Excerpt: 'Weather Matters: An American Cultural History Since 1900,' by Bernard Mergen

Sept. 15, 2009— -- This book is the first real cultural history of weather in the United States, providing a comprehensive look at our obsession with the weather. The author maintains that weather has such a strong hold on the American imagination because it has been elevated to "quasi-religious" status -- it illuminates the paradoxes of order and disorder in daily life and it brings together disparate forces, such as scientific law, chance and free will.

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Introduction

The wind is blowing steadily at 70 miles per hour, the temperature is about 10ºFbelow zero, it's 2:30 in the afternoon, January 16, 2003, on top of Mount Washington,New Hampshire. I take a few steps away from the shelter of the observatory,and the wind shoves me forward like an automatic revolving door, onlymuch harder. There's no stepping back. I do a couple of glissades but go where thewind blows. Swinging around, I stumble back under the trellises that protect observersfrom windblown pieces of ice from the observatory tower. All the antennaeare covered with rime flags whose delicate filaments stretch out toward thewind. They look like white iron filings on a magnet. I'm standing at 6,200 feet inthe middle of a cloud. It is the beginning of my two-day EduTrip offered by theMount Washington Observatory.

The meteorological division of the U.S. Signal Service and its successor, theU.S.Weather Bureau, made observations here from 1870 to 1892. The observatorywas rebuilt with private funds and has operated as a nonprofit research and educationalinstitution since 1932. The observatory cultivates its mystique as theplace with "the worst weather on earth." Its great claim to fame is the 231-mile-per-hour wind recorded at 1:21 p.m. on April 12, 1934, which remains a world's Record for a surface station. Wind, cold, and, for a few hours a day, the view of the Presidential Range and the White Mountains are what the observatory is selling. In summer, tourists are allowed to drive up the narrow seven-mile road, but in winter EduTrippers ride up in a big Bombardier snowcat.

Bryan Yeaton, an energetic young man in a bright red parka, greets us in theparking lot at the base of the mountain. Yeaton does education programs for theMount Washington Observatory and produced The Weather Notebook, a nationallysyndicated radio show about weather that aired from1997 to 2005. He introducesthe other participants and staff. My fellow worst-weather seekers are aretired couple recently settled in New Hampshire for its outdoor activities andtwo guys in their forties from Massachusetts. One was a commercial fisherman,the other is a computer programmer; their trip is a Christmas present from theirwives. Ken Rancourt is a research meteorologist for the observatory who doublesas the Bombardier driver. His assistant, Wayne, looks like the actor Mark Wahlbergand mentions this resemblance when he is introduced. When he speaks, hereveals several missing teeth. The next day, as I am inching down the icy moun-tain on rented crampons, he speeds past me on a Flexible Flyer, providing an explanationfor his dental condition.

In winter the observatory and adjoining visitors center are usually coated withsnow and ice. The buildings resemble a Gothic wedding cake. The instrumentrooms and labs are a jumble of records, supplies, and humorous signs that initiatethe visitor into the culture of a research institution. "Big Empty Box" is attachedto what looks like an air-conditioner, and "Bimetal Box" contains supplies. Theseare insiders' jokes on stupid questions from visitors. Bryan begins our orientationwith similar "ice-breaking" jokes about being the "world's worst weather observer"and "world's highest paid weatherman."

He then explains why Mount Washington is important for meteorological observation. Its elevation makes it akind of permanent weather balloon, transmitting data visually and numericallytwenty-four hours a day. Its location exposes it to many of the storm tracks acrossNew England, and New England is the "exhaust pipe" of the nation's weather.1Later in the afternoon, sharing a chair with the observatory's mascot cat, Nin,I look at the logbooks. For almost seventy-five years, visitors have written commentssuch as "fine day," "high clouds," and "gale winds." Confined by nature tothe prosaic, the steady accumulation of such observation ascends to poetry. Iglance out the window. The sunset is a soft apricot line on the western horizon.Thus it is with the history of weather. The simplest daily occurrences of sun, wind,clouds compose its raw materials; a hand shielding eyes from the brightness, ora finger pointing to the sky, is the beginning of a weather chronicle.

Weather Matters is about the ways in which Americans of the past century havecoped with weather. In that century, meteorology became one of the premier environmentalsciences, weather reports emerged as computer-generated works ofart, forecasts based on thousands of variables and covering areas as large as theglobe and as small as neighborhoods were developed, weather disasters came tobe anticipated and the loss of life and property kept to a minimum, and artistsand poets struggled to offer alternatives to the reduction of weather to numbersand formulas--but people never stop praying for rain, or sunshine, or snow, or tobe spared from tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, and blizzards. Many of thoseprayers are mere incantations, others deeply pious appeals to God, while some arespontaneous expressions of faith in the promised order of science. While some believein miracles, others believe in the miracle of General Circulation Models (thecomplete statistical description of atmospheric motions over the earth) and Advanced WeatherInteractive Processing Systems (AWIPS).

Weather is, as others have noted, well suited to the electronic age--constantlyin motion, frequently fast-moving (aided by time-lapse photography), ubiquitous,and visually beautiful. In a culture that enshrines freewill but expects conformity,weather offers a third alternative, chance, to explain the fate of nature and humanity.Even meteorologists acknowledge that weather is chaotic. Weather re-minds us of who we are and what we value. This is why there are so many differentkinds of weather, so many different maps of what we think we see.This book is organized by the perception, marketing, and management ofweather in the United States since 1900. The focus is on weather in American lifein the past 107 years, with occasional brief excursions into the nineteenth centurywhen it seems necessary to make a point about contemporary issues. By perceptionIman, simply, how owe see and understand the largely invisible phenomenawe call weather. What tools do we use to describe it? What do we do withwhat we think it is? How do we depict it?

Marketing, too, is fairly straightforward. I realized when I was reading aboutwhy and how the Weather Bureau began to study snow that the bureau, like allgovernment agencies, needed to justify its existence to taxpayers and their congressionalrepresentatives. The bureau sold the only thing it had of value--knowledge.Like any business, it sought to create a monopoly on its product andsucceeded for many years, partly by controlling the language used to discussweather. Hence, the emphasis in this book is on words and how they are used tomake the ineffable seem normal. Businessmen and businesswomen found waysto market sunshine, wind power, snow, and other "products" of weather.

Management of the weather is here taken to mean all attempts to predict, create,and protect against weather. We manage weather when we dress in the morning,open an umbrella, or write a poem or paint a picture of it.Obviously, these rough categories overlap in significant ways. As the manuscriptgrew and I looked for ways to keep it within reasonable limits, seven chaptersbecame five. Sections on drought, floods, climate and climate change, riskand natural hazard mitigation, including weather insurance, were shortened oreliminated. Each deserves its own book, and there are already many books andarticles that cover these subjects quite well.

What remains is a cultural history of meteorology and weather, subjects I didnot think were covered adequately in the existing literature. For the twentiethcentury, the only institutional history is Donald R. Whitnah's History of the UnitedStates Weather Bureau, published in 1961. Kristine C. Harper's doctoral dissertation,"Boundaries of Research: Civilian Leadership, Military Funding, and the InternationalNetwork Surrounding the Development of Numerical WeatherPrediction in the United States" (2003), is indispensable for understanding theorigins of the current weather establishment. Frederik Nebeker's Calculating theWeather: Meteorology in the 20th Century is a fine survey of the science, but it lacksinstitutional, political, and cultural contexts. James R. Fleming sets the standardfor the history of meteorology and climatology in Meteorology in America,1800–1870 and the several volumes he has edited. Mark Monmonier's Air Apparent:How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather is a fascinatingaccount of the ways atmospheric scientists visualize their subject. Onlytwo recent books attempt what I would call cultural history of weather, geographerWilliam B. Meyer's Americans and Their Weather and writer David Laskin'sBraving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather, neither of whichdevotes more than seventy pages to the twentieth century. Gary Fine's ethnographicstudy of the work culture of meteorologists was published just ashy bookwas going to print; it should make important contributions to our understandingof how the weather is perceived, marketed, and managed.

This book is meant to complement the existing scholarship on the history ofmeteorology and weather in the United States and to strike out in new directions.It also addresses the major questions of environmental history, namely, the waysin which nature in the form of weather has affected humans, and how humanshave thought about weather and acted upon it. Chapter 1, "Talking aboutWeather," introduces the U.S.Weather Bureau in its principal role as forecaster,and the struggle that ensued over definition of terms, public acceptance of meteorologicalauthority, and the meanings of uncertainty. In its complexity andchaotic behavior, weather interacts with three other mysterious human activities--religion, politics, and play--in numerous ways, and weather chatter becomes,by turns, profound, ridiculous, and sublime.

Chapter 2, "Managing Weather," is chiefly concerned with the ways in whichweather has become part of the nation's economy. It continues the story of theWeather Bureau's attempt to market its knowledge but adds the history of theAmerican Meteorological Society, founded in 1919, which helped to legitimize thework of the Weather Bureau but also challenged its authority. As the atmosphericsciences grew, new groups with vested interest in the weather emerged: meteorologistsin private business, media weathercasters, and promoters of variousweather-related businesses. These communities were not fettered by the bureau'squaint notion of public service and aggressively worked to control what the publicshould think about weather. Some particularly entrepreneurial individuals advocated weather modification through geoengineering projects on various scalesand with questionable results. I touch on a few of them to illustrate the most audaciousaspect of selling the weather.

Chapter 3, "Seeing Weather," looks at the history of sky awareness, the fascination withclouds, and weather-themed photography, motion pictures, painting,and sculpture. One of the most important developments for understanding our relationwith nature in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first centurymay, I think, be found in the work of artists such as Walter De Maria, James Turrell,and Dozier Bell, who strive to use elements of weather to place an observerin a living landscape created by a fusion of science and art. Philosopher EdwardCasey's ideas on the meanings of place offer ways to understand how weathermay enable us to achieve a sense of harmony with nature. The chapter concludeswith a section on the exhibiting of weather in museums and science centers.Chapter 4, "Transcribing Weather," examines the work of more than fiftyAmerican poets and novelists who have used weather in various ways to explorethe meanings of human existence and our relationships with nature.

The pervasiveness of weather in literature and the arts raises in another way the questionof obsession. Are we obsessing on the weather or the idea of weather? The answer,of course, is both, and poems by Wallace Stevens, Richard Hugo, HowardNemerov, Carol Muske, Naomi Shihab Nye, and others lead us into mental andspiritual towers where real and imaginary winds blow. Weather in the work ofnovelists--George R. Stewart, Gore Vidal, Rick Moody, Jean Thompson, ClintMcCown, Paul Quarrington--is the avatar of chance. Necessity, the laws of scienceand religion, and freewill, the cornerstone of Western philosophy, are challengedby the chaos of weather.

Chapter 5, "Suffering Weather," looks at the times and places where weatheris most troublesome. Episodes of disaster are just part of the story, however, andI am interested in showing how we accommodate and acclimate to everydayweather on our own and with the help of the National Weather Service and themedia. I begin the chapter with an account of my own quest to understand the extremeweather obsession of storm chasing. I look at some of the social and cultural meaningsof tornadoes and hurricanes, then explore the impact of everydayweather on our lives. Efforts by the air-conditioning industry and the WeatherService to protect us from any weather-caused discomfort only underscore thehighly personal meaning of weather. Each of us experiences weather differently.This book is full of quirky facts and eccentric personalities. I sought to bring thepast alive by quoting from some of the more colorful commentators on weather.Their anecdotes stand alone.

Nevertheless, there is coherence to the story I tell,and that is that weather is the part of the physical environment closest to us. Weare enveloped by air that is the medium for our life and communication. It is somuch a part of us, our thoughts, our languages, our feelings, that we are mostlyunaware of it, but we ignore it at our peril. Weather is obviously more than whatatmospheric science says it is, but how much more?

My argument is that we live simultaneously in at least four weather systems, the one we feel with our senses, another that we learn about in science classes and National Weather Service reports,a third from the media that interprets the first two for our consumption,and a fourth in which our minds work to synthesize our experience and theknowledge acquired from art and literature. We express all these in meaninglessbanter and eloquent art. The paradox of weather is that it is both quotidian andunique.

As someone once said about sex, weather is what we think about all the timewhen we're not thinking about something else. Maybe it's also what we talk aboutwhen we are thinking of something else. "How's the weather?" often solicits morethan meteorological commentary. A word on the wind is sufficient to establish arelationship between speakers, a mood, a tone, an atmosphere within the atmosphere.Weather can be a metaphor and a met language. "Hot enough for you?"may be an indirect inquiry into sensitive questions of health, well-being, success,or failure. We deem weather a safe topic, unlike religion and politics, but weatheris religion and politics. Weather raises the most fundamental questions about theorigin and purpose of life, the ability of humans to predict and control nature,and the place of science in public policy. To talk about the weather in the twenty-firstcentury requires us to at least consider the possibility of anthropogenic climatechange. Weather is a commodity, its products--water for people andagriculture, solar and wind energy, snow for winter sports and sun for summer--marketed and managed.

By some estimates, trillions of dollars are made and lostannually by weather-dependent businesses. Insurance losses from hurricanes,tornadoes, winter storms, and other weather-related disasters are increasing dramatically.Media attention to weather is extensive, compelling, and sometimesmisleading. In short, we cannot escape weather even if we want to.This book began as a challenge from Nancy Scott Jackson, at the time and acquisitionseditor at the University Press of Kansas. Why, she asked, are Americansobsessed with weather? I hope this book answers Nancy's question. The preponderanceof evidence leads to the conclusion that some Americans are obsessed byweather, but fewer than are obsessed by genealogy, NASCAR, or sex. As a nationwe are more possessed by weather than obsessed. We possess weather from within,in our lungs, blood, and mind.

You don't need to have an opinion about it, but if you already love weather,then this book will provide you with some new perspectives on what you alreadyknow and give you something to talk about with other weather weenies. If you areindifferent to weather and the people who talk about it, this book offers plenty ofevidence for why you are.