Haboob Hub Bub

We all make chit chat about the weather. "Nice day we're having". "We sure need some rain". "Think it will freeze tonight?" But sometimes our weather gives us something so spectacular, so over-the-top that it becomes more than a topic, it becomes an actual experience that fixes us in time.
Our family moved to Lubbock in Fall of 1969 and was then greeted in the following Spring by the big tornado of May 11, 1970. After that I became nervous and edgy every time I saw clouds building in the sky, or sudden, high gusts of wind, so that I was ready to strip my mattress from the bed and roll it around me in the hallway in the blink of an eye. I had experienced a fierce storm at sea on a ship as a child (too young to think I could die), an earthquake in Utah, a hurricane in Florida, and an occasional shut-the-world-down blizzard, but tornadoes made me the most nervous. For years when I was anxious or stressed in my life my dreams would find me fleeing from one of those dark funnels. However I never feared the dust storms. They were just a major irritant of living in West Texas, especially as an art major, struggling from my car, walking across campus with an armload of paintings and drawings that threatened to become airborne at any moment. The dust storms back then were not quite dust bowl caliber but they definitely packed a punch. None so much as when the dust AND the rain arrived at the same time and, as if in some biblical plague, we were pelted with mudballs.

   For a few decades after that the dust died down. An occasional cold front would whip up some grit, some haze on the horizon, but nothing to comment on besides muttering that we had just washed our car. Then last Monday, after a summer of drought and dead lawns, and unplanted fields, the great Haboob rolled in, the wall of dust 8000 feet high that made jaws drop and cell phones whip out. The sky went from sunny blue, to firey orange, to deepest twilight grey within seconds. I had to step outside and view this mighty force of nature as it descended on us, and then retreat before I got a faceful of sand. We lost power shortly afterwards, so in the candle lit darkness we heard the wind howling around us, rushing the dirt of other states and countries on their journey south. I wasn't frightened or nervous, oddly enough, I just found it fascinating.
 Later there were endless posts on Facebook, photos, videos, articles, about the mighty wall of dust. One such article, from someone in another state, described it as terrifying. A bit hyperbolic. Even in the many cell phone video accounts, you can hear people saying things like "Holy smoke, here it comes" in a less than frantic voice as they gleefully watch themselves absorbed into the orange wall. Other posts from out of state people who used to live here repeated comments like: "This is why I am glad I don't live there anymore." Well, I wouldn't say this is the garden spot of the universe, but seeing that magnificent sight was, for me, a memorable event I was glad I experienced. Nature unleashed without the fear and the death and the major destruction. Just an incredible show. But as for sweeping up all the dirt in the aftermath? Not so incredible.