Assessing Ben Franklin’s take on the weather

Most anyone familiar with the witticisms of Benjamin Franklin likely would agree that the statesman-philosopher made numerous perceptive observations that have withstood the test of time.

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead,” is one that resonates with newspaper reporters who have labored in the business long enough to build up a decent roster of sources. That one is a favorite of mine, along with “An empty bag cannot stand upright,” an adage that comes into play a lot in the coverage of politics.

But the Franklinism that seems most applicable to this alleged “summer” that we are presently wading through has to be his take on wenches, guests and the weather. “After three days men grow weary, of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy,” Franklin suggested in the June 1733 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack.

I suppose it might be argued by some that the possibility of growing weary after three days with a wench would depend upon the attributes of the wench in question. And, in my experience, a three-day stay by most house guests is a stay too long by roughly two days. As for “weather rainy,” since we’ve had that now seemingly forever I doubt it would take a full three days’ worth anymore to drive most of us around the bend for keeps.

Still, Franklin’s maxim would seem to be pretty much on the money. Here in The County, farmers worry about the effect of all this rain on their crops – whether they will be able to “mud them out,” as the saying goes, when harvest time arrives. Or, in some cases, whether there will even be much of a crop to reap.

Throughout the state, rain has fallen on many a parade, festival or athletic event. Campers have been washed out of their vacations, mowers of lawns have been thwarted for days on end and, according to Thursday’s newspaper, climbers scaling the gentle mountains of Acadia National Park have been falling off those hills in droves – slipsliding their way toward a visit to the local hospital emergency room for repairs to body and ego.

Before we know it, Labor Day will be here and we can cease our water-based fun and games in favor of preparing to hunker down to worry about winter and the sticker shock that is said to be lurking at the end of the rainbow in respect to the cost of home heating oil.

Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecies. If the incessant harping by the national news media about anticipated $5 heating oil doesn’t fall into that category – just as the predicted $4-plus per-gallon gasoline did earlier this year – I’ll eat my faded Maine Black Bears hockey hat.

But that will all come later, when the cruel winds of November begin their annual blow straight from the Canadian tundra with nothing to divert them but the quirky whims of a jet stream that has not done us any favors of late.

For now, the main topic of most conversations these days is the rain – not in Spain, where it allegedly stays mainly in the plain – but in Maine, where it has become a pain wherever it may fall.

All my whining notwithstanding, can there be anything more poetic than a good paragraph written by a master wordsmith about the misery that too much rain can visit upon the soul? To my thinking, it’s pretty hard to top a passage by the German soldier-author Erich Maria Remarque in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” his 1929 anti-war classic about World War I.

“Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously come the calls, monotonously falls the rain,” Remarque wrote. “It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich’s grave; it falls in our hearts.”

In such wretchedness, poor Kemmerich would seem to be the lucky one. When the rain begins to fall in our hearts it’s time to move to higher ground.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.