Menace awaits Mark Hooper in a Kentish field.

At the brow of the hill I paused on the road, leaning on a five-bar metal gate to look back across the fields, trying to pick out familiar landmarks. Through the heat haze I watched the small cloud of dust and crops following in the wake of a tractor hidden by the slope, which seemed also to muffle its noise. 

As the flying debris grew closer, working its way up the hill towards me, something about the scene didn’t sit right. The steady plume was thrown up vertically in the air with seemingly no source. No tractor was at its head. The silence was baffling. With a start, I sensed that perhaps it was an animal, not a machine, that was causing the weird spectacle. But more than that. A herd, surely, moving at such speed and apparent violence. It was hard to make out the velocity or direction, but it seemed to be heading diagonally towards me.

I braced myself against the rusty gate, unsure of how much protection it would give me — or even what it would have to protect me from. I rested one foot on the bottom bar, then lifted myself up fully on it, testing its strength. It sagged forwards a little, straining at the baling twine that held the hinges in place, but it held my weight. I climbed up to the middle bar, peering over the edge of the rise for a better view. 

Then I saw it fully. 

It was a small whirlwind; a swirling mass of corn — stalks, ears and other fragments — mixed with dirt, foliage, and anything else in its path, picked up and twisted into a spiral above the ground.

Identifying it didn’t make it feel any more defined in my mind. The words my brain scanned through — tornado, twister — seemed too alien for a field in Kent. Relating the phenomenon to a friend over a cold pint that evening, they came up with a local name that seemed to describe it far better — ‘That was a dust devil,’ they said, with the proud air of a wiley farmer rather than a semi-retired City worker. There was certainly something sinister about the way it moved, snaking in zigzags across the ploughed earth, sometimes following the groove of a furrow before suddenly leaping in another direction with what seemed like cold purpose.

It passed in front of me at a small distance until it settled against the base of the hedgerow, finally finding its progress halted. Penned in, it paced up and down, as if searching for an opening, gathering in size, its growing power like pent-up rage.

Then the weirdest thing happened.

Just when it seemed to be burning itself out, stuck in a deepening rut of its own making, it  jumped. 

The broken tarmac lane I stood on must have been ten feet across — one of those country lanes that can’t quite contain two cars passing abreast — with a ditch on the far side before rising to a small verge and another hedgerow. But just as the dust devil seemed to die down to almost nothing, it reappeared in the field directly opposite, right against the facing hedgerow.  

Suddenly released, it flailed wildly away, down the opposite bank, growing far larger than it had been when it passed me. Gathering speed, it raced into the distance until I lost sight of it in the shadows of the valley, and an eerie calm returned, its only sign the pieces of ripped corn gently drifting groundwards, like a light flurry of golden snow.

I looked around for someone to share the moment with. Eventually a car drove up the lane, cautiously, keeping half an eye out for a passing lane, the driver’s window wound down so he could hear any vehicles heading towards him, his bronzed elbow resting in the empty space of the door frame. Slowing as he saw me, he smiled and nodded, thinking I’d climbed the gate to give him space.

‘Beautiful day,’ he said.

I wanted to tell him what he’d just missed, to somehow articulate the thrall and rapture of seeing the sheer energy of the elements up close, humbling and unexplainable.

Instead, I grinned dumbly back at him.

‘Beautiful,’ I replied.