Toughest Hard Time – A Book Review and a Knock Upside the Head

I’ve had to take some time off from this blog because I’ve been recovering from the Boulder Lurgy. This has been a humdinger of a cold, which saddled me with both a congested head and chest. I really thought I was walking around with cement in my head and lungs and although my voice still sounds like I smoke a pack-a-day followed by a chaser of whiskey in the evening I am feeling better. Marginally. At least until I try and complete one of the work-outs at CrossFit Roots then it all goes to hell.

But my hard time pales, quivers and becomes transparent when placed next to the events described in “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl“. It’s hard to read this story and come to terms with the fact that these events happened relatively recently, that there are still areas of the Plains states where the earth has not yet recovered and that the severity and level of destruction was man-made. I don’t know how someone could finish this type of book and not accept that humans can change the environment irrevocably. I find it harder to believe that politicians from states with this history could be so resistant to the ideas and impact of climate change. The effects of human behavior on the land still leaves a mark in some areas of the High Plains; the land has never recovered.

A couple of ideas stayed with me:

• A huge percentage of Oklahoma’s residents were on some sort of social welfare program during the height of the depression because the land was so scarred it could no longer provide subsistence living to those that farmed it.
• The topsoil found in the Plains states had taken 1000s of years to develop and we removed 80 million tons of it in two decades.
• Each state’s soil had a unique color as it blew all over the country.
• Dust traveled from the High Plains to the East Coast and 200 miles off-shore to coat a naval ship with fine silt.
• Removing the native grasses plus aggressive farming destroyed the soil and the land. The High Plains were never meant for farming; grazing of animals but not farming.
• Elderly and children suffered the most, many dying of dust pneumonia.

Can you imagine having so much dust in your lungs you basically are drowning in silt? I walked around congested, breathing in relatively healthy air, and found the going rough. The dust blew in from every crevice of a house; it was everywhere, covered everything and people breathed it in all day and all night.

The book folds in stories of real families desperately trying to survive, and the descriptions of what a dust storm looked like and how they destroyed homes, crops and killed entire communities. Amazing and poignant read, which had me thinking, but hoping to the contrary, that we were headed in a very similar direction.