Weather

      Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.  

      Perhaps we don’t do anything about it.  But we do lots because of it. 

     I put in 30 Colorado Blue Spruce trees this past week, all replacements for last year’s failures.  It seemed a good time to do it in light of the predicted weekend blizzard. 

       I scattered some grass seed on a couple of bare spots in the yard.  I covered the seed with a light covering of composted soil to keep the seed in place until it could get covered up with snow.

      I put out a couple of rows of radish / carrot seed mix in hopes that the forecasted snow would sprout them and have me crunching a radish or two come June.  In other years, I would have buried some pea seeds, too, but other projects demanded my time and my diminished supply of energy. 

     The asparagus patch beckoned.  It had a good mowing a couple of weeks ago.  The last of the snow bank had only just melted off the first of the week. A few clod eruptions here and there signaled its intent to burst forth.  Just in time to get nailed by the incoming weather.

    Wait!  Here and there was a spear sticking out of the ground.  My inability to tell green from brown made it a difficult task, distinguishing a fresh new spear from the stub of a stalk from last year’s crop, but I grabbed a pan and knife and gathered enough for a small batch.  I cut anything I could see sticking above the surface, even the smallest heads, knowing the cold temperatures would turn the crisp green spears to black jelly and set the crop back to day one.  My lunch was a reward for my labor.  

     If the weather reports were right, I had to choose whether to leave Friday afternoon, or wait until Monday to return to my home near the front range.  Saturday and Sunday travel would be difficult to impossible.

      Parts for my broken down tractor have yet to arrive.  I couldn’t hole up in the shop and work on the tractor during the blizzard.   I had an appointment or two scheduled for Monday.  I left Friday afternoon.

     The Goodwife was expected in Denver Saturday morning to help make corsages or some other creative flower thing.  I told her she should call her friend and tell her she wasn’t coming.  Heeding my advice as usual, she set off about 8:30.  It was raining, not snowing.

     About 45 minutes later, she called saying she was turning around.  The further south she went, the worse the weather got, some snow accumulating and slush on the roads. 

     A few hours later, we still had no accumulation, but apparently Denver had quite a little, causing airport cancellations and delays.

      My good farm neighbor called in the afternoon to report an overnight rain of maybe as much as an inch followed by about ten inches of heavy wet snow through the day, with little wind.  The moisture didn’t turn to snow till after daybreak, he said.  The trees were threatening to break under the weight of the snow that no wind blew off.  

     

      There’s probably a reason no one tries to do anything about the weather.  I remember a dry spell in the mid-sixties.  There was a guy called himself Doctor Crick, or something similar.  He was trying to drum up support from the farmers, promising he could make it rain.  He shot cannons of something, silver iodide maybe, into the clouds.

     He put on a few demonstrations, I think, though I never attended one.  Then came May or June of 1965.  Heavy rains fell.  Floods wreaked havoc.  Highways and roads washed away on mountain and plain.  Cabin Creek all but disappeared.  Deer Trail silted in.  Concrete pillars set up to support I-70 across creeks and other roads and railroad tracks east of Denver washed away.  Rumors of motorists and their cars vanishing in the deluge persisted.

     Doctor Crick must have washed away, too.  I never heard of him again.  I always suspected he vamoosed in fear of being held liable for the flood damage.  Maybe he realized nobody needed his services and left the country.

    More recently, maybe ten or fifteen years ago, some government body or other was conducting “weather modification" experiments.  They were flying specially equipped aircraft  around thunderstorms that threatened to become severe.  They had, or thought they had, evidence that silver iodide reduced the severity of a storm and maybe prevented tornadoes and hail from forming all the while inducing kinder, gentler rain.

      It also was a dry time on the plains.  Far from seeing cloud seeding as a beneficial rainmaker, some of the local farmers (Western Kansas farmers that is) were sure the cloud seeding was having the opposite effect.  The proof was watching a thunderhead approach from the west and either blow over in a dry dusty blast of wind or skip around to the north or south while dropping nary a drop of moisture.

     That never happened before silver iodide treatments began, they implied.  They got mad, held meetings, made demands.  Farm Bureau got involved.  Other insurers were quite interested in the experiment, hoping the treatments would reduce hail losses.  Farm Bureau sided with its members.

     Initially, the scientists tried to explain what they were trying to do, but ultimately the airplanes quietly withdrew, going west and south to friendlier territory.  Mother Nature returned to unrestrained flinging of wind gusts and lightning bolts.  If there were results of the weather modification, I never heard what they were.  Interest waned with the airplanes’ departure.

    There was one interesting tangent from the furor.  In the wake of the cloud seeding brouhaha, many of the locals signed on to the “chemtrail” conspiracy theory.  The theory claimed that high altitude aircraft were spraying the country with dangerous chemicals.  The proof was the contrails left by the high-flying jets.  They are not passenger or military aircraft but tankers spraying deadly chemicals over the populace. 

     Who is behind the poison sprayers?  Some theorists insist it is our very own government, while one local family insists China is behind it all in an attempt to do irreparable harm to our country.  Local gossip says the family stays indoors as much as possible on days when contrails are abundant.            

     The movement reached its peak (maybe) when a small group rented a film and hired the local theater to show it.  Ads and letters to the editor in the local paper urged us all to attend.  I didn’t attend.

      Living in a small community, I have learned, or tried to learn, to keep a closed mouth when such controversial subjects arise.  (Never discuss religion or politics with your friends, or they won’t be your friends for very long.)  Many of my rural friends did attend the movie and subsequent meetings. One of them was a Certified Flight Instructor who gave me a couple of flight lessons when I was learning to fly.

      Mark Twain or Charles Dudley Warner or whoever came up with the observation that folks complain but never do anything about the weather, correctly characterized human nature.  Sometimes, there is a good reason for such human behavior.

      It’s probably not a good idea to try to do something about the weather, unless you like being the cause of controversy.