When you live in places like West Idaho or East Oregon for long enough, near small towns like Vale or Parma or Weiser, you start to learn the unspoken rules of the land. You learn the summer sun hits harder than an angry mule. You learn that some winters can be so cold that snow refuses to fall. And you learn that there's at least one day of every year, sometime in the middle of September, that God likes to turn on the fans of heaven at full blast over the state.

Idaho's one of the furthest places north of the Continental 48 that you can actually find tornadoes. There's just something about the land here and along the valley into Malheur County in Oregon that just shapes the wind into a constant funnel, pushing it along at dangerously high speeds during some parts of the year. And during that time in the beginning of what most folks call Fall is when it gets to be particularly nasty.

The only thing nastier than the wind is probably the dust.

I think it has something to do with the sun. The way it beats down on the earth. You notice it way more often in the summer at any rate. On fields that haven't been set for harvest, covered in weeds but untouched by the notorious cheat grass that tends to grow worse than black mold in an old apartment. The dust lies there, exposed, finer than flour with next to no grit. When you walk in it, it seeps through into your shoes, getting past your socks and into your feet. And it stings like a mother.

Almost like it's eating you alive.

*

I was five or six years old when I saw my first dust storm. We were living a ways away from an old town called Vale, about a half an hour's drive from the Idaho border into Oregon. It had been in the early morning, in my grandparents' house on a ranch that my familiy bought but could have been there since before dirt even had a name.

You never realize that you take the sky for granted until it turns brown. The wind roared across the flats and over the hills like a stampeding herd. Weeds and shrubs were pulled up and thrown aside like they were made of paper, and even the trees threatened to come down as all greenery was stripped from them and their smaller branches tore off into the gale. Though I was still young I held that memory vividly. No passage in the Bible could compare to that horrible throng of wind and fury that was imprinted into my childlike mind.

As I walked up to the giant window that made up my grandfolks' living room wall, pressing my nose against the glass, I thought I could see something. It was like an imprint into the brown, the dust pulling free form the Earth through the force of the gale. The shape was no taller than I was, but it was vaguely human. Almost like somebody was standing there, buffeted against the dust and the wind. Just looking back at me.

"Get away from the window, boy!"

Before I knew it I was pulled back away from the glass and plopped on an armchair as my grandfather hurriedly closed the blinds, shutting us away from that everpresent turmoil of brown fury outside. I was confused and about to ask who it was standing outside, but even at six I seemed to recognize that sharp, worried look upon my grandfather's form for what it was. The way his breath caught in his chest, his eyes darted between the window and the blinds.

"You listen to me, boy," he told me, sharp and stern like a drill instructor - that tone he would make whenever I did something wrong or had to pay attention like when he was working with dangerous farm equipment that could get me hurt if I strayed to close - "Stay away from them windows in a storm. You see brown out, you go to your room or the back wall, and keep the windows closed. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," I said in a small voice. Mom and dad always told me to listen to grandpa and grandma, especially when they got stern. The farm always had some kind of dangers for a small boy like myself.

My grandfather softened a bit when he saw I got the message and took me to the kitchen to fix up a bowl of cereal for breakfast. I knew better than to ask more than I should, but I couldn't shake the feeling or the memory of what I saw. The figure in the dust, my age and my height, staring through the window. Straight at me.

*

It wouldn't be for another ten years before I saw the figures in the dust again. Mom and dad had a falling out with my grandpa and we moved into the city for a while. Though the wind can be just as bad at that time in September, in places like Boise there was never dust. Not like back in Vale. Something about the river being nearby I guess. My grandparents would eventually sell the ranch and move on down state, and I treated the old memory like a childhood dream.

I was about 15 when my dad decided to take us on a trip to see cousins up north in some of the old towns near Hell's Canyon. We passed a number of small towns with small names like Midvale, Council, Indian Valley. We kept driving off the back roads until we reached a tiny yellow house on a plot of land beside a dirt road, out in the middle of nowhere.

It was a far cry from the city like Boise or Meridian, but something in my blood woke back up then - drawn by the familiar sites of rangeland, barbed wire fencing, and cattle pens alongside barns with the whinnies of horses and the bleating of sheep. We were visiting an uncle who I barely remember meeting and cousins I hadn't seen since I was a toddler. A three day weekend of farm life, good food, and no traffic. A veritable frontier paradise.

It was on the second day out there with my cousins. Ben was about my age and Joey was a little younger. They had been plying me with all sorts of questions about what life was like in the big city the day before, and today they decided to take me out hiking over to the backwoods near the farm. It was a great day of boys just being boys, playing with sticks, finding weird-looking rocks, occasionally sighting tracks of elk along the trail.

It wasn't unitl we were on our way back that I noticed the quiet. The birds had suddenly stopped calling and even the leaves seemed to hush. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I looked around at my cousins apprehensively. They felt it too.

Ben was the first to say that we should head back. Joey wanted to look at the track that we had just found a little longer but I was quick to agree. Everything just felt off, and I could hear a distant rumbling not quite unlike that of thunder. We decided to avoid the trail altogether and go the quick way home by cutting through an old field that had been left out of seed that year.

We cut past the treeline and headed for the house, ducking under some old barbed wire as we hurried. I felt a bit of the sharp metal tug a hole into my shirt and winced at a scratch. I didn't even think about the potential for tetanus or at my mom being angry at a ruined shirt, as my focus was more on what was approaching fast from the west.

It was like a massive, transparent wall was speeding across the landscape. Scattered branches, weeds, and other debris was picked up and thrown aside as it came. As it passed over the range it brought up with it clouds of dust that seemed to swallow all else in its path. And it was headed our way.

I barely had time to register the stinging bite in my feet as the three of us ran in a panic. The dust beneath us seemed to be biting through my shoes almost hungrily, easily passing through the foam and rubber and going up through the denim of my jeans. My tongue felt like a dry rag in my mouth as I panted.

Ben and I had just managed to cross the barbed wire fence and over the creek by the time the wall of wind hit us. The closest I could compare it was to a car accident when my mom had picked me up from school. The sudden thud, followed by a wave of shock that made your bones shudder and grit your teeth, knocked me off my feet. If I hadn't already been partway in the ditch, I swear it would have sent me airborne. I got up and tried to get my bearings as I suddenly felt like the very world was tipping me off balance from the sheer strength of the wind.

"Joey! Joey, get out of there!"

It was then that I turned to realize that Joey hadn't made it past the fence with us when the storm hit. He had stumbled and lost his footing in the dust by the time we had crossed the barbed wire fence. In our panic I hadn't even realized that he had lagged behind.

The whole sky became a shade brown, like the ugly paint of an old office building's wallpaper. The wind seemed to howl and shriek like a wailing banshee, threatening to pull us off the ground and into the sky like plastic bags. And with it carried the dust.

The whole field that we had just been running across seemed to come alive, rising with the wind like a terrible fog. It quickly enveloped Joey within its suffocating embrace. One minute he had been getting to his feet and was turning to run towards us, and the next he was gone.

And then we heard the screaming.

Ben called out to his younger brother, trying to raise his voice above the roaring wind. I couldn't make a sound. I watched with horror as the shapes within the dust moved with a life of their own. Shapes like clawed hands and cackling, child-like faces tearing into the screaming form of Joey as they tore him to pieces. It was like something out of a horror movie, played out before us in slow motion as bits of skin, muscle, and clothing tore free into the wind. Occasionally the dark shape of a rib cage or a skull with hair peered through the dust as Joey's screams echoed through the roaring gale.

*

I don't know how long Ben and I were out there in the storm for, but it was starting to get dark by the time I remember being back in the safety of the house. We were both caked in dirt from head to toe, and it took ages for us to get it all off. My shoes were a mess and had looked like they had been eaten through by rats. My feet were bleeding.

They never did find Joey's body. Search parties went through the entire landscape for two whole weeks before the search was called off. They didn't even find any bones, even despite us telling them where to look. I heard his dad had that whole plot of land dug for years after without ever finding a trace.

Ben was never the same after that. Hardly ever spoke, said he blamed himself last time I ever heard him talk about Joey again. He went into the construction industry when he got out of school and spent most of his nights in bars and strip clubs, drinking his misery away. They later found his body in the Boise River. He was only 27.

Mom and dad quietly decided that we were done with country life. We made our ends meet in a small apartment in Meridian until I graduated and moved out. I have a family of my own now. My wife talks about how she wants a quiet life on a farm away from the hustle and bustle of the city. I quietly try to talk her out of it, but that doesn't stop us from occasionally going out to Hell's Canyon for quick vacation trips in the summer.

But every September, when the leaves start to turn color and God decides it's time to turn the fans over Idaho, I keep indoors with the blinds tightly shut. Even out here in the city, away from the farms and fields left to the weeds and the sagebrush, there's occasionally enough dust picked up to turn the sky a little brown. And every now and again I see them, through the glass, standing across on the road or in a construction lot in town. The shapes of people, standing invisibly, silhouetted by the dust. Staring at me.

Waiting for me to join them.