Dust Storm

Published May 25, 2025

A page from a journal with a watercolor of a desert scene at dusk. We see mountains and the sky awash in golden light, the sun low on the horizon. A translucent brown cloud encroaches on the scene from the right, beginning to block out the sun. A handwritten caption on the right of the frame reads Dust Storm, US 90 outside Marathon, Texas, 4-18-25

I do some of my best thinking on long drives.

On a whim a few weeks ago I found myself headed through the hill country of central Texas just on the tail-end of wildflower season, but as often happens on long drives I felt drawn onward into the desert. After sleeping in a cheap motel I headed south, stopping for lunch at the mostly-deserted Amistad National Recreation Area.

From my journal:

Having a picnic at a day use area at Amistad, but this area of the lake is completely dried up. There's a boat ramp here leading straight down into miles of dry thornscrub.

This morning I saw photos from a (thankfully very small) protest in Frisco where someone had a sign reading "Climate change is fake." As I walked down the boat ramp onto the dry earth that was once a massive reservoir, it felt remarkably tangible that things are very bad.

I drove west along the border, through mostly abandoned little towns and the seemingly endless scrub, and set my sights on Marfa for the night. Just before dusk I saw what seemed like weird clouds billowing on the horizon, and my weather app chimed with a warning: a literal dust storm. I sat and watched for about five minutes as the cloud grew, stretching ahead and behind me to the horizon, moving closer.

I tried to take photos and video, but they failed to capture the scale and intensity of what I was seeing...and then it was time to get in the car and stay there. The sky shifted as the cloud engulfed me completely, blotting out the setting sun and transforming the golden light of dusk to the black of night. The whole scene had a surreal, uncanny quality that brought to mind the total solar eclipse last year. I continued slowly through the blinding wind and dust for another two hours, and just before hitting town the air began to clear. I found Marfa eerily still and quiet in the way it almost always is, and drifted to sleep in a cozy bed.

In the morning light I found everything laminated with a fine layer of dust.

a mostly blank page of the same watercolor journal with a few test swatches from color mixing.

Notes:

Dry in the Rio Grande Basin features imagery taken by NASA Earth Observatory illustrating the extent of the drought in the Rio Grande Basin.
Steven Monacelli's coverage of the April 19th protest Frisco on Bluesky.

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