30th April Took day off!

There was a “Wind Advisory” on the weather forecast today and given the strength of the wind when there was no warning I couldn’t summon up the energy or the enthusiasm to fight another battle with that Aeolus chappy today so had a day off , met quite a few other bikers, mostly from the States on shorter trips and took stock of why I was so interested in doing the trip.

It was all down to John Steinbeck and his accounts of the migration west of the dirt farmers who chose to leave the dust bowl of Oklahoma or who were thrown off their farms when the banks called in loans they couldn’t repay. 

Info around explains that severe droughts ravaged the Great Plains in the early 1930s, stirring up dust storms and eroding land that had once been prairie grass but had been ploughed up to grow wheat and then over-farmed to meet the high demand following the First World War. When, additionally, in the Depression-era crop prices fell drastically less wheat was planted so there was no binding for the soil and as the drought continued “the landscape became uninhabitable and as the depression wore on, more than 200,000 refugees from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri followed Route 66 west to Arizona or California in search of jobs and new homes.”

In Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath “Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66—the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map….66 is the path of people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership….66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”

 It was that “Mother Road” I wanted to follow and I’ve done a pretty good job of doing just that so far I think.

 I’m surprised though at how little historical information I’ve come across on the great dust storms whilst on this trip.  I have though experienced physical conditions that have shown me the potential for such storms - the wind is incessant and lifts the dry red dust with ease - and which have brought home to me how desperate those families must have been to keep going across terrain that even with the modern convenience stops of Burger King and House of Pancakes totally drains you.

 It may not be so obvious in an air conditioned car on the Interstate so you could say what he is going on about but on a bike on the old road you get a fair idea of what doing that journey in an open cab of an overladen jalopy must have been like.           

I know, get a life .......