This chapter continues the inquiry that began when I first learned about overburden, a technical term from the mining industry that refers to the layers of vegetation, soil, rock, and water that must be excavated to get down to valuable ore and minerals below. The process of extracting bitumen from the tar sands of northern Alberta in Canada involves a form of strip-mining, in which trees and boggy marsh of the boreal forest wetland, known to First Nations and Métis peoples as muskeg, are removed to scoop up the bituminous sand beneath. As I wrote in “Improvement and Overburden” (Wenzel 2016), when energy companies look upon the living landscape of muskeg, what they see is (deemed) mere overburden: useless stuff in the way of the valuable stuff beneath. Paydirt.

Thinking about overburden and its relationship to the underground—the above/below, surface/subsurface relations at work in this concept—sparked my curiosity about verticality. I approach these vertical relations from the vantage of the energy humanities, in order to speculate about what the relationship between the horizontal and the vertical means for the material and cultural politics of hinterlands, before, during, and after the era of fossil fuels. Thinking capaciously about the geographic, social, and ecological relations entailed in hinterlands, I ask, what comes to serve as hinterland to what? How are those dependencies imagined and understood?

Underground Frontiers

From a metropolitan perspective, hinterlands are the lands “back there,” “over yonder”: beyond the horizon. As Raymond Williams taught us long ago, such cartographies are constituted by the uneven economic and ecological metabolisms between country and city, particularly under capitalism. In “The New Metropolis,” a late chapter of The Country and the City, Williams observes that imperialism extends these country-city relationships to the scale of the entire world, which is why we speak of imperial nation-states in Europe as “metropolitan”:

The “metropolitan” states, through a system of trade, but also through a complex of economic and political controls, draw food and, more critically, raw materials from these areas of supply, this effective hinterland, that is also the greater part of the earth’s surface and that contains the great majority of its peoples. Thus a model of city and country, in economic and political relationships, has gone beyond the boundaries of the nation state, and is seen but also challenged as a model of the world. (1973, 279; emphasis mine)

Williams acknowledges the problems with positing most of the world as the country to “Western Europe and North America’s” city, particularly amidst the massive urbanization underway in the Global South in the late twentieth century. But how might we understand differently this “effective hinterland, that is also the greater part of the earth’s surface,” by peering below that surface, and by considering that many of those critical “raw materials” are things that come from underground? As it is circulated and distributed by global capitalism, some peoples’ subterranean stuff becomes other peoples’ built environment. This idea that the underground of that global hinterland becomes the aboveground of the imperial metropolis is reflected in Frantz Fanon’s observation that Europe “raises up her tower of opulence” from the “gold and raw materials of the colonial countries,” “from the soil and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world” (1963, 102, 96). What happens if we consider the vertical dimension of the hinterland, a geographic category that has been conventionally understood as a horizontal relation—quite literally, the land beyond the metropolitan horizon? What do we miss in thinking hinterlands solely in horizontal terms, without considering, for example, dynamic subterranean stocks and flows of matter and energy, whose effects profoundly shape what might seem like stable ground? How does the underground help to determine what comes to function as hinterland? What is the hinterland underground?

These questions should be understood in relation to broader scholarly conversations about the vertical and the horizontal. We might identify two countervailing tendencies in twenty-first-century scholarship. The first tendency, among historians and geographers, seeks to counter a longstanding horizontal bias in spatial thinking by recognizing the salience of verticality in theoretical analyses of the production of space and in historiographies of colonial expansion. These scholars ask, what if we understand geography or history not merely in terms of surface area or far horizons, but also in terms of volumes, heights, and depths?Footnote 1 The second tendency is perhaps more familiar to scholars in literary studies: I have in mind the turn toward surface reading, and away from hermeneutic probing for meanings that lie beneath the “surface” of the text, or for intentions and ideations that emanate from subconscious depths inaccessible to the conscious mind.Footnote 2 Symptomatic reading figures the text as a sort of underground hinterland whose meaning waits to be mined—as opposed to surface reading’s construal of text as a flat landscape accessible to any flâneur wandering by.

I mention debates about surface reading in literary studies in order to highlight the surprising variation across disciplines about whether it is verticality or horizontality that occupies the status of the hegemonic or default. In thinking about geographic spaces (rather than metaphorical spaces like the page or the mind), what accounts for the prevailing “bias towards surface landscapes and horizontal practices,” as Heidi Scott (2008, 1857) describes the first tendency in contemporary spatial thinking? To answer this question, one might look to the history of ideas of the underground. Beginning in early modern Europe and accelerating in the nineteenth century, Scott notes that the underground was “regarded, increasingly, as a resource that could be legitimately and systematically exploited for the enhancement of human wealth” (2008, 1854). Unsurprisingly, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of what Paul Carter calls a “vertical third dimension” in spatial thinking, as opposed to a previous “‘scenographic conception of space’ that allowed the world to be ‘imagined as a continuous planar surface’” (quoted in Scott 2008, 1854). European understandings of the underground shift at the moment that it emerges as an important site for resource thinking. The argument of historians and geographers like Carter, Scott, Bruce Braun, and others is that the vertical implications of this modern underground, as a site of human intervention, particularly in the form of resource extraction, have not been fully recognized in contemporary scholarship.

These tensions take on a particular significance for historians of energy. Histories of human energy use are often organized around a wide range of fuels and other inputs—including forces such as wind, falling water, wave, and solar; as well as combustible materials like wood, dung, and other biomass; organic fats and tallows; charcoal, whale oil, kerosene, coal, oil, and natural gas. But historians Matthew Huber and James McCarthy posit a more fundamental distinction. They argue that the industrial revolution and the turn to fossil fuels in the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a “subterranean energy regime” (Huber and McCarthy 2017, 655). “Industrial capitalism,” they argue, “is defined by an intensive vertical reliance upon subterranean stocks of energy that require relatively little surface land to harness” (655; emphasis mine). They contrast the verticality of this subterranean energy regime, involving the mining of fossil fuels, with the previous “surface energy regime” (663) characterized by “‘horizontal’ reliance upon land-based energy extraction” (656; emphasis mine). The surface energy regime involved forestry, pastoralism, and agriculture as modes of capturing the energy of the sun, as well as the harnessing of wind and waterways.

This shift from “land-centred flows” to “subterranean stocks,” in demographer E. A. Wrigley’s phrase, has important implications for hinterlands (quoted in Huber and McCarthy 2017, 660). Huber and McCarthy observe that before the industrial era, “energy struggles were more properly struggles over land” (666) because “control over extensive areas was key to capturing the annual flows of energy at the heart of the mode of production” (663). By contrast, the subterranean fossil energy regime “liberated humans from their ties to area size…. [T]he territorial solar energy principle was broken,” as German historian Rolf Sieferle argues (quoted in Huber and McCarthy 2017, 660). In “The Hole World,” geographer Gavin Bridge contrasts “the expansive geographies of forestry or agriculture, where production and the generation of value are diffused across a broad surface,” with those of mining, in which “an oil well or mine shaft” is a “strategic,” “restricted portal” that “provide[s] access to mineral-rich portions of the underground” (2015, 3). In a subterranean energy regime, then, the imperative is to control the hole, the place where those energy-dense subterranean fuels are brought up from the underground. This strategic importance of the hole lends itself to the colonial spatial logics of the concession and the enclave, which aim to control “specific patches of ground” (Bridge 2015, 3), as opposed to the more expansive logic of national territory.

In addition to these divergent spatial politics of different energy regimes, what fascinates me as a literary critic is how they register in the realm of metaphor and the geographic imaginary, with the proliferation of ideas like the “underground frontier”Footnote 3 or the “subterranean forest.” These metaphors transfer the indispensability of productive surface landscapes to the realm that lies beneath. “Subterranean forest” is Sieferle’s (2001) counterfactual metaphor for the coal that fueled industrial expansion in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Sieferle calculated that the amount of energy provided by coal in this period would have required woodlots eight times the size of the entire country. Instead, coal underground—the subterranean forest—takes the place of these nonexistent woodlots. This metaphor is an important example of what geographers call “ghost acres” or “virtual land,” hinterland spaces that are non-contiguous with the territory being supplied. But these relationships of command or colonial control sometimes extend to the imagination, with the demarcation of spaces that do not actually exist: coal provides energy as if there were vast fields or forests instead.Footnote 4

What does this turn to the underground mean for the hinterland? The answers to this question tell us something about the contradictory meanings of hinterland, which can either recognize or disavow the indispensability of hinterlands as “areas of supply” from which coastal ports or cities command the stuff of life. (Hinterland, like nature itself, is one of those terms that come to designate realms from which modern humans have supposedly freed themselves, even as these realms become ever-more intensely necessary for survival.) To tease out this contradiction, borne of dependence and disavowal, was Williams’s project in The Country and the City, where he shows how literary modes for representing rural spaces can variously depict or deny, idealize or elide the ecological and economic metabolisms joining them to the city. Extending this line of thought, then, what becomes of the hinterland in the shift from surface to subterranean energy regimes, from extensive national territories to control of the hole?

I want to consider two propositions. First, whether the material relations that constitute a hinterland, and the importance of these “areas of supply” to urban development, nation-building, and geopolitics, might differ radically between surface and subterranean energy regimes. Second, whether rural hinterlands become hinterlands in that second, derogatory sense—of forgotten backwater, “the back of beyond,” places unconnected to and forgotten by the modern world—precisely when “areas of supply” for the necessary stuff of modernity shift underground. How does a nation’s indispensable heartland become its forgotten hinterland in the fossil fuel era? Is it only “ties to area size” (Sieferle 2001) that are lost when the rural agricultural hinterland is superseded by the fossil fuel hinterland, the underground frontier? Moreover, in the realm of ideology and cultural narratives, how are fossil fuel deposits incorporated into geographic imaginaries of agricultural heartlands and, in many cases, settler-colonial frontiers?

Take the United States, for example. Even though commercial oil deposits were first discovered in Pennsylvania, and even though California led oil production in the US and possibly the world by 1911 (Brechin 1999, 261), the figure of the oilman in the American imagination is decidedly and stubbornly Texan. As Daniel Worden writes, “Oil culture is Texas culture” (2017, 350; emphasis mine). The wide-open spaces of Texas ranchlands, and the rugged individualism of the cowboy, home on the range, are more conducive to this renovation of geographic imaginaries of the agricultural hinterland than are pumpjacks nodding away in the urban oilfields of Los Angeles. And not for nothing are the vast flatland prairies of Alberta, in Canada, often described as the “Texas of Canada.” Texas and Alberta are both western ranching and farming regions, whose identity and economy have become wrapped up with oil, with a persistent pioneer/frontier mentality among many settlers.

Mining the Soil

This proximity between rancher and oilman in the North American rural imagination points to broader complications with Huber and McCarthy’s distinction between surface and subterranean energy regimes. And beyond the realm of cultural imagining, in what ways are horizontal and vertical—or surface and subsurface, agriculture and mining—materially intertwined rather than diametrically opposed or following one another in a stadial progression? Environmental historians like Jason W. Moore and Gray Brechin have emphasized mining’s effects upon, and voracious demands for, surface landscapes in the form of forests as a source of fuel and framing timber for mineshafts, particularly before coal replaced wood in steam engines that pumped water out of mines. In addition to mine waste in the form of slag piles and tailings ponds, deforestation is a visible trace on the surface of mining’s effects below. Mining chews up ore and spits out waste, but it gobbles forests and waterways too. This voracious appetite for both surface landscapes and subsurface depths resonates with Elizabeth C. Miller’s observation that “extraction requires constant movement, downward and outward,” so that “the vertical and horizontal work together in … extractive space” (2021, 85, 87).

“Agriculture and mining,” writes Brechin, are “the two prototypical human activities from which towns first sprang. Until recently, they stood for opposite ways of regarding and transforming the natural world” (1999, 16). In my previous essay on overburden (Wenzel 2016), I described these two modes of viewing and acting upon nature as a logic of improvement and a logic of extraction: while the “logic of improvement rests on an organic premise of addition, bringing forth, and sustained development,” the logic of extraction is one of subtraction, attrition, emptying out unto exhaustion, and moving on to the next hole. But I want to trouble those distinctions between agricultural improvement and extractive mining, in order to complicate some of what I suggested earlier about the hinterland underground.

In The Country and the City, published in 1973 on the cusp of the first oil shock, Williams argued that these modes are not as distinct as we might think: “What the oil companies do, what the mining companies do, is what landlords did, what plantation owners did and do.” He points out the inadequacy of conventional distinctions “between agricultural and industrial development” that view “the country as cooperation with nature, the city and industry as overriding and transforming it.” Rather, Williams finds in both mining and capitalist agriculture a common stance of “seeing the land and its properties,” whether surface or subsurface, “as available for profitable exploitation,” so that “the quite different needs of local settlement and community are overridden, often ruthlessly…. The land, for its fertility or for its ore, is in both cases abstractly seen. It is used in an enterprise which overrides, for the time being, all other considerations” (1973, 293). This “overriding” is at work in overburden: mining overrides nature and unprofitable relations to it by designating lived landscapes—such as muskeg—as mere overburden in the way of paydirt.

In addition to identifying a fundamental (if underappreciated) similarity between agriculture and mining, Williams draws an important connection between perception and action: how we view, imagine, and understand nature helps to determine what we do with or to it. This relation is at work in my multivalent approach to what I call “the disposition of nature” (Wenzel 2019). Disparate ideas about what nature is (i.e., its disposition, or temperament) shape conflicts about how it should be “disposed” by humans: inhabited, cared for, used. What the acquisitive modes of seeing at work in mining and agriculture tell us is that a resource logic is also a resource aesthetic. By resource logic, I mean a way of thinking that understands nature primarily as something other than human, disposed for human use, and subject to human control. A resource logic also entails particular modes of seeing and protocols of judgment and evaluation—in other words, a resource aesthetic. To look upon nature primarily as a resource for accumulation is also to bring the profitable and the beautiful into alignment, with the promise that they are (or will be) one and the same.Footnote 5 Hinterlands are the geographic instantiation of such resource logics/aesthetics: they are regions designated, imagined, and looked upon primarily as sites disposed to supply the necessary stuff of life to areas of command.

I began this chapter with Raymond Williams’s account of the Global South as an “effective hinterland” for Europe and North America. Brechin echoes this notion when he posits the acquisitive mode of what Williams calls “seeing the land and its properties as available for profitable exploitation” as hegemonic at a planetary scale: “the fountain of wealth, power, and glamour that issues from the mine and the oil well has also decisively shaped the way humans perceive and treat their planet—not as a farm, let alone as a garden, but as a mine head and battlefield” (1999, 25). Williams and Brechin use a lot of words to say, in effect, that agriculture can be just as extractive as mining and that extractivism predominates as the way that humans view their world and their planet. And yet, I prefer the texture and nuance of their accounts to what I might dare to call the reductive efficiency of much contemporary discourse, in which the word “extractive” names an ever-expanding category of exploitative practices and habits of mind, and in which to label something extractive often seems to shut down thinking rather serving as a point of departure.Footnote 6

In the remainder of this chapter, I move beyond this simple label of “extractive” in order to examine some specific ways in which agriculture is imbricated with mining, both metaphorically and materially. How is agriculture sometimes similar to mining, and how is agriculture sometimes dependent on or necessary to mining? This is another way of complicating the distinction that Huber and McCarthy make between surface and subterranean energy regimes. My aim is not to make the obvious point that industrial agriculture, agribusiness, and Big Food exist. We all know this; industrial agriculture has so become the unthought horizon of the everyday that it takes cognitive effort to recognize that many seemingly newfangled farming practices are, in effect, simply a return to how humans grew things for thousands of years—before, Huber and McCarthy might rush to remind us, the nineteenth-century emergence of the subterranean energy regime. But beyond notions of profit-seeking that, as Williams says, can override all other considerations for landowners and oil companies alike, what does it mean to “mine the soil”?

Here I draw on the work of David Montgomery, whose Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization traces a phenomenon that he sees recurring throughout much of human history, in which agricultural civilizations “undermine” (2007, 3) their own survival through practices that allow soil to degrade and erode faster than the slow geologic processes through which topsoil forms. Topsoil is produced when gradual erosion “triggers the uplift of rocks from deep within the earth” (12) and thereby exposes “fresh rock” to the surface—a geological phenomenon called isostasy—and this newly exposed rock is then broken up by a “destructive blanket” (4) of soil, as it recycles decaying organic matter. For Montgomery, this process means that soil is the “dynamic interface between rock and life” (13), “the interface between the rock that makes up our planet and the plants and animals that live off sunlight and nutrients leached out of rocks” (16). In other words, soil is, among other things, the link between surface and subterranean energy regimes; this understanding also complicates too-easy distinctions between “surface” and “subterranean,” whose relation, Montgomery reminds us, is not static but dynamic, even if geologically slow. Montgomery’s analysis suggests a series of equations in which life + rock + dirt + time = soil, and soil = life (16). Thus, he argues, to “mine the soil” is to ignore the temporal “balance between soil production and soil erosion [that] allows life to live off a thin crust of weathered rock” (23); mining the soil means “consuming soil faster than it forms” (2).

Here the act of “mining” in “mining the soil” may seem to be mere metaphor, akin to the oversimplifying label of “extractive” mentioned above. But what is most fascinating about Montgomery’s narration of history organized around dirt are the material ways that soil, mineral ores, and oil intersect within it. Unsurprisingly, a key example in Montgomery’s account of mining the soil is the Dust Bowl on the North American Great Plains in the 1930s. Montgomery emphasizes a series of technological innovations in the middle of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. First, the mass production of John Deere’s steel plow in 1838, and of Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper in 1848; then, in 1917, Henry Ford’s mass-marketing of a gasoline-powered tractor, which replaced the humans and their teams of horses, mules, and oxen that had previously driven these new inventions across the plains. (In Huber and McCarthy’s terms, the emergence of a subterranean energy regime radically transformed practices of the surface land-based energy regime.) As Montgomery notes, “With steel plows and iron horses, a twentieth-century farmer could work 15 times as much land as his nineteenth-century grandfather” (2007, 146); “Together John Deere’s plows and Cyrus McCormick’s reapers allowed farmers to work far more land than a single farm’s livestock could reliably manure. … No longer would the scale of an agricultural operation be limited by the capacity of a farm to recycle soil fertility” (176–177).

The mechanization of agriculture, epitomized by the tractor, ushered in what we might understand as a war between soil and oil. This war had several phases: first, the use of gas-powered tractors that exploded during and after World War I, when US federal policy aimed to boost wheat production to make up for agricultural disruption in Europe; then the reliance on petrochemical fertilizers commercialized after World War II, many of which are used to “replace … soil nutrients lost by topsoil erosion” (Montgomery 2007, 200). Here is the relationship between soil and oil in a nutshell: fossil-fuel-powered mechanization mined and degraded the soil with “a truly formidable phalanx of tractors, combines, and trucks … clanking across the fields” (Worster 1994, 229); fertilizers derived from petroleum extracted from underground are used to compensate for that lost topsoil. One generation after the Dust Bowl, art historian and US Parks Service consultant Hans Huth observed that the catastrophe on the American plains had “suddenly and forcefully taught the nation that nature could not be relied upon to produce and yield crops as assembly lines produced automobiles” (1957, 193). The rise of Fordist farming in the early twentieth century brings home a truth implicit in Montgomery’s account of dirt as the foundation of civilization. Although the geological timescales in the production of soil are significantly shorter than those involved in the fossilization of oil, both have become central to human flourishing, and soil is an “intergenerational resource” (Montgomery 2007, 5) fundamental to food production. In other words, petromodern society has for decades worried about the prospect of peak oil, but Montgomery shows how human societies have repeatedly, for millennia, grappled with the consequences of what I would call peak soil.

To be sure, many other factors—demographic, geopolitical, and ecological—converged to create the catastrophe that swept the Great Plains in the 1930s. John Deere’s plow, groundbreaking in every sense of the word, was invented in the mid-nineteenth century to solve a very particular problem, but it ended up creating another. Only a steel plow was sturdy enough to break up the tough sod and cut through the clay-rich soil of the vast grasslands that settlers found as they moved into the Plains hinterland. The underground root systems of these wild grasses often comprised significantly more biomass than the leaves above the surface, sometimes delving downward several times as deep as the tips of the grass grew high. In a very real sense, the root systems of the grassland prairie were an “underground forest” (Rosen 2022), not merely a metaphorical one (as with Sieferle). This thick sod posed a problem to would-be farmers pouring into the Plains in the last decades of the nineteenth century after the decimation of the bison, the forced removal of Native Americans, the development of railroad infrastructure, the settlement-friendly federal policies of homestead land allotment, and new practices of consumer lending opened up this interior wedge of the continent, leaving the “homesteaders free to plow up the grasses, and to make the land over to fit their imaginations” (Worster 1994, 217).

Busting the grassland sod with Deere’s steel plow, and breaking up more and more of the sod with Ford’s and McCormick’s tractors, created a new, deadly, and devastating problem. The grasslands and their matted roots had held together for hundreds of thousands of years a fragile but rich layer of fine dirt, called loess. As Montgomery describes it, loess is a fine soil, composed of “mostly silt with some clay and a little sand”; it is “an ideal agricultural soil,” partly because it is rich in minerals but largely free of stones (2007, 143). The problem is that precisely because of its fine texture, “with little natural cohesion, loess erodes rapidly if stripped of vegetation and exposed to wind or rain” (143). As farmers plowed up the grassland sod, “the old grasslands became the new wheatlands,” we hear in the voiceover to Pare Lorenz’s 1936 Dust Bowl documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains. After being plowed, “the loess of the semiarid plains simply blew away in dry years” (Montgomery 2007, 146).

The removals of bison and Indigenous peoples from the Plains cleared a path for settlement, which in turn catalyzed the removals of the grass and the loess. Eulogizing these losses in Fortune in November 1935, Archibald MacLeish observed, “the grass was everything. It was a natural resource richer than the oil and the coal and the ore which have since been dug beneath it” (64). But Huber and McCarthy would remind us of the ways in which the oil, the coal, and the ore were indispensable for the war on the grass: the industrial revolution, they insist, involved not merely an aboveground labor/energy transition with “automatic machinery performing tasks once reserved for muscular toil” (2017, 660; emphasis in original), but also a material change in relations to the underground. The very metal of those machines comprised “iron and steel made possible through subterranean reserves of energy-dense coal” (661). As it cut into the ground and mined the soil, the steel plow was returning, in a sense, to the realm from which it came.

Matter Out of Place

“Frontier stories helped cause the Dust Bowl,” observes William Cronon in an analysis of narrative framing in historiography of the event; he shows how the choice of protagonist or the shape of the narrative arc changes the story that is told (1992, 1375). In a similar vein, it is worth considering the disparate metaphors used to describe the plains before and after settlement. “Great American Desert” was Stephen Long’s influential designation for the largely treeless, putatively uninhabited region on the map that he charted during a 1819–1820 expedition from western Pennsylvania to the Rocky Mountains. Plains booster William Gilpin sought to counter this image, arguing against a “radical misapprehension in the popular mind … as complete as that which pervaded Europe respecting the Atlantic Ocean during the whole historic period prior to Columbus” (1860, 120). The Plains are the “opposite” of “deserts,” Gilpin wrote; they are instead “the cardinal basis of the future empire of commerce and industry now erecting itself upon the North American continent. They … form the Pastoral Garden of the world” (1860, 120).Footnote 7 If a resource logic is also a resource aesthetic, then we might wonder at Long’s dismissal of the Plains grasslands: they were neither barren nor uninhabited when Long looked upon them in 1820. We might assume that this settler-explorer simply could not perceive their vitality. And yet, Long’s dismissal reads now as a prescient warning against visions of settlement like Gilpin’s: “we do not hesitate in giving the opinion, that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course, uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence. Although tracts of fertile land, considerably extensive, are occasionally to be met with, yet the scarcity of wood and water, almost uniformly prevalent, will prove an insuperable obstacle in the way of settling the country” (quoted in James 1823, 361). Even before the emergence of the subterranean energy regime, Long understood why the plains were a fragile foundation for a garden empire.

More than “desert” or “empire,” the sheer expanse of the grasslands is best captured in Worster’s image of a “vast inland sea” (1994, 215), which echoes the “uncharted ocean of grass” described at the beginning of The Plow That Broke the Plains. This image of the continent enfolding a grassland ocean spurs me to revise the description that opens MacLeish’s “The Grasslands”:

For more than three centuries men have moved across this continent from east to west. For some years now, increasingly in the last two or three, dust has blown back across the land from west to east. The movement of men, long understood, is taken for granted. The blowing of dust, little understood, has filled the newspapers and rolled across the newsreel screens. And yet the two are linked together like the throwing and the rebound of a ball. (1935, 59)

Describing how people have long moved west, while the dust suddenly starts blowing east, MacLeish reaches for the image of a ball, thrown and bounced back. But these movements evoke something more like an ocean tide, with waves of men, women, machines, and livestock rolling westward into the expanse, and wall-like waves of dust cast back upon the eastern shore, after the sea of grass became once more a desert: a desert of dust, what MacLeish describes as “ruined Saharas” (59).

This eastward blowing of dust was so extreme as to boggle the mind. In the spring of 1934, and again in 1935, powerful winds on the treeless plains swept up the loess into fearsome “black blizzards” and carried the dust for thousands of miles, to the eastern seaboard and beyond.

On 10 May 1934, a storm dumped twelve million tons of dirt on Chicago (Worster 1994, 221), which grew up in part as a marketing hub for meat and grain grown on the plains. The next day, the cloud, estimated to be 1800 miles wide and perhaps as much as 10,000 feet tall, reached Washington D.C., Boston, and even the island of Nantucket off the mainland. It darkened the sky like an eclipse for five hours in New York City, and the Empire State Building, finished in 1931 and then the tallest building in Manhattan, was coated in a film of white dust, which also “lodged itself in the eyes and throats of weeping and coughing New Yorkers” (“Huge Dust Cloud,” 1934; “Dust Storms,” 1934). As US soil conservation expert Hugh Bennett recalled the 1934 storm, “‘I suspect that when people along the seaboard of the eastern US began to taste fresh soil from the plains 2,000 miles away, many of them realized for the first time that somewhere something had gone wrong with the land’” (quoted in Montgomery 2007, 155).Footnote 8 In this stunning moment, mobilized dirt activated a sort of citizen sensing system. The taste of plains dirt in coastal mouths spurred the US federal government to act, with a series of studies and soil conservation measures that would later also inform so-called Betterment policies that aimed to address problems of soil erosion (as well as overgrazing and overpopulation) in the South African reserves.Footnote 9

Returning to this chapter’s themes of horizontality and verticality, agriculture and mining, and the relation between rural imaginations and hinterlands, I want to conclude by recalling that accounts of American westward expansion often observe that the railroad catalyzed peculiar compressions of space, by “br[inging] markets to the edge of the plains” (Lorenz 1936), or by linking the mine shaft technologically, materially, and financially to the skyscrapers of the downtown financial district (Brechin 1999, 27). In these fearsome dust storms, however, the wind is the vector that scrambles geographic relations between areas of supply and areas of command. This soil-from-elsewhere blew from the hinterland, the lands back there, over yonder, beyond the horizon, to the coastal metropolis. This dirt is indeed Mary Douglas dirt, matter out of place, in places across the continent: dirt-on-the-move that, in turn, spurred masses of desperate people to hit the road. The country arrives in the city. We might want to think, what could be more local, more place-based, than dirt? But those tons of plains dirt, carried on the eastward tide of wind, had already come from elsewhere, as Montgomery explains: the loess of the plains was formed in the Great Ice Age of the Pleistocene geological epoch, when glaciers scraped soils from the Arctic and the wind carried them to temperate sites that became “the world’s breadbaskets” (2007, 143). Across human and Earth history, what becomes the hinterland to what? The Arctic is legible as an unlikely hinterland for the rise of agriculture on the Great Plains. The itinerary of loess, from the Arctic to Texas, from the polar region to the temperate zone, from hinterland(s) to coast, is another kind of flow that invites us to think the rural not as static, but as mobile; to think the hinterland not only as logistical, economic, or industrial, but as cultural and ideational; and to think the countryside not as isolated, and not merely global,Footnote 10 but, indeed, as planetary.