From the mothers in my family I learned
what poverty and drought were like during the 1930s. To them, these
were experiences so profound they became proper nouns: the Great
Depression, the Dust Bowl.
Not quite 30 years later, when
I was a boy verging on gangly teenager, a thunderstorm of unusual
menace advanced one day from Nebraska toward my grandparents’
farm. She had not, my grandmother said later, seen a cloud so dusky
since the Dust Bowl, when chickens had been deceived into roosting
at mid-day.
My mother’s remembered dark days were
most often of the Great Depression, a time coincidental with the
multi-year drought, but remembered together. Indelible in her mind
had been her classmates who earned a paltry 75 cents a day prying
prickly pear cacti from the prairie pastures.
This story,
told frequently, explained the plastic straws that accumulated in
the kitchen after trips to McDonalds, the brown paper bags from
Safeway that were always saved, the pencils that never got short
enough to discard. Much later, during her final illness, it
explained her indignation when I tidied her kitchen without her
consent. Of the several dozen flimsy aluminum pie-tans that she had
saved, I had appropriated three-quarters to the recycling pile.
A product of the 1960s and ‘70s, when excesses as
well as creativity defined the times, I am only secondarily a
product of the Great Depression, of the Dust Bowl, of a drought
that that was a benchmark for hard times.
Yet now, that
20th century drought is being eclipsed. Hydrologists and
paleoclimatologists say the drought that quickened in severity last
year was measurably worse. In places of the West and Great Plains,
it may be the most severe in 150 to 300 years. But instead of dust,
this time we had smoke.
One day last year, still in
spring, I stood atop a mountain. A behemoth of smoke from a fire
called Hayman was eastward. Westward was a fire called Coal Seam.
Farther south was yet another, on Missionary Ridge. After shuttling
around the state by air, the governor turned toward television
cameras and said, “All of Colorado is burning today.”
For
the governor, a man of instinctual caution, the remark was out of
character. Strictly speaking, it was also false. Only a miniscule
portion of Colorado was truly ablaze. But he told his gut’s
truth: It did seem like all the state was afire. After that, the
governor was widely ridiculed for discouraging tourists.
In any case, if all of Colorado wasn’t on fire, smoke still
hung over us the way a sulfurous stink wraps itself around a sewer
plant. The norm was late-afternoon sun that cast a diffused orange
hue. Once you see forest-fire smoke, you never forget it.
That smoke resulted from fires, fires from drought. Reminders of
that drought were constant. Reservoirs shrank, leaving giant
shorelines of mud that dried into dust. Hiking one day above a
high-altitude reservoir for Denver, a place at mid-summer usually
crystalline blue except when dotted with white sailboats, I instead
watched a zephyr spiral a dun-colored swirl of dust.
When
my mother and her mother talked about the Dust Bowl, they focused
on particulars. The spindrift dust blew in through cracks,
doorjambs and even keyholes. They recalled stories about people
losing their way in those great storms, suffocating in the sand.
There is also the story of a mother hanging herself in the barn,
weighed down from the sand storms, poverty and perhaps more private
torments.
So far, nobody seems to have hanged themselves
because of this new, worse drought. I explain it by our greater
remove from the land. Like me, most Americans are now at least a
generation or two off the farm, less directly connected to weather.
Drought is less intensely personal, while most pastures and gardens
are hobbies, not livelihoods.
But you don’t have to
run a plow to feel scraped raw by drought. When a July rainstorm
drenched one mountain town in western Colorado after weeks of
desiccating sun, people pranced outside in the wetness of it. When
snow fell so heavily in March that tree limbs broke around my
house, I shoveled my neighbor’s walk less out of kindness
than in the sheer joy of the moisture. In May, as the temperature
again dived toward freezing, I gratefully got out a thick
jacket.
“Let it rain, let it snow in July,” I tell my
companion. “We haven’t had nearly enough.”
Allen
Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado. He writes in Arvada,
Colorado.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
