Since leaving Burning Man, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the role that principles play in a society, and what to do when people don’t live up to them.

Burning Man attracts more than 70,000 people each Labor Day weekend to an inhospitable dry lakebed called “the Playa” in northwestern Nevada. Burners marvel at incredible art installations, boogie to electronic dance music, and create and engage in hundreds of different participatory experiences at camps with a staggering variety of themes. These activities range from walking the catwalk after picking out a new (free) outfit at a pop-up thrift store to hanging from bungees attached to a geodesic dome.

But this year, there was another unexpected activity: waiting out two-and-a-half days of rain and the thick mud it formed on the Playa’s surface. News networks ran breathless stories about how the participants were “trapped,” and interviewed people who fled instead of listening to the requests to stay until the lakebed dried out again.

What really happened, and what lessons can we draw from it given that the event is trying to create a particular type of culture?

The non-profit organization that runs Burning Man was chartered in 2011 to better manage the event, and promote its principles throughout the year. It is very clear about its theory of a good government for society, and that vision is basically libertarian. Among its 10 key principles are “radical self-reliance” and “community effort.” Many of the other principles have to do with the event itself, including a focus on its gifting economy, the immediacy of experiences people have there, and leaving no trace of participants’ presence on the Playa.

For those of us who take these principles seriously, the two days of mud were simply a challenge to be embraced and overcome, even enjoyed. “You get the Burn that you need,” a common saying about the experience goes. The vast majority of people who came this year took the opportunity of the massive rainstorms to connect more closely with their campmates, to create clever art from the mud, and/or to keep on partying their faces off through the deluge.

There’s a growing contingent at Burning Man of newer folks, though, who seem to see it as another version of the Coachella music festival—even though it is held in a patch of desert that might be the most inhospitable place for human life in the lower 48 American states.

I ran into two such party people as the storms were rolling in, and the ground was becoming impassable. “Pretty soon it will be every man, woman, and child for themselves,” one of the women warned me. “This happened before, and people were stuck here for 10 days.”

This precise kind of weather had not, in fact, happened before (at least not since I first came in 2000), and people were not, in fact, stuck for 10 days, nor were we at all likely to be. But two things struck me about her sentiment.

First, in spite of all of the pervasive propaganda around the 10 Principles, the woman had absolutely no idea where she was. Over the course of the next three days, I was overwhelmed with the generosity of the people who were constantly checking on their neighbors, opening up their StarLink WiFi for people to contact their families, or offering an unending stream of food, water, and booze to strangers that became new friends. (Even though very few people actually needed anything since most of us took the radical self-reliance part seriously.)

Had the woman simply asked for anything, she would have gotten more than she needed from a giving community. But she didn’t. Instead, like thousands of others, she and her friends fled or tried to, turning a fine, even fun, situation into a risky one. After folks who waited out the mud finally exited when it was safe to do so—generally no more than a day later than they were planning to leave anyway—they passed a Prius half submerged in the mud. Its driver had ignored all the warnings to just chill out and have fun with what life was presenting us with, and the result was a ruined $30,000 vehicle.

As it’s been reported, the people who fled were generally among the most well-off. I’m looking at you Chris Rock who apparently thought the event was going to descend into cannibalism after one day of rain. Many of those who stayed were the Burners of relatively modest means who make up a big chunk of the event’s attendees, people who spend some or all of their disposable income for the year on a week or two’s escape from the “default world.” And my experience has been that people with disabilities are the very picture of radical self-reliance on the Playa. But a minority of primarily able-bodied well-off folks did panic and the world picked up on that panic, magnifying it.

The second thing that struck me was how much the people who run Burning Man stuck to its view of a good society, especially the fostering of radical self-reliance of the denizens of the Playa. All of the information that we were given over the radio for the better part of a day was to “shelter in place and conserve food and water.” We were eventually directed to find more information on a website that most people couldn’t access.

I do think that the folks who run the event could have put out a less sensationalistic announcement that would have cut down on the panic. “Shelter in place” makes sense as your verbiage if there is an active shooter on the loose or if a tornado is on the way. Less so for what to do during a rainstorm that creates some thick mud. They could have reassured people and told them to reach out to their neighbors if they needed anything.

But the people who run Burning Man are very, even willfully, bad at different elements of event management, including entrance and egress to the Playa and communication during the event. Perhaps this is an intentional call for people to practice those principles of self-reliance and community effort on their own, without their “government” giving them any more additional specific instructions on how to do so when the mud hits the fan?

It got me thinking: What is the obligation of a government to its citizens when the terms of the social contract, so to speak, are so clearly laid out but not followed by many?

In terms of the event itself, I believe Burning Man could do at least a little more to ensure that it has prepared attendees. If you fled the Playa this year, you probably should not have been there in the first place. This may seem to be a violation “Radical Inclusion,” the first principle of the event, and people argue for the importance of acculturation of those who are not long-time Burners into the ethic of the place. Asking people to attend an online seminar or ensuring that they have enough water when they enter the event, however, would not be a major violation of this principle. I do a lot with the Scouts, and the event can probably help folks traveling to this inhospitable wasteland to be at least as prepared as the 11-year-olds that we send to sleepaway camp.

But here’s the rub: societies generally cannot and really should not choose only self-reliant people committed to community effort as their citizens.

This leaves us with the challenge of what to do given the extreme humanness of humans. Libertarianism, like communism, is an interesting theory that is problematic in practice. You can have all of the principles you want, but some people make idiotic decisions and these decisions can have tremendous negative consequences for themselves and those around them. And even though this rainstorm did not actually qualify as a disaster, we clearly need governments that are capable of responding to true crises in a more organized and effective fashion.

Pondering all of these things, I stuck it out to see the climactic “Man burn,” which happened two days late, on Monday. It was a tremendous moment of catharsis for those of us who stayed to see this 70-foot-tall art installation go up in flames after a massive fireworks display. Only the following morning, muddy and tired, did I make my way out of a desert of possibility and back to a world of practicality. In this world, governments generally attempt to take care of us rather than holding us to a standard of self-reliance that most people are not even trying to achieve.

But I hold on to the dream of Burning Man’s governing principles.

You may have heard that Burning Man was a disaster but I “got the Burn that I needed.” The compassion and community spirit modeled by those who stayed behind will remain an inspiration to me. As for those who fled, I will stay curious about how societies can work to help people achieve more self-reliance and avoid panic, in crises both real and imagined. And I will keep working on rebuilding trust in a society that believes that even the minor challenge of a couple of days of mud will quickly lead to people turning on—and potentially eating!—each other.

The post Finding a Good Society in the Mud of Burning Man appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now we’re just waiting for the next iteration of this “Godzilla” El Niño that threatens to send torrents of rain over California until March. As I check the weather report every morning—something I haven’t done in many, many years—I keep thinking: Have we done enough to prepare for these storms? Have we gone overboard? And, Didn’t I come to California to escape all of this?

I know rain. I lived through the wettest consecutive 12 months on record in England, a place famous for waterproof Wellington boots and soggy holidays. Between April of 2000 and March 2001, 53.37 inches of rain fell. In October 2000, large parts of Kent and Sussex were underwater as the rivers Ouse, Uck, and Medway burst their banks. In November, the swollen Ouse, in Yorkshire, damaged 5,000 homes and businesses in the worst flooding in 400 years.

I didn’t see that much catastrophe in Oxford, where I was studying for a master’s degree in English literature. But there were a few torrential downpours, frequent soft rains that soaked everything, and a sky that gave me a sense of how many shades of gray there really are. It was like living in a Eurythmics song on loop: Here comes the rain again.

I consider my two years in England (1999 to 2001) my years of living indoors. I learned to relish reading in libraries in Oxford and London—inspired to pore over books about swamps as part of my master’s thesis. But sometimes I could only stay inside for so long. One spring day, a group of us grad students decided to go to London. It began to rain at our first stop—the Tate Modern museum, where we had to stand outside in line for tickets because it had recently opened—and we were lucky that staff began handing out ponchos. The downy soak continued through the afternoon as we filed into Shakespeare’s Globe, a faithful reconstruction of the 1599 playhouse that was the Bard’s home stage. We had bought “groundling” tickets, which meant that we had to stand in the open-air area that extended from the foot of the stage as we were doused for over an hour. In retrospect, perhaps we tempted fate by choosing to see The Tempest.

On a typically rainy English day, the author (at right) visits Shakepeare’s house in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

 
I could have laughed it all off as a lesson in charming English living if I hadn’t gotten so sick. In late February 2001, after enduring what seemed like an excessive number of colds, I was having trouble breathing. I couldn’t hear out of my left ear. My face broke out in hives. I slept with a hot water bottle to keep warm, and in my exhaustion I burned one of my legs.

That finally prompted me to see a doctor. She prescribed me antibiotics and an inhaler. I was so out of it that I lost the antibiotics shortly after I picked them up—they fell, unnoticed, out of my backpack on the bike ride home. It wasn’t long after that I discovered the source of all these problems. While looking through the wooden wardrobe in my room one day, I pushed aside all the hangers. The entire back of the wardrobe—which had been wallpapered—was covered in black mold. When I looked at the back of cabinets and bookshelves, there was more.

I went on a de-molding mission with bleach and a sponge, but the spores came back. I resigned myself to the fact that the mold was better suited to this climate than I was. So, that spring, as I had to think about what I would do once I finished my master’s degree, I was ready to go some place dry and warm. I dreamed of California.

Even on sunny days in Oxford, storm clouds often loomed.

 
When I got back to America in July, it took me only days to lose the inhaler, stop wheezing, and feel the sinus pressure disappear. By the end of 2001, I’d made it to the Golden State. During my first few months in sunny Los Angeles, I put off doing chores like grocery shopping on the weekends in favor of going to the beach, or hiking in the Angeles National Forest. The days seemed too lovely to waste. And then a friend pointed out, “You know, every day is like this here.”

In the 15 years I’ve lived here, I haven’t really missed the rain. I love that I don’t have to worry about mosquitoes, which always seem to seek me out. And when I was a newspaper reporter and I had to stakeout a hospital or house on a news story, I appreciated that I didn’t have to do it the rain. Now that I have a young daughter, I know that when I run out of activities to entertain her with at home, I can always take her to a playground.

But four years of severe drought can make you change your mind. The paltry snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has meant water restrictions throughout the state and not a lot of skiing, one of my favorite outdoor activities. I’ve seen the shriveled almond and fruit trees in agricultural areas along the I-5. Walking on our lawn sounds like walking on corn flakes, and we’ve got a basin to collect water as the shower warms up. Of course, the city’s Department of Water and Power has announced a rate hike on our taps to thank us for our conservation efforts.

I was telling people I couldn’t wait for El Niño to show up, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t anxious when it did. The first El Niño rains hit Southern California in January with ferocity. Freeways turned into giant channels of water. Hillsides washed away.

My husband put out the sandbags in front of our house so that all the rainwater washing down the street wouldn’t end up down our driveway. But then he found out that there’s a concrete sluice that someone built behind our next-door neighbors’ backyard a very long time ago that channels the water away from their basement to a corner of their property, where it flows into ours. Contractors have told us it is legal for property owners to help water flow downhill.

All of this makes me think of the strange things rain makes us do. Our current next-door neighbors have always been kind and generous, taking in our newspapers when we’re on vacation or letting us pick extra lemons from their tree. So how do we even bring up this issue of previous owners’ channeling potentially damaging waters toward our house? Where else are they supposed to send the water to? And should we just cut a hole in a fence and send the water down into the next neighbor’s yard?

Rain connects all of us in L.A. in ways we don’t always acknowledge. And it forces us to think ahead in ways that so many of us grasshoppers, singing happily in the sunshine, haven’t done in a long time. I’m stressed about the money we’ve had to channel into repairs, but I’m even more worried about doing nothing.

I realized recently that my 4-year-old daughter was born just as the drought was beginning. In those early days, when we struggled to find ways to calm her down in the middle of the night, we found that turning on a recording of rain helped her fall asleep. Since she hadn’t heard rain before, we wondered if there isn’t something hardwired in our brains that makes the sound of rain so soothing. Now, I guess, we’ll find out.

The post Can Rain Hold Us Hostage? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You know that earthy smell that comes just as it begins to rain after a dry spell? It has a name. Scientists call it petrichor.

When I smell petrichor, I get excited: Rain is a personal and professional obsession. I begin keeping close tabs on the window while I check weather reports for the forecast. As the manager of citizen science (getting the community involved in scientific studies) at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, I start making a list in my mind to share with others. What mushrooms and slime molds and snails and slugs will I be likely to find? I imagine all of the places I should check to find these uncommon organisms that only come out when the soil is moist.

Where I grew up—England—rain was not at all a rare event. As a kid, I’d follow the slime trails of snails to chase them down among the bushes, then carefully take them to the designated snail house—a crook in a tree. Somehow the snails would always escape! I would walk across the farm fields around my house looking for mushrooms growing in circles, which my grandma told me were called fairy rings.

One day I was exploring a hollow tree and a huge puffball mushroom exploded in my hair. It happened as I climbed up inside the dark recess and spotted a large creamy white orb about the same size as my 7-year old head. As I wiggled through the hollow, trying to pull myself through, I brushed against the puffy mass and it burst. It was white and gooey and made my curly hair stick to my head. My family thought it was hilarious.

In Los Angeles, I have to wait months and months for a good rain. With El Niño 2016 upon us, I am on alert for the new slimy city that springs up after a rain, whenever I hike, walk to the bus stop, or bike through Koreatown.

Fungi live most of their lives underground, hidden from our eyes. Here in the arid Southwest they are easy to miss, only showing themselves for the briefest of moments after rains, or on irrigated lawns and mulched garden beds. Hiking in Griffith Park after a storm, I look along the sides of the trail hoping to spot spectacular fruiting bodies—what most of us think of as mushrooms. In Southern California, there are almost 400 species of fungi, including wicked poisonous ones like the western destroying angel, and delicious chanterelles, which sell online for $24 a pound. If you are really lucky you might even stumble upon a jack o’lantern, a bright-orange-gilled mushroom that glows in the dark! This is real bioluminescence. It contains the enzyme luciferase, the same as in fireflies.

A few years ago, I found a puffball mushroom in Griffith Park. It was much, much smaller than the one that popped on my head as a child, but I still couldn’t resist taking a closer look and marveling at the white bumpy flesh. This time, I touched it with my finger—and a faint puff of brown “smoke” seemed to be exhaled. Just like a raindrop, I had triggered the spores to release so the puffball’s genetic material could carry on.

Slime molds are even more alien than fungi and just as fun to hunt down. Take the dog vomit slime mold, for example. The name comes from its common incarnation as a bright yellow or pink oddly puffy aggregation on lawns, paths, or walls. It can be found all over the city, and I’ve found it in mulch along the L.A. River, and in planters in Koreatown. Most of the time the dog vomit slime mold lives as a single cell, surviving underground or inside dead wood and engulfing food. It’s when times are tough—for instance, when they run out of food—that the cells come together to move around in these large masses called slugs. Scientists have been studying their movement—watching them solve mazes or making them grow interstate highway systems on maps! After the slime mold goes through sexual reproduction, they produce and release spores and then turn black. The spores are caught by the wind and blown away, landing on new territory where they can go through the cycle again.

Dog vomit slime mold spotted in a planter in Koreatown. Courtesy of author.

Thirty years later, I am still chasing snails. A few days ago, after a rain, I went on a work field trip with museum herpetologist Greg Pauly in search of snails and slugs. In celebration of the museum’s SLIME (Snails and Slugs Living in Modified Environments) project and El Niño, I was bent on getting pictures for this citizen science project. We strolled through West Coyote Hills in Orange County and kept our eyes peeled. At the bottom of a mountain biking trail, Greg and I began gently flipping over old bits of rubble.

After 30 seconds, we found snails. I took a look and immediately thought they might be interesting. They didn’t look like the regular brown garden snails (the big ones that were introduced from Europe for escargot) that are found all over town. Instead, they had a chocolate brown stripe that followed the swirl of the shell and they had a much darker body. We took pictures, hoping we could get the snail identified by the museum’s malacologist—a.k.a. snail/slug/clam/squid/octopus scientist—Jann Vendetti. Later that evening I got a two-word text message from Greg.

Helminthoglypta tudiculata

These are the types of texts you get when scientists are your friends. Greg had shown the photo to Jann, and she had been able to make a positive identification. These two words carried a lot of weight. It meant the snails we found were native Angelenos—Southern California shoulderband snails, to be exact. It meant we had found another population of this under-studied group. It also meant the pictures Greg and I had taken could be valuable citizen science data points. We both shared our photos to the SLIME project on iNaturalist (like FaceBook for nature nerds) so Jann can better study these snails, which are at risk of extinction. Our local native snails are L.A.’s version of the canary in the coalmine, if the snails are not doing well, our environment is not doing well.

When it’s very hot or dry, snails aestivate—which means they retreat into their shells to use as little energy or water as possible. Some species can even excrete a liquid that becomes a barrier—Jann calls it an epiphragm—sealing themselves (and their moisture) inside. And then they just hunker down waiting for the rain to return.

Sometimes I’m so excited when the rain returns that I lie down on dry pavement or dirt, so the rain can darken the ground around me to make a “rain shadow.” I’ve noticed that some raindrops feel sharp and prickly; others splash on my face in huge droplets. As I lie on the ground and really feel the rain, I wonder, what must this feel like to other creatures, who’ve been waiting so long for this manna to fall from heaven?

The post The Slimy Underworld That Emerges After the Rain appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Tharpe is truly great and this recognition is long overdue. Born in the small but thriving town of Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in 1915 and raised partly in Chicago, Tharpe was a musical prodigy of the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal denomination that encouraged adherents to express their faith through music. (The honorific “Sister” came from the church.) With her mother, an evangelist, she came of age as a singer and instrumentalist at Southern tent meetings, churches, and religious revivals. She ultimately gained bigger fame in 1938, when she began appearing on the stages of prominent New York nightclubs and recording her music for the Decca label. The 1940s found her fronting Lucky Millinder’s popular swing band and then, in the post-World War II years, playing with the Sam Price Trio, with which she recorded “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” a No. 2 record on the “race” charts (which charted music made for black audiences) in 1945. In the late 1940s, she began collaborating with Newark, N.J.-based singer Marie Knight, with whom she made memorable duets, including “Didn’t It Rain” (1947) and “Up Above My Head” (1948).

Newspaper coverage of Rosetta Tharpe performing in 1944.

 
She was so popular, particularly among black audiences, that in the early 1950s she staged her own wedding—her third—in a sold-out ceremony/concert in a Washington, D.C. baseball stadium, playing electric guitar from the outfield while wearing a white wedding gown. An indication of Tharpe’s flamboyance and gift for stagecraft, the stunt was featured in a multi-page photographic spread in Ebony. Fans brought gifts of tableware and even a television set, and the whole affair, which was more radical and perhaps more self-exploitative than anything Madonna ever did—was issued by Decca as a two-disc “wedding album.”

Tharpe didn’t just know how to play the electric guitar, she had a pre-Hendrix gift for making her relationship with the instrument a show in itself. She developed a distinctive finger-picking style and cradled the guitar with an eye toward spectacle. She calibrated her persona carefully, stretching the boundaries of gospel while crafting an image of churched respectability. As a woman who could outplay her male counterparts, she managed the “threat” of her virtuosity to men by undercutting it with disarming humor and a dose of feminine decorum.

By the late 1950s, Tharpe’s star had dimmed, for reasons that included the mercurial nature of the music industry, which demanded the production of new stars and new styles. Tharpe lived comfortably, but modestly, in Philadelphia, reduced to playing small venues and flailing around in search of a sustaining hit that could compete with the rhythm-and-blues records being put out by younger performers.

Paradoxically, her star was then on the rise in Britain and Europe, where earnest music fans wanted the chance to see African-American musicians live. Even as Beatlemania and the British Invasion took hold in the United States, the black American music that had inspired John Lennon, Robert Plant, Keith Richards, and others attracted young people’s attention in England. American kids wanted the Beatles singing “Love Me Do,” but back in the U.K., kids were clamoring to hear the black American blues musicians who had influenced the young British acts.

Ironically, the video that has sparked this recent Rosetta Tharpe “moment” on the Internet is a testimonial to the discovery of Tharpe and other black American musicians by these overwhelming white English audiences in the 1960s. With imprints of U.S. R&B records hard to come by in Britain and mostly unplayed on BBC radio, young Brits flocked to live shows. The much-circulated clip of Tharpe playing “Didn’t It Rain” is from one of these festivals, the American Folk, Blues, and Gospel Caravan, which traveled Britain and Europe in spring 1964, showcasing Tharpe along with the likes of bluesmen Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Muddy Waters.

The Blues and Gospel Caravan, as the TV show based on the 1964 tour was dubbed, was filmed at a defunct suburban Manchester, England, railroad station repurposed for the occasion as the fictional town of “Chorltonville,” a half-Hollywood, half-Disneyland fantasy of a (racially segregated) Southern railroad depot. On one side of the tracks are bleachers filled with long-haired white British kids; on the other side, a set of older, more formally attired black musical notables make their way among stage props including a bale of hay, a rocking chair, and two goats tethered to a rail.

Such an old-timey, countrified setting was embarrassingly off-key for a group of seasoned musicians who had performed at Carnegie Hall and on Broadway, but it gave the assembled English kids and folks watching at home the illusion of having journeyed to a mythic backwater and discovered a diamond in the rough, the sources of rock and roll. And although they were amused at being “discovered,” Tharpe and her fellow performers played along with the fans’ fantasy, appreciating the interest. At the beginning of the clip, as pianist Cousin Joe helps Tharpe off a horse-drawn buggy and onto the damp set, you can even hear her remark that she is having “the wonderfulest time in my life.”

In the performance of “Didn’t It Rain” that follows, Tharpe overcomes the cornball sentimentality—or, read less generously, the patronizing racialism—of her surroundings. Dressed in a cape and high heels, she sings and accompanies herself on a white electric SG with the self-assurance of a pro who has seen and done it all before. Her confident, magnetic persona upends expectations both of what a woman was or wasn’t supposed to do (She was handling the guitar with such boldness!) and of how African-Americans were supposed to carry themselves (Look at how sophisticated she seems!). At the same time, attentive viewers might see in Tharpe’s performance a submerged history of black female gospel musicians as musical trailblazers.

In the popularity of the 1964 British TV clip on today’s global social media, we see history repeating itself. That’s because Tharpe’s career, like the career of so many other black American musicians, has been defined by cycles of obscurity and popularity, forgetting and remembering. My own interest in writing a biography of Tharpe was spurred by a then-obscure video of her doing “Up Above My Head”—a clip that is now accessible to anyone with a smartphone. But my curiosity was equally piqued by the realization that I wasn’t alone my ignorance. Her erasure, I found, was a function not merely of the passage of time, but of a tendency in American history to celebrate and elevate the achievements of white men and to “forget” or ignore the brilliance of a figure like Rosetta. Nowhere was this made clearer to me than in a 1970 newspaper clipping I stumbled upon that attributed her sound and style to Elvis Presley—when it was Elvis, and so many others, who emulated Tharpe!

Tharpe’s present moment of fame is unlikely to end soon. This fall, two new theatrical productions—one set to debut off-Broadway, another in Pasadena—will bring elements of Tharpe’s story and a taste of her music to new audiences. Passionate supporters continue to lobby for her recognition by the Rock Hall. And gifted young musicians including Rhiannon Giddens, of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and Brittany Howard, of the Alabama Shakes, continue to explore Tharpe’s repertoire and draw inspiration from her example.

That unmarked Philadelphia grave? Today it has a rose-colored marble headstone paid for by fans incensed that her legacy had been ignored for so long. Inscribed with a quote from a close friend, it reads, “She would sing until you cried and then she would sing until you danced for joy.” We are not finished crying or dancing.

The post Why We Keep Rediscovering the Flamboyant Godmother of Rock appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rays of light during monsoon rains over the Catalina Mountains outside Tucson, Arizona.

This obsession with desert rain also meant it was hard to resist dreaming about the possibility of rainstorms on Titan, my favorite moon of Saturn, which I was studying (and continue to study) through the NASA and European Space Agency Cassini-Huygens mission. But we knew from data gathered in 1980 by Voyager—the first spacecraft to visit the Saturn system close-up—that there was essentially no water in the moon’s nitrogen atmosphere because it was too cold.

So what would rain on Titan even be made of? Methane takes water’s place on the moon as cloud-forming gas, and thus would be the main ingredient of raindrops, if there were any. And because nitrogen is so soluble in methane, each droplet of rain would have to be 20 percent nitrogen, as opposed to Earth’s droplets, which carry carbon dioxide but essentially no nitrogen. How would these exotic methane rains behave? Would they be gentle and steady, or violent downpours like those in the desert?

First, to know if rain was even a possibility, we had to figure out where the methane on Titan was and wasn’t. Voyager told us that the lowermost part of the moon’s atmosphere was not saturated in methane; the “humidity” (which means the ratio of the methane in the air to the amount required for saturation) at the equator was about 50 percent. That’s not a desert—more like New York City or Chicago. Saturn is almost 10 times farther from the sun than Earth, so there is not as much solar energy to warm the air and push it upwards to the altitudes where clouds can form (and then release its moisture as rain when it cools). It seemed that for any rain to get going, special conditions—mountain ramparts to force moist air upward, and seasonal shifts in winds and sunlight—would be needed.

Armed with these ideas and my picture-window view of the desert mountains, I worked with Maria Awal, a master’s student in atmospheric sciences, to model what it would take for methane rainstorms to form on Titan. We found that a rising column, or “plume,” of methane-rich air that was buoyant compared to its surroundings would be needed, and that Titan’s atmosphere could in fact create one. But the distant sun could provide only enough energy to trigger one or two storms anywhere on Titan at a given time. In other words, Titan storms, if they existed, had to be sporadic but violent—gully washers of the true desert style.

What about the nature of the raindrops? Shortly before he arrived at our laboratory, the planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz speculated that they must be giant and flattened, falling so slowly that the storms that produced them might drift away before the drops even hit the ground. And those drops that evaporate in the dry air—which might be most of them—leave behind “ghost droplets” of ethane—a sister molecule made from methane’s destructive encounter with ultraviolet sunlight high up in the atmosphere.

With Lorenz and another scientist, Caitlin Griffith, who came to Arizona in 2002, our Tucson lab became a thundercloud of research on Titan’s storms as we awaited an up-close and personal view of the moon. That view would come from Cassini-Huygens, the Saturn-orbiting spacecraft launched in 1997 that carried a probe designed to land on Titan. The mission would tell us whether all our guesswork was right or wrong.

In 2004, Cassini-Huygens dropped into Saturn orbit. Early images of Titan showed a south pole bathed in early summer sun with masses of slow-moving convective clouds. Evidence of dark spots under the clouds led us to wonder: Could those be ponds of methane that collected after storms? When Huygens made its descent through Titan’s atmosphere the following year, one of its instruments measured the amount of methane at different altitudes in its descent, and found that it was quite a bit higher than typical cumulus clouds on the Earth.

Most striking were the pictures taken during descent. As the probe drifted over a rocky hill—the rocks on Titan are actually made of extremely chilled water ice—at roughly the cruising altitude of a jetliner, it captured a series of vein-like channels, carved into the hillside in just the way one would expect from rainfall. Bathed in the dim twilight from a distant sun, they had to be caused by streams of methane as they ran down to a dark plain—the signature of occasional and intense methane storms.

The Huygens probe captured this image of Titan’s landscape as it descended through the moon’s atmosphere.

As the seasons changed, Cassini saw vast clouds, covering thousands of miles of terrain, appearing and disappearing around Titan’s equator. They left behind a dramatically darkened surface, which then brightened again. We know that moist soils on Earth look dark in space when they are doused with rain, so why couldn’t Titan’s icy “soil” be darkened by intense methane rain?

What the spacecraft had found was an active methane weather pattern—yes, clouds and rain—on a moon a billion miles from the Earth. Mars has dust storms, Io has volcanic eruptions, and Pluto may have methane snow, but Titan is the only place we know of in the solar system that has liquid rainfall like we have on Earth. Only Titan has environments that allow clouds to make rain, which carves out gullies and valleys in the landscape, ultimately to find its way to the polar seas—seas, as Cassini has discovered, that are so vast that they contain hundreds of times more hydrocarbon in the form of methane than all the known oil and gas reserves on the Earth. What secrets do they hold?

Five years ago, I left the Sonoran desert for wetter and cooler climes back east. The snow outside my window in Ithaca, New York, has no analog on Titan—it’s too warm for methane snow anywhere there. But Titan’s methane cycle has almost everything else that Earth’s hydrological cycle has—clouds, rain, streams, rivers, and seas. (Titan just lacks the globe-girdling ocean.) Titan is our home world transcribed into a minor key. The only witnesses have been our robotic emissaries Cassini and Huygens. Will human eyes someday witness firsthand a Titan monsoon rainstorm?

As I think back to that Tucson office with the panorama of summer thunderstorms moving off the Catalina mountains, I conjure up a fantasy of the future: a lonely base halfway across the solar system with a picture-window view of methane rain falling on an icy hillside, perched next to the final resting place of the Huygens probe, an artifact from long ago.

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Old Holborn yellow, Zig Zag “Le Zouave”
Barcelona chocolate, Kronenbourg pint
four rose for you, heated terrace
rain street, an ambulance passes by
Turkish Techno, European tourists
Notre Dame, smoke in the air
French David went to Miami and L.A.
hated Hollywood, sold himself in movies
I think of walking to Bois de Boulogne
but was told not to go after dark
David shames me for not visiting the Louvre
or looking out from the Eiffel Tower
imagining Paris 100 years ago, the boats
at night, I show him my drawings
he hates to bother me and my writing
but finally someone talked to me

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Lancaster’s character is beefy and full of swagger, just as dramatist N. Richard Nash imagined him when he wrote the play upon which the film was based. But the real-life rainmaker who inspired Nash was quite the opposite.

Charles Mallory Hatfield was trim and partial to pressed suits and trilby hats that sharpened his already-narrow face and nose. He struck a studious humility that disarmed civic leaders and businessmen who would have been wise to any Burt Lancaster bluster. “I do not make it rain,” Hatfield would demur. “That would be an absurd claim. I simply attract clouds, and they do the rest.”

Hatfield was once the most famous rainmaker in America. His notorious “success”—“Hatfield’s Flood”—arrived in the form of extreme rains in January 1916 that burst through the dam at San Diego’s Morena Reservoir, killing more than 20 people and washing away roads, bridges, and homes.

The compelling mystery about Hatfield is not whether he brought the rain; meteorologists say “atmospheric rivers”—long streams of water vapor in the atmosphere that can stall over vulnerable areas—were likely to blame for Hatfield’s Flood. The great question in his life and work is also the central theme of Nash’s play: Did Hatfield believe in his own ability to milk the clouds?

Hatfield was born in 1875 in the rainmaking motherland of Kansas. During a crushing drought in the late 19th century, the state’s dry winds blew in some of the most audacious conmen of American history along with the tumbleweeds: Traveling rainmakers would charge up to $500 for a storm, brew chemicals in tents or train cars, and claim success for any rain that fell within many miles. (As meteorologists know, it’s always raining somewhere.) They hardly needed to advertise; credulous newspaper reporters did it for them.

Hatfield’s family moved to Southern California when he was a boy, and he shined in his first career, sewing-machine salesman. But his passion lay in picking apart the machine of the atmosphere. Hatfield read and re-read classic weather texts like Elementary Meteorology by William Morris Davis. The San Diego Public Library still has his well-thumbed, underlined copies. By 1902, he was dabbling in rainmaking at his father’s ranch outside San Diego.

The swirling steam of a tea kettle gave Hatfield the idea to climb a windmill at the ranch, heat some chemicals in a pan, and send the vapors ambling into the sky, Clark C. Spence writes in his classic history of American “pluviculture.” When a heavy storm descended after his first try, Hatfield was convinced either that he had figured out the recipe for rain—or could make people believe he had.

Hatfield turned professional on a public bet in Los Angeles, when he claimed he could draw 18 inches of rain to the city for the winter and spring of 1904 to ’05. L.A.’s annual average rainfall is 15 inches. In times of drought, the city can see as little as five. During what we now know as the El Niño cycle, L.A. can draw closer to 20. Ending an unusually dry decade, the winter of Hatfield’s bet was such a year.

Thirty L.A. business leaders pooled a total of $1,000 for Hatfield if he could draw 18 inches by May. Hatfield erected a 12-foot derrick in the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena. He set to work mixing his chemicals and sending them aloft. He explained his technique to the Los Angeles Examiner:

When it comes to my knowledge that there is a moisture-laden atmosphere hovering, say, over the Pacific, I immediately begin to attract the atmosphere with the assistance of my chemicals, basing my efforts on the scientific principle of cohesion. I do not fight Nature … I woo her by means of this subtle attraction.

After a dry Rose Parade on New Year’s, as requested by the locals, the Los Angeles skies rained furiously that winter. The last inch specified in Hatfield’s contract fell a month before his deadline. The triumph created demand for Hatfield and his rain derricks throughout the West, including Canada and Mexico. He was soon credited with filling the streams that kept local mines in operation in Grass Valley, California; replenishing the reservoirs of the Yuba City Water Company; and bringing rain to the parched badlands near Carlsbad Caverns.

The late Riverside journalist and historian Thomas W. Patterson, who wrote extensively about Hatfield and interviewed his family members, described him as scrupulous. He discouraged crowds from congregating around his towers. But those who caught a glimpse were mesmerized. Hatfield clambered across his scaffolds almost like a madman, pouring his concoctions, and keeping huge plumes moving until they evaporated. Patterson concluded that Hatfield believed in his abilities, and in the product that he sold.

The science and technology historian James Fleming argues Hatfield’s contracts gave him almost unbeatable odds. He always worked during rainy season, and his contracts extended over a hundred-mile radius, “which increased his chances of apparent success a hundredfold,” Fleming writes in his weather-control history Fixing the Sky. Hatfield’s most dogged detractors were the scientists at the U.S. Weather Bureau. Each time a newspaper lauded him, bureau chief Willis Moore sent scathing rebuttals from Washington. Back home in San Diego, the local weather bureau commissioner wanted him prosecuted for fraud.

Instead, the people of San Diego would credit Hatfield with the most copious rains in memory—and the city’s most devastating weather disaster. In December 1915, the San Diego City Council engaged him to conjure enough rain to not just fill, but overflow the Morena Reservoir. If Morena topped its banks by December 1916, the city would pay him $10,000. If not, he would be owed nothing.

During the first week of January in 1916, not long after he’d built his derrick and started brewing near the reservoir, the skies began to drizzle. The drizzles turned to steady rains. The rains turned to record torrents; more than 28 inches fell that month. Morena Reservoir overflowed. On January 27, the Lower Otay Dam burst, sending a wall of water into downtown San Diego that killed at least 22 people and washed out all but two of the city’s 112 bridges.

Armed vigilantes were said to have gone after Hatfield and his brother, who fled on horseback. When the pair returned to collect Hatfield’s money, the shrewd city attorney argued the deluge was “an act of God.” Hatfield filed a lawsuit. City lawyers said San Diego would pay only if he would sign a statement assuming responsibility for the flood and relieving the city of damages; some $3.5 million.

Hatfield never received his fee. But the publicity was worth more. For the next 15 years, Hatfield built his derricks around the American West and on a few international assignments, even if sometimes he cashed in on rains an inch below normal. In 1922, the New York Times ran a story about his trip to Italy to help break a drought: “He was anxious to explain his secret process to Pope Pius, and if the Pontiff agreed he would try to induce rain to fall on the Vatican gardens.”

If Hatfield’s methods were suspect, the concept was sound. Cloud-seeding—injecting clouds with silver iodide or other aerosols to make them form the ice crystals that then fall as snow or rain—can boost precipitation in clouds that were going to rain anyway.

Of course, it’s impossible to know whether it would have rained without a nudge. The most comprehensive study of cloud-seeding found that it increases precipitation by only 5 to 15 percent. Still, it is a testament to the value of water in arid regions that western state and local governments, utilities, agricultural consortia, ski resorts, and others have ongoing cloud-seeding programs to try and squeeze every possible drop from the sky. From rainmaking to reservoirs, to the $1 billion seawater desalination plant opening this year in San Diego County, all promises of water to quench drought require some magical self-belief; a suspension of the reality of living in arid lands. This is part of the American dream of the Big Fix—pervasive in our environmental history, the belief that an ingenious solution will come along to solve our water, land—and now climate—mistakes.

Hatfield died quietly at his home in Pearblossom, California, during a rainy El Niño winter in 1958. No one picked up the news of his death until four months later, when the city of San Diego tried to reach him—perhaps for a history project or a documentary.

The answer to the question of whether he believed in the rain-making power of his curious chemical concoctions went with him to the grave. It may be that Hatfield himself was not quite sure. And perhaps it didn’t matter, so long as others believed in him, and in America’s latest water dream.

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Preparing to face the elements here usually means sunblock and a hat. A colleague in the English department at UNLV teaches the concept of “the sublime” by telling students to walk outside in summer. Need to be reminded of human mortality in the face of nature’s power? A blast of dry heat will do it.

I grew up in Phoenix—where the excitement of a stormy day could blot out concentration and the heat created a lot of time for indoor reading and dreaming about rainier places. Now that I teach poetry in another Sun Belt city, I’m reminded about rain’s particular power in the desert. It’s not only that I’ve seen it come down in monsoons that cause flash floods and stop traffic. I’ve also heard it beating through the poems that made me love poetry, the poems I share with my students.

“The weather is made for us partly by writers and artists,” whose preserved responses to “its fleeting effects” we project onto lived encounters with rain, wind, sleet, snow, and sun, writes Alexandra Harris in her history of artistic responses to wet English weather. The insight applies to other weathers, of course. And to get caught in the rain in literature is to tune in, if at a distance, to an activating force for the thought and flow of poetry.

There’s an obvious, elemental truth linking rain and creative genesis. We can’t live without rain; it is life-giving, life-sustaining, though too much or too little brings disaster. When artists run out of ideas, we say they’ve hit a creative dry spell. The converse is also true: When poets write about thinking, they often write about rain. It becomes a soundtrack that invites—or even in some way resembles—thought, and that thinking-through to the beat of sound is the seed of all poetry.

Rain sets in motion two of the most famous opening passages in English poetry. April showers kick off pilgrimage season in The Canterbury Tales (“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote”), and the damp returns with the first lines of The Waste Land, “mixing / memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rains.” The link between rain and verse feels almost primeval: Rain marks winter’s thaw, a reanimation of the landscape, and as it melts ice and stirs roots, it also gives metaphor to a writer’s mind rousing into language.

The rain’s force can drive a poem forward. The beating of “Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain,” in a poem by Edward Thomas sweeps me into the meditation. And poetry’s rains can be brutal: Witness the S&M “whip rain” wielded by Hurricane Katrina in a Patricia Smith poem or the city shower that turns London streets into a flood of “dung, guts, and blood, / Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud” in Jonathan Swift. Even where Swift finds the rain and its effects gross, they propel the writing. “Ah! where must needy poet seek for aid, / When dust and rain at once his coat invade?” He may complain about rain, but the words flow.

So what precipitates once rain has started to come down? In A. E. Stallings’ “Whethering,” a poem whose punning title matches worry to weather, rain’s patter triggers memory and regret by acting as a kind of poet, “typing” on the windowpane. In Robert Creeley’s “The Rain,” it awakens a self-criticism as unrelenting as the fall of raindrops. But by the poem’s end, his rainy night meditation has also cleansed him and brought him closer to tenderness and intimacy: “Love, if you love me, / lie next to me. / Be for me, like rain.”

Gertrude Stein’s great love poem and poem about thinking, Stanzas in Meditation, takes rain a step further in translating its patter as speech:

That it is now that it is there
The rain is there and it is here
That it is here that they are here
They have been here to leave it now.

Stein’s quick, light monosyllabic words “enact” rain, as poet and critic Joan Retallack writes, rather than describing it. Stein’s rainy lines are monotonous, repetitive, but also shifting, changeable, like weather itself. With the many “small hands” e. e. cummings once attributed to rain, this rhythm conveys in pantomime Stein’s sense of what thought and love are—not a sudden flood, but intermittent gust and omnipresent shower.

Where water is lacking, the need to summon rain’s metaphor for thought persists. Listening intensifies. The Welsh writer Gillian Clarke keenly feels its absence. Addressing a fellow poet in “A Recipe for Water,” she writes:

You imagine me writing in the falling rain,
rain on the roof, writing in whispers
on the slates’ lectern,
rain spelling out each syllable.

Her correspondent—like me, a resident of a hot climate—takes pleasure in imagining what it would be like to write to rain’s proxy poetry. But Clarke’s usually rainy corner of the world disappoints, “day after day / no huff of rain / on the roof.” The silence is painful because it alters a familiar fact of home, and it reminds her that drought is increasing worldwide.

As a desert reader, I feel that absence, too. I am grateful for poetry’s rains, for being able to imagine others elsewhere writing and thinking to them, and also for the days when rain’s “huff” comes even to Las Vegas and I get to read or teach listening to its fall. I know that imagined rain can be a powerful, sustaining thing, but eventually readers and poems want the real thing.

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