two hundred siege guns: Powers, War and the Weather, 200.
The war had been fought: Spence, The Rainmakers, 29.
In 1890, Charles Benjamin Farwell: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 64.
The chief of the division: Donald Grebner, Pete Bettinger, and Jacek Siry, Introduction to Forestry and Natural Resources (London: Academic Press, 2013), 410.
He complained that he had neither men nor means: Spence, The Rainmakers, 29.
The agent was Robert St. George Dyrenforth: Ibid., 30.
“A patent lawyer”: Ibid., 30–31.
“They Made Rain”: Ibid., 33–34.
When the real experiments began: Dyrenforth, “Report of the Agent,” 19.
Still, Dyrenforth reported dark clouds: Ibid.
The farm journalists sometimes witnessed: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 67, 69.
Instead, they repeated the hype: Spence, The Rainmakers, 34.
“more than one Congressman”: Ibid., 35.
The following year, Congress again ignored: Ibid., 41.
The nocturnal explosions rained: Clark C. Spence, “The Dyrenforth Rainmaking Experiments: A Government Venture in Pluviculture,” Arizona and the West, vol. 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1961), 227.
“The scheme”: Ibid., 228.
When he wrote to U.S. agriculture secretary: Ibid., 229.
That left people particularly vulnerable: Spence, The Rainmakers, 39–40.
Working in explosives: Louise Pound, “Nebraska Rain Lore and Rain Making, California Folklore Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 2 (April 1946), 135.
On a hot July day: Ibid.
He claimed he’d been forced: Spence, The Rainmakers, 52.
He took bets: Ibid., 53.
Melbourne began to charge $500: Pound, “Nebraska Rain Lore and Rain Making,” 137.
He toted it: Spence, The Rainmakers, 55–56.
In Canton: Ibid., 53.
“Melbourne Causes the Rain to Fall”: Ibid., 60.
Police ruled it a suicide: Ibid., 62.
After Melbourne left Goodland: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 86–87.
By 1902, he was dabbling: Spence, The Rainmakers, 80–81.
He got into professional rainmaking: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 90.
“I simply attract clouds”: Nick D’Alto, “The Rainmakers,” Weatherwise, vol. 53, no. 5 (September/October 2000), 26–33.
“When it comes to my knowledge”: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 90.
He was soon credited: D’Alto, “The Rainmakers,” 26–33.
Hatfield worked like a madman: Ibid.
In Hatfield’s home: Ibid.
If Morena topped its banks: Spence, The Rainmakers, 90–91.
On January 27 the Lower Otay Dam burst: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 94. 170 The disaster became known as “Hatfield’s Flood”: Spence, The Rainmakers, 91.
The city lawyers: Ibid., 92.
“He was anxious to explain”: “Italy Engages Rainmaker,” New York Times, August 22, 1922, 6.
He made a trip to Honduras: Spence, The Rainmakers, 96.
When the spectacle was over: Ibid., 94–95.
Hatfield’s fans urged: Ibid., 98.
The headline in the Washington Post: “Charles Hatfield, The Rainmaker, Dies in Obscurity,” Washington Post, April 16, 1958, C2.
When the ag secretary Jeremiah Rusk: Jeremiah McLain Rusk, “The Future of American Agriculture,” in Albert Shaw, ed., The Review of Reviews, February 1893, 331.
Wright had been a key: Peter L. Jakab, “Aerospace in Adolescence: McCook Field and the Beginnings of Modern Flight Research,” in Peter Galison and Alex Roland, eds., Proceedings of the Evolution of Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, MIT, April 4–5, 1997.
“The cloud began to fade away”: Manus McFadden, “Is Rainmaking Riddle Solved?” Popular Science Monthly, May 1923, 29.
Grandson of the well-known historian: John W. Servos, Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling: The Making of a Science in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 159.
Bancroft had a particular: Wilder Dwight Bancroft, Applied Colloid Chemistry (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1921), 2.
He pondered the mechanics of raindrops: Ibid., 283–86.
It is not clear how: Spence, The Rainmakers, 104.
Infused with sand: Ibid.
He wrote to Warren: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 113.
The sand shot out: L. Francis Warren, “Facts and Plans: Rainmaking—Fogs and Radiant Planes,” January 2, 1928.
The head of McCook Field: “Expect to Spend $10,000,000 for New Buildings on Big Air Site,” Dayton Daily News, October 29, 1922, 11.
Warren and Bancroft might have cashed in: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 116.
“The idea of the college professor”: Ibid.
“No use arguing”: “Rainmaking Plans Attacked as Futile,” New York Times, March 22, 1923, 10.
While the electrified sand: Spence, The Rainmakers, 114–15.
With little to show: Ibid., 114.
They hauled the portable dynamometer: Jakab, “Aerospace in Adolescence.”
This included aircraft icing: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 139.
Langmuir and Schaefer decided: Earrington S. Havens, “History of Project Cirrus,” General Electric Report No. RL-756, July 1952, 3–5.
It turns out that supercooled: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 143.
When Schaefer shared his discovery: Ibid.
Langmuir, fifty miles away: Ibid., 146–47.
GE lost no time in asking the military: Ibid., 147.
The New York Times crowed: “Three-Mile Cloud Made into Snow by Dry Ice Dropped from Plane,” New York Times, November 15, 1946, 24.
Letters, telegrams, and postcards: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 148.
Vonnegut experimented: Ibid., 154.
GE employees were: Havens, “History of Project Cirrus,” 13.
“No chemist, physicist, or mathematician”: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 156.
Ten years later, an advisory committee: Dianne Dumanoski, The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), 136.
The idea was to flood out roads: Clyde Edward Wood, Mud: A Military History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007), 46.
Operating out of Udorn Royal Air Base: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 180.
In 1972, Seymour Hersh: Seymour M. Hersh, “Rainmaking Is Used as Weapon by U.S.,” New York Times, July 3, 1972, 1.
At congressional hearings: Peter Braestrup, “Witness Silent on Rain War,” Washington Post, July 27, 1972, A-21.
The years of drought and storm: Marquis Childs, “Making War with the Weather,” Washington Post, July 13, 1976, A-19.
Project Popeye’s final report: Wood, Mud, 47.
State water scientists in Utah: Utah Division of Water Resources, “Cloud Seeding,” pamphlet, March 2003.
“There is still no convincing scientific proof”: National Research Council, Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003), 3.
China spends by far the most: Xinhua Chinese News Agency, “Better Tech to Boost Weather Manipulation,” May 23, 2012, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/sci/2012-05/23/c_131605614.htm.
Roelof Bruintjes, lead scientist for weather modification: Author interview with Roelof Bruintjes, National Center for Atmospheric Research, April 30, 2014.
Miamians rowed: Jay Barnes, Florida’s Hurricane History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 175–76.
The GE and military scientists: “Destroying a Hurricane,” New York Times, September 10, 1947, 26.
He described a “pronounced modification”: Irving Langmuir, The Collected Works of Irving Langmuir (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1960), 172–73.
“Savannah early this morning”: “1947 October 15: Hurricane Hits Savannah,” Savannah Morning News, August 8, 2010.
The federal government’s chief hurricane forecaster: Jack Williams and Bob Sheets, Hurricane Watch: Forecasting the Deadliest Storms on Earth (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 161.
Soon after the fateful hurricane: General Electric Company, General Electric Review, vol. 55 (1952), 26.
Hurricane scientists were dismayed: Williams and Sheets, Hurricane Watch, 162.
The quote was a flourish: “Postal Service Mission and ‘Motto,’ ” U.S. Postal Service, postal history, http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/mission-motto.pdf.
In 2009, the billionaire Microsoft founder: “The Latest on Hurricane Suppression,” Intellectual Ventures, IV Insights Blog, October 30, 2012, http://www.intellectualventures.com/insights/archives/the-latest-on-hurricane-suppression.
NINE: WRITERS ON THE STORM
His primary school was a “bleak mausoleum”: Morrissey, Autobiography (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 8.
A young visitor, Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (Hamburg, Germany: Tredition Classics, 1845).
It was Marr who came: Johnny Marr, personal biographical sketch, http://www.johnny-marr.com/about.
“a vast company that loves misery”: Michael Azerrad, “Book Review: ‘Autobiography’ by Morrissey,” Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2013.
Marr said that the band’s: Johnny Marr, “The Smiths Make Their Top of the Pops Debut,” Guardian, June 13, 2011.
Their 1984 hit: “500 Greatest Songs of all Time,” Rolling Stone, April 7, 2011.
“Teenage depression”: Tom Cardy, “He’s Not Miserable Now,” Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand), December 14, 2012.
“His composition that evening was full of raindrops”: Tad Szulc, Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000), 212.
The Manchester-born music journalist: Nabeel Zuburi, “ ‘The Last Truly British People You Will Ever Know’: Skinheads, Pakis, and Morrissey,” in Henry Jenkins III, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, eds., Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 541.
The Doors used those sorts of sound effects, Stephen K. Valdez, A History of Rock Music (Dubuque, Ia.: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 2006), 318.
But the song’s well-known rain solo: Jon Pareles, “Harold Rhodes, 89, Inventor of an Electric Piano,” obituary, New York Times, January 4, 2001.
The area consistently suffers: Jim Vleming, “Grays Harbor County Profile,” Washington State Employment Security Department, July 2012, https://fortress.wa.gov/esd/employmentdata/reports-publications/regional-reports/county-profiles/grays-harbor-county-profile.
Some ascribe the rise of Cobain: Pete Prown and Harvey P. Newquist, Legends of Rock Guitar: The Essential Reference of Rock’s Greatest Guitarists (Milwaukee, Wis.: Hal Leonard, 1997), 242–43.
Anthologies seem to have no end: See the “Rain” entry in Tessa Kale, ed., The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Anthologies (New York: Columbia University Press, 13th edition, 2007), 2126–27.
“It’s a sorrowful morning”: Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert, February 1852, in Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 177.
Dickinson considered rain: “Everything is so still here, and the clouds are cold and gray—I think it will rain soon—Oh I am so lonely!” she writes to her brother in 1851. Emily Dickinson to Austin Dickinson, October 25, 1851, in ibid., 150.
“We are a rather crestfallen company”: Emily Dickinson to Austin Dickinson, June 8, 1851, in ibid., 110–12.
In other letters, Dickinson describes her horror: Emily Dickinson to Austin Dickinson, October 5, 1851, in ibid., 140.
Dickinson’s dark days: Christopher H. Ramey and Robert W. Weisberg, “The ‘Poetical Activity’ of Emily Dickinson: A Further Test of the Hypothesis That Affective Disorders Foster Creativity,” Creativity Research Journal, vol. 16, nos. 2 & 3 (April 1, 2004), 173–85.
In fiction, rain gives a sense: Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (London: Harmsworth Library, 1905), 681.
Louisa was sure: Bernard N. Schilling, The Rain of Years: Great Expectations and the World of Dickens (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 21.
In The Old Curiosity Shop: Ibid., 22.
Snowy London winters: Bill McGuire, Global Catastrophes: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 53.
Lord Byron suggested: Lucian Boia, The Weather in the Imagination (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 107.
The Earth, and he, were grateful: Walter Raymond, The Book of Simple Delights (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1906), 129.
Hardy, putting hangman: Thomas Hardy, “The Three Strangers,” in Wessex Tales (London: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 35–61; and Thomas Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor (New York: Harper, 2003), 76.
None worked as perfectly: Harold Bloom, ed., Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (New York: Infobase Publishing), 26.
“The fiery exultation”: Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker (Boston: Harcourt/Harvest Paperbacks, 1978; orig. pub. 1961), 239.
The counterpoint to rain as cleanser: Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, 77.
The sight of herself sullied: Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Vintage International, 2004), 312–16.
“At the calendar’s gloaming”: Timothy Egan, “The Longest Nights,” New York Times, January 10, 2013.
It is said that one in ten: Rosie Goldsmith, “Iceland: Where One in 10 People Will Publish a Book,” BBC News, October 13, 2013.
In his four-part “Gifts of Rain”: Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968–2008 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 3, 85.
Rain, gray skies, and lightning: S. E. Gontarski, ed., A Companion to Samuel Beckett (West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 193.
“I mean, it wasn’t always as stormy”: Woody Allen, Radio Days (Orion Pictures, January 1987).
“is for me an aphrodisiac”: Kristi McKim, Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (New York: Routledge, 2013), 109.
The final, rain-kiss scene: McKim, Cinema as Weather, 95.
“People are confined”: Woody Allen and Stig Bjorkman, Woody Allen on Woody Allen (New York: Grove Press, revised edition, 2005), 186.
The unconvincing line: Alasdair Glennie, “Andie MacDowell Defends THAT Four Weddings Line,” Daily Mail, March 29, 2013.
To conjure a tempest: Alexander Pope, No. 78, June 10, 1713, in The Works of Alexander Pope, with Notes and Illustrations by Himself and Others, vol. 5 (London: Longman, Brown, and Co., etc., 1847 edition), 440–41.
Charles Schulz’s Snoopy: Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, 74.
“the rain fell in torrents”: Edward Lytton Bulwer, “Paul Clifford,” in The Works of Edward Lytton Bulwer, Esq., in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1836), 523.
“Wild piles of dark and coppery clouds”: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The American Claimant (The Gutenberg Project, 2006, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3179/3179-h/3179-h.htm), originally published 1892.
“We all need rain”: Paul A. Woods, Morrissey in Conversation: The Essential Interviews (Medford, N.J.: Plexus, 2007), 156. The emphasis is added.
As the millennium turned: Marilyn Ann Moss, Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 178. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard bought their Encino estate from the director Raoul Walsh. It was on Petit Street, but they changed the name to Tara Drive.
He rented a little guest house: Budd Schulberg, “Remembering Scott,” in Jackson Bryer, Alan Margolies and Ruth Prigozy, eds., F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Perspectives (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 11–12. Scott rented the Encino guest
cottage of Edward Everett Horton.
The estate lies just south of Ventura: 4543 Tara Drive, Encino, California, 91436. Lynn Barber, “The Man with the Thorn in His Side,” Observer, September 14, 2002. This was where Morrissey was living in 2002, when Lynn Barber of The Observer asked him about his estate, and whether he really lived next door to Johnny Depp. Morrissey corrected her: “No—he lives next door to me.”
TEN: THE SCENT OF RAIN
While color and song eventually returned: Waldemar Hansen, The Peacock Throne: The Drama of Mogul India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), 113.
A seven-spouted silver hydra: Ibid., 124–25.
“Smell,” wrote Helen Keller: Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: The Century Co., 1904), 66.
“My little friends and I”: Ibid., 67–68.
Geosmin is the bane: Mark Waer, Leland Harms, Rick Bond, and Nicholas Burns, “A Matter of Taste: How to Control the Odor and Flavor of Water Before Residents Raise a Stink,” American City & County, June 1, 2003, 16–24.
In the desert Southwest: Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O’Odham Country (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982), 5–6. Nabhan once asked a Papago Indian boy to describe what the desert smelled like to him. “The desert smells like rain,” he replied. How could that be, Nabhan wanted to know, when it hardly ever rains there? It turns out that his question had triggered in the child the strong memory of a scent. When the boy pondered the smell of the desert, he remembered feeling overtaken by the odor of creosote bushes after a storm—their aromatic oils released by the rains. The scent and the memory attached to it were so strong that they became, for him, the desert’s essence.
“Clean but funky”: Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Scribner, 2000; orig. pub. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 69.
To Sanjiv Chopra: Deepak Chopra and Sanjiv Chopra, Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream (Seattle: Amazon Publishing, 2013), 23.
At fifty-three, he wrote of how: Rafael E. Lopez-Corvo, The Dictionary of the Work of W. R. Bion (London: H. Harnac, 2003), 2–3.
The scent can so tantalize: I. J. Bear and R. G. Thomas, “Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” Nature, vol. 201, no. 4923 (March 7, 1964), 993–95.
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