Let’s face it: Rainbows are dippy.
We associate them with the sickeningly sweet stuff aimed primarily at 6-year-old girls, whether it’s toys, desserts or songs:
Red and yellow and pink and green
Purple and orange and blue
I can sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow too.
Are your teeth hurting?
Cut to last Sunday evening. I’m settling in with a dissertation (having made up my mind not to fritter the evening away on preseason football) when I notice an eerie glow on the living room wall: The rain has stopped and the sun is making a brief appearance before nightfall. Do I have time for a quick bike ride? I do.
Cycling generally cheers me but more so lately because back trouble had kept me off my bike all summer. I missed it. My physical therapist recently cleared me to ride as long as I maintain a ‘neutral spine’ as much as possible. (Thanks to my physical therapist, I am conscious as I have never been before of how I sit, stand and move.)
So I’m gliding around Holmes-Foster, happy to be riding after a day of prepping for the first day of class, happy to be riding in the glorious light radiating from low sun onto lifting storm clouds, happy to be riding at all after three months on the shelf.
Then I see the rainbow. The timing is perfect because I’m a block away from the Community Field, a high place that affords an unobstructed view to the south and the east.
I roll to a stop at the corner of Prospect and Gill. It is the most vivid, most sharply etched rainbow I have ever seen. It looks, forgive my saying so, like the rainbow on the rump of My Little Pony (I have daughters, you know).
We’re not talking rainbow segments here, either. This is the whole arch, spanning a vast stretch of sky. The best part, for all you true-blue (and white) Penn Staters, is that one end of it flows directly onto (or out of) the top of Mt. Nittany.
It’s a sign, I decide. We’re going to win the national championship!
With a rookie QB. And a whole new set of linebackers. Not. Women’s volleyball, perhaps? Even that’s a long shot with the talent Coach Rose has lost.
Next, instead of just admiring the lovely apparition before me, I do what any 21st-century human would do: I whip out my cell phone and start calling people to say, hey, get yer butt outside and check out the celestial show. Another bike rider nearby with a less primitive phone starts taking snapshots.
Irrationally, I call my sweetheart in California. She can’t get her butt outside and see what I’m seeing, but I want to tell her about it. I know this sounds corny, I say, but…
Frankly, I’m surprised that my first impulse was to get on the phone. I’m one of those cranks who usually deplores all the noses one sees buried in cell phone displays.
I worry about the loss of connection to the natural world: If you’re looking at the tiny screen in your hand, you’re not looking at the sky and the trees. And if you rarely look at the sky and the trees because you’re always looking at the little screen, I fear, you may not care about the sky and trees all that much, may not, then, rise to their defense when they come under siege.
A few weeks ago, my son and I went rafting on the Arkansas River. One of our guides grew up in the Poconos and found his way to the whitewater rafting world via canoeing on the Delaware when he was a kid. He was dismissive of his way of making a living. Being a guide is fun work, he said, but it’s not important work.
I disagreed. To take people down a wild river is to give them an intense experience of the natural world. I guarantee that if you told people at the end of a river trip of a pending proposal for an upstream dam or development, most of them would be instant converts to the cause of saving that river. But you have to get them out there.
We are all of us out there every day walking beneath the canopy of trees and sky. But we need to pay attention. We need to be present. Better, I suppose, to have snapped and zapped a picture of a corny Technicolor rainbow than not to have seen it at all.
