Behind was the road, fifteen hundred miles of concrete stretching eastward to the past. Back home they had had three bitter years, each worse than the one before. All the way from the Dakotas to the Rio Grande, men said, the same wind blew, working away at the dried-out crust of the Gelds, loosening the dirt, carrying it off in whistling swirls, gathering strength until great brown clouds swooshed off with an angry roar. On Armistice Day in igg; the sky was dark as far cast as Albany, New York, and a red, poker-chip sun hung over the plains. Men and women huddled in their houses, tied handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths when they went outside, and children choked on the dust. When the wind wasn’t blowing, the dust lay like fog, sifting down endlessly, piling up on houses and fence posts, smothering what few plants survived.

Always before there had been someplace a man could go when things went wrong—forests unimaginably rich, streams running clear, grass for grazing. And a man who owned an acre of ground could look a stranger in the eye or tell him to go to hell. Now the land was used up: where there had been trees there were millions of stumps, rivers were choked with sewage and trash, and year after year the topsoil blew away on hot summer winds or ran off with the snow and spring Hoods. Great chunks of the continent had turned to hardpan or dust, and families that once owned the land worked it now for someone they didn’t even know. Debtridden, their only harvest weeds and misery, they were hated in the towns, where they applied for relief or looked for jobs. Finally there was nothing to do but move.

Leaving home meant weighing the memories of generations, sorting out family belongings, paring them down to what would fit into one crowded vehicle. Farm tools and equipment and animals were sold for next to nothing. All the non-essentials had to go—chest of drawers, stove, scraplxx)ks, toys, pillows, old letters, lamps. Next they needed a car, and in every town were hard-eyed, fast-talking men with jalopies for sale at a price. As fast as they could find them, dealers sold the old wrecks, squeezing every penny they could out of the desperate, impoverished men who were departing. When they had gone, nature usurped their homes: birds and bats and field mice moved into the deserted shells, the dust settled permanently on the floor, piling up, covering every trace of the people who had lived there.

Westward they drove, heading for a Promised Land in the tradition of their forebears, jamming Routes 66 and go and the old Spanish Trail in dilapidated cars and trucks piled high with people and possessions. Out of Arkansas and Oklahoma went unending streams of them, joined at each new crossroad by more grotesque arks feeding into the main stream of Route 66.