Essay: Children of the Dust- Human Experience of Desertification

As a teenager, I read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which sparked my interest in my own family’s experience with the Dust Bowl. I heard from my parents that my grandfather came to California during the Great Depression, but I never heard any details about the experience directly from him. I caught my grandfather one evening after Thanksgiving dinner and asked him about Oklahoma.

“Shoot,” he adjusted himself in his armchair. He didn’t look directly at me, but stared off over my shoulder at the solid-oak entertainment center which held his hard-earned television and stereo. “You don’t wanna hear ‘bout that.”

“I do, Grandpa,” I prodded, “did Great-Grandpa have a farm?”

“Hmm, yep,” He nodded and frowned, “but I don’t remember too much, just that when the wind blew, ‘bout ever’ day, dust blew in the cracks under the door an’ ‘round the winduhs…” His gaze shifted downwards, and after a pause, “Nita had tuh sweep three times a day.” He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. I knew it was time to stop asking questions- he and my dad are alike in that when they pretend they’re going to sleep, that means “stop talking”.

I know from pieces of conversation that I’ve picked up from my father and his siblings that my grandfather was born to a white father and a Cherokee mother in 1921 and lived on a farm in Oklahoma until 1930, when drought struck and literally blew their soil away. They packed up and traveled Route 66 to California, and then up the second Great Okie Trade Route- 99- where I was born almost fifty years later. The farm that they left is now at the bottom of a reservoir used to help prevent the Dust Bowl from ever happening again.

Before the rush of European settlers, the soil of the American Midwest had been held on the ground for millennia by perennial grasses with deep root systems that could reach far down into the water table if conditions became too dry. When settlers with shovels arrived, they immediately tore out the grasses and found a wealth of rich, black soil that produced prolific crops. The crops that the settlers planted, however, didn’t have the complex root systems of the indigenous plants. In periods of drought, they couldn’t hold the soil. This fact in addition to plowing in dry periods and overgrazing of cattle led to the loss of much of the richest soil in North America (1).

Soil. It is our planet’s living shell, and ours is the only planet in the universe known to possess it. Soil began as stardust, exploding through space, boiling and steaming into rocks, only to be washed and crumbled into clay by water. Many scientists believe that some of the first life forms to come from the sea lived in the clay and created the conditions to allow plant life to establish. When a plant or animal died, its body fell, which gave microbial life something to eat, digest, and waste. The waste of these life forms, in addition to minerals, plant and animal debris, is soil. From the soil, another plant will grow, die, be broken down, create more soil, and on, and on (2).

The scientific theories about the relationship between soil and life are not anything new. The book of Genesis, written more than 3,000 years ago, tells of how man was created:

“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).

In the Americas, many creation stories regarding clay and soil abounded, one of which was from the Blackfoot tradition. It told of Napi, or Old Man, creating the world and taking the time to shape a human woman and child from clay and call them “people”(3).

It seems natural to me to come to the conclusion that people are made from dirt after considering the countless childhood hours I spent squishing mud between my fingers chanting, “God made dirt, so dirt don’t hurt”.

Dirt was a good friend; I dug to China in the backyard, painted my face with mud, and even ate it on occasion (to my little sister’s dismay). The elementary school which I attended had a camp in the woods that the sixth graders went away to for five whole days. The camp was paid for by the state and sixth grade students from all over the region got to have their week. It was an ecology camp, though I didn’t realize it at the time. All I knew was that I got to sleep in a bunk with other girls from school and we got to eat in a Mess Hall. Wow! During meals, to quiet the riotous clamor of sixth graders with little supervision, a couple of the Program Directors- a married couple, if I remember right- sang folksy, cutesy ecology tunes to the strum of the husband’s guitar. The songs were about “Rusty, the Red Tailed Hawk, soaring in the sky...” and something about amphibians, but the song I remember clearly to this day was:

Dirt made my lunch,

Dirt made my lunch,

Well, thank you, dirt, yeah

Thanks a bunch,

For my tacos, my beans, my milk and my munch, ‘cause

Dirt made my lunch.

Brilliant.

It seems obvious that we should thank soil for giving us all that we have, from clean water filtering under the soil of forests, to the timber or mud to build our homes, to the very food we must eat to live. It is the catalyst between life and death for most of the life forms on Earth, especially humans. From healthy, rich soil, plant life may grow. On the other hand, soil devoid of organic material and low in microbial life will not feed growing plants, and will not recycle our water. Without soil, we cannot live.

Estimates are that in good conditions, it can take 500 years for natural processes to break down one inch of topsoil. The slow process of the decomposition of organic matter and the breaking down of minerals has never changed with the frantic pace of human life. Current agricultural practices erode one percent of that soil every year. One percent doesn’t seem too bad, right? Well, considering that the practice of tilling and synthetic fertilization (without any organic matter added) over most of the planet’s arable soil has been the predominant means to farm for at least fifty years, we are left with less than half of the soil that humanity inherited(4).

Modern historians and archaeologists have long pondered the reasons behind the fall of the greatest human empires on earth- the Romans and the Mayans, for example. The collapse of Rome in the 5th century can be traced back to many causes, but historians are now suggesting that the basic reason for the weakening of Rome’s infrastructure was caused by its environmental degradation. A massive population explosion fueled the need to plow more fields, attempting to grow the same crop year after year. Cattle, sheep, and goats stripped all plant life from the hillsides. This combination of unenlightened farming practices led to flooding, hillside erosion, drought, dead soil, and a starving population. The same is suggested about the Mayan civilization, whose population rivaled that of present-day Los Angeles County in approximately the same amount of area. From being one the most densely populated areas in the world to the current society of small farmers, there is still much debate about this mysterious civilization, but these facts are clear: deforestation coupled with an extreme drought destroyed the soil on which the Mayans depended (5).

In a National Geographic article about the spread of the Sahara Desert, I saw a picture of a North African family sleeping under a cloth shelter in the hottest part of the day. The mother is probably in her thirties, still young by western standards, with a soiled yellow scarf draped over her head and behind her shoulder and large gold hoops in her ears. Her face is dry and the dust highlights the wrinkles wrought by her short years of squinting over the dunes. A child lies next to her, a girl who might be two years old, wearing only a beaded necklace. Her chocolate skin is dusted, sand glistens in her curls and is sprinkled over her body- as though the sand fairy came to her as she slept and kissed her in affection. Mother will wake soon, I imagine, and look out through the opening of the makeshift tent; she’ll wonder how far she will have to carry her child to the next patch of shrubs to feed their only goat. The space from one well to the next becomes wider and wider.

Desertification is the human-made process of previously fertile soils being unable to support life (6). Regions that once were able to sustain successful subsistence show signs of becoming desert-like, and its effects are being felt already all over the world. North America has had its own share. My aunt has shown me an old black and white photo of my grandfather- not one of the old black and whites proudly displayed in my grandparents‘ hallway- this one was given to my aunt by Nita, my grandfather’s older sister. It is a wrinkled old photograph of my grandfather just before they left Oklahoma. He is the stereotypical Dust Bowl child, squinting, mouth downturned and slightly open in objection to being forced to face the sun for a picture. His cheeks, his overalls, the porch behind him, all dusty. I never heard about how my great-grandparents felt about losing the farm; I can only imagine. The dust must have been heartbreaking to wash off the children every day. Dust on the dishes, dust in your hair, dust in your teeth.

I don’t think that the loss of the farm was what traumatized my grandfather. I think that it was the stigma of being an Okie fruit picker in California that upset him. At nine or ten years old, boys are just starting to grow outside their immediate family to search for acceptance in the community; he was sleeping in one-room shanties with the rest of the family and all of their possessions. No land of their own to claim, no roots, their former farming community dispersed throughout the California valley, their culture denigrated as backward and filthy. If he got to go to school at all, it must have been hell, with the ridicule ten year old children inflict on each other. It’s no wonder that he won’t talk about it. He has been hiding the fact that he is a son of the dust his whole life.

Herein lies the tragedy of desertification; good people trying to feed themselves and their families the same way that everyone around them do, only to find that the crops don’t grow anymore. Crops that can be salvaged are sold, leaving the family with nothing until the next season. Countless families throughout the world suffer silent desperation, believing that their situation somehow is their own failure. When they can’t grow food on their land anymore, they must leave the dust behind. Where do they go? To the neighbor’s farm to work, usually to pay off a debt, or to the city, only to find their old neighbors fighting for the scarce work there is. What then? There is no one in charge to tell them where to go, because the truth is too tragic to utter. Instead they are ignored, forgotten. So the people drift, from one shanty to the next, from one mine to the next, from one factory to the next. “Like whirlwinds in the desert,” Woody Guthrie sang about the Dust Bowl Refugee- the children of the dust lose everything that tied them to their soil. Soil lost, culture lost, lives lost, blown away in the wind.

Sources:

¹ Cunfer, Geoff. "The Dust Bowl." Economic History Services. Web. 25 Apr. 2010. a href="http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Cunfer.DustBowl%3E">http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Cunfer.DustBowl>;.

² Grubinger, Vern. "Soil Microbiology: A Primer." University of Vermont Extension Service. Web. 25 Apr. 2010. a href="http://www.uvm.edu/vtvegandberry/factsheets/soilmicrobes.html%3E">http://www.uvm.edu/vtvegandberry/factsheets/soilmicrobes.html>;.

³ "Blackfeet Creation Tale." Blackfeet Community College. Web. 25 Apr. 2010. a href="http://www.montana.edu/wwwbcc/legend.html%3E">http://www.montana.edu/wwwbcc/legend.html>;.

⁴ "Global Resources and Productivity." USDA Economic Research Service. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, 14 Dec. 2000. Web. 25 Apr. 2010. a href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/GlobalResources/Questions/grql.htm%3E">http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/GlobalResources/Questions/grql.htm...;.

⁵ Diamond, Jared M. Collapse. New York: Viking, 2005. Print.