March of 1935 was as bad a month as we ever had. It seemed like it blew every day, and some days it blew all day and all night, and the dust got into everything so that you stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing your own smell. School was let out more days than it was held. My mother gave up on the sheets for a while because they would not stay wet long enough to do any good. The first part of April was no better.

Then on Sunday, the fourteenth of April, which was Palm Sunday, we woke up and it was clear.

I don't know how to tell somebody who wasn't there what that morning was like. The sky was blue, a hard bright blue all the way down to the ground in every direction, and there was no wind, none at all, and it was warm, like May. You could see the elevator at Tolliver, eleven miles off, standing up white on the edge of the world. You could hear a meadowlark. It was as if somebody had opened the door of a jail.

My mother had every window in the house open before breakfast. She pulled down all the sheets and rags and stripped the beds and had the washtubs going in the yard by seven, and by the time we left for church there were two lines full of clean white wash hanging perfectly still in the sun. She stood and looked at them before she got in the truck. I think it was the happiest I saw her that whole year.

Church was full. Everybody in the country had come in, I think just to be outside and see each other's faces without dirt on them. We didn't have palms, of course, nobody in Cimarron County had ever seen a palm tree, but Miss Walls's Sunday school class had cut palm branches out of green paper and the little ones carried them up the aisle at the start of the service. Nettie was one of them. She was six and very serious about it. The preacher preached about the triumphal entry, and I don't remember a word of it, because I was looking out the window at that blue sky.

After dinner Dad went out to look at the wheat on the west quarter, what there was of it. May went to visit a girlfriend in town, and my mother sat on the back step in the sun, which I had never once seen her do in the daytime. Carl and I took off on foot for the old Pool place, a mile and a quarter east, where the house was standing empty. We had been told to stay away from it, which is why we went. There was a cottonwood in the yard that still had leaves on it, and a cistern we liked to drop rocks down, and a barn with swallows in it.

It got warmer all afternoon. Hot, almost. Along about three or four o'clock, I don't know exactly, I didn't have a watch, Carl and I were sitting on the Pools' porch and the air changed. It got cooler, quick, like when somebody opens an icebox. And the birds came.

They came out of the north, flying low and fast and all going the same way, south. Little birds, sparrows and larks, and then bigger ones, ducks and geese, honking, in a hurry. More birds than I had ever seen at one time, and none of them stopping. A jackrabbit came running past the porch and didn't even look at us.

Carl said, "Art. Look."

I stood up and looked north.

It was a black wall, all the way across the sky from one side to the other. Not brown or gray or red like the dusters we were used to. Black, like the smoke off a tire fire, and so tall the top of it was rolling over and boiling. It was coming toward us faster than anything I had ever seen move on the ground, and it made no sound at all yet, which was the worst part.

We ran.

A mile and a quarter is a long way. We ran along the section-line road, and I could feel it getting colder behind us, and then the light started to go, the way it goes in an eclipse, all yellow and wrong, and the wind hit us from behind and nearly knocked Carl down. I grabbed his hand. We could see our windmill ahead of us, and then we couldn't see it, and then we couldn't see anything at all.

I mean anything. I held my hand up in front of my face and I could not see it. It was blacker than any night, blacker than a cellar with the door shut. The dirt was driving into us so hard it stung through our shirts, and I could not get a breath that wasn't half dust. Carl was crying, and I believe I was too, but you couldn't tell with all that dirt.

I knew the fence was on our left. I got down on my knees and felt for it and found a post, and then the wire, and I put Carl's hand on my belt and told him not to let go for anything, and we went along that fence on our hands and knees, post to post, feeling for each one. I don't know how long it took. It seemed like hours. It was probably twenty minutes. When the fence turned, I knew we were at our corner, and I knew the barn was straight ahead, and I got up and walked straight ahead with my hands out until I hit the barn wall so hard I cut my lip. Then I felt along the wall until I found the rope Dad had strung to the house, and we followed it to the back door.

My mother was standing just inside with a coal-oil lamp that you could barely see from three feet away, an orange smudge in the dark, and when she got hold of us she did not say a word. She just held on.

Dad was not back. He had been on the west quarter with the truck. We sat in the kitchen, the five of us, with wet dish towels over our faces, and listened to the wind and the dirt hitting the house like sleet, and nobody said anything. Nettie asked if it was the end of the world, because some of the grownups at church had said that about the dusters, and my mother said no, it was just the wind. I did not believe her. I think she did not believe herself. About an hour later the back door opened and Dad came in, black from head to foot except for two white rings around his eyes, and sat down at the table, and put his head down on his arms. He had driven the truck into the ditch, and walked home along the fence the same way we had.

May didn't get home until the next morning. She had spent the night at her girlfriend's house in town, the way a great many people spent that night, wherever the storm caught them.

The worst of it passed in a few hours, but the dust hung in the air all night, and when the sun came up Monday it came up red. The yard was drifted over like after a snow. Some of the chickens that hadn't made it into the henhouse in time we never did find. And on the two clotheslines, my mother's clean white wash from Sunday morning was hanging there stiff and black, every piece of it. She went out and looked at it for a while. Then she took it down, and filled the tubs, and washed it all again.

A day or two later we read in the paper that a newspaperman who had been out in that storm had written a story about it, and in the story he called our part of the country the dust bowl. The name stuck so hard and so fast that I believe people today think it was always called that. It wasn't. It was only home until then.

Everybody in that country who was alive that day can tell you exactly where they were when it hit. Old men in the coffee shop in Guymon still tell it to each other, and it does not matter that everybody at the table has heard everybody else's story fifty times. I have told mine to my children and my grandchildren, and now to whoever reads this.

Carl died in 1991. Not long before he did, I went to see him in the hospital in Amarillo, and he was pretty far along by then and didn't always know who I was. But I sat with him a while, and after a bit he opened his eyes and looked at me, and said, "Art. Don't let go of the fence."

I told him I wouldn't.