The Great Plains

DUKES FANS: I was idly flipping through channels a week or so ago when I came upon an interview with one of my favorite filmmakers, documentarian Ken Burns. A hallmark of public television, he is to me the quintessential, wide-eyed, questioning American, exploring things social and cultural about us in a wide-ranging manner that focuses on the people involved in the midst of great events and cultural changes. I have seen and loved many of his films: The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, Country Music, The Viet Nam War, and many, many more. As I watched the interview, I was thinking about the heat waves we have been endlessly experiencing for the last three months, and I suddenly thought about the Mid-West and The Great Plains. I first traveled through some of the Plains States in the late 1970’s playing with a great bluesman by the name of Sparky Rucker. We played the National Folk Festival , which one year was in city of Winfield, Kansas. We also visited Tulsa, Oklahoma and several places in Missouri. It was eye-opening for this East Coast city kid. The skies went on forever, there were few mountains, and what ones we saw were way off in the distance. The motels we stopped at showed us how to get to the storm cellars. We saw storms brewing some 30-40 miles off and witnessed great ground-to-sky lightning strikes. It hit me then that the Mid-West, year in and year out, probably had the most extreme weather in the country. And that is true today. While the heatwaves here have been tough, parts of the Plains have been in drought conditions since May. And those conditions have been interrupted by tornadoes and torrential rains that have led to floods. Extreme conditions, indeed. Thinking about that and the Ken Burns interview led me to pull up a newsletter piece I had written in 2020 about one of Ken Burns ‘films, The Dust Bowl, and one of the books that helped inspire that film; The Worst Hard Times by Timothy Egan. Here, slightly edited, is that piece: The Great American Dust Bowl “…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 just the dates and famous people. I was looking for connections and cause and effect that linked events. I was growing in the depth of both my questions and my reading, And then, somewhere in junior high school, what history meant really hit me: HIS- STORY. STORY! That was what made it all come together for me. I was most interested in the stories of the interactions between people and history. Yes, big events and theories were important. Major players in the historical arena matter, of course. But what really drew me in were the personal stories of real people who were there. 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?? Was it like to be in a war? 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 factual 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 there 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 human-made environmental disaster. I certainly hope so (Here is a link to Ken Burns’ PBS film, The Dust Bowl. Timothy Egan was a consultant: (https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/ ) (I have since seen the film and was blown away by it. Here is a link to a list of all of Ken Burns’ Films: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/films/ ) Sparky Rucker’s site: https://sparkyandrhonda.com