8.25.2005

Rain Down Main

Yesterday while I was sitting out in the hallway waiting for my class on the seventh floor to start I noticed something as I was just staring out the window . I was looking straight down Main Street. (The main building for UHD is on Main Street. Even more generic, the address is 1.) For anyone that has taken a drawing class and is familiar with vanishing points, this might be more interesting. Or not. While looking straight down the street I noticed that I could see the vanishing point. Every edge of a building, lines in the street, window, door, and sign followed this single vanishing point. The only other times I had seen this other than drawings was looking down a set of train tracks. I sat and thought about how odd it was that I'd never really noticed anything like this before. It seemed that the reason it was so easy to see the vanishing point when looking at train tracks is that they have to be on a pretty flat surface. Houston is a pretty flat city, but there's also a lot of crap that gets in the way of your line of sight, cars, people, buildings... etc. Being seven floors up though got all of that out of the way and I was able to see hundreds, maybe thousands, of feet down the street and this perfect example of a technique I'd learned a dozen times.
To add to this moment of mine was a rain cloud hovering over downtown. It was a fairly cloudy day, but this cloud was charcoal gray and moving very slowly. After a few minutes I could see the street below becoming shiny and slick from the mixture of the rain and oil forming below the cloud. Since the cloud was moving so slowly it took me a while to realize that the cloud was moving right in my direction, following the road below. I could follow the rain falling on the street. From my perspective, each fraction of an inch it moved down the road it moved a few dozen feet closer to the building. The rain stopped about halfway down my line of sight of Main Street and the cloud just continued moving toward me. But being able to see the fine line between the world of wet and just before the rain starts to fall in the world of the dry reminded me of a time I was in a car and one said was pouring rain while the other didn't have a drop on it. It stayed that way for a few minutes before the rain surrounded the vehicle.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it rare to be able to see that split of wet and dry like that?

No comments: