It could be just me—the dust bowl was an unspoken, unacknowledged force in my childhood.
It marked Jack. Born in 1909, he was 20 when the Great Depression hit. He took a year off school, and went out to North Dakota.
No money.
The stories got told. Feeding the newborn lambs: he would sit in one room next to a partly barricaded door. He’d grab the first lamb, feed it with a bottle, and then toss it over the barricade into the other room. Then grab another.
Why? Where was the ewe?
He needed wood for the wood-burning stove. And there was none. He hit on the idea of chopping down telephone poles….
He baked his own bread, and was a bit ashamed of having to. He was caught in the act by a cowboy, visiting, looking for coffee if not a free meal. So Jack threw a towel over the dough, talked to the cowboy. At last, the cowboy spotted the rising dough. “Christ, son, you gotta knead that dough!” shouted the cowboy. Threw off the towel, punched down the dough, and started kneading away.
The stories carried the message—life is grim. You can lose everything overnight. Only the tough survive, and sometimes not even then.
And another message—implicit, not stated. You got it easy. You weren’t there in that cold dark house with the damn lambs puling and needing to be fed and the wind attacking the house and coming through the cracks in the walls and wondering…
…am I ever gonna get out of this place?
Ever get back to the university?
Ever make anything of my life?
“He didn’t think he’d make it,” Franny once said of him in those years. And he couldn’t quite believe that he did.
And what of this family, in the photo above? Here’s the caption:
"Farmer John Barnett and his family are 'Okies' who stuck to their land near Woodward. They have 21 dairy cattle which yield a scant seven gallons per milking. Mrs. Barnett takes care of a vegetable garden that is always blowing away. The children, Delphaline, 17 (top), Lincoln, 11 (right), and Leonard, 9, do plenty of chores. On Sundays the Barnetts eat jack rabbit." Oklahoma, 1942. (Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Oh. It almost raises more questions than answers. Seven gallons of milk from 21 cattle? That’s a third of a gallon per cow. And that garden—blowing away. Couldn’t she mulch it? Or was it so infernally dry, and so fiercely windy, that nothing could be done?
The jack rabbit—the only meat that they could eat? Here in Puerto Rico there are chickens everywhere in the country. Why no chickens there?
They stuck to their land—why? Nowhere to go? Obstinacy? Didn’t believe it was any better anywhere else?
Mostly, though, it’s the faces that haunt. Barnett—strong and tough and lean. Life has beaten him—does he know it? Can’t look into the camera, and yet his eyes are lifted—as if wishing to see out. His wife, also looking down, is she as submissive as she appears? Does she really acquiesce, as she sees her garden—that is, the food for her family—blow away? What woman would not be full of rage—rage at a man who had taken her to this barren place, who had put her and her children is this position? Rage at a man who had failed to do what a man was supposed to do: support his family.
Each of the children now—so different. Delphaline—and what’s the story behind the name? And yet she looks out at the camera, apparently untroubled, a typical girl. She has none of the tight-lipped, compressed look of her mother.
Lincoln, who I assumed was the youngest. But he appears, instead, the shyest. And then Leonard! That look—wry, innocent, savvy, questioning, impish…what? What is he thinking, as he sits in front of his broken father? Is there some life in him that has been snuffed out of his father?
A photo captures a moment. But life goes on. Jack went on, made a life for himself, got the hell out of North Dakota.
And also didn’t.
