It’ll Be Better Next Year

“Did it rain last night?” Cash Murdock, age eleven, asks his father. “Nope, no rain,” the forty-three-year-old rancher, Casey, replies. “Maybe tonight.” With this exchange, Ashley Gilbertson and Ed Kashi introduce the small farming and ranching community in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, which was the epicenter of the Dust Bowl in the nineteen-thirties, and is presently experiencing the region’s worst drought in fifty years.