The Weather Companion: An Album of Meteorological History, Science, and Folklore

PREFACE

The study of weather in relationship to human knowledge and belief is called ethnometeorology. In ages past and in many cultures it was part of daily experience to have some knowledge of weather lore, but today we depend on forecasts from radio and television. Weather prophets were common in the small towns of America, but they have long since disappeared and have been replaced by weathermen or meteorologists.

Near the Iowa farm of my youth was the Mississippi river town of McGregor. A few feet away from the river was a teepee where a Native American named Emma Big Bear lived. Each fall she was interviewed by the local newspapers for the winter report. Her predictions were probably based on cornhusks, the thickness of squirrel fur, and the time when the ducks flew south.

The rich traditions of Emma Big Bear’s and our own ancestors have been replaced by satellites and computers. We do understand the weather better, and we have sophisticated, accurate forecasts. An understanding of natural forces and subsequent influences enriches our feeling for life and enables us to tune into nature. It is my wish that your skies and sunsets will never be the same.

Special thanks go to meteorologist Eric Wergin, whose friendly discussions lead to this book. Another word of thanks goes to Karen Murphy, who turned crude ideas into artful sketches. I have tried to keep the weather expressions of many poets and writers alive, through the use of old journals and records of antiquity. All translations have been put into modern English.

I.

WEATHER PAST

FAMOUS WEATHER ANECDOTES

While living in the mountains, I saw that old farmers could predict both rain and sunshine, being right seven or eight times out of ten. I asked them how they did it, but they said it was only practical experience. If you ask people living in the cities, they don’t understand this.

Since I had plenty of leisure time, I usually rose early in the morning, and then with an empty mind concentrated on the beauty of the fields, trees, rivers, mountains and clouds and I found that I could predict the weather right seven or eight times out of ten. Then I realized that in quietness the universe can be observed, the inner moods felt and real truth obtained.

YEH MENG-TE A.D. 1156

There are several versions of an old story of Sir Isaac Newton’s walk. Beautiful morning, he said to a shepherd. It will rain soon, sir, replied the shepherd. I don’t think so, the sky is almost clear, said Newton. No, insisted the shepherd, it’s going to rain. Newton continued his walk, but an hour later he was soaked. Returning to the shepherd, he asked how he knew this. The man replied, See that sheep over there? When she turns her tail to the wind it always rains.

Although Newton laid much of the foundation for modern science, he is not known to have taken an interest in the weather. It is said that Newton predicted there would be little difference between the summer and winter of 1682. He was right, for it was a cold, wet summer with a poor harvest.

Leonardo da Vinci took a more modern view of the weather. He noted that the winds were characteristic of the places of their origin. At a time when dew was believed to be of a supernatural origin, he believed that it was only water in the air. He noted that the ring around the moon was a sign of vapors in the sky.

Weather studies occupied the time of our first two presidents. George Washington began his notebooks in 1767 entitled, An Account of the Weather. Thomas Jefferson kept copious notes on the weather, which were edited and published in 1944 under the title, Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book.

Benjamin Franklin did even more toward the study of American weather. He was the first to note that storms move from west to east, and that winds shift as the storm passes. In his library he had five thermometers and a barometer.

Franklin was the first to recognize that volcanoes affect the climate. During the severe winter of 1783–84, he correctly guessed that the cause of the cold was either a meteorite shower or the ash from the volcanic eruption at Hecla, Iceland. The reflection of sunlight by the ash lowered the winter tempertures.

Henry David Thoreau was the first American naturalist to be an avid collector of weather lore. The wind turning east meant rainy weather for him, and white fog over the pond was a sign of fair weather. The chirp of the robin spoke of rain, and the call of the loon meant wind. Thoreau mentions that plentiful acorns and thick cornhusks were signs of a cold winters.

One of the most interesting bits of weather lore concerns Christopher Columbus. He saw his first hurricane in August of 1494 and watched another one from the shores of Hispaniola in October 1495. By the time of his fourth voyage to the New World, he was familiar with native hurricane lore. He noted the large numbers of seals and dolphins on the surface of the ocean. Oily swell was coming from the southeast and veiled cirrus clouds were in the sky. There were light, shifting winds with a beautiful crimson sunset.

He sent Captain Terreros ashore to Governor Ovando of Santo Domingo, with the request that he be allowed to anchor his ship in the harbor, because of the coming storm. The governor mocked his request as the folly of a prophet and soothsayer. Without permission to land, he took his ships to the mouth of the Rio Jaina, which gave him some protection from the wind. The rest of the fleet ignored his warnings and set sail for Spain. Nineteen ships were lost with all hands, and only one ship reached Spain without damage.

The enemies of Columbus declared he had raised the storm by magic. It disturbed Columbus, who wrote What man ever born, not excepting Job, who would not have died of despair when in such weather, seeking safety for my son, brother, shipmates and myself, and we were forbidden the land and the harbors that I, by God’s will and sweating blood, had won for Spain.

Perhaps the most interesting use of weather lore in modern times has been done by the Seminole tribe of Florida. They attracted much attention in 1926 when the entire tribe moved to another reservation north of the Everglades. They predicted that a seven-foot wall of water would sweep over the area, and during the storm, six feet of water did.

The night before the great storm, weather bureau forecasters were saying that the storm might strike Florida. The next day thousands of homes were destroyed and there was a heavy loss of life, but the Seminoles lost nothing. After the storm they heard that the white men were giving out free food, but when they saw how much damage they had suffered, they returned empty handed.

The tribe’s first hurricane sign was an unseasonable blooming of saw grass. They knew that the height of the grass indicates the depth of the flood water. A week before the storm, rats and rabbits began moving north and westward. The birds stopped singing and began flying northwest. Alligators barked with unusual frequency and began moving into deep water.

The Seminoles continued to be accurate forecasters. In 1944, Florida was the target of two hurricanes. Before the first, the weather bureau issued an all clear, but the Seminoles left the area. The storm turned around and struck Florida. For the second storm, the Navy and Coast Guard began evacuating planes and equipment, but the Seminoles didn’t move. That storm missed Florida. Perhaps we should send our weathermen into the swamps of the Everglades to take lessons on hurricane forecasting from Nature herself. We need look no further than our natural environment to learn lessons about the weather.

NOAH’S FLOOD

The wind and flood raged for six days and nights, but on the seventh day, the stormy wind exhausted itself and died down and the flood water receeded. I surveyed the scene and the earth was silent. Man and all his works turned to mud and clay. I opened a hatch and daylight fell upon my face. I wept as I looked for signs of life. On the twelfth day I could see a dozen patches of land sticking out of the water. The ship eventually grounded on Mount Nisir, and it stayed there for six days until we got out."

The Babylonian flood story. The Noah of the Gilgamish flood epic was Utanapishtim.

Nearly every year, newspapers publish accounts of expeditions going to Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey to locate Noah’s Ark. Films have been produced, and the ark has become part of public consciousness. Does Noah’s Ark really exist on this 16,945 foot mountain? In the biblical account, Noah was the only man on earth favored by God. At the age of five hundred, God gave him instructions for building a giant boat 3 stories high and 450 × 75 × 45 feet high. It took a hundred years to build the boat, and then pairs of all known birds and animals were taken on board. Heavy rains fell for forty days until the peaks of the highest mountains were submerged.

A half year later, the survivors landed on a mountain and waited until the waters receded to repopulate the earth. After sacrificing to thank God, they traveled east to the town of Babel and built a great tower to celebrate. God became angry and changed their common language into many languages.

Biblical dating is done by backdating the genealogies, and this has produced three dates for Noah’s flood. Archbishop Ussher dated it at 2349 B.C., and these dates were added to the King James Bible in A.D. 1703. The Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) dated the flood at 2242 B.C., and the Rabbinical chronologies date it at 2103 B.C. This legendary flood must have happened between 2,100 and 2,350 years before the time of Christ.

In 1927, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated Ur of the Chaldees, the legendary home of the biblical patriarch Abraham. Digging forty feet below the surface, he found a layer of flood-washed debris ten feet thick. Further digging showed that this flood extended from modern day Baghdad to the Persian Gulf.

The entire area was within the flood plane of the Euphrates River, and most of it was less than twenty feet above sea level. The lower areas of Ur were only five feet above sea level, but the higher sections of the town were untouched. To those living in the flat lower valley, it must have looked as if the entire earth was flooded, when all they could see was flood water in the distance.

This flood was incorporated into a remarkable series of stories involving the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh. The inscriptions on the clay tablets parallel the Bible story, except for the fact that the forty days in the Bible are seven days on the tablets. Both stories end with a sacrifice and the gods smelling the odor and being pleased.

If a universal flood occurred around 2200 B.C., there ought to be plenty of geological evidence for it. There would be thick varves, great slack-water deposits, huge mounds of dead trees, animals, and plants. All of the old Egyptian documents and all Babylonian clay tablets would be ruined. Raised beaches would be carved into mountains. Pollen counts would be altered in swamps, and thick records would be left in the ice cores of the Arctic and the Antarctic.

Archaeologists digging through caves carefully study layers, which they call horizons. These layers are caused by shifts in climate, winds, vegetation, and habitation. A universal flood would cause a thick layer of mud and organic materials to be deposited in the caves, and this would be readily recognizable and easy to date. Such an obvious layer has never been found, even at locations near sea level.

Numerous tree-ring records extend through the time of the flood, and no alteration of the ring sizes or of the isotopic ratios has been found. Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica have been traced back 70,000 years. The layers show cycles and record the shifting climate, but they don’t show a universal flood 4,000 years ago. Varve counts (silt layers) trace the history of many lakes back 10,000 years. These show many variations in rainfall patterns over the centuries. Pollen counts in marshes show exactly how the vegetation has changed in the past 10,000 years, and they trace the cold and warm periods as well as changes in plants. If Noah’s flood was a worldwide event, evidence should be everywhere, but it can’t be found anywhere.

The events after the flood are even more suspicious. Where did the three billion cubic miles of water go? How did Noah get the marsupials to Australia and New Zealand? How did genetics allow Noah to have a black son, a yellow son, and a white son? Supposedly only one language existed on the ark, but written records of the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian languages start before the era of the flood and continue for more than a thousand years afterward. They make no mention of a flood except as an ancient legend.

The early church fathers answered the questions on Noah’s flood this way: It’s obvious, just look at the fossils in the mountains. Leonardo da Vinci examined the fossils in the mountains near Lombardy, Italy, around the year 1500. He observed that clams could only move twelve feet a day, far too little to reach the mountains. Under the title of Doubt, Leonardo wrote in his notebook: At this point natural causes fail us and therefore in order to resolve such a doubt we must either call in a miracle to our aid, or else say that all this water was evaporated by the heat of the sun.

The discovery of America raised a new series of questions. People wondered how the animals there got in the ark. Joseph Acosta wrote, Who can imagine that in so long a voyage men would take the pains to carry foxes to Peru, especially the kind they call acias, which is the filthiest I have seen. Who would say that they have carried tigers and lions? Truly it is a thing worthy of laughing at to think so.

Sir Walter Raleigh spent the years from 1603-18 locked in the Tower of London writing The Historie of the World before he was executed. He raised the question of how Noah had room for all the animals. The Ark must have seemed huge to Bible writers, but they had never been to a small modern zoo.

The Ark is about the size of a modern 150-unit apartment building. If we assume that it was divided into 150 units, leaving space for the stairways, this leaves us 150 units measuring 25’ × 25’. If we take two of each species, then each apartment has to have 115 birds, 69 reptiles, 57 mammals, and 5,000 insects. Each apartment would also have to have enough food and fresh water to last for a year.

Early world travelers found many flood stories, which added support to the biblical believers. But floods are experiences happening every year in some part of the world. Before the days of writing, our ancestors entertained themselves by telling stories. Local floods became world-class events when retold many times over the evening campfires.

The Bible account says that the survivors traveled westward and built the tower of Babel, which was excavated in 1899 by German archaeologists. Why are Ark seekers traveling four-hundred miles north of the Bible location to a mountain that was renamed Ararat by European travelers in the sixteenth century? Furthermore, six different mountains were named by Jewish and Christian writers as the site of the ark.

The French businessman Fernand Navarra began the modern search for Noah’s Ark by making two trips to Mt. Ararat in 1955 and 1969. He brought back oak beams (the wrong wood) from the mountain and had them carbon dated by six different laboratories. Five out of six datings were around A.D. 650 and the sixth was A.D. 270. The timbers were cut 3000 years after the flood was supposed to have taken place.

During this time in history, a dozen churches had pieces of the true cross of Christ and many other relics. As a Christian, you might make several pilgrimages to ask for special favors from God. As proof of your devotion, you were expected to donate generously to centers with holy relics. Around A.D. 700 a group of clerics selected Mount Agri Dag (Ararat) as the true site of Noah’s ark. Teams of men hauled oak beams up the mountain and assembled them into a large boat. The men may have originally been rebuilding the Ark from a few old pieces of wood. As time passed, the replica, became the real thing. Meanwhile the collection plates of the local churches were filled with the donations of grateful pilgrims.

In the eighth century, the remains of an ancient boat were found on the slopes of Mount Judi near the Tigris River. Learned men immediately proclaimed that Noah’s Ark had been found. The boat was taken to a Mosque, and people traveled all over the Middle East to view Noah’s Ark. The mosque was struck by lightning in A.D. 776 and burned, so that version of Noah’s Ark is lost to history.

The Ark books present no up-to-date materials from geology, because there are none. Proof should come from the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, varves, pollen counts, horizons etc. Creation scientists have resorted to geological distortions. The Paluxy River layer that is supposed to show footprints of man and dinosaurs is seventy million years old, and has no relationship to strata existing 4,200 years ago. Some of the prints show unmistakable signs of being carved. Others are obvious solution marks and many have only a superficial resemblance to human prints.

The strength of the story of Noah depends on the question, Where is the flood? Those who travel to Mount Ararat in order to prove the words of Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Peter, and Paul are mistaken. I think they must sleep uneasily at night remembering the old story of how the weavers wove the invisible cloth to make the finest garment for the emperor, only to have the grand occasion ruined by someone shouting; The emperor has no clothes on.

ANCIENT WEATHER

—SOME LANDMARKS OF ANCIENT WEATHER KNOWLEDGE.

Early man believed that the weather belonged to God. Storms were proof of God’s anger and rain was proof of God’s blessings. The earliest book of the biblical collection is the book of Job. After Job suffers and returns to God, he learns: Great things doeth God, which we cannot comprehend. For he saith to the snow, fall thou on the earth; likewise to the shower of rain, and to the showers of His mighty rain. Out of the chamber of the south cometh the storm; and cold out of the north. By the breath of God, ice is given and the breadth of the waters is congealed.

The ancient Hebrews pictured a pie-shaped land mass indented by the Mediterranean and Red Seas. God stretched out a flat earth (Isaiah 44:24) within a great sea (Psalms 24:2). This sea had four corners, and many interpreters believed that since God had bounded the seas, there was either a strip of land or a distant mountain range, so ships didn’t have to worry about falling over the edge. The earth was supported on pillars, and when they shook (Job 9:6) there were earthquakes.

Today’s Bible contains little weather information, for the book which gives a complete view of Hebrew meteorology was excluded. However, the book of Enoch was accepted by the early Christians and is extensively quoted in the book of Revelation. In it, Enoch visits heaven and learns the secrets of the calendar year, the moon’s travel and the timing of the heavens.