Musings: The Worst Hard Time

Timothy Egan's book The Worst Hard Time is one that was not on my radar at all.  But it was available for audio download immediately, and the subject matter seemed very relevant to me, based on current circumstances.

Most of the United States is in the midst of a major drought.  We're also still suffering from the worst recession since the Great Depression and are committing acts that are drastically changing our planet.  Reading about the Dust Bowl in some ways made me more philosophical about the whole thing - these things happen in cycles, and there's nothing we can do to stop them.  But it also made me so sad.  It seems like there are so many quaint phrases and promises like "Never forget" about horrible things that have happened in the past but people, inevitably, do forget because collective memory can only last for a few generations, and then we make the same mistakes all over again.

The Worst Hard Time is about ground zero for the Dust Bowl, Cimarron County, Oklahoma.  There, people uprooted the prairie grass and killed the bison to make way for cultivated farms and cattle.  Within a few years, this plan failed miserably.  There was an epic drought that created horrible dust storms (see cover picture above), giving people and animals dust pneumonia and bankrupting whole communities.  It follows a few of these families through the hope and rush of the boom time, when they all came south to buy cheap land and settle down as gentlemen farmers.  And then, so quickly, those dreams turned literally to dust.

I listened to the audiobook version of The Worst Hard Time, and I think this had a pretty big impact on my impression of the book.  The narrator, Patrick Lawlor, had the gravely tone of voice I often associate with PBS American Experience narrators.  He told the story as though he had lived through the dusters.  I appreciated this as it brought the stories to light much more.  But I didn't like the voices that Lawlor gave to the people quoted in the book.  The men invariably had southern drawls (even those who were not originally from Oklahoma) and the women.  Ugh.  He made all the women sound high-pitched and whiny, which bothered me a lot.

I also thought that this book got very repetitive in the audiobook version.  It seemed like every half hour, there would be another dust storm that came and ruined everything.  I understand that they happened very frequently, but I don't think I needed to hear about every single one.  I preferred reading about the people and how they made do with so little, the sense of community that came up of people helping each other, how inventive the women got with recipes for their families and farm animals.  While I know the Dust Bowl was a terrible and important part of our history, I just wish there had been more in this book to lighten the load for brief moments.

Overall, this was an enlightening read about a phenomenon I wasn't very familiar with previously.  I really enjoyed the first half but got much more distracted in the second.  Still, it was good to read about so many people who lived through so much.