House of Earth (3 page)

It was while busking around New Mexico that Guthrie's gospel of adobe took root. In December 1936, nineteen
months after the Black Sunday when the dust storm terrorized the Texas Panhandle, Guthrie had an epiphany. In Santa Fe he visited a Nambé pueblo on the outskirts of town. The mud-daubed adobe walls fascinated him (as they had D. H. Lawrence and Georgia O'Keeffe). The adobe haciendas had hardy wooden rainspouts and bricks of soil and straw that were simple yet perfectly weatherproof, unlike most of the homes of his Texas friends, which were poorly constructed with scrap lumber and cheap nails. These New Mexico adobe homes, with their mud bricks (ten inches wide, fourteen inches long, and four inches high) baked in the sun, Guthrie understood, were built to last the ages.

Adobe was one of the first building materials ever used by man. Guthrie believed that Jesus Christ—his savior—was born in an adobe manger. Such structures seemed to signify Mother Earth herself. If the people in towns like Pampa were going to survive dust storms and snow blizzards, Guthrie decided, they would have to build Nambé-style homes that would stand stoutly until the Second Coming of Christ. In New Mexico, with almost religious zeal, he started painting adobes of “open air, clay, and sky.” In front of the Santa Fe Art Museum one afternoon, an old woman told Guthrie, “The world is made of adobe.” He was transfixed by her comment but managed to nod his head in agreement and reply, “So is man.”

Out of these epiphanies in New Mexico was born the central premise of
House of Earth
. To Guthrie, New Mexico,
the Land of Enchantment, was a crossroads of Hispanic, Native American, African American, Asian, and European cultures. He thought of the state as a mosaic of enduring peoples and cultures. Taos Pueblo—some of its structures as much as five stories high—had been occupied by Native Americans without interruption for a millennium. Santa Fe, founded in 1610, was the first and longest-lasting European capital on US soil. As Guthrie wrote in his song “Bling Blang”—which he recorded for his 1956 album
Songs to Grow On for Mother and Child
—his day of reckoning, with regard to New Mexico–style adobe, was fast approaching.

From his inquiries in New Mexico, Guthrie learned that you didn't have to be a trained mason to build an adobe home. His dream was to live and wander in the Texas Panhandle, and to build a lasting adobe sanctuary on the ranch land he could return to at any time—one that wasn't a wooden coffin or owned by a bank or vulnerable to the dreaded dust and snow. With the well-reasoned conviction, Guthrie, voice of the rain-starved Dust Bowl, started preaching back in Texas about the utilitarian value of adobe. For five cents, he purchased from the USDA its Bulletin No. 1720,
The Use of Adobe or Sun-Dried Brick for Farm Building
.
Written by T. A. H. Miller, this how-to manual taught poor rural folks (among others) how to build an adobe from the cellar up. In the Panhandle, there was no cheap lumber or stone available, so adobe was the best bet for architecturally sound homes in the Southwest. All an amateur needed was a homemade mixture of clay loam and straw, which helped the brick to dry and shrink as a unit. Constructing a leakproof roof was really the only difficult part. (Emulsified asphalt was eventually used to seal the roofs of adobes.) The rest was as easy as playing tic-tac-toe.

The model US city in the pamphlet was Las Cruces, New Mexico, where 80 percent of all structures were made of adobe. Guthrie promoted this USDA guide for decades. Realizing that dugouts in the Panhandle had endured the Dust Bowl better than wooden aboveground structures, which were vulnerable to wind and termites, Guthrie considered it a public service to promote the notion of adobe dwellings in drought areas. If sharecroppers and tenant farmers in places like Pampa could only own a piece of land—even uncultivable land among arroyos or red rocks—they could build a dream “house of earth” that was fireproof, sweatproof, windproof, snowproof, Dust Bowl–proof, thiefproof, and bugproof.

It was early in January 1937 that Guthrie's vision of adobe inspired
House of Earth
. A vicious blizzard, in which dust mixed with snow to turn the white flakes brown, hit the Panhandle, and Guthrie's miserable twenty-five-dollar-a-month shack rattled in what the
Pampa Daily News
deemed
the most “freakish” storm ever. Never before had residents experienced a summer storm, complete with thunder and lightning, in subzero temperatures. Sitting by the fireplace—the thermostat having frozen—Guthrie dreamed of warm adobes and started plotting
House of Earth
. In Los Angeles the previous year, Guthrie had befriended the actor and social activist Eddie Albert (who would make his feature film debut in Hollywood's 1938 version of
Brother Rat
with Ronald Reagan and would star in the CBS television sitcom
Green Acres
from 1965 to 1971). Guthrie had been so taken with the charismatic Albert, a proponent of organic farming, that he had given Albert his guitar as a going-away gift. “Well howdy,” Guthrie now wrote to Albert from frigid Pampa. “We didn't have no trouble finding the dustbowl, and are about as covered up as one family can get. Only trouble is the dust is so froze up it cain't blow, so it just scrapes around. Had seven or eight fair sized blizzards down here. But was 3 or 4 days a having them. It run us out of our front room the last freeze. We had the cook stove and the heater a going full blast in the house and it was so windy inside it nearly blowed the fires out. We dig in at night and out about sunup. This one has really been a freezeout. Snowed and thawed out 3 times while we was hanging out the clothes. They froze on the line. We took em down just like boards.”

The mercury dropped to six degrees below zero in Pampa, and gas lines froze, leaving homes without heat. While Guthrie was glad to be back home in Pampa—even in wintertime—he was a worried man. What the
New York
Times
called a “blizzard of frozen mud” the color of “cocoa” was pummeling the Great Plains. In Pampa, visibility was often less than two hundred feet. Stuck in his shack, bitterly cold and trying to keep his baby girl from catching a fever, Guthrie fantasized about handcrafting adobe bricks come the spring thaw. Such a bold venture would cost him $300 for supplies for a six-room residence. “You dig you a cellar and mix the mud and straw right in there, sorta with your feet, you know, and you get the mud just the right thickness and you put it in a mould, and you mould out around 20 bricks a day, and in a reasonable length of time you have got enough to build your house,” he wrote to Albert. “You kinda let the weather cure em for around 2 or 3 weeks and the sun bakes em, then you raise up your wall.”

Guthrie's letter to Eddie Albert—previously unpublished, like
House of Earth
itself—is a recent discovery. It illuminates how mesmerized Guthrie was by the vision of his own adobe home while trying to survive the brutal winter of 1937.

Starting in the late 1930s, Guthrie toyed with the idea of writing a panegyric to survivors of the Dust Bowl with adobe as the leitmotif. Because John Steinbeck had stolen his thunder by writing
The Grapes of Wrath
, about the Okie migration westward from Oklahoma and Texas to California, Guthrie decided to focus instead on his own authentic experience as a survivor of Black Sunday and the great mud blizzard. Also, to his ears, the dialect of Steinbeck's uprooted Joads fell short of realism. To Guthrie, true-to-life bad grammar was the essential way to capture the spirit of how people
really
talked on the frontier. Like Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus tales, he was an excellent listener. So
House of Earth
, in Guthrie's mind, would be less an adulterated documentation of the meteorological calamities than a pioneering work in capturing Texas-Okie dialects. Steinbeck, like all reporters, focused on the dust cyclones, but Guthrie knew that the frigid winter storms in West Texas during the Dust Bowl era also crippled his fellow plainsmen. Guthrie granted Steinbeck the diploma for documenting the diaspora to
California. Nevertheless, he himself claimed for literature those brave and stubborn souls who decided to stay put in the Texas Panhandle. It was one thing for Steinbeck, in
The Grapes of Wrath
, to feature families who were searching for a land of milk and honey, but Guthrie's own heart was with those stubborn dirt farmers who remained behind in the Great Plains to stand up to the bankers, lumber barons, and agribusinesses that had desecrated beautiful wild Texas with overgrazing, clear-cutting, strip-mining, and reckless farming practices. The gouged land and the working folks got diddly-squat … nothing … zero … nada … zilch. (For a while Guthrie used the nom de plume Alonzo Zilch.)

While Guthrie's twenty-five-year-old heart stayed in Texas, his legs would soon be bound for California. Much like Tike Hamlin, the main character in
House of Earth
, Guthrie paced the floorboards of his hovel at 408 South Russell Street in Pampa during the great mud blizzard of 1937, wondering how to find meaning in the drought-stricken misery of the Depression. His salvation required a choice: to go to California or to build an adobe homestead in Texas. When the character Ella May Hamlin screams, “Why has there got to be always something to knock you down? Why is this country full of things you can't see, things that beat you down, kick you down, throw you around, and kill out your hope?” the reader feels that Guthrie is expressing his own deep-seated frustration. He decided he would have to try his luck in California if he
wanted a steady income. Having learned the Carter Family's old-style country tunes, and with original songs like “Ramblin' Round” and “Blowing Down This Old Dusty Road” in his repertoire, he was determined to become a folksinger who mattered. In early 1937—the exact week is unknown, but it was after the snow had thawed—Guthrie packed up his painting supplies, put new strings on his guitar, and bummed a ride in a beer delivery truck to Groom, Texas. Hopping out of the cab and waving good-bye, he started hitching down Highway 66 (what Steinbeck called the “road of flight”), where migrants were begging for food in every flyspeck town, to Los Angeles.