Watching the Sky for Weather

I have previously posted a blog on the topic of weather predicting in the 1800s, and in this series about the impact of outer space I  return to the perspective of we earthlings.   

Photo Credit:  Lyn Fenwck

Isaac Werner began every entry in his daily journaling with the weather.  Following a long interruption from his journaling in Illinois, he finally resumed writing daily on the Kansas prairie, starting on page 129, August 24, 1884:  "Some light raining during the night, and similar prospect this A.M."  Following that entry, he wrote every day until he filled his journal, always beginning with the weather.  On June 10th, 1891, at page 480, he wrote:  "Occassional wind during night whirling bended peach trees, still partly cloudy, clouding over from N.W. & cool wind." 

Isaac was following the advice of Henry Ward Beecher, a famous minister and the brother of Harriet Beecher Stow.  A newspaper clipping by Beecher, titled "Keeping a Diary," was glued on the inside  front cover page of Isaac's journal.  Beecher concluded his article with these words:  "One may trace, from day to day, the mere facts of his history, the proceedings of the farm, or the books read, visits made or received, the events in society, the conversations with men of mark, the facts of the weather, the seasons, the aspects of nature, and in short, a journal of knowledge, in distinction from feeling..." Isaac Werner followed that advice exactly, which is what made him an excellent reporter of his time and location.

Photo credit: Lyn Fenwick

It also made him a capable weather reporter, with the ability to turn to specific dates to determine the previous years' weather, building a record of weather from year to year.  In a new environment, where less was known about seasonal changes, Isaac's journal gradually collected that information so that he acquired some weather predictability.

At a web site online I found advice for becoming a Citizen Weather Reporter.  Although weather forecasters today have many sophisticated means for predicting the weather, citizen reporters can still help.  Although meteorologists can see snow showing up on radar, citizen reporters can alert these professional men and women to what is happening in specific locations, and of such things as when snow changes to freezing rain.  They can also report tornadoes, hail, and wind damage, with specific information that could help save lives during a severe weather event.

For example, precipitation is extremely localized.  Recently, we received no rain at our home, and we were quite surprised when we found large mud holes on the road only a quarter-mile south of our house the next morning.  I also remember driving through heavy rain and suddenly driving out of the rain onto dry pavement.  I understand that rain must stop somewhere, but the the abruptness of driving out of rain, rather than simply the rain gradually becoming less heavy, (or as my father used to say, "letting up,") surprised me. 

Photo Credit:  Lyn Fenwick

The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network utilizes thousands of citizens with official rain gauges and snow rulers to measure precipitation right in their backyards.  This is particularly helpful for meteorologists to use figuring out areas prone to flash flooding in future storms.

Skywarn is an official weather spotter training program run by the National Weather Service to teach the basics of spotting severe and hazardous weather and properly reporting that weather back to the NWA.

Some amateurs want to learn how to do their own forecasting, and that can be a fun hobby.  However, professionals warn that there are many events involved that are not intuitive about how air, water, and solar radiation interact and evolve to create weather conditions.  While amateurs may enjoy forecasting for their own pleasure, they should not encourage others to rely on their predictions.

The Challenges of Keeping a Journal in Early Days

 

One of the followers of this blog commented on how seeing Isaac Werner's signature moved her, bringing him to life in a way that his transcribed words alone could not do.  I have shared in an earlier blog post  how special it was for me to receive the gift of a book in which Isaac had written his name.  Although I still long for the discovery of a photograph of Isaac, his signature remains almost as intimate.  

Of course, I spent months transcribing his 480 page journal, so I can certainly recognize his writing.  Early blogs have explored the significance of dropping cursive writing from the curriculum of public schools.  The art of a distinctive penmanship has been a mark of education and aesthetic appreciation for generations, and the abandonment of that discipline is regretted as disappointing by many of us. 

In past years I was often complimented for my style of printing.  Today, I am more likely to be complimented for my cursive script.  Either way, I believe how we write introduces us in a particular way.  Many graduates of the past decade no longer have been taught cursive, and even their training in printing is treated as only an adjunct to the "real" writing they will be doing electronically.  In short, writing by hand is not taught as particularly important, and it certainly is not considered an extension of the writer's personality, respectfulness, or education.

Transcribing Isaac's penmanship from his journal was challenging, not because his writing was careless but rather because of how densely he often wrote and because some of the lettering was of a style no longer used.

However, the biggest problem was the ink.  I suspect that living far from town without a horse may have caused Isaac to stretch his ink by adding water when he noticed the ink well getting low and he had no plans for a trip to town.  The paleness of the ink did not appear to be the result of fading through  exposure to sunlight.

In 2016, the Berk's History Center republished the April 12, 1946 article by Luke Sutliff titled "An Old Recipe for the Making of Ink.  The recipe was taken from a 1748 German Almanac.  "It often happens that if people in our country have something to write they will take gunpowder and water, and make ink, and write with it."  The author of the recipe complained that when the gunpowder and water ink dried, it not only smeared but could be wiped off the paper.

Instead, his recipe suggested "pulverize a piece of cherry tree gum the size of a bean, let it dissolve in as much water as half an egg shell can hold and add the [gun?] powder afterward for then the ink will not wipe out."  The author also suggested "gallnuts from oak trees in the late summer when they are ready to fall and are soft" with a recipe including vinegar, vitriol and gum added later.

The ink recipes sounded confusing to me, but the 1946 article had added an ink recipe from the 1943 World Book Encyclopedia, and I hoped it might be simpler.  It wasn't!  It involved a "pound of bruised nutgalls, one gallon boiling water, five and one-third ounces of sulphate of iron..., three ounces gum Arabic previously dissolved, and a few drops of antiseptic such as carbolic acid."  I failed to make it through the details of steeping and straining.

Not only do I now understand why Isaac would have preferred to buy his ink in town and water it a bit if he ran low before he anticipated another trip to town.  I am also grateful for my ball point pens!

More Historic Diaries

Leo Tolstoy

Continuing to share the history of diary keeping from Alexandra Johnson's book, A Brief History of Diaries>>From Pepys to Blogs, I was not surprised to see that writers and authors are often diary and journal keepers.  One example is, however, rather unique.

Sonya Tolstoy

From the beginning of Leo Tolstoy's courtship of his wife-to-be Sonya in 1862, until Tolstoy's death in 1910, Leo and Sonya kept diaries.  In her book, Johnson writes:  "A year into their marriage, Tolstoy decided they should share theirs.  For forty-two years, they read, wrote in and commented on the other's diaries."  Tolstoy's novel, War and Peace, grew from a seed planted by a story he read in his wife's diary!

Fanny Burney (1752-1828)

Frances d'Arblay, known as Fanny Bruney, was a member of the literary circle that included Boswell and Johnson in the 1700s.  In 1768, when she was only fifteen years old, the clever girl began her practice of diary keeping with these words:  "To Nobody then will I write my journal since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved--to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart."

Dorothy Wordsworth

Like Sonya Tolstoy, another female diarist aided a famous relative.  In this case it was Dorothy Wordsworth who kept a diary to "give pleasure" to her brother, William Wordsworth.  She was twenty-six years old when she began in 1798, and William acknowledged that "She gave me eyes" through her journal entries.  The sketch of Dorothy is taken from her biography.

Alice James

Alice James, sister to novelist Henry and philosopher William, began her diary in 1889.  At her death in 1892, her brother Henry described her diary as "heroic in its individuality...Her style, her  power to write--are to me a delight."  Despite the praise of his sister's writing, he burned the diary!  We know what she wrote only because her companion had copies printed.

Anne Frank  (Fair Use)

War is often the inspiration for keeping a diary.  Perhaps the most famous war diary in the world is the one kept by Anne Frank.  Her second day's entry could not have been more wrong, for she wrote:  "Writing in a diary is really a strange experience for someone like me.  Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musing of a thirteen-year-old school girl."  Those musings, begun in June of 1942, ended August 1, 1944.  A noncombatant, young Anne Frank, kept one of the most read diaries about war that has ever been published.

Siegfried Sasson

World War I, with the horrendous loss of life as troops faced modern warfare in a way unlike past wars, produced a group of poet soldier diarists, among them Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves.  In this 1916 diary entry, Sassoon wrote:  "As I sit in a nook among the sandbags and chalky debris, with shells flying overhead in the blue air, a lark sings...Heaven is furious with the smoke and flare and portent of shells, but bullets are a swarm of whizzng hornets, mad, winged and relentless.  There are still pools in the craters; they reflect the stars like any lovely water, but nothing grows near them."

Mary Chestnut, age 13

Perhaps the most powerful diarist of the Civil War was a woman.  Mary Chestnut was the wife of a Senator, and when the War began, a Confederate soldier.  She had lived in Washington in the early years of Lincoln's presidency but returned to their home in the Confederate South when war came.  She was a sophisticated, well-educated woman raised in a slave-owning family, but as an adult the idea of slavery and the war being fought over that issue left her in anguish.  She socialized with men leading the South in the war that she questioned, and her diary became a place to express the feelings she could not speak.  On Spetember 20, 1863, upon seeing open railroad cars transporting sleeping Confederate soldiers, she wrote:  "...soldiers rolled in their blankets, lying in rows, heads all covered, fast asleep.  In their gray blankets, packed in regular order, they looked like swathed mummies."  Chestnut's diary was first published in 1905.  Historian C. Vann Woodward used her forty-eight copybooks, 25,000 pages that she had revised from the original diary, to restore and annotate what she had written.  His work was published as Mary Chestnut's Civil War and won the Nobel Prize.

Dame Ellen Terry

Alexandra Johnson ends her Brief History of Diaries with a chapter devoted to online diaries and blogs.  You may read my own blog on that subject at "Keeping a Journal," in the blog archives of 6-6-2013.  Johnson quotes Ellen Terry's definition of a diary:  "What is a diary as a rule?  A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contemporary who reads it, invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it!"  Dame Ellen Terry (1847-1928), pictured at right from a painting by her first husband, George Frederick Watts, was the leading Shakespearean actor in Britain, and her respect for the English language can be seen in her wise definition of diary keeping.

Isaac B. Werner found his journal useful as a personal reference to aid in his farming, as well as an occasional place to vent frustration.  There is no evidence that he shared his journal with any contemporary, but I, more than a century later, have become a student of the era and community about which Isaac wrote, and his journal is certainly a treasure to me!

If these brief samples of diary and journal keepers over the years have made you curious, you may read more in Alexandra Johnson's book, A Brief Histoy of Diaries>>From Pepys to Blogs.

Historic Diaries

Isaac Werner's Journal

When I was a young girl I kept a diary.  Two of my diaries survive, both with faux leather covers and a flap from back cover to front with a metal closure secured by a lock that could probably be picked with a hair pin.  They contain the typical adolescent secrets, and my attempt to read one of them after I was an adult ended in disappointment.  Frankly, it was boring, even to the author.
 

Reading Isaac B. Werner's journal was another matter entirely.  Each day's entry was fairly mundane, but as one day built on another, I was transported back into another time.  His day-to-day chores and encounters allowed me to experience the era of my great grandparents and other settlers who had claimed homesteads on the prairie.  Isaac was influenced by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, (See "Advice from Henry Ward Beecher, 12-7-2012 in the blog archives) and kept his entries free of most personal opinions and emotions, sticking to the weather and actual events during his days.

Queen Victoria

Isaac was not alone in keeping a diary in the 1800s.  England's Queen Victoria wrote almost daily for sixty-eight years, and her diaries constitute over one hundred volumes.  Isaac wrote daily from 1884 to 1891, filling 480 oversized pages, and the journal was labeled "Vol. 5th."  With the opening pages including entries from 1870-1871 and an unexplained gap of 13 years, it appears that four volumes were kept prior to 1870 when Isaac was in his mid-20s and volume five began.

Isaac's journal provoked a curiosity that led me to read a book title A Brief History of Diaries>>From Pepys to Blogs, written by Alexandra Johnson.  The author acknowledged the ancient keeping of journals and diaries, but it was her history of those kept in the 1800s and 1900s that I found most interesting.

Francis Kilvert

The words of an English country curate named Francis Kilvert writing in the 1870s particularly caught my eye because he was keeping a diary at the same time Isaac was keeping his.  Kilvert wrote:  "Why do I keep this voluminous journal?  I can hardly tell.  Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record...and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me."  I can't know whether Isaac shared Kilvert's anticipation that some future reader might enjoy his journal, but I certainly have enjoyed Isaac's record of his day-to-day life.

Charles Darwin

Alexandra Johnson also selected examples from travel and explorer journals and diaries.  One such example was Charles Darwin, whose notebooks and journals filled 2,070 pages and became the sources from which he formulated his theory of evolution and natural selection which led in 1859 to the publication of The Origin of Species.  

Cover art by Sophia Thoreau

Another explorer did not go far from home.  A reader of Darwin throughout his life and a friend of diarist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau's exploration was of Walden Pond, which was only a mile and a half from the center of Concord, Massachusetts where he and his circle of friends lived.  Yet, from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847 he recorded his observations of nature and Indian trails while living in his secluded tiny cottage beside Walden Pond.  Those observations became the material for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854).  Thoreau explained his purpose for devoting himself to exploring and recording observations of Walden Pond and the surrounding environment, saying that he used his journals "to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."  The cover art for Walden was done by his sister Sophia.

Unlike Thoreau, Isaac documented not so much the native plants but rather his meticulously kept records of planting, nurturing, harvesting, and storing the crops he introduced to the prairie's sandy loam soil.  Yet, he too wrote about the weather, the native birds, and nature's spectacles, such as eclipses, mirages, and sun dogs.

Next week's blog will continue sharing other examples of journal and diary keepers described in Alexandra Johnson's History of Diaries.