It's January 21st, 1932 in the Northwestern Texas Panhandle.

Lizzy White is sitting on a wooden stool staring at her bed-ridden child.

Lizzy's son melt is pale and sweaty, and he's been racked with a cough that won't loosen

its grip.

Lizzy leans forward and dabs her son's temples with a rag, but as Melt hacks out another

cough, the winds outside suddenly pick up.

They come whistling in through the cracks in the plank walls of their tiny home,

and as a breeze comes blowing across Lizzie's face, she can taste it, fine particles of dirt.

There's dust all across the house, on the floors and mantle, on the cabinets,

and picture frames and linens.

Everything is coated in a fine layer of prairie soil

that's all but impossible to get rid of.

Lizzy is convinced that this is what's making her son sick, this land, which has been

a plague on their family ever since they first came into town.

The white family never meant to end up in Dalhart, Texas.

They were moving from Colorado looking for a warmer climate in a town south of Amarillo, when the horse making the trip with them keeled over and dropped dead.

Lizzy's husband, Bam, took it as a sign that they were meant to settle down in northwest Texas, but Lizzy saw it differently.

She believed it was a warning sign that the panhandle wasn't a place meant for the living,

and so far Lizzy believes the facts have proven her right.

After the horse died, Lizzy lost a child, a little girl who passed on before she could take

her first breath.

And after that, the sand started falling from the sky like a plague.

...