This dry spell we are having has me remembering some dry years when I was a teenager. I was talking with Charles Lee the other day. Charles was a teenager in the 1950s, as I was. We were out in the heat on an errand, and our conversation turned to dry years that we remember well. I have done my share of lamentation about the hot, dry days of August, but most of our talk of the heat and the lack of rain involves how uncomfortable we are with it. I’m remembering years when things were much more serious, when not only were we comfort-challenged, but our very way of life was threatened by the incessant heat of the sun and the cloudless, rainless skies of summer.

The old folks of my family used to talk of the dry years of the 1930s. Those were the years of the Great Depression in our country, and were made even more serious by the droughts that plagued farmers during those same years. Out of them came the legendary Dust Bowl days that hit Oklahoma so hard, and the migrations of “Arkies” and “Okies” westward to California. People were leaving behind the farms on which they had struggled, and moving west looking for the promise of a better livelihood, out there.

Two of my uncles eventually joined that migration, moving their families “out west” to Los Angeles. Both of them went to work for North American Airlines.

Uncle Gene sold his farm to my dad, and that farm became our home place north of Pea Ridge where I grew up. Uncle Earl moved back to Pea Ridge briefly in the mid-1940s, but soon left the farm for good and moved back to Los Angeles.

The dry years I remember best were when I was13 and 14 years old, in 1953 and 1954. Those were back to back years with little rain. Our grain crops failed, and we struggled to make enough hay to feed the livestock. Otter Creek often went dry during the summertime, at least the stretch of it that flowed through our farm. Sometimes there would be small pools of water here and there; but in 1953 and 1954 the creek went dry almost all the way to Pea Ridge.

For the early part of the summer we could open the fences and drive our herd of cows up the creek on Mr. Couchie’s farm, where there was more water. Mr.

Couchie was our basketball coach at school, and he also owned a large acreage north of town. His north fence line was our south line. Later in the summer, during those two years, even the upper stretches of the creek went dry, and we had to begin hauling water for the cattle from the spring on the Charles Day place, north of us.

Thankfully, that spring never failed during those dry years.

I was astonished at how much water cows could drink in hot, dry weather.

I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised, since our cows were producing milk. But I would make trip after trip to the spring with our little Ford tractor anda two-wheeled trailer. We had five big barrels on the trailer, and I would dip water from the spring to fill all those barrels, then haul the load to the pastures, and pour it into tanks and other barrels so the cows could drink. At every slurp, thosethirsty cows could lower the water level in their barrel by an inch or two. They could drink almost as fast as I could pour.

Not only were we short of drinking water for the cows, the pastures and hay fields dried up in August of those years. The dusty dirt roads left a covering of dust on everything. Then, to top it off, in 1954 the grasshoppers moved in in hordes, eating whatever was left growing. My dad never liked pesticides or herbicides or anything poison, but that year the grasshoppers got so bad that even he resorted to spraying the fields in the effort to get rid of them. I remember how distasteful it was to him to have to be so careful with the sprays, to avoid getting stuff on ourselves or on the cows.

That year was an especially tough one for the dairy farmers of our area.

One neighbor who lived in the edge of Missouri ran out of everything for feeding his herd. We had a certain amount of stockpiled hay and silage, so he made an arrangement with my dad that we would feed his cows and sell the milk they produced, hoping that we could all survive until springtime.

He had about 20 nice Holstein cows. After wintering those cows with ours, Dad eventually bought most of the neighbor’s Holsteins.

We made it, but the dry years were tough.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.

He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 09/01/2010