The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

of the second day, they heard
the awful clank of crumbling timbers. Hazel Lucas poked her head above the dugout and saw in a swirl of dust and wood chips that their new home was being carried upward and away with the wind. The storm took the entire house. After four days, the family went searching the prairie, looking for pieces of their home.

    Dugout homestead, Blaine County, Oklahoma Territory, 1894

    For all the horror, the land was not without its magic. The first Anglos in the Panhandle used to recite a little ditty:
I like this country fine

I think it's awfully good.

For the wind pumps all the water

And the cow chops all the wood.
    After a rain- or hailstorm had rumbled through, the sky was open and embracing, the breeze only a soft whisper against the songs of meadowlarks and cooing of doves. A prairie chicken doing its mating dance, its full-breasted plumage in a heave of sexual pride, was a thing to see. So was a pronghorn antelope coming through the grass, bouncing out of a wallow. Robin's egg blue was the color of mornings without fear. At night, you could see the stars behind the stars. Infinity was never an abstraction on the High Plains.
    Hazel Lucas would ride her horse Pecos over the prairie to visit with the James boys, one of the last big ranching families, whose spread touched parts of Texas and Oklahoma. There was Walter and Mettie and their kids Andy, Jesse, Peachey, Joe Bob, Newt, and Fannie Sue. The boys could ride, rope, and cuss better than anyone in Boise City, and the stories they told made a girl feel she was being allowed into a secret—and vanishing—world. Andy was a bit of a mysterious presence and had a swagger that drew people to him. He would disappear for five days at a time, then show up suddenly in Boise City.
    "Where you been, Andy?" Hazel asked him.
    "Riding fence."
    "What'd ya eat out there?"
    "Grasshoppers."
    "How do you eat a grasshopper?"
    "Just snap off his head, light a match, and stick it up his ass."
    "Yeah? How's that taste?"
    "Mighty crunchy."
    For the rest of her life, whenever Hazel saw Andy James, she would say to him, "Mighty crunchy."
    Hazel also learned to play basketball outside, wearing the black sateen bloomers of the Cimarron County High School girls team. The coach's Model-T was kept at courtside, to chase balls once the wind got a hold of them, or to light the court after dusk. Hazel was barely sixteen when she went to see the first track meet held in Cimarron County. She could not take her eyes off a fleet-footed boy who won several races. She had the crush bad on that good-looking kid, Charlie Shaw, who was tall, about six-foot-five inches. You could tell, all the Lucas cousins said, by the way they looked at each other that something was doing between them.
    In the fall of 1922, Hazel saddled up Pecos and rode off to a one-room, wood-frame building sitting alone in the grassland: the schoolhouse. It was Hazel's first job. She had to be there before the bell rang—five-and-a-half miles by horseback each way—to haul in drinking water from the well, to sweep dirt from the floor, and shoo hornets and flies from inside. The school had thirty-nine students in eight grades, and the person who had to teach them all, Hazel Lucas, was seventeen years old. In its first years, the schoolhouse lacked desks.
Fruit crates, or planks nailed to stumps, did the job. After school, Hazel had to do the janitor work and get the next day's kindling—dry weeds or sun-toasted cow manure.

    Sod schoolhouse, Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle, 1889
    When the winds kicked up as always or a twitching sky threatened hail, she felt like she was back in the dugout, cramped and gasping for space. But when it was nice, she took the children outside and staged horse races. She taught them basketball. Once, she loaded up players in a wagon and galloped off four miles to play another team. But the sky turned ugly, growled, and broke in a fit of hail. The children started to cry. One