potato cart on wooden floor

This morning I heard the potato cart.

I was in bed listening. The sound told me what may be coming.

It is the sound of a potato cart being turned over and the potatoes spilling out onto a wooden floor. 

That is exactly how it sounds.

It doesn’t sound like people running upstairs on the floor while you are trying to sleep. Little kids running with complete abandon - back and forth. Unsupervised. 

I only bring up the running kids analogy because maybe it is something you can related to. Maybe you can’t imagine a potato cart being overturned on wooden floors although that would be a more accurate description of the sound.

If you live in the plains or the midwest part of the United States, you know the sound. If you live somewhere else in the world where the vastness of grasses and trees that stretch out forever doesn’t exist then maybe you haven’t heard the sound.

I was in bed listening. The sound told me what may be coming.

First it would be wind. Maybe a little at first. Then more. And then the rush. The crashing.

Once I saw it coming across the plains. We were traveling West - maybe in “The Dakotas” or Nebraska I don’t remember - and we were parked in a small motorized RV. 

Out on the plains. 

Exposed. 

Only two other RV’s in the park… not that it mattered.

I went outside to look at the sky because I heard the storm coming. I felt the wind on my face. The grasses nearby were bending showing you the direction of the wind. The rumble of the potato wagon was soft. It would get louder. Louder still. Then it would change and not be a rumble, but a crash.

The lightening would be upon us. Around us. I would then count the seconds from the flash of light until the crash of the thunder. The timing would tell me if it was close or far away. It was an exercise without true meaning because I didn’t know if three seconds meant it was in the RV park or a mile away.

While I was standing outside I could see the cloud front moving from the west. The wind grew stronger and the trees in the distance were in distress. The sky in the west was gray and the sky around me was a color that no one can agree upon. I call it green and no one else calls it green. They don’t have an alternative color to describe it. No one does. It is a weird color that accompanies these storms.

Everyone thinks that color bodes of a twister. A tornado, where the wind’s don’t sweep past you but twist around and around to carry whatever it wants away. They are terrible and have their own whimsical nature in that they don’t care. At their whim they will carry away a cat, a car, a tree, a house with a family of four. It doesn’t care. 

Somewhere in a city far away there is a man or woman looking at a computer screen and they are telling their boss that there is a storm. These people will try to make sense of the senseless. they will try to understand the chaos. They will fail. They will leave the people on the plains to their own devices and watch the wind as patterns on a screen, protected by distance. 

Maybe they will hit a button that will send a signal to that place on the plains far away. The signal will cause an alarm to sounds that says "get ready".  It says, "do the best you can". 

And the people at the computer screens may whisper a prayer or say "good luck".

The alarm will sound in a small city, no one in an RV park on the plains will hear it. They are, we are, "on our own".

Back on the plains I quickly stowed everything that was outside. There was nowhere to go. Should we go? Go where? Maybe if we left we would be driving into instead of away from the storm. Maybe. 

Would it be better to jump into a ditch at the last second if needed. Or was it better to “ride it out” inside the beast of a vehicle that was the RV. It wouldn’t be too late to know, until it was too late to know.

The wind swept by. It didn’t sweep us up. We weren’t observers nor were we participants. Observers don’t wonder if their molecules might be instantly rearranged by thousands of volts of random lightening followed by a load BOOM that they would not hear. Participants on the other hand might be made one with the wind, swept up and swept away. Sometimes they find the still bodies of the participants and sometimes they are,,, just… gone.

The wind swept by and went on across the plains to terrorize people to our East.  Suddenly it was calm. Some strange rain. Strange in that it was normal. And normal seemed strange after the madness of the storm.

Today I lay in bed and listened to the potato cart and remembered the day on the plains.

©David L Arment, 2026