Living the Dust Bowl

My grandmother, Naomi Fisher Davis and
 her brother Frank Fisher, Oklahoma circa 1931.
 

I remember clearly the first time I heard about dust storms.  I was sitting on a red step stool watching my Grandmother Davis standing against the kitchen sink peeling potatoes. I was always fascinated by how she could peel a potato so thin that you could see the knife blade beneath the skin.  I remember asking her where she learned to do that, and she told me about the Great Depression and the dust storms that forced her family to migrate to Idaho in the 1930’s.  She told me she learned to peel potatoes so thinly because there was no food, and you didn’t waste anything.  “If you ate potatoes and carrots for supper, you soaked the peels in water overnight so you could fry them in bacon grease if you had it, for the morning.”  My question about why she didn’t have any food prompted her to tell me about how the dust had taken over the farm land Kansas.

Her stories about blowing dust always frightened me but, as most curious children do, I would pelt her with questions about what it was like.   She told me the dust would blow in and block out the sun so it was so black that she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face.  She also told about how she and her mother would stuff wet rags underneath the doors to keep the dust out of the house and how she and my uncle would wear bandanas over their nose and mouth so they could breathe.  Nothing captured my imagination or crept into my dreams like the stories about dust storms.  I remember asking her what the dust was like, and she compared it to flour.  “Imagine if someone just came in the house and dumped flour all over the floor, 4 inches thick.  That’s what the dust was like, flour.”

None of her stories could prepare me for the impact that Ken Burns’ “The Dust Bowl”, a PBS documentary, had on my understanding of my grandmother’s childhood.  The images of dust clouds roiling miles in the air and descending to engulf everything in their wake into darkness made her childhood real to me in a way that nothing else had.  I understood that I could never make sense of how frightened she must have been or how desperate the situation was to make her grandmother and mother, both single women, pack up everything they owned to travel to somewhere, anywhere else. 

In my teenage years, I used to wonder what would possess someone to settle in the Bear Lake Valley because I was positive it was 50 miles past the middle of nowhere.  How could a valley forsaken by modern times and lagging 20 years behind the rest of the world be the place you would want to settle for the rest of your life? I realize now that it must have appeared to be a paradise with a blue glacier lake at its center; promising these women a life free from the drought that caused the dust to blow.