No one expected another drought like that of ’33 and the really big dries, like 1928, came once in a lifetime. Men grumbled.īut you learn to live with dry spells if you live in west Texas. They watch the grass slowly lose its green, then curl up and fire up like dying corn stocks. They watched the rank weeds shrivel as the west winds relentlessly sought them out and smothered them with its hot breath. Ranchers watched waterholes recede into brown puddles of mud that their livestock wouldn’t touch. Just another dry spell, men said at first. A cancerous blight burning a scar on the land.” Here is the way one writer describe one of these twenty-year droughts: “It crept up out of Mexico touching first along the brackish Pecos River, and spreading then in all directions. The reading of this novel lies not in what happens next but in the unfolding depth of a strong character and the clear picture of a time and a place.The great Texas meteorologist Isaac Klein reportedly said back in the ’30s that Texas is a land of eternal drought, interrupted occasionally by biblical floods. There is no surprise ending to this story, no magical solution to the harsh realities of life in West Texas. When the drought breaks, it has lasted too long and he is too old. Although Charlie never loses his dignity and never quits, he does not win out in the end. Self-sufficient, courageous, with a strong sense of right and wrong, he is also old and overweight, a thoroughly believable human being who has trouble communicating with the wife who loyally struggles to keep life in its pattern, the son who has no feel for the land but yearns for the rodeo circuit, the Mexican family who has worked for him for years and whose help he can no longer afford.
Charlie is by no means the typical cowboy hero. The struggle made them fiercely independent, a trait personified in Charlie’s persistence throughout the seven dry years, his refusal to accept defeat, his opposition to federal aid programs and their inevitable bureaucratic regulations, his determination to stay on the land he loves and respects even as he suffers with that land. By that time, Charlie Flagg, the central character of this novel, was one of a dying breed of men who wrested their living from the harsh land of West Texas. In the 1950s, West Texas suffered the longest drought in the memory of most men then living.
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