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Off to the right there is our dad's family. It's 1934, Kansas. They've been beaten by the dust storms. They're all packed up and headed to Arkansas, where they'll last two weeks. They'll stop on the White River, contract malaria from mosquitoes, and trek back to Kansas. They'll only survive because our grandfather will get $1 a day from the government for grading the dust dunes left after storms into elevated roads.
If nothing else, Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time:The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl has helped us understand why our parents have three full freezers and a pantry of food that explodes when you open the door like Fibber McGee's closet. Probably after your third or fourth week of pickled tumbleweed, you wish you'd laid in more food.
In the Readers' Guide, Egan says he wrote the book because the generation that stuck out the Dust Bowl and Depression is passing on, and he wanted to capture an untold experience. We've read the reviews -- all glowing -- about his novelistic take on the era. While there's plenty of historical facts and figures, Egan's interviews allow him to "drop in" on various families, and so there's compelling human drama, too. A "page-turner" is a common description. [Here's Egan on video.]
Yet we can't help but wonder if his project isn't already too late. Seriously, it's difficult for us to connect with people who lived in holes in the ground out in the middle of a prairie. When Egan mentions the home invasions of black widow spiders and tarantulas or worms and centipedes, our brain goes out for a walk. Pickled tumbleweed? COME ON! When put the book down and walk outside, we're confronted with what looks like a different world. How are you other readers relating, we wonder? Is it just too much to take in, or is it weirdly plausible to those of you out there in your solar-powered sod houses?
We'll be back next Friday with more. There's a crazy editor of a newspaper called the Dalhart Texan, John McCarty, who deserves some discussion, too. What is it with Texans and their response to human-augmented environmental changes?
TO JOIN IN: Visit Bailey Coy Books on Capitol Hill, or Santoro's Books in Greenwood, and ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount.
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Maybe it's because my parents had me when they were in their 40's and their parents had done the same to them, but it seems like the rural version of the stories I heard about growing up in the slums of Boston during the same period. More extreme, of course.
I love how Egan sprinkles facts in that are not necessarily important to them main thrust of the story without their seeming at all like nonsequitirs. A good example is the quote from Jim Perry on page 21. "If it weren't for this old black face of mine, I'd be foreman." He wants you to recognize that things weren't great for *all* of the cowboys before the sodbusters arrived. But he keeps himself from digressing into that territory too much--it isn't the focus of his story. But that detail helps remind us of an important issue to keep in mind.
I don't find it that hard to relate, but then I read a lot of history. Although it is really amazing to think that it wasn't long ago in this country where you could legitimately starve to death...or maybe it's weird that now you probably can't.