Red Light, Green Light

On the virtues and pitfalls of patience in the stop-start world of aurora chasing.

8:00 pm

All systems go. Every app, every website, every social media headline, is boldly predicting the arrival of prime conditions for northern lights tonight. If you’ve chased the lights, you’ve been here before: the headlines blare with great fanfare about the coming aurora. They trumpet all-but guaranteed results, can’t-miss-predictions, only to have the whole thing fizzle like wet fireworks leaving you bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, questioning your sanity, wondering if you would be better off with a new hobby, or a horse.

So, of course, I grab my gear, a thermos of hot tea, a eyeful of hopes, and head out the door just as soon as it gets dark.

How can you not? What you stand to lose is just eight hours of sleep. What you have to gain is bearing witness to one of the true natural wonders of the world, the sky dancing with light, a gift from the sun 93 million miles away. To stand under the northern lights is the kind of experience those who opt for sleep only dream about. So, it is out into the dark I go.

11:00 pm

The beach at Little Sand Bay is festooned with moonlight. Only a few days passed full, the moon hangs silver over the trees casting its light like handfuls of glitter on the water and letting the incoming waves sweep it up and carry it back to shore. The air is full of that back-of-the-throat rumble that is the song of waves in the dark, a sound Henry Beston in The Outermost House calls “a symphony of breaker thunderings, an endless, distant, elemental cannonade,” full of both “beauty … and ancient terror.”

There is no terror in it for me this night, only the beauty.

For hours, it is enough. Even if the northern lights don’t make an appearance, I think to myself walking the shoreline in the dark, being swaddled by this sound, this light, stars overhead like silver coins, is reason enough to give up some sleep. Perhaps the true gift of the chase is the permission to be out here alone in the dark with the moon and the waves.

Lying in the sand behind the protection of the dunes, I count the waves instead of sheep. It is so peaceful, so beautiful and warm behind the dunes, I nearly fall asleep.

1:00 am

Patience, patience. I repeat the mantra to the cadence of the white light flashing from the Raspberry Island lighthouse. To keep from falling asleep, I have changed locations - moving to a friend’s dock on Raspberry Bay. Out of the wind in the arms of the bay, I sit on the old wooden stairway watching the white light of the Raspberry Island lighthouse ticking off the time in the distance, and think about patience, patience.

These islands are a landscape of patience. There is time written into every island — the slow sculpting of sea caves by the combined chisels of ice and waves, the slow dance of the white pines that bend and sway in ancient winds. Looking out across the blue-black back of the water, I imagine sturgeon swimming slowly beneath the surface. The largest fish in Lake Superior and a creature that can live more than a hundred years, the sturgeon is a living link in a species that has been on earth for more than 150 million years, long before Lake Superior was even carved by glaciers and filled by glacial meltwater.

What are a few hours to a 100-year old sturgeon? Decades must seem like minutes to a white pine, hardly even the span of a shooting star to a cliff wall. I look out across the lake and up into the aurora-less sky, trying to emulate that Buddha-like patience.

But I can’t. I am not a rock, nor a white pine. Soon, restless and getting chilled, I am up digging my flashlight out of my pack and light painting on the dock as I dance beneath the stars, trying to trick time into passing, trying to ignite the aurora with the sheer force of my will.

3:30 am

It doesn’t work. No amount of human will or coaxing, however whimsical, will conjure up an auroral display. What am I doing? I think to myself trudging back down the beach at Little Sand Bay again and still under a sky mockingly free of aurora. Where did I go wrong in my life that has left me here, alone in the dark and cold at this hour of the morning? Maybe I should get a horse. The lights might not even happen. Those websites and phone apps, they are just educated guesses, predictions on the behavior of solar flares leaving a star 93 million miles away. Even if they are correct, those solar winds could hit the earth on the opposite side of the globe or miss the earth all together. It could …

And then I see it.

At first it is as soft as a half-heard whisper, so faint I have to only half look at it to be certain, slanting my eyes this way and that to make it out. But, it is starting. The first faint glimmer of aurora over York Island starts faint and then rises like an aria, brighter with every passing breath. Soon, there is no doubt. Aurora is lighting up the clouds over the dunes, tangling in the branches of the trees.

Shining so brightly it begins reflecting in the still waters of the Little Sand Bay marina, its slips empty for the coming winter.

And the ghostly figures of the ice sculptures built up by the freezing waves on the breakwall.

And over the Herring Shed on the recently rebuilt Hokenson Fisheries dock

It is like being inside of a diamond. No more slow thoughts about the virtues of patience. No more hours dragging their frozen feet in the sand. Gone is any thought of sleep. Sell the horse.

Standing beneath the shimmering sky, I have no more doubts, no more chains of second-guessing or indecision. I know from the first click of the shutter, I will be up photographing until the rising sun washes out even the last hope of aurora.

The gift is here — the aurora is dancing. And I am there to see it, smiling in the dark as if I never had a doubt.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)

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