AH, THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Blog number 160                                               April 24, 2008

A Sunday in mid - April 1935 dawned quiet, windless, and bright. In the afternoon the sky went purple - as if it were sick - then the temperature plunged.  People looked northwest and saw ragged-topped formation on the move, covering the horizon.  The air crackled with electricity.  Snap.  Snap.  Snap.  Birds screeched and dashed for cover.  As the black wall approached, car radios clicked off, overwhelmed by the static.  Ignitions shorted out.  Waves of sand, like ocean water rising over a ship's prow, swept over roads.  Cars went into ditches.  A train derailed.

The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal.  The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon.  More than 300,000 tons of Great Plains topsoil was airborne that day.

When the dust fell, it penetrated everything; hair, nose throat, kitchen, bedroom, well.  A scoop shovel was needed just to clean the house in the morning.  The eeriest thing was the darkness.  People tied themselves to ropes before going to the barn just a few hundred feet away, like a walk in space, tethered to the life support center.  Chickens roosted in midafternoon.

Cattle went blind and suffocated.  When the farmers cut them open they found stomachs stuffed with fine sand.  In desperation, some families gave away their children.  The instinctive act of hugging a loved one or shaking someone's hand could knock two people down, for the static electricity from the dusters was so strong.

On the skin the dust was like a nail file, a grit strong enough to hurt.  People rubbed Vaseline in their nostrils as a filter.