86 • DECEMBER 2021CHASING THE NORTHERN LIGHTSB
y the time I finish
dressing and walk into
the lobby of the Explorer
Hotel in Yellowknife, it’s
9pm. There is a crowd of
Japanese tourists wearing
identical red parkas and
black polar boots the
size of toasters. Outside,
in the black Canadian winter night,
four yellow school buses pull up. The
Japanese group fills the first three,
and the rest of us, a mixed dozen from
several countries, climb into the last.
The bus bumps onto the dark
highway. It is February 2020, and
it’s almost as cold inside as out; the
windows are already icing over from
our breath. Our guide is Céline, a
petite Frenchwoman. “The prediction
is clouds tonight,” she tells us. “But
a prediction is just a prediction. So we
will be hopeful.”
After about 20 minutes, the bus
turns down a narrow road toward
Aurora Village, a collection of teepees
and small buildings beside a frozen
lake. The few lights are dim and
downcast to protect our night vision.
We follow Céline’s blinking red
headlamp, the only way we can tell
her apart from the crowd. More than
a hundred people are plodding from
the parking lot along hard snowy trails
between dark trees. As we emerge
from the woods, Céline points out
the path to the heated, 360-degree-
rotating recliners (extra fee required).
We find our teepee at the edge of afield—a place to warm up and rest,
but not to stay. We aren’t here to
be indoors.
The clouds lift. The teepees are in
a small bowl, and trails lead through
the trees to low bluffs with longer
views. I join a crowd of silhouettes.
I shift from foot to foot. All winter,
Portland, Oregon, where I live, had
been unseasonably warm. I longed
for cold, the kind that would make
me sit up and pay attention. I went
north for the aurora, but also this: the
dark, the sky, the ice.
“Is that it?” someone asks, pointing
at a small dome of brightness on
the horizon. I think it is Yellowknife.
The city has dark-sky compliant
streetlights, but the town is plainly
visible from a distance.
“Is that it?” somebody else
asks, pointing at a pale flash on
the opposite horizon. But it is
just headlights from the highway.
We don’t really know what we
are seeking, what we will see. We
may see nothing at all. The aurora
follows its own subtle schedule,
and aurora tourism runs on hope,
on expectations manipulated by
Instagram and travel websites.
Thousands of edited, enhanced
photos of emerald-green drapery and
quivering ruby-red arcs make false
promises. I’ve tried to keep my own
expectations tightly bound.
We watch, and over about 20
minutes, a cloud grows into a fine
white arc stretching across the lower photo,previousspread:^ ©vincent^ demers/getty^ images^