I don’t know how we missed this Timothy Egan book in 2006 when it was first published, but after starting it last night, we’re hooked. The Worst Hard Time is the epic story of the dust storms that terrorized America’s High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression and the families who stayed and survived the choking dust of our nation’s greatest natural disaster, the “dirty thirties”. From the Introduction:
On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there. It scares them because the land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in its immensity. It scares them because they feel lost, with nothing to cling to, disoriented. Not a tree, anywhere. Not a slice of shade. Not a river dancing away, life in its blood. Not a bump of high ground to break the horizon, give some perspective, spell the monotone of flatness. It scares them because they wonder what is next. It scared Coronado, looking for cities of gold in 1541. It scared the Anglo traders who cut a trail from Independence to Santa Fe, after they dared let go of the lifeline of the Cimarron River in hopes of shaving a few days off a seven-week trek. It even scared some of the Comanche as they chased bison over the grass. It scared the Germans from Russia and the Scots-Irish from Alabama — the Last Chancers, exiled twice over, looking to build a hovel from overturned sod, even if that dirt house was crawling with centipedes and snakes, and leaked mud on the children when thunderheads broke.
It still scares people driving cars named Expedition and Outlander. It scares them because of the forced intimacy with a place that gives nothing back to a stranger…
History, delivered as though in a novel you don’t want to put down. I find myself stopping to re-read paragraphs, to draw in a melodic phrase or colorful description, marveling at the perfect choice of words and hoping to remember how they were woven, all the while discovering how little I really knew about this part of our history and the very real people who lived it.
I don’t usually recommend a book before finishing it, but this may well be the exception.