BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 52

DAVID

In all my extensive attention to dust devils (a brief obsession I had as a boy) I never saw the genesis of a single one. Admittedly, as a youth—as now—I lacked the naturalist's perseverance to observe and measure, to note the movements, differences and actions of my experimental subject. Expecting that when I put forth a question it would be answered, I was continually disappointed—the failure for a twister to suddenly appear before my eyes was just one of many occasions of chagrin.

Likewise, I never saw a twister die, though that summer I viewed a hundred and some, at least according to my childhood accounting—I kept that notation for years until embarrassment took over. And in a lifetime of accidental observations since—those from the Butte while I was a fire lookout, those seen while driving between the desert farms—I never saw a birth, never saw a death, of any vortices of air, just witnessed their passages through as ghostlike entities. Despite viewing hundreds during summer weeks of fallowing ground for government payment—no births, no deaths, though summer had prime conditions for whirlwind development: hot, dry, the ground disturbed enough to yield its smallest surface particles.

Among the boyhood experiments, failed all, was an attempt to decipher a dust devil's path of debris. Grains of sand or silt, of course, evaded my eye, but I knew that twister's drew up dried weeds, bits of light trash, and even the occasional feather. After the detritus circled the funnel any number of times I assumed it would be spun out or, when a twister died, simply be dropped all at once to the earth. Had I ever witnessed such a "dump" of a quickly dying dust devil, debris deposited in a single place, I could have derived an hypothesis from my findings—but no such evidence developed and no theory emerged, save the thought that, like the horizon, twisters went on forever, evading apprehension.

To "trap" a dust devil, I tore up magazine pages and spread the pieces where I thought one might arise or pass through. I hoped to witness how material lifted up and was later expelled. My efforts came to naught, my diligence minimal then as it is now, and at the dinner table my father commented that there seemed to be a lot of trash about in the wasteland where the experiment took place. Whether he knew the trash was of my doing I can't say, but I took his statement as a warning and stopped the endeavor. A direct accusation may have been better, for the hint made me think that all my actions were secretly monitored without my knowing, increasing an already overgrown wariness.

© Ralph Thurston 2025