Copper, Wire, and Prairie Wind
On April 14, 1935, the catastrophic Black Sunday dust storm sweeps across Cimarron County, Oklahoma, turning afternoon light into pitch-black midnight. When seventy-mile-an-hour winds snap the telegraph lines along the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific tracks, an inbound relief train hurtles blind through the dust, unaware that a massive sand dune has buried the switch at Milepost 62.
Eleven-year-old Hobie Miller straps on his absent father’s lineman irons and grabs his fence pliers, determined to halt the locomotive. With his mother choking on dust pneumonia and his nine-year-old sister Ruthie manning the parlor telephone battery, Hobie races into the blinding gale to bridge three miles of downed wire across a supercharged cattle fence.
Every minute narrows the distance between eighty tons of charging iron and disaster. To trip the trackside semaphore in time, Hobie must battle rotted cedar poles, stinging electrostatic discharges, and an impossible mechanical breakdown before the relief train jumps the iron and destroys the county's only hope for clean water.
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A short preview from Copper, Wire, and Prairie Wind.
The Sucker-Rod and the Horizon
The galvanized platform of the eight-foot Aermotor windmill shivered under Hobie Miller’s boots, humming like a bowed saw blade. Twenty feet below, the dry pasture stretched flat and yellow toward the Texas line, scored with dead sorghum stubble and pale caliche dust. A mile to the north, the section road lay empty beneath a sun that felt greasy through the gray haze, hot and thin as grease on a cold skillet.
Hobie leaned his ribs against the cold angle-iron rail and wiped his forehead with the greasy cuff of his father’s flannel shirt. The wind was blowing out of the south-southwest, steady and mean, carrying the taste of pulverized river clay from the Beaver breaks. It carried something else, too: the dry clatter of the pump jack.
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