House of Earth Read Free

American, Asian, and European cultures. He thought of the state as a mosaic of enduring peoples and cultures. Taos Pueblo—some of its structures as much as five stories high—had been occupied by Native Americans without interruption for a millennium. Santa Fe, founded in 1610, was the first and longest-lasting European capital on US soil. As Guthrie wrote in his song “Bling Blang”—which he recorded for his 1956 album Songs to Grow On for Mother and Child —his day of reckoning, with regard to New Mexico–style adobe, was fast approaching.
    I’ll grab some mud and you grab some clay
    So when it rains it won’t wash away .
    We’ll build a house that’ll be so strong ,
    The winds will sing my baby a song .
    From his inquiries in New Mexico, Guthrie learned that you didn’t have to be a trained mason to build an adobe home. His dream was to live and wander in the Texas Panhandle, and to build a lasting adobe sanctuary on the ranch land he could return to at any time—one that wasn’t a wooden coffin or owned by a bank or vulnerable to the dreaded dust and snow. With the well-reasoned conviction, Guthrie, voice of the rain-starved Dust Bowl, started preaching back in Texas about the utilitarian value of adobe. For five cents, he purchased from the USDA its Bulletin No. 1720, The Use of Adobe or Sun-Dried Brick for Farm Building .Written by T. A. H. Miller, this how-to manual taught poor rural folks (among others) how to build an adobe from the cellar up. In the Panhandle, there was no cheap lumber or stone available, so adobe was the best bet for architecturally sound homes in the Southwest. All an amateur needed was a homemade mixture of clay loam and straw, which helped the brick to dry and shrink as a unit. Constructing a leakproof roof was really the only difficult part. (Emulsified asphalt was eventually used to seal the roofs of adobes.) The rest was as easy as playing tic-tac-toe.
    The model US city in the pamphlet was Las Cruces, New Mexico, where 80 percent of all structures were made of adobe. Guthrie promoted this USDA guide for decades. Realizing that dugouts in the Panhandle had endured the Dust Bowl better than wooden aboveground structures, which were vulnerable to wind and termites, Guthrie considered it a public service to promote the notion of adobe dwellings in drought areas. If sharecroppers and tenant farmers in places like Pampa could only own a piece of land—even uncultivable land among arroyos or red rocks—they could build a dream “house of earth” that was fireproof, sweatproof, windproof, snowproof, Dust Bowl–proof, thiefproof, and bugproof.
    It was early in January 1937 that Guthrie’s vision of adobe inspired House of Earth . A vicious blizzard, in which dust mixed with snow to turn the white flakes brown, hit the Panhandle, and Guthrie’s miserable twenty-five-dollar-a-month shack rattled in what the Pampa Daily News deemedthe most “freakish” storm ever. Never before had residents experienced a summer storm, complete with thunder and lightning, in subzero temperatures. Sitting by the fireplace—the thermostat having frozen—Guthrie dreamed of warm adobes and started plotting House of Earth . In Los Angeles the previous year, Guthrie had befriended the actor and social activist Eddie Albert (who would make his feature film debut in Hollywood’s 1938 version of Brother Rat with Ronald Reagan and would star in the CBS television sitcom Green Acres from 1965 to 1971). Guthrie had been so taken with the charismatic Albert, a proponent of organic farming, that he had given Albert his guitar as a going-away gift. “Well howdy,” Guthrie now wrote to Albert from frigid Pampa. “We didn’t have no trouble finding the dustbowl, and are about as covered up as one family can get. Only trouble is the dust is so froze up it cain’t blow, so it just scrapes around. Had seven or eight