History staring you in the face

You can’t blame the machines, the woman said, talking about one-ways and listers – plows - at Nerdy Dirty Thirties Night at Pachemamas. It was the practices.

Nerd Nite was packed with people, most of them perhaps around their thirties, talking back and forth, getting something to drink - and to hear presentations on the Dust Bowl. The startling photographs of clouds of roiling farmland about to engulf farmhouses and towns were on the screen. Equally startling was the fact, the woman said, that in fifteen short years, men walking behind horse-drawn, one bottom plows would be replaced by fossil fuel-powered multi-gang plows, although she pointed mostly to the gangs of plowshares on machines on the screen. And she was right, of course: thirty years into a new century, a wet period had turned to drought almost overnight – but, as she pointed out, anyone with an eye to history could have seen that cycle coming around, if the timing could not be not predicted precisely to coincide with the exposure of the land to the weather.

But If the plow wasn’t to blame, well then, what could they have been thinking? Another woman passed around a jar full of Dust Bowl dust, collected from buildings torn down from that long ago era. She mentioned water erosion in her talk about the art that followed those dirty thirties – and she had paintings and photographs to show. But none of them were scenes – not apparently startling or historical enough yet - of farmland flowing under the Kaw River bridge every minute, day after day, a few blocks from where we all coolly sat. She informed us that in Arabic there’s a word for dust storm, ‘haboob,’ and everybody laughed. What else can you do? The Dust Bowl is, after all, like water under the bridge.

But if John Deere gets the credit for innovating the moldboard plow – adding metal to the share so that it could cut deep into prairie soils - who does get the blame for the dust bowl? It was a relief to finally step into an unseasonably hot September night. The air-conditioning in Pachemamas had been set way too high. If there’s a Nerd Nite next century, will there be a woman showing photos of Carrier air-conditioners saying you couldn’t blame the machines, it was the practices. What could they have been thinking?

I walked home. I use best practices on my AC – 78 degrees, sometimes turned down to 76. What else am I going to do – sleep in a tent made from buffalo skins? I dreamt that there was a haboob on the horizon.