Starbuck counters: “You gotta take my deal because once in your life you gotta take a chance on a con man! You gotta take my deal because there’s dyin’ calves that might pick up and live! Because a hundred bucks is only a hundred bucks—but rain in a dry season is a sight to behold! You gotta take my deal because it’s gonna be a hot night—and the world goes crazy on a hot night—and maybe that’s what a hot night is for!” H. C. responds, “Starbuck, you got you a deal!”
While the family is busy performing their rainmaking rituals, Starbuck romances Lizzie, getting her to acknowledge her own beauty. Here is where real confidence is built. But Starbuck, also known as Tornado Johnson, is wanted for selling four hundred tickets to a rain festival when it did not rain, peddling a thousand pairs of smoked eyeglasses to view an eclipse of the Sun that never happened, and selling six hundred wooden poles guaranteed to turn tornadoes into a gentle spring breeze (152). In a final confrontation with the town officers of Three Point, one of whom is sweet on Lizzie, Starbuck throws the $100 on the table and makes a dramatic escape. He returns soon thereafter, just as the drought breaks and a storm is unleashed overhead: “Rain, folks—it’s gonna rain! Rain, Lizzie—for the first time in my life—rain!” (as he takes the money and races out for the second time, pausing only long enough to wave to Lizzie). “So long—beautiful!” (182).
The Rainmaker opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre, New York City, on October 28, 1954, with Darren McGavin as Bill Starbuck and Geraldine Page as Lizzie Curry. London’s Daily Mail called the production “a beautiful little comedy with a catch in its throat.”19 One reviewer commented that Starbuck captivated Lizzie and her family “neither to connive nor corrupt but because he must live in a glow of esteem, and what to do in that case but radiate it oneself?”20 A 1956 film version starred Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael observed:
The cowtown spinster suffering from drought is Katharine Hepburn, and the man who delivers the rain is Burt Lancaster. The casting is just about perfect. Lancaster has an athletic role, in which he can also be very touching. His con man isn’t a simple trickster; he’s a poet and dreamer who needs to convince people of his magical powers. Hepburn is stringy and tomboyish, believably plain yet magnetically beautiful. This is a fairy tale (the ugly duckling) dressed up as a bucolic comedy and padded out with metaphysical falsies, but it is also genuinely appealing, in a crude, good-spirited way, though N. Richard Nash, who wrote both the play and the adaptation, aims too solidly at lower-middle-class tastes. Once transformed, the heroine rejects the poet for the deputy sheriff (Wendell Corey); if there were a sequel, she might be suffering from the drought of his imagination.21
A musical adaptation, 110 in the Shade (1963), played to packed houses; a remake broadcast on HBO in 1982, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Tuesday Weld, was less than memorable; and a Broadway revival featuring Woody Harrelson and Jayne Atkinson in the lead roles opened and closed with little fanfare in 1999. Still, The Rainmaker has perennial appeal and has been performed many times since by innumerable school and community theater groups.
Sky King and the Indian Rainmaker
Sky King, America’s favorite flying cowboy, ruled the “clear blue Western skies” over the Flying Crown Ranch in Arizona (although the opening credits showed a high cirrostratus haze). With the help of his niece Penny, nephew Clipper, and private airplane, the Songbird, Sky King solved mysteries, rescued those in need, and fought villains—on radio from 1946 to 1954 and intermittently on television on Saturday mornings from 1951 to 1962. In June 1948, as news of cloud seeding at the General Electric Corporation reached the public (chapter 5), an episode titled “The Rainmakers Magic” aired on radio. Eight years later, in 1956, the TV episode “The Rainbird” revisited the topic, juxtaposing traditional and modern methods of weather control.
During a devastating drought, Indian dancers, medicine men, and rainmakers implore the heavens for rain. The chief and elders of the local tribe present their elderly medicine man, Tai-Lam, with an ultimatum: bring rain in two days or be replaced. Sky King, who is sympathetic, decides to help out behind the scenes by seeking advice from the local weather bureau on when and where to seed the clouds. Penny coordinates efforts, signaling Tai-Lam to begin shaking his Kachina doll and droning his pitiful rainmaking chant, while Sky King simultaneously seeds an “upper-level front” with silver iodide. A deluge follows, placing both Penny and the tribe at risk, filling the dam to its brim, and threatening to flood the valley. None of the protagonists, however, place the blame on modern weather control technology or traditional methods. The weather bureau attributes the rain to unexpected changes in a naturally occurring system. Tension returns as a second storm rapidly approaches, which could cause the dam to burst. At the risk of his life, Sky King takes off, flying into the weather front to divert it, again by cloud seeding, while Tai-Lam begins a new chant, this time to stop the rain. Through the mixed agency of the Kachina doll and silver iodide, all turns out well at the end of the half-hour episode. This fictional episode has its counterpart in the actual practices of the era. A. J. Liebling described a magazine clipping from 1952 titled “Old Order Changeth: Navajo Indians near Gallup, N.M. have become skeptical of—or just plain bored with—their ancient rainmaking rites. During a recent drought, they hired professional rainmakers to seed the clouds over their reservation. Result: one-and-a-half inches of rain.”22
The futurist Arthur C. Clarke, of all people, wrote about the Zuni tribe of New Mexico, who are famous for their rain dances. At the beginning of the ceremony, just after the summer solstice, a boy representing the Fire God torches a field of dry grass. This serves as a signal for the Zuni dancers, painted with yellow mud and carrying live tortoises, to begin dancing, which continues as long as necessary, until it rains. Clarke editorialized: “That is one beauty of rain making. It always works eventually, though sometimes you have to wait a few weeks or months for the pay-off.”23 A cartoon contrasting traditional and scientific methods accompanied Clarke’s article (figure 1.4).
1.4 Rainmaking old and new.
(CARTOON BY CHARLES ADDAMS, IN CLARKE, “MAN-MADE WEATHER”)
Porky Pig and Donald Duck
Commercial cloud seeding even found its way into the cartoons. The Warner Brothers Looney Tune Porky the Rain-Maker was shown in theaters in 1936. During a devastating drought, Porky sends his son to town with his last dollar to buy feed for the starving animals. There, next to the feed store, Dr. Quack is selling an assortment of “rain pills” for $1 from the back of his wagon. As part of his presentation, Quack hands out umbrellas to the crowd and launches a rain pill into the sky with a peashooter. The pill bursts like Dyrenforth’s ordnance, and rain begins to fall immediately.
Convinced, Porky Jr. buys a box of the pills with the family’s last dollar, but his angry father, in a scene reminiscent of Jack and the Magic Beanstalk, throws them on the ground. This gives rise to a series of comedic shticks. A barnyard chicken eats a lightning pill and is instantly electrified; the old gray mare eats a fog pill and is shrouded in cloud; the goose eats thunder and wind pills and all hell breaks loose. When, in the melee, one of the rain pills reaches the sky, clouds form instantly and the rains fall. As the cartoon credits roll, all ends well on the farm and everyone is happy. “That’s all Folks!”
In Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories (1953), Donald Duck, M.R.M. (Master Rain Maker), has perfected the science of rainmaking. In the opening sequence, a farmer orders 2 inches of rain on his barley field. Donald, wearing an aviator’s helmet and pointing to his bag of M-3 “rain seed,” offers him 2.5 inches for the same price. Donald fulfills his contract with extreme precision “to the millimeter” by seeding the farmer’s X-shaped field with an X-shaped cloud he has “bulldozed” into position. The farmer and his wife are delighted, since none of the rain falls on his hay field next door: “That duck shore is a Jim Dandy! It’s raining right up to the fence row! And the drops that fall on the line even have one
flat side!”
Of course, Donald eventually loses his temper in every cartoon, and this one is no exception. Daisy has gone to the Idle Dandies picnic with Donald’s cousin, Gladstone. Donald, jealous and angry, takes off in his cloud-seeding airplane, this time loaded with “snow starter,” to gain retribution. Flying over the picnic site in Greenwood Canyon in a clear blue sky, Donald’s agitation with his rival increases until he admits, “I feel mean enough now to do anything!” After herding some ominous rain clouds together, Donald declares, “I won’t give ’em ... anything as common as a cloudburst—I’ll give ’em a blizzard!” In a memorable image, he pulls the control lever beyond “rain,” “hail,” and “snow” all the way to “blizzard,” but he miscalculates and “overseeds” the clouds, turning them into a solid dome of ice.
Donald crashes his plane on the ice and parachutes down into the canyon to warn the picnickers of the danger above. The ice dome crashes down on their parked cars, but since this is a Disney cartoon, no one is injured. However, to avoid liability and preserve deniability, Donald suspends his lucrative rain business, sneaks away from the ongoing investigation, and takes an extended vacation—in Timbuktu.
Henderson the Rain King
On a more literary note, in Henderson the Rain King (1959), by Saul Bellow, the title character, Eugene, an introspective, earnest, and egocentric former violinist and pig farmer, seeks to find himself and escape his troubles with the modern world with a one-way ticket to Africa. Traveling cross-country on foot to visit native tribes, he unexpectedly becomes the Great White Sungo, the rain king of the Wariri, when he performs certain feats of prowess. In charge of both moisture and fertility, Henderson participates in a frenzied ceremony involving leaping, drumming, shrieking, chanting, and whipping both images of the gods and one another:
Caught up in this madness, I fended off blows from my position on my knees, for it seemed to me that I was fighting for my life, and I yelled. Until a thunder clap was heard. And then, after a great, neighing, cold blast of wind, the clouds opened and the rain began to fall. Gouts of water like hand grenades burst all about and on me. ... I have never seen such water.24
Having found at least part of himself, Henderson, significantly transformed by his experiences and eager to start anew, takes a flight back to America. In evocative passages that inspired Joni Mitchell’s popular song “Both Sides Now,” Bellow writes, “We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides. What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward. This is bound to change something” (280). “[Clouds are] like courts of eternal heaven. Only they aren’t eternal, that’s the whole thing; they are seen once and never seen again, being figures and not abiding realities” (333).
Cat’s Cradle
At the urging of his older brother Bernard, Kurt Vonnegut moved to Schenectady, New York, in 1947, where he worked, unhappily, as a publicist for General Electric—a company he once said “was science fiction”—in what he called “this goddamn nightmare job.”25 At a time when the air force’s Project Cirrus was taking over the cloud-seeding business (chapter 5), Vonnegut published “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” a science fiction story in Collier’s that emphasizes an inventor’s moral resistance to an attempted militarization of his invention. His first novel, Player Piano (1952), was inspired by the mechanization he witnessed at GE and deals with the demoralizing effects of vast corporations attempting to use technology to automate everything and replace human labor with machines. The setting is Illium, a fictitious town along the Iroquois River in New York State, a dreary mill town dominated by a high-tech factory called Illium Works. In reality, Schenectady, on the Mohawk River, is the home of General Electric, while Illium is the ancient Roman name for Troy, which is also an industrial city near Schenectady in New York.
While still at GE, Vonnegut heard about the visit of H. G. Wells to the plant in the 1930s and how Irving Langmuir proposed a story idea to the famous novelist and futurist involving a new form of water (ice-nine) that would freeze at room temperature. Wells never wrote about this, but Vonnegut thought it might someday be worth pursuing. Bernard Vonnegut had, in reality, identified the hexagonal structure of silver iodide (ice-six?) as a substance that could trigger natural ice formation in clouds. Years later, Vonnegut used these ideas in his book Cat’s Cradle (1963), where a quirky and amoral scientist named Felix Hoenikker, a loose composite of Langmuir and H-bomb scientists Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller, invents a water-like substance that instantly freezes everything it touches. When a tiny crystal of “ice-nine” is brought into contact with liquid water, it stimulates the molecules into arranging themselves into solid form.
Bernard obviously had a big influence on Kurt. Real-life meteorologist Craig Bohren credited Cat’s Cradle with the “best discussion of nucleation” in print and claimed that the novel contained more information on this subject than “all the physics textbooks written since the beginning of time.”26 Indeed, Langmuir and Teller were reportedly fascinated by the theoretical possibility that a substance such as ice-nine could actually exist. In the book, Hoenikker’s intent is to create a material that will be useful to armies bogged down in muddy battlefields, but the result is an unprecedented ecological disaster that destroys the world.
Clearly, the practice of weather control is not restricted to the West, to modern times, or to scientific practices. It has much deeper roots in world cultures and carries much deeper meaning than simply making rain or stopping it. In Rain Making and Other Weather Vagaries (1926), William Jackson Humphreys (1862–1949), a meteorological physicist at the U.S. Weather Bureau, classifies rainmaking into three general categories: magical (practices alleging personal control over secret forces of nature), religious (appeals to a higher power or supernatural being), and scientific (using natural means to alter the otherwise undisturbed course of nature). Closely following Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer’s influential work The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890), Humphreys introduces his readers to magical rainmaking practices such as bloodletting and mimicry of lightning, thunder, rain, and clouds. As did Frazer before him, Humphreys writes of ceremonies to stop the rain, involving the sympathetic magic of setting fires, heating stones, or keeping things dry. His treatment of religious rites includes appeals and supplications directed to the gods, tribal ancestors, or deceased rainmakers. In some cases, the ceremonies are intended to threaten, abuse, or annoy the powers that be. Ringing church bells in inclement weather and praying for rain were the two most common. In his writing, Humphreys tries heroically to separate myth from science and reserves “scientific rainmaking” for special treatment, but as this chapter and those to follow demonstrate, the distinction between mythological and analytical, fictional and aspirational is not so clear-cut.
Today, chemical cloud seeders have largely superseded traditional rain kings and queens, but apart from (apparently) dealing with the same topic, weather control, they hold a vastly different social status. Silver iodide flares may serve as the new fetish replacing shamanistic practices, but traditional rainmakers were and still are celebrated as central figures in their societies, while the cloud seeders are considered culturally marginal at best. If the world’s cultures remain firmly rooted in myth, tradition, and storytelling, so too does the history of weather and climate control.
The hubris and folly of Phaethon, themes from Milton and Dante, and examples drawn from cultures other than our own serve to remind us of the richness and relevance of myth and storytelling. Daniel Quinn’s distinction between the Takers and the Leavers, expressed through the fictional voice of Ishmael, serves further to problematize and universalize human relationships and attitudes toward the sky. Rather than standing in opposition to rationality, these stories point to fundamental relationships among nature, culture, and human solidarity that are currently not being examined in the scientistic West.
The examples of early popular sci-fi literature on weather and climate
control make many of the moral points often left unsaid by scientists and engineers. Some of the stories told here are drawn from prominent authors, but most of them are probably unfamiliar. All of them, written in a variety of genres and from different angles, are relevant to later chapters. Standard histories often privilege the heroic genre. Warriors, statesmen, scientists, and lone inventors rise to face the unknown or to meet unprecedented challenges. This is particularly true in much of the history of science—but not in this book. The FIDO fog-clearing story (chapter 4) is about as close to the heroic genre as it gets.
In the fictional accounts presented here, George Griffith’s Great Weather Syndicate fits the heroic mold, with Arthur Arkwright ending up as a managed hero. Less ruly are the heroic socialists who oppose the Air Trust. Tragedy dominates The Wreck of the South Pole, The Evacuation of England, and the short story “The Rain-Maker.” Mark Twain’s American Claimant is pure comedy, as is the geoengineering Western The Eighth Wonder. So, too, are the stories of Jeremy the rain bat in Jingling in the Wind and Porky the Rain-Maker, while N. Richard Nash’s Rainmaker is a self-described romantic comedy. The Sky King episode is largely unclassifiable, but on balance it is indeed an adventure-farce.
The tragicomedic hybrid genre is also prevalent in this literature, from the Baltimore Gun Club’s failed attempt to tip the Earth’s axis for profit in Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole to PAX and his Lavender Ray in The Man Who Rocked the Earth, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Felix Hoenikker and the practitioners of the absurd human-centered philosophy of Bokononism in Cat’s Cradle. Even Donald Duck, as “Master Rain Maker,” strikes out in anger and slinks away in shame to avoid blame. There are ample opportunities in this type of analysis to reward additional scholars with literary interests—if we can only break out of our narrative ruts. There are no classical heroes here. It is the tragicomic—the voices of Verne, Vonnegut, and even Donald Duck—that seems to come closest to the actual tone of most of the checkered history of weather and climate control.
Fixing the Sky Page 7