The Saint & the Devil

St. Swithin's Day, if thou dost rain, For forty days it will remain: St. Swithin's Day, if thou be fair, For forty days 'twill rain nae mair. Last week, 1,083 years after St. Swithin's death,* the ancient verse was quoted again. On many Americans rain had fallen on St. Swithin's Day (July 15) and most of the time since.

In Manhattan, in the first fortnight after St. Swithin's Day, rain fell eleven days. New Jersey was soggy after the worst floods in four decades. At Little Falls, the Passaic River washed out a railroad bridge, leaving only the tracks swaying above the swollen current (see cut). New Orleans sloshed through its rainiest July ever (14 inches plus). When a man in Minneapolis ran out of ice cubes, his mother-in-law dashed into the backyard, picked up a handful of hailstones. It was no legend, but a fact, that the U.S. had had unusual weather since the hottest March on record.

New Englanders noted that the trusted Old Farmer's Almanac had said all along it would be a poor summer.

Hot Winds. The weather was not all wet: Los Angeles had recorded only a tenth of an inch of rain since April 1. In the Midwest, summer's first good hot spell perked up the backward corn crop and the farmers' hopes. In the Pacific Northwest, hot winds pushed giant fires through unnaturally dry forests (see cut), near the 250,000-acre wasteland left by Oregon's "Tillamook burn" of 1933.

In spite of such dry spots, the U.S. Weather Bureau called it the country's fifth wettest July since 1817. It blamed the East Coast's rain on a northward migration (to a point off New York) of the eastern high pressure area, known to weathermen as the "Bermuda high," that usually lies off the Carolinas. That brought southeast winds, dripping with moisture picked up from the hot Gulf Stream and the Caribbean. Annoyed with vagrant Bermuda highs, the New York Times decided that they are "an invention of the devil and should be abolished." But the devil was still at it--keeping green the memory of a long-departed saint.

*The last request of nature-loving Swithin, 9th-Century Bishop of Winchester, was for burial under the eaves of his church, where footsteps and raindrops would fall on his humble grave. A century later the clergy, having erected a new edifice, decided to move him indoors. One legend says this so infuriated St. Swithin that it rained for 40 days after.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.