Notting Hill Editions – Essay Prize

THE LONGLIST FOR the biennial William Hazlitt Essay Prize was just announced... and I am on it. The prize is £20,000 given for a single essay. The long list is long, but also on it are such luminaries as Ben Lerner, Charlotte Higgins, Tim Parks and Hal Foster. I am on the list for my essay “The Rainmakers’ Flood,” about the nature of ice and snow, Johannes Kepler, war, water and weather modification – also the brothers Vonnegut Kurt and Bernard and how all of these things wind up causing a flood here in the Western Catskills in 1950 thanks to New York City. The essay is one chapter of the book I’m working on Growing Up Modern.

You can download an audio version of the essay here and the essay starts here hiking in the woods:

I. To Manhattan – War, Water and Weather 

Weather modification has long been a dream of armies. Greek historian and biographer Plutarch wrote in his life of Roman General Gaius Marius that “extraordinary rains generally follow great battles,”  and nearly a thousand years later, soldiers in the Civil War believed it too. They slogged through the muck and mud of multiple battlefields, which were simply fields, once farms – the war taking place on so much farmland in the humid South and East. One soldier, Captain Thomas Parker, describing the Battle of New Bern wrote of the “muddiest mud ever invented, being knee-deep and of a black, unctuous, slippery character.” 

I was thinking of him as I slogged up a ridgeline in the Catskills in three feet of snow last February. I was walking to New York City, only I’d never reach Manhattan. It was 107 miles away; instead I walked up vacant land I owned that bordered hundreds of acres the city had bought to protect its water supply. The snow would melt and run into a reservoir that fed the city, and ever since I’d moved to the Catskills a decade earlier, I’ve been thinking about all the uses to which the landscape here has been put: Hudson River School paintings and notions of nature in the 19th century and now water to slake a city’s thirst. Every winter I did this hike, slipping onto New York City’s land, which seemed distant and forbidden, cloaked in snow. It was this snow that also meant I was less likely to get lost in the woods.