The extraordinary memory of rare events

Last week I was walking with our dog Jack along the western shore of Siletz Bay on the Oregon coast. It was 7:02 pm, and the sun was low in the western sky. Looking east across the bay there was this eerie-looking, gray arch spanning the bay.  There was almost no color except for a pale tinge of red and yellow as the arch met the water on both sides. I set my iPhone for ultra-wide, equivalent to a 13 mm lens, to encompass the whole arch in the shot. There were no clouds or rain, but there was a faint mist over the water. What was this strange illusion? I had never seen anything like this before. A quick Google search identified this as a “fog bow.” According to Wikipedia,  “it appears as a bow in fog rather than rain. Because of the very small size of water droplets that cause fog—smaller than 0.05 millimeters (0.0020 in)—the fog bow has only very weak colors, with a red outer edge and bluish inner edge. The colors fade due to being smeared out by the diffraction effect of the smaller droplets.” It is indeed a rare event.

I can also vividly remember two other rare astrophysical phenomena I have witnessed, a parhelion and a total solar eclipse. When I was first in practice in Portland in 1989, every Thursday I had a weekly out-of-town neurology clinic alternating between Astoria, about 100 miles to the west, and The Dalles, a little over 80 miles to the east. One bright, sunny evening after seeing patients in The Dalles, I was driving back home to Portland with the sun in my eyes, when all of a sudden I could see small rainbow-like images on both sides of the sun. I found out that these are called parhelia if paired and a parhelion if single.  They are caused by upper atmosphere ice crystals that cause the sun light to be refracted into the small colored stripes set 22 degrees from the sun on a horizontal axis. I didn’t have a camera with me and iPhones had not yet been invented, so I had no record of this event. Then fortunately, I had a second chance to see a single parhelion on May 14, 2021 at 8:04 am. I took this photo from the dock below Beacon Rock looking east up the Columbia River. The colorful parhelion is seen off to the right of the morning sun. No paired parhelion could be seen on the left, presumably due to encroaching clouds. This time I had a camera, and I got the shot.

Finally, my most memorable event must have been the total solar eclipse on April 21, 2017. I know, millions of people have seen total solar eclipses, but in my nearly 73 years, I have only this once experienced totality. We were fortunate that the path of totality passed directly over our beach home on the Oregon coast. Darkness, quiet, birds stopped chirping, people stopped talking, even Jack, our dog who almost always has something to say, was quiet during totality. I can remember thinking that this was like an earthly reset button had been flipped, and I can appreciate how some might interpret this as a spiritual experience.

Thanks to Alzheimer’s dementia, my short-term memory continues to worsen.  I can’t remember where I placed things many times a day. I can’t perform simple arithmetic anymore because I can’t remember sequential steps. I can’t remember the name of neighbors or friends. But I can still remember many events from the past, especially if they were tagged by an emotional reaction or an extraordinary sense of uniqueness.