Gaye LeBaron: Play based on a Steinbeck classic calls up memories of Sonoma County’s Dust Bowl past

The Greeks had it right. If you want to start a discussion about what history means in today’s world, write a play about it, have a chorus to walk up and down offering background, add myth for spice and let ’er rip.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is much more than Shakespeare, has been purposefully doing just that in recent years. A commitment to support new plays that explore some aspect of America’s past (often in partnership with other theater groups or foundations) has offered premiere performances of such successes as “All the Way,” the LBJ play that won a Tony on Broadway, or “Roe,” on the matter of abortion rights, or Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat” about what happens to Rust Belt residents when the factory shuts down.

These are the dramas that those of us who are Ashland “regulars” come home talking about. So I’ve come home to talk about this year’s premiere. It may not be the runaway success that “All the Way” was. That remains to be seen.

This year’s entry in this history-drama derby is “Mother Road” by Octavio Solis, a familiar name in the OSF playwright list. The title is from “The Grapes of Wrath,” part of author John Steinbeck’s lyrical description of Highway 66, the 1930s “escape route” from the devastation of the Dust Bowl. To Steinbeck’s fictional Joad family it was “the mother road, the road of flight.“

Solis’ cast of characters are bound for Oklahoma, but the old truck on center stage turned me around and took me directly to Camp Windsor, a place that exists only in bits and pieces now. The flagpole still stands (although someone has shot the ball off the top); there are visible foundations, if you know where to look, and a small building that was once a washhouse. That’s what remains of a place that was very important for two unrelated reasons before and during World War II.

There is a small street off Windsor River Road named Old Camp Lane that marks the eastern boundary of Camp Windsor, which was built as a migrant labor camp by the Farm Security Administration before the war and converted to a German prisoner-of-war-camp in 1944.

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The FSA’s Camp Windsor was the last stop on that “Mother Road” for about a thousand families, just a sliver of the 350,000 forced out of their homes in Oklahoma, northern Texas, Arkansas and Missouri by the economic and natural disasters written large by historians as the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. They came to California in the 1930s and early ’40s in a land migration that exceeded the Gold Rush of 1849.

Several times in the last four decades I have been privileged to talk with people who traveled that “mother road.” Their memories were recorded in a book on the history of Santa Rosa and its county, and left me with a clearer understanding of the Dust Bowl migrants.

They arrived in Sonoma County, in cars that literally came apart on the journey and were patched together with determination and baling wire. Some had to borrow $2 to buy gas and a ferry ticket to cross the bay. They were road-weary, looking to stop and stay awhile. And the word was out that there were jobs in the hop yards and the orchards.

The camp they came to was built on 67 acres of wooded knoll purchased by the government from rancher Harold Calhoun for $8,000. It was one of the last camps built by the FSA in California and was not initially welcomed by conservative Sonoma County farmers who had endured a damaging apple pickers’ strike in ’35. But the county was 10th in nation in agricultural production in those years and required some 20,000 pickers per season, about 8,000 more than the population of Santa Rosa at the time. The need transcended the politics and leaders emerged as backers, including Windsor rancher Calhoun who willingly sold the property.

There were tent cabins with wood floors and half-walls and canvas tops - enough to house perhaps 200 people at a time. There was a kitchen, a health clinic, a dance hall for Saturday nights and guards to keep everyone safe (At least one of the young “campers” married a guard). A woman who was only 10 when her family arrived told me her mother cried tears of joy when she saw there was laundry room. The travelers were welcomed by hop growers and orchardists. Not only did hops need to be picked and dried within two weeks of ripening, but there were apples and prunes (and even some peaches and cherries) to be picked and the fruit processors and canneries that opened at harvest time. This meant plenty of work, immediately and onward.

One road-weary dad reportedly told his family that when he was a little boy he wondered what heaven looked like and “when I got to Sonoma County I found out.”

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Which brings us to the transplanted natives of Quanah, Oklahoma, a small (and getting smaller even now) city of fewer than 3,000 people in the Texas Panhandle that borders Oklahoma. Like so many towns in the region, it was hit hard by the dust storms of the ’30s, prompting an exodus. Either purposefully or accidentally (maybe some of both) many of the migrants from Quanah ended their westward diaspora at Camp Windsor.

Back when I first started making my history notes, a Healdsburg minister named Charlie Coates made it sound accidental.

“When we got to Camp Windsor,” he said, “There were more people from Quanah there than were left in Quanah.’

The Quanah connection endures. Read the gravestones in the Shiloh Cemetery or check at Hembree House, Windsor’s history museum, for evidence of this.

Just this past week, I talked with a couple, grandchildren of Dust Bowl migrants, who had just returned from a pilgrimage to Quanah. They couldn’t go “back to Quanah” because they’d never been there. But they had heard a lot about it.

They found a small community - bigger than Graton, about the same as Penngrove. The old town was abandoned - “boarded up,” they said - but there was a Best Western and a grocery, where the storekeeper told them proudly “we have a stoplight now.” The road crew worker they got directions from to the cemetery followed them there because “he just wanted to make sure that we found it,” they said.

Curious, I asked these descendants of old Quanah if they would ever consider going back there to live and the answer to my question should give us pause.

“I don’t know," the wife said after careful thought. “The people are so darn nice.”

Now that should make us think a bit. As should the play called “Mother Road.”

It did, at least for me, what good drama should do. It set me on my own path. There I was, as the cast took its bow, thinking back to my childhood when my mother told me, no matter what the other kids said, “Okie” was “not a word we use.” And it made me think of all the good friends whose fathers or grandfathers came as part of that pilgrimage from ruined land.

I was connecting the roles with reality, including all the migrant and immigrant stories I’ve heard and read. If a drama accomplishes what a playwright intends, everyone in the audience sees something different, and leaves the theater changed - sometimes, yes, dramatically - from when they took their seats.