Once Upon a Drought

Our weather is always a topic for conversation. Recent talk has been of our current drought and the promises of rain. Prairie folks, including those of us who live in the Ozark foothills, are an optimistic lot. Drought. I think in our part of the world the word has an emotional loading. The Dust Bowl. Although the actual location of the Dust Bowl was to our west, our ancestors felt it.

An Okie was an Okie. I suppose it would be challenging for an Oklahoman regardless of age not to make the correlation. The Dust Bowl era is just too steeped in our history, we are emotionally marinated in its legends and lore.

The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression are not separate events for us.

John Steinbeck, in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, made a literary decision to have the Joad‚s journey to California begin northeast of Sallisaw. His choice painted the entire state with the same brush. Make no mistake, Oklahomans suffered. Our drought was terrible. The poverty painful and crippling. I recently saw a photo of a group of men sitting on the curb outside Brockman‚s Store in Vian in about 1936. Their eyes required me to redefine desperation.

When the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath hit the theatres in 1940, this was clarified for all to see. We watched as an overloaded truck strained onto the highway and headed west. The first sign you see on the big screen says Sallisaw. The world believed they knew.

Although I was born into The Great Depression, I mostly know what I have been told and what I have read. I want to recommend a book, The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. This book provides an emotional understanding of the Great Depression in the Dust Bowl region that I have never found anywhere else.

Dust Pneumonia wasn‚t universal, hunger was. I do recall accompanying my dad to pick up cheese, butter, peanut butter and other commodities at a government building to the south of the courthouse in Stigler. It seems you took what you were given and then went outside and traded “what you got for what you needed.”

I remember driving at night and watching the sparks leap from the pavement as the chain being dragged by the pickup in front of you bounced along the hiway. I was told the chain removed static electricity from the air. Must have worked because I never saw a pickup explode.

We have an election soon. Vote!

Billie and I watch “The Boys” on Fox most Sunday mornings. Jimmy Johnson, Howie Long, Terry Bradshaw, Michael Strahan and Jay Glazer. I looked at the screen and was afflicted with election overload. I thought JJ reminded me of Richard Nixon, TB seemed a behavioral doppelgänger for Bill Clinton, the dapper Strahan was Ben Franklin, Long Obama. Glazer stumped me and then I remembered Taft.

Go figure! And do go vote! I ain‚t been a Communist necessarily, but I have been in the red all my life. – Woody Guthrie

Hal McBride writes a column, Just Thinkin‚, published each week.