12 episodes · 4h 43m
Fair and Warmer
One day's line in a weather book, read out, and what that day actually was in the county. Fifty-four years of taking the reading at seven in the morning.
Read the back cover
Elden farmed in north-central Kansas and kept the weather for the government from nineteen forty-seven to two thousand one. A cooperative observer: the white instrument shelter, the copper rain gauge, the book, and the reading at seven in the morning, every day, for fifty-four years, in harvest and in blizzards.
Each episode opens with one day's line read out of the book — high, low, precipitation, sky, wind, remarks — and then tells what that day was. Seventy days of dust in the gauge. Eleven minutes of hail on a field ready to cut. A week of rainbows. A Christmas snowed in with company.
The weather is the frame. The people are the story. Storms come, and nobody dies in them.