Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (21 page)

8

In the Tracks of Tom Joad: A Journey through Jobless America

‘To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.' So begins John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath,
in which a poor Oklahoma family journeys to California in search of work.
¹
The events it describes happened eighty years ago, when America was in the grip of recession and Oklahoma in the grip of drought.

In July 2011, as Congress took America to the brink of a debt default, I decided to drive from Oklahoma to Los Angeles following the route described in Steinbeck's book, in order to take a snapshot of Recession America. It was a snapshot alright—but it turned out to be of something else.

Farmers don't quit

Kiowa County, Oklahoma.
It's a wide, flat country with only the Wichita Mountains to give the skyline any kind of edge. The sky is cloudless, the grass is white and crunches under your feet as if covered in deep frost. If you look closely at the redbud, the state tree of Oklahoma, the leaves are brown and curled, as if they too are about to drop with frostbite. But it's 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Oklahoma, like much of the American south, is in the middle of its deepest drought for sixty years.

In the field where what's left of his herd of cows huddles beneath the skeleton of a mesquite tree, Brett Porter slashes the netting on a bale of hay; it too is on the white side of green, but moist enough for the cows, who jostle into a feeding line. They are sleek, muscular, prime Angus beef. Brett has spent twelve years working on the DNA.

But this DNA is doomed. The Porter ranch is down to just eighteen bales of hay, which will last a week. He has already sold twenty out of 100 cows for hamburger meat. Once the hay runs out, it will cost $200 a bale, or $3,600 a week, to feed the herd. And he doesn't have that kind of money.

I can't control it. You can't control a drought. There's a lot of nights I don't sleep—I stay awake thinking how I'm going to make this out, and that out.

That July, across western Oklahoma, they are starting to scuff the grass under their feet, look at the sky, look at the temperature gauge—which hovers way above 100°F even at dusk—and talk in their cracked, gravelly voices about the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

‘It's the worst it's been in sixty years, and we're actually drier today than in the 1930s,' says Terry Detrick, who runs the American Farmers and Ranchers union here:

Right now, though the farms are bigger than the 1930s, 90 per cent are still family owned. Our winter wheat failed; we tried to put in a summer crop and now the summer crop's not going to make it. Double the input costs and zero income. They have crop insurance—but they can only afford to insure 65 per cent of the value. We owe retailers, can't pay our bills; so they're going to go as well.

We remember the Dust Bowl primarily through two stark sets of imagery: Dorothea Lange's photographs of displaced Oklahoma farmers, staring vacantly as their hopes and children die; and Steinbeck's novel, made into a haunting movie by John Ford in 1940.
The Grapes of Wrath
begins with the Joad family losing their land to drought and debt; it follows their journey southwest to California, where, like 350,000 others, they end up as exploited farm labourers living in squatter camps.

Today's situation looks different. The Porter ranch is not small—Brett farms 3,500 acres. And the problems of land misuse that caused the Dust Bowl have been solved by sixty years of applied agronomy: Brett's generation no longer tills the land, but uses crop rotation—cattle, wheat, alfalfa, barley and cotton—to keep the soil nourished. For there is no river water here, only rainfall. And now the rain has stopped.

As for debt, though Brett borrows half a million dollars a year to run the farm, the Federal government underwrites his loans, so instead of 5 per cent interest he's paying 2 per cent. On top of that there are direct state loans. In good years he breaks even; in bad years he relies on disaster payments and crop insurance—again from Federal money.

But as the relentless summer of 2011 hammers the earth solid, the strain is beginning to show. Brett and his fellow-farmers are worried that Steinbeck's ‘red country' might again be the stage for another onesided fight between nature and a broken economic model.

For the Joads' penury was partly the product of the economic model small farmers had fought for during the Civil War: the right to claim and farm ‘homesteads' no bigger than 160 acres. They had wrested these rights from the cattle drivers and the southern cotton barons. But, sinking deeper into debt as the rains dried up, they could not defeat the banks. It's a cycle as old as capitalism: finance capital screws the farmer.

Now, right here on these vast lands, the cycle is being played out again. Detrick, in a low voice, tells me:

We don't quit. What the banker managers say to me is, the first people to come to them asking to be foreclosed are the wives. She says: ‘There's no way we're gonna make it and he won't quit, you gotta wind us up'—the women! Always the women, because the men don't quit.

By 9 a.m. each day at the stockyard in El Reno, just outside Oklahoma City, there is a queue of trucks and trailers as the farmers come in to sell their cattle. Always, in the driving seats, the same demographic: a grey-haired farmer and his grey-haired wife. Brett Porter, in Oakleys and baseball cap, is untypically young; the average age of an Oklahoma farmer is fifty-eight. Instead of a 1930s-style geographic exodus, there's been a quiet, generational one, even during the boom years—and the boom years are over.

You can read the worry on the faces of the men on horseback too, beneath their crisp, white Stetsons. Most of them are farmers working the sale to make an extra buck. Grim-faced behind their sunglasses, they consult clipboards, spit tobacco. There are only three big buyers, each of them specializing in the hamburger trade: the occasional magnificent bull goes for a decent price, but most of the animals sell for around $52 per 100 pounds, down on last week and just two-thirds of the price they were getting six months before.

On top of climate change and the credit crunch, the farmers now face yet another problem. In Washington the newly installed Republican majority in the House of Representatives is blocking the Federal budget. Though everybody is sure that it's political manoeuvring and that a deal will finally be done, the Republicans' price for their approval of the budget is a $4 trillion cut in Federal spending. In the firing line are the Federal direct state farm loans—worth a billion dollars in Oklahoma alone—and the disaster payments. Detrick says:

I think we're going to see some drastic cuts. Some programmes will survive, but they won't be sufficient. The young will look at farming and say: I can't do this. The elderlings can liquidate and sell out—but without the incentives, nobody young's going to do this.

Route 66

At Hertz they fix me up with a Mercury Grand Marquis, an old beige Zimmer frame of a car with white leather seats. Plus a GPS, which I will barely need because the road to California is simply the Interstate 40 for 1,800 miles. But Route 66 runs beside it, the route the real-life migrants took in the Thirties. I dip on and off Route 66 along the way: a single-lane highway whose edges now are crumbly, invaded by sunflowers and alfalfa.

The geography changes dramatically as I tank westwards, but the human geography along Interstate 40 is forlornly uniform: low-rent motels, high-carb food outlets, the occasional roadside porn cinema and a vast sky. For company there is always the radio, which favours homilies from Christian country-music singers before switching to Spanish oom-pah music somewhere around the Texas—New Mexico border.

Then there are the shock jocks: Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and their local imitators. Actually, Beck is inimitable:

There was this guy, remind me, an advisor to Putin who said in the nineties America would break up into five separate countries. You think that's not happening? Well, take a look at who's buying land in California! The Chinese! I'm sure the Mexicans would want to take New Mexico and Arizona. [
Doomy voice
] It's happening.

All the way along, the jocks and news bulletins will riff endlessly on the same theme: the unsustainability of Federal spending, its evil, un-Christian nature, and the sinful character of ‘pork-barrel' politics—which signifies that some special interest is being disproportionately served in Washington.

At the motels they advertise ‘hot breakfast'. Day after day I am confronted with ‘biscuits and gravy'—a combo of buttermilk scone and white reconstituted sludge, with a microwaved hamburger and a slab of yellow gloop they call scrambled egg; washed down with coffee so weak, you can read the minuscule type of the
Wall Street Journal
markets columns through it.

On the TV, as you struggle to get breakfast down, it's always Fox News: no longer starring Beck, who's been relegated to the radio after one outrageous claim too many, but folks indistinguishable from him. Presenters obsessed with the debt and deficit, determined to cut the healthcare of the poor, the pensions of the elderly, the farm payments of the Oklahoma ranchers, and the minimum wage.

If you're up early in a motel, you meet the people who earn the minimum wage. They are nearly always women. And these jobs are not full-shift jobs. They are low-skill, part-time jobs for people who, in the era of globalization, cannot find anything better than microwaving burgers and cleaning greying bedsheets for $7.50 an hour.

One motel blends into another. There's a whiteboard in the reception:
Welcome Brad and Stacey, ‘thanks for choseing us'
and a bunch of other misspelt words announce a party for the newly graduated Brad. Which college? ‘Ha, no sir, infantry basic training.'

In the morning, an elderly woman shuffles out of the kitchen with a tray of reheated burgers and slides them—painfully slowly because she is fatter than she is tall—onto a plastic tray, then tidies the plastic knives in a plastic cup, and is she in my way? Yes she is, but, ‘No, ma'am, you go right ahead,' for America has become the land of polite, meaningless conversation.

The bed is soft; the sheets are old; the towels have been laundered a hundred times too many and are stiff. The soap does not lather. There is nothing whatsoever organic in the room as you arrive: no bottle of water, no flower—not even a plastic one. Yet someone has individually hand-wrapped each of the four plastic cups available, in cling film, so that you cannot sue them if you catch a mouth infection.

Outside the traffic swirls and hums. There are, from the looks of the car park, maybe twenty guests staying. Some drive shiny station wagons or ride the classic menopausal boy's toy of the American Midwest, a Harley-Davidson. But there are also battered repossessed cars—and the people who own them, playing with their kids in the motel's swimming pool, look local, downtrodden and poor. Could they really have come to the motel pool, completely unsheltered from the glaring sun, to spend a Sunday afternoon?

I cross the Canadian River on Route 66: the riverbed is pure dry white sand. I cross the Texas panhandle and then the little Steinbeck-era towns flash past, just as the writer lists them: Shamrock, McLean, Wildorado, Amarillo, ‘and there's an end of Texas'. In New Mexico, the farmland ends and the mesas begin: arid scrubland with canyons and island plateaus.

As I turn off the Interstate and into Albuquerque, I'm about to experience something that will never again leave me feeling unlucky to be sleeping in a motel.

Joy Junction

The families learned what rights must be observed—the right of privacy in the tent; the right to keep the past black hidden in the heart; the right to talk and to listen …

That's how Steinbeck describes the camp for homeless migrants that awaited the Joads in California. Joy Junction is its modern equivalent: 300 people bed down each night in the barrack blocks and gymnasiums of this abandoned school by the railroad tracks in Albuquerque.

Jeremy Reynalds set the place up twenty years ago. With his white smoking jacket, dyed ginger hair, crucifix earrings and sparkly nail-job including tiny pictures of the face of Jesus Christ, he has a distinctly non-Steinbeckian air. ‘There are two Albuquerques,' he tells me: ‘the one that queues for lattes in the morning, and the one that queues for mattresses at night.'

Joy Junction is, he admits frankly, mainly used by people who've had alcohol, drug or domestic violence issues, including some of the staff. The routine is to do a religious version of the twelve-step programme, some literacy and some praying. But now, Reynalds says, there's a new kind of clientele, the American middle class: folks whose problem is not drink or drugs, but debt.

Sandra and Tim live in one of the barracks at Joy Junction, which means they get a single room and a shared bathroom. She worked in Subway, but they cut her shifts; he managed a branch of McDonald's, but it closed. They lost their house and downsized to a small apartment, and then the unemployment benefit ran out and they lost the apartment. ‘We slept in our car for four weeks. It was scary,' says Sandra. ‘We'd buy fast food. Take a wash in a gas station.'

On the floor of the reception centre, a gym strewn with about eighty mattresses, I meet Larry Antista and his daughter Michelle, aged fourteen: ‘We're here because of the economic times: my spouse split on us and that halved our income so we lost our place.'

With a grey ponytail, grey moustache and dreamy eyes, Larry, maybe in his fifties, looks like a character out of Pynchon rather than Steinbeck. He's been a driver and worked in adult care, but has lately been trying to write a screenplay. They stayed on the floors and sofas of friends—‘sofa surfing', Reynalds calls it—until their friends got sick of it. Now they sleep, dad and daughter, side by side with eighty people they do not know.