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The crop has failed again, the wind and sun

Dried out the stubble first, then one by one

The strips of summer fallow, seared with heat,

Crunched, like old fallen leaves, our lovely wheat,

The garden is a dreary blighted waste,

The very air is gritty to my taste . . .

In that terrible decade, the rains had failed. Or, rather, the rains became normal, for over the centuries they had often failed and the landscape had adapted. But the farmers could not adapt. When prices collapsed and the drought persisted, the unanchored topsoil began to move. Blowing topsoil drifted across roads and railroad tracks, keeping the towns and cities bathed in dust and grit inside and out, causing yellow twilights at midday. The roads were impassable, with deep drifts of sand that built up until they covered the fences, choked out the few remaining shelterbelts and gardens, and reached the roofs of chicken houses. On May 12, 1934, the Associated Press reported huge clouds from the Great Plains dust bowl at ten thousand feet over the Atlantic, and amateur statisticians began calculating the amount of arable soil that had been removed in this storm alone, reaching more than three hundred million tons before the exercise became pointless. It was called the black blizzard, the name ironically foreshadowing the laments of Uzbek peasants a decade or two later, when their own landscape was blown away after the Aral Sea began to shrink, a disaster caused by overuse and careless engineering. The American black blizzard swept from the Rocky Mountain states to Washington and New York, and deep into the thoughts of Congress.

Many bitter tales from the Great Depression are obsessed with the winds that never ceased, banging the doors and shutters, rattling rickety barns, filling every crevice with drifting sand, a constant howling that picked at the nerves and seemed to cause violence in otherwise peaceable people. "My husband stood it for two months," a memoir by a Saskatchewan farm wife lamented, "watching our farm blow away in the winds, listening to that awful whistling, and then one day he hauled open the door and fought his way out onto the porch, yelling and screaming so hard it broke my heart." Her husband strode off into the gale and was not seen again; he disappeared into the wind and the wind-driven sand until he could walk no more, and then—or so it is assumed—the wind did him one final service, and covered over his body with the drifting soil of his own farm. He was neither the first, nor the last.

Jan DeBlieu's Wind mentions the classic West Texas melodrama The Wind, published anonymously by Dorothy Scarborough in 1925. Its dreamy eighteen-year-old heroine from Virginia wrestles unsuccessfully with the deprivations of mind, spirit, and body of life in endless drought and bitter poverty. It was the demon wind that was her undoing. Under its maddening influence her fragile spirit crashed. "With a laugh that strangled on a scream [she] sped to the door, flung it open and rushed out. She fled across the prairies like a leaf blowing in a gale, borne along by the force of the wind that was at last to have its way with her."20

Russian peasant leader Stenka Razin, about whom many legends swirl, claimed the maddening wind as his ally in his battles against the hated boyars, driving more than one enemy brigade to binges of suicides and mass self-mutilations.

During a sirocco in the Mediterranean, the oppressive heat is enough to drive up crime rates in Naples and Palermo. In Sicily, a sirocco that lasts more than three days is an excuse for a crime of passion. In America, in the eastern foothills of the Rockies, the incidence of rape is said to go up in a Chinook. It is said—though I haven't been able to prove it—that in Wyoming a law dating from the mid-nineteenth century allowed that wind-induced insanity was a sufficient defense against a murder charge.21 One of Raymond Chandler's best-known Philip Marlowe passages in "Red Wind" deals with the Santa Ana winds that blow down the Cajon and San Gorgonia