The Weather: Everyone's Favorite Topic

By Frank Trippett

At this time of year especially, weather is on everyone's mind--and on everyone's tongue. It is Topic A everywhere, more apt to be chatted about than money, food, sex or even scandals. Nor is it regarded as trivial small talk--"the discourse of fools," as an English proverb has it. Indeed, it is fodder for the conversation of board chairman and bored charwoman, of young and old, of the bright, the dull, the rich and the poor. As if this basic coin of conversation needed to be gilded, the average American constantly reads about the weather in his newspapers and magazines, listens to regular forecasts of it on the radio and watches while some TV prophet milks it for cuteness on the evening news.

Since the weather is to man what the waters are to fish, his preoccupation with it serves a unique purpose, constituting a social phenomenon all its own. Far from arising merely to pass the time or bridge a silence, "weathertalk," as it might be called, is a sort of code by which people confirm and salute the sense of community they discover in the face of the weather's implacable influence. By dispensing a raging blizzard, a driving rainstorm or even a sunny day, the weather tends to ameliorate the estrangements inherent in cultural divisions and social stratifications. Inspired by exceptional weather, otherwise immutable strangers suddenly find themselves in communion. In the spoken code, all those weathered cliches -"Cold enough for you?" "Good day for ducks, huh?" "Gonna be a hot one!" "What a day!"--mean the same thing: "We are, after all, in this boat together."

The boat sails on, buffeted by the winds, tossed by the waters, drenched by the heavens--its inhabitants subject not only to the physical effects of the weather but to its metaphysical sway as well. People everywhere, including the U.S., confront the weather with marvelously confused feelings and attitudes. They love it as an unrivaled spectacle and fear it as an unrivaled destroyer. One day they curse the rain, the next they dream of walking in it barefooted with a lover. They study meteorology in school, while clinging to the conviction that the weather can be forecast on the basis of the behavior of bugs, animals and vegetation. Groundhog day is still observed.

As victims, people hate to cancel a picnic on account of rain, and yet they often cheer when the weather brings human activity to an abrupt standstill. Very few people are like Blaise Pascal, who insisted: "The weather and my mood have little connection." Most feel that the weather indeed affects their moods, and yet a gloomy day does not necessarily mean a gloomy disposition for all: a book before the hearth, an afternoon of tinkering in the basement or an extended visit to the local bar pleases some people as well as the brightest sun. And at least one study of test scores seemed to suggest that the occasion of a violent storm stimulated the intellectual performance of an entire class of students.

The prime oddity in the whole snarl of attitudes is the fact that almost everybody develops perverse pride in abominable weather when it happens to be their own. Abroad, there are the desert tribes that profess to revere their baked domains. Similarly, the New Englander or the Minnesotan boasts about his frozen Februarys and the snow that waits till spring before uncovering the earth again. The Deep Southerner seems proud of those stifling summers that reduce everybody to sweat and distemper. Human responses to weather are, in sum, as variable as the weather itself.

If man sees the weather differently according to his circumstance, healthy fear works at the hub of his obsession with it. Facing the awesome grandeur and cruel humors of the weather, ancient man was forced to attribute the mysterious cosmic moil to deities. Wishing desperately to better his odds against the weather (or lessen its against him), he invented innumerable prayers, supplications, sacrifices, all intended to coax the gods to bestow better weather. Wanting exactly like modern man to know about tomorrow's wind, he developed the practice of looking for omens of coming weather in the conduct of animals, the tones of the sky or the turnings of foliage. He tried rituals, such as dancing, to control the weather. They did not work, of course, but they made for some lively times.

Through human history, weather has altered the march of events and caused some mighty cataclysms. Since Columbus did not know where he was going or where he had arrived when he got there, the winds truly deserve nearly as much credit as he for the discovery of America. Ugly westerlies helped turn the 1588 Spanish Armada away from England in a limping panic. Napoleon was done in twice by weather: once by the snow and cold that forced his fearful retreat from Moscow, later by the rain that bedeviled him at Waterloo and caused Victor Hugo to write: "A few drops of water ... an unseasonable cloud crossing the sky. sufficed for the overthrow of a world." In 1944 the Allied invasion of Normandy was made possible by a narrow interval of reasonably good weather between the bad. It was so narrow, in fact, that Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisen hower later expressed gratitude to "the gods of war." Paganism dies hard.

Every year brings fresh reminders of the weather's power over human life and events in the form of horrifying tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. These leave behind forgettable statistics and unforgettable images of devastated towns and battered humanity that can only humble people in the face of such wrath. Farmers often suffer the most, from the drought and plagues of biblical times to the hailstorms or quick freezes that even today can wipe out whole crops in minutes. Last week's icy assault on the Midwest, for all its ferocity and cost, is merely another reminder of the in escapable vulnerability of life and social well-being to the whims of the weather.

And history is packed with reminders of far worse. The weather, for example, provoked a major social dislocation in the U.S. in the 1930s when it turned much of the Southwest into the Dust Bowl.

No wonder, then, that man's great dream has been some day to control the weather. The first step toward control, of course, is knowledge, and scientists have been hard at work for years trying to keep track of the weather. The U.S. and other nations have created an international apparatus that maintains some 100.000 stations to check the weather round the clock in every sector of the globe and, with satellites, in a good deal of the more than 4 billion cubic miles of the atmosphere.

With computers on tap and electronic eyes in the sky, modern man has thus come far in dealing with the weather, alternately his nemesis and benefactor. Yet man's predicament today is not too far removed from that of his remote ancestors.

For all the advances of scientific forecasting, in spite of the thousands of daily bulletins and advisories that get flashed about, the weather is still ultimately capricious and unpredictable. Man's dream of controlling it is still just that -- a dream.

The very idea of control, in fact, raises enormous and troublesome questions.

Who would decide what weather to program? Since weather patterns are interrelated, would interference cause harmful imbalances? Is weather that appears to be beneficial to man also beneficial to nature? The vision of scheduled weather also raises ambiguous feelings among the world's billions of weather fans -- and poses at least one irresistible question: If weather were as predictable as holidays and eclipses, what in the world would everyone talk about?

--Frank Trippett

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