The Nixon dustman appeared one Sunday afternoon (August 10, 1968) in the desert near Las Vegas. The huge benumbed skull of the Leader of the Free World was born out of a wicked squall, a rolling lip of grit similar to the great dust bowl kickoff storm in May of 1934, the one that blew “Kansas dirt” three hundred miles off the Atlantic coast and powdered the decks of so many ships. The ‘68 storm came out of the blue (literally) and produced the Nixon Dust Phenomena, as it came to be known: a Mt. Rushmorish, chiseled dustman that swooped down on two hippies who were not quite sure if what they were witnessing was a freakish aberration of nature or just some aftermath of a previous acid trip in which they’d seen dust figures—men and dogs, mainly—arise out of the turbulent sands of the desert. The Nixon dustman had the same smile/grimace that would appear on his face when he appeared publicly one last time, raising his arms skyward in a final so-long salute from the hatch of the presidential helicopter.

Then, of course, the Hemingway dustman appeared near Cabo de Gato National Park. The dustman was sighted by an old peasant holdout dating back to the time of Franco, leading a donkey across the terraced, useless land, and a writer who summered in a house along the cliffs, who was having his afternoon martini on the back patio and happened to be looking east when a dust cloud rose up—as it had so many times before—out of the brisk afternoon winds. He studied the cloud’s progress. That’s a hell of a big dust cloud, he thought. It’s clearly larger than the usual dust clouds. It looks as though a man’s face is appearing. Yes, there’s a skull shape. And lips. And brows. And a forehead. Holy Christ, that’s formidable beard growth. Meanwhile, down in the rambla, the peasant shouted in recognition. The Hemingway dustman outlived all other dustmen, almost outperforming the Grand Tetons dust ghost, a cloud sighted by campers one afternoon that took the shape of a great bear and lasted for at least an hour, a great humping beast of tree smoke (forest fire) and golden pine pollen. ^*As if fueled by the great myth of the man himself, the accidents and broken bones, the falls and plane crashes, the Hemingway dustman backtracked and flew once again over the writer’s house before launching himself out over the Mediterranean, where he sucked water into a pale blue skirt, as if to mock the dry, unyielding terra firma, a land that once nourished fine tomatoes—similar to those now produced by the drip-method farms fifty kilometers to the west, near Málaga.

The Gogol dustman was sighted near St. Petersburg by a computer programmer named Gregor Petrovitch, as he was driving to his office. It formed out of dry summer air (there wasn’t a lot of dust around), a clearly delineated face, and most certainly the face of Gogol, the same small neatly trimmed mustache, the long, dark hair parted on the far right, hanging limp to the side of his wide brow, the eyes soft above an abundantly long, fine nose. Petrovitch pulled over to the shoulder, got out of his car, and snapped a photo (he was an avid amateur photographer). It was the nose, for God’s sake, he told the press. The nose was a dead giveaway. The nose grew until it dwarfed the head. A huge schnoz dancing over the countryside until it gave in to the whims of chaos and unfurled like a giant overcoat. It became known as the Dust Schnoz, the Dancing Nose, and then, later, when the photograph of the dustman was officially identified as Gogol, it was (officially) dubbed the great Gogol dustman, an abhorrent quirk of nature, a glorious case study in the physiognomy of the miraculous.