The Worst Hard Time

Finished The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan about the Great Dust Bowl and have come away humbled by the scope of the disaster and mankind’s tenacity in the face of horrible conditions.

There are two parts that seem so cinematic I’d love to see them in a movie. The first is the great dust storm on Black Sunday. Something I hadn’t realized before is these storms create static electricity. People would try to leave town only to have their cars short out. They could see the electricity sparking inside the car. If people touched each other they could be knocked to the ground by the static discharge. Blue electricity would sparkle off the barbed wire fences. Trees would be blackened by sparks of electricity. Of course, this is just the prelude to the big act when hundreds of tons of dust would blot out the sun and plunge the world into darkness. One dust storm dropped more tons of dirt in a day than all the dirt that was moved to create the Panama Canal.

The other scene would be with Big Hugh Bennett the soil expert that FDR would count on to find a way out of the disaster. Bennett plans a Senate hearing to plead his case that soil conservation is the only way to stop the dust storms and that they need to fund conservation programs. He comes in with charts, graphs and mountains of data but the ace up his sleeve is that he knows a giant dust storm has hit the Midwest and that this one is big enough to make it to D.C. If he times it right the storm will darken the windows of the room as he makes his case and leave D.C. covered in dust. Twice aides come in to update him on the status of the storm as he stretches for time. He pulls it off and finally Washington understands what is going on in the Plains.

Overall the book is a sober look at how unbridled capitalism and poor government planning can wreak unbelievable havoc. The end has a teaser that there may be another great story to tell about the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer by large corporate farms and poor water conservation policies. The Ogallala spreads out beneath eight states from South Dakota to Texas and is being emptied quicker than it is replenished.