| 83.4 | 43.8 | |
| Nebraska | 115.5 | 23.2 |
| Wisconsin | 7.2 | 3.7 |
In 1987, these 19 states accounted for 60 percent of all U.S. wheat production. Combined with the overall reduction in the number of farms since 1988, total American wheat production is approximately half of what it was before the war.
The full report, detailing all aspects of U.S. productivity, is available as it
I Will
The rich farmland of northern Missouri was dusted brown, the towns were brown, the late-summer trees were hazed with dust.
Each town we passed through granted us a secret glimpse down its streets. An occasional decontamination team could be seen in white coveralls, seeking slowly along the sidewalks, or a cleanup crew with a water truck spraying the pavement. We saw into backyards where people were cleaning clothing, furniture, and each other with hoses.
And everywhere, as passengers came and went, we heard tales of the storm. It was the biggest duster in history. Winds clocked at a hundred and ten miles an hour and more in town after town.
Took roofs, cars, collapsed buildings, reduced a dozen trailer parks to pulverized aluminum.
Despite it all, we found a powerful spirit moving among the people that seemed at moments almost otherworldly, as surprising as sudden speech from a Trappist.
SYLVIE WEST, MARCELINE, MISSOURI: “I’m goin’ up the line to La Plata to see that my mother’s okay. We been in Missouri a long time, us Wests. We aren’t going anywhere. A lot of people from around here went south, down to Alabama and Georgia and Florida. There’s trouble getting into Georgia. But this is good land, and we just decided we’d stick it out. The storm? I’ve seen dust before.”
Sylvie West was the color of the land, yellow-gray. Her arms were as long and improbable as the legs of a mantis. She was missing her bottom teeth.
GEORGE KIMBALL, EDINA, MISSOURI: “It wasn’t all that hot. We got a real low dose in Edina. I’m looking at it this way—I just got myself a whole lot of good black dirt from Nebraska scot-free. Hell no, I’m not goin’ anywhere. I stayed right in Edina through the war and the famine and the flu. That’s the place for me. I’m a farmer, of course. I guess you could say I like the look of the town, and I like the people. The stayers, that is. The loafers and the new people all went south. But Missouri needs her people now, and I am not leaving,”
He carried a weathered Samsonite briefcase, which turned out to be full of warehouse receipts recertified that morning by the Knox County Radiation Board. He was on his way to Galesburg to present these receipts to the accepting agent for the Agriculture Department’s Regional Strategic Grains Allocation Commission.
His wedding ring was on his right hand, signifying his widowerhood.
ALFRED T. BENSEN, GALESBURG, ILLINOIS: “I am in the practice of law in Galesburg, Illinois. I have been in my practice for twenty-eight years, and expect to continue until the day I die. I noticed some dust. But I was working through some title questions for a client and I did not have time to deal with it. This is a man who’s been able to buy up over sixty thousand acres at auction in the past year. Abandoned farm properties. This man is twenty-eight. By the time he’s fifty, you watch. Illinois will have done for him what it’s done for millions in the past. It will have made him rich.”
He sat rigidly against his seat, his dark blue suit shiny from many ironings. He spoke as if he had memorized his lines, and been waiting for years to deliver them. Once I noticed him looking long and carefully at us, through brown, slow eyes.
GORDON LOCKHART, LASALLE, ILLINOIS: “We got a little dust, but most of the blow was south of here. I am an International Harvester dealer. As of December of this year I will be able to sell you a tractor, a combine, just about any piece of equipment you want.
What Harvester did was very smart. They just went out, over the past few years, and repossessed all the abandoned IH equipment they could lay their hands on. Meanwhile, they were getting the factories running again. Nobody was getting paid, but the company organized an employee barter co-op, so Harvester people didn’t starve, either. We have company doctors and now a company hospital, so the triage doesn’t mean a thing to us. IH people are a big, rock-solid family. We are going to make this land work for us again, maybe better than it did before. No question. Better.”
A moment later he was asleep, snoring, his head thrown back, the midmorning sun full in his face. One of the trainmen came and tried to get him to eat some soup, but after he was awakened he spent the rest of the trip staring out the window.
JOHN SAMPSON, JOLIET, ILLINOIS: “We got the prison here, and a sure sign that things are picking up is that we got more inmates.
Robbers, second-story men, mostly. No more drug dealers. That kind of petered out. Nobody wants to import drugs into a country where the money’s worthless. We don’t have many murderers, either. No car thieves. Joliet’s kind of quiet. About half the bunks are filled. We got the electric chair back, and once in a while somebody gets the juice. Illinois abides by the U.S. Supreme Court rulings, even though there isn’t any Supreme Court anymore. We still work under the old laws, just like before Warday. Why shouldn’t we? This is part of America, and it is going to stay that way.”
The other passengers kept away from Mr. Sampson. It might have been better for him to travel in ordinary clothing. His Joliet prison guard’s uniform made his fellow passengers uneasy, and he had a lonely trip.
Twenty-five miles from the Loop, we began to pass through Chicago’s suburban and then industrial outlands. The suburbs are mostly depopulated. People have moved into the city centers or rejoined the small-town economy rather than contend with the difficult transportation problems of suburban life.
Just as Chicago’s skyline appeared ahead of us, we passed a tremendous sign, red letters on a white background:
I had again that sense of strangeness, as if I had come upon the spirit of the past alive and still moving in the land. It was a little frightening, but it could also fill me with the reckless energy of boosterism gone frantic.
We moved through a sea of factories with names like Ryerson Steel, Kroehler, Burlington Northern, and Nabisco. Some of these establishments were empty, but others were running—Nabisco, as it turned out, on what must have been an all-out schedule. A fifty-car freight was sided there, being loaded. People were swarming along the loading bays where trucks once came and went, hauling boxes on trolleys to the new rail siding. Another
