” in the 60’s
are familiar with the songs and stories about the traveling hoboes of
the Depression: Woody Guthrie wrote many great songs about “Okies” and families
always on the road and desperately looking for a place to work and to settle.
Many of us are also familiar with the book and the film, The Grapes of
Wrath. All of those were largely about people who left the Dust Bowl and
wandered. Egan’s work, though, is about those who stayed behind. The ones who
tried to live through the Dust Bowl. I always meant to see Ken Burns’ film, “The
Dust Bowl,” but I never got around to it. I do know now that I will see it
as soon as I finish this book.
The power and beauty of this book
for me is that it looks at more than just the historical events and science of
what led to the dust storms that devastated an area larger than the state of
Pennsylvania: an area that stretched from half of Kansas to parts of Colorado,
New Mexico, Oklahoma, and 1/3 of Texas. Egan tells the stories of the people in
that area at that time. People who stayed throughout the storms and what their
lives were like. He gives detailed looks at individual people of different ages
and backgrounds and what it was like to live in a sod house or an underground
dugout. Or what it was like to shake someone’s hand and be knocked down by the
static electricity contained within the dust. What it meant to plant a crop of
wheat and have no rain for two years. How some families had to rotate the days
of the week on which each of their children could eat in an attempt to make
their meager food supplies last. How towns had to deal with invasions of
hundreds of rabbits, grasshoppers, tarantulas and black widow spiders. What it
was like to take a breath and have your throat fill with tiny particles of
dust. And what it was like when the dust repeatedly flew so heavily that
it blotted out the sun.
The Plains had a surprising mix of
people, and Egan also gives us backstories of the different people there and
how they got to the Plains. Why so many German-Russians came from the Volga
River area across thousands of miles to settle. How Jews wound up in the
Oklahoma panhandle. How the Homestead Acts of the mid 1800’s led to a
flood of people of all types-Welsh, Irish, African-American and more,
trying to find work or make a claim and get rich planting wheat during a “wheat
boom” that suddenly went bust. And what about the Naive Americans who had settled it first? Egan ties all of this together in a way that is
involving and compelling. He transports us there, and we don’t just read about
it. We feel it through and through. He takes a part of our history that most
would rather forget and brings it back to life. The book has plenty to teach
us, especially in light of our now near desperate climate crisis. Maybe, just
maybe, we can learn something from it in time to help us reverse our own
environmental disaster.
(Here is a link to Ken Burns’ PBS
film, The Dust Bowl. Timothy Egan was a consultant:
