Personal Accounts of Black Sunday and Dust Storms
During the 1930s, many residents of the Dust Bowl kept accounts and journals of their life and of the storms that hit their area. Collections of accounts of the dust storms during the 1930s have been compiled over the years and are now available in book collections and online.
In a New Republic article, Avis D. Carlson wrote:
"People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk…. The nightmare is deepest during the storms. But on the occasional bright day and the usual gray day we cannot shake from it. We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions."
Lawrence Svobida was a wheat farmer in Kansas during the 1930s. He experienced the period of dust storms, and the effect that they had on the surrounding environment and the society. His observations and feelings are available in his memoirs, Farming the Dust Bowl. Here he describes an approaching dust storm:
"… At other times a cloud is seen to be approaching from a distance of many miles. Already it has the banked appearance of a cumulus cloud, but it is black instead of white and it hangs low, seeming to hug the earth. Instead of being slow to change its form, it appears to be rolling on itself from the crest downward. As it sweeps onward, the landscape is progressively blotted out. Birds fly in terror before the storm, and only those that are strong of wing may escape. The smaller birds fly until they are exhausted, then fall to the ground, to share the fate of the thousands of jack rabbits which perish from suffocation."
The Black Sunday storm is detailed in the 2012 Ken Burns PBS documentary The Dust Bowl.
Read more about this topic: Black Sunday (storm)
Famous quotes containing the words personal, accounts, black, sunday, dust and/or storms:
“In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state.... It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“But, on more accounts than one, I had had enough of moose-hunting. I had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had I foreseen it, though I had been willing to learn how the Indian manvred; but one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The body is no body to be seen
But is an eye that studies its black lid.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago.”
—Richard Hugo (1923–1982)
“Be it so, for I submit; his doom is fair,
That dust I am and shall to dust return.
O welcome hour whenever! Why delays
His hand to execute what his decree
Fixed on this day? Why do I overlive?
Why am I mocked with death, and lengthened out
To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet
Mortality, my sentence, and be earth
Insensible! how glad would lay me down
As in my mother’s lap!”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)