Holding Up the Sky

Went to Yerevan and back today, so I had a about 4-5 hours in the car, did some reading but also looked at the scenery. Aragats is the largest mountain in Armenia, and I see it every time I drive to Yerevan. This is the first time I saw it snowcapped. It was quite beautiful, and I saw it from several angles as we drove.

In Yerevan today I went up to a building called Kaskad ie cascade, which is a sort of park that has a fountain or rather several fountains built up into the mountainside, a sort of waterfall of brick with fountains on each tier. It was raining when we walked up to we took the escalators inside, and even though it was cloudy and rainy it was still a wonderful view of the city. I was told I really have to experience it at night. It supposed to be the best view of the city, probably similar to the incline in Pittsburgh.

The trip back I to Vanadzor I saw some insane clouds. Fog. Whatever. I don't know how to classify one or the other, but either way, seeing Aragats on the way back it was covered in clouds, except for the snowcapped part. The mountain was stabbing a hole above the clouds. They seemed so low to the ground and so close, maybe only because of the mountain in the distance but either way I kept getting that feeling you have when you're flying above the clouds in an airplane and they're so close you feel like you could touch them, or jump out and onto them, and they'd catch you. It was a new feeling being in a minivan and getting the same sort of airplane feel. It might've been the shape of the clouds, their texture, they looked suspended, like a photograph of waves crashing against a rocky shoreline of mountains, the movement in the clouds seemed obvious, they had so much energy, but somehow they were still.

It was raining on and off, and it was strange, I've seen this so many times in Armenia where I look out and see ominous clouds in the distance covering the sky, but then I look the other side and see blue skies smiling. It's not that I haven't seen that before, but it just seems that I see it so often here.

With the rain on and off I was hoping to see a rainbow, I actually was hoping to see one in Yerevan, but no luck there. But then on the way back I saw, just for a second, out the side window a tiny rainbow, in between storm clouds, and when I looked again it had disappeared. I kept looking for it, even thought I saw it a couple times as I glanced to my right, but it was gone.

I arrived in Vanadzor and was walking to the bank on a side street, thinking about this rainbow I had seen, and how just for an instant it was there, but gone, and I kept thinking about how there has got to be some sort of metaphor for Armenia in there. So I'm thinking about any kind of meaning I can get out of then when I look up and see a perfectly formed rainbow jutting up from the city, holding up the sky.

Something is so incredible about rainbows. They're so ephemeral, I wonder what it must have felt like to see one without any explanation of light or prisms, just a rainbow, a hundred thousand years ago. I know I'd run that thing down, I'd run and run trying to find it. Yeah all that stuff about a pot of gold, that wouldn't be on my mind. I'd just want to climb it, take a bite out of it, chew it, breathe it, drink it.

Well anyways. That seems about enough.