FOUNTAIN CITY — Harold Dyer, 82, read his rain gauge at ten after seven Tuesday morning and wrote 0.31 in the notebook, then read it again, because the airport had come in at 0.31 too.
Dyer has kept a gauge on a fence post behind his house off Tazewell Pike for nearly sixty years. His total for the year has come out 0.4 inches over McGhee Tyson’s every year that he has had a column to set next to theirs, and he has the totals in a stack of spiral notebooks in the hall closet. The Weather Service put a new sensor at the airport the first week of September, and since then the two columns have been the same.
“Almost two months of it now,” Dyer said. “I keep going out there thinking I read it wrong. I pour it in the measuring cup, you’re supposed to read it in the tube, but I pour it in the cup anyhow, and it comes out the same as theirs. I never had that happen before.”
Dyer has written the Weather Service about once a year since 1971 to say the airport is reading low. The office has never answered, but a calendar comes in December and hangs by the chest freezer with the dentist written across a photograph of hail.
His wife, Lorene, keeps a second gauge in the side yard under the maple. It has always come in with the airport, and Dyer has always said that was the maple. He went out and looked at it Tuesday after he finished with his own, and stood there a while.
He emptied the tube onto the hostas and said he would see what tomorrow’s looked like.