Timothy Egan's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, asked him in an interview, "Why a book on the Dust Bowl now?" He responded, " To me, there was an urgency to get this story now because the last of the people who lived through those dark years are in their final days. It's their story, and I didn't want them to take this narrative of horror and persistence to the grave. At the same time, this part of America--the rural counties of the Great Plains--looks like it's dying. Our rural past seems so distant, like Dorothy's Kansas in
The Wizard of Oz. Yet it was within the lifetime of people living today that nearly one in three Americans worked on a farm. Now, the site of the old Dust Bowl--which covers parts of five states--is largely devoid of young families and emptying out by the day. It's flyover country to most Americans. But it holds this remarkable tale that should be a larger part of our shared national story." Indeed, none of us who attended the discussion of
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl were fully aware of the causes, extent, and results of the Dust Bowl until we read Egan's book. And reading it in the context of what we learned about the connection between agricultural policies and the fundamental health of our environment from both Michael Pollan's
The Omnivore's Dilemma and Elizabeth Kolbert's
Field Notes from a Catastrophe, we wondered how it can be that this event seems to have slipped from common memory and why we just cannot seem to learn from history.
We marveled at the tenacity of those who remained in the Dust Bowl in spite of the poverty, desolation, and death they faced. They seemed to have felt a strong sense of place, even when that place changed beyond recognition into a desert of dust. We agreed that Egan does a good job of conveying their stories and describing the power of the dust storms. One of the most poignant passages in Egan's book, however, one that illustrates this love of place, is from the diary of Don Hartwell: " . . . this year gives us one more day to hold to the place which has meant so much to me in life and tradition in the last 35 years, from the scent of the wild plum bush and the violets and the blue grass in April, to the little dry thunder showers in June which break away late in the afternoon, with the meadow larks singing and the wild roses which seem to be brighter and smell sweeter when wet with rain than any other time." We also gained a great appreciation for the insight and foresight of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hugh Bennett, the head of the soil conservation effort Operation Dust Bowl, whose policies helped to begin the healing of the country and the land of the Dust Bowl.
Although we enjoyed the drama and immediacy of Egan's narrative, we wish he had spent more time describing the aftermath of the decade of the Dust Bowl, how the land was slowly but only partially restored and what life is like there today. Several of us also felt oppressed by the accumulation of negative description and event in Egan's narrative, but we agreed that this sense of loss and also of foreboding was Egan's purpose, to sober us and to provoke us to avoid similar mistakes in the future. In fact, in the interview with Houghton Mifflin, he notes that "[t]he Dust Bowl story is a parable, in a way, about what happens when people push the limits of the land."
To see some images of the Great Plains and the Dust Bowl, you can visit the Library of Congress's
American Memory collection online. To view part of the film
The Plow That Broke The Plains, created in 1936 by Pare Lorentz, visit the
Internet Archive online.
We hope you will add your comments about Egan's book to our discussion. And we hope that you will join us for our next discussion, either Tuesday, August 5, at Main Library or here on the blog, of Bliss Broyard's memoir
One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Hidden Secrets, as we move on to a consideration of identity.
