is located in the far northeast corner of that fine state. It is a part of the "four corners", that spot where New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, and the Oklahoma panhandle come together. In 1907, my grandfather acquired 320 acres of virgin plains some 20 miles northeast of the the County Seat, Clayton, by way of the Homestead Act; my mother was born there in 1919. New Mexico was not a state when my grandfather arrived there; it was by the time my mother was born.
You would be correct in surmising that I grew up listening to stories about the "dust bowl". But my imagination at its best couldn't begin to fathom the horrors of that location at that time...until I sat, spellbound, through both parts of Ken Burns' powerful documentary. As I watched, I couldn't help but think of mom who passed away in 1997. I suspect that her viewing of the program would have engendered mixed emotions with a vast load of memories, both good and bad.
My granddad broke the land in the beginning; it broke him in the end. I never knew anyone who toiled so diligently from "can to cain't" to provide for his family. He and most of his neighbors utilized the land to sustain their families, not to get rich by growing wheat. Still, whatever the homesteader's motive, they created the dust bowl out of ignorance, not malice. No one could have loved the land more than those pioneers but that ignorance of the consequences of tilling the virgin soil was proved by the disastrous results.
The consequences of ignorance with regard to the dust bowl pales in comparison to the catastrophic consequences of global warming. Those early settlers had no idea of the monster that they were creating. In our time, scientists from all over our small planet are warning us of the dangers of ignoring the causes of climatic change. We can't use ignorance as an excuse; we've seen the consequences in the microcosm of damaging nature called the "dust bowl".
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