Phyllis Enarson remembers when the horizon disappeared.

Her perspective as a 5-year-old is still vivid. A nebulous mass consumed the blank Kansas sky, she can remember, the shadow hanging heavy and opaque as it rolled closer.

"All of a sudden this black cloud formed in the West," said Enarson, 87, seated in her Hayden home on Monday. "It went way up and enveloped everything, and strong winds went with it always."

It would remain for several years.

Enarson, native of Hunter, Kan., acknowledged that the entire country heard about the Dust Bowl ravaging the West throughout the '30s, the result of drought and poor farming practices.

But few grasped what it was like to survive it, as Enarson and her farming family did for three oppressive years of her childhood.

Those experiences have become fresh again, she said, after her nephew's recent discovery of old articles written by her mother, Mildred Baker, a newspaper columnist during and after the Depression.

"I was in awe," Enarson said of seeing the columns again. "It just brought everything back."

Everything being nightmarish, despairing memories. Storms carrying truckloads of dirt bombarded the small Kansas hamlet nearly nonstop, she said, building up drifts of dirt that buried farm machinery and weighed down fences. During the worst of the storms, Enarson said, the particles swarming through the air were so dense it wasn't possible to see across the street.

"You could cut it with a knife, it was so thick," she said.

Some got lost walking in the storms, she said. Some died. She and her three siblings were forbidden from straying far from the home, even to attend school, in case a bad storm hit.

Though quality of life wasn't much better at the farm.

"My mother cut rags and put them around windows and doors to keep the dust out, but it didn't work," Enarson said.

When she woke every morning, she said, there was a white circle on the pillow where her head had lain, surrounded by a layer of dirt.

Her mother once filled three bushels by shoveling dirt off the staircase, she added.

"You'd be breathing it all the time," Enarson said, adding that when she was sick with measles, her parents waved a wet cloth over her face so she could breath. "How I survived, I don't know."

Besides the air, the dust smothered the family's livelihood. The storms wiped out their acres of orchards. Their cattle died, as did their pigs, chickens, horses.

"Anything that was alive," Enarson said.

There was no help from the government back then, she added. Everyone relied on their friends and neighbors to get by.

"(My parents) had a hard life, but they worked hard and never gave up," she said.

She doesn't know how her parents made do, she said, but they managed to feed their children and even provide food for their starving neighbors.

Every day there was a stream of homeless drifting by their home, she said, some with small children, some in canvas wagons with animals tethered in back.

With preserved fruit stored up, her family fed them all, she said.

"That has held true for me, for the rest of my life," Enarson said. "I've always looked out for the other guy."

Throughout the blizzards of grit, Enarson said her mother was constantly at work caring for four children and writing her column, for which she was only compensated with free newspaper subscriptions. The family's telephone was ever ringing with calls from folks pitching stories and tidbits for the writer to mention.

"She wrote things like 'Johnny came home from abroad to visit family,'" she said. "All the interests of the country. People loved to have their name in the paper, you know? It was important."

Otherwise, her family passed the time indoors by wearing out the Monopoly board, she said.

For such a young girl, and even for the entire family, she said, the ruthless dust outside was terrifying.

"It was horrible," she said. "I'll never forget it, even as young as I was."

Many moved, Enarson noted, but with little improvement expected, as joblessness was rampant across the country.

Her own family escaped when her father found a job with John Deere in Beloit, Kan., in 1939. It was like a "whole different world," there, she said - clear air, clear sky.

When Enarson eventually moved on to California, she adopted her parents' work ethic, she said, serving on civic boards and multiple PTAs as she raised three children with her now late husband Joe.

The dust that ushered her into adolescence taught her to take nothing for granted, she said.

"It made me appreciate everything I had, appreciate everything around me," Enarson said.

She is the only member of the original Baker family living, though she has three children and seven grandchildren. Enarson's advice to others, she said, is to enjoy what they have while they have it. To strive to support themselves, like her family did.

And to respect the whims of nature.

"I look back on it as a terrible experience. There wasn't anything good about it," she said of the years of pervasive dust. "I hope that never happens again."