It Is Haboob!

This has been a pretty active year for dust storms around Phoenix. Here's a view of a rather substantial dust storm about to hit - the picture is looking southeast, toward Phoenix, and the dust cloud is the solid light-colored bank in the distance. I was driving home from work when this thing was brewing and though I can't cite actual numbers, I do know that it spanned the entire southern horizon and must have been sixty miles long, if not more.

There's a certain amount of controversy these days about what to call such things. The local media has taken to calling them "haboobs", which is an Arabic word. Some people think it's unpatriotic to use Arabic words, or think that using them somehow insults US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. I personally think the uproar is kind of silly. English has been borrowing words from other languages since day one, and other languages have been borrowing words from English just as rapidly. If they think "haboob" is unpatriotic, maybe they'd like to give up other Arabic words like algebra, Rigel, alcohol, Betelgeuse, sultan... (Actually, some people really WOULD like to give up algebra, now that I think about it.)

As George Carlin once said, there are bad thoughts and bad intentions, and then there are just words, man. Haboob is just a word. If you don't like it, don't use it.

I confess that I generally don't refer to these sorts of things as haboobs. I'm used to the term "dust storm" and that's what comes most readily to mind, but it isn't an exclusionary practice; it's just the way my brain works. And it doesn't bother me if you do or not. Unlike the Thought Police that want to tell me what words I can and can't use, I hew to the line that the ultimate freedom is freedom of thought, and that means you can call them Floyd if that's what makes you happy.

Note the dry wash beyond the edge of the "cleared area". I grade the cleared area with my tractor every so often because that's where the garbage truck and mailman turn around, and it also serves as a firebreak. But I leave the dry wash alone (if I were in a sufficiently perky mood, I might refer to it as a wadi, another one of those dratted Arabic words). It doesn't look like much in the picture, but it's a wonderland of weird rocks, weird insects, and weird reptiles.

I go out in the dry wash - I mean, the wadi - with a metal detector from time to time. My master plan is that I'll find some enormous nickel-iron meteorite among all the rocks, and that isn't an entirely forlorn hope. But mostly I find bottle caps, nails, ancient steel Coca-Cola cans, the metal stubs of shotgun shells, and on one occasion an odd piece of wrought iron hardware that looks like it was once part of a horse-drawn wagon. And every now and then I find walnut-sized lumps of magnetite. Heaven knows where that stuff came from originally.

I also find a lot of tires. Someone upstream of me must have dumped a bunch of old tires in the wash, because every time it runs, a few tires come down with the flood and get beached in my part of the wash. I also suspect that that's how the shotgun shells and bottle caps get there too.