The Pot of Gold

Sunlight refracts (bends) as it goes into a raindrop, reflects off the back, and then refracts again as it comes back out. The amount that light refracts depends on the wavelength (or colour) of that light, so blue light with a shorter wavelength will refract more than red light with a longer one, but as it is refracted twice (once on the way in and once on the way out) red ends up on top and blue on the bottom.

…You don’t need me to tell you what a rainbow is!

But, have you ever seen a snowbow?

That’s when the sunlight refracts off tiny snow crystals in the air instead of raindrops and it’s what I saw while skiing last week. It turns out the amount by which light refracts also depends on the refractive index of what it is refracting through. For example you get smaller radius rainbows through salt water spray off the sea and my snowbow was more of a parabola (kinda like a semicircle but stretched). It was also really close, so close it looked like I could ski right underneath it.

So did I turn around and go the other way, thinking I’ll leave this mysterious natural phenomenon just that, a mystery? After all who knows what happens when you go underneath one, the myths say nothing about that, and if nothing happened, that’s my childhood imagination ruined forever, right?

Hell no! Like any human would I went straight through the middle. Or at least I tried.

I never found out if there really were riches at the end of the rainbow because the ends sort of disintegrated into swirling sparkly snow crystals, as I got closer and closer. I kept thinking a Lepricorn was going to pop out at me any second and try to make some sort of questionable deal with me!

Interlude: There’s this cupboard in the room where my brass band practise, where we keep spare instruments, sheet music and colouring pencils. However, what mostly goes unnoticed is a door at the back of this cupboard into a second cupboard that never seems to get much use. So far, not that exciting until my friends and I learned that there was in fact yet another cupboard behind this one, a third cupboard. And yet whoever we asked we could find no one who had ever actually been in there. Or rather, no one who had actually been in there and come back alive! So we swiftly decided that this third cupboard was heaven, and spent many an evening while collecting music stands not daring to go there. “It’s not the right time.” We would say. But one fateful night we could bare it no longer, it was the right time, whether them cupboards liked it or not!

We’re not the most intelligent bunch, but we’re sensible enough to know that nothing was actually going to happen when we went in. Still there was that doubt though, that little spark of make-believe left over from our childhoods, that little spark of fear, that was enough to keep the adrenaline pumping and keep our little fantasy alive.

So it was with that mixture of experienced confidence and childish trepidation, that third-cupboard-feeling, that I skied right under what was left of my rapidly disappearing snowbow.

The third cupboard as it turns out, was just a room with no floor boards and a boiler. You might think we would have been a little disappointed by this, but I think it was this final chance of ours to really play pretend like kids in the playground; to imagine we were like those children in the Chronicles of Narnia, who faced not just adventures but also grave danger, but ultimately stuck together; to forget our troubles and enter this half imaginary world we might never return from. But we did. And it was fun, but it’s over now.

It was the same with the pot of gold. It’s kinda sad to have to let go of childish fantasies when you actively prove them wrong. But you have to go do it. You can’t just turn around and say “I’d rather not know – I’ll keep my childhood intact, thank you very much!” Because what child would do that?