The Usefulness of Rainbows
An Alaskan postcard
Rain on my glasses, dripping off the bridge of my nose, down the back of my neck like cold fingers. We are hiking the short Nugget Falls Trail along Mendenhall Lake near Juneau, Alaska and I am thinking of John Burroughs, trying to stay positive: “I think rain is as necessary to the mind as to vegetation,” he once wrote. “My very thoughts become thirsty, and crave the moisture.” It is not really working.
And then I glance up: a shaft of sunlight slips through a ragged hole in the clouds behind us and ignites a rainbow right over the glacier, climbing from the gray-green lake to the mountaintops and beyond. A rainbow is, according to John Burroughs, “one of the most lovely and wonderful things in nature, and yet it serves no purpose … it has no use.”
Isn’t the lifting of human spirits on a rainy day purpose enough? Even if there were no eyes here to see it, couldn’t its existence alone be purpose enough? Must everything be of “use” to have value and purpose?
Burroughs may be right about the rain but he is wrong about the rainbow. There is more of a spring in my step. The rain claws are not so cold on my back. For just a moment at least, there is a rainbow in the sky, in my soul, and that is “use” enough for me.
— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).
Has a rainbow ever lifted your spirts? Send me a note below and tell me about it.