Reflections

“Brrrrrrt”

The sound of the trucks tires running over the warning track of divets which divides and skirts each lane of the road. The shake of the chassis can be felt in your feet and hands on the wheel. The design is to alert drivers who may otherwise not be paying attention to the divergence of their direction away from the road. It’s effective, almost spoiling, as some claim one can drive “by brail” in an alerted state. We are on our way down Nevada 95 South. A new direction for us but nothing new with respect to being on the road. Though, a new feature of the warning track caught my senses. Reflection.

It had begun to rain when we left Oregon the day before. Rain is a minor challenge on the road, but for us having been stationary for so long  and the dry season just beginning it has felt like a welcoming party. The rain has not stopped on our journey South East. The only uneasy feeling is that of not knowing which spots of the roads my become susceptible to hydroplaning. Hydroplaning occurs when there is enough water and momentum to surf the wheels off the road. This causes the tires to slip as if you’d hit ice only worse because the force of the water will wrestle the steering wheel. An can operator can lose track, over correct, and quickly end up in a dire situation. Luckily the road, unfamiliar to us, hasn’t generated such spots. None the less my attention even as a passenger is on the road.

“Brrrrrrt”

This time something else caught my senses. There was an image in the divets. Of course, there was nothing in the divets but a level plain of water, but as they passed along sequentially they collectively projected an image, like a motion picture. This motion picture was the clouds in the sky and each divet a moment of it as it passed. It dawned on me that each divet is completely unaware of what it is projecting, no reflecting. Besides being a rectangular pool of water or how coherent their collective image was, each individual reflection was a subjective observation. The reflection took into account all and only the parameters of the viewer and the subject they reflected, not the pool of water. The divets only serves as a point, the water a substrate, the succession of them a sense of change, the sky a subject, and my viewpoint an observation of the collective projection. All together I was provided perspective of the sky, were there was no sky at all.

“Brrrrrrt”

I then wondered, If I were looking at a different point, I would see a different window? A different substrate a different reflection? A different sequence a different sense of change? A different , an entirely different sense of information.