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Drought reignites Dust Bowl fears
ELKHART, Kan.• This empty stretch of prairie, broken only by the stony ruins of a long-demolished basement, is where Floyd Coen learned that you can eat tumbleweeds if you have to.
The basement, today just a ring of rocks around a pool of sand, was where his family lived in the 1930s, on a farm his father chiseled out of the arid grassland.
It’s where the family took shelter when “dusters” swept through — “Let’s all go in the house and die together,” they would say.
It’s where seven older brothers watched helplessly as their 2-year-old sister succumbed to dust pneumonia.
This was the epicenter of one of the worst ecological disasters in American history, the Dust Bowl. Drought and unsustainable farming methods left 83 percent of Morton County, home to Elkhart, in extreme southwestern Kansas, barren, and fierce prairie winds blew much of the land away. No other county in the six Dust Bowl states had a greater portion of its land devastated.
Seventy-five years later, the land is blowing again.
The past two years have been among the driest since the Dust Bowl days. This winter, nearly 10 percent of the Cimarron National Grassland, a swath of former farmland bought by the government in the 1930s, has been stripped bare, federal officials say. Dunes cover many fences. Tumbleweeds pile up higher than houses.
The “drouth” — that’s how they say it in southwestern Kansas — is the topic of conversation in restaurants and on the street. And if you ask an old-timer such as Coen, he’ll tell you he’s seen it all before.
“Anybody that has been here very long knows it, with the wind all the time, and it sure looks a lot now like it did in the early ’30s,” Coen said.
But in a place where folks always look to the sky with optimism, waiting for the next rain, they aren’t yet battening down the hatches.
Russian thistle blooms
Five inches of rain fell in October, the wettest month here since June 2004.
There has been 0.65 inches of moisture since.
The fall precipitation caused a bloom in Russian thistle, a plant brought to the region when German Mennonites fleeing czarist Russia settled here in the early 20th century. The soil dried, and the fierce prairie winds blew the thistle away, which is why they call it tumbleweed.
“People today, this winter, it’s been a daily chore to go out and move the tumbleweed from their homes so they’re not a fire hazard and dispose of them,” said Joe Hartman, U.S. Forest Service district ranger of the national grassland. The tumbleweeds choke fishing ponds and blocks roads. Road crews have plowed more tumbleweeds than snow this winter.
Equally disconcerting are the patches of bare earth spreading across the landscape. Hartman estimates that at least 10,000 acres of the national grassland have lost their cover, places where the hardy sagebrush and yucca have died.
“It’s hard to kill a yucca. That tells you how severe this drouth is,” Hartman said.
In 2007, Elkhart received a little more than half its average precipitation, 11.68 inches. Last year saw 14.81 inches. In an average year, 19.33 inches of precipitation falls.
Farmers without irrigation have lost their winter wheat, and without any rain, some have decided not to plant milo this spring, Hartman said.
“Some people are saying they dig down 7 feet and can’t find any moisture,” Hartman said.
The lack of crops makes the fields blow like the barren prairie. On windy days, the air in Elkhart tastes granular and leaves a film of dust on cars and windows. Last spring, the Forest Service had to replace 27 miles of fence line buried by dust.
This has always been an arid region. Before settlers arrived, the section of the Oklahoma Panhandle just to the south of Elkhart was known as “No Man’s Land,” for its lack of water and trees. It was a hardy ecosystem of tall prairie grasses and massive buffalo herds, all adapted to survive in the arid climate. The land had supported American Indians for 12,000 years.
White settlers nearly destroyed it in fewer than 10.
Parents homesteaded
At 84, Coen is among the dwindling number of people who can say they remember the Dust Bowl.
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