4
Cloudbusting in Fulton County

Do you know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of him who is perfect in knowledge?
—Book Of Job 37:16

On the afternoon of Saturday, August 22, 1964, David Fulk achieved an unusual distinction. At half past one, with the sky a blend of clouds and sun, Fulk rumbled into Big Cove Tannery, Fulton County, Pennsylvania, in a pickup truck with big round fenders and curves all over. A generator for vaporizing silver iodide stood upright in the back. When he stepped out of the truck, Fulk, age twenty-five, became the first person in American history to be arrested for trying to change the weather.

David Fulk played a small role in one of the boldest schemes ever dreamed up for dominating nature. The will to control the weather stretches deep into the American past.^[1] But weather modification, in its modern incarnation, dates from only 1946 when Vincent Schaefer of General Electric, a self-trained chemist and high school dropout, produced snow artificially in an ordinary home freezer. Schaefer discovered that something as simple as dry ice could make some clouds precipitate. Later that year, Schaefer flew east over the Hudson River in search of a cloud to

test his discovery. At fourteen thousand feet, he found one and seeded it with dry ice, causing snow to fall. "This is history," exclaimed Schaefer's colleague Irving Langmuir—himself a Nobel laureate in chemistry—as he rushed forth to greet him when he landed.^[2]

This was history all right, but cultural history as much as any other kind. Weather modification had its roots in the most American of preoccupations: the success story. Without advanced educational degrees, without even a high school diploma, Vincent Schaefer, who worked his way up at GE from his start as a machinist, had discovered a new technology with the potential to change the world forever. Weather modification was the control of nature made easy—technology for the people. What Schaefer had done looked so simple, it seemed anyone could do it. Consider the story of an Arizona rancher who after reading about Schaefer's discovery in Life magazine, took off in a plane of his own to seed clouds over his drought-stricken property. And he succeeded, not just in making snow but in making history: He too was written up in Life.^[3] Weather modification had stunning cultural resonance. It was a technology that everyone could support; after all, as the saying goes, everybody talks about the weather, and now, finally, somebody was doing something about it.

Schaefer's discovery was far too important to be left only in the hands of GE and the occasional rancher. Before long the military embarked on weather modification research with the hope of adding it to its cold war arsenal. Nor did the prospect of weather control escape the eager eyes of American business. Everything in America had a price tag, and now even the weather seemed to be entering into the realm of markets and commodities as weather companies— fifteen in all by 1965—sprang up to capitalize on the bold

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Schaefer Making History

new technology. The scope of that technology was wide indeed. It promised rain and snow on command, as well as an end to lightning, fog, and hail. By 1952, it was estimated that cloud seeding was taking place over almost three hundred million acres of land, an area almost three times the size of California.^[4]

It had long been said that rain falls on the just and unjust, the rich and the poor alike. But weather modification threatened to destroy that truism. No longer would all humanity be equal before the forces of nature. Weather modification offered science, the state, and business a chance to appropriate nature in the most literal way, to control sun and rain and clouds however they wished. It only remained to be seen who the winners and losers would be in this grandest of plans to dominate the natural world. This is the story of what happened when weather modification came to south central Pennsylvania.

FULTON COUNTY. A near-perfect parallelogram of close to three hundred thousand acres nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. In 1960, about ten thousand people lived there, most of them spread out across the valley that plunged through the center of the county. The landscape unfolded in rectangles of corn, wheat, hay, some peaches, and the occasional strawberry patch, dotted in barn red, splashed with whitewash, and thick with the sounds and smells of cattle, hogs, and chickens. Like much of rural America in the second half of the twentieth century, Fulton County had seen better days. There were nine hundred farms in the county in 1960, and what poor ones they were. The average value of land and buildings per farm was just over seventy-five hundred dollars, the lowest reported figure for all of the

sixty-seven counties in Pennsylvania.^[5] Fulton County was poor, dirt poor.

It was also dry. A drought descended over the region beginning in 1962 and lasted for the next five years, driving farmers further into debt as their crops shriveled. The drought made weather history, affecting not just Fulton County but the entire Northeast and beyond from Maine as far south as Virginia.^[6] In Fulton County, there was a lot to talk about: the streams that dried up into dust, the crop yields that tumbled, the livestock that went hungry, and the schools that closed for lack of water as the earth was baked dry as a bone. The summers of 1964 and 1965 were by far the worst ones. In the words of one farmer, there was scarcely enough rain in the latter summer "to wet your shirt."

As farmers watched the sky dry up, as they hauled water to their livestock, kicking up dust as they went, they began to wonder if the dry weather was truly an act of God. For what distinguished this drought from all the others, what made it stand out from the average drought, if such ever existed, was not its severity, duration, or the hardship it caused but one simple fact: some Fulton County farmers believed this drought was man-made. And the man they thought had made it was Wallace Howell.

Wallace Egbert Howell was born in 1914 in Central Valley, New York. Early on in his career, he worked as a meteorologist for Mid-Continent Airlines and then served in the military. He went to school at Harvard and MIT and wrote a dissertation entitled "Growth of Cloud Drops in Uniformly Lifted Air." He forecasted at the U.S. Weather Bureau. He directed the Harvard-Mount Washington Icing Research Project. He consulted to the U.S. government on weather modification. Finally, he went into the weather

business. The founder and president of W. E. Howell Associates, a private company specializing in weather modification, Howell had by the 1960s worked on over sixty weather-related projects, from New York to the Philippines and elsewhere in between.^[7] What he sought to do in his business was something that others had done countless times before, transform nature into a commodity. With airplanes, chemicals, radar, and whatever else he could muster, Howell worked to control the weather, to extend his mastery such that he could sell it and make a profit.

There was no way the farmers of Fulton County, struggling to endure the drought, could afford to pay for Howell's service, however much it might have helped. It took money to hire Howell, and the people who had it suffered the least from the dry weather. Howell was invited to Pennsylvania by the Blue Ridge Weather Modification Association, a group made up of commercial fruit growers in neighboring Franklin County and in other nearby areas, including parts of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. They were able to survive the drought by relying on irrigated water. However, there was one thing about the weather they did want to change: they yearned for an end to the hailstorms that pounded the region. The group had organized in the wake of a fierce storm that rolled through the area in the summer of 1956, a deluge of hail so severe that it destroyed the fruit and stripped the bark off trees. Not long after, the Blue Ridge association hired the Weather Modification Company of San Jose, California, to cloud-seed in order to chase the hail away.^[8]

The hailstorms continued. On June 29, 1960, as an evening thunderstorm swept through the area, hailstones, some the size of baseballs, fell on Franklin County—contiguous to Fulton—defoliating trees, shattering windows,

and smashing roofs. A severer storm pummeled Franklin County two years later. Winds gusted up to thirty-eight miles per hour as the storm hit on July 23, 1962, destroying peaches and apples in more than three-quarters of the county's commercial orchards.^[9]

The following spring Wallace Howell arrived in the area and went to work on the weather. His tools included two single-engine planes—a North American T28 and an AT6—and one hundred ten ground-based generators. Silver iodide was the key ingredient. The planes were flown through thunder clouds streaming silver iodide out the back; the generators vaporized the chemical, which was then carried up into the clouds. Once in the sky, the silver iodide helped to increase the number of hailstones to the point where there were so many that not enough supercooled water remained for any of the stones to grow large enough to threaten the fruit crop. Or so the theory went. For two consecutive summers starting in 1963, Howell's company activated its generators and flew boldly through thunderheads to ward off hail in a targeted area that included Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and parts of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. But it is extraordinarily unclear what effect, if any, Howell and his company had on the weather. And in any event, by 1965, Howell and his equipment were gone.

He did not leave voluntarily. Howell was forced out by a rising tide opposed to weather modification. As early as 1962, farmers in Fulton and Franklin counties became suspicious that weather modification had contributed to the drought that blanketed the region. That same year, vandals chopped down over one hundred young plum trees at the Heisey Orchards, which was a member of the Blue Ridge Weather Modification Association. And rumors surfaced

Cloud Seeding Target Area

that the company's supply of irrigated water might be poisoned if the cloud seeding continued. "We always used to get rain when the clouds came across that mountain," Franklin County dairy farmer Jack Beck told a reporter as he pointed into the distance. "But not any more, with that cloud seeding going on. I've stood here and watched the plane fly into a black cloud, and within five minutes that cloud scattered and the sun shone. I tell you, somebody's going to get hurt over it unless they stop."^[10]

To help sort out the cloud seeding issue, Beck and others organized a public meeting. Over four hundred farmers gathered for the event on a spring evening in 1962. Among those who spoke was Charles L. Hosler, head of the department of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University. It was Hosler's view, based on twenty years experience, that efforts to modify the weather were futile. "You may as well spit into the air," he remarked that night, "as seed rain clouds with chemicals or any other substance. . . . You just can't push nature around." Meanwhile, the farmers who endured the two-and-a-half-hour meeting believed the cloud seeding was having some effect. "Take the airplanes away," they yelled repeatedly from the floor, directing their pleas to Ralph Heisey, who was there representing the Mercersburg orchard.^[11] They sensed a change in their weather since the cloud seeding had begun, and no scientist, whatever his credentials, was going to convince them otherwise. Hosler was made to understand this when he had to be escorted out of the meeting by the state police.

It is all too easy to imagine a simple causal relationship between the drought and the farmers' opposition to weather modification. This is a view of history founded on correlations, a vision of the past that lines up events neatly in rows, drawing arrows from one to the other. Such an understand-

ing of history is useful at times but is not without its risks. Chief among these is that the past will emerge as a mere caricature. For in truth, the opposition to weather modification was not simply a product of the drought. That is not to say that the drought did not matter but only that dry weather alone hardly accounted for all the opposition to cloud seeding.

Weather modification was scarcely a neutral technology and, drought or not, it was going to have important social consequences. Cloud seeding would benefit some and not others, and in this case it threatened to breach the bounds of the shared "weather culture" of rural Pennsylvania. The weather is not simply some objective force; different cultures make sense of the weather in their own special ways.^[12] Fulton County's weather culture was founded on equality before the forces of nature, where every person stood in the same relationship to the weather as every other. The weather was a vast leveling force that paid no attention to wealth, character, class, or the kind of car one drove. The farmers of Fulton County knew their weather. They had seen enough storms and sat through enough dry summers to know that just a few inches less rain could make a big difference in their lives. But they also knew that their suffering, however long and hard, was the work of nature; it was the hand that they had been dealt. And then there came weather modification. Marl Garlock, a Fulton County farmer, put it this way: "From the beginning of time until recently, the weather has been controlled by Our Creator. Why then should we have men professing to control our weather today, to suit the whims of a few people, with so many left to suffer so much."^[13]

Weather modification did more than threaten Fulton County with drought. It shook the entire moral economy of

the weather to its very core. And in the summer of 1964, over four hundred farmers gathered in Fulton County to do something about it. Together they formed the Pennsylvania Natural Weather Association (PNWA), an organization dedicated to one, and only one, kind of weather. They elected local newspaperman Guy Oakman to be their chairman. The editor of the Fulton Democrat, Oakman believed weather modification to be among the worst abuses ever heaped on the region's farmers. He saw through the veneer of hope and opportunity that Howell said weather modification offered the region's people, farmer and orchardist alike. And when he stripped away all the false promises, what Oakman discovered in cloud seeding was a technology with the power to benefit some at the expense of others. "We fail to see," he wrote, "how any one group should and does have the right to attempt to control the weather at the expense of another and larger group of people."^[14] Some things are better left to nature, to chance, to God or some other higher force, and the weather, according to Oakman and his supporters in the PNWA, was one of them. As Delmar Mellott, a farmer and PNWA member remarked, "Those who talk of the practice of weather control in any way should take note to Psalms 46:10: 'Be still and know that I am God.'"^[15]

According to Oakman and the PNWA, their right to natural weather was founded on one of the most cherished institutions in American history, private property. "We fail to see how anyone, with a just regard for the rights of a property owner," wrote Oakman, "can ever hope to apply the science of weather modification without infringing on these inherent rights."^[16] Landowners, whether wealthy commercial fruit growers with a thousand acres each or poor dairy farmers with just a hundred or so, owned not just their land but also the air and weather above it, believed Oakman and

the PNWA. It was not then simply a question of whether cloud seeding contributed to the drought. "We believe the question is much broader and more basic," wrote Oakman. "We believe the question is: Does a man have the right to have the weather above and around him remain in its natural condition and undisturbed? We believe he does."^[17]

This same concern with natural weather prompted the townships of Fulton County in June 1964 to pass a series of ordinances. The one for Ayr Township stipulated that "no person or persons shall install, construct, erect, operate, or maintain any equipment, machinery, or device within the said township designed to, or intending to, or which has a tendency to install, eliminate, regulate, or interfere with the normal rainfall or precipitation." It was this law that David Fulk ran afoul of that Saturday in 1964. Fulk had been sent into Fulton County ostensibly to operate a ground-based generator. But he was really sent there because Wallace Howell wanted to test the legality of the Ayr ordinance outlawing weather modification. So Fulk was taken into custody and brought before Justice of the Peace Lewis Strait, who found him guilty as charged. That result was hardly surprising. There was, after all, an affidavit signed by Harvey Richards, the officer on the scene, swearing that Fulk operated the generator. There was the ordinance stating that operating a generator was contrary to town law. And then there was Strait's own opinion of weather modification. Strait seemed to prefer his weather the natural way, precisely as God would have it. His advice to his drought-stricken neighbors, given in a letter to the local newspaper, could not have been clearer:

Will it rain?
Why does it not rain?

Read the Bible:—
I Kings 8:35-36.
II Chronicles 7:13-14.
Amos 4:7-11.

L. W. Strait, J.P.^[18]

Before David Fulk left for his home in West Virginia that Saturday, he posted a bond in the amount of two hundred eighteen dollars. The money signaled Fulk's intention—actually that of Howell and the Blue Ridge organization—to appeal the decision against him. Meanwhile, Oakman and the PNWA hired a lawyer and decided to bring a case of their own. "These people are not a bunch of wild eyed farmers going about with torches, conducting a witch hunt," said Clifford Weisel, the PNWA's new legal counsel. "They are farmers with a lifetime of work and accumulation being threatened by the actions of a group who appear to have no consideration for their neighbor."^[19] So on January 8, 1965, Weisel and the PNWA decided to do something about their inconsiderate neighbors. They filed a lawsuit in the Fulton County Court of Common Pleas against the Blue Ridge Weather Modification Association and Wallace E. Howell himself.

WALLACE HOWELL had run into trouble with the law before. Sometime around 1950, the city of New York, suffering from a water shortage, hired Howell to seed clouds in the Catskills, the source of the city's water supply. The trouble began when the Nevele Country Club, located in upstate New York, sued the city. The owners of the club argued that Howell's cloud seeding threatened them with floods and damaged their business by scaring off sun-loving vacationers. Refusing to grant Nevele the injunction that it sought,

the New York Supreme Court found that the interests of the city and its millions of people far outweighed any damage the club might endure. In passing, the court noted that Nevele clearly had "no vested property rights in the clouds or the moisture therein."^[20]

There was a lesson to be learned in the New York case, a lesson not lost on Wallace Howell. The opinion is brief, a mere five paragraphs; it cites no case law, and for a very good reason: there was none. So long as the weather remained beyond human control, there was no one to sue and no opportunity for law to be set down. Suddenly, with the advent of weather modification, the common law was forced to confront the dilemmas raised by a new technology that promised the control of nature on a scale never before imaginable. The potential for litigation was vast, even frightening, as Howell himself realized. Where would judges turn for advice when landowners sued because they believed someone had stolen their weather?

Though there was no case law, the common law was not completely silent on the matter. The seventeenth-century jurist Lord Edward Coke had written Cujus est solum ejus est usque ad coelum,^[21] meaning, He who owns the soil owns upward to the sky.^[22] Such an understanding would seem to have offered landowners a solid basis on which to sue a cloud seeder who ventured over their land. The problem was that apart from Lord Coke and a handful of long-dead jurists, nobody really took the ad coelum doctrine seriously, especially by the twentieth century.^[23] The doctrine, based as it was on an unbounded concept of ownership, would not survive when faced with an economic order in need of a more dynamic set of property rights to spur efficiency and growth. With the beginning of modern air travel, what little credibility the doctrine once had was now firmly thrust

aside. One opinion written in 1936 put it bluntly: The ad coelum doctrine "is not the law, and . . . never was the law."^[24]

If Lord Coke could no longer be taken at his word, that still left the question of how the law would settle disputes over clouds and weather. One idea was to employ an analogy from some other area of property law.^[25] There were lots of possibilities to choose from, for after all, this was hardly the first time that the law had tried to wrap the language of property around the natural world. For example, there was the law pertaining to wild animals, the law of oil and gas, the law of surface and percolating water—all cases in which property rights to nature had to be decided, however elusive the resource might seem. Surely one of these resources was comparable to weather and clouds. Quite a few pages—none of them  conclusive—were written by legal scholars on which area of law offered the best analogy to the weather. But in the end, a bird was not a cloud; nor was oil, gas, or percolating water exactly the right analogy for the weather.

With so many directions for the law of property to move, so many jurisdictional issues, there was but one sensible place to look for help, the federal government. In 1951, the year after the decision in the New York City case, Howell made a pitch for federal control over weather modification.^[26] Nobody, or at least nobody with the power to do something, seems to have heard him. The task of regulating conflicts over the weather fell into the hands of state and local governments, where it would continue to rest, despite Howell's objections. There was a lot to object to, in part because when Howell took to the skies over the Blue Ridge area, he passed over no fewer than three states, and each would have its say about the weather. By early 1965, the legislatures of

Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, all under pressure from natural weather groups like the PNWA, had cloud seeding legislation before them. A West Virginia bill banned all commercial cloud seeding. A Maryland bill declared a two-year moratorium on all cloud seeding—commercial or not—until the controversy over hail suppression could be sorted out. And Pennsylvania, after an earlier bill failed, introduced a proposal similar to the one in West Virginia.^[27] A war was being waged against cloud seeding, and the Blue Ridge Weather Modification Association did about the only sensible thing it could do: retreat. In March 1965, the association relieved Howell of his duties.

That caused Howell to think seriously about his less than warm welcome in the Blue Ridge area. In his view, there was one main explanation for the opposition. Very simply, the farmers in the region had held him accountable—quite mistakenly he believed—for the dry spell. The opposition to his cloud seeding activities fluctuated with the weather. The hotter and drier the weather, the more intemperate became the forces opposed to cloud seeding. But that opposition was nothing that a little rain could not fix, and when things cooled off, according to Howell, the objections disappeared. This simple causal relationship went way back to the start of cloud seeding in the Blue Ridge area. In 1957, when the cloud seeding began, a severe drought caused farmers to protest. That opposition was washed away by the adequate rains that fell over the next four growing seasons. Then drought returned again in 1962, and so did the objections to cloud seeding. It all could be captured in just one short equation: opposition was inversely proportional to rainfall. That cloud seeding had caused the drought, as many farmers presumed, was nothing short of preposterous

to Howell. It was not possible for him or anyone else to stop the rain. "If it was," said Howell, "Robert Moses would have hired us for the World's Fair."^[28]

Howell was so fixed on the skies over the Blue Ridge area that he failed to see that this was a clash not of clouds but of cultures. One culture took the weather however it came, and the other did not; one subordinated itself before the weather, and the other aspired to dominance; one liked to think the weather affected everyone equally, and the other was eager to change that; one was willing to let fate and God and whatever else intervene, and the other sought to liberate itself from nature, transforming the weather into a simple commodity that could be bought and sold like a million other things in America. It was these two cultures, these two vastly different ways of making sense of the weather, that stood staring each other in the eye.

But Howell did not see it this way. To his mind, what had gone wrong in the Blue Ridge area was in part a technical problem. In his words, "The situation in which large numbers of people can be persuaded that it is scientifically possible, and actually the current practice to break up rain clouds and suppress rainfall, is one that exhibits a failure of communication between the scientific community and a considerable segment of society."^[29] What had gone wrong in the Blue Ridge area had nothing at all to do with morality, culture, or anything else; the problem there was purely technical, a mere "failure of communication." That, according to Howell, was easy enough to fix: simply have meteorologists talk more with the public. Understanding was everything.

There is no doubting what it was that Howell wanted the public to understand. "It has been a truism of weather modification," he wrote at one point, "that it concerns every cit-

izen whose life is affected by the weather, and that means all of us." In Howell's view, everyone had a stake in weather modification. With just a little education, any reasonably enlightened citizen could be made to realize its true value, to see the enormous potential benefits of mastering the elements. The control of nature was not simply a technical task or a scientific charge. It was a civic duty. To be sure, as Howell put it, "the channels of scientific communication cannot hope, of course, to reach every crank who holds peculiar notions."^[30] But as for the rest, they would surely see that support for weather modification was part of what it meant to be a good weather citizen.

It might be a while before Howell's message dribbled down to the ordinary American, months and years at least, time that Howell and his colleagues in the field of commercial cloud seeding really did not have. Control over the sky was slowly slipping away from them as state governments in the Blue Ridge area moved to restrict weather modification. So again Howell cried out for federal intervention. This time he took that message directly to the U.S. Congress. In early 1966, Congress had legislation before it seeking to shift authority for weather modification away from the National Science Foundation to the Department of Commerce. "There is nothing tentative in my mind about the present need for Federal preemption of the power to regulate," Howell told a Senate committee. "A power vacuum exists that is being partially filled by inconsistent State and local legislation, in some instances capricious and ill-advised."^[31]

Nor was Howell the only one who called out for federal intervention. He was joined by a lawyer named Edward Morris, who had successfully defended a California utility company against a charge of more than ten million dollars in damages from floods caused by its cloud seeding. Some-

thing along the lines of the Atomic Energy Commission or the Federal Communications Commission, Morris believed, needed to be set up, and fast. "This Federal agency might eventually plan weather by zones or by days, sell or buy weather to or from other agencies, possibly even make decisions as to the 'best' weather for certain times and places."^[32] Morris was dead serious.

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, a bill prohibiting all commercial cloud seeding for two years passed the legislature and just missed becoming law when Gov. William Scranton—explaining that he did not want to stand in the way of scientific progress—intervened in July 1965 to veto it. Then in November, act 331 became the law. It said that if a county passed a resolution saying that weather modification adversely affected the region's welfare, then all cloud seeding would be banned there. By February 1966, both Fulton and Franklin counties had such resolutions on the books. The so-called cranks had gotten the upper hand.^[33]

It was all so easy to make those opposed to weather modification into cranks and crackpots, so tempting to see them for what, in this view, they were: dirt farmers with toothless smiles, tobacco juice drooling down their faces, so wretched and deprived that they were unable to see what was in their own best interests. If the natural weather people could not be educated, at least they could be diagnosed. Some years later, in the seventies, Richard Heisey, whose family owned the Mercersburg orchard where workers once carried guns to protect themselves, reflected on those opposed to the cloud seeding: "Ninety percent of the people who were up in arms were, caliber-wise, mentally, ah . . . Well, let me tell you, there are people in this area who think that when man landed on the moon it was fake. They think it was filmed in the desert."^[34]

When the Fulton County cloud seeding trial opened on February 2, 1966, David Fulk did not make it to court. The weather stopped him. A blizzard, one of the worst in recent years, kept him away. The snowstorm, as far as anyone knew, was natural weather, exactly the kind of weather the PNWA had come to court to fight for that day.

The PNWA and its lawyer, Clifford Weisel, arrived at the courthouse in McConnellsburg prepared to argue their case for an injunction against the cloud seeding. They had one main story to tell and it went like this: Back in the old days, certainly as far back as anyone now alive could remember, thunder clouds would roll up over Fulton County and rain would pour down on the land. The weather came and went, but of one thing farmers could be certain: when those clouds approached, dark and forbidding, there would be rain. Things began to change in 1963. Those same clouds swelled out over the sky, and just as they looked about to burst forth with rain, a plane would appear, and the cloud would be gone, the weather changing to bright sunshine beating down on the dry land. If landowners had a right to the natural weather over their land, argued the PNWA, then Wallace Howell and the Blue Ridge association had interfered with this right, and it stood to reason that the court should stop them from any further cloud seeding. It had been agreed beforehand that the PNWA's lawsuit and the appeal of Fulk's arrest brought by Howell and the Blue Ridge association would be combined into one trial. Finally Fulton County farmers would learn who really owned the weather.

Boyd Hawkins was the PNWA's first witness.^[35] He was fifty-seven and had lived in Fulton County since 1917. All told, he farmed about five hundred acres of land, where he grew corn, hay, barley, oats, wheat, and potatoes and tended to a variety of beef cattle. About the weather over

this property, he had nothing unusual to report until 1963 or so. From that point on, he could recall at least a dozen instances similar to this one:

I was sure we were going to get a good rain, clouds come up in the west, and several occasions, I would hurry in to close the barn doors or cover up the hay I had in the field and sometimes before I would get the door closed, I would see a plane or hear it come into these clouds, two or three times, and as a result, before I would get to the house, the color had changed, and the cloud had broken up and scattered and it got light, and it got so towards the last if I heard or saw the plane before I closed the barn doors, I wouldn't bother.

Lewis Gordon, a farmer from Big Cove Tannery, told a similar story. One day in the summer of 1964, Gordon went to the Fulton County Fair. To escape the afternoon heat, he took cover under a wagon. Lying there looking up, he saw a storm start to blow in from the west, when all of a sudden a plane appeared and "in a few minutes, the cloud just broke up in small parts and went north and south, and that was it." William Lucas was getting ready to cut hay when the same thing happened in June 1964. And that was Delmar Mellott's story, too. A farmer and manager of a farm supply store, Mellott traveled a good deal around the area and said wherever he went farmers were talking about the weather and those airplanes. Something odd had been going on in the skies over Fulton County.

To Robert Frantz, lawyer for Howell and the Blue Ridge association, fell the task of cross-examining these witnesses. His strategy was clear. He wanted to get them to admit at least the possibility that weather modification could benefit them. He did not have a whole lot of success.

"Would you object if your farm got more water as a result of cloud seeding?" he asked Boyd Hawkins. "I object to the cloud seeding," Hawkins replied. "I will take my dry weather and my wet weather as it comes." And that was essentially William Lucas's answer and Delmar Mellott's, too. As Mellott put it, "I feel that if there has to be talking to a—what I call the rain maker  . . . I would rather do it on my knees, not on the telephone."

Frantz questioned witness after witness. Not one gave an inch—until he reached Jack Beck, the last person the PNWA called to the stand. If any witness would budge it would be Beck. He had been involved in the cloud seeding dispute since at least 1962 when he helped organize a public meeting on the issue. At the very least he was open-minded. Once he had even agreed to meet Wallace Howell to talk the matter over. But by the time the trial came around, Beck was dead set against weather modification. A member of the PNWA, Beck felt that nature ought to take its course, "just the same as we took this big snowstorm," he said, referring to the blizzard that had kept Fulk from coming to court. As he had done all along, Frantz tried to draw Beck into admitting that if cloud seeding caused more rain to fall, then surely he would not quibble. But Beck made it perfectly clear that he could never embrace weather modification. "I do not feel I can do that and still treat our neighbors the same." Frantz would not give up. What if the scientific community accepted weather modification, Frantz replied, what if it definitely worked, then surely you would favor it. No, apparently not even then. "Can we all make hay the same day?" Beck answered. But the point was lost on Frantz, completely lost.

Luckily for Frantz, he did not have to change the minds of the natural weather people. He only had to convince one

man about weather modification: Judge W.C. Sheely. Frantz put Howell on the stand and had him explain that during the period in 1964 when he was cloud seeding, one study showed an increase of 14 percent in the area's precipitation. Rarely do statistics tell the whole story, and in this case the figure was a dubious one, there being an almost one in four likelihood that the increase was due to chance.

Of course, there was no way that anyone could say exactly what had gone on in the sky over Fulton County and thus no way to know if Howell had influenced the weather. But Frantz was determined to convince Judge Sheely that whatever went on up there, Wallace Howell was no irresponsible opportunist out to make a fast buck. He had Howell review his credentials for the court: service for the military, the Weather Bureau, the Blue Hill Observatory of Harvard University, consultant to the federal government, editor of a major journal, right down to the exam he took to become a certified consulting meteorologist, which he passed, of course. One could call Howell a lot of things, but unqualified was not one of them. And Howell had F. W. Reichelderfer, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau for almost twenty-five years, to back him up. Called to testify as an impartial witness, one whose appearance both sides in the case agreed to, Reichelderfer described Howell as "one of the most responsible of those who are experimenting and operating in the cloud seeding field."

That was not all Reichelderfer had to say. Although admitting that commercial weather modification was a controversial area, he explained that cloud seeding had not caused the drought in Fulton County. The drought, which encompassed an area many times the size of Fulton County, came from a change in atmospheric circulation. Moreover, he had

a way to account for all those eyewitness reports of clouds breaking up, one that had absolutely no connection with airplanes, silver iodide, or Wallace Howell. It had to do with something called the "lee effect." Fulton County lay on the lee side of the Allegheny Mountains. When a wind blowing from the west encountered a mountain, it was forced up, temporarily compressing and cooling the air, perhaps condensing enough moisture for a cloud to form. Then as the air reached the other side of the mountain—the lee side— it had room again to expand; the air would heat and the cloud might disappear. All this, according to Reichelderfer, could happen in just fifteen or twenty minutes. There was nothing unusual about it. Insofar as Reichelderfer could be trusted—and who would dare not trust a man of his stature—Fulton County farmers had been getting natural weather after all.

But just in case Sheely chose not to believe him, Frantz had filed a number of briefs to steer the judge toward his clients' position. The PNWA had argued from the start that landowners had a right to the natural weather over their land. Natural was the key word, and Frantz took it upon himself to explain to the court what this word meant to a culture that during the postwar period had grown so obsessed with the technological domination of nature. What was the meaning of natural in a world so eager to master the environment, whatever the cost? What could possibly be natural in such a world? Or as the law might phrase it, what were the natural rights to which a landowner was entitled?

To this last question, the common law had proffered an answer. When someone bought a piece of land, the common law extended a bundle of so-called natural rights. These included riparian rights and the right to "lateral and subjacent support," which prevented someone from digging a

hole around one's property that might compromise the land's integrity. They included the right to air that was reasonably free from pollution, the right to natural drainage, the right to use the land for any legitimate purpose, to build on it, farm it, and so forth.^[36] It was indeed a long list, and it seemed fair, even natural, to think that the weather in its undisturbed form ought to be a part of it, or so the PNWA and its lawyer argued.

The word natural comes of course from nature, which is one of the most complicated words in the English language.^[37] And natural too is a very slippery word. To Frantz and the cloud seeders, it did not mean undisturbed or pristine. For such a strict interpretation would just about put Howell and anyone else interested in controlling the weather out of business. There would be lawsuits galore as landowners found their rights to the peaceable enjoyment of their land invaded. Frantz made it clear that we must search elsewhere for the true meaning of the word. "The so-called 'natural' rights theory expounded in the legal periodicals," Frantz wrote, "does not in fact mean natural to the extent that it is absolutely undisturbed by any other activity." "A more correct interpretation of the theory," he explained, "would be that if a landowner were to receive a 'normal' amount of rain, he would have no grounds for complaint."^[38] Here was the true meaning of natural, and it was so simple and obvious it is a wonder that no one had thought of it before. The word when used in the sense of a "natural right" to the weather meant above all one thing: normal.

So what was normal weather? As Frantz saw it, normal weather changed a great deal. "Fluctuation," he explained, "is a normal property of the weather with which every person must of necessity contend. Favorable weather brings enormous economic benefits, unfavorable weather enor-

mous loss." In the capitalist language of costs and benefits, there were only two kinds of weather that mattered: weather that favored economic growth, and weather that did not. Nor was there any question as to which kind of weather the cloud seeders were promoting. But to sell Judge Sheely on capitalist weather, Frantz had to make it seem as natural as any other weather that the world had known. In other words, the weather fluctuates, it has always done so, and what would it matter if it proved a bit more changeable, especially if it did so for the sake of extra profit? "Fluctuations of the weather," wrote Frantz, "whether natural or artificial, intentional or inadvertent, are not per se unexpected or improper as long as weather modifying acts do not cause the atmosphere to deviate beyond its normal range of fluctuation. "^[39]

If the weather did not change, if the wind blew always from the west, if the sun stayed out each and every day, there would hardly be anything to talk about. The fact that it did change, however, gave Frantz a whole lot to say. And what he wanted to say the loudest was this: weather fluctuations are normal, natural, even if they resulted from human contrivance. Weather modification, as Frantz would have it, was part of the natural order of things, just one more change that people should expect to endure. Of course, he left unsaid that cloud seeding served some interests and not others, that the drive to master nature, to chase hail from the skies, was supposed to benefit the fruit growers who hired Howell, not the farmers who lived nearby.

Those sweltering farmers, padding back and forth over grass so dry it crunched underfoot, would have to wait more than two full years for a ruling on the cloud seeding. Meanwhile, Judge Sheely died. He was replaced by Judge John MacPhail who read over the testimony, listened to oral ar-

guments, and finally on February 28, 1968, wrote two opinions. MacPhail affirmed Lewis Strait's lower court decision against Fulk for violating the town ordinance against cloud seeding. The town, MacPhail believed, had every right to enact such legislation and Fulk was guilty of violating it. But far more was at stake in Pennsylvania Natural Weather Association v. Blue Ridge Weather Modification Association: MacPhail would decide if landowners had a right to the natural weather over their land.

Not much had been said by jurists on the question of natural weather. There was, of course, the New York case involving the Nevele Country Club, in which the court ruled that one could have no vested right in a cloud. But MacPhail was certain that the statement was dictum—an opinion offered in passing—and in any event no legal authority supported it. MacPhail also mentioned a group of Texas cloud seeding cases, but none of them ruled on ownership rights in the weather. MacPhail was on his own with this one. He reasoned that it would make a mockery of the entire idea of property if a landowner were not entitled to some reasonable expectation of natural weather. After all, what farmer would buy a piece of land after eyeing the local weather, only to find that his neighbor had some scheme to alter the rain pattern? Moreover, MacPhail believed a precedent existed which gave landowners a right to the airspace over their land. The 1933 Pennsylvania Aeronautical Code said a landowner had title to the air above to the extent that it was "necessary to the enjoyment of the use of the surface . . . subject to the right of passage or flight of aircraft." What all this added up to, in MacPhail's view, was "that every landowner has a property right in the clouds and the water in them." But that right was not an "unqualified" one. He felt that weather modification done by the government to

benefit the public, as opposed to private interests, must be permitted.^[40]

"Men are not God," MacPhail quoted a Catholic priest as saying, "and they do not succeed well when they attempt to play God." That said, MacPhail could not find any evidence that Fulton County's farmers had suffered from what Howell had done. Nor, for that matter, did the drought coincide with Howell's presence in the area; it had begun before he arrived and continued after he had left. And finally, MacPhail had one last reason for dismissing the PNWA's suit. In the time it took for a decision to be reached, the state legislature had passed a law that regulated cloud seeding by setting up a weather modification board. Disgruntled farmers, or anyone else who found their weather tampered with, could now—thankfully, no doubt, from the court's perspectiveturn to the board for relief.^[41]

That MacPhail had said landowners had a property right in the clouds, that he had thrown his support behind natural weather (albeit subject to government intervention)—all this did not count for very much among Fulton County's farmers. Property is founded on possession, and as yet there was still no way to own the weather, to define and fence its boundaries as one would a field or pasture, even a burned-out one. There was, in the end, no way really to own the weather, at least not in the sense that one owned land or a house.

Still, that did not stop the natural weather farmers from arguing, in effect, that they had absolute dominion over their property. Back before the nineteenth century, that argument held a good deal of weight. But a world where everyone had an absolute right to landed property, where no one could use their land without worrying about what effect it might have on their neighbor, was a world where economic

development could scarcely proceed. So it came to be that landowners' rights to absolute and peaceable enjoyment of their property were sacrificed to benefit economic growth. Once landholders had, for example, a right to the natural flow of water across their property; aqua currit et debet currere, ut currere solebat: water flows and ought to flow as it has customarily flowed, was the saying. By the Civil War, however, a far more instrumental vision of property had come into play. No longer were landowners entitled to absolute dominion over their land and water; the natural flow rule was eclipsed by a "reasonable use" standard. Which is to say that courts would weigh the relative efficiencies— the costs and benefits—of a particular water use. Whether it was natural or not was beside the point.^[42]

Now landowners in Fulton County were being forced to forsake the natural flow of water above their land. There was no way that weather modification could continue to be practiced if all landowners had an unqualified right to the natural, God-given weather over their property. MacPhail was saying that the relative merits of weather modification would have to be weighed against the damage to property interests. The law would favor the use that generated the greatest economic utility for society as a whole—nature and God notwithstanding. Thus was the moral economy of the weather in Fulton County overturned by a far more marketoriented one.

If one took weather modification and put aside its technical jargon, forgot for a moment its wildest promises, what was left in the end was the incorrigible will to dominate and control nature.^[43] But it was domination that did not profess to benefit everyone equally. The German philosopher Max Horkheimer said it best: "Domination of nature involves domination of man."^[44]