When I was little, my grandfather sat me on his knee. He smelled a potent mix of fresh cigarette smoke, a smell left behind by the cigarette he had just smoked, while at once tinged with stale cigarette smoke, left behind by all the others that he had smoked before. He told me of a great plan. One day, he said, we’ll control the weather. One day, not in my time, we’ll be able to make clouds come and then make them go, and we can make rain pour and then make it stop. He said we’d be able to harness the skies, and we’d be able to turn the weather on or off via a switch. The switch, he speculated, would be kept inside a deep concrete bunker, and it would require the help of two grown men just to turn if from sunny to cloudy and back again. I listened and wondered if some day, his great dream may possibly come true.
Men, those like my grandfather whom shared his elaborate smoke tinged vision, set about to make this dream a reality. There were false starts at first. One weather machine overheated under the weight of turning the clouds away, the great explosion of the hot metal parts killing the man who came up with that particular plan. His life and spectacular death are celebrated on some day in October. It wasn’t his invention that stuck, but he was the first one to use large metal fans to assist in both cooling the weather machine and at the same time blow the rain and clouds back out to another county once we were finished with them. He was our Wright Brother, the one who sort of made the whole thing work but left it to others to perfect the grand plan.
The fans are hidden, mostly, by a large stone berm that extends up beyond a far Western boundary of this county, and that stone berm is guarded by a high fence with tightly coiled barbed wire around the top of it. The barbed wire only came later, after too many kids found their way to the fans and tagged them with all sorts of things, none of which were pleasant or fit for decent eyes. The way the whole thing works is quite simple. The fans are switched to the ON position, at first to blow away any blue skies and then to sustain a stormy type feeling. Then, once we’re through with the storms and Monday comes, we turn the fans up even higher to blow the clouds and the rain into another county, or over the waters and into Michigan. They have fans pointed in this direction attempting to blow the clouds and the rain back at us, but our fans our better and theirs always pop the breaker.
The fan controls are in the bunker, the one men dug into the hill behind the village hall. My grandfather died one week before the digging started there, which isn’t such a big deal when you consider the Hansen boys’ grandfather died while actually digging the hole. He was digging and digging, with an effort not generally associated with an old man, and in the middle of all that digging he hadn’t heard the warning or seen the flashing lights and when he finally did, it was too late. The charge had blown and he with it. There’s a plaque for him on the bunker, and his grandchildren stop by once a year sometime in July to lean some flowers against it. Inside the bunker there really isn’t much. Just two big switches, the position to the left labeled SUNSHINE and the one to the right labeled CLOUDS/RAIN. At first, the sign just said CLOUDS, but someone thought it would help if we added RAIN to the label, as sometime the people assigned to work the switch didn’t know that the CLOUDS label also turned the RAIN on. It’s just easier this way.
I almost forgot to mention the rain seeding device that we use. We bought it used, through an ad on Craigslist. It was an ad for a massage, but there was also a mention of a rain seeder, so someone went to check it out. The machine works just as it should, able to fill the sky with rain when we need it. It generally works on command, though sometimes it’ll shoot rain up even when we hadn’t asked it to, so it isn’t a machine that works without a few glitches. Last summer, the bunker had to be fortified. We added some barbed wire around that as well, and also some of those Owls that people put on their piers to keep predatory things away. The farmers kept fiddling with the bunker door, trying to get the machine to turn on. It was no secret that it was broken for a spell last summer, and some people were so mad they suggested we cancel the ceremony that celebrated the invention that led to the invention of the machine. But by October it had been working again for a month or more, so we went ahead and had the party as originally planned, even if some people were a bit sore about it all.
While the weather machine is mostly good, the intentions were not always so noble. The goal was to keep the good weather for the locals, and foist the bad weather upon the visitors. So when the rain turns on during a Friday afternoon and sometimes doesn’t turn off until a Monday morning, the idea here wasn’t, and isn’t, to simply water the fields. The idea, hatched by men like my own grandfather, was to douse the visitors in rain so many weekends in a row that they’d someday never return. Then, these men figured, they could keep the lake to themselves and with it the fish, and the boats, and the property. They weren’t noble men at all, but instead selfish weather hoarders, seeking to invent something that would allow them to greedily soak in the weekday sun before watering the tourists from the time they arrived until the time they left.
The problem now, at least as I see it, is that the machine has broken. No one will admit to this. How else to explain a rainy weekend followed by a rainy week? And how else to explain a weather pattern that is no longer controllable by the use of some large fans, a rain seeder, and an underground bunker that controls them both? I’m going to try, this week, to do something about this, and if it takes destroying those things that the celebrated greatest generation built, then so be it. The whole plan has gone awry. Everything is wrong. We shouldn’t expect sunshine on Tuesdays and Wednesdays only to command the rain for Fridays and Saturdays. We should fix this mess that we’ve made. I’ll see what I can do to bring the sunshine back not just on a weekday, but a weekend too. I can’t remember what a glorious sunny Saturday looks like, and I desperately want to.