WRITING NATURE: 
DISCOURSES OF ECOLOGY

The distinct sound of raindrops shook me from my intense concentration. Texas weather is so random. I involuntarily marveled at how quickly the spotless blue turned into an equally spotless gray, from such innocent peacefulness to such sinister violence; it was disconcerting, amazing, fantastic. Drops, materializing from an invisible nothingness, suddenly appeared.

The drops slowly covered the window, beginning as points, growing into dots, streaking into beads of lines. A collection of water grew, mathematically more complex until the meteorites of water ceaselessly bombarded the once barren world. Zero, then one, then two dimensions! Finitely countable, then infinitely impossible, the raindrops crowded onto their planar universe. I was the Deistic observer, and this was my world to watch.

The screeching of skidding tires interrupted the seemingly ceaseless sound of splashes, and I jolted to a stop in the middle of an intersection after running a stop sign. A cacophony of car horns and people, screaming expletives at me, greeted me, accompanying the curses of stupidity I quietly directed at myself. I quickly pulled to the side, looked for my hazards, and cut the engine before I made a more fatal mistake. Cursing my inept driving skills, I sat in the driver seat, unable to drive lest I risk an accident, unable to leave without becoming drenched, immobilized by my fear and nature's torrent.

The drops fell faster and larger, the symphony's individual notes no longer distinguishable, but becoming a hurried, frantic stream of chords, harmonies, voices. My beautiful universe had transformed from the simple to the complex in only a matter of minutes; so many lifeless bulbs of water, so many drops of water seemingly waiting for something, a catalyst, a spark, a breath of life.

I saw a flash of lightning in the distanceŠ waitingŠ threeŠ fourŠ five secondsŠ then came the crash of thunder. The storm was only a mile away and quickly moving closer, but still the wait seemed like an eternity, the anxious eternity for an awesome event that can bring either the fulfillment of dreams or disappointment, the cry of rejoicing or sadness, life or death, the eternity that brings an almost unbearable nervousness and unavoidable anticipation. I watched and waited, hoping to witness a lightning strike, at the same realizing the dangerous consequences of such an event. Nevertheless, I froze and waited for the looming event.

As the lightning approached, I noticed the raindrops growing in size: some of the drops merged with others, forming oblong, deformed looking shapes. Some drops began inching towards others, as if attracted by some unseen force and, once merged, bound by some unseen bond that held the drop together, preventing it from shattering into a million smaller pieces. It was an interaction on a microscopic level, an interaction between millions of individual molecules.

Chemically, water molecules attract other water molecules, bonding with each other through electrostatic and magnetic forces, a sort of invisible glue that turns water into those hemispheres that bead up on windows and hard surfaces. Macroscopically, we see water droplets fuse together simply because it is a liquid, and that is the nature of liquids. Water has a natural affinity for itself, for its own kind, and the world I witnessed was no exception. Clusters of water droplets merged to form one large drop, while the isolated others were quickly ignored as I focused on the larger, clearer, more active collections of drops.

The crash of thunder came, no longer growling but sudden, instantaneous, loud. Involuntarily, I jumped, shaking the car, disrupting the peace on my world with a sudden earthquake, the drops shaking with an equally involuntary shudder. Amazingly, as if the drops received some breath of life, many of them unanimously began moving towards the windowpane in a race to the bottom. Perhaps my shake gave the drops the energy needed to begin their downhill descent. Perhaps gravity was finally able to overcome those invisible forces holding the drops stationary on the window. Perhaps the drops had grown so large that they no longer could hold themselves to the glass. Perhaps nothing happened at all and it was just some random occurrence. The world took an evolutionary step from absence of life to life, as the window became a place of dynamic motion and forces.

It was a cluster of raindrops, and I was the objective scientist, silently recording the random movements between drops, watching as the forces of gravity inevitably pulled the drops down to the bottom of the window. Probability ensured that each frame in time, each moment that passed, would never repeat, so I watched, fascinated by the infinite number of possibilities that nature provided. If only I could record the multitudes of data required to mathematically recreate merely one scene on the window, then I could generate a model that emulated the captivating world before meŠ

It was accelerated Darwinian evolution and I watched the creatures appear, grow, live, and die, silently hoping for the impossible event for all the drops to survive. They moved around randomly, larger drops consuming smaller drops as a hierarchy of them arose. And as soon as the hierarchy was established and seemed to provide a stable law for the world, Nature destroyed it again, as the largest drops exploded from the impact of falling rain: they were easy targets for the water missiles, providing an evolutionary check on the domination of the largest onesŠ

It was a society and I was their hopeful deity, silently imagining the drops' social interactions, wishfully dreaming about the religious ceremonies they held in my honor. Drops collected and became families, organizing themselves into nomadic clusters of houses, then villages, then towns, then cities. Some societies remained small and slowly disappeared, forever forgotten in history, for they simply had no impact in their world. Some societies grew until they consumed the others around them, wreaking havoc to the area surrounding, leaving a conspicuous water trail, a history, in its violent wake. Some societies cooperated with their neighboring civilizations, consuming the growing enemies around them in a strangely symbiotic relationshipŠ

It was a race and I was the spectator, silently hoping for the smaller drops to first overtake the bigger ones and eventually win the race to the bottom. They swerved and raced, fearlessly colliding with other drops, all the while striving for that goal at the end, the bottom of the windowpane, the black rubber that absorbs those water drops lucky enough to make it. They raced unknowingly, or perhaps knowingly, to the bottom where they would eventually leave their world forever, destroyed. Collisions were inevitable in that crowded world, and yet the drops experienced no fear, unafraid of change.

The symphony again slowed until I could hear the individual notes of the cadenza, and soon, the rain stopped just as quickly and surprisingly as it started. The collisions between drops slowed, the societies began to vanish, the race completed as the stragglers struggled to reach the bottom. I became saddened as I realized that my world would soon vanish and end just as quickly and surprisingly as it began. I quickly started the engine and carelessly pulled back into the road, again resuming the travel that I began only a couple of hours earlier. I ceased to be the Deistic observer and became just another member of the three dimensional world called Earth.

The drops became still, then grew smaller, then eventually dried on the window. As they evaporated and perished, they left white stains on the glass, leaving only a trail of fossils for me to remember the once lively world that surrounded me. The calcite remains became the drops' history, an unmoving account of a time and a place when raindrops decided to create societies and race and fight in a bid for survival. I drove away, wistfully hoping for the next storm when once again I could witness the universe with an omnipotent perspective.