Today we crossed Oklahoma west to east. That’s a lotta miles. We came across the Panhandle to see what communities that JCB read about in Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time (2005; NYTimes review by Elizabeth Royte here) look like today, something like seventy years after the Dust Bowl.
This about sums it up. Some communities we went through were doing better than others, especially as we drove farther east, but many had long-empty buildings, both commercial and residential.
Once again we crossed paths, in space if not in time, with John Steinbeck, who wrote about both Okies/the Dust Bowl people and the people of Monterey Bay (Cannery Row, 1945), where we were in late October.