How To Read Water Quotes

“As I discovered a few years ago, once you learn that you can measure the size of raindrops by looking at the colors in a rainbow—the more red, the bigger the drops”
― Tristan Gooley, How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
― Tristan Gooley, How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea

“And if you know something, then maybe you are worth something.”
― Tristan Gooley, How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea

“On a walk last year, I turned a corner to find a large puddle reverberating with ripples. It was a large, typical Turn puddle, created at a dark mud junction by a farmer’s tractor, and it would not normally have held my attention for long, but the ripples caught my eye. There was a calm center to the puddle, surrounded by a short series of ripples marching toward the puddle’s edge. It was a very calm day, so I knew that I could discount the wind, and the ripple pattern was wrong anyway. Besides, I had a more likely suspect in mind. I dropped back, quietly concealing myself in the undergrowth in the direction I had come from and stayed perfectly still as I studied the puddle and listened. Sure enough, a minute later the culprit returned, and I spent a wonderful couple of minutes watching a nuthatch take his bath. The ripples in a puddle will reveal things, just as the ripples in a pond and waves in the ocean will. Drop a stone in a puddle and you will be able to see the ripples charge away from the disturbance. If the puddle is big enough, then you will notice the center return to calm, before the ripples rebound from the edges and the reflected ripples return, sometimes creating diamond patterns and crests as these tiny waves crash back into each other. The brief calm in the center is the clue that whatever was disturbing the puddle is doing it no longer, the prettiest case being a bird or insect taking off.”
― Tristan Gooley, How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea

“Rain churns up plant oils into the atmosphere and activates the actinomycetes bacteria in the soil, and this is part of that unique smell of rain on dry ground we come to know so well. If rain falls after a long dry spell, it generates a particularly strong scent known as “petrichor.”
― Tristan Gooley, How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea

“When it comes to finding, mapping, or predicting where the water is in your area using plants, the trick is not to launch yourself into a masochistic ritual of learning the names of those plants that indicate water—there are hundreds of them—but instead start to take an interest in how the plants change as you approach water in an area you know well. You will then begin to build a collection of water-loving friends, recognizable on sight, and the names will follow this familiarity in good time. I rail against the naturalists who think that knowing the name of a plant is better than knowing its character.”
― Tristan Gooley, How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea

“Sam regaled me with something scarier than tales of life at sea. Nothing he had seen at sea was more terrifying than facing the Board for the oral exam to become a Master at the Warsash Maritime Academy. Sam’s vicarious pleasure in recounting the ludicrous level of detail that needed conquering in this professional rite of passage was obvious. “They might allow you a mistake, but probably not two. And if they smell any weakness in your knowledge they are merciless . . . Predators!” The nautical rite of passage was beautiful in itself to me.”
― Tristan Gooley, How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea

“This is what the great artists manage. They flatter us, by observing better than others and then speaking to each of us as individuals and in a language that we worry we may be the only ones left caring for.”
― Tristan Gooley, How To Read Water