Fixing the Sky (9 page)

As the plant goes up in flames, the oxygen tank explodes in a huge ball of fire. Thus the socialists foil the attempt to control the air supply of the world—and thus the world itself—and inaugurate the “Great Emancipation” of humanity from the clutches of greedy capitalists. In the words of the protagonist Armstrong, “Academic discussion becomes absurd in the face of plutocratic savagery” that seeks a “complete monopoly of the air, with an absolute suppression of all political rights.” Slavery and violent revolution are the only options.

“The Rain-Maker,” by Margaret Adelaide Wilson, a short story that appeared in
Scribner
'
s Magazine
in 1917, recounts the hopes and dreams of William Converse, who operates, like the real Charles Hatfield at the time (chapter 3), by mixing and evaporating chemicals on a high tower: “The chemicals are holding the storm-centre right overhead, and the evaporation is tremendous. The rain will come this time if it holds off, the wind holds off—if only it holds off.”
¹⁵

Converse is a true believer in his rainmaking process. He came to the desert on a mission: to use his skills to atone for the death of his father, who died of thirst near this very spot some thirty years before. But Converse has much more to confront than just the desiccated sky. His wife, Linda, who thought she was marrying a prosperous entrepreneur, has become super-critical of his idealistic quest, which keeps her cooped up in a tent with a smoky stove, frying bacon and potatoes: “You've gone and thrown up a perfectly good contract in Grass Valley, a thousand sure, and more if your luck held, and you've dragged me off to this God-forsaken spot, with not a soul in thirty miles to know whether it rains or not. I want to know what you mean by it” (503–504). The high-minded Converse, like a modern-day Job, is seeking “to bring rain in the wilderness” by lifting his voice to the heavens as his father did on the night of his death. He receives no support from the vulgar, vain, and greedy Linda, though. She drives him from the tent into the night with her cutting remarks about how she no longer believes in him, and perhaps never did.

“Driven by an animal's blind desire to escape its tormentor, Converse stumble[s] down the rocky path toward the tower” (506). Devastated by her verbal assaults, he realizes that Linda has managed to shatter his faith in himself. He trips over something in the sand, and “a hot pain dart[s] through his ankle ... it must have been a snake” (507). Pitiful and increasingly delirious, he collapses in the dry waterhole where his father met his demise. Even as he nears death, his gaze is fixed on the black and brooding sky, with its great masses of clouds sinking lower until a soft hiss, a pitter-pat of rain on the sand, informs him of “his” success: “Rain!... Rain in the wilderness.... I've not failed, after all.... I must find father and tell him” (509)—an impossible quest for his paralyzed body but not for his triumphant spirit.

Jingling in the Wind
(1928), by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, is a stylistically complex and multivocal tone poem, “a fantasy of weather control.”
¹⁶
Here we meet Jeremy the rainmaker, a man who participates in the pure sensation of nature and “gives it a point.” For Jeremy, interior feelings and reflections trump the mere wetness of the rain, which is the “least significant part”: “He had brought the rain into the sky. With his science and his apparatus he had engendered the rain and now, as rainman, reve of the rain, he looked about and saw his work was well done, saw his work take purpose in the clods and the parted loam.”
¹⁷

Using Jeremy's techniques, the commissioners of rural Jason County, Kentucky, in conference with the farmers, set the rain schedule for the month, but only in their own local jurisdiction. The process is so precise that if you wish for fine weather on a scheduled rain day, you merely need to cross into the next county. Much like the Kansas and Nebraska rainmakers of yore, “retorts, clouds,
equations, antennae, derricks, vats, and acids” play their symbolic, if nondescript, roles in the rainmaking scenes. So does the hall of the rainmen, where licensed practitioners confer and visitors thumb charts, prod apparatus, and inscribe their names in the guest book.

Of greater rhetorical significance, however, are the debates over the morality of the technique. Half the population, led by the Reverend James Ahab Crouch (“Make the World Safe for God”), oppose rain control as a “device of the devil,” blasphemous or pagan. He champions a bill in the legislature designed to crush the rainmen and preaches from his great tent how terrible it is “to subtract from the omnipotence of an omnipotent God” (179). Others, more open-minded or daring, look on it as a great benefit (25–27, 74). They plan a carnival with “a great rain display, a model rain, predicted, arranged, conducted by some rainman, controlled” (185).

Like Frank Melbourne at the Goodland County fair (chapter 3), Jeremy, known popularly as the “rain bat” for his tight-fitting black rain suit, is invited to the carnival and promises the expectant crowd a deluge by two o'clock. He works feverishly, tuning his instruments, mixing the proprietary chemicals, and conjuring up and battling with the clouds, which fight back like dragons. Finally, “out of the great rent in the beast rolled a stream of rain and the gutters were running flush, running over” (213–217). Jeremy's success is celebrated with a parade, with the rain bat riding in a convertible at the head of a motorcade as music plays, drums beat, men cheer, women swoon, and skywriters pay homage overhead. At the time the book was written, Charles Hatfield was still active in the field, and the Rock Island Railroad rainmakers persisted in memory.

N. Richard Nash's romantic comedy
The Rainmaker
(1955) is set in Three Point, Texas, “on a summer day in a time of devastating drought.” Lizzie Curry's family worries more about her marriage prospects than about their dying crops and livestock. Suddenly, a charming stranger arrives, a Texas twister of a man named Bill Starbuck—
Rainmaker!
—a charlatan, but not essentially a crook, who promises, for $100, to make miracles, to bring rain. As the summer storm clouds gather overhead, lonely and plain Lizzie, too, has her love life “seeded” by the confidence man's machinations.

How to make rain? Starbuck mocks the scientific voice of the charlatan when he cries, “Sodium chloride! Pitch it up high—right up to the clouds. Electrify the cold front. Neutralize the warm front. Barometricize the tropopause. Magnetize occlusions in the sky.”
¹⁸
But Starbuck, like faith healers, has his own method, “all my own,” that begins with him brandishing his hickory stick and exuding confidence. After inviting himself to supper and collecting $100 in advance, Starbuck puts the family members to work for him in a test of their faith—beating on a big bass drum, painting arrows on the ground to direct the lightning away from
the house, tying the farm mule's hind legs together—without allowing any questions and certainly without acting sensibly. Lizzie, who is flabbergasted by all this, admonishes her father, H. C.:

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:

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, 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).