Not everybody's history is PBS

My wife’s Uncle Murray Raley, in an undated letter written to a cousin, but never mailed:

“I can barely remember the way it was in the early thirties when daddy was trying to feed us raising cotton on rented land. The dirt was so poor and wore out that it wouldn’t have made much of a crop with plenty of rain which it didn’t get.

“That was the years that part of the state of Oklahoma blew away and the inhabitants of that bleak and desolate region migrated enmasse to California thereby causing that state some severe economic problems.

“I didn’t know the extent of what was happening until years later when I watched some TV documentaries on P.B.S. that dealt with that particular period of history and read the novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ by Steinbeck about the tribulations and triumphs of the Joad family.

“My personal memories of the dust bowl era, however, have nothing to do with the exodus or the economies of state governments. Instead they are of standing at the edge of a field on a cold, dry spring day and looking skyward at the sun – barely visible through a thick cloud of dirt and/or dust hanging high above the earth (troposphere).

“It was so thick a cloud that the sun didn’t shine through it but I could see its outline. I could look directly at it without even squinting. Didn’t seem to give much more light than a full moon.

“This went on day after day for what now seems like weeks. It eventually took on an eerie, foreboding quality; I wondered if it was sort of a prelude to the end of the world. In spite of it all we made the usual bale plus a little over that year.

“Looking back it seems almost miraculous that we did so well.”