The Texas Grapes Of Wrath

I've read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I've seen the John Ford movie version several times. A couple days ago I watched The Grapes of Wrath for the first time while both living in an area of America affected by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and during a recession which is the worst America has suffered since the Great Depression.

Times were way tougher in the 1930s. People were left to fend for themselves way more than they are today. And the police could act in bad ways that are much worse than the current day abuses of the Fort Worth Gestapo and other misbehaving police.

In the 1930s there was no Internet, no cable news, no nothing to shine a light on the abuse heaped upon those forced to escape the Dust Bowl. It was an era of foreclosures, much like today. And like today, you could be ordered out of your home with bulldozers soon to follow, ala Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys and the City of Arlington.

I have personally known escapees from the Dust Bowl. The parents of my best BFF, known as Big Ed, in Texas, escaped the Dust Bowl, from Ness City, Kansas in the mid 1930s. Big Ed's mom and dad had 2 kids at the time. Big Ed's dad made a makeshift camper on the back of a pick up truck. One of those old time vehicles, which started the engine using a crank in the front. I was to see that truck, still running, in the 1970's, hauling firewood in a pasture in Washington. It should have been in the Skagit County Museum.

Big Ed's mom and dad made their way west on Route 66, joining thousands of other Kansans, Okies and Texans, seeking work and a life away from the walls of lethal dust and grinding poverty.

Big Ed's mom and dad eventually made it to Yuma, Arizona. There was cotton to be picked. Ed's dad, a real hard working man, picked cotton for one day, declared it the hardest job he'd ever done, quit and headed north, towards Ely, Nevada, where they heard there was work to be found in mining camps.

Big Ed and I have driven through the same areas his mom and dad traveled through on that old truck, including Yuma and Ely. Even today, Ely is a very isolated place, at the east end of the Loneliest Road in America.

They found work at the mining camp, room at a boarding house. Ed's mom worked as the boarding house cook. Ed's mom was not a good cook. But she made really good bread and homemade noodles. I suspect those were her specialities in the boarding house.

Eventually Big Ed's mom and dad got a letter from some Kansas friends who had made it all the way to western Washington, to this valley called Skagit, near this town called Alger. They told Big Ed's mom and dad that there was logging work and land for sale, cheap.

So, the family loaded up their makeshift RV, again, and headed north, by what road, I do not know. I do know there are some high mountain passes to cross between Nevada and Washington and that the roads were not quite what they are today.

Eventually the family made it to the Promised Land. A job logging for Weyerhauser was found. Land was bought, from Weyerhauser. The makeshift RV was taken off the pickup and became the first part of what became the house Big Ed and his twin, Wally, grew up in.

The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression trauma continued to affect Big Ed's mom and dad decades later. They were very frugal. Indoor plumbing was not introduced until the 1960s. In the 1970s I told my mom that Big Ed's mom had this cool thing with big rollers to wash clothes with. My mom was appalled. Mom decided she needed a new washer and dryer. Big Ed's brother-in-law, Keith, Big Ed and I brought my mom's old washer up to Ed's mom's place. Ed's mom was not happy at first, but she soon learned to like the modern appliances. When those wore out, she bought new ones.

Years later I remember visiting Big Ed's mom and being fascinated by her tales of life in Kansas in the Roaring 20s. She was a flapper! Big Ed had no idea his mom had such a scandalous past. He'd always known her as an extremely pious, Christian mom. Not a bob-haired, short-skirted Charleston dancer.

And now, all these years later, Big Ed finds himself back in the Dust Bowl zone, during yet one more Great Depression, trying to figure out if he needs to fashion a makeshift home on the back of a pickup in order to escape this place and seek his fortune elsewhere. What an ironic conundrum.

Excellent YouTube video below about The Grapes of Wrath. And how it mirrors our current troubled times....