“analytical description of your interaction with the book”
very emotional connection
words sparse like the fields
no wasted energy
introspective
thoughtful
poingnant
understated response to the drama of mother, hands, makes understated response to dust more
powerful.
Barrren
Grateful for things we don’t even consider -- rain, breathing easy, birds, clear day. What do we
need that we don’t appreciate till it is gone, ruined, in jeopardy?
Environmental themes in this book?
Effects of poor land use practices
Humans at mercy of land - powerlessness
Gratitude for rain
Night bloomer -- scorched by sun
Big dust storms of Black Sunday, etc-- info is on web, but this gives an immediacy
Federal disaster relief
Migrants v those who stayed
Trees, “wheat’s not meant to be here”
Strong emotional impact of US History event
(What is it like now?)
greed/shortsightedness, or in less judgemental words-- joy in productivity, unawareness, lack of
control over consequences. Role of govt? Shows up here as relief, money to replant wheat.
Portrayals of interactions with the natural and technological world?
Trucks unable to operate in the dust
Failure of technology vs natural world
“we didn’t see it coming, even though it had been making its way towards us for a long time.”?”
In Amarillo, p.20-- wind ruins plate glass, neon signs, and wheat-- all unnatural human things
destroyed by wind.
How would you utilize this book to challenge and expand your students’ thinking concerning a
particular environmental issue or issues?
“Thousand Steps”-- heading straight for us. What could have been done? What was the cost?
Can we really weigh prevention in? Would these people have been unwilling to change their
practices? Why or why not? Emotional connection to the results of poor land use practices.
Makes things immediate, strong and real.
What is happening today that is comparable? Rainforests? What about OK area today?
Kay Berglund
2/15/00
Environmental Science
“A Thousand Steps to Take
Before You Get There”
The Dust Bowl was an ecological and human disaster that took place in the southwestern Great
Plains region of the United States in the 1930's, including parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New
Mexico, and Colorado. It was caused by misuse of land and years of sustained drought. Before
farmers came, the region was covered by hardy grasses that held the soil in place in spite of the
long recurrent droughts and occasional torrential rains characteristic of the period. However, in
the thirty years before World War I, a large number of homesteaders settled in the region,
planting wheat and row crops and raising cattle. Both these land uses left the soil exposed to the
danger of erosion by the winds that constantly sweep over the area. Beginning in the early
thirties, the region suffered a period of severe droughts, and the soil began to blow away. . . .
Millions of hectares of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced
to leave their homes.1
We have all read paragraphs like that one before. “Human tragedy as a result of poor land use”
is a theme that recurs from the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s in the Great Plains, to the flooding in the
Mississippi Valley in 1993, to the fires in Indonesia in the last few years. “Many have been
forced from their homes,” the newscasters say somberly, and then it’s on to the sports and local
weather report. But Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust does not let a reader respond with an
intellectual “tsk-tsk” at poor ecological judgement. It grinds dust under your eyelids, and makes
you feel the mud in your spit. The Dust Bowl is not just another ecological tragedy, not just
another episode of U.S. History to study about for that A.P. exam. Instead, we see and feel and
choke on the wind-blown soil with Billie Jo, a thirteen-year-old girl living in the drought and
wind and dust in Oklahoma in the 1930’s.
1
http://www.ultranet.com/~gregjonz/dust/dustbowl.html
The Dust Bowl storms weave in and out of the plot of this story. Hesse gives us Billie
Jo’s thoughts in free verse, with words as sparse as the Oklahoma fields where wheat once grew.
The brevity of these words at times holds their power, as in this poem entitled, “Almost Rain”2
It almost rained Saturday.
The clouds hung low over the farm.
The air felt thick.
It smelled like rain.
In town,
the sidewalks
got damp.
That was all.
November 1934
Part of what we feel, as readers of this poem and this story, is the decision of Billie Jo’s family to
stay on their farm, despite the hardship they face. Hundreds of thousands of people became
migrants during these droughts, but many more stayed with their land, hoping to wait out the
rain.
This story tells the same lessons that a factual summary of the Dust Bowl conveys:
overfarming, urged on by the high prices for wheat during WWI, removed the native grasses
across the Great Plains and replaced it with wheat, whose roots could not hold the water during
times of drought. The problem then became a vicious cycle, as the sparse surviving wheat was
blown away, and rain that did come ran off the hard dry soil, taking seed and seedling along with
it. But one of the truisms of teaching is to show rather than tell. A recounting of the factors
that led to the Dust Bowl tells what happened and why; this story shows the real human impact,
the complicated reasoning, and the emotional toll these storms and this drought caused. Billie
Jo’s parents put the problem in emotional terms, as her father says, “It has to be wheat./ I’ve
grown it before./ I’ll grow it again,” to which her mother replies, “The wheat’s not meant to be
2
Out of the Dust, p.88.
here.”3 We feel both the tragedy and the complexity of the tragedy, how the people living in
this area both created and suffered at the mercy of this natural disaster. And how much more
powerful is this lesson about land use, than learning about runoff and crop rotation in narrow
“scientific,” emotionless terms?
After I read this story, I immediately wanted to know more about this period in U.S.
history, and I searched the internet for information about these years. In a classroom, this story
could serve the same purpose. A factual description of Black Sunday:
April 14
Black Sunday. The worst "black blizzard" of the
Dust Bowl occurs, causing extensive damage.4
magnifies in intensity when we page back through the book and realize this must have been the
storm Billie Jo called “Blankets of Black.” Reading this book brings a remote event, which
happened in another part of the country, when our grandparents (our students’
great-grandparents) were young, into the immediacy of a real event that happens to someone you
know, because we feel like we know Billie Jo by the end of the story. After reading this story,
or while reading it, we can learn much more readily the causes for this disaster, and the lessons
we have learned (some say not well enough) from it.
Out of the Dust is also a powerful book in its ability to let us feel gratitude and happiness
for things we usually take for granted: a clear day, birds in the sky, gentle rain, clean air, a flower
that blooms. It asks us to ask ourselves what we love and need about the natural world, before
the beauty changes and every breath or beat of wings or unfolding petal becomes a struggle.
Without lecturing or admonishing, this book lets us feel the spirituality that David Orr urges in
Earth in Mind. Even as it explores a drastic natural catastrophe, Out of the Dust resists the urge
3
4
p.40
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/timeline/index.html
to paint nature as evil. Instead, through rapturous descriptions of snow and rain and
night-blooming cereus, juxtaposed with drought, wind, and waves of dust, we feel the spectrum
of the natural world in whose arms we are held.
Hesse’s depiction of technology and the encroachment of intense farming into the Great
Plains is gentle in its lessons. The wheat is the most prevalent image of human-made impact on
the land, and it is likened to more obviously unnatural objects in such passages as this one:
wind
blew plate-glass windows in,
tore electric signs down,
ripped wheat
straight out of the ground.5
in which two clearly human-created objects are set in parallel to the wheat, which is also
destroyed by the wind. Though one of our favorite American songs equates “purple mountains
majesties” with “amber waves of grain,” we see in this story that the fields of wheat exist
because of determined human intervention. The natural state of these plains, so much more in
balance through wet and dry cycles, is “grass and wild horses and wolves roaming,”6 not the
wheat whose shallow roots caused devastation by the wind. We can learn a lesson from Hesse
in her gentle approach; how much more effective whispering can be than strident polemicized
argument.
This is not an easy book, and we would need to use caution with a young audience.
Billie Jo’s mother dies, and Billie Jo suffers horrible injury to her hands halfway through the
story. As a teacher who wants to protect her students, part of me wanted to edit these scenes
from the book, but as I reflect more thoughtfully on their role, I do not think they can be excised
so easily. Part of what these tragedies do is give us a comparison. As we see how Billie Jo
5
6
p.20
p. 107
responds to these events, and we cry (even when she does not) for her loss of her mother and of
the joy music brought her, we gain greater understanding of the way she responds to the dust,
and we have a context for the sparse emotion she shares with us.
One of the most didactic passages in this story comes from Miss Freeland, Billie Jo’s
teacher, as she describes the reasons for the dust storms. The words in this poem echo the
words in many textbooks about this time in our history, but as we hear them through our
narrator’s ears, we feel the gravity of each step on this path. Miss Freeland says,
Without the sod the water vanished,
the soil turned to dust.
Until the wind took it,
lifting it up and carrying it away.
Such a sorrow doesn’t come suddenly,
there are a thousand steps to take
before you get there.
Billie Jo’s response to this lesson puts into words the problem we face with every environmental
issue; namely, that it sneaks up on us, that even when we cause it and can later say exactly how
and why, we do not see it coming, or do not truly know what it will mean, as it comes slowly
towards us. Billie Jo says,
But now,
sorrow climbs our front steps
big as Texas, and we didn’t even see it coming,
even though, it’d been making its way straight for us,
all along.7
In this poem resides a lesson that we could apply to nearly every issue, every sorrow that we face
in environmental education. How do we see what is heading straight for us, and how do we
change a course of a thousand steps?
7
p.84