A Dry Run

In late March, while returning home from Spring Break with my family, I drove smack into the Age of Consequences.

It happened a few miles west of Winslow, Arizona, in a desolate and lovely stretch of country called the Painted Desert. We were zooming along the Interstate, singing songs, when suddenly I saw a dirty brown cloud on the horizon. At first, the tempest looked minor – maybe the trailing dust from a herd of pick-up trucks coming off the Navajo reservation or a mischievous dust devil of unusual size and naughtiness. But as we drove, it kept growing. Soon, Gen noticed it and a few moments later the singing stopped. The cloud was huge. Towering. Angry brown. Gen and I conferred, but before we could make a decision we were engulfed by a dust storm straight out of Lawrence of Arabia.

It wasn't that bad, of course, though it went on for miles. I turned the truck's headlights on, slowed down and gritted my teeth. As good westerners, we never seriously considered pulling off the road. Instead, we urged our faithful horsepower forward, determined to fulfill our modern manifest destiny to get home by suppertime. The kids thought the swirling dust was great fun, and when we emerged out the other side, unnerved but undamaged, they urged us to turn around and do it again.

Miles later, I was still unnerved. I couldn't shake an ominous feeling that had come over me in the middle of the tempest. In forty-odd years of criss-crossing the American West, driving hundreds of thousands of miles, including countless back-and-forths   on  this  particular  stretch  of  Interstate  40,  I  had  never