Passing through the agricultural area around Lamesa, Texas on our way home to Seguin, Texas from Yellow Bear Canyon, Pine Ridge Reservation & Santa Fe, NM (7/2/2024).
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More than 60 years ago, my brother Lawrence Alton and I did support work for several summers during our high school-years … in the growing, harvest, processing, & transport of southern field peas, Vigna sp. (blackeyes, purple hulls, creams, & crowders) & chinese reds on a large part of this area of the Southern Plains, Caprock, & Panhandle of Texas … for our Uncle Peggy (Lowell Curtis) Martin.
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About 47 years later I bicycled on my own across the Hill Country & Rolling Plains one beautiful spring (listening to wonderful birds & insects and seeing beautiful wildflowers & other vegetation along the way) from Seguin, Texas to the 21st Annual Southern Plains conference in Lubbock, Texas in 2010.*
This amazing conference was organized by the nonprofit Ogallala Commons and “the event focused on a famous date in environmental history [with the keynote speaker being the very knowledgable ecological historian, Don Worster].
No, it wasn’t [what was] the upcoming 40th anniversary of Earth Day, but the 75th anniversary of ‘Black Sunday’ – April 14th, 1935 – when a massive dust cloud arose from the Great Plains like a biblical vision and blew topsoil all the way to Washington, D.C., and out to sea.
It was the Dust Bowl, of course – a national calamity of epic proportions that still reverberates today. It was a ‘perfect’ storm of ecological and economic havoc. Massive tilling of prairie topsoil, abetted immensely by the introduction of diesel-powered tractors, followed by a series of unusually dry years in the early 1930s, followed by big winds put hundreds of millions of tons of fertile soil into the air.” (Courtney White)
[*With the wind at my back and up on the flat Llano Estacado, I easily made the last 100-miles of my bicycle trip in 2010 … from Big Spring through Lamesa to Lubbock … in one day!]
paul bain martin
7 Ss / VV->^^
