A series of deadlines are keeping me chained to the studio bench, more or less, but I slipped my shackles yesterday to grab some groceries. The National Weather Service was predicting a monsoon event in the afternoon, but I figured I had time to run out for some bread and fruit.

The hot blue bowl of the Phoenix sky was rimmed with enormous thunderheads — towering marbled cumuli were dropping rain on the higher country around us, but so far they’d been held off by the city’s searing pressure bubble of dry air and pollutants. These huge, soggy clouds can bring thunderstorms and rain or hail to the low desert, or they can build thousands of feet up into the atmosphere and chill their heads.  When this happens, the heavy, cold air at the clouds’ lofty tops collapses, hitting the ground like a bomb.  The shock wave of dense air meeting loose desert soil roils up into a haboob: a massive, strongly directional dust storm, which charges snorting across the desert led by its rolling brown snout of grit.  Inexorable is not an exaggeration here: the dust cloud swallows everything, leaving variable amounts of itself and other wind-borne detritus behind.

Above, Leading edge of yesterday’s dust storm.  It’s easy to see the difference between the fluffy, water-vaporous cumuli above, and the dirt-laden, brown snout of the haboob, about to plow over the stores like a rooting, heavenly javelina.  This photo and the one immediately below were taken on my cell phone, no Photoshopping at all.

That’s what we got yesterday.  I’d just finished my shopping, and was scuttling across the parking lot laden with groceries like a saharan dung beetle when the edge of the storm rolled over the neighborhood to the east.  Within minutes, the blue sky had gone brown and the wind hit, so strong that I had to work hard to shut the truck door behind me.

These photos were taken around 5:40 pm 21 July as the haboob hit the corner of Thomas Road and 44th Street in Phoenix. (all photos A.Shock)

While I was standing in the clear taking the photos above, my neighborhood had already been engulfed by the cloud.  The drive home was murky, but mercifully short.  Here’s what it looked like inside the dustbelly >>

Update:

Of j-pigs and j-pegs: the profile of the Heavenly Javelina Haboob inspired the following, originally published on my Facebook page.  It’s the face of one of my clay javelinas superimposed on the actual dust cloud.  Uncanny resemblance!  Click to enlarge:

But a very, very, VERY tiny one.

This morning we rescued this young scorpion from the pool, where it was stuck limbs akimbo to the surface tension of the water, sending out tiny struggling ripples. Since little scorpions look just like big scorpions except small, a close-up like this one doesn’t provide any clue to scale. So, know that the blue mesh it’s sitting on is the pool skimmer net, and each of the mesh squares is 1/20 of an inch, making the body of this Dinky Dude of the Desert about a quarter inch long, or less than 1/2 inch from head to tail tip (which, you can just see in the photo, is quite capably armed with a tiny but sharply barbed telson).

It’s most likely a Vaejovis spinigerous, the Stripe-tailed scorpion, our most common and not especially venomous species. (Click here for more info about AZ scorpions, and excellent drawings.) I put it over the fence; I don’t have the heart to crush them, even the grown ones. I’ll let the geckos or foxes or thrashers take care of it, or not. Seems only fair to let it try to make its way — after all, it’s only very, very small.

Here’s one of E’s photos:

If you can enlarge the top image twice, do — the photo isn’t perfectly sharp, but you can see the lil sensory hairs on its limbs, all the better to find dinner with, since the eyes aren’t so sensitive. (Upper photo A.Shock, lower E.Shock.)

Here’s a post-script from the subject of the previous post, which, despite its mildly peevish tone, I’ve included at the author’s request:

Ah yes, that’s my ground-bound, tail-dragging cousin, much less economically armed than us pseudoscorpions, with all that extra apparatus dangling off the rear. I’d like to see one of them hitch a ride on a bird or a wasp; the image is grotesque. And, really, is it absolutely necessary to have such unpleasantly potent venom? — it strikes me as strident, and certainly doesn’t win you any friends. Still, I suppose it works for them — they’ve been around since the Silurian.