The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006; $28; 340 pages.

FROM THE DUST JACKET:

The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people who held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize--winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived -- those who, now in their 80s and 90s, will soon carry their memories to the grave -- Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression. As only great history can, Egan's book captures the very voice of the times: its grit, pathos, and abiding courage. Combining the human drama of Isaac's Storm with the sweep of The American People in the Great Depression, The Worst Hard Time is a lasting and important work of American history.

"This is can't-put-it-down history." -- Walter Cronkite

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Publishers Weekly: Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious Plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster -- the Depression -- and natural disaster -- eight years of drought -- resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity.... With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds.

Kirkus Reviews: Grim, riveting account by New York Times reporter Egan makes clear that although hurricanes and floods have grabbed recent headlines, America's worst assault from Mother Nature came in the form of ten long years of drought and dust.

The "dust bowl" of the 1930s covered 100 million acres spread over five states: Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, and Colorado. From 1930 to 1935, nearly a million people left their farms, littered with animal corpses and stunted crops. Towns simply disappeared. Thousands died from "dust pneumonia," a new condition born of swallowing and inhaling the swirling topsoil.... The great southern plains, once covered with native grasses that fed the buffalo and held the soil in place, were essentially stripped bare in the 1920s by wheat farmers eager to cash in on cheap land and high grain prices. The newly invented tractor made the job easier, and unusually wet weather in the late '20s made farming on the arid plains seem feasible. But then the Depression hit, wheat prices crashed, and once-bountiful farms went fallow, abandoned to the deepening drought and ever-blowing winds that literally sent the soil skyward.

Stark and powerful, a gripping if depressing read and a timely reminder that a Nature abused can exact a terrible retribution.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Timothy Egan, born in Seattle in 1954 and raised, primarily, in Spokane, is a national enterprise reporter for the New York Times. He is the author of four books and the recipient of several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Seattle with his wife and children.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR:

Tim Egan, from his home in Seattle, said that his parents had nine children and little money. They moved the family across the state, to Spokane, when Egan still was relatively young.In a New York Times article, Mr. Egan wrote: "At age seven, I walked into first grade at Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary elementary school in Spokane and was confronted by an enormous poster depicting the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Our school was blue-collar, the second- and third-generation Irish and Italian children from huge families. We had nine in ours, but could not compete with the Flynns, down the street, who had 13, or the Phillipses, who had 19."

"The Jesuits," Mr. Egan told me, from his study desk, "saved me at Gonzaga. Gonzaga Prep was a school that went out of its way to help blue-collar people. They took us in. I worked in the kitchen and got a great education."

After graduation from Gonzaga in 1973, Mr. Egan enrolled at the University of Washington. He also began work. "I got my degree in 1980. What happened was, I took a job [on the staff of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ] before I got my degree, so I had to go back and get it a few years later." In 1989, he joined the New York Times .

Mr. Egan is concerned that readers will not care about the Dust Bowl days. "It seems so long ago to so many people. One point I tried to make fairly high up in the book, in the introduction, is that those people who lived through that, at least some of them are with us now, and this is their story. It happened in their lifetime. It didn't happen in long ago, far away.

"These people lived through the most dramatic technological innovations in the Great Plains. Those innovations did change the Great Plains overnight. Without those changes you still would have had relatively small family farms, people working the land within the scale of what they could sustain. But with tractors you brought industrial might to what was a family agrarian situation. And then you throw in the wild volatility of wheat prices, which have never done any swing since -- today the price of wheat is almost below what it was 80 years ago. So you had this convergence of one-time-only economics and technology."

I asked about the April 14, 1935, "Black Sunday" dust storm.

"To listen to people talk about that is extraordinary. Their memories are as if it did happen yesterday. They describe what it smelled like and what it felt like, how abrasive the wind was, how their heart was racing, how the sun was snuffed from the sky, how they thought the world was coming to an end. I tried to imagine myself being a boy and looking up and seeing the sky go dark at noon.

"That Black Sunday storm had a drama of its own. The day started pleasantly. People were fooled into thinking that the worst was over. I heard that repeatedly from people I talked to, that they woke up on this Sunday morning, it was a crystal clear, robin's-egg- blue sky; there weren't any winds. The sun shone, the Plains showed a hint of promise and optimism, and people came out of their dusty little homes, their dugouts, and their plank houses and underground homes."

"Those underground houses," I said, "amazed me."

"Yes. A lot of people lived completely underground. On this April Sunday they came out and started to stretch and clean their clothes, and fire up their cars and go to church, and do things that they hadn't been able to do because they'd been prisoners of the weather.

"Around noon, starting in the far north, this enormous storm kicked up and moved its way south, and as it approached these individual communities, people were pointed to it and it was like looking at a three- to five-thousand-foot wall. I described it once I think as a 'moving mountain.' It's brown and raging and moving toward you.

"One of the great things about the Plains is you can see forever. So you would see this thing off in a distance, and it scared them -- they'd been used to dust storms but nothing like this. As it got closer, static electricity was so intense that you couldn't touch the person next to you, because it would actually throw you back.

"I hadn't known that these storms had that kind of kinetic power. But they do, and they did, and everyone spoke about that. I remember one guy telling me, 'We stopped shaking hands,' because you could get a shock, there was so much static in the air after one of these things.

"Everyone spoke about not being able to see your hand. That was the most consistent image. You'd hold up your hand in front of your face, and you couldn't see it.

"The first time I heard that about not seeing your hand, I thought that was preposterous. People tell stories, 'I remember the day the snowstorm was so bad.' I thought, that can't be true. But two things told me it was true. First, the contemporaneous accounts printed in newspapers at the time repeated that. Second, people I interviewed, and oral histories I listened to, time and again, described it the same way."

"But the sound of this storm," I said. "Amazing."

"Yes, this thing, at first, it was quiet. It was deadly quiet. You'd see it and you wouldn't hear anything. And then when it was on you -- of course things were ticking around and stuff was flying. You'd lie on the floor, you'd cover your face. You thought you were going to suffocate. You thought, 'I'm going to drown in this thing.' And imagine falling underwater. And that's what it was like. Like falling underwater at dusk.

"The wonder is, if there's any historical value of this story I tell, is that we all did think that most of these folks fled to California or got out of it. We don't have the sense of what it was like to be in the middle of it for so long. But there are so many terrific memories of it."

"You avoided the caricatures -- the Okie, Arkie, all that. You avoided the Woody Guthrie songs."

"Exactly. That's one of the things that was interesting to me as a writer. Suddenly you realize you have a great story to tell that hasn't been told in full detail. That our image of the Dust Bowl comes in large part from this balladeer, who didn't stick around -- I credit Woody Guthrie, but he left."

"But he left. Yes."

"Right after that Sunday. He went to Hollywood and to the Pacific Northwest. He didn't stick around. The struggle was a class diaspora like we have with Hurricane Katrina. At least two-thirds of the people stayed behind. So if you look at the big story, the big story was not so much the movement, it was people who put up with this."

Mr. Egan reminded me that most of these homes were without electricity. They were lucky if they had a telephone. "Some of them," he said, "got all this during the wheat boom and then lost it soon as the Depression hit. But most of these houses, and most of the rural Southern plains, did not have electricity. That was a great Roosevelt initiative to bring rural electricity. So they were living in conditions that we can't understand. And it made me admire them, tremendously."

"How did these people deal with this in terms of their religious faith?"

"These people were very religious, and they had very strong faith, and a lot of them interpreted the Bible literally. They thought that Revelations predicted this -- the end was near, the Rapture was coming. But this is the surprising thing. A fair amount of them lost faith. I read a lot of diaries and talked to a lot of people who said, 'What sort of God would betray us like this?'

"There were two sides of it. There were people who thought 'the end is near,' 'the apocalypse is upon us.' The Germans were different. The Germans from Russia. They're not extroverts, they're very 'hold it in.' They'd been through hell, coming from Russia to here. So they were used to quite a bit of bad stuff. They were Lutheran. They approached it differently."

"In your book," I said, "you've made the land seem almost a character."

"Yes, I wanted to write it like the land was a character; I didn't anthropomorphize it, but it seemed it was like Mother Nature, it got teased and pushed and beat up and finally got its revenge. I've always written stories about the outdoors. Growing up in the Northwest you can't help but love the outdoors, but you work on a story like this and you realize that the land has a limit, and if you abuse it, there's a terrible toll. Some people think there's a parallel to what's going to happen with global warming. I'm not sure I'll go that step."

"As a reader, I was glad that you stayed away from the global warming discussion. That discussion would have taken away from the immediacy of your story."

"I'm glad to hear you say that because my editor wanted to push me into that. I wanted to stick with the story. I wanted to let the story tell itself, like a parable, and lay it out and let people see what's obvious. I didn't think I needed to draw in the global warming."

"Did you think a lot about James Agee when you did this?"

"Certainly, he was one of the people I read going into this. But he wasn't a role model. Agee was trying to stir a conscience. I'm mostly trying to bring this almost lost era back to life. So he wrote out of urgency. I'm writing out of 'Wait a minute, wait a minute. Most of these guys are going to die. Let's not forget this.'

"So as a journalist who tries to write history as well, I know that there's a sense of urgency and you want people to wake up. That's what Agee was motivated by."

"Both you and Agee allow the vanquished rather than the victor tell the story."

"We always write from the point of view of the victor. History is always written in the sunshine, while they're drinking from the goblet. The first take is the most accurate take. I wanted to get those voices. I wanted to get them. I wanted to let them talk."

Mr. Egan, in libraries, looked at people's Bibles. "The interesting thing about that is that in a lot of households in that part of the country, the family Bible is more sacred than anything. It's the heirloom that gets passed down. The story of that family is in that Bible."

"The family Bible," I said, "is one thing people will grab."

"You finished my sentence. It's the one thing they'll grab. That's exactly right. I did hear people saying, you also need your gun. But the family Bible was the one thing."

"Can you describe for me what the dust felt like?"

"At one point, I tried to illustrate this in my book. A dust particle is about one-fifth the size of a period at the end of a sentence. As much earth as was excavated to create the Panama Canal was thrown to the air during a single storm, the Black Sunday storm. It has this sandpapery quality, fine sandpaper, people often said. It was like someone was rubbing sandpaper against your face."

"I kept trying to come up with ways to try to describe this. But it comes from the way the people talked about it. That when it was that concentrated, there was abrasiveness to it. It scratched at you. It got in your eyes, your nose, your throat."

"Your lungs."

"There's a kid, a doctor looked at him, he was a young, healthy man, and the doctor said, 'Young man, you are filled up with dirt.' And the kid died the next day. I mean that's why I said people would literally drown from the stuff.

"You could go out in your back yard, what was left of it, and you'd see a dust snowdrift. It would be misshapen one way. And then a day would go by and everything would have moved to one side, or it would have buried something that was not buried. People would have their cars buried in a day or two.

"Women worked so hard. You'd get old real quickly. A beautiful young woman, getting married in her 20s, by the time she's 30, would be broken down and beaten up.

"I quote a woman as saying, 'People get old very quickly in this part of the country. You age very quickly.' But women would talk about how they'd turn the pots over all the time, upside down. And you'd only flip it up to cook. You knew the dust was going to filter most of those rooms. Those houses were not insulated. They were plank boards.

"Dust would get in your house. It doesn't take much for it to get in. One woman told me the entire ceiling of the house caved. They saw it swelling, swelling, and it opened and it caved, and all the dust came down on them inside their house.

"'Why didn't they all flee?' Well, they always thought things would get better, that it had to end. They also didn't have any real choice. I mean it wasn't like they had spare cash lying around. These people were living a subsistence existence, even in towns."