He read the weather from the anthill. He died at the age of 79.
“Then the wood ants killed me”: Martin Horat, Wetterschmöcker.
Urs Flüeler / Keystone
According to the legend that he himself told, Martin Horat began to think about the weather on the fifth day after his birth. He died last Saturday at the age of 79, an almost world-famous weather forecaster.
For a long time he lived a completely normal life in Rothenthurm, Canton Schwyz. He was a trader and lived in a house with a sign in front of it: “Martin Horat, landw. Article”. He listened to folk music on a radio with a TCS sticker on it. On the wall behind the kitchen table hung his family’s carved wooden coat of arms and an autograph from Toni Brunner. He drove to farms in his Subaru to sell the farmers a snow shovel or a pitchfork. That was the passage of time. Until at some point he came up with the idea of becoming a weather prophet.
Horat specialized in ants for his predictions. Before winter began, he sat down in the anthill and said: “Damn Chaib, they have thighs like a ski racer, which only means one thing – we have a wonderfully beautiful winter in Switzerland, with lots of snow and lots of sun.” As the winter slowly passed, he ate some of the snow and said: “Dead Chaib, the real snow, it’s really sweet.” From this he read the weather for the summer.
Old weather
For many years of his life, the weather was an innocuous topic of small talk. When two people were standing together and nothing else occurred to them, someone asked: “Will the sun ever return?” Humanity, which in previous centuries had been dependent on the weather because of agriculture, had become largely independent of it with industrialization. In an air-conditioned office, the weather no longer has any existential significance. What was now of interest was the hiking weather.
That was the heyday of the Muotathal weather forecasters. They did not fathom the weather with measurements and graphics, but rather with feeling and “imagination,” as Horat once explained. In order to base his predictions on more than just the ants, he looked in a folder to see whether he could read anything for the present from old traditions. But if he was wrong, “then the wood ants killed me.” It wasn’t the end of the world. Horat once said that he liked to “make people happy” with his forecasts.
At some point an advertiser came across Martin Horat. He became an advertising medium for Swiss tourism, his forecasts were dubbed in French and subtitled in English. This is perhaps how people abroad imagined Switzerland: a man sitting in an anthill and predicting a sunny winter. “Chömid zuenis, mier bissed nid,” said Martin Horat.
New weather
But then the climate changed. Once Martin Horat explained that the ants rolled their eyes and that it was going to be a wet summer. Climate scientists predicted record high temperatures for the same summer. “I trust the ants more,” said Martin Horat. “The ants show absolutely nothing about climate change.” He puffed on his pipe and said: “A human being can’t do anything to the climate.” For this he was described as a “climate denier” in the Zurich media.
The weather has become political. When it’s hot in summer, Badi pictures are problematic. The temperature graphics on television have become dark red heat maps. The journalists no longer call a weather forecaster, but a climatologist. With Martin Horat the time has died when the weather was apolitical.