Last week, we almost set a couple of different records for rainfall, and there was serious flooding not too far from the city. Real Pacific rain isn’t like a Midwestern bucketing or a tropical monsoon; days-long waterdrumming, never violent but never stopping. On the second day of this, the local paper distinguished itself with the headline “Drought Officially Over” (they weren’t being ironic, we really did have a drought).
The morning after a night of rain the leaves of the Akebia can’t possibly carry any more water, but there’s lots more coming.
This is the corner of Pender and Granville streets, about as downtown as you can get in Vancouver, around mid-day. In this kind of situation, those umbrellas, while adding some much-needed colour to the scene, basically Just Don’t Work.
When we left the office at the end of the day, it was obvious that the rain was breaking up. Driving along Richard Street, I rolled down the window and pointed the camera at the sun with my left hand; Stephanie in the passenger seat showed admirable fortitude as I failed to do a very good job either of photocomposition or staying in my lane. You can fix the framing with PhotoShop, but at the speed they go on Richard, bad lane-changing might put you where it wouldn’t matter that you threw away your Life for Art.
Coming out of downtown the rainbow jumped into view, brilliant against the darkening sky, but this is rush hour and you just don’t stop for that photo no matter how much you want to. The other end of the rainbow, the one you can’t see in this shot, plunged into grey crenelations of cumulus, and I wept for the picture of it that I’ll never get; oh for the Gibson-future Zeiss optics in the eye socket so I could capture anything I see forever.
When I got home the show to the West was almost over, but not quite. It started raining again sometime in the night.
