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mallorys_camera
Watched the first half of Ken Burns' Dust Bowl documentary. Amazing and emotionally devastating. It's an in depth exploration of the consequences of what arguably was the greatest ecological disaster ever to hit North America, the destruction of the Great Plains prairie grasses. What makes the documentary so devastating is the speed with which the disaster unfolds and the fact that there are still people alive today who own it as part of their personal history.
Because, of course, it's just one more disaster. And the history of mankind on this planet is filled with personal stories of one person's tiny share of the collective disaster. After a time, it all becomes history and history, as we all know, is bor-ring.
But to see it…
It begins with a real estate scam in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. That's an arbitrary spot. It could have begun in any of the three counties that make up the Oklahoma panhandle, or any of the four states that abut it.
Parenthetical aside: When I was traveling with the circus, I never made it to Cimarron, but I did make it to Beaver County, practically next door. Hardscrabble little place. Here's what I wrote about it. (And may I just give myself a congratulatory back pat and say, My, it's well written!) As you can see, I focused mainly on outrages visited upon Native Americans. The Dust Bowl is part of the Oklahoma pandhandle's secret history, and there are no public reminders of it.
Anyway, in the early 20th century, a pair of unscrupulous real estate developers began selling lots in a place they named Boise City – Boise being French for "tree." Not that there were any trees, mind you. Anyway, their claims were so outrageous that the Federal government actually ended up bringing charges against the pair and they ended up living out their days in the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.
I'm not so sure they deserved it. People would have come to this part of Oklahoma anyway, because it was part of the Oklahoma land grab. The Oklahoma land grab was a very odd phenomenon, and what makes it even odder is that it didn't happen all that long ago.
As another parenthetical aside – I'm just full of them today! – I was actually pretty perturbed recently when I did the math and realized I was born during the Truman administration! I mean, I had always thought of myself as an Eisenhower baby, but no – Harry S. was grasping the buck firmly in his haberdasher-ish hands when I emerged from the womb. Why should this matter? Because Eisenhower and the military industrial complex that he helped usher in and then immediately began to warn us about is part of current history in my mind. But Truman belongs to "way back then."
Except, I suppose, it was not way back then. History is a continuum. The Oklahoma land grab is actually pretty close to us in time. It happened right at the very beginning of the 20th century. Think of it! All those poor whites eking out their difficult existences in the ruined post-Civil War South, dreaming the Scarlett O'Hara dream: Land is all that matters! And then betting it all on Oklahoma where suddenly they're land owners.
1929, the year stockbrokers began jumping en masse from skyscrapers back in New York City, was a bumper year for these newly minted Oklahoma landowners. They had a record wheat crop.
Next year – almost as good. Except no one had the money to buy their wheat crop. Laws of supply and demand kicked in: Overabundance of supply, decline in demand. Wheat prices went from $2 a bushel to 25¢ a bushel.
As one of the people interviewed says, "You try something, it don't work, next year you don't try something different, you just try the first thing harder."
Except the next year – 1931 – it stopped raining.
Drought is more or less the steady state of the land in those parts. I believe Cimarron County gets an average of 20 inches of rain every year. So happened that the 1920s had been unusually wet.
So the land began to dry up, and soon something strange starts to happen. Big clouds of dust begin to descend at regular intervals upon Boise City and the surrounding towns. On May 13, 1934 one such dust cloud made it all the way to Washington, D.C. and thence to New York City, blanketing those metropolises in a darkness so profound that streetlights on at midday didn't have very much effect:
Once dust storms began reaching the Citadels of Power, a number of amusing remedies were proposed. My favorite was the recommendation that the government pour three linches of concrete across the thousands of miles that had once made up the Great Southern Plains.
I don't quite get the timestamps on Burns' interviewees, who all look to be in their 80s, but who would have had to be in their 90s to be eight or nine years old at the time these events happened. They tell stories about the eerie static electricity that preceded the storms, and the plague of starving jack rabbits that descended in place of locusts.
Some of interviewees were in their late teens then, I guess. One man tells the story of how he asked his future father-in-law if he could marry his daughter. He went over to his girlfriend's house and found his future father-in-law sitting in a car with a shotgun.
He took the gun away from the man – "without any conversation." Sat there for however many minutes, finally asked, "So is it okay if I marry your daughter?"
Three months later, his father-in-law blew his head off with a shotgun anyway.
Many, many deaths. Suicides and dust pneumonia.
Then on Palm Sunday, 1935, the largest dust storm anyone had ever seen --200 miles large and moving at a speed of 65 miles per hour – appeared out of nowhere on a gorgeous sunny day. And that was the last straw. That was what made them leave. The largest mass migration in American history. Bigger than the frontier push out west.
Woody Guthrie's song So Long, It's Been Good to Know You was written about that day. Religious folk thought the storm was the world coming to its promised end and began shaking hands, telling one another, "So long." Apparently they didn't think they'd all meet back up in heaven.
Steinbeck got it wrong, though. The Joads were not completely representative of the people who left Oklahoma. At least one-third of the people who left Oklahoma were white collar, educated people.
Lots more to write about, but no time…
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no subject
Date: 2012-12-30 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-30 04:43 pm (UTC)I supect you'd... well. Not enjoy it. Get a lot out of it.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-30 04:27 pm (UTC)So "Dust Bowl, Part Two: This Time It's PERSONAL!" might be a movie we can look forward to in the future.
A buddy of mine grew up on a farm in Western OK. All the water they used came from rainwater catchment and to this day, he has a 3000-gallon tank installed at his home---it can go from empty to full in a few hours during a good Spring thunderstorm. Them roofs catch a whole lotta water, yo, but you gotta catch it when the catching is good.
Water is about to become the New Oil, but folks in the Plains don't seem to realize it yet. Maybe they should watch Burns' film for a taste of past as prelude.
If you look at what grew in Oklahoma before it was settled after the Land Run, it was a type of grass capable of surviving in hard ground that didn't require a deep root system---but which had a root system good enough to keep the fucking dirt from blowing away (the wind blows a lot in Oklahoma.)
When the farmers plowed up all this grass and planted wheat instead, that's when the fun began.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-30 04:49 pm (UTC)Obviously, ecology was not a science back then so every domino in the falling chain couldn't be identified. (Interestingly Steinbeck's good buddy Ed Rickets was one of the first scientists to understand ecology.)
But I think what is so devestating and amazing about this documentary -- at least to me -- is how well it portrays the lives of people who are caught up in something that's so, so much bigger than their own personal histories but they don't know it. Documentaries about the Jews living in pre-World War II Gerany and eastern Europe have affected me in much the ssame way.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-30 06:59 pm (UTC)I also watched the documentary...... and like most events in history, its easy to see it happening all over again (I know some seriously stupid, but influential people, who are strong advocates for 'biofuel' made from miscanthus grass.....they would happily rip up the un-farmed plains and plant this weed everywhere).
no subject
Date: 2012-12-30 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 01:45 pm (UTC)I'm perpetually surprised by people poking at things without taking the time to try to understand the connections on down the line. It's time I stop being surprised, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-31 02:37 pm (UTC)The mortgage crisis was similar in many ways, particularly because it actually happened somewhere else first -- Japan and the "lost decade."
I think as humans we are mired in particular points in time and it is hard to see the ripple effects moving forward.
Happy New Years!