The Rainbow Bridge

Somebody's dog must have died yesterday because I saw the “rainbow bridge” that supposedly is used by dogs to cross into heaven.

“Over the Rainbow Bridge”--this is the second picture I took, where I tried to zoom in further.

I was sitting alone on my front porch, eating my dinner while enjoying the view of my village and the ocean beyond. Although I am not exactly close to the ocean, I can still see pelicans diving for fish, frigate birds gliding gracefully on the air currents, and fishermen returning to the nearby port in their small wooden boats (not to mention the nightly bat exodus).

I also enjoy watching the sky. At night, we are treated to great views of the Milky Way, and I am much more attuned to the phases of the moon down here. During the day time, beautiful blue skies and puffy white clouds are typical. It is interesting to watch the weather forming far out to sea.

On this particular day, I noticed that a smaller but higher cloud had decided, for whatever reason, to dump its load of moisture. A smear was apparent where rain was falling from this cloud, and with the nearly horizontal late afternoon sun, a rainbow quickly formed. However, instead of a typical 180 degree rainbow, this was just a much smaller arc segment. The spectral colors were amazingly brilliant.

At first I resisted the urge to take a picture of what reminded me of that proverbial “rainbow bridge.” My excuses were that “it will never turn out to look as fantastic as it does to my eyes at this moment” and “by the time I get my camera out and ready, it will probably have diminished or disappeared altogether.” Fortunately, I changed my tune and went to get my camera.

This is the first shot I took, and the wide angle shows a bit of my village with the ocean in the distance (just ignore the utility lines).

While these two shots are still not as stunning as what the naked eye could see, they still came out pretty good (maybe if I had not made excuses at first and had taken them sooner, I could have got better pictures). It was unusual to see such a short piece of a rainbow, especially one that was obviously occurring because some unknown catalyst enticed a small cloud to start letting loose of its water droplets.

Eventually, the rainbow arc, as well as the raincloud from which it sprang, disappeared. Below is the last shot I took, when the cloud was merely a smudge of pale white on God's sky blue canvas.

Maybe I should have described this in the passage above as “a paler shade of white” for any Procol Harum fans.

The cloud was gone, and apparently so was somebody's dog. At least I was inspired enough to get up out of my chair and grab my camera. Let's all try to remember to catch life's rainbows rather than come up with excuses.