When the Desert Gets Up and Walks: My First Haboob
When I lived in Connecticut, my big weather dramas were Nor’easters and blizzards. But if you’ve ever been upstate New York, you’ve probably seen the lake effect snow. It’s unlike anything else: one minute the sky is cloudy but manageable, and the next a wall of white rolls off the lake and swallows everything in its path.
The temperature drops fast, the air thickens, and then the snow comes — not gentle flakes, but sheets. It’s a sudden, overwhelming curtain that blinds you. Visibility drops so fast it feels like someone flipped a switch. Your ears fill with the muffled hiss of snow piling up on the world, and the air itself becomes sharp with cold, biting every inch of exposed skin. You can taste the metallic sting in your nose, your eyelashes freeze, and even the silence feels heavy. When you’re caught in lake effect, it’s not just weather — it’s a takeover.
Now imagine that, but instead of snow, it’s dust.
That’s a haboob.
One minute the Arizona sky is blue and bright, the sun glaring down like a spotlight. Then, on the horizon, you see it — a rolling brown wall, miles wide and thousands of feet high, moving toward you like a living thing. It’s not subtle. It looks apocalyptic, like the earth itself decided to rise up and march across the desert.
When it hits, everything changes at once. The temperature drops. The air turns thick, grainy, and dry, like breathing through sandpaper. The world goes sepia, like you’re walking inside an old photograph. The wind roars against metal and glass, rattling signs and slamming palm fronds sideways. Your ears fill with that hollow, howling rush. Your skin feels gritty as dust clings to sweat, and if you open your mouth, you taste earth itself on your tongue.
Driving in one is chaos. Visibility disappears in seconds. The taillights in front of you vanish, the road disappears, and all you can do is pull over, turn your lights off, and wait it out. Arizona locals have a saying: “Pull Aside, Stay Alive.” And when you’re inside a haboob, you understand why.
Both lake effect and haboobs arrive like ambushes — sudden, overwhelming, and absolute. They look different, feel different, smell different — snow with its metallic freeze, dust with its hot, earthy grit — but the effect is the same: the world stops, humbled by nature.
And here’s the spiritual part: storms like this remind me of God’s power and the impermanence of everything. No matter how much control we think we have, the sky can flip in an instant and rearrange the whole world. The haboob doesn’t ask permission, just like the snow doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It comes, it covers everything, and then it passes.
That’s life, isn’t it? Our struggles feel endless while we’re in them, but they’re temporary. They rise up fierce, they block out the light, and then eventually, they clear. What’s left behind is cleaner air, a fresh sky, and a reminder that we are small but deeply connected — to each other, to the earth, and to God.
A haboob is dust and chaos, yes. But it’s also a sermon in motion: This too shall pass. You are not in charge. You are not alone.
With Love,
Elfy & Nicky
