The Brown Wall Comes Across the Flats

All afternoon the wind has been up. It rattles the fence ties along the shoulder, sets the signs humming, and moves tumbleweeds in stiff little hops across the asphalt. The highway runs straight across the basin, the asphalt dark against pale earth, the fields on either side bare and furrowed. There is a taste of dry earth in the air, the kind that makes a driver check the rearview mirror without knowing why. The brown wall comes across the flats and it is coming on fast. At first it is a smudge on the horizon, the light going sour, the fence lines ribbed through a haze. Then it is a cliff face rolling forward, swallowing the earth as it comes. A pickup ahead flips on its hazard lights, and the four-way blinkers pulse in the heavy air. Traffic on the two-lane road slows to a crawl.

The first taste of the storm is the change in the light. The sun goes flat and white, then amber, then gone. The wind arrives with a hiss of grit against the windshield, and the world outside the glass turns the color of old paper. The shoulder disappears. The road ahead disappears. The pickup ahead becomes a pair of red lights, then a single red light, then a smear.

Nothing is visible past the hood. The asphalt runs under the bumper and then vanishes into beige; the white line at the edge is there, then not, then there. The driver keeps his foot light on the gas, hands steady on the wheel, watching the right edge of the pavement for the shape of a stopped car. The road's crown is the only guide, the whisper of the tires where the pavement falls away to the shoulder. The grit sifts through the vents, gathers on the dashboard, and films the inside of the windshield no matter how the wipers work. The wipers leave crescents of mud, and the glass outside is scoured to a frosted translucence. It smells like a dry lake bed, dust and salt and something metallic. He rolls the window down an inch and the dust comes in, a taste of soil and electricity.

The radio crackles, and no one says anything, because no one can say where the lane is. The cars move again, all together, a convoy of hazard lights in the brown dark. The pickup edges forward, and the line of traffic follows at the pace of a walk. It is not driving so much as trusting the red lights ahead not to stop too quickly. The crossing is measured not in minutes but in the slow advance of the white line beneath the hood. Time goes soft; there is only the next ten feet, and then the ten feet after that.

There is no good place to pull over. The shoulder might be there and might not; a stopped car is a dark shape no one can see until they are in it. So he keeps on, foot light, eyes down, riding the rumble strip where it buzzes and letting off when it is silent. The semi ahead is a suggestion, a dark mass that resolves and dissolves in the brown.

The storm does not end so much as thin. The brown goes the color of tea, then the color of smoke, then the sun comes back as a bright coin. The road sharpens. The fence lines return, and the mountains that had been swallowed stand again on the horizon. The sky on the other side is a clean, hard blue, as if the storm were a shut door.

He pulls off onto the shoulder, steps out, and wipes the headlights with a rag. The windshield is coated with a fine mud, dry to the touch, and the grill is packed with a silt that will take a hose or a stick to move. The mirror on the driver's side is streaked, and where the rag passes, the glass shows a road that is empty and clean. He cleans the taillights too, and the license plate, because a car covered in dust is a car that disappears in the next storm.

The dust still hangs behind him, a brown column between the road and the ground where the sun went, already fading at the edges. He does not hurry. He gets back in, clicks the seatbelt, and the road ahead is open all the way to the next range of hills.