Bad Weather

People on the West Coast endure droughts and forest fires. People on the Northeast Coast endure minus degree temperatures and a foot of snow. People in the Southeast endure the ferocious winds, rain, and flooding that hurricanes bring. People who live in Tornado Alley—Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri—suffer from those spinning cyclones’ destruction.

Here on the Great Plains, in fly-over country, we suffer from droughts, prairie fires, hailstorms, grasshoppers, and winter blizzards.

The drought of the century occurred on the Great Plains in the early thirties. Beginning in the summer of 19...