The Worst Hard Time

I just finished reading a book given to me as a Christmas gift by a friend of mine.  The title is The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan.  It is about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.  It is an excellent read.

The hard lesson of the Dust Bowl of 1930s is that too much land was broken up by the plow to grow wheat.  The grasslands of the plains states had thin soil and not as much rain as the midwestern states.  It was better suited for grazing cattle.  The farmers that plowed up the soil were warned by cowboys and ranchers not to break up the grasslands.  What happened was hell on earth:  little rain, dust storms, failed crops, displaced families and vacant farmsteads. 

Here is an excerpt:

Pages 256-257:  The journalist Ernie Pyle, one of the most influential writers of the day toured the plains in the summer of 1936.  He called the Dust Bowl "this withering land of misery."  Driving through counties in Kansas that used to have a farm on every quarter-section, Pyle said, "I saw not a solitary thing but bare earth and a few lonely, empty farmhouses . . .There was not a tree or a blade of grass, or a dog or a cow or a human being -- nothing whatsoever, nothing at all but gray raw earth and a few farmhouses and barns, sticking up from the dark gray sea like white cattle skeletons on the desert."  It was, he wrote, "the saddest land I have ever seen."

Pyle never bumped into the ghostly figure who traveled the dusted roads of western Kansas, a man with a white beard and long white hair who carried a staff and called himself "Walking Will".  Farmers would see him along a road, stop and ask him if he needed a ride.  Sometimes he would get in; other times he kept walking.  When he took a ride, it was not for long.

"Stop the car!" he shouted.  "The Lord has instructed me to get out and go back."

Then he would walk over another stretch of road, repeating his pattern.  In 1936 Kansas, he seemed to belong, a figure from an uncertain dream.

Another excerpt by Don Hartwell from his diary:

Page 297:  [July 20, 1938]  I wonder if in the next 500 years -- or the next 1000 years, there will be a summer when rain will fall in Inavale [Nebraska].  Certainly not as long as I live will the curse of drought be lifted from this country.

Leviticus 18:25:  "And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants."

When I think of Walking Will walking and hitchhiking the roads of western Kansas during the Dust Bowl:  maybe he was interceding and breaking the curses off the land.

Intercession

The Plow That Broke the Plains