At noon we went out into a sunny beach. The droplet in the middle of the ocean caught my gaze. I called it Little Droplet. What would it be doing out there if it didn’t plan to escape the body of water; it was floating, rolling, and tumbling in the middle of the ocean, it was sunbathing!
I watched it closely as the temperature kept on rising. Little Droplet rolled over its back as the sun hit it. In an ecstasy of flight, Little Droplet became vapour. My companion was also watching. “It evaporated”, he screamed. We continued to watch Little Droplet as it rose in the air. It rose high to where the clouds are. Muttering to itself as ascended: “It's cooler up there”. I could feel the heat rising from where I stood in the sand. From the sand, hot air rose after Little Droplet which just turned vapour. “Updraft! Updrafts! Those are updrafts!” shouted my companion.
The vapour of Little Droplet continued to rise until it caught unto strong winds. It rode with the strong winds hundreds of miles upwards, not looking back. By the time it looked back it was way over land; a stream of updrafts running behind, coming after it. The updrafts caught up with Little Droplet’s vapour and took it even higher. Higher to zones in the sky where the air is cold. It was so cold where the updrafts took the vapour that the vapour changed it state and turned liquid. “That’s condensation” shouted my companion, once again. Little Droplet’s vapour changed into liquid due to the cold air up there.
Just about that time, tiny dust particles skid into the zone where the liquid water formed, and the liquid water settled on them. The liquid water became droplets again, and Little Droplet was happy to be back in his body, again as water. The dust-settled droplets continued to skid around, and so did Little Droplet. Soon, more droplets joined in, they combined to form larger drops. The drops grew bigger and bigger, big enough that gravity had to pull it down. Gravity! Gravity! That force that stops anything from escaping upwards. Gravity pulled it down, so did it fall. “That's precipitation” yelled my companion.
The drops continued to fall as precipitation from where they rose to. Little Droplet fell too. When the drops eventually came to earth, some landed on leaves; some landed on the ground; some went back to the body of water in the ocean where they had escaped from.
Little Droplet landed on the ground, but it didn’t stay there for long. From the ground where it landed, Little Droplet continued its journey down into an aquifer, a water body trapped underground. In the aquifer it joined the underground body of water. Little Droplet could have been trapped there forever but a farmer dug a well into the ground. The farmer pumped out water from underground and pumped Little Droplet too. The farmer used the water to spray his crops. Now above the ground, Little Droplet watched as other droplets got incorporated in the crops. It still hasn’t given up his ambition to escape. Little Droplet rode with the excess flow of water in the farmers field and escaped through run-off. The run-off led to a stream, the stream led to a river, the river led back to the ocean, back to where it started its flight.
Back home to the body of water in the ocean things are still the same. Little Droplet came home to find other droplets sunbathing in the middle of the ocean, nursing the aim to escape. It was then the words of the Grand Droplet dawned on it: we are in a cycle kid. There’s no escaping. We must continue to go round, round this cycle: The Water Cycle.
No comments:
Post a Comment