Tumbleweeds

"Ay, chihuahua! This fucking wind!"

"Oh, si, Eddie. What would Holbrook be without the wind?"

"Uh...peaceful? Calm? Quiet? Pleasant?"

Eddie Ochoa and Lena Garcia, on their way home from Holbrook High ("Go Roadrunners!") shuffled down Buffalo Street, the gusts of wind shoving them from behind, nearly knocking them off their feet, filling their eyes with pollen, dust and sand. White cotton was everywhere, a blizzard unleashed by the cottonwood trees, drifting up at curbs and along fences, creating the illusion of snow on a warm, windy spring day.

The wind also snatched trash from cans lined up along the street, filling gutters and empty lots with fast food wrappers, cups, straws, aluminum cans, and tumbleweeds, those timeworn symbols of the American West, imported a century before from Siberia.

People in Holbrook were used to the incessant wind, particularly this time of year, when high pressure and low humidity created a perfect storm of clear, dry weather, dusty, hazy skies, and extreme fire danger. Situated on the high plateau of the Little Colorado, there were few windbreaks at all until Flagstaff and the San Francisco Peaks, ninety miles to the west. Millions of years of this persistent penetration of wind into the landscape had also created surreal visions of beauty, as in the Painted Desert, just twenty miles east of town; strange formations of rock and sand sculpted over eons to confound the modern day observer.

"Hey, where's Beth?" Eddie shouted over the dull roar of the wind, the flapping of flags and tarps in broken out car windows, the barking of dogs, and the wailing of the tortured trees.

"She had to go do some Church thing with her parents, I guess..."

Beth Page was the third member of this trio of inseparable friends. Beth's family was Mormon and thus lived "on the hill," not far from the Church. But Beth's own allegiances were with her friends in the lower part of town.

Eddie smirked but didn't bother to respond in words. He knew better than to comment on the Church things Beth's parents forced her to attend. It was a touchy subject, even when Beth wasn't around.

Instead, he focused on his main objective: getting home out of this insane wind. While the wind blew to some extent nearly every day on the Plateau, there were some days when it seemed like whatever god that took charge of the wind would let it off its leash. Then it became an angry demon shrieking its furious way through town. On those days, the only sane strategy was to take refuge indoors until it relented.

Lena and Eddie had been neighbors since they were little. They lived across from Hunt Park on East Florida Street, their two houses separated by a perennially boarded up crumbling wreck of a house, with its weed-and-trash-filled lot. Because they spent so much time together, most people assumed they were dating. But in reality, they--and Beth--had observed the havoc that "dating" generally produced among groups of friends at their school, and, vowing friendship forever, they'd sworn off it.

Though, truth to tell, three years earlier, when they were twelve, Eddie and Beth had tried out kissing to see what it was like. And it was all right, they'd thought at the time, but it went no further and was never repeated. And, they'd never told Lena about it.

The next day, being Saturday, the three friends were back up on the causeway of the new freeway being built straight through town, separating "on the hill" from "Town" below, in the most graphic way possible; four lanes of unstopping, unstoppable Interstate traffic right through back yards, splitting the town in two. The three friends had slipped through the cut-away section of chain-link fence to walk along the symbol of the death of their town; the freeway that would bypass Holbrook, replacing the thriving and historic Route 66 with Interstate 40.

For weeks they'd been brainstorming, trying to come up with some master plan to derail the Interstate project. But they knew it was a pipe dream. Even if they managed to dynamite the thing, the construction crews would simply be back the next week, with tighter security and a shorter fuse. Once the I-40 project had started, somewhere out east--one of the Carolinas, maybe--it had taken on a life of its own. In the past week, the pavers had completed a whole section of road, all the way to the overpass at 8th Street.

It was still early and the day's wind hadn't started up yet in earnest.

The three teens strolled easily along the new blacktop, noticing that a layer of sand blown by yesterday's gale had already blotted out the pavement. As they walked they left dusty footprints that would be wiped away by afternoon, when the wind again began its assault upon the town. The unfinished freeway covered in sand, tumbleweeds rolling past, looked to them like some post-apocalyptic scene as if the highway had existed long ago, instead of in the future.

"Look at us," Lena said, laughing. "The last three kids on Earth."

Beth and Eddie laughed but said nothing. They'd all recently seen a film in American History class with Mr. Stewart about the atomic bomb testing in this area back in the 50's and 60's. They knew something about the testing already. Every family had at least one cancer victim, and everyone had heard about the Government's compensation payments for giving it to them.

The footage in the film was of a cabin that stands on the desert one moment, and vanishes the next, annihilated by the wind generated by the nuclear blast a mile away. Everything in the picture becomes horizontal lines of dust, while some dweeb narrator rattles off statistics like, "At 470 miles per hour, the wind hits with the force of 10 hurricanes..."

It had made an impression. When you lived in a place like Holbrook, you appreciated the power of the wind. Everything seemed permanently sandblasted, including the days and years of their lives that flew by in unrelenting progression.

Soon, they thought, would be summer break, then another school year; eventually graduation, jobs, marriage, their own kids trooping through cotton drifts on their way to school.

Beth suddenly said, "Hey, you guys ever think about what you'll do after we graduate next year?"

Eddie shrugged, "Yeah, I think I'd like to check out the Valley. My older brother Victor's in Mesa. He said I could come stay with him...he'd teach me some stuff. What about you?"

Beth's face lit up a moment, "I want to travel. See other places. Like LA, or Chicago. Or maybe go to college."

"Wow," Eddie said in wonder. "I never heard you say that. Think you can pull it off?"

"I feel like maybe I could. What about you Lena?"

Lena stopped walking, a thoughtful look on her face. Beth and Eddie stopped too. They looked at her expectantly.

"You know what I was thinking about?" she said in a dreamy, far-away voice. "I was thinking about that song, you know, by Kansas? 'All we are is dust in the wind...' I know what they're saying. I mean, all of us...our parents, our friends, our kids, our kids' kids...we'll all be dead and gone eventually. It's weird but true.

"But, whoa. This freeway they're building? It'll be here forever."