Page 62 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Donald crashes his plane on the ice and parachutes down into the canyon to
warn the picnickers of the danger above. The ice dome crashes down on their
parked cars, but since this is a Disney cartoon, no one is injured. However, to avoid
liability and preserve deniability, Donald suspends his lucrative rain business,
sneaks away from the ongoing investigation, and takes an extended vacation—
in Timbuktu.

Henderson the Rain King

on a more literary note, in Henderson the Rain King (1959), by Saul Bellow, the title
character, Eugene, an introspective, earnest, and egocentric former violinist and pig
farmer, seeks to find himself and escape his troubles with the modern world with a
one-way ticket to Africa. Traveling cross-country on foot to visit native tribes, he
unexpectedly becomes the Great White Sungo, the rain king of the Wariri, when
he performs certain feats of prowess. In charge of both moisture and fertility, Hen-
derson participates in a frenzied ceremony involving leaping, drumming, shrieking,
chanting, and whipping both images of the gods and one another:

Caught up in this madness, I fended off blows from my position on my knees, for
it seemed to me that I was fighting for my life, and I yelled. Until a thunder clap
was heard. And then, after a great, neighing, cold blast of wind, the clouds opened
and the rain began to fall. Gouts of water like hand grenades burst all about and on
me. . . . I have never seen such water. 24

Having found at least part of himself, Henderson, significantly transformed
by his experiences and eager to start anew, takes a flight back to America. In evoc-
ative passages that inspired Joni Mitchell’s popular song “Both Sides Now,” Bel-
low writes, “We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides. What
a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and
downward. This is bound to change something” (280). “[Clouds are] like courts
of eternal heaven. only they aren’t eternal, that’s the whole thing; they are seen
once and never seen again, being figures and not abiding realities” (333).

Cat’s Cradle

At the urging of his older brother Bernard, Kurt Vonnegut moved to Schenec-
tady, New York, in 1947, where he worked, unhappily, as a publicist for General

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