DECEMBER 2021 • 91the end, viewing is a local problem.
Maybe you need a treasure to trade,
good luck, good karma, or a blessing.
Once you are in the right place at the
right time, all you can do is wait.
After lectures, we mingled in the
lodge, an artificial family. I joined
games of Trivial Pursuit. I hung out
with a doctor from Melbourne and
talked to a retired social worker
from the US state of Maine. About
9:30pm, someone would say, “It’s
starting.” We would get dressed and
go out, and move slowly from one
viewpoint to another, from the bluff
in front of the lodge to the tepee on
the far side of the hill. A few gentle
arcs would gradually widen and join
and become an arch with trailing
ribbons, wavering, glowing, seeming
to shimmer.
Before I had seen aurora borealis,
I had imagined it erupting above me,
an abrupt display of light spilling out
of the sky. I put myself in the centre.
But I was just spinning slowly beneath
an enormous event. It is happening
all the time, this torrent of ionisation
and spectral light; mostly we don’t
see it. For a few hours each night,
I was granted a fractional view of
cosmic forces, by the benevolence
of darkness and a clear sky.
The days were clear and bright
and flagrantly cold. After breakfast,
people would break into pairs and
small groups to go on snowmobile
rides or ski across the lake. I read,
napped, played more Scrabble. I went
for hikes, stomping along snowmobile
tracks in several layers of insulation.
The trails passed through mounds
of glittering snow dappled with
velvet-blue shadow, broken by the
marks of other travellers: snowshoe
hares, caribou, lynx. Walking was
cacophony, every step a chorus of
squeaking snow, swishing pants, and
creaking ice. But when I stood still,
silence. A single bird’s note. Then
silence again.“I
t’s starting,” someone says.
This is our last night at the lake,
and the temperature is minus 32
degrees Celsius. We stand at the ice’s
edge under the black sky. The snow,
which is everywhere, which is the
whole world, reflects the faint fog of
starlight, and yet we see one another
only as shadows. Above us the sky is a
white wash. The wash glows, widens,
brightens, and begins to spin over my
head, a luminous cyclone of pearl and
dove and alabaster, suddenly so thick
and near I could pluck off a tuft in my
hand. Faint flashes of pink and green
and blue, barely there, gone. We spin
and crane our necks, gasp and laugh.
When I first arrived in Yellowknife,
I kept reminding myself that I might
not see the aurora at all, that it
wouldn’t look like the pictures, that
the real thing would be less than I
expected. And I was wrong. I am not
sorry that I couldn’t see what is in the
photos. I am sorry that the photos
don’t capture what I could see. QREADER’S DIGEST