He says, “There was a time when we looked up to Uncle Sam. The central character is Charlie Flag, a tough old rancher from a bygone era who refuses to take government aid to survive the drought. The 1950s drought is a major character asserting itself, maliciously and unceasingly, throughout the book. This is how Elmer Kelton’s superb Texas novel, “The Time It Never Rained,” begins. It always has.īut it didn’t and many a boy would become a man before the land became green again. No one expected another drought like that of ’33 and the really big dries, like 1928, came once in a lifetime. Men grumbled.īut you learn to live with dry spells if you live in west Texas. They watch the grass slowly lose its green, then curl up and fire up like dying corn stocks. They watched the rank weeds shrivel as the west winds relentlessly sought them out and smothered them with its hot breath. Ranchers watched waterholes recede into brown puddles of mud that their livestock wouldn’t touch. Just another dry spell, men said at first.
A cancerous blight burning a scar on the land.”
Here is the way one writer describe one of these twenty-year droughts: “It crept up out of Mexico touching first along the brackish Pecos River, and spreading then in all directions. The great Texas meteorologist Isaac Klein reportedly said back in the ’30s that Texas is a land of eternal drought, interrupted occasionally by biblical floods.
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