It did not get better all at once after Black Sunday. People think the bad storm was the end of it, but it was more like the middle. It stayed dry through 1936 and 1937 and most of 1938, and it blew every spring, and we kept on doing what we had been doing, which was hanging on.

What changed was that people started to understand what had happened to the ground. Men from the government's new soil conservation office came around that summer of 1935 and held meetings in the schoolhouse, and showed us with drawings on the blackboard how the wind picked up loose, dry, bare ground and carried it off, and how ridges plowed across the wind could catch it. Dad was not a man to take farming advice from somebody in a necktie, but he went to every meeting, and that fall he and I listed the whole place, every field, in deep furrows running north and south across the way the wind came. It helped. Not enough, but it helped. The fields that were listed held, and the fields along the road where a man named Cantrell had given up and left his ground bare blew right over onto ours.

I finished the eighth grade at Prairie Star in 1935 and went on to the high school in Tolliver, which had about forty students and one bus, a converted truck with benches in the back. I was a middling student in everything but arithmetic. May married a young man named Jesse who worked at the lumberyard, and they moved to Dalhart, Texas, where he had a job with the railroad. That left six of us at home, and the house didn't feel one bit bigger.

I graduated in May of 1939, seventeen years old. That summer it rained some, more than it had in years, and the wheat that came up was the first decent stand I could remember since I was ten. But it was not a big crop, and the price was still poor, and there was the bank note, which had grown fat over those years the way a bank note does. There was not work enough on that place for my father and three boys, and there was not money enough to feed us all, and I knew it, and my father knew I knew it, and neither of us said so.

It was Mr. Barnes, my old teacher from Prairie Star, who told me about the CCC. He was on the county relief committee by then. The Civilian Conservation Corps took young men, single, from families that needed the help, and sent them to camps around the country to plant trees and build dams and fight erosion. They gave you your room and board and clothes and paid you thirty dollars a month, and twenty-five of it went straight home to your folks. He said there was a place open in October if I wanted it.

I talked to my mother first. She was at the kitchen table shelling beans, and she listened, and then she said, "Your father will say no," and then she said, "Go tell him anyway."

Dad was in the barn. He did say no. He said no Farr had ever taken charity and he wasn't going to start with his own son. I said it wasn't charity, it was a job, the same as working for wages for any man, and that twenty-five dollars a month would pay the interest on the note and leave something over for Nettie's shoes. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he went back to what he was doing, which was mending a harness, and after a minute he said, "You'll write to your mother every week." And that was the end of it.

That September the war started in Europe. We heard it on the radio. It seemed a long way off.

I had turned eighteen in August. I left in October, on a cold bright morning with the wind out of the north. My mother packed me a shoebox of fried chicken and biscuits, and Dad drove me to Tolliver in the truck to meet the bus. At the bus he shook my hand, which he had never done before, and said, "Mind the officers," and then he got back in the truck and drove off without looking back. My mother told me years later that he had to stop the truck a mile out of town and sit there a while before he could go on.

There were six of us from the county on that bus. We went to an Army post, where they looked in our ears and our mouths, gave us shots in both arms and a pile of clothes that didn't fit, and then put us on a train to a camp down in the southeastern part of the state, in the hills. I had never been on a train before. I had never seen a hill with trees on it. When I got off at that camp and looked around at all that green, pine trees and oaks on every side, a creek running clear over rocks, I thought I had come to a different country. I suppose I had.

The camp was run by Army officers and the work by the park men. We lived in long wooden barracks, about forty to a building, with a coal stove at each end. They got us up at six with a bugle, and we ate breakfast, and then trucks took us out to the work. Our company was building a park for the state, a dam across a creek to make a lake, and stone buildings and a road and trails. We quarried the rock ourselves, out of a hillside, and cut it and laid it. Some of those buildings are still standing. I went back and saw them in 1985 with Wanda, and I put my hand on a wall that I had laid up myself when I was eighteen, and I am not ashamed to say that it got to me.

I ate more in that camp than I had eaten in five years. Meat at two meals a day, and all the bread you wanted, and pie on Sundays. Most of us gained fifteen or twenty pounds the first few months. A boy in my barracks named Elmer Mooney, from Tulsa, who had never been out of the city, cried the first night because it was so quiet, and by Christmas he could swing a sledge with anybody. Another one, Milton Curley, from down near Ada, could play the fiddle, and on Saturday nights we would sit around the stove and he would play until lights out. Those two were the best friends I made in my life, outside of Wanda, and I wrote to both of them until they died.

After a couple of months they moved me off the rock crew and into the motor pool, because somebody found out I knew a little about engines from that old Fordson. There was a mechanic there from the park service who taught me more about engines in six months than I could have learned in ten years on my own, and it is the reason, when I got out of the Army after the war, that a farm implement dealer in Guymon was willing to give me a job. I sold farm equipment for thirty years after that. I have always said the CCC taught me my trade, and the Panhandle taught me my customers.

I wrote to my mother every week, the way I promised. She wrote back every week too, a page in pencil, the weather first and then the family and then the church. In the spring of 1940 she wrote that it had rained four times in March, and that the wheat on the north quarter was the best she had seen since 1931, and that Dad had stood at the edge of it with his hat off. She did not write the next part, but I knew it. He was not going to sell.

I came home on leave that June for harvest. I got off the bus in Tolliver and walked the eleven miles home rather than wait for a ride, because I wanted to see it. The road was not drifted over. The fences were standing, most of them. And on both sides of the road, as far as you could see, the wheat was standing gold and heavy and moving in the wind like water.

Dad was out in the yard when I came up the lane. He looked at me for a while, at how much I had filled out, and then he looked out at the wheat, and then back at me.

"Well," he said. "I believe we'll stay."

That was the end of my boyhood, more or less. Two years later I was in the Army, and that is another story, and I may write it someday if Joshua will type it. But this is the part my grandchildren asked about, so this is the part I have written down. I hope it was worth reading. It was worth living through, though I would not want to do it again, and I would not wish it on anybody.

My father never said much about any of it afterward. But he never again let a field of ours lie bare through a windy spring, and neither did I, and neither did any customer of mine if I could talk him out of it. Keep something growing on the ground. That is about all the wisdom I came out of those years with, and I have never found a reason to give it up.

A. F.