Will Byrnes's Reviews > The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

How to explain a place where hollow-bellied horses chewed on fence posts , where static electricity made it painful to shake another man’s hand, where the only thing growing that a man or cow could eat was an unwelcome foreigner, the Russian thistle? How to explain fifty thousand or more houses abandoned throughout the Great Plains, never to hear a child’s laugh or a woman’s song inside their walls? How to explain nine million acres of farmland without a master? America was passing this land by. It’s day was done.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is far from public consciousness today, and that is a shame. There are lessons to be gleaned from that experience that apply directly to challenges of the 21st century. If we are not to be doomed to repeat the mistakes that were made before, it is critical that we know what happened then, how it came to be, and what might be done to prevent it, or things like it, from happening again.


Timothy Egan - image from Willamette.edu

Timothy Egan takes on that task in The Worst Hard Time. In an interview with Author Magazine Egan tells of seeing his son’s American History text and being appalled that the Dust Bowl had been relegated to a single paragraph. In another interview he says,

I want to see if history got it wrong. With the Dust Bowl, it wasn’t that history got it wrong, it’s just that they got a different take. Here’s the largest Diaspora in American history and our view of it is entirely from Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, where everyone left and went to California. Well, two thirds of the people didn’t leave.

His methodology is not to lay out a raft of facts and statistics, but to follow several families through the ordeal of the Dust Bowl years. He focuses on the area where Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas meet. He does get in the numbers but the human experience is how he makes the era emotionally accessible. Egan has a gift. He is a wonderful story teller, with a feel for portraying people. Egan’s time as a young man writing a novel (unpublished) helped him find his voice and it is in full throat here. I was reminded of excellent war books that paint a picture from the point of view of soldiers on the ground. Sebastian Junger’s War and The Good Soldiers by David Finkel are recent examples that pop to mind. Egan’s people cover a wide range, cowboys, farmers, schoolteachers, immigrants. The primary actors are supported by a cast that includes racists, unscrupulous politicians, town boosters, journalists, a forward-looking conservationist and the odd president or two. But he incorporates more than just a few points of human reference, bringing to his tale a sense of narrative arc, a perspective he brings to all his writing. In the Writers Workship interview he says, “I don’t want a phone book of episodic oral history. I’m looking for beginning, middle and end. I want things to happen. I want the reader to see change. All the things you want in fiction.”

Take a landscape that is prone to drought, a place that has almost no river water, a place where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain fast and relentlessly. Remove from that landscape the grass that has evolved over thousands of years to survive in such conditions, grass that fixes the soil to the ground. Throw in a government policy that promotes populating a place that had been called the American Desert well before the 1930s, giving land away to get people to settle there. Plow it under and plant as much grain as you can. The result? After decades of misguided land use, then several years of severe drought, the topsoil goes airborne and the wind becomes a vehicle for destruction on a biblical scale. This was an era when simply breathing was a life-threatening exercise, as thousands were affected by pneumonia caused by constant dust bombardments filling up their lungs. The Red Cross gave out thousands of face masks to help people fend off the flying dirt. They would be covered within an hour. Lives were extinguished by perennially awful conditions, and help was not a thing one could count on. Worldwide economic conditions contributed to the creation of the Dust Bowl, and did not aid in its recovery, but ignorance, greed, shortsightedness and damn foolishness were big players as well.

I was blown away by scenes that could have come from the time of plagues in Egypt, from a science fiction tale about surviving on a hostile new planet, or, worse, from a horror movie. Infestations of centipedes, clouds of locusts, Sunday community events centered on slaughtering rabbits by the thousand, trying to find one’s way from place to place through blinding clouds of soil, machinery failing because of the extreme static electricity in the air, rapidly forming dunes stopping traffic. It is a chilling tale. There are also heartening stories of communities banding together to help each other forestall foreclosures, and of an enlightened scientist determined to save the land from such callous disregard.

At the end of the book Egan looks at some of the present-day foolishness that is contributing to future catastrophes. He could have gone on for a lot more, but showed considerable restraint. That sort of perspective is in good supply these days in the work of serious writers. Michael Lewis, in The Big Short offers a pointed look at how short term gain crushing long term investment did serious damage not only to Wall Street firms but to the nation, and indeed the world. Jared Diamond’s Collapse looks at the damage to civilizations that a solely short-term perspective can have.

The Worst Hard Time is an outstanding book. The National Book Award people certainly thought so, bestowing on it their 2006 award for Best Nonfiction Book. Egan makes the time come alive, shows how the Dust Bowl came to be, looks at the impact it had on area residents, what was done to try to fix the problem, and sounds an alarm for us all to make sure we don’t repeat the errors of our past.


=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal and Twitter pages

Egan’s columns for the New York Times


Interviews
——Houghton Mifflin - A conversation with Timothy Egan
——Duncan Entertainment - Landslide -- A Portrait of President Herbert Hoover - by Tracey Dorsey
——The Writer’s Workshop - Nature Bats Last: A Talk with Timothy Egan - by Nick O’Connell
—— Author Magazine - Timothy Egan Interview

Items of Interest
——There is an outstanding 1998 PBS documentary in their American Experience series on the 1930s, Surviving the Dust Bowl
——A seminal documentary from the time, The Plow That Broke the Plains
——A new (April 9, 2015) piece by Chris Megerian in the LA Times on how bad drought conditions are becoming in California, California faces 'Dust Bowl'-like conditions amid drought, says climate tracker