A rainbow in the falling drops

 

The intersection of Gault Lane and Burnet Road is home to a good-sized pond—good enough to host not one but two fountains that shoot jets of water upward. If you stand in an appropriate place at an appropriate time, as I did on the morning of July 7th, you’ll see a rainbow created by sunlight refracting through the multitude of drops as they fall back into the pond.

 

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Here’s a question I haven’t heard anyone else ask: When people who want others to refer to them as “they/them” speak about themselves, do they say “I” or do they say “we”? My guess is that virtually all of them still use the traditional singular, “I,” rather than the plural, “we.” Would that inconsistency undermine their insistence that other people refer to them as “they/them”?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. On the “not” side is the vernacular tradition of using “they/them/their” as an indeterminate personal pronoun. English speakers have been reinforcing that tradition a lot in recent years. For example, most people—especially young ones—wouldn’t find anything wrong with a sentence like “Anyone who wants to keep their teeth should brush and floss every day.”

Walt Whitman might well have sided with that usage:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

That’s from “Song of Myself,” not “Song of Ourselves.”

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Another fountain

A year ago today I was driving on Lake Victor Drive in the rapidly grown and still growing Austin suburb of Pflugerville when I noticed a path between houses that seemed to lead somewhere interesting. After parking, I walked through and found myself at a new place: a large pond apparently connected to an apartment complex. The immediate shore all the way around had been heavily mowed and looked like it was always kept that way. Even so, I still found some plants and non-plants to photograph. In the latter category was a fountain of the type that shoots water straight up into the air. The top picture reveals the top of the jet at 1/2000 of a second. Below is a view at 1/1250 of a second showing how sunlight created a rainbow in the water that was mistified* as it fell back into the pond.

* In case you’re mystified by mistified, I’ll add that I created it on the pattern of words like liquified and solidified. Following that pattern, mistified means ‘turned into mist.’

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Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who came to the United States in 1831 and ended up writing the classic book Democracy in America, had extraordinary insights into the spirit of the young country. Here’s an example:

What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

That strikes me as even more relevant in 2021 than it was in 1831.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Rainbow or nebula?

You know those optical illusions where a drawing or design can be seen in different ways; this isn’t exactly one of those. And it’s also not quite like those works by Escher in which one thing gets transformed into another. Still, this photograph has elements of both of those: going from bottom to top, lily pads with a rainbow above them give way to a nebula in the night sky.

Here’s the story. On July 14th (Bastille Day), I was on the Burnet Rd. side of the Domain complex and discovered a pond with two fountains shooting water to good heights. The morning was clear, so sunlight refracting through the sprays of water created two rainbows. I set out to photograph each one along with the heavy splashing of the water as it rained back into the pond and moved sideways at the will of the wind. In the picture above I serendipitously got more than I bargained for.

Below, in a crop from a different frame, you get a closer look at the effect of the splashing water I was originally after, photographed at 1/800 of a second. Click to enlarge and see more details.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

I’ve looked at clouds

On the flight from Coron back to Cebu City on December 14th
I sat next to a window and took pictures of clouds that interested me.

At one point I saw a rainbow by looking down, as I had on land earlier in the year.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

The Middle Falls at Letchworth

The Middle Falls at Letchworth State Park in western New York State proved as abundant* as the other two main waterfalls in supplying me with pictures during our July 27th visit. Let’s begin with a scene-setter from a faraway overlook. Notice that in the distance beyond the Middle Falls you can make out the Upper Falls, which are indeed upstream and therefore higher up in altitude as well.

Now for a better look at the Middle Falls in its own right:

And here’s an even closer look at the cascade:

Given all that turbulence, the downstream view from the top seems placid:

A slight, slender, tall waterfall graced one side of the gorge:

When I looked down and to the right I was pleased to see this:

* Appropriately, the word abundant comes from Latin unda, which meant ‘wave’ (think undulate) and which evolved from the same Indo-European root that gave rise to native English water. That root also appears in Irish whisky and Russian vodka, which are, euphemistically speaking, forms of ‘water.’

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Looking up at Hopewell Rocks

You’ve already seen picturesque rocks and peeling tree trunks from Hopewell Rocks, New Brunswick, on June 7th. At one point I looked up from the shore there and saw this prismatic band running across the clouds.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: remembering Lake Wakatipu

[Today carries you just past the half-way point in a series of daily posts marking the one-year anniversary of last year’s trip to New Zealand.]

On February 21, 2017, we drove north from Queenstown along the eastern shore of Lake Wakatipu, which I trust you’ll agree is scenic, especially with wind-whipped waves on it.

Weather changes quickly at Lake Wakatipu. Look at the menacing clouds in the next picture, which came less than an hour after the first one.

Early that evening, just north of the end of the lake in Glenorchy, we saw this rainbow:

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Rainbows don’t get named

Waterfalls get named. Mountains get named. Rivers get named. Deserts get named. Even people get named. Rainbows, those ephemeral creatures, get no names. Here a necessarily nameless rainbow I saw near 5 in the afternoon on May 28th after we came down from the windy top of Scott’s Bluff National Monument in western Nebraska. Whether the grasses are native, I don’t know, but the rainbow surely was.

It seems like two or even three rainbows banded together here, and I don’t know how to account for that. In checking my archives, I can confirm that multiple rainbows show up in all of the eleven pictures I took.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: closer looks at a Milford Sound waterfall

Tour boats on Milford Sound get close enough to some of the waterfalls cascading into it for tourists on board to see one or more rainbows in the spray, as we found on February 22nd. In the photo above you can make out a faint second rainbow half-way across the intersection of the land and the sound. When our boat got closer to the waterfall, the main rainbow got brighter and better defined, as shown in the second photo.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Glenorchy

A few days before we were going to be in Queenstown I looked online for a hotel but the town was so crowded in February that I couldn’t find a single place to stay. None. Zero. I did, however, find an opening at a hotel in Glenorchy, at the northern end of Lake Wakatipu about an hour north of Queenstown. That turned out to be a good thing because I don’t know if we’d otherwise have taken the scenic drive along the eastern side of the lake. The picture above shows the mountains outside Glenorchy late in the afternoon on February 21st. Notice once more that fields of ice had lasted into the warmest part of the year.

After settling in, we went out again during the last hour of daylight and drove a few miles further north, where we found this rainbow:

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman