Tell Me About the Dust Bowl

[Master Taran]

Originally Posted by Angakuk

I also recall driving through a sandstorm in Grapevine Pass (or maybe it was Cajon Pass) when I was about ten years old. The sand left the windshield pitted and perforated the radiator. We had to keep adding water to the radiator until we got to a place where we could get it fixed.

Tejon Pass. Cajon Pass. I lived in So. Callie for 37 years.

[Angakuk]

As I think about it a little more I think that if it was not the Grapevine then it was the mountain pass on Old Highway 80/Highway 94, east of Jacumba. I can't recall the name of the pass, but there was turn off near there for In-Ko-Pah County Park. We used to travel that way pretty frequently going from San Diego to visit family in Arizona. We always stopped at the Wisteria Candy Cottage in Boulevard. The place appears to still be in business, much to my surprise after all these years. I am pretty sure that it was not Tejon Pass and probably not Cajon Pass either. I will have to ask my mother about it some time as I recall that she was driving and my father was not with us. He was probably at sea at the time.

Enough about my childhood memories. Let's hear some more about the Dust Bowl.

[livius drusus]

Ken Burns' next documentary will be about the Dust Bowl.

[Burns] then showed a clip of a not-yet-completed film — "The Dust Bowl" — which is scheduled for release in mid-November.

"For the first time in our life, we're approaching an oral history," said Burns, after showing a series of interviews. "This is mostly the story of 25 people who were children and teenagers during this 10-year apocalypse. They're remembering unbelievable trials as if they were yesterday."

Asked by Rowan professor David Bianculli how many researchers work on one of his documentaries, Burns answered that the filmmakers do the research themselves.

"It's this small nucleus of people doing the work," he said. "In this case ("The Dust Bowl"), I got on PBS and made an appeal. I asked for people with stories, film and still photographs. It's animated by you becoming intimately acquainted with their families. One of the most important characters is actually dead, but her diary is unbelievable."

I'm looking forward to seeing this, needless to say.

[Dingfod]

I bowled a couple of lines in the Dust Bowl a couple weeks ago.

[livius drusus]

Ken Burns' Dust Bowl documentary debuts this November on PBS.

[LadyShea]

Weather.com has an article about it http://www.weather.com/news/dust-bowl-20120718

I remembered seeing the headline while I was checking on the massive ass rainstorm we were having and thinking "dust bowl 2012? Whu?"

[livius drusus]

Excellent article but wtf is with the pagination? It's like a children's book, for Chrissakes. Anyone likely to read about the Dust Bowl can probably handle more than two paragraphs a page.

[LadyShea]

It's weather.com , it was a p. good article even though

[Sauron]

Apparently a lot of California's Central Valley was settled by people from Oklahoma fleeing the Dust Bowl. I gather that there are still traces of an accent among some of the old-timers.

In a slightly different tale, something I learned in one of my China-area studies for my MBA. Apparently someone in China got the bright idea of raising lots of goats on the high Mongolian plateau, to exploit the high prices that cashmere was fetching.




Consequently, cashmere prices worldwide plummeted due to the massive glut of Chinese cashmere.

Only one problem: the goats graze right down to the ground, leaving almost nothing of the grass left to recover. The grass in that plateau grows slowly, if it all. And given global warming, the land isn't recovering. So the already-massive dust/sand storms that blow into Beijing have gotten much worse. What goats there are left are scraggly and underfed. The goats cannot graze there anymore. So for the price of a few years' of cashmere exports, the ecosystem was destroyed and the sandstorms will continue to expand for decades to come.

Yay, capitalism.

[livius drusus]

China is about 5 minutes away from going full WALL-E.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by Sauron

Apparently a lot of California's Central Valley was settled by people from Oklahoma fleeing the Dust Bowl. I gather that there are still traces of an accent among some of the old-timers.

Parts of California, mainly around Bakersfield, have the pin-pen merger due to settlement by Southerners in the area.

[LadyShea]

going full WALL-E

Stoled

[ImGod]

One thing Nebraskans do is write down their history.

This one looks like a bucket of suck headed their way.



Adams County Historical Society

Here's a map.

I never thought of asking my grandparents, but we lived outside the worst areas. I wonder if the sandhills started moving. A couple more years of this summer and the sand dunes may start blowing again.

ETA: I found this at the University of Nebraska http://drought.unl.edu/DroughtBasics...BowlYears.aspx

Cool picture of Kansas there too.

[ImGod]

Here's what a large portion of Nebraska looks like under the green.



Too much drought and there is a risk of the underground desert moving again. It would take a lot of drought as almost all of this is ranch land and not farmed.

[livius drusus]

That is an excellent writeup of the Adams County Dust Bowl experience, ImGod. Props to Ms. Dorothy Creigh.

[Ymir's blood]

She had the power to go home all along.

[ImGod]

Originally Posted by livius drusus

That is an excellent writeup of the Adams County Dust Bowl experience, ImGod. Props to Ms. Dorothy Creigh.

There are historical societies in most counties in the state. The state version collects all sorts of information, photos, etc. You can get lost in their archives looking at glass plate negatives or scans of people's letters.

Here's the wierd section from one of the sites

weird nebraska index Close to an oxymoron.

[livius drusus]

The first episode of Ken Burns' The Dust Bowl debuts on PBS tonight at 8:00. The second episode is tomorrow.

[Angakuk]

I watched it. Now I feel dirty.

Seriously though, it was very good. Real down-to-earth stuff. Lots of gritty realism.

I really like the first-person oral history approach. In his documentary on the civil war Burns had to settle for diaries and letters to get that first-person touch. This time he had honest-to-God living human beings and they were very engaging.

[livius drusus]

Agreed. They were able to convey the drudgery and terror of the period extremely vividly. I wept like a baby several times, especially when the brothers talked about Rina Marie.

[It's Me!]

Originally Posted by livius drusus

Yup. Sadly, the fiction of endless fertility was sold by the US government too. They were completely clueless about the cycle of rain in the semi-arid environment of the Great Plains.

Just as folks were completely clueless about the endless amounts of fresh water at our disposal. Our knowledge of agriculture has expanded immensely, but the task ahead of us is daunting. It's been calculated that, with current population estimates that we'll have to generate an equivalent amount of food (calorie-wise) from now to 2050, as has been generated by society from 1500 to the current day.

Where will all that land and water come from?

Link: http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Multimed...the-World.aspx (see figure 1).

[It's Me!]

Originally Posted by ImGod

Here's what a large portion of Nebraska looks like under the green.

Too much drought and there is a risk of the underground desert moving again. It would take a lot of drought as almost all of this is ranch land and not farmed.

Too much drought and the water being drawn out of the Ogallala Aquifer is being done so at an unsustainable rate ... (all that corn for ethanol requires a whole lot of water, doncha know). Never mind what would happen if the Keystone XL pipeline were built and had an accident, dumping oil into what was left of the aquifer.

[SR71]

Originally Posted by It's Me!

Too much drought and the water being drawn out of the Ogallala Aquifer is being done so at an unsustainable rate ... (all that corn for ethanol requires a whole lot of water, doncha know). Never mind what would happen if the Keystone XL pipeline were built and had an accident, dumping oil into what was left of the aquifer.

The oil and gas pumped from shale formations also use a lot of water. The water then has to be sequestered underground after use because it's contaminated.

[ChuckF]

Originally Posted by livius drusus

Agreed. They were able to convey the drudgery and terror of the period extremely vividly. I wept like a baby several times, especially when the brothers talked about Rina Marie.

Oh god I cried like a babby both nights, but it was worse tonight when they were talking about the Okies in CA. And last night when the woman was dusting the portrait of Roosevelt.

It was also more overtly political than I expected it to be. Of course, when you think about it, how could it not be?

[LarsMac]

My maternal grandparents lost their OK farm during the dust bowl years.
They moved to Florida and he went to work driving a truck.