Do You Think the Rain Will Hurt the Rhubarb?

A few words on the Weather, Progress, and God

“Everybody always talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

-Mark Twain

Rain. Finally, rain.

I’m glad for the flowers and bees, and our nearly-empty cistern, but after a month with little rain, I’m mostly glad to be corralled under a roof and made to sit and listen to its pattering. The now surging stream carries with it dirt made by the passing of millennia, countless cycles of life and death. I say bye to it on its journey back to the sea.

As a topic of discussion, weather is to most people a polite way to talk about nothing, or a way to guide a conversation that’s venturing into unsafe waters. When a conversation veered towards something unseemly, my Grandmother used to ask, “My, do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?”

To the uninitiated, there’s only good weather and bad weather. When your livelihood depends on the sun, clouds, rain, snow, and wind, it takes on a whole new dimension. To the farmer or gardener, there is endless fodder for conversation on the nuances of each season and its influence on the growth of the plants and health of the animals that sustain us all.

Growers have long memories. I’ve learned this by listening to the old-timers sipping beers at the brewery, or chatting, leaned up against the stone spring where I collect our drinking water. Every year is deemed a record-breaking something or other. Last year was the coldest September in twenty-five years here in Bohemia, according to Lucie’s grandmother. I’ll take her word for it. She can rattle off the price of potatoes to the penny for the last three decades. We’ve spent many pleasant Sunday afternoons discussing the season’s weather, and potatoes.

The timing of dropping seeds in the ground depends on Spring weather, which is as dependable as a drug dealer. A dry March turned into an unseasonably warm April. Buds and blooms sprung forth weeks earlier than usual, only for a frost to strike in mid-April, which decimated the fruits and flowers that were already well on their way. Many tears were shed among farmers, gardeners, and vignerons across Central Europe. For most people entirely blind to agriculture, living in climate controlled conditions, the cold snap simply means very expensive fruits and nuts come summer and fall, assuming trucks and ships are still running. If our global transportation infrastructure is harmed or impeded, it will mean no fruits or nuts at all.

Perhaps one of the greatest joys of growing your own food is the feeling of agency. So much of modern life is so meticulously managed for us through apps, algorithms, and HR policies, and so much of the ‘work’ being done shows no material results at the end of the day.

What got me into gardening was the amazement, and yes, empowerment, that comes with being able to grow your own food. We make most of our living by farming for around thirty families who live within walking distance. Many things that we need, we trade for with food we grow. No money is paid in taxes for bombs or bureaucrats. That’s certainly not the reason to start or keep farming, but it’s a good one.

The garden and the gardener also have defined limits. The strength of the gardener, space, borders, access to water, seeds, fertile soil, and the need to rest. And then there is what’s beyond our control, the weather.

That’s not to say we humans don’t affect the weather. Clear-cutting vast swaths of old growth forest and paving it with concrete certainly affects the weather of a region. But to affect something and to control it are two different things. I can affect the speed at which I make compost by introducing nitrogen-rich materials like chicken manure, but the proliferation of life and the alchemy that transpires to transform life into death, and back into life again, is beyond my control or understanding. And I’m alright with that. In fact, it fills me with awe.

Karel Čapek, a Czech writer from the era of the First Republic, between the wars, wrote a short book (A Gardener’s Year) about gardening. As he says:

“With everything in the world it is possible to do something, but against the weather nothing can be done. No zeal, no ambition, no newfangled methods, no meddling or cursing is of any use; the germ opens and a sprout comes up when it is time, and a law has been accomplished. Here you are humbly conscious of the impotence of man; soon you will realize that patience is the mother of wisdom!

After all, nothing can be done.”

Humble. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Maybe, what we’ve come to call ‘the climate’ or ‘the environment’, is our supposedly secular society’s way to talk about God. I realized this when I clicked on a link on Wikipedia and saw someone accused of ‘environmental skepticism.’ I guess ‘heretic’ seemed outdated. 

Perhaps all those Old Testament plagues of locusts, frogs, flies, and pestilence is God. Because maybe God (insert ‘Nature’ if that makes you feel better) is the law of the germinating seed Čapek wrote about. It’s the laws that govern our material world. I’m not saying God (Nature) is only that, just that when we break laws, like not returning our humus to the fields, or allowing animals to overgraze, or weaponizing respiratory viruses in laboratories, we are punished for breaking the law. 

I don’t call myself an environmentalist because I’ve developed an allergy to ‘ists’, and ‘isms’, and movements in general. As they grow, they always seem to clot.  I’ll take the liberty to set a low bar and say that you can’t call yourself an environmentalist if you don’t compost your food waste. That should reduce the stone throwing. 

There are, nowadays, open calls to politicize the weather. Within this realm of political myth-making we have people who call themselves ‘conservative’ that have busied themselves for decades conserving nothing, and ‘progressives’ that are voicing virtuous pleas to save the environment by stuffing money and people down dark wells for lithium batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines; as if the processes to mine, refine, produce, transport, install, and eventually throw these bobbles back in the ground doesn’t influence the climate, and is less benign than cows farting.

If solar panels won’t do the trick, our leaders will work hard to continue their tireless efforts to turn life on this planet into one grand experiment. They’re already hard at work modifying genes, playing with emotions online, spewing imaginary currencies, and trialing new drugs, why not start monkeying with the atmosphere? A cohort of climate scientists, government agencies, and their industrious friends are proffering up a grand scheme to cool the planet by way of ‘geo-engineering’ (i.e. world engineering) that would involve spraying millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s light. This is a courageous project, admirable for its bold simplicity and use of scientific power. 

It’s also absolutely insane.

Look no further than the melted statues of Eastern Europe in the middle of the 20th century for the scale of the possible destruction.

Perhaps the only thing scarier than a rapidly run-away climate scenario is how the people most responsible for causing any such change in climate are using, and in no doubt to some degree creating, an emergency in order to gain power over us peasants. Given the choice of living under the tyranny of a global nanny state or an inhospitable climate, I’d opt for the reset button. The case being that for all their hand-wringing and fist-shaking about the climate, the politically enthroned don’t actually give a damn, as seen by their willingness to wage ware and blowup pipelines full of methane.

This growing cult of people seem to think death is simply a problem to be solved, or that the ‘climate’ is another thing to be tinkered with and ultimately controlled. What they are really saying is: they think they’re gods.

These want-to-be deities like to call their projects ‘progress’. Who could be against progress, after all? The very notion of progress, technological or social (increasingly viewed as the same thing, i.e. “social engineering”) implies that there is a goal, or some agreed upon aim. I can’t make out what it is, but it doesn’t seem good. The direction tends towards radical monocultures of our fields, cities, and inner thoughts, of unconscious control along with welcomed passivity and dependence in the name of safety and convenience.

‘Humble’ and ‘human’ share a root with the word ‘humus’, Latin for ‘earth’ or ‘ground’. The root of our humility comes from the knowledge that we all come out of the ground, and we’ll go back into it - that we are a part of a whole, that the ‘environment’ is not something separate from ourselves.

I think about this often when it rains, maybe because I have time, but I think it’s deeper than that. I’m reminded of how much I need it, how my entire life, livelihood, and comfort of my family depends on it. The gutter is overflowing as the storm picks up. I smile, knowing our buried cistern is nearly full by now; we’ll have weeks of hot showers and clean dishes and clothes. And I know that tomorrow I’ll see the vegetables glistening with beads in the morning sun, noticeably larger than today.

A burst of soil across the pathway catches my eye, and I watch a toad emerge from his den. He stands for a moment, drinking, then hops to the cover of the neon leaves of Swiss chard bobbing in the downpour. I look to the sky. Grey clouds begin to clot, turning to black in the West. A wren takes shelter from the storm in the outdoor kitchen, landing on the corner of the slated spruce table at which I sit, and wiggles her tail feathers, pointing at the darkening sky. Then, in a blink, she’s gone, without a song.

Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?