december sidewalk, crown heights

norway's coast in the fall, lygra

Some camera mistakes, Lygra, 2012

Durham, NC, 2007

Sky-level

A story in Knee-Jerk: http://kneejerkmag.com/2012/10/the-flight-by-molly-dektar/

There were some more rainbows today. The rainbows here always seem so low and close compared to rainbows I've seen in Colorado, especially. But the sky also seems low here. I feel like the sky is also low in England and very high in California. Maybe it has to do with clouds and that's all. When I wear a hat, the sky always seems super-low.

I was looking up facts about rainbows. They look sort of like ring-worm when seen from an airplane, as it turns out.

(Photo from the Telegraph)

I love the post on this message board:

Colophon writes: It's certainly possible to see rainbows very close to you, not just "in the distance". I vividly remember seeing one just outside my school about 20 years or so ago. I was on an area of grass with overhanging trees, and there was a fine drizzly rain falling. When the sun came out and shone between the trees, I could clearly see the end portion of a rainbow striking the grass a few feet in front of me. Of course, when I walked towards it, it moved and then disappeared, but I could definitely see "the end of the rainbow" on a patch of grass right before my eyes. No pot of gold, though.

I remember thinking at the time that ought to be impossible, but I have since seen similar effects near waterfalls when there's a fine mist of water droplets in the air. I'm not sure exactly what factors affect the perceived distance of the rainbow.
 
Edit: I see njtt mentions a similar experience in actual rain. Glad it's not just me! 

It's the same kind of emotion that reaches its purest form on Sad Youtube (http://sadyoutube.com/)--plain language + longing for the past + the kind of memory you keep close to your chest, casually revealed in an anonymous conversation about something else. One of my great friends told me this summer that he's figured out that every moment that passes is loss, which didn't seem particularly true to me at the time, but now everywhere I look I see examples of it.

 

Slakt

 Above: Photobooth struggles to balance its colors after I thrust my computer out of the window to photograph the third-best rainbow I've seen on Lygra

Today was a day off, after three days of gathering sheep for slaughter. (Slakt means slaughter in Norwegian. Because sometimes Norwegian is like phonetic English!) Rounding up the sheep is harder than you (or I, having herded goats all summer) would expect, because they are wild and live all year on the heathlands without human intervention. Like Erik said, "They are more fit than us. They are faster and know the landscape better. Our only advantage is our intelligence." Erik is a farmer on Lygra. He held a two-hour tactical meeting the night before the major round-up, using color-coded maps to show how five different groups of people would line up and march across the neighboring uninhabited five-kilometer island (Lurekalven), forcing the sheep south into the corral.

The sheep evaded capture twice--the worst round-up in ten years or so. Farmers, residents of Lygra, their relatives, grad students from Bergen, and wwoofers (about 50 people in all) strung out across the island, into ravines and creek beds and sucking marshlands, through bracken and juniper, up on high heads and cliffs, trying to maintain our lines so the sheep would be afraid to pass us. We communicated by shouting. It is surprising how far a voice can carry from a high hill, even in windy rain--an old-fashioned special effect. One ewe, the flock's leader, twice thwarted us, darting courageously through our ranks like Tim Tebow (I have no idea if that simile even makes sense), the other hundred sheep pounding after.

On the third try, we managed to force them into the corral. After all that herding, they were like celebrities. We all stared at them as we refreshed with paper bowls of mutton stew. These sheep are black, white and gray, an ancient breed of short-tailed sheep no bigger than large dogs. Their wool is so fatty it clogs yarn-making machines--the kind of wool you could make into a waterproof sweater, like in A Moveable Feast. The Vikings used these sheep's wool for their sails.

They huddled together desperately as we grabbed them one by one, deciding which rams to keep as studs, which to sell, which lambs were fat enough to keep alive, which were too little to kill, which ewes had healthy enough udders and teeth to have healthy children again. These survivors got medicine and a quick return to the heath. The rest we ear-tagged (some are only good for meat, others for their skins too--those with multicolored coats, dove gray or black on the outside and creamy white nearer the body), grabbed by the horns or neck and fought down a slick muddy hill to the boat. "Are the moms sad without their kids?" I asked Johan. "They don't understand death," he said. But that wasn't what I was asking.