Muddy rain reminder of other odd weather events
JERRY AULDS

The sticky, slurpy mud bath Mother Nature dumped on the Ricebelt a week or so back produced boom times for car wash emporiums while stirring old-timers' ruminations on historic nasty, bad old storms.

After listening to a slew of South Texas Global Warming tales - "The White Christmas of 2004," The deluge of '68" and "Hurricane Carla in '61" - I'm convinced none tops the 1953 norther that came roiling and boiling into the Texas Panhandle and coated my hometown of Borger with a slippery witches brew of wind-driven dust, rain and carbon black.

On the Texas High Plains of the early- and mid-50s, frigid cold northers often blasted the landscape with a combination of wind-blown topsoil and carbon black belching out of tall smokestacks.

What was rare in those droughty times was heavy rain.

On that winter day in '53, the confluence of man, nature and a Borger ISD Junior High School construction project beget a day for scholars to contemplate, scientists to study and for students to skate.

Looking over the rocky, rutted and uneven junior high school yard, the administration recommended and school trustees voted to asphalt the whole shebang.

And when the norther blew in misting the school yard with its black magic amalgam of rare rain, fine dust and refined carbon black (the product that supplanted natural rubber in tires for the war effort in the Second World War) and eighth or ninth grade teenager could, with only minimal thrust, glide smoothly, effortlessly and ever more swiftly down the slight grade.

"Enhanced viscosity," a slick term if I ever heard one, was the key, pronounced one of our future NASAbound, slip-stick wielding classmates.

Alas, the friction-evading discovery, came to naught, a process like the embalming practiced by the ancient Egyptians, lost to history.

Perhaps one of our classmates from the Class of '58 can rediscover the process when we convene for our 50-year reunion in July of this year.

Unfortunately, conjuring up a July norther, let alone rain, may prove to be a daunting task for even the best and brightest of the Class of '58.