Back Talk

Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

I remember it as if it were yesterday: the wind howling, visibility zero, dust and sand in my eyes and mouth as I coughed and spat. I was terrified: and three years old. We were moving south from Denver to a place called White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico, the empty stretch of desert that included Trinity Site from the first atom bomb test, where the Army had sent Werner Von Braun and his people to test and develop their guided missiles.

But we’d never seen anything like this storm, and it was moving day. I just hated it, and in after years my mother told the story of how the moving man had said to her, “Hey, lady, you sure you want me to unload your stuff here?” That night, the wind still howled and the sand beat on the windows, and nobody slept a wink. It wasn’t just springtime in New Mexico, when these things happened and when in another year the hills were carpeted with yellow caterpillars migrating from who knows where to wherever their genes drove them. (After that squishy experience, that same mother of mine swore never to wear open toed shoes again, and I don’t think she ever did.) No, it was worse because we were moving into a newly built housing development on the base, and, to build the houses, they had bulldozed even the minimal desert vegetation, so for a mile all around us, there was nothing but bare dirt just waiting for a good gust of wind.

In the months that followed, the spring storms died down, they planted grass around the houses, and my mother learned to vacuum my butch haircut before she tried to wash my hair — after the time when she went straight to soap and water and the stuff that had accumulated turned to mud. And I learned to keep my mouth shut while walking into the wind.

Now I’m back in the southwest after many years and it’s monsoon season again. Literally monsoon season: the cells of atmospheric energy that come up our way from the Gulf of Baja California are doing exactly what their cousins do coming across the Indian Ocean towards Mumbai. I’ve been away from the southwest so long, of course, that the storms make me nostalgic. Old timers are tired of them, rookies are terrified, and when a good one comes in our direction, I’m out on the deck with a big grin on my face, loving every minute of it and feeling twelve years old again. A couple of years ago, to be sure, I noticed it was getting a little windier than usual and I decided to go inside. Checked the web and saw that in fact the wind was gusting to 60 mph, which really is a good time to take cover.

But when the rain starts, following on the mountains of dust whipped up at first, it can be truly amazing. We know not to drive through the sudden rivers that can materialize, and we know that the worst will be over in fifteen minutes and it will be safe to go on again. When I first learned to drive, back in El Paso, I did try to drive through one of those instant rivers as fast as I could and then got to climb out of the car and sit on the roof until a kindly elder waded over and showed me how to take the cap off the carburetor and dry the thing out. And so the storms are still exhilarating for me. I come away from one revved up and eyes glowing, my troubles far away. And when one passes us by, visible in the difference but veering past Phoenix’s heat island, I’m disappointed. This is the column I’m writing at a time when lots of what we’re all thinking about is morose and discouraging: the politics of exclusion and disempowerment everywhere and just downright nastiness, a pandemic that just won’t quit, war in Ukraine and mass shootings at home, wildfires and heatwaves, and the acute sense that human beings are better and smarter than this, that we could be more inclusive, more generous, and more peaceful than we are. The best non-storm hour I spent this week was in Phoenix’s spectacular Burton Barr Central Library, wonderful for the architecture, wonderful for the books, but especially wonderful for the swarms of patrons, none of whom had parked a Lamborghini outside, but every one of whom knew they were in a good place, a place for calm, a place for the exercise of intelligence, a place for patient reflection. Quiet libraries, rousing storms, a cheerful kicking baby: 2022 is a good year for paying attention to the things like that, things that ground us and let us cherish the moments we have.

The mountains in the east are getting hard to make out this afternoon and the sky is darkening. I’m optimistic.