Just Another Jim's

Alaska Journal

Ch. 19: The Norhtern Lights

Posted March 30, 2007 by James E. Nelson

It was -30° and late, probably 10:00 p.m. We were on our way home from Fairbanks but still thirty or forty miles north of the Tanana River bridge. The moon was about quarter phase, so it provided enough light to illuminate the snow-covered mountains with a soft glow but dark enough to see the sky in all its detail. This particular stretch of road is well protected from the wind, so the snow clung to the spruce boughs and reflected the moonlight. The scene was close to winter perfection. And then the northern lights began to play across sky above the Alaska Range in front of us. We stopped the car, put on our parkas, and stepped out into the night to take in their incredible beauty.

We stopped the car and observed the lights on many a cold night in Alaska. Sometimes we would sit in the car and watch them, but often we would bundle up and get out. There was something about being outside in the cold air with the immense sky stretching above and the northern lights playing in the south that made the experience more real.

It surprised me that they were in the southern sky in Delta; I grew up in northern Montana where on rare occasions we could see them dancing right on the northern horizon. But there was no need to squint in Delta because they could overwhelm the night sky. At times when they were particularly intense they would burst across two-thirds and maybe even three-quarters of the sky, but they always began in near the southern horizon. Because of the proximity of Delta Junction to the Alaska Range, it often appeared as if the lights were emanating from the mountains themselves.

The aurora goes through a regular multi-year cycle of increasing and decreasing activity. They were near the low of the cycle while we lived in Alaska but they were still spectacular. Most typical was a fluorescent green glow, but reds, blues, and other hues were not uncommon. Most often they shimmered, but sometimes they looked like a beam of light. The variety of patterns was seemingly endless.

It’s difficult to put a finger on just what is the attraction of the northern lights. I suspect a lot of it has to do with the fact that they are “out there,” that they are inaccessible and far up in the sky. It provides a certain mystical quality to them that is not a part of terrestrial events. There is a certain similarity with fireworks. When observing the aurora in a group one hears the same oohs and ahs typically associated with a good fireworks display. Of course, the aurora is fundamentally different than a fireworks display. Fireworks are a product of human ingenuity while the northern lights are completely beyond human control. They have to be observed on their terms and not ours.

But there’s something more than just that. Winter nights are arguably the quintessential experience of Alaska. Winter is certainly far prettier than summer in the interior. Alaska trees are spindly and scrubby and generally not very pretty upon close inspection. But with a layer of snow on them, they are magnificently beautiful. A winter day is so overwhelmingly beautiful that it is sometimes almost too much to behold. But in the night, the beauty is veiled. The magnificence is often seen in a fleeting moment. In the daylight, beauty assaults the senses. At night it must be sought out, giving the observer the opportunity to linger over it, to fill in the hidden details.

I was told that Hugh Hefner claimed scantily clad women were more beautiful than nude women. When nothing is left to the imagination the scene has to be perfect in order to be truly beautiful, but when clothing is strategically used to reveal a particular curve or suggest an elegant form, then the imagination can work together with what is really there to create a scene of beauty that in one’s imagination actually exceeds perfection. According to this theory, aesthetics is best when it is interactive, involving the wishes, desires, and sensibilities of the observer with the scene being observed. This is precisely the magic of an Alaskan winter night. By covering over much of the scene, it reveals far more of the beauty that is there, but hidden beneath the surface.

The northern lights add yet another dimension to this aesthetic phenomenon. The typical winter tableau, with the mountains in the background, the glistening, snow covered trees and hills in the foreground, and the star-studded sky overhead, all bathed in the cold, sharp light of the moon, is a fairly static scene. Add the dancing aurora overhead, unexpectedly appearing, and then disappearing just as quickly, and the scene comes to life, changing moment by moment, leaving the observer dissatisfied and wanting more.

I remember trying to wrestle a moose carcass on the side of a deserted midnight road on a bitterly cold night while overhead the northern lights performed their cold, impersonal dance. It was such an incongruous scene: Bloody death at my feet, but unspeakable and silent beauty all around me. It spoke to the loneliness of the Alaska night. The aurora is so far away and the land is big, that it creates a sense of insignificance. Add the impersonal and ignominious presence of death on the side of an utterly deserted road and it created a sense of solitariness that was almost destitute of meaning.

Another night Chris and I went ice skating. It was a “warm” night somewhere around 0° so we went to the outdoor rinks instead of the indoor rink which was always very crowded, rowdy, and noisy (deafening actually—it was a metal building with ice on the floor so it echoed terribly). On the one rink there were a group of six kids on one end playing hockey, and on the other a half dozen girls from the local figure skating club practicing their jumps and twirls. Johnsong Lee, the Korean pastor who was a speed skater while growing up in Korea, was skating around the edge of the second rink in that long fluid motion to typical of speed skaters. All of this skating, the beauty of the speed skater and the figure skaters, the intensity of the hockey players, and the laughter and joy from the recreational skaters, was happening on the ice as the Northern Lights skated across the sky. The aurora added a certain flare to the figure skaters and a flourish to the hockey players’ activity. It created a sense of celebration to an evening that was otherwise simply fun.

The Northern Lights didn’t simply reflect what was happening on earth below, they rather magnified those activities. The loneliness was deeper and more stark, the play was more festive, the landscape was imbued with even more mystery and wonder. It is no wonder that a great deal of folklore is therefore associated with the Northern Lights. It is a common belief that you can smell them when they are particularly intense. Others claim that they can be heard if you listen carefully. From a scientific perspective none of this makes any sense at all. The effect occurs outside the atmosphere up in the ionosphere. There is no way that sound and smell could work their way from there to here. A rational person would simply not consider it as reasonable.

But when you stop the car on the side of the road, forty miles from anywhere, step out onto the crunching snow, and watch the aurora dance from south to north across the sky, you just can’t help but get caught up in the mystery of the moment. You may cock your head to one side and listen. You may sniff the air. You may even turn off the car ignition so you are left in the utter silence and aloneness of Alaska under the Northern Lights and search the air from the slightest sound. In the end, you get back into the car trying to convince yourself that you have heard or smelled nothing, but you get into the car changed—expanded and renewed for your efforts at experiencing fully the Northern Lights.