Farm Girl by Karen Jones Gowen Page B

or learned anything more about her or her boys.

Young Lucille and Catherine in a buggy

John Marker

Chapter Thirteen:
Dustbowl Days

    For us, the Dust Bowl started in 1934. We didn’t have any rain that summer, the corn grew up about twelve inches high, then turned brown and fell over. There wasn’t enough moisture in the soil to hold it up. It was growing in dust, so it just fell over. There was no snow that winter, or if there was it was very little, didn’t amount to anything and blew off the fields.
    In March of 1935, I was at Kearney State Teachers College going to school for my rural teaching certificate. Mother and Dad drove up one weekend to bring me home. A girlfriend came, too. Her dad was going to come out from Red Cloud the next day to pick her up at our place.
    We approached the house and saw a huge black cloud. My dad hurried and did the chores before the storm came. It was evening, but things were darker than usual because of these clouds and dust blowing everywhere. Mother quickly went in and turned the house lights on, and the yard light on the windmill. There was no rain, just dust and awfully hard wind blowing.
    We went to the basement because Mother thought it would be a tornado and, of course, we always went to the cellar for a tornado. My dad hadn’t come in yet from the barn and Mother was pretty worried because storms frightened her. The memory of her family’s sod house being destroyed by a tornado was still clear in her mind.
    Dad didn’t come in for the longest time. Finally he made his way in and said he’d gotten lost from the barn. It was dark and blowing dust so hard that he couldn’t see at all. He couldn’t see the light on the windmill or the lights in the house, and he couldn’t tell what direction to go to find the house from the barn. For twenty years, he had taken that path from the barn to the house and probably could have found his way blind-folded. Yet caught in the blackness of swirling dust, he became disoriented and lost in his own yard. Eventually the wind let up a little, enough so he could see the light on the windmill and he was able to find the house. He was completely covered in dirt, just black from head to toe.
    In the house, the dust was so thick we had to hold wet handkerchiefs over our faces so we could breathe. We went to bed that night with the sound of the wind howling and dust hitting the windows.
    In the morning, my friend and I woke up and looked at each other and started laughing. Our faces were gray, covered in dust. The quilt on my bed had lots of colors and designs on it, but now with the dust covering it so thickly it looked like gray velvet. About a half-inch of very fine dust covered the floors of the house. During the night, the dust had collected around the pig fence so much that it made a drift three feet high, and the pigs walked right over the fence.
    We listened to the radio and to the party line telephone to hear news about the storm. There were so many stories about people getting lost during the storm and stranded out on the roads.
    We had dirt roads, but the main roads to town had gravel on top. As people drove on them, gravel would build up along the edge of the road and make a raised line or ridge. On the rest of the surface, the gravel would get ground into the dirt until it was pretty much back to being a dirt road, but there would still be this ridge of gravel along the edge.
    That night cars stalled with the dust clogging the engines. The storm lasted through the night and people couldn’t stay in their cars. So they’d get out and almost crawl along the road following the ridge of gravel at the edge until they could get into Campbell, Inavale or whatever town was closest. A lot of the people said they crawled most of the way, because that was the only way they could tell where the gravel ridge was. They would feel it with their hands because they couldn’t see a thing, it was so dark with all the dust blowing.
    That was the