There were three of them.
And the three of us, John, Joe, and I, had never seen anything like it…
About thirty miles east of Albuquerque is a little town called Edgewood. Well beyond the shifting western range of the Great Sandia Mountain, past the purple sage, and close to ten miles east of the town, was a little offshoot of a road.
Every morning for a week or so, we would travel east on I-40 to a home that stood erect and barren on this graft of a road just north of the highway.
And every morning, with the bitter cold, and whipping wind, we would attempt to install a worthy roofing system on this home. We would jump up and down in the 18 degrees with our shorts on until the wind tore the sun off of the horizon and placed it high enough in the sky to warm the land, and our bare legs, stopping our dervish only long enough to take a quick and satisfying drink from the thermos of coffee that always seemed to accompany us on our endeavors. Ahh, how that sun would warm our bones as the coffee warmed the rest of our bodies. The aching would subside and slowly, and deliberately we would break out the tools needed to accomplish our tasks.
This one day in particular stands out in our minds, with only a few others that might be considered, well, significant days in ones life, sort of like the day you get married, or have your first child, or find out that your most loved and endeared person has terminal cancer.
We had been working for about an hour and a half, and I was making an attemt at conveying a method that I had found extremely useful for attaching an underlayment to a roof in what would be considered an extremely high wind area, when John had chanced to look up. It was his coerced exclamation of, “What the…”, that caught my attention and caused me to peer up and over the crest of the roof.
Three miles to the west of us stood the edge of the forest. And somewhat close to a mile towards us from the forest was a burm that grew up out of the ground like the the most displaced pimple that one had ever seen. Betwixt the burm and forest a very peculiar event was taking place.
There were three of them.
And the three of us, John, Joe, and I had never seen anything like it. Oh, you could say that we had seen our fair share of phenoms, we lived in Albuquerqe for Gods sake, but never had we seen anything like this.
It was almost as if they were living, breathing, emanating from the sandy floor of the earth itself. Three dust devils, standing tall and swhorling in unison as if they were brothers with the Noja Hasrudin himself sifting over the land.
The three dervishes made their way from the forest edge toward the burm. Now, you would think that they would approach the mound and dissipate. Well we thought incorrectly also. All three of those whirlwinds retreated from the burm to re-group, or whatever it is that they would have been doing had they a living presence amongst them, and not only once, but three times did they accomplish this. On their third attempt at crossing over the mound, they made a tactical decision, they divided…and transversed a path around the foreboding obstacle, reconnected their distances with one another on the opposite side, and headed straight for the three of us, as if it were going to be a straight up negotiation between us and them. Not likely, but there we were with three dirt devils, extending from earth to sky, heading in our direction and not asking permission to do so. As we were frantically attempting to protect the work that we had already performed, the impending onslaught came ever closer, and closer, until…
Just before they had reached their destination and accomplished whatever subterranean goal that had been placed in their spinning souls, we watched in amazement as the sand fell to the gravity that would claim it, and their breath ascended to the heavens. This would have been more than acceptable, had that breath not transversed our bodies as it angled toward the clouds above.
That was almost enough for one day, one half hour of pure assailment, attacking slowly but rigorously from a source unbeknownst to us, only to end in an almost imaginary realm, like a mirage would end, only if you tore your eyes away long enough, and actually reached the intended oasis by doing so.
