aurora interruptus

Here’s something I never thought I’d write: Look at my photos of the aurora borealis!

A wide swath of the continental United States experienced a strong geomagnetic storm on Friday, May 10, which meant the aurora borealis was visible much farther south than usual. I don’t live under a rock, but I didn’t know this was happening until I checked my weather app around 9:00pm that night to see the forecast for a trip we took last weekend. “Special Weather Event” appeared just below the temperature, so I tapped. That’s when I learned about the possibility of seeing the aurora.

I texted MizFitz, and Mr. Adventure and I picked her up around 10:00pm. We drove around a while before parking in a fairly dark development, a scattering of houses on multi-acre lots carved from a former thoroughbred horse farm. Then we started looking up.

It was a clear night, itself somewhat unusual for early May in Olympia, when the chance of it being clear or mostly clear is about 25 percent. It had been a hot (again, for Olympia) day and the stars began to blink on as the night got darker. Then, around 10:30pm, we started to see long striations across the sky. They looked at first like pale gray cloud streamers, but within 15 minutes started to resolve into colors: purple, pink, green.

I’d read somewhere that the best way to “see” the northern lights is through the lens of a camera, because it picks up light and color that our eyes cannot. So I’d brought my little point-and-shoot Canon and a tripod. I set it up, turned on “star mode,” aimed skyward and started shooting. Wow!

As the colors became more intense and started filling the sky, we became giddy. It felt a lot like witnessing the 2017 solar eclipse (another last-minute decision, which landed us, unforgettably, on a sheep farm in eastern Oregon). It’s a moment of unity, when you know you are experiencing the same thing as millions of other people. Differences don’t matter. Shared experience brings us together. The three of us stood there awestruck, laughing and pointing and thrilled to our cores.

I’ve always wanted to see the northern lights in person. At the recommendation of our cousin, we often watched the live aurora feed from Churchill, Manitoba, as a way to soften monotony and uncertainty during the pandemic. Just on our TV screen, the aurora captivated. Mr. Adventure has had Churchill on his travel bucket list for a while now, so I figured that someday, if I were lucky, I’d see the lights from there or maybe from somewhere in northern Scandinavia. Someday. Never, never did I imagine that I’d drive a few miles to a darkish suburb of Olympia, and watch them unfold above me.

And yet there they were, and here I was.

We’d watched and pointed and clicked for about 40 minutes when I noticed a man and woman walking down the street toward us. It was now past 11:30pm and I wondered whether we’d been too loud in our oohing and aahing. As they approached, I said, “Amazing, isn’t it? Are we making too much noise?” No, they replied, we locked our keys and phones in our car and we’re walking home to get them, the man replied. “How far is that?” asked Mr. Adventure. “About four miles,” came the answer.

Four miles? At nearly midnight? Oh hell no. We insisted on driving them home, packed up our stuff, and squeezed into the car. It turned out to be nearly five miles, much of it along roads with little to no pedestrian infrastructure, much less walkable shoulders. We pulled into their driveway, and they ran in to get their spare keys. We drove back to the street where we’d started, turning off the headlights as we passed several other cars parked along the road, aurora viewers set up in lawn chairs and looking skyward. We were all there together, watching these curtains of color dancing among the stars. As they got out of the car the woman handed us a bag with a bottle of wine in it, thanking us profusely. We tried to refuse. This is just what decent people do: treat other people decently. She insisted, so we thanked them and said goodbye, waiting to pull away until we heard their car start.

It was midnight, so we decided to call it a night. On the way home we talked about how lucky we felt to have seen the aurora, and to have chosen that particular spot to park, perfectly placed to be able to help some folks. We’d seen the aurora borealis from little old Olympia, and been reminded that celestial phenomena, and locked cars, can bring us together in remarkable ways.