Rain: A Natural and Cultural History. Cynthia Barnett. New York. Crown: 2015. 355 pages.
I just finished a book about the rain. I just finished a book about the rain and was not once bored by it. I expected to trudge through Cynthia Barnett’s seemingly niche history and instead, I was reminded of rainy long runs and summer afternoons the pool closed because the lifeguards could no longer clearly make out the lines running the length of the tile bottom. There was the Girl Scout overnight that turned into a muddy game of hide and seek and the were caught unawares (or as unawares as Girl Scouts can be all rushing to our packs for ponchos and baseball caps) by the kinds of sudden crashing rainstorms that hit Virginia in the summer. We were tried out again in time for a camp fire. My mom had kept a cut milk jug full of dried twigs in the back of the van. Rain won’t ruin a camping trip, but wet kindling will.
Barnett know rain’s power to conjure these sorts of memories and weaves cultural allusions to the rain throughout her meandering narrative. That seems to be the trick at the heart of this book. While she takes time to mentions the rains centering the works of Dickens and Morrissey and Kurt Cobain, there is no main character of this work. Barnett is careful to position herself as narrator always and never the protagonist, even when she and a woman named Rimjhim, Assamese for “rain”, hike to see natural root bridges in the rainiest place on earth, the village of Cherrapunji in Meghalaya along India’s border with Bangladesh. It barely rains during the unusually dry June visit.
Instead, Barnett structures her work semi-chronologically. She begins with ancient tribes and their sacrificial prayers for good rain. Even still, she connects this to more the present when she notes Rick Perry’s call for prayer during a particularly rough Texas drought. Despite our advancing technological, we are no less beholden to rain’s whims. Her section on rainmakers—a particularly American sort of miraculous scamming and pseudo-science was most interesting to me. I knew the story of Robert St. George Dyrenforth (though I did not know his name) and his attempts to blow up the Texas sky to burst open the clouds so they would rain. I did not know his scheme was funded by the U.S. Government. Predictably, it did not work. There was Charles Malory Hatfield, who built derricks like oil rigs to send rainmaking vapors into the sky. Hatfield relied on almanacs to pick his “rainmaking” days and was run out of town when his rainmaking coincided with a flood that killed dozens of people. When Hatfield returned to collect his money (he only asked for payment in the event of rain) the city attorney refused, calling the deluge an act of God.
Rainmaking did not stop at the end of the 19th century. Both Bill Gates and the Department of Defense have bankrolled geo-engineering programs. The DoD funding cloud-seeding experiments some of their scientists claim caused a measurable increase in rain over the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. It’d a difficult thing to measure now, and would have been impossible to confirm at the time, Barnett writes. But our current climate crisis has renewed interest in this sort of geo-engineering, which begs all sorts of ethical questions I hope will be answered before the technologically actually works.
What you take away from a book like this is how much the same rain we wish away of sunny summer vacations is essential to our increasingly fragile and volatile ecosystem. I doubt I’ll be too bothered the next time rain interrupts my run.
Progress toward my reading goal: 13/26 (historical non-fiction)
Blown by a strong wind 