“Did it rain last night?” Cash Murdock, age eleven, asks his father. “Nope, no rain,” the forty-three-year-old rancher, Casey, replies. “Maybe tonight.” With this exchange, Ashley Gilbertson and Ed Kashi introduce the small farming and ranching community in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, which was the epicenter of the Dust Bowl in the nineteen-thirties, and is presently experiencing the region’s worst drought in fifty years.
Arthur Rothstein’s famous photograph of a father and his two sons fleeing the dust storms that crippled the county nearly eighty years ago was taken here, in 1936. Lloyd Coble, the grandson of the man in that photograph, speaks of the hardships that he and his community face today, as Cimarron County is once again beset by acute environmental devastation. Despite improved farming and irrigation techniques, the current drought already affects some eighty per cent of agricultural land across the United States. “The drought drives our lives so much right now,” Casey Murdock says in the multimedia piece. “It’s just a miserable existence.” Both FEMA and the National Weather Service project that the drought will be the most costly and damaging in U.S. history.
Gilbertson and Kashi set out to profile, in the course of nine days, a slice of the community of Cimarron, population two thousand and five hundred, and to gain a better understanding of their struggles and resilience. “The sense of drama and severity I personally felt about the drought was a fact of life out there, something which simply had to be accepted and eventually overcome,” Gilbertson told me. The result of their journey is an account of one community, over multiple generations, determined to hold onto a way of life that Mother Nature seems to be trying to snatch away.
Photographs and audio by Ashley Gilbertson and Ed Kashi/VII.
