Making It Rain

On Shakespeare’s enchanted island, Prospero stands at the shoreline, staff raised toward the darkening sky. With arcane words and gestures, he summons the winds, sculpts towering clouds from empty air, and commands lightning to split the heavens. The seas churn and rise at his bidding, their blue-green waters transformed to white foam and shadow. “I have bedimmed the noontide sun,” he declares with supernatural pride, “called forth the mutinous wind / And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault / Set roaring war.” His manufactured tempest—precise in its fury, calculated in its destruction—serves both vengeance and restoration, shipwrecking his enemies without claiming a single life. When his ethereal servant Ariel reports back, voice lilting with satisfaction, “Not a hair perished. / On their sustaining garments not a blemish / But fresher than before,” we glimpse the ancient dream of perfect mastery over nature’s most violent expressions—catastrophe without casualty, terror without trauma. One wonders if the Prosperos of the Cold War era harbored similar fantasies as they stood on tarmacs watching silver iodide crystals stream from aircraft wings, their white lab coats fluttering in the same winds they sought to command.

Jennifer Kabat’s remarkable Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods excavates the histories of these twentieth-century storm sorcerers who fashioned dreams of skies yielding rain upon command in upstate New York. Their ambition—cloaked in scientific respectability yet breathtaking in its reach—represented the ultimate extension of Baconian dominion over nature, enacted with government funding and military applications never far from mind. Kabat turns to her own intimate knowledge of the Catskills and Hudson River Valley and from it conjures something deeper: an act of rare grace and profound witness that interweaves meteorological manipulation, architectural hubris, family chronicle, and climate catastrophe into a tapestry of relationships Walter Benjamin, whose “Theses on the Philosophy of History” serves as the book’s philosophical wellspring, would surely have recognized as a “sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.”

Two of the deluges obliquely recounted by Kabat are ominous metonyms in the annals of the western Catskills, where she has lived for almost two decades in the small village of Margaretville—population 500—at the confluence the Munsee called Pakataghkan (“the meeting of three rivers”). The “Rainmaker’s Flood” of 1950, which devastated Margaretville, sweeping away twelve bridges and several thousand-gallon oil drums, had been precipitated by an extended drought in New York City. With reservoirs running alarmingly low, officials were desperate for solutions and contacted “cloud physicists” Bernard Vonnegut—brother to Kurt—and Vincent Schaefer from General Electric for help. Concerned about liability, the company referred them to Harvard research meteorologist Wallace Howell. From his base upstate, he employed a tandem technique, known as cloud seeding, of firing silver iodide from below while dumping dry ice from on high. True to his word, he proceeded to make it rain. (As well as snow—New Yorkers were dazzled by the sight of snowflakes falling in mid-April.) That fall, however, Howell’s path of seeded clouds collided with a legendary nor’easter, ravaging Margaretville just before Thanksgiving Day.

After less than a year, the city declined to renew Howell’s contract, opting for a more permanent drought preventative; the Pepacton Reservoir opened in 1955. Officials deliberately inundated four local communities, exhuming 2,371 bodies from cemeteries to create the state’s largest reservoir by volume—a historical erasure Kabat captures in the very evolution of the name: “Originally pronounced paw-pacton, it was a Munsee community, then the name is said as pee-packton by white settlers…. Now the village is gone but it is still the reservoir’s name, said with a sigh, puh, like a puff of air.”

Kabat writes extensively about her firsthand encounters with flooding. In 2011, Hurricane Irene (“a storm with a woman’s name”) dumps a foot of rain on her village. Unmoored oil drums and water heaters course down the Bull Run River, and the foundations of Kabat’s Victorian house—complete with turret and ornamental folderol she consistently describes as “gingerbread”—are crushed. The debacle had been preceded by a 2006 storm that inundated the basement during her first year in the home, after relocating with her husband from London. This place where they have moved, she writes with unsettling matter-of-factness, “keeps washing away,” and with climate acceleration arriving in earnest, “now Biblical years come every year.”

Without downplaying its idiosyncrasies, Nightshining could be described as the story of an investigation. In Schenectady, Kabat pores over records at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, where Schaefer’s papers are kept, while at the original Shaker settlement outside Albany she recovers accounts of the Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson and her prophetic “visions of clouds.” Born to a free Black woman in 1795, Jackson experienced her spiritual awakening during a thunderstorm—she opened all the windows in the house “to let the lightning in”—and later, in Philadelphia, founded the only urban, predominantly African American Shaker community. The juxtaposition between personal revelation and technocratic enterprise becomes a kind of argument: On the one hand, there is the laboratory, the silver iodide, the careful calculations that unleashed a Thanksgiving deluge; on the other, the opened window, the lightning invited in, the divine afflatus that required no human intervention to hasten its arrival.

Kabat discloses these findings in exchanges with her husband and confidants like the poet Iris Cushing, often while on hikes. The evidence also leaks out in dribbles of small-town chatter, the character of which ranges from cordial to conspiratorial. (“When everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in the position of having to play detective,” Benjamin once mused.) Kabat is a thorough if unhurried correspondent, and her interviews with several seniors who have possible connection to the Rainmaker’s Flood and its aftermath are indelible in the tenderness of their portrayal. She is just as attentive to botanical and geographical particularities. In area, Delaware County is as large as Rhode Island, yet Kabat effortlessly recalls its range of flora, fauna, and hydrology. A longtime volunteer in the local fire department, she wests along switchbacks, layering Devonian Sea floodplains through glacial melt to the Covid-19 pandemic in sentences that achieve a kind of temporal vertigo. Deep geological time is recast in the present tense, past and future compressed into a continuous now:

One reads such passages and understands Kabat’s writing as an instance of language as transtemporal artifact, of words that hold multiple eras at once, the way certain landscapes do—ancient and immediate, fixed and washing away.

Two personages are especially significant in Kabat’s memoir. In the peculiar fraternal connection between Bernard and the author Kurt Vonnegut, she discovers a perfect case study of how exploratory scientific techniques can infiltrate cultural consciousness. While Bernard developed the silver iodide method for cloud seeding at GE’s Schenectady facility, his younger brother worked in the company’s public relations department—a position that provided him privileged access to the scientific work underway. Kurt would later transpose Bernard’s research in the novel Cat’s Cradle (1963), specifically the fictional substance ice-nine capable of crystallizing entire oceans upon contact. This apocalyptic event exaggerates but does not fundamentally misrepresent the ambitions of the cloud-seeding program, which in its military applications in Vietnam sought precisely to weaponize weather, to transform precipitation from natural occurrence into strategic resource or tactical advantage.

Such technocratic ambitions extended beyond the atmosphere to the terrain below. In Nightshining, the Delaware River watershed emerges as a palimpsest of intention and intervention. The examination of Edward Durell Stone’s modernist campus at SUNY Albany (1964), where after leaving GE Bernard Vonnegut worked as a professor and secured a $900,000 Department of Defense grant to study “modifying the environment,” proves particularly incisive. Notable for its monumental colonnades and an elevated concrete plaza called the Academic Podium, SUNY Albany was built on the desiccated floor of an ancient lake and the withered Mohawk River delta. During its construction, workers excavated sand and dust from 10,500 years ago, releasing geological particulates that contributed to chronic howling winds and airborne grit. The Academic Podium collects and channels rainfall in ways its designers failed to anticipate; the geometric perfection of its towers weathers unevenly, inscribing the passage of time in patterns of concrete spalling, only recently repaired at great expense. The markings belong to an enigmatic architectural history—the plaques on Florentine buildings recording the 1966 flooding of the Arno, the waterlines spray-painted on New Orleans structures after Katrina—where building surfaces become involuntary archives of atmospheric violence. Every stain and crack in Stone’s hardscape is material testimony to nature’s refusal to be designed away. Kabat captures this process with characteristic lyricality:

The tone is made distinctive by Kabat’s insistence on placing herself—her body, memory, and family saga—within the currents she chronicles. Hurricane Irene’s devastation of Vroman’s Nose, a bluff in New York’s Schoharie Valley where Skóhare Mohawks once took in refugees from other native tribes and even British settlements, becomes in her telling not merely a meteorological event but a personal wound. She imbues the site’s historical layers with archaeological precision: Indigenous creation myths that identified the hill’s charismatic figuration as the profile of a sleeping spirit; Revolutionary War skirmishes fought in its shadow; generations of local residents who used it as a navigational landmark; and finally, the rushing waters that scarred its flanks during Irene’s unprecedented downpours.

Often, environmental damage occurs gradually and out of sight, dispersed across time and space in ways that make conventional representation difficult. By tracing the incremental yet inexorable transformation of landscapes she knows in her bones, Kabat translates large-scale atmospheric processes into the register of felt, local experience. A neighbor’s heirloom furniture—carried through four generations—floats away during a flash flood. A local farmer watches helplessly as topsoil cultivated over decades disappears overnight. Library archives containing centuries of community records are reduced to pulp. Kabat frames these losses not as anecdotal evidence of climate change but as its essential reality.

“History,” wrote Benjamin, “is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.” Kabat’s floods operate precisely this way. Her itinerant, emotional prose captures a life borne of multiple migrations—her own, crossing the sea from East Anglia to the Catskills, as well as her father’s earlier move from Ohio to upstate New York. Kabat’s father becomes a tireless advocate of rural electric co-ops, and his role as Nightshining’s moral center becomes achingly clear when Kabat, a heterodox, Engels-quoting socialist, writes, “I believe in ‘the public.’ It’s a phrase my father used often, part of his vocabulary to talk about the greater good and shared resources, the collective and the communal—of us. All the things to which he devoted his life.”

Kabat conceives of memory itself as fluid, subject to eddies and currents, to siltation and sudden rushes of clarity. Recollections of childhood and adult life become inseparable from the region’s industrial past and climate-uncertain future. Family photographs are considered alongside stark images of Margaretville under water, creating a temporal montage that crackles on the page. She documents the peculiar grief that accompanies loss due to environmental change—a complex emotion distinct from more familiar forms of mourning. When a home is lost to fire or a loved one to illness, the bereaved can at least place their loss within recognizable patterns of human experience. But what framework exists for processing the sudden disappearance of landscapes considered permanent? Is it possible to conceive of an emotional vocabulary that adequately captures the disorientation of seeing water rearrange familiar geography beyond recognition? In examining these questions, Kabat’s work aligns with that of Glenn Albrecht, who coined the term solastalgia to describe the distress caused by environmental change to places where one feels at home.

Several literary witnesses offer illuminating parallels to the terrain Kabat maps. Richard Hughes’s In Hazard (1938), at the heart of which is a confrontation between nautical engineering and oceanic fury, leading to the physical and psychological unraveling of a ship and its crew, offers a perfect counterpoint to the rainmakers’ bluster. George R. Stewart’s Storm (1941) ventures further still, elevating a Pacific weather system christened “Maria” to protagonist status. And then there is John Ruskin, the only of these whom Kabat mentions (in an aside). “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884), a set of lectures in which Ruskin decried industrial pollution’s role in darkening the skies above England, casts a shadow over Nightshining’s atmospheric preoccupations. So, too, does contemporary climate fiction and memoir—the defining genres of our era. Kabat’s invocation of hurricanes and torrents recalls Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), which opens with Hurricane Irene bearing down on New York City and closes as Hurricane Sandy transforms the urban landscape. Both Kabat and Lerner use these meteorological events to brook temporal distinctions, crafting stories where past and future leak into the present through atmospheric disturbance. Similarly, Justin Beal’s Sandfuture (2021)—ostensibly a biography of World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki—begins with Sandy’s inundation of lower Manhattan, using the storm as entry point for exploring architectural vulnerability and hubris.

What distinguishes Kabat’s contribution to this emergent canon is her assertion that climate change represents not a rupture with the past but its logical culmination—the predictable if unintended consequence of viewing natural systems as subject to human mastery. Even her title bears this layered significance: “Nightshining” is the literal translation of noctilucent, referring to those rare, luminous cloud formations in the upper atmosphere that glow eerily in the dark after sunset—clouds that have become more common as the planet heats up. In this sense, Nightshining offers not merely a personal account of environmental volatility but a vital reframing of climate discourse itself. Against apocalyptic visions of climate future, Kabat posits continuity with climate past; against abstract global narratives, she offers intimate local documentation; against technical solutions, she prescribes cultural reckoning.

Like Shakespeare’s Prospero—who ultimately abjures his “rough magic” and drowns his book of spells—Kabat implies that addressing climate crisis requires not merely technological innovation but philosophical reorientation. The weather-makers of the Cold War believed they could command the elements without consequence; Kabat’s tempests reveal the hollowness of their claims while suggesting that genuine wisdom begins with recognition of our embeddedness within, rather than mastery over, the atmospheric systems that surround us. If the Anthropocene represents humanity’s unwitting ascension to geological agency, Kabat reminds us that such power must coincide with an acknowledgement of its limits. The storm, after all, has never truly been under our command.