I tooks these photos a few years ago when I was still living on the acreage in the Alberta foothills. My place was 10 ½ acres mostly in poplar and spruce woods, with some native short grass pastures that had never been turned. It was on a hill overlooking an unpopulated valley, with the mountain peaks just beyond. I had my own well and a pump down by the barn; you can see it in the first photo. One hot spring day I after I’d filled the stock tank, I just stood for a moment and let the cool water run over my hands. For a moment I had a kind of epiphany, envisioning the flow of rain, racing down the mountains, soaking into the land, filling the underground aquifer beneath my feet, rising up through the pump, and finally the water traveling across my skin before splashing back down onto the dry earth. Later that day, I saw what I call heliospouts (officially, crespuscular rays). When I was a kid we used to say it was the "sun drawing water" as if the rays were huge straws that the sun used to take up the moisture from the land, in order to have it fall again as rain. And I remembered the feel of the cool water on my hands, and I felt that for a moment I had been just as much a part of the water cycle as the grass and the rain and the rocks.
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