Dust!

A Texas Panhandle Memory of the 1950s

The Southwest Collection Archive, Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University

The Texas Panhandle is in my past, which means that I have a special relationship with dust. When the preacher says, “Dust to dust,” I nod my head in understanding – because I’ve known dust. I saw it with my earliest eyes in the 1950s, rolling in from the northwest over the prairies, a billowing, bellowing brown beast, first spotted far off, growing larger and more ominous through the hour it took for it to reach our little plot of world (little, but vast to little me), engulfing us in a totality of dust.

My mother would watch it, uneasy, I could tell, with that innate animal unease from sensing a seismic something in the offing. She had lived her whole life in the Panhandle, so she too knew dust, real dust, the dust of Dust Bowl days – the desiccated 1930s. Many of her people left for California then – a paradise where they said there was no dust, and long before the smog – but she, and those closest to her, did not.

She told me of those dust-shrouded times, when the dust storms blew for days. I can hear her saying still, as she looked toward advancing storms, "That's not Texas dust. That's New Mexico dust." It seemed a point of honor for her that it was NOT Texas dust. Honing an eye that knew the difference took decades of dust storm living. I left before my own eye got that good. To me it never much mattered where the dust came from. I just knew it was bound to be howling hell for hours to come, dust everywhere!

Those dust storms I experienced 20 years later, though tame by comparison to the ones she described, perhaps, still blew fierce. After a spell of watching and waiting – longer or shorter depending on how far in advance you glanced west, and how sharp your eyes – the first stirrings of wind rustled the leaves of dying Dutch Elms (dying from Dutch Elm disease, a subtler plague, less ominous at first, but then as devastating), a benign breeze at the beginning, spawn of the marriage of Psamathe, Greek goddess of sand, and an angry Zephyros, god of west winds and spring – gone mad in the hot, dry, vastness of an exile far from Greece. (This is Google Greek mythology, so please forgive any god-ignorant misnomers.)

Then, after a long enough while to let the nerves fully frazzle, it struck, rolling a brown airborne beach of sand over everything. We called it “dust” for some reason I never even knew I might have reason to question. Haboob could not have been further from our vocabulary then.

Dust, dust, dust. Stinging sun-wrinkled faces and the eyeballs of any foolish enough to leave them open. Sandblasting the paint off cars; pitting glass panes. Awnings, heedlessly left unfurled, ripped and flapped. Windows shuddered in their frames. Hats had no hope, destined for new lives as Stetson tumbleweeds.

There would be no playground that day, and restless school children in classrooms would feel personally aggrieved – though likely not many would know to use the word. It would be a long brown blowing day, with only Mrs. Wilson’s droning math and history lessons to muffle blasts.

These were straight winds. My Panhandle childhood knew other winds too. Tornados! The winds of a ferocious, perturbed nature with its knickers in a twist. Or maybe “skivvies” is a more American term. Either way, “twisters,” as some old people still called them, put the fear in me from my youngest days, as soon as I felt the sense of disaster that could twirl down from the sky at any moment, tearing my world to pieces.

First, there were the dark, dark clouds and the sirens wailing like banshees. Though I had no clear sense of what banshees were, even at a young age I knew that their cries accompanied destruction and death. And after the sirens, a frantic sprint to the backyard cellar, where rotting 2-by-4s festooned with years of cobwebs shored up dirt walls and ceiling, where spiders (black widows! brown recluses!) and other monsters (maybe even vinegaroons!!!) lurked in the dark corners. The terror as the door boomed shut, and father and mother hung like dead weights on the rope, to keep it shut as the twister passed, lives with me still.

And then there were the frigid winds of winter, blowing down from the north, from the Dakotas, from Canada, from the Arctic, with nothing in their path to scatter them, and too little heat in the pathetic sun to warm them. I remember the sound of them blowing on December, January, February nights against my north facing bedroom window, loose enough in its frame, even though stuffed with towels, to rattle (the death rattle I’d once heard mentioned in relation to a dying aunt, I imagined), loose enough so that icy daggers of frozen wind blew in, and ice sheets formed on both sides of the panes. Too young to have any sense of sacrilege then, a phrase heard in sermons and Sunday school lessons chilled my childish soul on such nights: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And ever since, Hell has been a frozen, not a fiery, place in my midnight dreads.

There were benevolent winds too. Cooling breezes as the sun set after searing summer days. And winds bringing white clouds and showers – yes, to be followed in a while by spring flowers. And even crisp fall winds that rustled the changing leaves on the few fall-coloring trees that had been hardheadedly planted in our inhospitable, arid place – perhaps as a reminder of longed-for paradises left behind.

But the benevolent winds of West Texas are not the ones I remember most – the ones I still feel, though left behind decades ago. It’s the hard, harsh winds that are still part of me. That may tell me something about myself – something I may not want to know.

At the start, I’d intended to write only about dust, and the winds that brought it into my childhood world. But here we are. Just another proof that once the wind gets going, you can’t always tell which direction it will blow – and what it might blow in.