shot and buried.
Ellen’s memories were of a different kind but no less vivid. She remembered the dust that seeped into the house no matter how carefully the doors were closed and sealed. Her mother had soaked strips of sheet in a mixture of flour and water before spreading them over the window and door frames. Every time she had hoped that this would be the storm when she got it right, when the dust wouldn’t fill her house. Every time, she had been heartbreakingly disappointed. The storm would strike their home, the dust would enter and the air inside turn hazy as it permeated every nook and cranny. Ellen Sampson remembered her baby brother choking to death on the dust before he reached his third month of life. Her mother had never recovered from the loss, she had spent days sitting in the one room of their home, listening to the wind howling outside. She’d done that until the day she’d taken the family shotgun and blown out her brains.
The government had done what it could, it had taught the farmers to use new techniques that conserved the soil and trapped water. They had paid the homesteaders a dollar an acre to use ideas such as crop rotation, strip farming, contour plowing and terracing. The payments took the grinding poverty out of the dustbowl but they didn’t solve the basic problem. It had taken the return of regular rain after a decade of drought to do that.
By then, John Sampson and his family had given up and left. They’d become ‘Okies’, migrant workers desperately seeking somewhere they could live and earn a regular wage. For years that had been a seemingly- impossible dream, but it was John Sampson that had achieved the family goal. He had managed, he wasn’t quite sure how, to land a job at the Lockheed aircraft factory. He’d started by sweeping the floor, trying to close his eyes to the dust that reminded him of their lost farm in Oklahoma. Then, he’d been promoted to the assembly line where he’d started to earn real money. By the time war had broken out, he had made it to foreman and the Sampson family lived comfortably. Then, he’d been transferred back to Oklahoma, to help set up a satellite production line in Lawton. That was where he’d met Ellen, one of thousands of young women recruited to help produce the aircraft America needed to win the war. Their marriage had lasted for sixty years.
Some things are never forgotten. John Sampson had driven to the local plaza to collect the week’s groceries, using a significant fraction of his weekly gasoline ration to do it. In some ways, there was a strange comfort in that, the use of coupons and vouchers for their shopping took him back to the days of World War Two when his life had been in front of him. Despite the rationing, he and his wife lived comfortably. They both had good pensions, their children had long left to live their own lives and now only appeared when there was a holiday or a new grandchild to display. So, the weekly shopping trip was no very great imposition. Only, this time Sampson had noted how the wind was already increasing while the sun beat down with a steady leaden glare. Sampson knew that glare well, and as he drove he had watched the horizon upwind. He knew what he was looking for and every time he scanned the horizon he was afraid that he would see it.
“John, there’s something wrong isn’t there?” Ellen Sampson was staring at the horizon as well.
“I’ve got everything we had listed. You know, I really think things are getting a little easier now. I got us two nice steaks for our dinner tonight.” Yes, steak was back in the stores and the gasoline ration had been increased. Sampson felt a little sorry for the people who had bought diesel-engined cars and trucks. Diesel fuel was all taken up by the armed forces and what little they didn’t need was given to other armies that were running short. No diesel for civilians but there was a little gasoline for those who needed it. As senior citizens, the Sampsons had an extra ration allowance. After all, nobody could expect an eighty year old couple to walk five miles to the store.
“I didn’t mean the stores John. I remember weather like this from when I was a child. There’s a storm coming.” She meant a dust storm but her memories stopped her from using the words.
The couple went inside their home. Ellen started to cook the steaks her husband had brought while he went around the house, ensuring everything was closed down and sealed. He kept the thought to himself but running through his mind also were the memories of the dust bowl and the 1930s. He took comfort in the fact that houses now were very different from the shacks that had been built back then. The windows in their home didn’t have opening frames, they were fixed shut to let the air conditioning work more efficiently. The house had no chimney to let the dust in and the doors all had draft excluders. Perhaps this time it would be different.
By the time they had finished eating, the wind had picked up still further. They were washing the dishes together when Sampson glanced out of the window and saw the sight he had been fearing. The horizon had changed, what had once been an array of fields was now dominated by a reddish-black cloud, one that was sweeping towards them with frightening speed.
“Ellen, it’s a Black Lizard. They’ve come back.”
His wife looked out of the window and saw the cloud of dust approaching. “Oh no. Not again. Please, I don’t think I can stand it, not again.” Tears trickled out of the corners of her eyes as she watched the clouds that were now towering over them, the wind wailing and twisting the dust into strange, abstract patterns. Sampson hugged her as the dust storm hit their house.
The force of the impact shook the whole house, causing shudders to run through the structure. Their oven opened as the door fell down and the newly-washed plates in the sink started rattling with the vibration. What really changed things was the darkness. It was as if a switch had been flipped, the day went from early afternoon to blackest midnight without any warning or transition period. Ellen Sampson panicked as she fumbled for the light switch, then sighed with relief as the main room lights came on. Her husband had remembered how the Black Lizard shut out the light and had known exactly how to reach the switch in the pitch darkness. Outside the howling of the wind picked up as the main body of the storm reached them.
Sampson seated his wife, then pushed an odd-looking circular silver switch on the wall. With the main lights on, the effect wasn’t obvious but the emergency lighting system, battery-powered LED units, were on. A few minutes later, the simple act of foresight was rewarded. The main lights flickered and failed, the overhead power lines outside brought down by the wind and the weight of dust in the air. The couple both remembered when a power failure during a dust-storm had caused their families to sit in total darkness, They’d been forced to sit in the sticky blackness, the dust from the air coating the inside of their mouths and throats. Now, the light from the LED emergency system might not be much but it was enough. It showed where things were so the couple could move around their home and it also showed the air was still clean. So far, at least, the dust was being kept outside.
Sampson took an LED torch, quietly blessing the strange twists in his career that were now standing him in such good stead. After marrying Ellen, he had decided to stay back in Oklahoma and had continued to work in the Lockheed subsidiary. Towards the end of his career, he had taken on a project that most of his colleagues had thought rather ridiculous, trying to find domestic applications for the then-new LED lighting technology. The work had blossomed into a major money-earner and, more importantly, made him a lot of friends in companies marketing LED lighting. As a result, their house was full of systems given to him for “testing”. Some of them were a different patterns of flashlights and one of them allowed him to go safely into the kitchen and bring back a couple of bottles of water.
“Here you are, Ellie. We’ll be fine, we’ve got food, lots of bottled water and more batteries than we can shake a stick at. We’ll just ride the storm out.”
“Why did they have to come back? I thought they had gone for ever.” Ellen Sampson was still crying quietly, more from shock than anything else.
“I bet Yahweh’s got something to do with it.” John Sampson nearly snarled the words out. “This is his work, I’m sure of it. We’ll get him for this, you wait and see.”
News Studio, KOCO Television, Oklahoma City
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The advertisement faded away and the monitor screen switched back the news desks. Brandon Breyer looked up from the piles of paper accumulating on his desk. “Well, our latest sponsor is certainly offering an unexpected new service. Anita, do you have the latest on the dust storm?”
“I do Brandon, and its plural, dust storms, now. We have reports of other dust storms forming in China, Canada and Australia. Locally, the storm here is hitting most of the southern half of our state and things are pretty bad. Our reporter JiaoJiao Shen is out in the town of Sapulpa. I believe she is on the line now. JiaoJiao, what’s it like out
