Editorial: The day Chicago got a dusty taste of ‘The Grapes of Wrath'

Chicago Tribune

19-05-2025

'A gentle wind followed the rain clouds, driving them on northward, a wind that softly clashed the drying corn,' wrote John Steinbeck in Chapter 1 of 'The Grapes of Wrath,' his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel charting the stormy upheaval faced by those who toiled on the American prairie in the 1930s. 'Little by little,' he wrote, 'the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away. The wind grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke.'
We associate such images with the Oklahoma of Woody Guthrie ('I am made out of this dust and out of this fast wind'), but on Friday, Chicagoland had its own encounter with a dust storm.
Clouds of the stuff — what stuff? — darkened our sky, obscured our view as walked our dogs, blew through our high school graduation ceremonies, halted plane departures at Midway Airport and made freeway travel even more difficult than usual thanks to the sensation of driving into a great wall of dust. Fans of Beyoncé, slated to play Saturday night at Solider Field, fretted that their visibility would be limited by more than the cowboy hats on their heads. Chicagoans headed out from their homes to find a Friday dust cloud coming at them with the intensity of the raging infected souls in the dystopian TV show 'The Last of Us.'
Chicago, we should note, did not experience the Friday tornadoes that ravaged cities like St. Louis, where loss of life occurred. At least 14 people died in Kentucky and seven in Missouri.
But Friday still was an extraordinary day, so much so that those of us who have been around these parts a while racked our brains as to when we previously had seen the like. Weather forecasters were doing the same. The National Weather Service said that this was first time it had issued a dust storm warning that included the city of Chicago.
What happened? 'Thunderstorms in central Illinois produced a big push of wind (60 to 70 mph) that surged northward into our area,' the National Weather Service said. 'As the winds moved over dry farmlands, it collected and suspended dust into the air. The trajectory of the push of wind was oriented into the Chicago area. Hence, we got a dust storm.'
But that didn't answer the question of why this hadn't happened since the notorious Dust Bowl of Steinbeck's writing. Some pointed to the exceptionally dry conditions in central Illinois this spring even as the fields had been recently tilled. Some noted the exceptional speed of the winds around Bloomington and Normal that pushed the dust to the north. Some fretted over agricultural practices that made such events more likely, issuing timely reminders that the problem of soil erosion in the Land of Lincoln did not disappear in Steinbeck's era. So noted.
As in all such events, there were winners as well as losers. With Chicago vehicles coated in a thin film of earthy particles, Chicago's car washes had a banner Saturday.