My First Haboob

Few people would go from Alaska to Gilbert, Arizona as the summer was starting to vamp up in the Valley of the Sun.  The Valley of the Sun is where average temperatures can get up to 110 degrees by 3 pm, but then, I’m one of the few people who did exactly that.  My father-in-law and I left our home in Chugiak, Alaska in the first week in May.  I had lived there for ten years, but he had lived there over twenty years and after retiring decided that he did not like being cold anymore.  He wanted to go somewhere that was warm.  After considering many options, we decided on Gilbert, Arizona.  

If you have ever driven the AlCan Highway, let me make one thing very clear, highway, hardly.  From entering Canada at Beaver, you drive through the Yukon Territory and into Yellowknife which is the largest township above the Arctic Circle in Northwest Territories before coming down to British Columbia.  A two thousand mile trek across some the most pristine land I have ever seen, filled with mountains, lakes and about every kind of animal with fur there is.  

I learned a lot from my travels, such as, caribou have got to be the dumbest animal I have ever encountered.  Driving what I thought was the speed limit of 100 miles/hour, but was later told it was 100 Km/hour, I came up on three caribou in a mountain pass in the Yukon Territories standing in the middle of the road.  I put on the brakes, shifting the load I had in my Ford minivan and leaned on the horn.  The three of them just looked up at me in bewilderment and continued to lick the salt left behind by the snowplows.  More horn, but this time none of them bothered to look up.  Fifteen minutes later, with the road licked clean of salt, the three of them trotted off into the woods never to be seen by me again.  

In Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, we stopped for lunch which meant I had to take Lucky, my Labrador and Shamus, my Scottish Terrier for a walk.  We wound up in a ditch where both dogs got excited and when I looked I saw bones in the ditch, dog bones.  This is where members of a dogsled team wound up when their dog sled days were over. Yellowknife is a town that is eighty percent Inuit and dog sled is still one of the main modes of transportation.  

Watson Lake is a small village with a postcard reputation, because there is a wall filled with license plates from every corner of the world left behind by people who had passed through. The lake had not thawed however since it was only the beginning of May.  I walked my dogs and came upon a resident who offered to share his bottle with me, but I declined with a nod of my head.  Saw a bear as we passed from here into British Columbia. On some of these roads, when I looked behind me I saw nothing, but trees and mountains and not another solitary living soul except my father-in-law’s truck in front of me. This was as raw and untouched nature as I have ever experienced.  

In Hope Landing, British Columbia, I saw three deer standing by my door as I parked near a hostile where me and my father-in-law had decided to stop for the night.  These deer looked at me as if to say, “What are you doing here?  This is our grazing place.”  All I did was get Lucky and Shamus out for a walk on their leashes and the deer decided that this was not a winnable argument.  In Hope Landing I saw more deer than livestock, thousands of them everywhere I looked.  

Once across the border, the traffic got heavier and the wildlife seemed to disappear. Driving through Seattle was an eye opener since it had been quite a while since me or my father-in-law had been in traffic like this and we still had to get through California.  I told him that I wanted to go down Highway 99 through Bakersfield rather than Interstate 5 which goes through the heart of Los Angeles County.  He argued with me about this all the way down the AlCan, but after getting through Seattle, it was Highway 99 the rest of the way.  

I had lived most of my military life in California and I was quite familiar with the drive, but as we went through Needles and on through the Mojave Desert, memories came flooding back to me as I remembered my time at George, Air Force Base just outside of Victorville which is where we ate lunch. The Roy Rogers Museum was still where it had been with his horse Trigger stuffed and on display outside the building.  

After three days we got to Gilbert, AZ and spent the night in our new home. My wife, son and daughter had flown down while my father-in-law and I finished getting the house ready for the new owners in Chugiak, AK. 

There are no words to describe what my transition was like from the ice in my backyard in Alaska to the approaching summer of Gilbert, AZ.  Since words do not adequately describe the cultural change we had to go through, I will give you some examples of what May and June were like for me in my first month in the Valley of the Sun.

First of all, Gilbert was once a small farming community just outside of Phoenix with the small towns of Mesa and Tempe in between.  Mesa was filled with orchards and Tempe is the home of Arizona State University (where I would attend for a year and my daughter now attends). Phoenix is the state capital and the one of the most populated metropolises in the country (barely nosing out Philadelphia).  Traveling east on the highway, after passing Gilbert, Apache Junction is the next exit.  I would teach there for eight years.  

We were lucky.  We had a swimming pool in the backyard.  This would provide relief from the heat.  As I would discover this was one of the many lies I would be told, because backyard swimming pools do not provide relief from the heat, but more on that later. 

If you have ever had the Arizona experience in the Valley of the Sun that includes all of the places mentioned previously located in Maricopa County (except Apache Junction which is in Pinal County), you will know that the temperature starts off in the 70’s which was where summer temperatures in Chugiak, AK got  during the hottest part of the summer. Walking about a mile to school with my son, the temperature was already about 80 and when I stepped into the direct sun it was as if someone had punched me in the head.  After he walked into the school yard, I still had to walk home.  After school, I learned and drove the car.  On the way home, the playgrounds were empty.  Strange until I realized that the slides were metal as were the monkey bars and if grabbed onto by a child, the child’s hand would be burned as if he or she touched a hot stove which was exactly what these playground devices had become.

The next day I drove to a shopping center where there were two stores I wanted to visit.  The stores were on opposite ends of the shopping center.  So I parked the car at my first stop with the intention of walking to the other store that was about three hundred feet away.  I put my purchase in my car and went across the parking lot to the other store, but I almost did not make it as the sun shriveled me on that pavement like a bug.  Most places had water readily available to the customer walking in.  I had two bottles of water and wondered how I was going to get back to my car.  On my return trip, I stayed beneath the overhead awnings until I had to cross the parking lot to get to my car.  I made it, but the heat was beyond what I had been prepared for.  

One evening my father-in-law and I were trying to sit on the patio as the temperature had just fallen below triple digits.  Suddenly a breeze blew.  

“Feel that breeze.” I said.

“Yeah, it feels like a confectionery oven to me.” He grumbled as he had lived and worked in Alaska since 1977.

There are some rules that must be followed and some things you will learn how to do.

Rule One:  Never leave perishables in the car even to go to another store.

Rule Two:  You  must drive everywhere.

Rule Three: You must carry water wherever you go.

Rule Four:  Air conditioning is wonderful and stay as long as you can in an air conditioned place. You see all those people in the mall?  Do you think they’re shopping?  You could not be more wrong. 

Rule Five:  Never go outside until the sun goes down and even then as you feel the heat radiate from the pavement, make sure you have something on your feet.

Rule Six: All pets must not be left outside all day or they won’t survive.  And whatever you do, make sure all pets and children exit the vehicle.  A woman went into a store leaving her child in the safety seat and when she got back ten minutes later, the child could not be resuscitated.  Happens a lot more than it should.

You will learn how to drive with two fingers.  You will learn that a swimming pool will become a sauna by mid June as the water temperature will not go below 90 degrees until next September.  Refreshing.  The temperature on pavement is at least ten degrees hotter than the air and Phoenix is nothing but pavement and walking your dog will burn the pads on his or her feet. 

And then there was the Haboob.  No, this is not a misprint.  A Haboob is part of the Monsoon that starts in June and ends in August.  The monsoon is a very curious weather condition that brings weather of Biblical proportions including a Haboob.  Do not ask me where this term came from, but simply put a Haboob is nothing more than a dust storm, but even saying that does not put a proper perspective on this phenomenon known to the locals as a Haboob.  

Our neighbors who had lived in their house since 1982, talked about it over dinner one night and while listening to them, I thought they were reading a Stephen King story.  Since the Valley of the Sun is just that, a valley, the terrain is flat and very brown and dull.  You can see mountains in the horizon like Four Peaks in Pinal County, but the Phoenix Bowl is flat with nothing to obstruct the Haboob.  Even with the development of the East Valley, the fierceness of the Haboob could not be stopped.

Living in the East Valley was like watching houses and buildings spring up out of the ground every day.  New neighborhoods would appear from the desert, sprouting like Saguaro Cactus (like the one in my front yard) and completely changing the landscape.  Queen Creek was a town in the middle of nowhere, but before leaving Arizona, I noted that it was part of the urbanization of the east.  

The monsoon was also the only season when it would rain, but just because the clouds would start forming near Thunder Mountain in the Superstitions, did not mean it was going to really rain.  There might be thunder, but sometimes when the rain fell it would evaporate before getting all the way to the parched earth. But when it did rain, it was like the sky suddenly opened up and let us have it once and for all.  

“That guy is building a boat with a bunch of animals in it, again.” I would comment when the rain flooded my pool.  After a rainstorm, I would go out and scoop out all of the poor lizards who drowned in the pool along with branches of some of the nearby trees. 

Now you might think, rain is a good thing, but you’d be wrong if you were from the East Valley where the ground is so sunbaked, that it can no longer absorb water or rainfall and before you know it rivers are forming where rivers had never flowed before.  In really rapid downfalls, there are stories of people being swept away in a torrent running through once dry arroyos.  My first rain downspout wasn’t too bad other than flooding the pool which would level out after running the filtering system for a few hours. Still this was just a downpour, not the dreaded Haboob where the savage winds of this summer storm could take me up in the clouds like Dorothy Gale. 

My first Haboob experience would come in August toward the end of the monsoon.  Let me be your tour guide and try to give you some idea what it was like.  The weather service issued an alert that a Haboob was coming toward the East Valley.  Try to imagine if you can see a cloud of dust that appears like a huge brown blanket being pulled over the valley and that would be the aerial view, but from the ground it looks like a wall of dust is going to swallow you.  This is definitely something from the works of Stephen King.  You notice the trees are suddenly full of wind and when you look up you see the wall coming at you.  If you are outside, it is now time to get inside as quickly as you can, because you will not be able to breathe in this storm.  If you were able to breathe, the dust stings like a thousand pin pricks on your skin and if you keep your eyes open the dust will fill them instantly.  Sounds like something from a Stephen King story, right?  

You might wonder what would you do if you were driving and this is what the Department of Motor Vehicles tells you to do; pull off the road and turn your lights off. I thought this was some kind of joke, but people who had experienced their share of Haboobs claim that if you leave your lights on, the traffic will follow you and wind up hitting you from behind.  The reason this happens is that you are so blinded by the dust, when you see taillights you think you are following the other traffic on the highway or road.  There were a few times I came close to being caught on the road.  Driving home from Apache Junction, I saw a Haboob coming right at me, but the storm moved slowly and I just made it into my driveway when the winds kicked in.  

During my first Haboob, I was inside my own home just before dinner and with all of the warnings, I felt like we all needed to hover together in the closet and hope the roof stayed in place.  I did not know what to expect or if our house would still be left standing after the winds stopped.   As it turns out while the wind does howl and the sand and grit sound like hail hitting the sides of the house, daytime turns to night, but the wind never becomes a threat unless there is a micro-burst.  My first Haboob was not that vicious even though some of the dust did start to filter in near some of the windows and doors, but I had taken all precautions watching it safely from my bedroom window where, I swear I saw some poor old woman pedaling a bicycle float on by.  

Later we watched the news as a weather helicopter showed what I had described before, a big brown blanket being pulled over the suburban development.  The video made it appear like a monster, but from our perspective on the ground, it was no more than a bit of dust and wind.  We high-fived each other in surviving our first Haboob. 

When it was over, I cautiously went outside in the backyard and saw there was a few inches of dirt and grit in the bottom of the pool.  It took three days to clean it out.  The water was still ninety degrees.  Still I was grateful to have survived my first Haboob. The storm, however, did nothing to cool us off of what I would call an unbearable  heat wave, but everyone else would call just a typical summer day in Gilbert.