House of Earth Read Free Page A

fair sized blizzards down here. But was 3 or 4 days a having them. It run us out of our front room the last freeze. We had the cook stove and the heater a going full blast in the house and it was so windy inside it nearly blowed the fires out. We dig in at night and out about sunup. This one has really been a freezeout. Snowed and thawed out 3 times while we was hanging out the clothes. They froze on the line. We took em down just like boards.”
    The mercury dropped to six degrees below zero in Pampa, and gas lines froze, leaving homes without heat. While Guthrie was glad to be back home in Pampa—even in wintertime—he was a worried man. What the New YorkTimes called a “blizzard of frozen mud” the color of “cocoa” was pummeling the Great Plains. In Pampa, visibility was often less than two hundred feet. Stuck in his shack, bitterly cold and trying to keep his baby girl from catching a fever, Guthrie fantasized about handcrafting adobe bricks come the spring thaw. Such a bold venture would cost him $300 for supplies for a six-room residence. “You dig you a cellar and mix the mud and straw right in there, sorta with your feet, you know, and you get the mud just the right thickness and you put it in a mould, and you mould out around 20 bricks a day, and in a reasonable length of time you have got enough to build your house,” he wrote to Albert. “You kinda let the weather cure em for around 2 or 3 weeks and the sun bakes em, then you raise up your wall.”
    Guthrie’s letter to Eddie Albert—previously unpublished, like House of Earth itself—is a recent discovery. It illuminates how mesmerized Guthrie was by the vision of his own adobe home while trying to survive the brutal winter of 1937.
    We sent off to Washington DC and get us back a book about sun dried brick .
    Them guys up there around that Dept of Agriculture knows a right smart. They can write about work and make you think you got a job .
    They wrote that Adobe Brick book so dadgum interesting that you got to slack up every couple of pages to pull the mud and hay out from between your toes .
    People around here for some reason aint got much faith in a adobe mud house. Old Timers dont seem to think it would stand up. But this here Dept of Agr. Book has got a map there in it which shows what parts of the country the dirt will work and tells in no hidden words that sun dried brick is the answer to many a dustblown familys prayer .
    Since by a lot of hard work, which us dustbowlers are long on, and a very small cash cost, any family can raise a dern good house which is bug proof, fireproof, and cool in summer, and not windy inside in the winter .
    I have been sort of experimenting out here in the yard with mud bricks, and after you make a bunch of em, you’d say yourself if a fellow caint raise up a house out of dust and water, by George, he caint raise it up out of nothing .
    Right on hand I got a good cement man when he can get work and also a uncle of mine thats lived up here on the plains for 45 years, and he knows all of these hills and hollers and breaks in the land and canyons, and river bottoms where we can get stuff to built with, like timber and rock and sand, and he’s too old to get a job but just the right age to build .
    This cement workers is just right freshly married. But could work some .
    Now since this climate is fairly dry and mighty dusty, and in view of the wind that blows, and the wheat that somehow grows, why hadn’t these good cheap houses beintroduced around here, which by the bricks in my back yard, I think is a big success .
    If folks caint find no work at nothing else they can build em a house. There is plenty of exercise to it .
    We’ve owned this little wood house for six years and it has been a blessing over and over, and the same amount of work and money spent on this house will raise one just exactly twice this good from the very well advertised dust of the earth