For someone born in 1948, such as I, AmeliaJake, there was a lot of talk in the history classrooms about the Dust Bowl. Descriptions of the the dust storms and mentions of the drifts of dust up against fence posts and barns and houses. But we still didn’t get, or at least I didn’t. I knew dust, but the truth of the matter was that it was not dust; it was fine gritty dirt – black sand. It had weight and it smothered both the animate and the inanimate. More bluntly, it smothered the living and covered things.

Yes, I’ve been reading a book: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. It is a far-ranging book, talking politics and government policies and agricultural methods. Sometimes I find it a little unfair to Hoover – well, maybe a lot so. Sometimes I find it a little hard on those who chose to pack up and leave the area. And in these sections it is often slow-going.

It is also slow-going in the segments that talk about the day-to-day, month-to-month and year-to-year accounts of individual battles with the dirt that filtered into everything, including the lungs and stomachs of people and animals. It also filled the eyes and blinded people. But that very plodding pace brings you closer  to understanding the horrible conditions – the situation went on and on and on. There’s no quick description and then moving on and the reader thinking, “Oh, yeah, I understand how terrible it was.”

This is a case where a thousand words are actually better than a picture. This is a book where you get a sense of the slow ticking of the clock, no fast forward to better times. Quick treatments such as that make me think of the Made-for-TV movies that take the viewer through first symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and coming out into the sunlight at the end of a dreaded illness. Two hours of your time and you think you understand. Think about enduring two hours in the middle of the dark night with crushing worries about an unknown future – night after night after night? That would be reality and that is what you grasp in this book about the Dust Bowl.

I am not done with it, but I am appreciating the plodding through, and I am learning.