"Puddles are not random! | From obvious observations, small insights can blossom!"

Musings on A Cute Campus Puddle 😊

& The Philosophy behind Puddles

#ruminationsonthepuddle

Puddles have been an all-time fascination with me - something that excites me much-o-much! 😊

Especially this one cute puddle that gathers into a beautiful circle in the quadrangle that’s quite adjacent to the Anderson Hall!

My fascination for these lovely puddles led me to further explore their cuteness-overloaded design, that I went hunting for books that would help me enrich my ideas on the puddles.

Then came along this wonderful book by the famous hydrologist Tristan Gooley titled, How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea, ‘a book about the physical clues, signs, and patterns to look for in water, whether you are standing by a puddle or gazing out across miles of ocean’.

Deciphering the patterns of the water, right from puddles to the sea has been Tristan’s passion.

Says he,

The things we notice in puddles and streams can be just as profound and helpful to understanding what is happening as those that might be spotted from a vessel mid-Atlantic.

Giving us all some vignettes straight from his book, on the Puddle!

The Not-So-Humble Puddle

THE PUDDLE’S DOWNFALL lies in its humility.

There it sits, low down and apparently motionless, meekly refusing to seek our attention. 

The only time a puddle makes it into a story is when a car goes through one, and then it’s all about the rude driver.

The puddle itself gets ignored.

No longer!

A puddle is evidence: There is quite a lot of water in one particular spot, but none all around it.

Why?

Puddles are not random.

There are different types of puddles, which all form part of a family tree consisting of the Low Point puddles, the Tracker and the Navigator puddles, the Overhang, Spring, and Seismometer puddles.

Every puddle is a sign that the water has been blocked, stopped from traveling down through the ground.

So if a puddle is persistent, then the first thing we can deduce is that the ground beneath the puddle is either not porous or it is saturated.

This is mainly interesting when we travel through a rural area and notice that the number of puddles suddenly increases, despite there not being any more rain in that area.

When focusing on a particular area to ask why there are puddles in some specific places but not others, we quickly realize that every puddle is indicating a low point in the local landscape.

Water is being pulled down by gravity, so it is always trying to travel downhill until something stops it.

For this reason, any local low points of non-porous ground will host puddles.

Urban planners and road builders start with an aim of eliminating puddles altogether, so a puddle anywhere in a town is a sign that something has gone a little bit wrong somewhere, and the simple story behind that can usually be found.

From obvious observations, small insights can blossom. 

Where two paths or tracks cross there will be a patch of ground where the land is worn much more seriously than on either of the two paths, because all the traffic following each path must also cross the junction.

Secondly, all small puddles act as miniscule reservoirs for the animals in that habitat. Thirsty animals will seek out the puddles, just as they travel to the larger ponds and lakes, and this leads to yet more footfall, gently encouraging the infant puddle to grow.

These Tracker puddles are everywhere, once you learn to look for them. They are one of the reasons that a puddle should not be viewed as a random mild hazard, but instead a small clue as to what is going on around us.

If we want to add a few layers to our understanding of nature, then the act of pausing to consider why the puddle is there will often open up the next level, because around the puddle we may notice the footprints of the puddle’s creators.

The soft mud around most puddles is an ideal spot to look for the animals’ tracks, at which point the story can become much more detailed.

Try to work out which animals have passed close by - you are very likely to spot and be able to identify the pads and claw marks of dogs, for example.

How beautiful! How lovely!!

To sign off in the words of E. E. Cummings (or e. e. cummings as he prefers to be known)

“The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.”

Puddle-wonderful, ain’t it? 😊