Is there anything a picture fails to capture the majesty of quite so thoroughly as a rainbow? Waterfalls, mountain ranges, and whales could make an argument, and from what I hear the sheer scale of redwoods and sequoias cannot be conveyed on a phone screen. But what makes rainbows, and sunsets for that matter, different is that they are manifestations of light rather than physical phenomenon.
I took this picture earlier this week. First a rainstorm went to the south of the farm, then the edge of one passing to the north caught us. Both were that peculiar sort of intense cloud system that can build up rapidly on a late summer day, not quite lightning and thunder but not so far off, brooding, gray towers looming up out of a bottomless pool of sky. They were made darker by the sunlight washing around and beneath them, and when the rainbows inevitably appeared they were spectacular.
The brighter of them had a fainter rainbow in miniature attached to its belly, like a visual echo, and it was also mirrored by another half arch above. They visibly landed in the pasture that stretches from the farm down to the village of West Exeter.
The picture conveys some of this, but what it utterly fails to show is the incandescent brilliance of a rainbow, the way sunlight organized into a perfect, prismatically glowing curve appears from nothing with an otherworldly perfection.
And then there's everything else that comes with it - the smell of rain, the sudden coolness of the air in the wake of the storm, the swirling, oceanic, changeable sky. A picture is static, while a rainbow is a dynamic and transient contingency that emerges from the confluence of sun and clouds and water.
As I say, a rainbow is uniquely ill suited to photography, but I think its lesson is more universal than I often recognize. A valley slowly filling with fog on a cool morning, so that it becomes a vast, pale lake, is not so dramatic as a rainbow, but it is every bit as real. A still afternoon with a heavy sun sweating the neighbor's corn may lack the showiness of a storm, but if I look closely I swear I can see it growing.
