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terms, turned out to be stranger and more significant than I’d expected. According to Lexis, my grandfather sued for an injunction to prevent Joe Regenzeit from “interfering with the clouds and the natural condition of the air, sky, atmosphere and air space over plaintiffs’ lands and in the area of plaintiffs’ lands to in any manner, degree or way affect, control or modify the weather conditions on or about said lands,” which, reading farther down in the document, seems to have been a response to Joe Regenzeit’s “cloud-seeding devices and equipment generally used in a weather modification program,” the purpose of which was, in short, to make it snow. As if it didn’t snow enough in Thebes! Beginning sometime in the autumn of 1968, Joe Regenzeit was sprinkling the clouds with silver iodide, bringing further gloom to the gloomy mountain town, with the intention of turning it into a winter paradise. My grandfather objected. He, or rather his counsel, Richard Ente, Esq., argued that Regenzeit’s snow had encumbered the land, choked the roads, and clouded the minds of Thebes’s inhabitants, who were already unhappy enough come winter. He did not prevail. Having failed to demonstrate, in the first place, that Joe Regenzeit’s weather modification program was responsible for any particular snowfall, and, in the second, that the plaintiffs’ hardships were brought on by snow, specifically, as distinguished from cold, darkness, old age, excessive consumption of alcohol, rheumatoid arthritis, poor eyesight, poor diet, unusual devotion to their domestic animals, acts of God, or any other cause, the injunction was not granted, and Rowland v. Snowbird assumed its place in the history of weather-modification law, an important precedent, but one with few successors. According to an articled titled “Who Owns the Clouds Now?” 73 Mich. L. Rev. 129, Rowland v. Snowbird established, tacitly, a doctrine of “modified natural rights,” which is to say that if Regenzeit could make money off the clouds, and my grandfather didn’t lose any money thereby, then the clouds belonged to Regenzeit, which would have made him, my law-school friend said, the first person in American history ever to own a cloud. I took copious notes, and even thought of writing a science-fiction story that would take the case as its starting point, and project from it a world where not only the clouds but all natural phenomena, rain, wind, sunlight, fog, and even such intangibles as “clear skies” and “autumn chill,” were privately owned, so that the experience of the outdoors would involve an endless series of payments, and become in all likelihood a pastime for the rich.
    Lexis had nothing to say on the subject of Richard Ente’s character. Since childhood, I had pictured my father as a handsome man, a distinguished lawyer in a dark suit and a blue-and-gold Bleak College necktie, because yes, he went to Bleak, just the same as my grandfather, the same as me, and I wonder if I didn’t go there in part because I hoped I’d find some trace of him. I imagined Richard Ente sitting at dinner with my grandfather, twirling a glass of wine between his fingers, like an old version of the young Sean Connery, if you see what I mean. Richard Ente offering his considered opinion on legal matters, then turning and catching Marie’s eye. Richard Ente pressing my mother’s hand as they said goodbye, and murmuring something in her ear. Richard Ente under cover of darkness climbing the roof of the garage, still in his dark suit, and slipping through my mothers’ open window. My love! said his love. Ssh, Richard Ente murmured, a cross now between James Bond and Humbert Humbert, although I suppose Humbert Humbert is already that. We don’t want to wake them, do we? Marie’s hands at the knot of his tie. Richard’s hairy fingers—with a ring, perhaps, on the third left one?—undoing the top of Marie’s dress. Then an unclarity, willful, on my part.