ORDEAL BY DUST

Evening Star, Issue 22671, 10 June 1937, Page 1

ORDEAL BY DUST

IMPENETRABLE BLACKNESS TERROR IH XAHSAS A graphic description of one of the terrible duststorms which sweep Kansas and other American States from, time to time is given in the following article by George Greenfield, which is reprinted in the ‘Readers’ Digest’ from the ‘New York Times ’:— In Kansas, aboard the Denver Special of the Union. Pacific:—l am in the midst of the first bad duststorm of 1937. Through the car window I can see the fences which, line a road about 100 ft from the track. Beyond that is blackness, impenetrable and forbidding, through which we have been travelling for nearly 200 miles. ■ j When I awoke this morning, about 300 miles west of Kansas City, I saw a countryside bathed ,in bright sunshine, a pleasant land. About an hour later the light became dim and the whistle of wind sounded outside the window. I realised we were in the dust bowl of Western Kansas. I had read about duststorms; now I was seeing one, and it was an awesome thing. DYING LAND. A dust bowl is a dying land. I would think this country a flat Sahara, except that the ground is. hard and brown, and not rolling and sandy white. I have not seen more than two automobiles on the road that parallels the railroad track for a hundred miles or more. I have seen human beings only when passing bleak villages, consisting of a few shacks. Houses empty, yards _ empty. I have not seen a single child in these ghost-like, pathetic villages. The few persons I saw looked like a lost people living in a lost land. I do not exaggerate when I say that in this country there is now no life for miles upon miles; no human beings, no birds, no animals. Only a dull brown land with cracks showing. Hills furrowed with eroded gullies—you have seen pictures like that in rums of lost civilisations. Trees, once in a while. But their naked branches are grey with dust. They look like ghosts of trees, shackled and strangled by this choking thing, flinging their limbs skyward as if crying for rescue. RISK THEIR HEALTH. The trainmen on this route risk their health—even their lives—from dust pneumonia every time the wind blows hard. When the train stops they have to get out and load f baggage, or flag. In those few minutes of exposure the dirt gets into their nostrils, mouth, and lungs. j£ saw onq pf them get o#;'at-a stop a while back,, 'He had a- stJk handkerchief tied around his mouth; he kept moistening it with saliva. That helped him to breathe. ' “ I’ve been taking treatments that cost me a lot of money,” one trainman told me. “ Dust gets into the intestines, and that isn’t so good.” His face was drawn and worried. He dreads this trip as though it were the plague. A dead land, did I say P A passenger told me: “ On one trip through here, in a distance of a few hundred feet, I counted 40 jack rabbits stretched out, choked to death by dust. You don’t see any wild life out here except, maybe, a few crows. No songbirds and hardly any cattle. Yet right in this spot we’re passing through the cattle herds used to be as -thick as flies.” There was a mystified look on his face. It was an expression I have seen on the faces of others on the train. They can’t understand _ this outburst of Nature, this dissipation of the soil which has fed us. I saw fear in their faces, as of impending disaster. IN THROAT AND EYES. When we got through the worst of the dust storm I wanted to get some pictures of the swirling, murky fog. I stepped out on the observation platform, and my skin felt as_ if it were being pelted with tiny icicles. My throat clogged and my eyes stung. When I went back into the car it took the porter 20 minutes to brush the dust out of my clothes. He told me that ordinary soap_ will not get the stuff out of your skin. “ When I get to Denver,” he said, “ I’ll have to take two baths—one with,, soap and water and another with Epsom salts. That gets the dirt out of your pores so your skin can breathe.” The man across the aisle is coughing, one eye is very red and tears run down his cheek. Even though all the windows in this train are sealed, the thin dust seeps through, and porter bustles from chair to chair with a towel cleaning the stuff from the window sills. The train is now within an hour of Denver. The sun is shining from a blue sky again. The air is free of dust for the first time in several hours. But my throat and eyes still burn. Wind erosion. The words are vague until you actually see what waste and greed have done to our land—actually see it blowing away under your eyes, piling up in mounds that make you think of the Gobi Desert. Little holes in the land, about two or three feet in circumference, dot the hare countryside where the wind has dug out the soil. No vegetation left to hold the land intact. The last time I was out here, 20 years ago, there was life—birds and trees, cattle and crops. To-day I see the cold hand of death on what was one of the richest bread baskets of the nation.