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 .......
