Pale Ydlow Ghost

For two days last week a pale yellow cloud rode a 70-mile gale across the southern Great Plains. In western Kansas, high-blowing sands blurred the sun and built ripply dunes along the east-west highways. In parts of Oklahoma the swirling dust cut visibility to half a mile. Winds in northern Texas sawed the sandy earth out from between dead cotton stocks, scooped fine topsoil from dry fields where winter wheat had failed to sprout because of long draught. Even in Dallas, 300 miles away, darkness came an hour early and sand sifted under windows and doors. Those who remembered the gritty, black devastating dust storms of the "Dirty Thirties" looked long and carefully at the sky.

Through the old dust-bowl region--spreading outward from the area where the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles hang together--hundreds of soil-conservation districts had been formed; farmers had "windstripped" their fields by alternating bands of cropland with long panels of soil-anchoring grassland. They had planted tree windbreaks, built broad terraces to catch snow and water, and planted crops on long-range rotation schedules.

But last week's darkened sky was a brief reminder of the undone. Since dust-bowl days, thousands of acres of normally dry grasslands in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico had been plowed and pulverized by "suitcase farmers." Lured by record .postwar wheat prices, they had sent gigantic plows into the poorest lands of the plains to reap quick profits from the opportune cycle of heavy rainfall. Now, in the new dryness, their fields were being abandoned to the drought and wind. If the dry cycle continued through one or two more years, U.S. soil conservationists warned, the pale yellow ghost of the grim dark days could turn both frightening and real.

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