We had always had wind. Anybody who grew up in the Panhandle will tell you that, and they will tell you that a calm day out there is something you remark on, like a two-headed calf. In the spring especially it blew hard most days out of the southwest, and there had always been a little dust in it, enough to grit your teeth. So when the first real dusters came in 1932 nobody thought much about them. By the spring of 1933 we were thinking about nothing else.

A duster did not look like weather. It looked like a wall. You would see it first as a dark line along the edge of the world, low, and then it would get taller and darker, and the top of it would roll over on itself like smoke coming out of a stovepipe, and then it was on you. Some came brown and some came gray and some came red. The old men at the elevator claimed they could tell where a storm had come from by its color, Texas or Kansas or Colorado, and maybe they could. To me it was all just dirt, and it was all in my mouth.

When a bad one hit, it got dark. Not dusky like a cloudy day; dark, so you lit the lamps at two in the afternoon and could barely see across the room by them. The chickens would go to roost thinking it was night. You could not see the barn from the house, which was less than a hundred feet. Dad strung a rope from the back door to the barn that spring so whoever went out to milk could find the way back, and I used that rope more times than I can count.

My mother fought the dust the way some people fight sin, every day, without hope of winning and without ever thinking of quitting. She tore up old sheets and soaked them in the stock tank and hung them over the windows and the doors, and when they dried out stiff and brown she took them down and washed them and wet them and hung them up again. She stuffed wet rags into every crack in the window frames and under the doors. She turned the plates and cups upside down on the table and didn't turn them over until we sat down to eat, and even so there would be a fine gray skin on the gravy before you were done with it. She kept the bread in a lard can with the lid pressed down. She swept out the house in the morning and swept it out again at noon and again at night, and after a big blow she swept it out with a scoop shovel. I have seen her sit down in a kitchen chair and cry over a pan of biscuits with dirt on them, and then get up and make another pan.

We slept with damp cloths over our faces. We put Vaseline in our noses, which helped a little. In the mornings you could see the shape of your head on the pillow, clean, with the dust all around it.

The fences went first. The Russian thistles, tumbleweeds, would blow up against the fence wire and stick there, and then the dust would blow up against the thistles and bank up behind them, and in a few weeks you couldn't see the fence at all, just a long drift of dirt with a few posts sticking out of the top like the teeth of a comb. Cattle walked right over them. Over toward Tolliver the road was drifted so deep in places that the county ran a road grader down it after every big storm, the same as you would for snow.

There was electricity in those storms, too. Static, I mean. If you shook hands with somebody during a blow, a spark would jump between you that would make you both holler. The radio was nothing but crackle. People dragged a chain behind their cars so the static would go into the ground instead of shorting out the motor. And one evening, when the light was nearly gone, I saw little blue sparks running along the top wire of our north fence, popping from barb to barb like something alive. I have never forgotten that.

The wheat crop of 1933 mostly didn't come up, and what did come up blew out by the roots or got buried. 1934 was worse. It hardly rained at all that year, and it was hot, and the wind blew. We had a garden only because my mother carried water to it from the windmill a bucket at a time and covered the rows with gunny sacks when a storm came. We fed the cattle Russian thistles that year, cut young and green before they got prickly, which is about the lowest a cow can come down to. In the summer the government sent men around to buy cattle, because there was nothing to feed them and they would starve otherwise, and Dad sold most of ours. Some of the ones the buyers took were too poor to ship. I will leave that there.

What kept us going, as much as anything, was the government wheat checks, which paid farmers so much an acre for not planting part of their ground. My father was a Republican all his life and did not like taking money from Washington for nothing, and he said so every time a check came, and then he went and cashed it. He said a man could have principles or he could have shoe leather for five children and he was choosing shoe leather.

That spring and the next we read in the paper that dust from the plains had blown all the way east and come down on the city of Washington, and on ships out in the ocean. I don't know that I believed it at the time. Our dust seemed like something that belonged only to us.

People got sick. The doctors called it dust pneumonia, and it was mostly the old people and the babies that it took. That spring we lost people out of our church. I will not put their names here; their families have had enough of it. Miss Walls kept a pan of water by the schoolroom door, and when a storm came up during the day she had us wet our handkerchiefs and tie them over our noses and mouths, and if it got bad enough she sent us home early, all of us holding hands in a line behind the big boys. I remember walking home that way with Harold, who was eight or nine, holding onto my belt, and not being able to see the ditch beside the road.

And people left. The Pools went in the summer of 1934. Everett Pool had come out the same year as my father and they had helped each other at harvest every year I could remember. He had a wife and five children and a mortgage, and that summer the bank took the place. They had a sale in the yard, and Dad went and bought a cream separator he didn't need just so there would be one more bidder. Then they loaded up a truck with everything that was left, mattresses tied on top and a washtub and the children in back, and drove off west toward New Mexico, headed for California. Mrs. Pool sent my mother a postcard from Bakersfield that fall, and one at Christmas, and then they stopped coming. Miss Walls had to find another place to board, and went to live with Mrs. Ruby Falk, a widow lady on the Tolliver road who kept bees and was the only person in the county who still had honey in 1934.

After the Pools went, I asked my father whether we would be going too.

He was sitting on the back step after supper, cleaning dirt out of the Fordson's air cleaner with a rag. He didn't answer for a long time, and I thought maybe he hadn't heard me.

"We'll see one more year," he said finally.

He said that every year for five years. It is about the bravest thing I ever heard anybody say, and I didn't know it at the time.