(Micro)climate change issues
Charlie the Rain King had much to teach about striking a deal
THE GRATEFUL MOOD OF THE TOWNSFOLK STARTED TO TURN
Ihave spent most of this week negotiating a number of contracts with a number of different people, which is always an awkward business. I’m a tough cookie and talk a big game from afar, but when I sit down across the table from a bank of hard-baked killers unburdened with my nougat-layer of self-doubt and personal insecurity, I tend to crumple like a cake left out in the rain.
No, instead I rely on the decency and generosity of my adversaries, which you may think is a tenuous strategy, but I console myself by thinking about Charlie Hatfield. Charlie was a shrewd businessman, a hard-nosed negotiator, and above all he was a rainmaker.
He started off selling sewing machines door to door in southern California in the early 1900s. He was a legendary salesman — my own father, himself a door-todoor operative of no mean ability for the Singer Sewing Machine company in Durban in the early 1970s, used to tell stories of Charlie “Rolling Thunder” Hatfield, who never took a closed door for an answer, and was once chased down the street by a shotgun-wielding homeowner who later came round and bought one of his most expensive models.
But Charlie Hatfield was meant for better things. He was a dreamer and a Quaker and a man of fierce enthusiasms and private passions, and after a long course of personal study in the art and science of pluviculture, he declared himself a Rain King. Actually, he called himself a “moisture accelerator”, but it came to the same thing. Using a secret recipe of 23 herbs, spices and chemicals, including dynamite and nitroglycerine, which he mixed in vast galavanised evaporation tanks mounted on tall metal towers, Charlie Hatfield could make water fall from the sky.
In the semi-desert of southern California, this was a very useful skill. He advertised his services at $50 a downpour, and following a series of apparently successful interventions in the microclimate, his fame grew and grew. He took his schtick to the Yukon and to Mexico; he performed emergency rainmaking to extinguish forest fires. The rain fell and his star rose, and as any canny
businessman knows, that earns you the big chair at the negotiating table.
So when the San Diego City Council approached Charlie Hatfield to help them break a drought, Charlie Hatfield knew how to drive a hard bargain. Brushing aside their opening gambits, the confident Rain King declared he would create rain for free, but would charge $1,000 per inch as the water level rose in the Morena reservoir. It was an audacious, extravagant contract, but if anyone could pull it off, it was Charles Mallory Hatfield. The council agreed by a vote of four to one, and in December 1915 Charlie and his brother Joel built their platform beside the dam.
Did Charlie also do rain dances and offer prayers to the Quaker heavens? Alas the details of his dusky arts remain overcast and occluded, but within days, on January 5
1916, it started to rain. Hoorah! cried the townsfolk. Told you so, said Charlie Hatfield.
On day two the rain was still falling, and still on days three and four and five. Charlie and his brother were rubbing their hands and imagining their bank account filling with the dams. But like many a backyard inventor before him, Charlie had forgotten to invent an “off” button. As the dams overflowed and bridges and train tracks were swept away and power supply went down, the grateful mood of the townsfolk started to turn.
When animals were swept away and weak swimmers were drowned, the city council called in their lawyers for a series of late-night meetings. The rain finally stopped on January 10, then started again. The Lower Otay Dam collapsed, sending a wall of water 6m high rushing down into the city, drowning farms, buildings, schools.
By the time the rain finally stopped, the townsfolk had a question or two for his majesty Charlie Hatfield the Rain King. A lynch mob formed outside his hotel, and he only escaped by disguising himself as a barefoot Japanese farm labourer, thus compounding his sins to our modern eyes. Not only did he destroy a city, he also wore yellowface. He may be grateful that Twitter didn’t exist in 1916.
The council was ready for him when he presented his bill. “The rain was an act of God,” they said.
“It wasn’t an act of God,” said Charlie indignantly. “I made it rain.”
“In that case,” said the council’s lawyers, “Here is the bill for the damages to the city. That will be $3.5m, please.”
“You can’t charge me for that,” spluttered Charlie Hatfield. “It was an act of God!”
“Ah,” said the council, and took their lawyers out for a martini and a generous steak lunch.
Charlie never did get paid by the council. He was a good rainmaker and a better negotiator, but he forgot a deeper truth of being in the world: it’s not the contract that matters, as much the person you sign it with.