G. L. Siscoe Mark Twain on Weather Department of Meteorology University of California Los Angeles, Calif. 90024 and Center for Space Research Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Mass. 02139 'You say you don't like it? . . . Well, just wait a minute.

When you read what Samuel Clemens has to say about The following compilation of quotes by Clemens shows Weather, you know that the subject was special to what a humorist and literary giant with an interest in him. His unique talents of imagery and humor applied the subject can do with standard weather topics. to Weather produced some of his best verbal perform- Judged solely by the volume of material, Clemens' ances. Her variety and caprice seemed to stimulate his primary interest in weather must have been climates. imagination and challenge him. The resulting literary He wrote about good climates, bad climates, and about product satisfied him enough to use the subject often. climatic curiosities that puzzled him. There was one His comments were numerous, his personal observations place with a climate rich enough to inspire an entire insightful and accurate, and he was obviously well- speech: New England. informed. In his mostly humorous but sometimes reverent style, There is a sumptuous variety about the New England wea- ther that compels the stranger's admiration—and regret. he remarked on the World's climates, on wind systems The weather is always doing something there; always at- both global and local, and on storms and floods. Barom- tending strictly to business; always getting up new designs eters and lightning rods made subjects for humorous and trying them on the people to see how they will go. yarns. Occasionally, he was serious and evoked deeper But it gets through more business in spring than in any emotions as, for example, when describing a violent other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred and storm or sublime skyscape. thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and He experienced different climates and weather phe- twenty hours.1 nomena during a lifetime of travel. As a Mississippi river boat pilot in his youth, around the time of the Civil There is a well-known big difference in the east and War, he had a personal interest in the storms and west coast climates. The contrast is made clear by com- floods that affected the river. After the war, he went paring the above with the following description of the West with his brother in a stagecoach. Of course the climate in San Francisco. coach was not air conditioned and he acquired a real During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies familiarity with The Great American Desert. While in are bright and cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls. the west, he learned about Chinook winds in Nevada, But when the other four months come along, you will need about invigorating, health-giving mountain air around to go and steal an umbrella. Bceause you will require it. Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days in hardly Lake Tahoe, about monotonous seasons in San Fran- varying succession. When you want to go visiting or at- cisco, and about the not-so-pacific Pacific on trips to tend church, or the theatre, you never look up at the clouds Hawaii. He returned to the East and settled in New to see whether it is likely to rain or not—you look at the York and Connecticut. From there he made a trip to the almanac. If it is Winter, it will rain—and if it is Summer, Holy Land and many trips to Europe. His accounts of it won't rain, and you cannot help it.2 these journeys were filled largely with history, customs, and scenery, with occasional references to the weather. The above two quotes illustrate large differences in However, weather was a major topic in his description climates at locations with approximately the same lati- of a "round-the-world" equatorial tour to the Pacific Is- tude. As we now know, the reason is the different dis- lands, New Zealand, Australia, India, and Africa. This tribution of continents and oceans with respect to these was his last major excursion. The records of his travels two cities. The effects of continents and oceans on in correspondence to newspapers and in five books are climate was not known to Clemens, and he was puzzled the main sources for this article, but also his speeches by the differences in climates at places with the same and short stories were used. latitude. * I have been unable to establish that this quote concern- If the climates of the world were determined by parallels ing New England weather is actually by Clemens. Some say of latitude, then we could know a place's climate by its posi- it was by Benjamin Franklin and others think it was by a tion on the map and so we should know that the climate friend of Clemens. All seem to agree that it could have been of Sydney was the counterpart of the climate of Columbia, by Clemens. S.C., and of Little Rock, Arkansas, since Sydney is about the 4 Vol. 55, No. 1, January 1974

Unauthenticated | Downloaded 10/05/21 11:55 AM UTC Bulletin American Meteorological Society same distance south of the equator that those other towns perfect." 10 For, as he noted, although the temperature are north of it—thirty-four degrees. But no, climate dis- was around 100° when he was there, the exceeding dry- regards the parallels of latitude. In Arkansas they have a ness of the air prevented discomfort. He made a fairly winter; in Sydney they have the name of it, but not the thing itself. . . . You could cut up an Arkansas winter into accurate summary of Australian climate generally. a hundred Sydney winters and have enough left for Arkansas . . . Nature is always stingy of perfect climates; stingier and the poor.s in the case of Australia than usual. Apparently this vast However, that climates should differ at locations sepa- continent has a really good climate nowhere but around rated in latitude did not puzzle him at all. In fact he felt the edges.n very safe in attacking the apparent ignorance of New To Clemens, Australia was a hot continent. He wrote England journalists on this topic. a poem entitled "A Sweltering Day in Australia" 12 to It is only natural that there should be a sharp difference emphasize his feeling. But it was the heat in India that between climates which lie upon parallels of latitude which inspired an exaggeration. are one or two thousand miles apart. I take this position, It is a common expression there, "the cold weather," and and I will hold it and maintain it in spite of the news- the people think there is such a thing. It is because they have papers. The newspaper thinks it isn't a natural thing; and lived there half a lifetime, and their perceptions have be- once a year, in February, it remarks, with ill-concealed ex- come blunted. When a person is accustomed to 138 in the clamation points, that while we, away up here are fighting shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable. . . . snow and ice, folks are having new strawberries and peas As long as those men [in India] were talking about what down South: callas are blooming out of doors, and the they knew, they were trustworthy, and I believed them; but people are complaining of the warm weather. The news- when they said it was now "cold weather," I saw that they paper never gets done being surprised about it. It is caught had traveled outside of their sphere of knowledge and were regularly every February.4 floundering. I believe that in India "cold weather" is merely He had encounters with warm climates, both desert a conventional phrase and has come into use through the and tropical. He traveled on horseback in Syria 5 and necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which found it "terrible," but considered the American desert will only make it mushy. 13 worse. The stagecoach trip from Missouri to Nevada was his first contact with desert climate, and it obviously Although they are a minority, good climates were impressed him. also mentioned by Clemens. In addition to the "perfect" At four P.M. we had doubled our distance and were climate around Adelaide, he found that the weather in ninety or a hundred miles from Salt Lake. And now we South Africa's June winter was delightful. entered upon one of that species of deserts whose concen- . . . the depth of the sky, and the beauty of the strange trated hideousness shames the diffused and diluted horrors new cloud-forms, and the glory of the sunshine, the lavish- of Sahara—an "alkali" desert.® ness, the wastefulness of it.14 The sun beats down with dead, blistering relentless malig- nity; the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and However, South Africa's large diurnal temperature range beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface— tempered his delight, as evidenced by this entry in his it is absorbed before it gets there; there is not the faintest diary: breath of air stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature At 4 P.M. it was unpleasantly warm. Half-hour after sun- visible in any direction whither one searches the blank set one needed a spring over-coat; by 8 a winter one.1^ level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound—not a sign—not a whisper—not a buzz; We close this subject with another example of a good or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of bird—not even a sob climate. While living in Virginia City, Nevada, he from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air. 7 worked as a newspaper reporter for the Enterprise and Although toward the end of his life he was accustomed a sometimes prospector. From there he took camping to wintering in Bermuda, in general, warm or hot trips into the Sierra Nevada mountains, especially to climates did not suit him. His last trip kept him close to Lake Tahoe. He found the weather around there not the equator more than half way around the world. In only good, but healthful. Fiji, he remarked on the heat to a native who replied: Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would re- "This? This is not hot. You ought to be here in the sum- store an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give mer time once." him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest We supposed that this was summer; it has the earmarks and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.1® of it. You could take it to almost any country and deceive people with it. But if it isn't summer, what does it lack? On the subject of winds, Clemens' knowledge and "It lacks half a year. This is mid-winter."8 observations were remarkably accurate, especially re- garding the global wind systems. As any ocean traveller He commented similarly on spring time in Sydney.9 of the time, he knew about the trade winds and about About Adelaide he remarked "It is a climate that is the equatorial doldrums. In correspondence written early

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Unauthenticated | Downloaded 10/05/21 11:55 AM UTC Vol. 55, No. 1, January 1974 in his career, he notes that the winds on both sides of hither and thither, going and coming, appearing and dis- the equator converge there: appearing among the rolling billows of dust—hats, chickens and parasols sailing the remote heavens; blankets, tin ... so that a windless, waveless belt is left at the center of signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade lower; door-mats the earth, which marks the equator as distinctly as does the and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on little black line on the map. Ships drift idly on that glassy the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the sea, under the flaming sun of the tropics, for weeks together, next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies and wheel- without a breath of wind to flutter the drooping sails or fan barrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above the sweltering and blasphemous sailors.*? ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant The above information Clemens must have acquired lots.20 indirectly for he had not before then been near the The above is accurate at least as regards the feeling of equator. He had sailed several times to Hawaii and had local residents toward the wind. But the following is a written accounts of shipwrecks on the Pacific and a perceptive observation pointing up a scientific curiosity serious article on commerce with Hawaii for the Sacra- about the wind. mento Union. He had opportunities to learn about the sea from sailors and passengers. First-hand knowledge The "Washoe Zephyr" ... is a peculiarly Scriptural wind, of the doldrums came much later on his last tour, about in that no man knoweth "whence it cometh." That is to say, where it originates. It comes right over the mountains from which he wrote: the West, but when one crosses the ridge he does not find We entered the "doldrums" last night—variable winds, any of it on the other side! It probably is manufactured on bursts of rain, intervals of calm, with chopping seas and the mountain-top for the occasion, and starts from there. It a wobbly and drunken motion to the ship—a condition of is a pretty regular wind, in the summer time. Its office hours things findable in other regions sometimes, but present in the are from two in the afternoon till two the next morning; doldrums always. The globe-girdling belt called the doldrums and anybody venturing abroad during those twelve hours is 20 degrees wide, and the thread called the equator lies needs to allow for the wind or he will bring up a mile or along the middle of it.is two to leeward of the point he is aiming at.21 He might have been satisfied that his experience at the Clemens seemed frequently to encounter local storms equator agreed with his expectation, but he was dis- while in some vulnerable and exposed situations as on satisfied that the ocean was named "Pacific." After giving the Atlantic Ocean,22 on the Nekar River,23 on Lake a lengthy and vivid opinion of the wisdom of Balboa in Tahoe,24 and on Lake Mono.25 In general the storm naming the Pacific Ocean, in which he concluded that itself is not described, but only the adventure it pro- the decision was based on insufficient evidence, he duced. The exception is the following description of a made this summary: severe thunder storm that overtook him on the Missis- In a word, the Pacific is "rough" for seven or eight months sippi River. The entire passage is quoted because of its in the year—not stormy, understand me; not what one would rich detail even to the greater dissipation with distance justly call stormy, but contrary, baffling, and very "rough." of the high frequency component of thunder. Therefore, if that Balboa-constrictor had constructed a name We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at for it that had "Wild" or "Untamed" to it, there would Vicksburg, and still another about fifty miles below Mem- have been a majority of two months in the year in favor phis. They had an oldfashioned energy which had long been and in support of it.19 unfamiliar to me. This third storm was accompanied by a Tropical and equatorial winds are regular and have raging wind. We tied up to the bank when we saw the been known for several centuries: trade winds and tempest coming, and everybody left the pilothouse but me. The wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale un- doldrums. Mesoscale and local winds are more irregular derside of the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in and regional. Clemens encountered several varieties of quick succession, thrashing the branches violently up and local wind: severe storms on the Mississippi and the down, and to this side and that, and creating swift waves of Chinook wind in Nevada, locally called the "Washoe alternating green and white according to the side of the Zephyr," which comes off of the Sierra Nevada moun- leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced after each tain range. On his first day in Carson City, his sightsee- other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats. No ing was interrupted by its activity. In the following color that was visible anywhere was quite natural, — all tints excerpt, Clemens tries to give an impression of its were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank strength without mentioning its speed. overhead. The river was leaden; all distances the same; and even the farreaching ranks of combing white-caps were dully This was all we saw that day, for it was two o'clock, now, shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their and according to custom the daily "Washoe Zephyr" set in; swarming legions marched. The thunderpeals were con- a soaring dustdrift about the size of the United States set stant and deadening; explosion followed explosion with but up edgewise came with it, and the capital of Nevada Terri- inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew tory disappeared from view. Still, there were sights to be steadily sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the seen which were not wholly uninteresting to new comers; ear; the lightning was as diligent as the thunder, and pro- for the vast dust cloud was thickly freckled with things duced effects which enchanted the eye and sent electric strange to the upper air—things living and dead, that flitted ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension shivering along

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Unauthenticated | Downloaded 10/05/21 11:55 AM UTC Bulletin American Meteorological Society every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession. The wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all rain poured down in amazing volume; the ear-splitting thun- those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that flow and der-peals broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased in burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which fury and began to wrench off boughs and tree-tops and send change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from them sailing away through space; the pilot-house fell to blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold—the tree rocking and straining and cracking and surging, and I went becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling down in the hold to see what time it was.26 jewels . . .34 He compared the Mississippi product with the best We are all familiar with cloud descriptions and cloud Europe could offer. photographic atlases. But there is something missing from these compared to this concluding example of People boast a good deal about Alpine thunder-storms; Clemens' descriptive power applied to a weather scene. but the storms which I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not the equals of some which I have seen in the The setting is dawn on a pinnacle on the crater rim Mississippi Valley. I may not have seen the Alps do their of Heleakala. Clemens is looking down on an approach- best, of course, and if they can beat the Mississippi, I don't ing bank of altocumulus clouds. wish to.27 Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high As a correspondent to the New Orleans Times-Demo- over the sea and the valley; then they came in couples and groups, then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their cfat, he gave a lengthy and factual, personal report forces, they banked themselves solidly together, a thousand of the 1882 Mississippi flood in which the river was at feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean—not a one point seventy miles wide.28 He gave a second hand vestige of anything was left in view but just a little of the account of a tropical cyclone that hit the island of rim of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon Mauritius in 1892.29 The eye of the cyclone apparently we sat (for a ghostly procession of wanderers from the passed directly over Port Louis, the capital city. In filmy hosts without had drifted through a chasm in the Nevada he learned about flash floods the hard way by crater wall and filed round and round, and gathered and ignoring the predictions of the Indians: " 'By'm-by, sunk and blended together til the abyss was stored to the heap water' ".30 brim with a fleecy fog). Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence reigned. Clear to the horizon, league on league, the Of course there were also humorous, purely fictional snowy floor stretched without a break—not level, but in episodes involving the weather, such as a one-of-a-kind rounded folds, with shallow creases between, and with here lightning display provoked when an enterprising sales- and there stately piles of vapory architecture lifting them- man fitted his house with over sixteen hundred lightning selves aloft out of the common plain—some near at hand, rods.31 And an occasion in the French Alps when he some in the middle distances, and others relieving the wanted to determine his altitude. He knew this could monotony of the remote solitudes. There was little conver- be done by boiling a thermometer or a barometer, but sation, for the impressive scene overawed speech. I felt like not remembering which, he tried both. The experiment the Last Man, neglected of judgment, and left pinnacled in did not reveal his altitude, but he discovered that the midheaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world. barometer improved the soup.32 While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the No observer of weather can resist making forecasts, coming resurrection appeared in the East. A growing warmth and Clemens was no exception to this rule. The follow- suffused the horizon, and soon the sun emerged and looked out over the cloudwaste, flinging bars of ruddy light across it, ing is a forecast which he felt would serve for any staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes, purpling the average day in New England. shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor- Probably northeast to southwest winds, varying to the palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all southward and westward and eastward, and points between, blendings and combinations of rich coloring. high and low barometer swapping around from place to It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, think the memory of it will remain with me always.35 succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning.33 Acknowledgments. I was assisted greatly in locating some of the references by Diana Royce, librarian of the There was also a sober and reverent side which Stowe-Day Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut and by Clemens could display with respect to certain atmo- F. Anderson, librarian in charge of the Mark Twain spheric phenomena. Partly in compensation for his Papers, University of California at Berkeley. Also I negative comments on the New England weather, he thank Nancy Crooker for proofreading the article and created this delightful verbal painting of a New Eng- suggesting several improvements. land ice storm: . . . when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top—ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; Notes and references when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, In the list below, page numbers for the travel books The frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, Life on white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the the Mississippi, and Following the Equator refer to the two 7

Unauthenticated | Downloaded 10/05/21 11:55 AM UTC Vol. 55, No. 1, January 1974 volume compilation The Complete Travel Books of Mark 17 Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii, A. G. Day, ed., Apple- Twain edited by Charles Neider, Doubleday, New York, 1966. ton-Century, New York, 1966, pp. 9, 10. 1 Speech entitled "The Weather" in Mark Twain's Speeches, 18 Following the Equator, p. 708. Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York, 1910, pp. 19 Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii, loc. cit., p. 11. 59, 60. 20 Roughing It, p. 535. 2 Roughing It} p. 688. 21 Ibid., p. 535, 536. s Following the Equator, p. 738. 22 The Innocents Abroad, p. 45. 4 Ibid., p. 639, 640. 23 A Tramp Abroad, p. 91. s The Innocents Abroad, p. 306. 24 Roughing It, p. 546. 25 Ibid., p. 602. e Roughing It, p. 524. 26 Life on the Mississippi, p. 594. 7 Ibid., p. 525. 27 Ibid. 8 Following the Equator, p. 725. 28 Ibid., pp. 646-654. 9 Ibid., p. 737. 29 Following the Equator, pp. 1039, 1040. 10 Ibid., p. 800. 30 Roughing It, p. 570. 11 Ibid., p. 739. 31 Sketch entitled "Political Economy" in Sketches New and 12 Ibid., p. 862. Old, p. 23. 13 Ibid., p. 979, 980. 32 A Tramp Abroad, pp. 237, 238. 14 Following the Equator, p. 1072. 33 "The Weather," loc. cit., p. 61. is Ibid., p. 1048. 34 Ibid., p. 63. i6 Roughing It, p. 541. 35 Roughing It, p. 776.

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NSB report on environmental sciences mental contaminants; and human adaptation to environ- The National Science Board (NSB) has announced the pub- mental stress. Copies of the report may be obtained from the lication of Patterns and Perspectives in Environmental Sci- Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing ence, a compendium of views and judgments about the Office, Washington, D.C. 20402 for $7.30. nature of current research efforts in the environmental field. The publication, a companion to the Third Annual Report EDS data buoy report of the NSB ("Environmental Science—Challenge for the A new report, "Environmental Conditions Within Specified Seventies"), is based on information and analyses supplied Geographic Regions: Offshore East and West Coasts of the by approximately 150 leading scientific researchers from United States and in the Gulf of Mexico," has recently been throughout the country. published by the Environmental Data Service. The report, Dr. H. E. Carter, Chairman of the NSB, said the purpose prepared for the National Ocean Survey's National Data of the new publication is "to assemble, in one place, enough Buoy Office, consists of data in standard formats containing material to permit the identification of fundamental patterns regional parameter and phenomenological characteristics. It that might help in appraising the status of environmental provides an analysis of regional climatological environmental science today." conditions for planning data buoy tests, supporting engineer- "In some cases," he said, "the views expressed are in con- ing design, assisting buoy deployment, and testing buoys and flict with others contained in the report itself or held by buoy networks. other members of the scientific community. Hopefully these The report should prove valuable to scientists and engi- conflicting views will challenge scientists to resolve these neers making decisions in marine areas or preparing en- differences and help identify directions of needed scientific vironmental impact statements, as well as the National Data advance." Dr. Carter also said that the NSB does not en- Buoy Office. It should also prove useful to those interested in dorse all the views contained in the report, but hopes that petroleum prospecting, drilling, production, and logistics; off- it will provide useful insights to policy makers in govern- shore power plant construction and operation; development ment and private institutions as well as to the general of new energy sources in the marine environment; and trans- reader. portation and recreation activities. Single copies may be Subjects dealt with in the 426-page publication include: obtained from Sidney Marcus (author) at the National Ocean- solar-terrestrial environment; dynamics of the solid earth; ographic Data Center, NOAA, Rockville, Md. 20852, Tel. climatic change; dynamics of the atmosphere-ocean system; (202) 426-9040. severe storms; water resources, forestry, agriculture; environ- (More announcements on page 15) 8

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