Rain!

Interlocutor: "All this country needs is a little water and some good people." Mr. Bones: "That's all hell needs, too" For months, as high winds scourged their dry and drifting acres and gritty clouds hazed the sun, the farmers of the new dust bowl had prayed for rain. Last week black storm clouds churned over land that had known drought for four long years--over west Texas and the gasping Panhandle, over southern and western Oklahoma, over eastern New Mexico--and the water came drumming down. It rained for days. In many an area, the drought-stricken found themselves the victims of floods.

The sun-cracked bed of the Rio Grande River filled with a boiling torrent, and in the flat lands of the lower valley, 4,000 people were driven from their homes by the rising waters. Three cities and towns were flooded; the brown tide covered 50,000 acres. Most of the onion crop in the lower Rio Grande valley, a quarter of the tomato crop and 10% of the cantaloupes were ruined. Health officers labored day and night against the threat of typhoid, by week's end had inoculated 60,000 people.

The Heavenly Mud. The country around the little town of Lovington, N. Mex. got not only torrential rains but tons of window-cracking, chicken-killing hail. Power lines were knocked out, low-lying houses were inundated; in west Texas, schools closed and highways were awash with silt-brown water. At Snyder, Texas, an earthen dam, weakened by the long, dry spell, gave way; 50 oil-well sites were flooded out. Near Hobbs, N. Mex., 100 sheep marched into a flooded ditch and drowned en masse.

But for all its attendant discomfort and difficulty, the rain (which was torrential and damaging only in scattered areas) brought jubilation to the dust bowl. "It was a joy just to lie in bed listening [to it]," wrote Frank Grimes, the aged editor of the Abilene (Texas) Reporter News. "If you had been just a little younger, you'd have climbed out of bed and rushed into the yard to squish the heavenly mud between your toes and turn your face to the sky." Many a farmer did stand shivering happily in the open; at Brownfield, Texas, the high-school band staged an impromptu parade, and a pretty girl named Kay Kissinger was elected "Miss Drought Breaker of 1954."

The New Lease. The rains had hardly stopped before seed stores had a rush of buyers, and thousands of farmers--many of whom had not made a crop for three long years--were out on tractors hopefully preparing to plant cotton or sorghum. It was certain that miles of drear range would be green, at least for a time, this spring, and great areas of winter wheat that had escaped complete ruin got a new lease on life. Drought persisted in central and western Kansas, much of southwestern and central Nebraska. Most of Colorado and New Mexico got little if any rain. Even the newly dampened land would need more rain to insure the crops that were being so blithely planted this week. "But," the Amarillo Daily News reported, "the people are grinning like a mule eating cactus."

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