Dust bowl role playing

I sit on top of a hard wooden crate, bouncing along a bumpy dirt road. I clutch the sides of the box to keep from falling off. The splinters dig into my fingers. I look over at my younger siblings who were all bouncing happily on my parents mattress. To them this was all a game. they didn't understand what was happening. But I did. All I could think about were the past few months events. Events that had forced my family and I to put everything we owned in our truck and leave our home. Now we were doing what everyone else was. We're going to California.

As we rumble down this dirt road, with not another soul in sight, All I can think about is how this happened. How everything we had ever known could have fallen apart this fast. Not long ago my pa and I were happily plowing the wheat fields. My little brother was off at school. My baby sister was playing in the living room and my ma was sitting on the couch watching my sister or in the kitchen making supper. That was how it was until the Black Blizzards hit. Before the storms we plenty of food, clean water, and and ocean of wheat growing in our 60 ackers. But the Storms changed all of that.

The day that the Storms hit pa and I were out getting ready to harvest the full grown wheat. We ha the combine started and I was starting the tractor and hooking up the grain trailer. Then I saw it. I had climbed on top of the tractor to start it. I was greeted with a wall of deep red and black sand. Off in the distance it looked like some kind of low hanging cloud from Hell. I didn't know what it was. I had seen all kinds of storm clouds but none of them red and on the ground. I called Pa over to see. He had to strain to see what it was in the distance. I studied his face as it went from soft and puzzled, to twisted in horror. He told me to finish getting the combine ready as he ran inside. I obeyed. The next thing I knew Ma was rushing out to the car and driving off toward my brother's school. As Pa and I pulled the combine and tractor into the fields I still didn't know what was going on. I shouted to Pa over the roar of the engine, asking him what was wrong. He turned around and shouted back. All I heard was Black Blizzard and sand storm. We kept harvesting. I ran the tractor and the whole time I just thought about what Pa may have meant. All this time the storm getting steadily closer.

Now that I really think about it, that was definitely the turning point. By the end of the day, pa and I had harvested about 35 ackers, and the Storm was getting disturbingly close. It was so close that it seemed to envelop the farm. Swallowing it whole. After Pa and I had put all the grain in the silo, we raced inside. Ma handed me Gum Tape and wet cloth and told me to plug up all the windows, door, and cracks in the walls. This was getting really weird. I saw my parents moving with a vengeance. I followed their example. By 6:00 we had that whole house air tight. Tats when the storm hit. The noise was deafening. As the sand hit the outside of the house it made everything shake.

The next day, we awoke to a scene of devastation. The lush green farm that we had called home the day before, no longer existed. In its place, the hand of God had dropped a whole other states worth of dirt. I felt like Dorthy, because there was no way we were in Kansas any more. The dust didn't settle for three days. But every day Pa would go out into the fields and look exasperatedly down at his decimated wheat crop. But the storm was just the beginning. During those three days, every thing was coated in dust. The sheets we had put up had done next to nothing.

A week after the storm, just when we were beginning to regain hope. Beginning to believe that we might have a future. The worst day of the depression hit. The day it starts to affect my family. A tall man in a black suit, that was now wearing its own coat of red dust, came to the door. Pa walked up to him and closed the front door behind him. I heard just mummers through the door and the sand had scratched the windows to the point I couldn't see out of them. But I still knew what they were talking about. The Peterson farm three miles down the road had this happen to them. The brokers need their money, and if you can't pay they just take the land and evict you. When my Pa returned he had a piece of paper in his hand and my mother began to cry. Pa helped her up and they went back into their room.

The next two days were spent packing and loading everything on the car. We had sold the little wheat we had managed to harvest to fund the trip. There was nothing left of ours on the farm when we pulled away. Now I am here. Bouncing along a dirt road sitting on an old crate getting splinters on our fingers. Headed to California, and hopefully, a dust free life.