Back in the late 1970s, I got stuck in a three-day dust storm in Bakersfield, California. Bakersfield is the kind of place where you expect dust storms, or blistering heat, or torrential winter downpours with flash floods, or air so acidic that it burns your eyes.

Anyhow, I was lucky enough to be staying in the only motel in town that still had electricity - which meant their restaurant was very, very crowded. The sewers backed up and overflowed into the streets in the nearby town of Arvin. I was only 108 miles from home, but I couldn't get there and I couldn't get any work done. The dust ruined the paint and windshield on my car. Everything I touched on that car felt gritty for a year afterward.

The Phoenix photo BrooklynJay linked to is dramatic - but dust storms aren't dramatic when you're in them. It's like you're in a gritty fog, and it's just plain miserable. Still, I lived to tell about it, and I still enjoy telling the story 35 years later. I'm glad I got paid to endure that dust storm; and that it was the government's car that got ruined in the dust storm, not mine.

-Joe-