![]() ("Who is this skinny black man?" Patsy recalls thinking at the time.) They talked about the time Chuck Berry showed up, seemingly destitute, and played at their homecoming dance. The truck's air-conditioning was on full blast as Miro leaned in to hear Tom and his wife, Patsy, tell stories about growing up in a town of two thousand people. As he took us on a tour of the old Fischer farm just west of Hooker, he steered his truck off paved roads and across fields following a map etched only in his head. Tom is 61 now, a tall man with a shy smile, an erect bearing, and a fondness for George Strait's brand of country music. They quit because the stakes got too high. But drought wasn't the reason Tom and his brothers Dick and Harry (yes, Tom, Dick, and Harry-his grandfather's idea) decided to get out of farming. They'd watched the sand pile up along the roads. The current drought had turned much of the family's seven thousand acres brown. ![]() The caption read: They faced the wind and held on.īut Tom Fischer wasn't holding on anymore. Photographer Chris Johns had taken a portrait of Tom, then 31, and his grandfather, father, and two sons-four generations of the Fischer family-standing in a field of ripe milo, or grain sorghum. We'd arranged to meet a long-time wheat farmer named Tom Fischer because his photograph had appeared in a 1984 National Geographic article called "Beyond the Dust Bowl," and we wanted to ask what had changed in 30 years. A giant grain elevator loomed over the town like a skyscraper lost in the desert. We arrived in the town of Hooker-the heart of the area hit hardest in the Dust Bowl-at around four in the afternoon. ![]() We stopped at a store called the Loaf 'n Jug and the drought was on everyone's lips. We passed vast yellow fields interrupted only by windmills and water towers. Once we turned north and arrived in the Oklahoma Panhandle, the mood in the car lifted: We were floored by the immensity of the sky and the flatness of the land. It was Carol who suggested the name for the novel, lifting the phrase from The Battle Hymn of the Republic: "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." He wrote about the Joads's journey by consulting a map he'd used on a trip along Route 66 with his first wife, Carol-years before he started writing The Grapes of Wrath. Sallisaw is too far east to have been affected by the drought that led to the Dust Bowl, and it's doubtful whether Steinbeck himself ever set foot in the town. That's the town two and a half hours east of Oklahoma City where the Joads worked as tenant farmers until tractors rolled in and smashed their house. Three weeks on the road started to sound like a long time.įull disclosure: We were cheating a little by not starting our trip in Sallisaw. My heart sank as the all-too-familiar shopping centers and big box stores of every American suburb rolled by in the rearview mirror. ![]() The romance of the open road fizzled a bit as we drove out of Oklahoma City on Interstate 40-the highway that's largely overtaken Route 66 there. The western United States is in the midst of a multi-year drought that many say is worse than the one that triggered the great migration of the 1930s, when a quarter million people fled the stifling dust storms of the Great Plains in hopes of a better life. I couldn't believe how relevant the 75-year-old book-with its depiction of industrial agriculture squeezing out small farmers, climate-driven environmental woes, and migrant workers at the mercy of big landowners-felt today.Ī road trip seemed like the perfect way to investigate whether history might be repeating itself. The plan was to fly to Oklahoma from our home in Washington, D.C., and drive west on Route 66, retracing the journey taken by the fictional Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. So I confess to some trepidation as our family headed out on a three-week road trip to California last summer. Like many of his generation, he sees cars as agents of global warming and the reason American suburbs can be soulless places with no sense of community, let alone pedestrians. The freedom of the open road holds no appeal for my 16-year-old son, Miro. Little by little they settled into the new life." - The Grapes of Wrath ![]() "The highway became their home and movement their medium of expression. ![]()
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