ECHOES OF THE GREAT DUST BOWL

By Hugh Sidey

All spring long, beneath the rainless Texas sky, Catholic Bishop Michael Pfeifer could feel the people in his San Angelo diocese edge closer to God. When he drove west to his Midland churches, the dust from the parched fields swirled across the roads and banked in the ditches. He joked to fellow bishop Placido Rodriguez that he was sending his Lubbock territory down to San Angelo. But Pfeifer, like many others, was hearing echoes of the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and he knew that nature's stinginess would grip the souls of his farm and ranch people like nothing else. He went to San Angelo mayor Dick Funk, and between them they worked out a proclamation for a day of prayer for rain ("Water is our lifeblood"). Since then, there have been three rains, followed instantly by prayers of thanks. But now the dry season begins. And so the bishop in his Memorial Day prayer reached out to God one more time. "Pour out abundant rain on all nature," Pfeifer asked.

For all the weather-study centers and new cultivating methods, the giant swings of nature must still be confronted more by theology than technology. When the pictures of the cracked earth began swirling out some weeks ago from Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, there was a generation that remembered vividly 60 years ago. The angry, brassy sun cleared the sky of clouds for years, and the plowed, raw soil of the plains was lifted five miles high in scorched air and blown East.

We could see it coming in my part of western Iowa. At first there was a yellow haze across the horizon, and then as the dust climbed in the hot sky, it became orange and finally brown, and the sun was dimmed. In the first minutes we stood in mute groups just watching, and then windows were slammed shut despite the l00u heat, and the women pushed strips of rags around frames and sills in a pathetic effort to keep the monster at bay.

It never worked. The dust found the crevices and loose joints and piled up in the corners and drifted through the air. Sometimes you could hear it fall on the roof, and then you would breathe it, and then, like all things in nature, it would be gone. One more cleanup would begin. And in nature's strange sequence, pestilence followed hardship. The chinch bugs assaulted the scraggly grain stalks, and the grasshoppers swarmed. I remember seeing a whole file of grasshoppers, head to tail, on the corner of my house, eating paint and wood and whatever was within their sight. Farmers rushed them with big nets, then dumped them in heaps and sprayed them with oil and burned them to ashes. The next morning there seemed to be more than ever.

Like the people of San Angelo, we bowed our heads and moved closer to God. The little churches rang out with songs and prayers, and sometimes after the suppers, the worshippers would linger on the lawn. I can still hear the hushed voices and see the hollow eyes. Too much denial for too long. Something had gone terribly wrong in nature's rhythms. On those few nights when there were clouds and even a spattering of rain, I recall seeing the drops streak down the upturned faces of the farmers. They just stood with their arms at their sides in some kind of improvised ritual pleading for more. But it would be years before nature and man were again in harmony on the prairies and Great Plains.