The collective of meteorologists suffers from a crisis of informative monotony. Every day they are forced to show the same maps full of the same suns and the same high temperatures. You can see them confused, agitated. It is understandable that they are worried about the drought because the consequences go far beyond the meteorological circles. They affect us all. As I write this column, the maps – a term that in its mouth takes on a predictive volley worthy of an astral chart – are predicting rain. it's time Hopefully the prediction doesn't end up on wet paper.
Until the invention of the mobile phone, every time humanity looked at the sky it was to see if it was going to rain. All cultures have invented a thousand strategies to influence the clouds, sometimes through the rudimentary method of firing firecrackers, as if playing a game of breaking the pot. The artistic version is the rain dances. The cliché in Hollywood leads us to associate them with Native American peoples, dressed in feathers and drumming, but the Wu shamans of ancient China also danced inside a ring of fire to sweat profusely until, I guess for sympathy, the sky also began to perspire, and in Europe some Slavic peoples were still dancing the Parparuda or Perperuna in the Balkans not long ago.
Now, however, Kilian Jornet has emulated the rain dance of the Mixtecs of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. This pre-Columbian people made a week-long pilgrimage through the mountains, in search of the sacred caves where the wind and the rain live. Jornet's latest feat is so incredible that it has to go this way. In case you were distracted by other news, last week Jornet climbed 177 peaks of the Pyrenees of more than 3,000 meters in just eight days (!). If Kilian can't make it rain, I don't know what we'll do.
