A Fifth and Final Ekphrastic Essay About Our 2022 Road Trip: the Prairie and the Dust Bowl

 

Erosion No. 2, Mother Earth Laid Bare by Alexandre Hogue

When Greg and I were planning our 2022 road trip, our goal was to visit friends and family in Ohio and to investigate some places of interest there, but we also wanted the trip itself to be as full of memorable experiences as possible. One of the most significant things about our journey, it seemed to both of us, was that we would be passing through a swath of the country that had been most deeply affected by the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s. We already knew about the environmental devastation that had been visited on this part of the country because of the destruction of the prairies and the use of bad farming practices, and we hoped to learn more about the Dust Bowl and see remnants of the few acres of prairie that are left. Greg brought along a jump drive on which he had loaded lectures and audio files from books that were relevant to this and other sights we hoped to see, and we listened to them along the way.

On the eastbound trip, once we left New Mexico, we drove across the Texas panhandle, spent the night in Amarillo, then continued across Oklahoma. In Tulsa, we stopped at the PhilbrookMuseum of Art, which has exceptionally beautiful and artfully landscaped grounds. There we saw “Erosion No. 2, Mother Earth Laid Bare” by Alexandre Hogue. At the museum, I stood for a long time in front of this painting in which the outline of a woman's body is etched into and formed from the dry and desiccated soil. Her face is veiled and her lower legs and feet cannot be seen, but otherwise the form of a mature woman's body is represented in the loess-like soil as she sinks into and is surrounded by the severely eroded land. In the distance a small, dilapidated house can be seen, along with a bare tree and a small strip of grass. The house looks abandoned, the land looks depleted, and a viewer might wonder what it was that happened here – unless they knew that in 1936, the date given for this painting, the Dust Bowl was well under way. In the foreground, Hogue carefully depicts one of the causes of the problem, one of the reasons why Mother Earth's body is deprived of the vegetation that once would have covered it and is exposed in such an undignified way.

In the foreground is a steel plow, the sod buster, with its curved moldboard that lifted the sod and turned it over, making it possible for farmers to break through the dense and complex root systems that prairie grasses send down into the earth. The prairies of North America were systematically "broken," that is, turned into farmland, after European settlers arrived. Beginning in the 19th century, various new and efficient types of farm equipment were used, as well as new high-yield seeds and artificial fertilizers, to grow corn and other crops on the land that was once grassland, but the first and most important step was the breaking of the sod, a task the steel plow was designed to do. As a result of these activities, the grasslands of central North America have been reduced by 79% in the past 200 years, and in some places by 99.9%.  All of the grasses and other plants that once formed the prairie ecosystem and made the land so fertile also held the soil down with their roots, and that's why, when this cover was removed by farmers and when drought struck, there was a surprisingly complex yet altogether predictable eco-disaster waiting to happen. We now refer to it as the Dust Bowl.

Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma, USA by Arthur Rothsetin, April 1936. This image is a work of an employee of the United States Farm Security Administration or Office of War Information domestic photographic units, taken as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain in the United States. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsc.00241

While we were driving through Oklahoma, we listened to the first few chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, and I was impressed by the solemnity with which Steinbeck described the terrifying changes in the land that had been brought about by 1930. The opening chapter is a description of drought-afflicted Oklahoma, and listening to it helped us to imagine what the landscape might have looked like then. Farmers in Oklahoma, and throughout the North American grasslands, had been told that "rain follows the plow," and so many of them were not prepared when an earlier period of plentiful rain gave way to a period of intense drought. The topsoil was exposed as crops died, and it was reduced to a powdery dust. What Hogue depicts in "Mother Earth Laid Bare" is the stage on which the Dust Bowl took place, but The Grapes of Wrath focuses on the human consequences of that event. Steinbeck describes the day after strong winds blew across the fields, darkening the sky with dust:

"The dawn came, but no day. In the gray sky a red sun appeared, a dim red circle that gave a little light, like dusk; and as that day advanced, the dusk slipped back toward darkness, and the wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn.

"Men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their eyes." (The Grapes of Wrath, page 5)

 

And this was only the beginning of an ecological catastrophe that drove three and a half million people out of Oklahoma and the other affected states. 

Of course, many of those people survived the Great Depression, and both the U.S. economy and the life of U.S. farmers later improved because of the New Deal (and World War II, sad to say). But what about the prairie? The future of that ecosystem and the plants and animals that depended on it continued to be a story of disappearance and loss. Most of the prairie land is gone now, and many people react casually to this fact: It was just grass and empty land, so why does it matter? But grasslands are among the most biodiverse areas on the planet, and in a world that’s in the middle of the sixth great extinction, this rich ecosystem is important. In addition, many of the Native peoples of this continent had a way of life that was deeply intertwined with the prairies, and when the buffalo were slaughtered and the plains were transformed to farmland, many Native Americans’ way of life was threatened as well.  

So what are the prairies like today? After we visited the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Greg and I headed to Missouri and stopped at Prairie State Park to get a small experience of the prairie ecosystem. Our time was limited, and we weren’t able to go to the visitors’ center; we just parked the car and walked out into the prairie. The air smelled like the essence of sweet grasses and wildflowers. There were swallows overhead and lots of flying insects. We knew there were wild bison around, but we didn’t see them -- just a rich mix of plants and many birds and butterflies. It was early July, so the grasses had grown waist-high in many places, but because this is tallgrass prairie, some of the grasses eventually will get to be eight to ten feet tall. The sounds of birdsong and buzzing, trilling insects made gentle music, and there was a light wind.

In a video we watched before the trip, naturalist Dana Hoisington says the park is the largest piece of preserved prairie in the State of Missouri. A third of Missouri was once tallgrass prairie; now it’s less than 1/2 of 1%. Hoisington says that prairies and grasslands are among the most endangered ecosystems on earth, and he describes many of the plants and animals that live in the park. He also talks about the Osage people who once regularly passed through this area and who depended on the bison for their food and other needs. By the late 1880s, Hoisington notes, there were fewer than 1,000 bison in North America, whereas before the European settlers came, there were as many as sixty million of them. He also says that prairies are worth preserving for their inherent qualities, and he adds, “There's so much natural beauty, but it takes a little different mindset to appreciate it…” After we had been at Prairie State Park for a while, Greg and I were most definitely of that mindset.

On our westbound trip, after we had spent time in Ohio, we wanted to expand our prairie appreciation, so we decided to go to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. Once we began to get closer to Kansas, we listened to an episode of the BBC series "In Our Time" about the American Populists. This 19th century movement in Kansas and other Midwestern and Southern states came about because farmers were really suffering from drought and they were also plagued by low prices for their crops and extreme isolation. As a result, a few decades before the Dust Bowl, farmers formed a Populist Party, and their candidates won many offices, both state and national. The fact that U.S. currency was backed by the gold standard was considered by William Jennings Bryant and other populists to be responsible for the low prices farmers faced, so the populists opposed the gold standard. If not for the ways racism was used to turn poor white farmers against poor black farmers, the Populist Party might have had a much greater influence on American politics. Toward the end of the episode, presenter Melvyn Bragg asked if it's true that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an allegory of the Populist era. His guests agree that this is probably true, and as in any allegory, the characters and settings have hidden meanings beyond the overt ones Baum assigns to them in the story. The scarecrow, from an allegorical perspective, represents the American farmers; the tin woodsman the American workers; Dorothy the average American; and the Cowardly Lion is said to represent the politician William Jennings Bryant. 

After we heard about the Populists, Greg and I listened to a couple of chapters of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Though most people know it as a children’s story made into a movie starring Judy Garland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has a complex and interesting connection with the American prairie. In fact, the first sentence of the story is: "Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife." And not only does she live on prairie land that has been “broken” and turned into farmland, but she lives in a world strangely similar to the one depicted by Hogue in "Mother Earth Laid Bare." Baum says that when Dorothy stands in the doorway of the house she shares with her aunt and uncle and looks around, "...she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere." It is from this harsh world that Dorothy and her dog Toto are swept up by a tornado and carried to the land of Oz. The wind, although not personified in this fantasy, is an actor in the story, just as it was in the Dust Bowl when it carried the loose soil skyward to block the sun and drove people from their homes.

By the time we got to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, we were pretty psyched about what we hoped to see there. Unfortunately, though the Preserve's website describes this as the place where "the tallgrass makes its last stand," we didn't have the kind of transformative prairie experience here as we did at Prairie State Park in Missouri. As before, our time was limited, but the areas that were accessible to us didn't have the kind of lush grass and plentiful bird and insect life that we found in Missouri. As far as the eye could see, the grass was short like a somewhat overgrown lawn, and we couldn’t see any bison. We speculated that this is in part because Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve is regularly burned and allowed to regrow so that cattle can graze on it. As we stood near the old schoolhouse and looked around, we felt that this land no longer had the heart and soul of the prairie. But at least our trip to the preserve and later our drive through the Flint Hills gave us a view of Kansas grasslands.

So is it possible that we could have another Dust Bowl? According to an October 2020 article in Smithsonian Magazine, the answer is yes. Author Alex Fox cites a study that shows that dust levels have been rising, as much as 5% per year, and this trend coincides with hotter and drier weather due to climate change and a 5-10% increase of farmland in the Great Plains. These conditions mimic those that led to the Dust Bowl, and researchers say there’s no reason such an event couldn’t happen again. And if there is another Dust Bowl, Hogue’s “Mother Earth Laid Bare” is a grim reminder of what human beings and other living things will have to face.