Wisconsin Idea project links weather, culture and storytelling

We’ve all encountered them. From early childhood, when we learn about old men snoring and the inevitability of rain falling into each of our lives, we have adopted notions and perspectives of the weather – and life – based on proverbs, rhymes, stories, legends, folk beliefs, sayings and omens.

From making hay while the sun shines (or putting something somewhere it doesn’t) to overcoming hell or high water and dodging downpours of cats and dogs, the pervasive nature of weather in everyday discourse is inescapable. To be greeted (Hot enough for you?), is to be confronted by the obvious in a manner intended to draw out conversation.

And while people talk about the weather in all kinds of ways, rarely do they reflect on the sayings and stories that often have far deeper meaning or are drawn from very real events. Even more unusual is any effort to forge links between folklore, artful storytelling and our scientific understanding of weather.

Now, however, a new project funded by the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment seeks to do just that. The project, a collaboration of researchers and educators from UW–Madison’s department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, the UW–Madison Folklore Program and the Wisconsin Arts Board, is bringing together UW–Madison students and Wisconsin K-12 teachers and students to explore weather lore and sayings, and to connect them to scientific explanations of the weather.

“It is the novelty of some weather events that lends cachet to the point where it becomes lore,” says Steven Ackerman, a UW–Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a leader of the Wisconsin Weather Stories project.

Think of the Ice Bowl as a contemporary example, he suggests. The NFL championship game played between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys Dec. 31, 1967 on (What else?) the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field has attained the status of legend, and is an inescapable reminder that, in Cheesehead lore, football is best served on a surface chilled to the consistency of cement.

“When people engage in weather-related folklore, they are usually doing it for playful or social reasons,” says James Leary, director of UW–Madison’s Folklore Program and a collaborator with Ackerman in the Wisconsin Weather Stories project. “People enjoy talking and thinking about the weather.”

Doing so, he says, reinforces an identity of place and history, linking people who may have little else in common.

The new effort has a focus on involving K-12 teachers whose students will seek out weather lore in their own communities and integrate it into the classroom. Teachers from the Northwestern Middle School in Poplar, the Oneida Nation School in Oneida, the Indian Community School in Milwaukee, Denmark Elementary School, and Nicolet High School in Glendale recently attended a UW–Madison workshop intended to expose them to interviewing methods and technical weather resources.

Helping to collect and analyze the stories is a mix of UW–Madison students studying both atmospheric science and folklore. Working with participating teachers in their respective communities, the students are gaining practical insight into the methods folklorists use to collect stories and how to match those stories to the natural history of weather as understood by science.

The weather narrative – atop the rhymes, charms and proverbs – is a way, for example, to integrate weather into our sense of place and, for the meteorologist, lends an oral history to be explored through the lens of science. Famous Wisconsin stories with a weather pitch include the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and the Armistice Day storm of 1940, when dozens of duck hunters – trapped on Mississippi River sloughs by a sudden 40-degree Fahrenheit drop in temperature – froze to death in their boats.

The drama and fatal outcomes of some weather events, according to Anne Pryor, a Wisconsin Arts Board specialist in folk arts education and a partner in the project, lend themselves to the narrative arts, good storytelling built on the footing of reality. “Stories are part of our everyday conversations. The narrative arts are a huge part of traditional culture, and personal stories of weather and survival can be at the heart of good storytelling,” she says.

With narrative in hand, including those collected from Wisconsin communities by participating teachers and their students, it is possible to plumb the science of a given event through explorations of meteorological archives. Even rhymes about the weather, warning sailors to beware of red skies in the morning or that fishing is best when wind is from the west, for instance, can be attributed scientific explanations. (See a sampling of some of these sayings below.)

A primary goal of the Wisconsin Weather Stories project, says Pryor, is to develop a set of three lesson plans. Field tested and honed by the K-12 teachers and their students, and matched to Wisconsin’s curriculum standards in social studies, language arts, science and math, the lesson plans will be posted on the web and made available for free to any interested educator.

“We see that weather and culture and stories really aren’t separated at all,” Pryor explains. “The intriguing idea is how this can be translated into the classroom. How can students relate to it?”