Giving back

At the end of probably one of the worst days I've had in a while, I decided I needed to look away from myself for a second.

The entire day had been less than enjoyable, and even the weather decided to get against me: it started snowing. (We might get up to 5 inches. . .)

When I decided to stop complaining, something told me to go outside. So I did, and it instantly hit me: build a snowman, and give it to someone.

So I built a snowman and put it in my neighbor's yard, where tomorrow the kids will see it when they go out to play.

From "the Bard of the Yukon" Robert W. Service

The Quitter

When you're lost in the Wild, and you're scared as a child,
    And Death looks you bang in the eye,
And you're sore as a boil, it's according to Hoyle
    To cock your revolver and . . . die.
But the Code of a Man says: "Fight all you can,"
    And self-dissolution is barred.
In hunger and woe, oh, it's easy to blow . . .
    It's the hell-served-for-breakfast that's hard.

"You're sick of the game!" Well, now, that's a shame.
    You're young and you're brave and you're bright.
"You've had a raw deal!" I know — but don't squeal,
    Buck up, do your damnedest, and fight.
It's the plugging away that will win you the day,
    So don't be a piker, old pard!
Just draw on your grit; it's so easy to quit:
    It's the keeping-your-chin-up that's hard.

It's easy to cry that you're beaten — and die;
    It's easy to crawfish and crawl;
But to fight and to fight when hope's out of sight —
    Why, that's the best game of them all!
And though you come out of each gruelling bout,
    All broken and beaten and scarred,
Just have one more try — it's dead easy to die,
    It's the keeping-on-living that's hard.

And the Sky Darkened

Looking towards the South. My backyard in Shallowater, Texas

(click on the pictures to view larger)
My room had a weird earth color to it, reflected from outside. I smelled dust and my nose was runny all day. The next morning I blew my nose and it came out bloody.

I never thought I'd live in West Texas.

There was a time in which I considered applying to Texas Tech here in Lubbock, but I never did. The thought of living out in the middle of nowhere didn't sit well with me at the time. What was I going to do in the middle of dustfields?

Granted, where I ended up and the snow storms there are the other end of the spectrum. The very next day I arrived in Texas for Christmas break, there was a small dust storm. I was amazed at how much dust was picked up. My mom and siblings told me that was not the worst it had been at all. . .

A couple of days after that, I checked weather.com and was surprised to see a warning I had never seen before: Dust Storm Warning, beginning at 11:00 AM. As in, Dust Storm Warning. (Ironically, I had seen a PBS documentary on the dust bowl not three weeks prior when I arrived for Thanksgiving.)

I could see the sky getting brown towards the west, so I ran out side with my camera and saw this . . .

. . . the storm was closer than I thought. The train tracks at the end of the road there are less than a quarter of a mile away, and as you can see, the dirt has begun encroaching this side of the tracks.

I snapped the photo and flew back to my house in a speed I haven't hit since High School. I admit I may have overreacted, screaming bloody murder at the top of my lungs: "Train tracks! The storm is at the train tracks!"

I'm sure any neighbor who heard me merely smiled and said, "Foreigners."

Within five minutes, all doors and windows were shut tightly and my family got back to business. This was all new material for me, and I just couldn't stop looking out the windows.

Here's about five minutes after the "train tracks" incident:

That's my backyard, and you can notice the sky isn't the normal clear blue of the Great Plains. The whole place had a weird red color to it, and I realized that there were worse things than the snowstorms we get in Nebraska.

As the day wore on, things only got worse. The wind blew harder and harder and only picked more dust up.

All I could think about was the Dust Bowl. They say that the sky went black during these storms, that candles were lit. I could not imagine living in a time when all you saw when you went outside was sand and a dust storm would hit you fairly regularly.

After some time, I went around and looked at the windowsills. What surprised me was that, even though they were tightly shut and had plastic sealer going around it, dust still crept through and there was a thin film of it all across the sill.

Here's looking out my window looking north, in front of my house:

As with any storm of any sort, there is a time where it is the thickest. At the height of it, here's how things looked:

For a glorious second, the sun grew a bit brighter. . .

. . . but all it did was make things more dreadful.


The storm didn't quite clear up until after the sun had gone down, and I was taken aback. Apparently, it had been one of the worst storms the Lubbock area had seen in a while, and there ended up being many accidents on the roads.

Then I got to thinking about the Dust Bowlers again.

If I were them, with a house with no plastic sealant on the windows, much less on the doors, with no crops to sustain the family/sell, I would have picked everything up and left. Many did, but to the ones that stayed I tip my hat.