Minimum Maintenance Road

During the trip I started reading The Worst Hard Time:  The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan.  One-third of southern plains residents left the region during the 1930s.  The book is about the two-thirds that stayed.  Most of the book's story is centered on the panhandle of Oklahoma, but Egan includes extensive quotes from the diary of Don Hartwell of Inavale, Nebraska, which is about 25 miles from where these pictures were taken.  With the book and location in mind it was exciting to see evidence of much older dust storms while driving toward Red Cloud. 

South-central Nebraska is covered in loess, or wind-blown silt deposits.  The loess was blown here from the mountains to the west during and after the last ice age.  Soil forms rapidly in loess and is very rich, which is why much of the midwest has such productive farm land.  But there's a dark side.  Loess deposits are unstable.  The only thing holding the silt to ground in the photos above are eight inches of little bluestem roots.  Plow the grass under, get unlucky with a dry year, and the soil and silt starts blowing away.

That concludes the geography and history lesson.  Next up, a literature, geography and history lesson with a cameo appearance by a Greenwich Village building!  By the way, I hope all the Kool-Aid fans saw the 1939 survey of popular soft drinks I put on Flickr.

Dust Bowl Resources:

Timeline - American Experience:  Surviving the Dust Bowl
Dust storm movie - Wind Erosion Unit of the USDA at Kansas State University
Dust Bowl pictures - WERU, Kansas State University
The Plow that Broke the Plains - Dust Bowl era documentary movie
Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection of "audio recordings, photographs, manuscript materials, publications, and ephemera" at the Library of Congress

More minimum maintenance:  Joey Harrison explores the abandoned Broderick Building in Detroit.  See 34 floors of glorious decay!
 

Comments

[Mark]

Hi Joe - welcome to the Midwest! I'd also recommend Great Plains, by Ian Frazier as a great read. It's essentially a populist history of the plains states, and wonderfully written.

[Joe]

Thanks for the reminder, I really enjoyed that book.