We're standing on North Beach in Westport, marvelling at the summer sunset. A fireball in the sky, in one direction. In the other, a soft pastel pink, with a full glowing rainbow. Close enough that you swear you could run up the beach and be touched by it. Brad's got his back to it, mesmerised by the fireball in the other direction. I'm whistling and waving, trying to get his attention, because any moment it can disappear. He sees it and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Nowhere else in the country hands out rainbows quite so freely. The West Coast gets its reputation for rain honestly. Low-lying coastal spots average somewhere around 140 rain days a year, and the ranges just inland catch over ten metres of rainfall annually, among the wettest ground anywhere on Earth.
But a rainbow isn't made by rain. It's made by rain leaving. Sun and water in the sky at the same moment, light bending back at exactly forty-two degrees to throw the colours apart. The West Coast's weather doesn't sit and soak the way other regions do. It arrives off the Tasman in fast-moving fronts, dumps hard, and clears just as fast behind it, the Alps forcing the whole system to work in a hurry.
That collision of drench and clearing, over and over, on a coastline that faces west into the afternoon sun, is what makes this stretch of country a rainbow machine. Somewhere on the Coast, most days, the sky is doing both things at once.
Every kid learns the same seven colours, red through violet, ROY G BIV, a rhyme that's stuck around since Isaac Newton first split light with a prism. In truth the spectrum inside a rainbow doesn't come in seven neat bands at all. It's a continuous smear of every wavelength the eye can register, and Newton is largely the reason we agreed to call it seven and leave it there.
Plenty of Coast rainbows don't even hold onto those seven. Late in the day, with the sun low and red-heavy, a rainbow can burn down to almost nothing but reds and oranges, which is likely close to what lit up that North Beach sky. Step into thin drizzle or hill mist and the colours can wash out entirely into a pale, ghostly arch, sometimes called a fog bow, because the droplets are too fine to sort the light properly and every colour ends up piled on top of the others. And not every rainbow bothers finishing the job. A full bow is really a full circle, centred on the point directly opposite the sun, and how much of that circle clears the horizon depends entirely on how high the sun sits. Low sun lifts a tall, generous arc. Midday sun crowds the whole thing down below the hills where you can't see it at all, which is exactly why the best Coast rainbows tend to show up morning and evening rather than at lunchtime. Patchy rain does the rest. If the shower's only falling in part of the sky, the bow simply stops where the rain does, one end trailing off into nothing.
None of which makes them any easier for Brad to actually get on camera. A rainbow doesn't have a location the way a mountain does. It's not a thing sitting out there so much as a trick your eye and the light are doing together, which means it moves if you move, and vanishes the second the light or the rain shifts, the way that North Beach one very nearly did while his back was turned. And because the whole thing can be gone in under a minute, there's rarely time to set up a shot properly. You get what's in front of you, sunset behind you and beach underfoot, and you make it work.
Maybe that's the whole reason we love them. A rainbow isn't really a thing sitting out there the way a mountain or a tree is. It's built fresh for wherever your eyes happen to be standing, the angle between you, the sun and the rain deciding exactly where the colours land. Stand three metres up the beach and technically you're looking at a different rainbow entirely. It appears like magic, holds for however long it holds, and then it's gone, and that fleetingness might be exactly why it feels less like weather and more like nature handing you a small gift of light and colour, one you'd better not blink through.
We grew up being told there's a pot of gold at the end, same as anywhere. Except here that's not entirely a fairy tale. This is a stretch of country that was quite literally dug up for gold, Charleston and Reefton and half the riverbeds between them, and there's still colour in those hills for anyone patient enough to pan for it. The Coast doesn't really need the rainbow's gold. It's already got its own, sitting quietly in the ground where the arch touches down.
Back on North Beach, the light shifts again, the way it always does here before you're ready for it. The fireball's dropped a little lower, the rainbow's already thinning at the edges, and in another minute or two both of them will be gone, replaced by whatever the sky decides to do next. Brad's got his shot. I've got my breath back. And somewhere between the two of us, we've decided this is the closest thing to a pot of gold either of us actually needs, a few seconds of colour on a beach at the end of the day, gone before you can spend it.
