The Dust Storm Story

And now, by lack of popular demand, I present the dust storm story.

For many years we lived in a small house in Peoria, a suburb of Phoenix. Over those years I collected a lot of unbuilt kits, and when it came time to move, I packed all those kits into various boxes and put them in storage. Due to various scheduling problems, we had to be out of our old house before our new house was ready. In fact, we were out of our old house about a full year before our new house was ready. Two of those months were spent living in a long-term hotel near a Cajun restaurant, so all my stuff (along with pretty much everything else we owned except soap and clothes) had to go into storage. We rented a house and eventually moved there, but we knew that we would only be staying there for six months or so, just long enough for our new house to be finished.

To save money, I emptied out the storage lockers, but there didn't seem to be any point in unboxing everything in the rental house, because we would only be boxing it all right back up again. So the house was full of boxes, and the carport (no garage) was also full of boxes, many of them my boxes full of unbuilt kits.

In the late summer in central Arizona, a weather pattern known somewhat inaccurately as "the monsoon" starts. It gets humid, thunderstorms percolate all day, and by late afternoon storms of considerable power are common. Thunderstorms in central Arizona follow a certain pattern. First comes the dust, then the lightning, and then, if you're lucky, actual rain. Dust and lightning are guaranteed; rain is not.

So anyway, a storm came up, and it appeared to be pretty bad. You can usually gauge the power of a storm by the density and size of the wall of dust that precedes it, and this one looked bad. And there were all my boxes of kits on the carport, completely exposed to the oncoming wall of dust. We started to try to weight the boxes with rocks, but we were too late - soon the visibility had dropped to about twenty feet and the wind was starting to blow boxes around.

Then it got bad. I went out into the storm to try to corral a couple of model boxes that had blown off the carport, just in time for a whole box of kits to blow over and disgorge its contents in a particularly powerful gust of wind. The dust was so thick I couldn't see more than three or four feet in any direction. That is literally true and not hyperbole - at times I couldn't see my own feet for the dust. Model boxes, instruction sheets, decals, sprues and whatnot flew by me in the wind, and I grabbed randomly at what I could, stuffing the rescued bits and pieces into my shirt. In a way it was like netting fish - I didn't catch things, I just held my hands out in the stream of model parts and things blew into my hands.

It was very strange. I've never been in a white-out, but I can say I know what it must feel like, because I was in a tan-out. I couldn't see anything but myself. No houses, no horizon, no sky, nothing but orange-glowing tan dust and fluttering, skittering model parts. For a while I had only the haziest idea of where the house was, and that was only because I knew what general direction the wind had been blowing when the dust storm started.

After the wind let up I went scouting downwind and found sprues, instructions, empty boxes and other model junk in a "strewn field" that extended several hundred yards before the search was cut off because it crossed into private property. To this day I wonder what the owners made of the stuff they must surely have found on their property, stuck in fences or wedged in bushes. To this day I have a boxful of random model stuff I rescued from the dust storm, mostly bagged sprues of parts covered with talc-like dust. One bag of parts survived intact, but there was a hole in the bag and if you hold the bag up, it contains literally an inch of dust in the bottom.

It was terrible. I looked at myself in the mirror and I had turned completely tan from head to toe, except for my lips and eyes, which were ringed with dark mud. The wind had blown so much dust under the doors of the house that we left footprints in the dust on the floor. Dust had gotten into my car through the window seals, turning the grey interior tan.

Oh, those were the days. Sometimes when I look at the sprue bag with the inch of dust in the bottom I can actually remember what the dust tasted like, and it's not a good memory.