Ellen Gray: Ken Burns' latest film brings 'Dust Bowl' to life

* THE DUST BOWL. 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday, WHYY 12.

THEIR FACES are as weathered as the land they once lived on, but it's the survivors who bring PBS' "The Dust Bowl" to life.

Still children when a frenzy of plowing and planting combined with years of drought to cause a disaster that for a period turned the country's heartland into a desert, they're one reason that Ken Burns' latest documentary couldn't have waited any longer.

"We were very anxious, coming off ['The War'], where we were dealing with young men who were now in their late 80s and 90s who had fought as young men in World War II," Burns told reporters this summer. "We were asking to go back a decade [beyond that] to find people, and we realized early on that we would be dealing with the children and the grandchildren" of those who were adults during the Depression-era disaster.

"That was all right. The memories were really present there. But we weren't sure that we'd find that many."

Producers had begun looking for the survivors of the Dust Bowl four years ago, in notices aired on small PBS stations throughout the affected areas and in local newspapers.

"When we were interviewing them, a lot of times their children would bring them," said Dayton Duncan, Burns' partner in both the two-part documentary and a companion book.

They would "ask if they could sit in on the interview. And we'd say, 'OK, as long as you're not in the sight line and don't disrupt it.' . . . When we were through, a lot of their children would come out and say, 'I'd never heard that story before.' "

The stories - of dust blizzards that left the dirt piled like snowdrifts against doors, of sitting inside with cloth draped over their heads to keep out the dust, of siblings and other relatives lost to "dust pneumonia" - would be almost unbelievable without the photographic evidence.

But the Dust Bowl disaster didn't just trigger a massive federal response to try to help its victims. Thanks to President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, there's also an official record, with the work of photographers like Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein more than backing up the survivors' memories.

"The Dust Bowl" begins Sunday with the events leading up to what Burns calls "greatest man-made ecological disaster in American history, a 10-year apocalypse punctuated by hundreds, hundreds of terrifying black blizzards that killed not only farmers' crops and cattle, but their children too."

I wondered what it must have been like, in a world without Twitter or CNN, to wake up some mornings to a blackened sky. At what point, I asked, did they understand what was happening?

Calvin Crabill's family fled Colorado for California when he was 10 or 11, but before that, "I was a little cowboy," Crabill told reporters.

"I rode a horse three miles to a country school. After school is out, my job was to, on my horse, go out in the open range and bring in the cattle. The open range was one of the few places left, and so it was over a two- or three-mile area that I would bring in the cattle. This one time, the teacher sent us home early because we could see the dust cloud from the west. And I had never seen one quite like that before myself. And the dust cloud started coming up. We didn't know what it was.

"She said, 'Go home, children.' But I had to get the cattle in, and it took me two or three or four hours to get the cattle in. I always got in after dark, anyway. And as I'm trying to get the cattle rounded up, this thing came, and I just said to myself . . . 'It's the end of the world.' I just assumed, a little boy, it's the end of the world."

"Cal is a lucky one," added Burns. "Some kids rounding up the cattle never came home, [were] found tangled in barbed wire, suffocated to death, choking. This is an apocalypse that is so hard to fathom and comprehend."

On Showtime's "Dexter" (9 p.m. Sunday), it's Dexter (Michael C. Hall) who's in for some shocks for once as the show's best season since John Lithgow played the killer known as "Trinity" continues with some family revelations.

But it's that other Showtime hit, "Homeland" (10 p.m. Sunday), that faces the real challenge this week: Just how crazy do things have to get between Brody (Damian Lewis) and his CIA handler Carrie (Claire Danes) before they outstrip what's been going on in the actual CIA?

Not to worry: They're on the case.

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