18 Miles

by Christopher Dewdney

Pablo Neruda claimed that he absorbed the language of the rain when he was a boy: “my poetry was born between the hill and the river, / it took its voice from the rain.” Walt Whitman not only listened to the rain speaking, he conversed with it. In his 1885 poem “The Voice of the Rain,” Whitman asks “who art thou?” and the rain replies in a marvelous synthesis of lyrical and scientific veracity:

  I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,

  Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,

  Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form’d, altogether changed, and yet the same,

  I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,

  And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn:

  And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make pure and beautify it.

  Whitman picked up the theme of fertility in his poem, echoing the work of Aeschylus 2,000 years before him. In Aeschylus’s Danaids, Aphrodite proclaims her dominion over the generative cycle:

  The pure sky loves to violate the land,

  and the land is seized by desire for this embrace;

  the teeming rain from the sky

  makes the earth fecund, so that for mortals it generates

  the pastures for their flocks and the sap of Demeter

  and the fruit on the trees. From these moist embraces

  everything which is comes into being. And I am the cause of this.

  John Updike maintained the heavenly threnody in his novel Rabbit Is Rich: “Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth: without rain, there would be no life.”

  Douglas Coupland grew up in rainy Vancouver, and I suspect that, unlike many others, he found gray rainy weather personally nourishing. A character in his collection of short stories, Life After God, confesses that “The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing — a blanket — the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.”

  There is a special smell, a sort of intoxicating perfume that accompanies the rain, especially after a dry spell. Barbara Kingsolver described it in The Bean Trees: “That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.”

  Decades before Kingsolver wrote that passage, two Australian mineralogists, Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas, had already not only set out to describe the scent of rain, but also to discover its earthen recipe. They ground up sunbaked rocks and clay and used steam distillation to extract the scent from the mixture. The terpenes that the rocks had absorbed from the atmosphere made up the bulk of this perfume. Bear and Thomas published their results in the scientific journal Nature in 1964, calling the scent “petrichor,” from the Greek roots for “rock” and ikhor, the blood of the gods. Paradoxically, nothing was better at instilling the highest levels of this scent in Australian rock and clay than a protracted drought.

  Drought, Rainmakers and Providence

  When the American explorers Lewis and Clark first encountered the Nebraska and Kansas territories in 1804, they noted in their journals that the region was too dry to support agriculture. Yet six decades later, a westward-flowing tide of settlers, encouraged by railroads and land-grab speculators, began to settle there. And once these pioneer farmers started to plow the fields, something extraordinary happened — a phenomenon that seemed to beg divine providence — it started to rain. Plentifully. The year 1870 heralded two decades of uncharacteristically high rainfall that oversaw the establishment and expansion of thousands of farms.

  The hubris of manifest destiny was embodied in a new pioneer maxim: “rain follows the plow,” and this saying was soon given quasi-scientific legitimacy. A professor at the newly established University of Nebraska, Samuel Aughey, explained the increased rainfall as a direct result of cultivation, which caused a “great increase in the absorptive power of the soil.” This, he insisted, led to more moisture being captured by the soil and therefore more evaporation and more clouds and more rain, and so on. It was logical enough. For two decades, downpour after downpour, his theory held true and the land grew fertile. Then, in 1890, the rain stopped.

  Within two years, there was a mass exodus. The drought-stricken region of western Kansas and Nebraska lost almost half its population. But the remaining homesteaders adapted. Well into the twentieth century, they eked out a hardscrabble existence, planting drought-tolerant crops like millet, sorghum and winter wheat. It wasn’t bountiful, but if you were prepared to cut corners and scrimp and save, the land was sufficient.

  The dearth of rain wasn’t the only scourge the homesteaders faced. In the midst of their misery, a new kind of entrepreneur began to stalk the parched farming communities and small towns — the rainmaker. Frank Melbourne, popularly known as “the Rain Wizard” or “the Australian,” was one of the most famous. He was tall and imposing, and he sported a dark beard that gave him an Old Testament authority. Born in Ireland, he had immigrated to Australia. This must have been where he learned to make rain, for he told his clients that he was forced to flee Australia to avoid arrest for causing floods. Hmm. Well, the farmers bought his story.

  Melbourne’s fee for a soaking rain, one that covered at least 50 square miles was $500, a tremendous sum in those days, especially for cash-strapped homesteaders. He worked farming communities from Canton, Ohio, all the way to Cheyenne, Wyoming. His technique was mysterious. It centered on his “Rain Mill,” a machine that was said to utilize a crank and special gases, though no one had ever seen it. He carried it in a big black rucksack with his pistol at the ready to discourage overly curious onlookers. In Cheyenne, where he convinced 23 farmers to pool their savings, he locked himself in a stable and covered all the windows with blankets. There he worked his quiet magic.

  It poured the next day, and the Cheyenne Daily Sun lauded his success in a glowing article. Later, in Goodland, Kansas, he operated the Rain Mill for several days without drawing a shower, though it did rain in other parts of Kansas. Melbourne claimed that the wind blew his influences off course. Even with that middling success, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “Melbourne Causes the Rain to Fall. Complete Success Attends his Latest Experiments at Goodland.” Suddenly Melbourne was a hot ticket on the arid plains. He plied his trade with mixed success over the next few years and then, mysteriously in 1894, after selling his secret to three Goodland businessmen, he committed suicide in a Denver hotel room. Each of the businessmen went on to form a rainmaking company: the Goodland Artificial Rain Company, the Interstate Artificial Rain Company and the Swisher Rain Company.

  Another Goodland citizen, a railway man by the name of Clayton B. Jewell, figured out Melbourne’s method on his own. He successfully pitched his technique to the Rock Island Railway, and it underwrote and refurbished a special rainmaking rail car for his personal use. Though most of his apparatus was hidden inside, there were tubes projecting from the roof for releasing special gases. Inquisitive onlookers stared as vapors flooded out of the tubes and dissipated into the sky. He became even more popular than Melbourne. But soon, like a lot of other smart rainmakers of the time, he headed west to California. That was where the big money was.

  Unfortunately, California was not an El Dorado for Jewell or for a dozen or so other rainmakers. Over a few dry years, he lost his reputation. But the rainmaking chapter had not yet closed. The most renowned rainmaker of all, Charles Hatfield, began his career just as the others were fading out.

  Unlike his forebears, Hatfield was familiar with meteorology. As a boy in San Diego, he had read all the meteorology books in the municipal library and become seized with the idea t
hat it might be possible to stimulate the formation of rain clouds with chemical vapors. In 1902, on a clear sunny day, he climbed the windmill on his father’s ranch with a concoction he’d mixed in a shallow pan. Within a day, it rained.

  Charles Hatfield had seen his destiny. With pale blue eyes, high cheekbones and his quasi-scientific vocabulary, he looked and sounded like a born rainmaker. In 1904, he made a bet with 30 Los Angeles businessmen that he could draw 18 inches of rain for Los Angeles over the winter and following spring of 1905. He referred to himself not as a rainmaker, but as a “moisture accelerator.” “I cannot make it rain,” he claimed. “I simply attract clouds and they do the rest.” He built his rain derrick — a 20-foot wooden tower crowned with a metal tank — and began to draw the rain. Onlookers were always impressed watching him work. He would climb up the towers and stir the chemicals in the tanks sending great plumes of vapor billowing into the air.

  The Los Angeles Examiner published an interview in which he explained his technique: “When it comes to my knowledge that there is a moisture-laden atmosphere hovering, say, over the Pacific, I immediately begin to attract the atmosphere with the assistance of my chemicals, basing my efforts on the scientific principle of cohesion. I do not fight Nature . . . I woo her by means of this subtle attraction.”

  Of course, it poured that winter, and Hatfield’s fame grew. He began to get contracts up and down the West Coast, from British Columbia to Mexico. His only opposition came from the chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, Willis Moore. Every time a newspaper published an article praising Hatfield’s rainmaking abilities, Moore would make sure the weather bureau published a withering disclaimer. Even the San Diego weather bureau was threatening to charge Hatfield with fraud. But the public knew better: Hatfield could make it rain.

  Perhaps it was hubris, or maybe it was the pride of a hometown boy trying to prove himself, but San Diego turned out to be his nemesis. A ruinous drought had parched the region for four long years, and the city reservoir was down to a third of its capacity. Hatfield, the homegrown hero, negotiated an all-or-nothing verbal contract with the San Diego city council — for $10,000, he would fill the reservoir by December 1916. They would owe him nothing if he failed.

  Hatfield built an evaporating tower beside the reservoir and started producing his vapor on January 1. Five days later, it began to rain. Then the heavens opened. San Diego received 28 inches in one month. Not only did the reservoir fill and overflow, but on January 27, two nearby dams, the Sweetwater and the Lower Otay Lake, burst and flooded their valleys. Railways, bridges and roads were destroyed along with hundreds of homes. Twenty deaths were attributed to the floods, and rumors started to fly that angry citizens had formed an armed posse to lynch Hatfield. But he had already escaped the city on horseback.

  Boldly, Hatfield returned in February to collect his fee, but the city council refused to pay him unless he accepted liability for the damages, a sum of $3.5 million. It wasn’t his fault, he insisted; the city should have made adequate preparations for the deluge. It didn’t help that there was no written contract. Hatfield persisted, first trying to settle for $4,000 and then, when that failed, he sued the council. He pressed his case unsuccessfully for 22 years. But in the two subsequent trials, the courts ruled the rain was an act of God.

  Drought

  Hatfield continued to ply his trade until the stock market crash of 1929 brought an end to his career. In 1931, a record drought struck eastern North America; the following year the drought worsened, spreading westward to the Midwest and the Great Plains. Summer temperatures soared. During a heat wave in Illinois in 1934, 370 people died, and two years later, between July 5 and 17, 1936, an even deadlier heat wave struck Manitoba and Ontario, resulting in 1,180 deaths. The mercury peaked at 44°C, causing steel rail lines and girders to twist and buckle and the tar to melt on the roads. In the countryside, farmers watched helplessly as their fruit crops cooked on the trees.

  The breadbasket of North America turned into the Dust Bowl. The earth dried and cracked open with great fissures deeper than the reach of a man’s arm. One of the most dramatic consequences of the decade-long drought was a series of epic dust storms. In the Dirty Thirties, it was dust, not rain, that followed the plough. Dry, furrowed earth crumbled into sand and desiccated loam. Fields with failed crops had no roots to hold the soil, and so much land had been cleared of prairie grass that the dry winds could scoop up the topsoil and carry it high above the clouds. Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico were particularly hard hit by big dust storms. “Dusters,” as they came to be known.

  Folk singer Woody Guthrie survived one of the worst of these in Texas when he was 23. The day the storm struck, April 14, 1935, is now remembered as Black Sunday. Guthrie and his neighbors watched a thousand-foot-high dust cloud roll in before they ran to their homes for cover as the howling blackness descended upon them. He wrote,

  We sit there in a little old room, and it got so dark that you couldn’t see your hand before your face, you couldn’t see anybody in the room. You could turn on an electric light bulb, a good, strong electric light bulb in a little room and that electric light bulb hanging in the room looked just about like a cigarette burning. And that was all the light that you could get out of it.

  A lot of the people in the crowd that was religious-minded, and they was up pretty well on their scriptures, and they said, “Well boys, girls, friends, and relatives, this is the end. This is the end of the world.” And everybody just said, “Well, so long, it’s been good to know you.”

  But this was not the worst of it. The biggest dust storm of all was a two-day marathon that had struck the American plains on May 9, 1934, a year earlier. It is estimated the storm picked up 350 million tons of topsoil, 12 million of which ended up being dumped on the Chicago region while the rest blew east, darkening the skies in New York, Washington and Boston before moving out to sea. Ships hundreds of miles from shore in the Atlantic Ocean encountered heavy dust falls. On some of their decks, the dust accumulation was a quarter-inch thick. By the end of the 1930s, 75 percent of the topsoil in the North American plains had blown away.

  The Last Rainmaker

  The Second World War saw a return to normal rain levels and the gradual replenishment of the topsoil. Regional droughts have continued to plague California, but droughts on the scale of the 1930s have not returned. Rainmakers never returned either, except for one strange exception: Wilhelm Reich.

  Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst, who pioneered the discipline of bioenergetic analysis, a body-oriented form of psychotherapy, around 1930. It turned out to be his last coherent contribution to psychology. Over the next decade, he became increasingly irrational and restless. He moved first to Norway and then to America just before war broke out. In New York, he started having visions of “orgone,” a blue particulate form of energy that he claimed was in all living things as well as the earth and sky. In 1942, he left New York and bought a property in Maine, which he named Orgonon. The land housed his residence, a laboratory and a small research community. He continued to work on isolating and accumulating orgone energy as well as developing therapeutic applications. The most iconic product of his research was his orgone accumulator, a metal-clad box that patients would sit inside to be cured of various ailments. He started to manufacture these and ship them to clients. It was about then that he caught the attention of the FDA, which opened an investigation on the basis of fraudulent medical claims.

  Meanwhile, Reich’s confabulations continued. In 1951, he discovered the sinister twin of orgone energy: deadly orgone radiation. It seemed that atmospheric accumulations of this radiation were responsible for the creation of deserts. But Reich, ever resourceful with his metalworking tools, had the antidote. He built an inverted form of an orgone accumulator that he called a “cloudbuster.” It consisted of a double row of four 15-foot aluminum tubes attached to a base that could be rotated to point in almost any direction. The base was
connected to a dozen or so grounding cables, the ends of which had to be immersed in water or soil in order for the cloudbuster to work. It looked like a cross between an antiaircraft gun and a barrage rocket launcher. There were no chemicals, projectiles or electric currents. To destroy deadly orgone radiation, he simply had to aim his cloudbuster at the sky. He also claimed the device could produce rain.

  When Reich’s neighbors caught wind of what he had been up to in his laboratory, they were more than credulous. In fact, during a local drought in 1953, two nearby farmers hired Reich to produce rain for their desiccated blueberry crop. He set up his cloudbuster on the morning of July 6 near their farms, and, according to an eyewitness account in the Bangor Daily News, it rained that evening. There was a new rainmaker in America.

  Meanwhile, back at the laboratory, all was not well. At night, above Orgonon, he began to see slim, cigar-shaped alien vessels trailing deadly orgone streams. It was obviously a task for his cloudbuster, which became a weapon at the forefront of what Reich called “a full scale interplanetary battle.” In 1955, he moved to Arizona where he used two cloudbusters to shoot down UFOs, or “energy alphas” as he called them. The year after, in 1956, he was arrested and ultimately jailed by the FDA. He never used his cloudbusters again, though even today his original machine sits unused and remarkably intact near the edge of a pine forest on the grounds of Orgonon.

  The Real Rainmakers

  While Wilhelm Reich was designing orgone accumulators in Maine, a trio of American scientists were on the verge of producing rain by tampering with clouds. Their laboratory was less than 200 miles west of him, in Schenectady, New York. The research was being run by Irving Langmuir, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, who was working under military contract to research cloud formation. He had two assistants, Bernard Vonnegut and Vincent Schaefer. Bernard’s brother, Kurt, also worked at the lab writing press releases.