Kindle Notes & Highlights
(Inspired by Storm, the National Weather Service would begin naming storms in 1953.)
He drove on, a little disgruntled. People from northern states always made trouble—thought they knew everything about driving in snow. He’d like to see that crowd now, getting around Windy Point on a bad day. Fifteen inches of snow—why, man, on Donner Pass you figure snow by feet, not inches!
Sister Mary Dolores was thin and oldish; she apparently came along to chaperon Sister Mary Rose, and her attitude seemed to be that if God had wanted us to know about the weather he would have informed St. Thomas Aquinas.
But language, which always said too much or too little, was also a great corrupter of knowledge. He who handled words most cunningly was seldom the wisest, but the catchiest proverbs, not the truest, survived.
if it were a chick they had seen hatch from an egg. There were even some private agencies selling weather information persuading their clients that it was better than what the Weather Bureau gave away free.
“Salesmen,” he thought, “not meteorologists!” Then he stopped himself, for he knew that they were meteorologists, and good ones too. He must be a better one, not call them names. He must work to match them in theory, and in the meantime must pit against their equations and diagrams the experience of thirty-five years,
real-estate companies had called off most of the advertising because they knew how cold and gloomy empty houses seemed in the rain, even if you could get people out to look at them. But he had five new ads from resorts in the snow-country, and a tire company had broken out with a half-page announcing a new non-skid tread.
The effects of the forecast tended to spread out link by link until they formed long chains.
Man is of the air, but through dim ages that-which-was-to-be-man lived not in the ocean of the air but in the ocean of the water. And even yet the saltness of blood is as the saltness of the sea.
He felt bitter—at ships which failed to report, at ships with faulty barometers, at the vast spaces of ocean with no ships at all, at scanty appropriations, at the public which failed to realize the difficulties under which the Weather Bureau worked.
In spite of the signs numerous motorists drove on without heeding. “Ah, y’don’t need chains,” some argued. “The Highway Commission is in cahoots with the garages; they want you to stop and pay four bits to get your chains put on, and maybe have to buy the chains too.”
At the same time a new little glow of pride came to him about the Weather Bureau. Why, the Bureau recorded and distributed the very observations which the air-line meteorologists depended on! The Bureau made the only public forecasts, and then stood by for the blame—usually not much praise—that was coming. In the end, a private meteorologist was only another fellow working for a company.
