High Skies. Tracy Daugherty

winds” and clutching a lamppost on Main Street to keep from blowing over—to the arcane: a meteorologist describing the composition of dust particles as a combination of “aluminosilicate, SiO2 and CaCO3, with organic compounds of inorganic nitrate.” Television was still in its infancy, searching for its voice.

      Far more useful were my father’s explanations. He took a break from his paperwork to watch with us. He weighed in, as an “old rockhound,” on what was happening. “All that dark matter you see in the air, it’s bare, dry soil from the ground with bits of rocks worn down by the wind over many, many years,” he told us. “When huge gusts roll over it, like today, all this loosely held stuff starts to vibrate, and then it saltates—that means it leaps into the air—and then it slams back into the earth, over and over, breaking into smaller bits. The wind picks it up and shoves it forward, using energy from a mix of hot and cold air and electrical charges.”

      “Like lightning?” I asked.

      “Like lightning, yes.”

      “Does this happen everywhere?” Dee Dee said. “In Russia? Korea?” Names she’d heard on television.

      “No. Only in places that don’t see much rain,” Dad said. “Plus, there’s been a lot of bad farming in Texas and Oklahoma. It makes poor ground, creating the conditions for this. We’re getting smarter. Things are getting better, but—” He glanced through the kitchen window at his brave little tree, whipsawing toward the zenith and the lawn.

      Ultimately, this first storm didn’t cause much worry in Midland proper. Most of the damage occurred on the “wrong side of the tracks,” the eastern half of town, separated quite literally by the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks from downtown and the upper and middle class neighborhoods. One day, Mr. Seaker told a bunch of us kids on the playground that “Negro and Mexican” families lived across the tracks, “pursuing their own ways of life.” Each group had its own high school, he explained. “The Mexican school was constructed in the 1920s and the Negro facility, Carver High, opened in 1932,” he said. “They’ve been the state football champs in their league almost every year since then.”

      I remembered this exchange later, when newspaper accounts of the dust storm listed Carver High students as the event’s worst victims, suffering “ocular infections” (“That means dirt got in their eyes,” Dad told me), “silicosis” (“Trouble breathing, but worse than your asthma”), and one reported case of pneumonia linked directly to swirling dust. A wheat farmer swore that six jackrabbits had suffocated on his land, and five crows had dropped from the sky gasping for air.

      Our fifth-grade class was just beginning a study unit on the development of the solar system. Stevie Williston and I were particularly excited about science lessons—both our fathers were petroleum geologists, and we had inherited their curiosity about natural phenomena. One day on the playground I told Mr. Seaker we’d seen pictures of Mars in class. The Red Planet had dust storms exactly like the one we’d experienced. “Oh yes, and much worse, too,” he said. “Sometimes Mars’s storms circle its entire circumference. And the dust up there is smaller than ours, which creates more static electricity. That makes it stick to stuff.”

      “If you were a spaceman, dust would stick to your suit?”

      “Most definitely.”

      I knew Mr. Seaker had once dreamed of being a “spaceman” (the word “astronaut” was not yet in common use). He’d been a military pilot. My dad had told me, once, that his family had long been active in West Texas aviation and that Mr. Seaker had served in the air force “with distinction.” I didn’t know what that meant but I heard school parents refer to him, affectionately, as Flyboy. I saw how eagerly they trusted him. No matter what happened, they said—fire or dust storms or a nuclear attack from Russia—Mr. Seaker would safeguard their kids better than anyone they could imagine.