THE HIGH PLAINS never fully recovered from the Dust Bowl. The land came through the 1930s deeply scarred and forever changed, but in places it healed. All told, the government bought 11.3 million acres of dusted-over farm fields and tried to return much of it to grassland. The original intent was to purchase up to 75 million acres. After more than sixty-five years, some of the land is still sterile and drifting. But in the heart of the old Dust Bowl now are three national grasslands run by the Forest Service. The land is green in the spring and burns in the summer, as it did in the past, and
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