North Dakota: The Big Dry

• Share

(3 of 5)

Leon Malard at his kitchen table smiled a good open smile when he talked about Sioux Indians being called to Ohio to do a rain dance, priests shaking holy water on farm fields and prayer gatherings in sale barns. Show business. The forces out there are so huge and incomprehensible, you don't waste energy trying to stop them in their tracks. You hunker down, you survive. Malard has for 60 years, and his dad before him, and before that his grandfather, who homesteaded on the Missouri River in 1905.

"The barley and the oats are gone," said Malard. "If we have rain soon, we can get some corn. But even some of that is shot." He watches the fields particularly in the evening, when the light is softer. "The corn is beginning to turn white," he said. "The leaves are curling. If there is no rain, if the wind keeps blowing like this, if it stays so hot, all the corn will be lost."

Malard's mind, tuned to seasons and years, is already calculating 1989. He got one scraggly hay crop this spring and has some carry-over bales from last year for his 75 Herefords and Black Angus cattle. With careful planning, that can get him into next year. But then without new hay and grain his future looks bleak.

Yet Malard might stare even that specter down for a little while longer. He did as a boy in the 1930s. "The country around here is not as bad off as it was then, not yet anyway," Malard said. His dad planted seeds that never sprouted. The dust blew so much it covered a hog house on his grandfather's farm. Malard walked right over the top of it. About the only thing that dimmed the sun during the big dry of those years was the clouds of swarming grasshoppers.

Malard has a fan-cooled house, and his big White tractor has an air- conditioned cab. The shelter belts of Chinese elms and Russian olive trees that he planted between fields have endured, and retard the dust and wind over the 1,200 acres he and his son farm. Malard's hunch is that the improved farming practices, the big dams and reservoirs on the main stem of the Missouri, farm ponds and all the other modern techniques will prevent the terrible devastation and suffering of the 1930s.

Yet there is the faint question that comes with the endless wind. How long before this drought tumbles the old records? Then what? Malard shrugs. The last good rain he felt on his face was in August 1987. In March of this year a 10-in. blizzard roared in and hit his area. He waited it out in his house, daring to hope that this was a break in the dryness and that a normal spring of rain would follow. It did not. Instead came the heat and the wind. Malard gets up every morning by 6 and checks the sky and looks at the thermometer outside his window. He tunes in radio station KFYR in Bismarck for the weather reports. Day after monotonous day the news is the same. Clear skies, or thin empty clouds, temperatures already in the 70s or above and not a trace of dew on the land. When a slight shower came a few days ago, the baked land and superheated air seemed to cause the droplets to vanish as fast as they fell. A ferocious drought feeds itself.