The Rain Gauge Feud
Two neighbors, two rain gauges, one inch of disagreement, and a full year of increasingly polite and increasingly exaggerated weather reports.
Every farmer in Oklahoma keeps a rain gauge, and every farmer in Oklahoma lies about it by at least a quarter inch, usually in the direction of optimism. My neighbor Burl and I have been comparing gauges across the fence line for thirty years. His is a glass tube on a post, and mine is a plastic funnel I got free from the co-op. After a storm, we stand at the fence and report our numbers, and we do it gravely, like generals.
The trouble started after a May thunderstorm that gave me an inch and a quarter and gave Burl, he said, an inch and three-quarters. That is a half inch of difference over a distance of about two hundred yards, which meteorologists will tell you is possible, but I did not believe it. I walked over to look at his gauge, and he had it in the shade of a cottonwood, under a leaning branch that funneled water directly into the tube. I said nothing. I just looked at the branch for a long time.
The next storm I moved my gauge under the eave of my barn. It gave me two and a half inches, and I reported this with a straight face. Burl nodded and said that was a good one, then went home and dragged his gauge under his own porch roof. Within a month both gauges were reporting totals the National Weather Service would have called a flood, and we were both claiming rainfall that would have turned the whole county into a lake.
It ended at the co-op coffee table, where a man who had been listening for a month asked us quietly how much rain we were getting in total this year. We both said, at once, forty inches. He said the county average was twenty-one. Burl and I looked at each other. Then we went home and put the gauges back where they belonged, in the open, away from every tree and roof. The next storm gave us each exactly a quarter inch, and we reported it honestly, and we have never been so disappointed in our lives. We keep the old numbers in a notebook anyway, because they are the best weather we ever had. The weather page at farm.FM still hasn't caught on to us.
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