Monday Arrives, Show Time

FTLComm - Tisdale - Monday, June 25, 2001

After such a magical display on Saturday it was surprising to see the ultra colour of this morning. The picture at the top of the page was taken at 0425 and shows the bottom of the cumulous overcast but also an unseen layer of smoke on the horizon contributed considerably to the effect. Since you were not here or up to see this event I took the liberty of capturing the Eastern sky in a QuickTime panorama VR which is shown at the bottom of this page. Microsoft's media player will not display this image so if you don't have it download QuickTime it is free and works just great.

Realising that this was a special event I dressed and headed downtown with the car to see this light (above) and then heading West was surprised to see a rainbow buried in highway #3. Though the street was damp and the humidity 100% it was not raining at this moment. The cause of the rainbow a mystery sent me out of town with some fleeting thoughts of a pot of gold located just West of Philip Seeds.

In this picture the second ring of the rainbow is faint but hovering near by. The radically low angle of light was creating the nearly vertical arc of the rainbow, we are used to seeing them with the sun higher in the sky and the arc is always much more horizontal But alas daybreak was occurring and the image below shows the sun making that quick passage from horizon to above the dense wet cloud layer above. But streams of gold flashed across the haze covered countryside.

From town the morning light had reflected crimson off the bottom of the Tisdale Dehydration plant's plume, now with daybreak behind the plant and an alfalfa truck are lit against the morning sky.

The truck turning onto the highway once again made me wonder about the pot of gold and perhaps the truck, the machine that moves the product is itself a symbol of that pot of gold. In amount it shot by as I hoped to catch its nose entering into the morning light and instead caught only the blur of its passage. Camera shutters and low light are completely unaffected by caffeine But with the truck gone coming toward me from the North a true native, some being who really belongs in this scene captured below in the glare of the sunrise drifting almost above the field, up toward the highway, stopping for a moment to check for traffic then across the empty road.

There is almost something like a Wagnerian Symphony that should go with such a scene. This free spirit trotting along at dawn, alone and seeming to have a preset course as it headed across another field, South, due South. It is 0439. Absolutely still, the sun climbed above the overcast and raindrops begin to appear on the windshield, not droplets of dew but fresh raindrops from a slate gray sky, I hold out my hand to check and it too witnesses rain drops.