Fresnel Haze

I wander through the world of engineering like an old beachcomber, pulling baubles from the sand where my work-mates would rather I was digging a deep hole of knowledge in one spot. Today I discovered fresnel zones and a fascinating insight. A fresnel cone influences how radio waves are disturbed by the ground beneath the signal, even if there is an uninterrupted line from the transmitter to the receiver. Counter-intuitively, the lay of the land can interfere with or even amplify the signal.

It seems to me that haze works in the same way. Though the light from a distant object passes directly to your eye, the surrounding landscape can influence the quality and colour of what you see. Can the ground create haze even if the air is supposedly clear? Can the presence of low cloud force light out of phase, dulling the view? Can a clear sky actually detract from the clarity of the horizon?

A series of experiments presents itself.  Do the colours of seascapes vary in intensity according to whether the breeze is on- or off-shore? The same may apply to other water landscapes. What about a dry field against a wet one. Does it intensify the colour of the sky or wash it out? When sunlight comes under hanging cloud, is it the colour of the cloud which creates that particular intensity or is the cloud amplifying the colours of the landscape. Does the light over a city, with its vertical surfaces, behave differently to light over a cement coloured landscape - The Burren for example. Is the light over a forest different to the light over a marsh, or a field of green, cloned, crops? How do these factors meld with the more obvious effects of reflected colour? Does rain depress a landscape because of the way that the falling drops reflect the light? Is this why wood is more pleasing to the eye than less natural, textured surfaces? Might these things be manipulated for artistic effect?

The Earth is not Afraid

By chance I have slipped into a curious job with a company on the bleeding edge of technology. For now that job takes me to the edges of society: elite research establishments, game shows, special forces in training and now this. We trundle across a rough road deep in the nameless High Plains, passing rows of huge derelict warehouses cut with overgrown railway tracks. They soon give way to bunkers. Mile upon mile of bunkers made of re-enforced concrete, covered over with the rough earth and then forgotten. Some are full of air and spiders, but some are filled with sick and brutal things that someone, once, thought was a good idea. Our mission is to delve into these secret places and do the tiniest part to rid the world of the abominations that lurk there, in those shadows.

I have seen a few of these places now. They are secure. No wandering hunter comes here. No itinerant tree-feller. No one will eat the meat of this land or burn its wood, even if they could. But nature takes advantage of the quiet and slips its gentle fingers over these lands. In an hour we saw two bobcat kittens at play, a badger, a village of prairie dogs, an eagle, jackrabbits and a kangaroo rat. All tame as can be. There are human predators here, but they hunt other humans, not rabbits.

We move along. The front range of the Rockies glows in the distance and the late sun lights their snowcaps and distinctive grain in fine detail. The last of the High Plains roll up to them, dipping away and shimmering. The plains are a mile high, the air is dry as ash. The foreground burgeons with blue-green sagegrass edged in liquid yellow sun. The Earth covering the bunkers has been reclaimed by the slow but nail-hard bushes. Tumbleweed rolls up their slopes and softens the yellow concrete. From the rear, against the distant mountains, under the ice blue afternoon sky, a herd of tiny gazelle mount the bunker, clustering like soldiers raising a flag, conquering this most highly guarded of human lands.

No. The Earth is not afraid of humans. No artefact of man can touch it. All our bombs combined might bruise it for a while, but the worst of our weapons would simply drive the evolution that would sweep our works aside. No, the Earth is immortal and we humans, we are not.

Masters of Light

I seem to have become a nomad in the stranger strata of the world. I look over the shoulders of doctors as they delve in the minds of the bewildered or the ancient or the horribly injured. I watch trainers train soldiers and those charged with preventing terrorists from making terror. One after another I hear businessmen ask how we can stop their employees from dying and tainting their profits. But today, I had a lesson in the distillation of light into pure colour heroin. I watched a game show in development, where the meek are chained to their seats to watch nothingness distilled into addictive phantoms by the true sorcerers of our age.

Strange Fruit

At Noon we were picking plums in the orchard. The dog was bored, asleep by the fence, and the dragonflies rampaged among the trees. Tonight I'm in Babylon, twelve stories up at the top of a gnarled old 20th century hotel and from my window I can see a very different kind of orchard in the never-dark, seasonless spinning of the city. Through the wet window office buildings and hotels cluster around. All are lit. Some are festooned with white light, like blossom. Through the bloating raindrops, I can see cherries and quinces, plums and damsons. Streetlights are crabapples and qumqwats. Alleyways are sloes. The lights of police cars and ambulances twinkle like moths and the day-bretheren of the moth. People working late or otherwise, worm around some of the glowing fruit-rooms. A police-van stumbles like a stag beetle toward a cluster of bright lights on the other side of a railway bridge. A helicopter searches overhead, its light stirring the ground like a silver spoon. There is a park, in the distance, which is jet-black in this light, and the street-trees are absences in the harvest.

Old Laughing Lady and her Lover

At noon we were picking plums in the Evening Orchard which has many plum trees, most of them oddities, crosses and wild damsons but the centrepiece of this old orchard is a grand old lady and this year the branches quite literally drip with clusters of fat, purpling beasts. The old lady has suffered neglect over the years and so is infested with coddling moths. This year is no different, but her crop is up and the proportion of infested plums is down. Another year and, perhaps, we'll have brought her back to her stately best. But still, we call this the Evening Orchard because its trees are in their twilight. A couple of years ago we wassailed the trees for fun and left a stoneware goblet of wine in her branches. We found it again as we pushed the birthing-ladder into her loins and reached out between two branches toward one of the apple trees which is dormant this year.

Not just dormant. It has a touch of fire-blight which it has fought without aid, but sits at a dangerous threshold. When we arrived, the trees ended at this line. Over several dark evenings we planted another line of espalliers at the edge of the old catchwater drain and, despite the head shaking of the local nay-sayers, this night planted orchard has thrived. But further up, there is a bloody line across the old orchard where the drainage fails and the winter waters gather. The dormant apple sits on one side, and the ruin of a newly planted pear sits on the other. Last year, the new pear was well away and this year it set fruit. Now it has all but died. For months I've been trimming away infected branches and for months, like an advancing army, the fireblight has killed another branch. The cruelty of it stings. The blight had set in the middle of the tree and the top four feet, all the new growth, was fine. Desperate to save the new growth, I refused to cut the main stem. Today, I had to as the disease approached the last new stem and I fear that I have even left that too late. Next to it a new Quince is recovering from its own problems. Finally, its leaves have turned a deep green after two years pale and sickly and infected. It has taken a lot of work to turn it around.

But the real patient in the orchard is a gnarled old tree so riddled with festering crevices that when we examined it, we condemned it on the spot. But then at the end of a wonderful day learning to prune with the East of England Apples and Orchards Project we were shown their own pet project, a tree with barely a quarter of a stem left intact, which they planned to renovate over many years. So, our own basket case got a reprieve. Over the last two years it has been reduced to force one tiny branch to grow into a main stem. Now that stem is a bough and thick with enough child-branches of its own to sustain it when we, finally, sever the main boughs. Curiously, like the old lady, it has responded with a thick load of the mankiest, bitter-pitted apples you ever saw. 

And the almost totally dormant Blenheim Orange? We found a pair of perfectly ripe apples on a high branch as we harvested the plums and ate them in the sun surrounded by our sickly, sleepy patients.