My first finished short story in years
The Aurora Chasers
Deborah Gardner
“The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright --
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done --
'It's very rude of him.' she said,
'To come and spoil the fun!’”
- Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and the Carpenter
Solar winds vary in velocity as they travel toward Earth, or wherever their final destination may be. They vary in density of protons, in intensity, and in effect. They may swoop past Earth without causing even the socks on the atmospheric clothesline to quiver, or they might knock over the whole clothesline itself, dancing with Earth’s magnetic field, taking over the sky with rich, vibrant displays of aurora borealis (aurora australis in the southern hemisphere) and causing human beings and tall trees to catch their collective breath. Transient tag signs of solar energy and awe, pulsations of irreverence, the auroras of the sun’s solar winds and solar flares know how to have a little fun and beauty all at once. With auroras, the sun takes center stage, even at night.
The sun is both mundane and surprising, the god of mixed messages and extraordinary phenomena. The sun burns, nourishes, attracts and gets forgotten as it rolls us along, marking time, minding its own business and ours while tickling our faces hoping for attention. It revels in the devotion of sunbathers and aurora chasers, patiently feeds plants and plant-eaters, and keeps us moving in ellipses on our paths of familiarity, repetition, and growth. It gives us freckles. It gives us life. Let there be light.
The sun was not out, having labored to send light over 90 million miles just to have that light rejected by Seattle’s fickle March clouds. From the sun’s perspective, it looked like the people had chosen to stay in bed, huddled under that greyish-white blanket again, which actually didn’t sound like a bad idea to Anna. She was having doubts about whether being out in the drizzle, headed to a rally against the war, a rally that would be witnessed only by other coffee-drinking anti-war Seattleites and not, say, the warmongering political administration, was really the best use of her time on a Saturday morning. It appealed than being curled under a warm, fluffy grey blanket on her bed, being witnessed only by a warm, fluffy yellow cat who had somewhat less political clout than the Bush administration and was significantly less earnest than many an activist. Anna didn’t particularly notice the clouds’ effort to replicate her blanket. She paid no mind to the sun since she couldn’t see it and, like most of Seattle’s earnest human beings and indifferent cats, occasionally forgot it existed. (The sun didn’t mind – Seattleites more than made up for that habit by gushing, any time the clouds revealed even a sliver of blue sky, that they were having a “sun break.”)
She wondered whether she’d remembered to feed the cat, and if she could justify this doubt as an excuse to turn around. (Worry not, dear reader, the cat had been fed. It was fast asleep on top of said blanket, blissfully far from rain or political activism.) (Incidentally, any comments in this story addressed to “dear reader” are sponsored by Jane Austen, who has been hired posthumously for such purposes. While Jane Austen, contrary to popular belief, did not use the term “dear reader” even once in all her writing, she misses you, the reader, and wanted a chance to visit.) Now where were we?
As these narrative distractions were going on, Anna reached Westlake Center and stood still. The anti-war protests had been inspiring at first, drawing large crowds and giving her a boost of hope, of momentum, and admittedly of emotional-political safety in numbers. But she was developing apathy, losing energy, and feeling like the insignificance of the protests did more detriment to her spirits than the solidarity of familiar faces, chanting in the rain or holding vigils around candles that inevitably got rained on. She stood watching people with signs milling about, handing out colorful flyers, holding lattes, and applauding or ignoring the speakers on a raised platform.
Watching the crowds, she slowly eases out of her head and into the present.
Six elderly ladies with white and grey curls carry signs saying “Raging Grannies” and “Bring our Grandkids Home”. A toddler circles around and around his mother’s legs, one hand on her knees. A grey-haired man wearing a skirt hands Anna a quarter-page red flyer about socialism. Anna receives it mechanically, too late to say “no thank you.” An attractive woman in blue with dark, short hair and chai-colored skin smiles at Anna, causing Anna to glance quickly away blushing, and then peek back again when she’s sure the woman isn’t looking her direction. The speaker from the Seattle City Council continues orating with pauses and punctuation, but each word, slightly distorted by a poor sound system, becomes lost to Anna’s memory seconds after it is uttered.
“Somehow I don’t see the City Council ending the war in Iraq.”
Anna startles and turns to see a man in his twenties with a bicycle. He is standing behind her left shoulder and definitely addressing her. He is taller than she, and is wearing a purple and black helmet and shorts that defy the cool, grey weather and show the legs of someone whose bike is rarely resting in the garage. His eyes are dark and playful. Anna doesn’t notice these details; she’s busy getting over the shock of realizing she isn’t invisible, and putting on her public facial expression.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re with us, but their stance on the war seems irrelevant,” he adds.
“Yeah, it’s a little depressing. Another reminder that this is just too small a scale to matter.” She is relieved to say it out loud. She uses her right hand to detangle some ends of her heavy, dark-chocolate hair.
“Absolutely. I had the sense you weren’t exactly getting inspired.” Anna isn’t sure why he’s really talking to her. She wonders if he’s flirting, which usually makes her feel suspicious and on guard, as if this is middle school, and he’s another boy who has been dared to ask out the girl with big glasses and too much brown hair.
“How could you tell?” she laughs a little to cover her uneasiness at being watched.
He squints at her face and pauses. “Remember that character Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh? And when he loses his tail and Rabbit finds it?”
“Hey, careful what you say about Eeyore.” Eeyore is her favorite Milne character, left over from a New York childhood spent hidden in the ritually familiar lands within books.
He holds up his hands, balancing his bike against his body, and insists, “Don’t worry; I have only the highest regard for him. But you looked like you were channeling Eeyore dubiously checking out the spot where his tail should be.” His expression is serious but his eyes tease her.
Anna notices something in the sound of his “Don’t worry.” At the risk of admitting too much in common and getting tricked into a date, she tells him, “We’re both from New York, by the way.”
“No kidding. How could you tell?”
“The way you said ‘don’t worry.’ Your cadences gave you away.”
“And here I thought I’d gotten rid of the accent with years of rigorous practice. You’re good. Okay, so where’d you go to high school?”
She tells him, and they play the name game awkwardly and unsuccessfully for a few minutes. They go through the motions of expatriate New Yorkers, comparing where in Seattle to find such things as mediocre bagels, tolerable pizza, and the pastrami she occasionally lets slide by her more vegetarian and fish-eating tendencies. The game is less about locating the foods locally than it is about expressing dissatisfaction with these diaspora imitations. She lets a lull happen, and looks the other direction, back across the crowds. The woman she’d admired is gone, and Anna feels the familiar comfort of regret from not having spoken to her.
“I’m Noah, by the way.”
She looks back. “Anna. Hi.”
He looks like he’s trying to find whatever she’s hiding behind her eyes. She blinks. He says, “Do you have a pen?”
Anna has one in her jacket pocket and has handed it to him before she’s thought to lie. He takes it, gently dislodges the red flyer from the fingers of her left hand, where she has been crumpling its corner, and writes his name and email address. He hands the paper back to her. Noah Bernstein. She realizes he’s Jewish too. She doesn’t say anything about this other trait in common, doesn’t want to be someone’s Nice Jewish Girl.
He says, “Send me an email sometime, if you want to get lousy bagels or something.” She nods, withdrawing behind her eyes. He looks up and says, “Hey look, a sun break!” before smiling and riding away. She raises her head and notices the faint strip of blue in the sky.
She doesn’t throw away the paper, but has no intention of emailing him. She has a distaste for flirtation, and yet wishes she had the courage to do it, to approach the woman in blue, to converse with her, to ask for her email. She resents Noah, is certain he’s now down the street having the same conversation with a different woman. She has no idea that Noah Bernstein has never in his life had the courage to give a strange woman his email address.
Now, Jane Austen would like this to be a love story, but the reality is that Anna is probably not ready for love, whether with men, with women, with sunspots, or with anyone else. Jane smiles when she hears that, but then again Jane has yet to see what Anna did to the geranium she received from the woman she had a crush on nearly a year ago. She was ecstatic to receive it, thrilled to have it live intimately in her house, leaves gorgeously releasing the regurgitated oxygen of her crush-recipient’s breath. She stole sidelong self-indulgent glances at it resting on the kitchen windowsill among her sunlit blue glass bottles while she stood at the stove scrambling eggs. Unfortunately, plants, unlike cats, do not meow for their supper. Only every month or so did she notice, while gazing lovingly at the geranium and stirring the eggs, that the leaves were getting tiny and sparse, and remember that geraniums benefit from occasional drinks of water.
It had never even occurred to her to ask the woman out.
The sun can drown us in the right ingredients for aurora borealis, but Earth has to be receptive in order to close the deal. The sun may send us the queen of all solar flares, but if the sky is clouded, the likelihood of eager human beings, tail-less donkeys or tall trees seeing the auroras is limited. The sun’s coronal holes may blow messages to us along a solar wind stream, but, unless our magnetic field is receptive, the skies will remain quiet. The auroras may appear, but only the aurora chasers in time zones where it is dark during the window of opportunity will get the pleasure of their company. Harmony and timing are essential catalysts.
The sun can be a tease too; its sunspots may hurl aurora dust tantalizingly the wrong way, off into the galaxy rather than aiming it directly at Earth, two-day priority mail.
Sometimes the skies clear. The magnetic field is tilted just so. The solar flare is sent on a direct flight to Earth, with no plan to change planes in the outskirts of the solar system. The sky watchers are awake and poised in dark, open spaces awaiting the sun like a lover. On those nights, the aurora chasers are captivated as the skies dance and dance.
It wasn’t Rabbit. It was Pooh. Anna wakes with a start in the middle of the night, realizing this. Her moment of awareness comes in a flash, intense as the suddenly clear night sky outside the window by her bed. Noah Bernstein was wrong. Rabbit does not find Eeyore’s lost tail. She fidgets under her blanket for a while, sending the cat scurrying to the floor, before actually getting out of bed, turning on the light, retrieving her worn-out hardback of Winnie the Pooh and confirming the correction. It bothers her. The rest of her sleep is fitful, as faintly green light and shadows dance across her face.
In the morning, she has forgotten all this. Avoiding the clouds and rain that have returned outside, she is cleaning out the pockets of yesterday’s jeans and preparing to do laundry, when she finds the red paper with Noah Bernstein’s email address. The correction floods back. She perches on the edge of her desk, moving aside a stack of black poster board from a forgotten and unfinished project. She is certain that a respect for accuracy and a love of children’s literature is all that is occupying her thoughts. It wasn’t Rabbit. It wasn’t Rabbit. She knows it will stop bothering her only if she tells him, reassures herself that this could not be construed as flirtation, just an expression of respect for precision. Ten minutes pass before she drops her laundry, opens her laptop, and launches her email. It’s important to her not to sound too charming or interesting, lest he actually want to respond to her email. Twenty minutes more pass before she has composed and actually sent:
Noah –
This is Anna, a woman you met yesterday. I had brown hair and you said something to me about Eeyore. I’m writing because it occurred to me that it wasn’t Rabbit who found Eeyore’s tail. It was Pooh. He found it at Owl’s house, where Owl was unwittingly using it as a doorbell. Anyway, I wanted to email you while I still remembered because I figured you’d want to know. Not that it matters, I guess.
-Anna
Trying to ignore the feeling that she’s done something really foolish, she assembles and loads her laundry, notices and actually waters her geranium, and crawls back onto her bed with her laptop. She browses websites of The New York Times and Seattle Times, glad to have the distracting topic of children’s literature off her mind.
The news of the war is discouraging as usual to her. Four GI’s were killed in a roadside bomb. An attack on a city left countless Iraqi civilians dead. Soaring costs. Profiteering American companies. The president’s optimism. She feels herself sinking and clicks away to another page.
An article in the Seattle Times catches her eye – it is about the aurora borealis, or northern lights. The article says that the aurora borealis was visible over Seattle last night during a break in the clouds.
Anna is captivated. She has never understood what the northern lights were, exactly, but has always felt drawn to the idea of seeing them, underscored by a fear that somehow her life will pass by without the opportunity. She stares at the picture of bright green waves and spirals in the sky above the Space Needle and Elliott Bay. She Googles “aurora borealis” and is rewarded with over a million hits, some for sites displaying pictures of what looks like glowing spilled paint feathering the nighttime sky.
On spaceweather.com, she reads that the previous night’s auroras were caused by an enormous solar flare, an “X-class” one, and that solar flares are what happen when sunspots – magnetic blemishes on the sun – erupt. A solar flare sounds to her like a sunspot having an orgasm. She lets herself get lost in the website’s photographs and explanations, absorbing all she can. She learns that auroras can occur not only when Earth basks in the protons of a solar flare but when Earth’s sails catch the sun’s gustier winds or even when our planet’s own magnetic field hiccups in just the right way. She scrolls through pictures from last night’s auroras: green, purple and red swirls over an array of the world’s nighttime landscapes. She’d always thought auroras were restricted to Alaska and the North Pole, but when she realizes the previous night’s geomagnetic storm caused the skies to burn in Arizona and Texas, she knows she has to see auroras herself, and that she will make it happen.
His email back is titled, Good Morning. If it is a good morning. Which I doubt. She recognizes the Eeyore quotation and can’t help the feeling of a smile if not exactly the muscle movement of one. She reads:
Anna –
“Not that it matters, I guess” you say? Could there BE a sentiment more worthy of Eeyore? Excellent. And yes, after I’d ridden away, I realized my error and was mortified. Nice to meet someone else who still takes the anthropomorphized inhabitants of children’s classics seriously.
If you’re still online, will you come have bagels with me for lunch? If there’s anything more worthy of an Eeyore’s pessimism than the value of protests during this political time, it’s the quality of bagels during this epicurean time.
-Noah
Still thinking about the aurora borealis, and wanting to tell someone about it, she hits Reply without any premeditation and writes,
Sure. Meet at Noah’s on Broadway at noon? And have you ever seen the northern lights?
He replies quickly:
Yes, Noah’s for bagels sounds great. No, I’ve never seen the lights. But I’d like to do both. Oh and I assume you mean “Noah’s Bagels” rather than any place belonging to me. :-)
She blushes. Shit. The lights fade out of her mind again. Auroras last only so long.
They are sitting at a small table with bagels and whitefish salad perched in reusable baskets, discussing the travesty of bagels that have been steamed rather than boiled. “The worst ones taste like marshmallows,” she laments.
They chew.
“So, you’ve never seen the aurora borealis?” she finally asks him.
“That’s right, you’d asked about that. My sister saw it out the window of a plane once. For a while I’d look for it if I flew somewhere at night. How come?”
“So, I learned this morning on a website about auroras that you don’t have to go way far north or up in the sky to see them. If the timing is right, you can even see them down here or as far south as Arizona.”
“Arizona? Seriously?”
“There was a picture of these red swirls in the sky over Monument Valley in Arizona. Right there mixed with the stars in the night sky.”
“Holy shit. So how do you know they’re coming?”
She thinks for a moment trying to remember the details. “Well, if I remember right from what I was reading, it’s because the sun gets sunspots that pop up for a while and then fade away. Sometimes one of them explodes, and if what explodes out of that sunspot hits Earth, and we’re lucky, we get auroras. This one website said last night’s auroras here were from a really huge explosion.”
“Wait, there were auroras last night? As in, here in Seattle?”
She nods. “There was a picture in the Seattle Times.” She realizes she’s been bursting to share all this with him, has nearly forgotten who he was yesterday.
He is looking at her intently. “And you read about this on the internet? That’s the most gorgeously dorky thing I’ve heard all morning.”
She is quiet, taking in what she knows is a compliment.
“What?” he asks her, his eyes on her.
She feels like all this talk of auroras has made the air around them too intense too quickly. She retreats back to familiar territory.
“Okay. You want dorkier online behavior from a New Yorker? Here’s a confession for you: I peruse pictures of smoked fish on the Zabar’s website like some people look at porn. You should see the pictures they have on there – freshly sliced nova, hunks of whitefish… it’s too much. I can barely stand it, but I can’t stop looking.” She blushes and sits back in her chair.
He laughs. “Very nice, Anna; that’s beautiful. Sexy whitefish hunks.”
“You think I’m joking.” She nibbles a few onion flakes off her bagel.
“No, no I really don’t. I’m relating more than I care to admit. I’ve had those dark days myself. Anna, do you realize how little decent pastrami porn there is on the internet? One good picture on the site for Katz’s Delicatessen. Nothing to speak of on the Second Avenue Deli or the Carnegie websites. What does a guy have to do in this world for some shots of hot, juicy pastrami dripping with mustard and stacked on fresh rye?”
“I can’t believe you just said ‘pastrami porn.’” She bites her cheeks.
He smiles.
A few sunbeams penetrate the window to have a look.
The appearance of sunshine in the greater Seattle area is not so rare as reputation would have it. There are sun breaks nearly every day, even if just a small fragment of blue and ray of sunshine appear over, say, the Fremont neighborhood or perhaps White Center. Seattleites are trained to look for sun breaks, to savor and appreciate flashes of azure sky that residents of sunnier climes, Colorado or perhaps Arizona, might not even notice on their greyer days. Seattleites are treated to whole weeks and even months of sunshine in the summertime, a lush hiatus of bright days, enormous berries, blue-eyed lakes, and lazy cats tapping their tails idly on sun-warmed front steps.
This mutual game of hard-to-get only feeds the attraction between Seattleites and the sun, making for tantalizingly brief encounters that so rarely get taken for granted between lovers who pretend indifference in dry spells. We revel in the sunshine, yes, but only allow ourselves to do so by professing pride in a preference for the comfort of grey, cooler clouds. After all, we, like Jane Austen’s heroines, have a reputation to uphold.
Noah and Anna slide between their safe topics, growing relaxed within those bounds. Noah has brought his laptop over, and they are sitting on a rug in her living room as daylight fades away outside, eating almonds and raisins from plastic bags and browsing aurora websites. Each has a grandmother whose favorite snack is almonds and raisins. They will never learn this fact in common.
They sprawl comfortably, leaning on pillows, comparing information they find. Noah notices, but does not comment on, Anna’s stacks of magazines and newspapers – The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Mother Jones and others. He can guess at Anna’s habit of paralyzing herself by internalizing hopeless world news. He has seen the difference in Anna’s eyes when she talks about politics and when she talks about her dreams of aurora chasing.
They are slowly becoming fluent in the language of auroras, but have not yet seen any. They are learning that sunspots produce the most common and predictable northern lights, with solar winds flowing from occasional coronal holes representing the second best source. They have found websites that show the placement of the sun’s current spots, and which explain the complexity of each spot’s magnetic field. The more complex the magnetic field – especially of a nice, large sunspot – the greater the likelihood of that spot erupting in a solar flare. If the spot happens to be smack-dab in the middle of the side of the sun facing Earth on the day it erupts, aurora chasers everywhere make plans to throw blankets in the car and head for the dark, north-facing spaces to await magic. More often than not, however, the sunspot rotates back over to the other side of the sun, decays, or taunts aurora chasers by remaining quiet.
Anna and Noah have been watching one large sunspot, Sunspot 486, which measures seven times the size of Jupiter across and has a magnetic field just ripe for juicy M-class or X-class solar flares.
“It says here that October has been one of the busiest months in a long time for solar activity,” Noah tells her. Anna looks up and crawls over next to Noah to grab a few more raisins and peer at his screen.
“Why’s that?” she asks.
“Hmm.” He keeps paging through the website’s text. “Have you heard of solar minimum and solar maximum?”
“Not yet.”
“So it sounds like there’s actually an eleven-year cycle from solar maximum, when there are tons of sunspots, to solar minimum, where there’s a dry spell. But the thing I can’t figure out is that solar maximum already happened, back in 2000, which means it’s been three years, and the sun’s behaving like it’s solar maximum, all over again.” He is quiet for a while.
She stirs the almonds in the bag. “That means in a few years it’s going to be even harder to see them. I wish I had known about this stuff earlier. What if the other night was the last show for years and years, and we missed our chance?” Her eyes are open all the way as she looks at him closely. He glances at her eyes and back at the screen.
“That would suck,” he agreed, “but I don’t think it’s the case. Besides, think about all those people who randomly come across them and don’t even know when to look. We’re giving ourselves the best advantage we can.”
“I suppose if they were commonplace they wouldn’t have such an aura of mystique.”
“Or an aurora of mystique,” he quips.
She laughs, groans, and throws an almond at him, which he deftly catches in his mouth. He throws one back at her, which she tries to grab with her mouth and misses. She scrambles across the rug and turns to pelt him again but sees at least two more almonds fly her way. She catches one with her hand and eats it triumphantly.
“You’re terribly cute with almonds in your hair,” he says, trying to sound dry and looking back and forth between her and his computer. She looks down to see an almond perched in the ends of her hair.
“Are you making fun of me?” she asks, trying not to sound serious as she eats the raisin.
Noah moves his laptop off his legs to the floor by his side, leans his head back against the sofa and looks at her. He speaks slowly when he says, “No. No, actually I’m thinking about how much I want to kiss you. But I’m weighing that with the knowledge that if I do, you’ll think I’m some sleazy guy who just feigns interest in sunspots to get all the pretty girls to notice him.” She looks at him, her hand gripping the rough edge of the painted coffee table.
He holds her gaze. “Between this and my appetite for pastrami porn, have I revealed too much to stand a chance?”
Anna is a little afraid of what she’s about to do, but knows she will make it happen anyway. She slides slowly over the rug until she is next to Noah. She places one hand on the side of his face, and her lips on his mouth. Their kisses are small and quiet, sweetly present. The computer screens go into sleep mode as the room grows dark, too dark for Jane Austen to be scandalized by the behavior of two twenty-first century un-chaperoned aurora chasers.
Jane may not notice their movements in the darkness, even when Anna takes Noah’s hand and leads him out of the living room, but the moon watches knowingly through the windowpanes. The moon has seen this all before, and it never gets old. Full moonlight is an aphrodisiac of unrivaled power, provoking senseless sensibilities in chasers and chased alike.
On some clear nights, after all, aurora chasers travel to wide-open north-facing spaces and open themselves up in anticipation, only to find that the geomagnetic storm never comes. On such nights, when the moon is allowed to keep watch over her charges without solar interruptions, aurora chasers under moonlit blankets may find other ways to spend their solar anticipation, urgently searching for beauty or just trying to stay warm. Their excuses make no difference to the moon. She is on nighttime watch, and all is well.
It has happened. Sunspot 486 has unleashed two colossal solar flares, one after the other. They are X-17 and X-11 class, respectively. They punctuate the sun’s abundance of impressive displays this month, and are sizeable enough to be extraordinary in the grand scale of solar activity; the X-17 class flare is among the top ten largest in recorded history. The aurora chasers begin their delicious wait.
It takes approximately one to three days for a sunspot’s coronal mass ejection (or sunspot ejaculation, Anna can’t help thinking) to reach and impregnate Earth’s atmosphere. Anna’s eyes are shining. At her temp job during the day, she continuously refreshes the screen of a website she has found that shows an ultraviolet image of the northern hemisphere’s auroral activity. When auroras hit, she knows the small green blob hovering above the polar region will explode into a large red mass extending further south, past her magnetic latitude, and tempting her out into the darkness. Everywhere the red circle covers, there will be a possibility of auroras.
So far, the weather is cooperating and giving her mostly clear skies. The sun has noticed Anna’s pleasure from its rays, but senses Anna wants more from it than sunshine. She has that wild look in her eyes of a new aurora chaser, and the sun can tell.
She makes the call at 10:24 pm.
He answers, “Yes, my palindrome?”
“It’s here.”
“It’s here?” His voice changes from playful to serious.
“Yes. The blob of activity level is enormous and red. I didn’t know it could get this big. I think they’re getting auroras in Greece.”
“My car?”
“Yes. Bring your passport, just in case.”
He arrives in his old Volvo in less than twenty minutes. He has brought almonds and raisins, a sleeping bag, a flashlight, an atlas, his passport, and assorted garments made of fleece. She has assembled sandwiches, and pulled the grey blanket from her bed.
He kisses her and touches the blanket, teasing, “I don’t know, that blanket looks kind of like cloud cover. Might not want to risk it.”
“Don’t even joke about it – avoiding the clouds is going to be tricky. A few fronts are coming in. According to the clear sky clocks, our best bet is going to be to head up north toward Mount Vernon or Bellingham, and then out of the light pollution, or to hit Canada if there are still clouds. It’s supposed to be clearer over B.C.”
They check the websites one last time to make sure activity is still happening. There are dots on a map to indicate where aurora chasers have already been seeing storms happening across the country. “Illinois,” she says. “And Nebraska. Noah, let’s get moving – it’s going to hit here soon.”
They steer a few blocks on Aurora Avenue North (no relation) and cut across 45th Street to I-5 where they can speed northward as far as they want. Anna feels breathtakingly free.
“How are the skies?” Noah asks quietly.
Anna peers up through the sunroof, the windshield, and her own window. “Cloudy with some clear spots.”
“Check out that glow. Do you think that’s anything?” he murmurs.
“Everett,” she sighs. “We’re still south of it, so that’s probably just the city’s lights.” A New Yorker at heart, she chokes a little at referring to Everett as a city. “Everett might have its charms, but I doubt it parallels the beauty of northern lights, so I suggest we keep driving.”
They are quiet. They snack on almonds and raisins. He rests his hand on her leg and she lets herself play with his fingers.
North of Everett, he comments, “That glow’s still there. I think it’s something else.” The northern sky is lit with a fuzzy haze.
“I can’t tell,” she admits.
“I think it’s our lights.”
She looks up and around at the sky. There are clear spaces and cloudy spaces. Nothing unusual. Sharing a sandwich, they continue driving north.
By Mount Vernon, there are still too many clouds, so they don’t exit the freeway just yet. They wind through the hills approaching Bellingham. When the hillsides of trees open back up to reveal wider landscape, Noah murmurs, “Anna, the glow is still there. That’s definitely our glow.”
Anna looks forward and then up through the sunroof. She gasps, “Oh my God.”
“What are you seeing?” His voice matches hers.
“There was a streak, and now it’s gone. I thought it was a cloud, but it pulsed in and out, just like the descriptions say. And there are more. Oh my God, Noah, we’re seeing auroras.”
Noah leans forward and looks up through the windshield. “Holy shit. You’re right.”
“Don’t crash! Do you want me to drive for a little bit?”
“No, that’s okay – let’s get off at the next exit.”
They exit, but find themselves tangled in Bellingham, with too many bright lights and no open views to the north. They are still seeing faint streaks in the sky, but know this is not their destination. “Canada?” Noah asks her.
“Canada,” she replies.
They get back on the freeway. Laughing and holding hands, they head north.
“I’m going to call in sick to work tomorrow. There was a huge solar flare and I unfortunately I had to flee the country.” He is grinning.
They slow down at the border and hand over their passports. At this point, the streaks shooting and fading above are growing bolder and more frequent, and there are faint pulses of white around the night sky.
“Where do you live?” the border guard accepts their passports and looks inside the Volvo at the two eager aurora chasers entering her country after midnight.
“Seattle,” Noah replies.
“And what’s your business in Canada?” She looks at Anna.
“We’re chasing – we’re looking for a good view of the aurora borealis, the northern lights.”
“Ma’am, you have to drive really far north for that, up around Prince George or Prince Rupert.” Anna can’t tell if the guard is amused or suspicious, but Anna has limited patience.
“One of the largest solar flares ever on record happened thirty-six hours ago, and the northern lights are visible down here tonight. You could see them right here, if not for the electric lighting. We’ll only be here a few hours, and then we’re coming home.”
The guard shrugs, returns their passports and waves them through.
“Prince Rupert and Prince George, eh? I didn’t know we needed permission from royalty to see solar phenomena.”
Anna ignores the comment and gives Noah directions to Highway 1, which they hope is their best bet for ending up somewhere dark and clear. They drive a few miles out on the highway and select an exit. Noah takes a series of turns, each time driving as far away from the light as he can. He turns into one road to find it is actually a bumpy dirt lot at the entrance to a large farm. He starts to turn around and then pauses, killing the engine and headlights.
“Sky check,” he says. They get out of the Volvo, look up, and shriek almost simultaneously. The dark sky is filled with feathers and pulses, streaks and waves, curtains and flashes, all glowing the color of icy jade.
Anna is ecstatic. “This is it! We’re not going anywhere.”
They dance around in a field of what looks like collard greens or cabbages, utterly awed by the sight above. They hop onto a wooden fence and hold on to its logs, leaning back and howling. When she can tear her eyes from the sky for even a moment, Anna runs to the car and pulls out the blanket, sleeping bag, and snacks. They bundle onto the ground, warm and squealing, holding each other and staring upward. The auroras have taken over the sky, and the aurora chasers are rapt, displaying enough devoted attention to please even the sun.
Anna and Noah grow quiet. A celestial rain-curtain of green light takes over the northeast quadrant of the heavens, pouring magnetic magic in glowing streams down to the horizon. The sky directly above pulses and rolls in ocean waves of light, feeling close enough to fall on their heads. A swirl of pale emerald sends spirals east across the illuminated darkness. Stars play in the magnetic field’s seductive hair. Human-made fireworks are put to shame as the heavens spill forth unpredictably fluctuating beauty, green feathery lights wafting in magnetic winds. Anna and Noah lie among the cruciferous rows and bask in light unlike any they have ever experienced.
After an hour, the displays are growing quieter, and the lovers, colder. They lie close together. Noah feeds Anna raisins, one by one.
“And to think,” he says, “I would have been content with seeing some lights out the window of a plane. Not the blinking ones on the wing, of course. Those don’t count.”
“Noah, I never would have been the kind of person to do this, even to think of it, like, three years ago. Not even a year ago. I’d have wanted it, but I wouldn’t have done it.”
“No?” He strokes her face.
“No! I mean I guess I’m not exactly your archetypal upper middle class Jewish girl from New York, or I’d never have moved out of the City.” She feels her cheek growing hot as he continues stroking it, aware that it is the first time she has admitted she is Jewish. She almost clarifies that “the City” means “Manhattan” until she remembers that he knows, that he too felt stifled by and left a city he will also always love more than any other. She continues, “I think I sometimes watch life happen, instead of making life happen. Live in my head. You know?”
“Yes.” His voice is quiet. He does not share more.
“I don’t want to do that any more, Noah.”
He takes her hand and snuggles in closer to her. They are quiet. The sky is still pulsing faintly, the afterglow panting sighs of a geomagnetic storm fogging up the windows of the atmosphere with the last small breaths of light.
The aurora chasers drive home, silent and full.
Anna calls in sick to work. She can’t get out from under her blanket. This is all too much, too fast, too open. So recently, she rekindled her dream to see the northern lights, and here she is, someone who has seen them, opened herself up to them, drowned in them. Now what? She can’t move.
She lies in bed and reads the news. How can she be thinking about the sun at a time like this? How can she do anything? How can she consider herself an active participant in the world, and not just a spectator, when there is nothing she can do about the war – or anything else that matters? Even as an aurora chaser, she is nothing more than a spectator. Everything is at once too big and too small. Her cat cuddles next to her, sniffs her, lies on her, ignores her. She can’t move.
Two days pass. So far, she has returned neither Noah’s phone calls and emails, nor those of other friends, wanting to chat, unaware of the turns Anna’s life has taken. She has crossed international borders to witness spectacular celestial phenomena and taken a nice Jewish boy from New York to bed. Things have shifted a little lately. She can’t move.
In the late afternoon, the phone rings again, and it is Noah. She breathes in and finally answers it.
“Hey.” He is surprised to hear her pick up.
“Hey.”
“So I found this tail, and I was wondering if it belonged to you.”
Anna is quiet.
“Okay, I just wanted to make sure you’re doing okay.”
“Mmm.”
“You haven’t gotten out of bed, have you.”
It’s not fair that someone she has known so briefly can tell this over the phone. She is quiet.
“Anna, there’s a sun break outside, and we’re close to sunset. I’m dragging you outside to see it if I have to. Or at least I’m petitioning your cat to if you need some breathing room from me.” He is worried about her, knows that this is about more than what has been going on between them.
“Look,” she grumbles, “I don’t need some Mr. Darcy to come rescue me. I’m doing just fine. Besides, sun breaks happen nearly every day.”
“So do auroras, this month, Miss Elizabeth.” he shoots back. She is thrown off for a moment, realizing he understood her reference to Pride and Prejudice.
“Well, I like the clouds.”
“I like the clouds too. That’s not what I’m talking about. Anna, we look for sun breaks when we’re being optimistic. You blew away the limits of optimism and said to hell with the sun breaks; let’s look for auroras. You got me to chase those auroras into another country, and find them. You’re amazing, Anna; you woke me up.”
Anna starts crying and doesn’t know why.
“I’m sorry,” he says into the phone.
“Thanks for calling me,” she chokes. “I need to sleep.” She hesitates. “Wait, Noah?” she murmurs.
“Mmm hmm?”
“Go look at the illustrations of Eeyore after he gets his tail back. He frisks around and stuff.”
“I know he does. Sleep well.”
Anna hangs up and closes her eyes.
While Anna is sleeping, Jane Austen comes to sit on the edge of her bed. She strokes Anna’s loose hair, dries the tears on Anna’s cheek, pulls the blanket up to tuck her in. Jane is concerned, alarmed even, for this girl who is so far from any comfort of her own family and with no fortune of which to speak. Jane wishes with her whole heart that Anna had a sister, the solace-bringing presence to whom a young woman might turn when her woes are due to matters of the heart, to overwhelming change, or to extraordinary geomagnetic phenomena. Jane is unaware that a precocious Anna at age ten, having actually read Pride and Prejudice, promptly began imagining Miss Elizabeth Bennet to be her own sister, talking to her at night when she felt alone in a city apartment, with the distant sounds of sirens and garbage trucks for company.
Miss Jane, however, is wise and patient, despite her alarm for Miss Anna’s health. And so, dear reader, she reassures you of Anna’s resilience and wellbeing. In place of a sister, in place of the Elizabeth Bennet Anna never really had, Jane Austen now sits with Anna through the night, witnessing the fortitude Anna’s face shows when she’s not hiding anything. The skies outside are clouded and still.
In the morning, Anna gets up to feed the cat. It is the weekend. The daylight feels fresh and new. She stretches and walks through the kitchen. She is hungry, and slowly gets out everything she needs for eggs and toast. Jane Austen stage whispers, “ cup of tea!” loud enough for Anna to think of it, and Anna makes herself some earl grey with soy milk – a remedy of which Jane approves, despite her puzzlement over soy milk. Anna takes her breakfast into the living room, begins to pick up a magazine, looks at it, and puts it aside. She eats on the edge of her couch, looking through the window at the last yellow leaves on a tree. Her mind is still.
When she opens the door to retrieve her mail and feel the fresh air she is craving, there is a brown paper shopping bag on her doorstep. Its handles are tied together with a piece of string, to which is attached an envelope marked:
Anna, a.k.a. Miss Elizabeth Bennet
She carries the bag inside and closes her door. She sits on the couch, looks at the bag again, and pulls off the envelope. Inside is a note that reads:
Dear Anna/Miss Elizabeth,
As Mr. Fitzpatrick Darcy is unavailable at present, having dashed off heroically to attend to some poor quality bagels in the Midwest somewhere, I have stepped in to scribe this epistle. Please, then, accept this humble gift as a thank you for exposing us to a superiour display of aurora borealis. While we were so fortunate as to experience fair weather in our venture to the north country, Prince George, Mr. Darcy and I were quite concerned that your own grey quilt did resemble cloud cover to so great an extent as might impede your future luck in such undertakings (which, for the record, are quite scandalous for a young woman to be taking unescorted with a gentleman of no known connexions). Please, then, accept the enclosed gift as a token of gratitude and concern.
Yours, etc.
Prince Rupert
She peers in the bag and pulls out a blanket. It is shockingly soft, jet black and sprinkled with an abstract patchwork of green and white. She wraps it around her shoulders, and then unwraps it and looks at it again. It is hardly real – and, yet it is unmistakably their sky. She picks up the card and looks at it again. She holds the quilt and card close, sitting on the couch, and looking outside at the maple’s yellow leaves.
Reader, she called him.
Certainly, she tells herself, she is calling not only because it is polite to thank a friend for a gift, but because she needs to correct a most egregious error.
“Hey, there.”
She pauses. “It’s Fitzwilliam Darcy, not Fitzpatrick Darcy. And thank you for the blanket, Noah. It’s amazing. I don’t know what to say.”
He laughs. “I know it’s Fitzwilliam, Miss Anna. But I couldn’t be entirely sure you’d call me unless I made such an egregious literary error.”
She finds herself blushing and then smiling. “How did you even find something like this? It’s really perfect.”
“Well, I found myself walking alone down by Pike Place Market yesterday before I called you, and before that sun break happened. It’s one of my favorite places to go and think. I went down to watch the ferries on the bay from Victor Steinbrueck Park. I was also looking for a sun break and there just wasn’t one. I guess I felt really small and stupid – it’s kind of arrogant to stand there and assume the sun’s going to give me a bit of blue sky, just because I, one poor schmuck out of many, ask for it. And it wasn’t a good kind of feeling small. The other night when we were watching auroras, that was a good kind of feeling small. I felt like a piece of dust, one proton in a cosmic conversation, and it was beautiful. But standing there at the park, I just felt like a schmuck.”
“So I walked back through the market, and ended up passing this quilt shop. And that blanket was hanging in the window. I couldn’t stop staring at it – it was our sky, Anna. It was perfect, right at that moment, not only because it was our sky, but because it was yet another experience of walking along, expecting the mundane, and stumbling serendipitously upon the mind-bogglingly beautiful. So many people sleep through the night, and never realize that the mind-bogglingly beautiful is going on right over their roofs. They forget to look for, and usually don’t notice beauty. It drives me crazy, especially when I’m the idiot who’s doing it. So anyway, yeah, I bought you the quilt. You really like it? I can take it back if you don’t.”
“I love it, Noah.”
“I’m glad. You sound good, by the way.”
“Thanks; I feel good. Are you doing okay?”
“Ehh. Suffering from some vitamin deficiency brought on by lack of pastrami, but I’ll live.”
“I’ll dig up some pastrami porn for you. Just don’t open it at work.”
“You’re the best.”
They get off the phone. Anna opens all her windows and cleans up her breakfast dishes. She looks around her kitchen, takes the geranium off the windowsill, trims off its dead branches with her sharp kitchen scissors and gives it a good drenching. She cleans the kitchen and returns to the living room, where she begins picking up the magazines strewn about. She carries them to her kitchen for recycling, noticing for the first time how many colors can be found in one magazine page. She places them on her kitchen counter, rearranging them, tearing out pages and covers. Sunlight streams through the window onto the pages, illuminating the vibrancy of their colors.
Anna retrieves from her bedroom a piece of the black poster board nearly forgotten on her desk, an old glue stick from a drawer, and her laptop. She finds her favorite aurora photograph on spaceweather.com, one taken in northern Ontario during the recent storm, and in which the skies are red, yellow, pink and green all at once, shaped like the geomagnetic lovechild of a tornado and a waterfall. She spreads the magazines out on the floor in a pool of sunlight and begins cutting tiny shards and curls of color from their pages. For hours, deep in concentration, even after the sunlight shifts off her work, she cuts fragments of color and glues them in place on the poster board. When she is done, she has a mosaic aurora, matching the photograph on the website, with even tiny pinpoints of white paper to fill in as stars.
There are over a thousand separate bits of paper in her swirling display. Inside this image, she lets herself fly. There is no going back.
As her artwork dries, she removes her now-drained geranium from the sink and replaces it on the windowsill. Looking at it, she thinks of Amber, the woman who gave her the geranium and whose phone number is buried in the scraps of paper that have accumulated by the kitchen phone. She digs up the right scrap and makes the call.
They are sweetly nervous at first as they chat, each of them shy of flirtation. Anna does not mention her obsession with the geranium. Amber does not admit that she still wonders if Anna hates geraniums, and if this is why they did not stay in touch.
Anna does tell Amber it’s great to talk to her. She confesses the self-avowed dorkiness of her new interest in northern lights, and hears Amber’s story of once seeing the lights on a trip up the British Columbia Inside Passage, of how the lights reflected on the water.
They talk about activism, about finding meaningful projects on a scale small enough to have an impact, thereby balancing out the issues that are overwhelmingly impermeable. Accepting that there are some phenomena beyond our control makes it paradoxically easier to work on them. Anna thinks of auroras, of how intensively she’s interacted with and been energized by something she cannot shape. She broaches this with Amber, who reminds her of quantum mechanics, of Schrodinger’s cat who is still both alive and dead until someone looks in the box and risks getting scratched. Reality is ambiguous until it has been witnessed.
They continue talking into the evening.
We make decisions about our lives, feeling confident that certain chapters are neatly closed. These beginnings and endings seem clearly delineated, just as we know a sunset marks the close of a day’s brightness, which will not return until the next day’s sunrise.
Yet, the universe is playful place, which frequently has other plans. Sometimes the sun returns in the middle of the night. Sometimes a once-in-a-lifetime solar flare is just a beginning. And so it is that Anna, just days later, takes a peek back at spaceweather.com, breathes in sharply, and quickly dials Noah Bernstein.
“Oh palindrome, my palindrome,” he answers, trying hard to sound nonchalant.
“X-28 class.”
“Excuse me?”
Her heart is pounding. “Sunspot 486 which we thought would be decaying by now? Yeah, it just unleashed an X-28 class flare.”
“Anna, there aren’t X-28 class flares. They don’t come that big.”
“This is the biggest solar flare ever on record. They’re only guessing at the X-28. It overwhelmed the instruments they use to measure the flares, so it might end up being quite a lot larger. The astronomers are peeing their pants.”
“Holy shit. So does this mean we’ll…”
“I don’t know if we’ll get auroras. It wasn’t even Earth-directed; it might send craziness off into another part of the solar system. But it was big enough that we may get storms anyway.”
“Shall we try?”
“I think we have to.”
“Emergency aurora chasers meeting at Noah’s Bagels?”
“I think so. I’ll bring my laptop, because you absolutely have to see this solar flare, and I’ll also bring something I made for you.” She pauses. “I’ll also call the princes and Mr. Darcy, to see if they can join us.”
“Alas, I think they’re otherwise occupied. Something about rushing off to rescue a heroine from some rascal who was attempting to destroy the honor of literary accuracy.”
“Well, let’s have our meeting anyway. We’ll send them the minutes. And maybe we can take a walk if we get a sun break; I’ve decided I don’t want to miss out on beauty any more.”
“Hmm, that doesn’t sound like Eeyore, but I’ll take it. Though let’s be cautious: if you’re going for breathtaking beauty and perfection, we might not want to be eating bagels in this city. Is it worth the risk?”
“I suppose. Not that it matters, of course.”
Aurora chasers know the importance of living in the moment and of patience. In the fall and spring, the high months for auroras, and especially during the busy years of solar maximum, aurora chasers revel in an abundant harvest of lights, storing memories for the long, dark nights of solar minimum.
Auroras remind us to let go, but never to become inert. The sun is in control, yet every aurora chaser knows that even during solar minimum there will be nights of extraordinary lights, sent from one lone sunspot who couldn’t help but get up and dance, from a hiccup in Earth’s magnetic field, or from a coronal hole that blew open and sent forth a solar wind to a perfectly-poised Earth. The aurora chasers are at peace with their solar cycle, awed by the months which knock over the charts with record-setting flares, and accepting of the quiet stretches of a more dormant sun. They never stop looking, just in case.
The sun both pays them no mind and licks their faces for caring, these aurora chasers at once tiny specks of irrelevance and quantum witnesses to beauty. Any illusion of finality, like the eventual closure of one month’s breathtaking auroras, is just one of many marks in the endless cycle of solar activity and human awe.
And so, dear reader, the story has no end.
Deborah Gardner
“The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright --
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done --
'It's very rude of him.' she said,
'To come and spoil the fun!’”
- Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and the Carpenter
_______________
Solar winds vary in velocity as they travel toward Earth, or wherever their final destination may be. They vary in density of protons, in intensity, and in effect. They may swoop past Earth without causing even the socks on the atmospheric clothesline to quiver, or they might knock over the whole clothesline itself, dancing with Earth’s magnetic field, taking over the sky with rich, vibrant displays of aurora borealis (aurora australis in the southern hemisphere) and causing human beings and tall trees to catch their collective breath. Transient tag signs of solar energy and awe, pulsations of irreverence, the auroras of the sun’s solar winds and solar flares know how to have a little fun and beauty all at once. With auroras, the sun takes center stage, even at night.
The sun is both mundane and surprising, the god of mixed messages and extraordinary phenomena. The sun burns, nourishes, attracts and gets forgotten as it rolls us along, marking time, minding its own business and ours while tickling our faces hoping for attention. It revels in the devotion of sunbathers and aurora chasers, patiently feeds plants and plant-eaters, and keeps us moving in ellipses on our paths of familiarity, repetition, and growth. It gives us freckles. It gives us life. Let there be light.
_______________
The sun was not out, having labored to send light over 90 million miles just to have that light rejected by Seattle’s fickle March clouds. From the sun’s perspective, it looked like the people had chosen to stay in bed, huddled under that greyish-white blanket again, which actually didn’t sound like a bad idea to Anna. She was having doubts about whether being out in the drizzle, headed to a rally against the war, a rally that would be witnessed only by other coffee-drinking anti-war Seattleites and not, say, the warmongering political administration, was really the best use of her time on a Saturday morning. It appealed than being curled under a warm, fluffy grey blanket on her bed, being witnessed only by a warm, fluffy yellow cat who had somewhat less political clout than the Bush administration and was significantly less earnest than many an activist. Anna didn’t particularly notice the clouds’ effort to replicate her blanket. She paid no mind to the sun since she couldn’t see it and, like most of Seattle’s earnest human beings and indifferent cats, occasionally forgot it existed. (The sun didn’t mind – Seattleites more than made up for that habit by gushing, any time the clouds revealed even a sliver of blue sky, that they were having a “sun break.”)
She wondered whether she’d remembered to feed the cat, and if she could justify this doubt as an excuse to turn around. (Worry not, dear reader, the cat had been fed. It was fast asleep on top of said blanket, blissfully far from rain or political activism.) (Incidentally, any comments in this story addressed to “dear reader” are sponsored by Jane Austen, who has been hired posthumously for such purposes. While Jane Austen, contrary to popular belief, did not use the term “dear reader” even once in all her writing, she misses you, the reader, and wanted a chance to visit.) Now where were we?
As these narrative distractions were going on, Anna reached Westlake Center and stood still. The anti-war protests had been inspiring at first, drawing large crowds and giving her a boost of hope, of momentum, and admittedly of emotional-political safety in numbers. But she was developing apathy, losing energy, and feeling like the insignificance of the protests did more detriment to her spirits than the solidarity of familiar faces, chanting in the rain or holding vigils around candles that inevitably got rained on. She stood watching people with signs milling about, handing out colorful flyers, holding lattes, and applauding or ignoring the speakers on a raised platform.
Watching the crowds, she slowly eases out of her head and into the present.
Six elderly ladies with white and grey curls carry signs saying “Raging Grannies” and “Bring our Grandkids Home”. A toddler circles around and around his mother’s legs, one hand on her knees. A grey-haired man wearing a skirt hands Anna a quarter-page red flyer about socialism. Anna receives it mechanically, too late to say “no thank you.” An attractive woman in blue with dark, short hair and chai-colored skin smiles at Anna, causing Anna to glance quickly away blushing, and then peek back again when she’s sure the woman isn’t looking her direction. The speaker from the Seattle City Council continues orating with pauses and punctuation, but each word, slightly distorted by a poor sound system, becomes lost to Anna’s memory seconds after it is uttered.
“Somehow I don’t see the City Council ending the war in Iraq.”
Anna startles and turns to see a man in his twenties with a bicycle. He is standing behind her left shoulder and definitely addressing her. He is taller than she, and is wearing a purple and black helmet and shorts that defy the cool, grey weather and show the legs of someone whose bike is rarely resting in the garage. His eyes are dark and playful. Anna doesn’t notice these details; she’s busy getting over the shock of realizing she isn’t invisible, and putting on her public facial expression.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re with us, but their stance on the war seems irrelevant,” he adds.
“Yeah, it’s a little depressing. Another reminder that this is just too small a scale to matter.” She is relieved to say it out loud. She uses her right hand to detangle some ends of her heavy, dark-chocolate hair.
“Absolutely. I had the sense you weren’t exactly getting inspired.” Anna isn’t sure why he’s really talking to her. She wonders if he’s flirting, which usually makes her feel suspicious and on guard, as if this is middle school, and he’s another boy who has been dared to ask out the girl with big glasses and too much brown hair.
“How could you tell?” she laughs a little to cover her uneasiness at being watched.
He squints at her face and pauses. “Remember that character Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh? And when he loses his tail and Rabbit finds it?”
“Hey, careful what you say about Eeyore.” Eeyore is her favorite Milne character, left over from a New York childhood spent hidden in the ritually familiar lands within books.
He holds up his hands, balancing his bike against his body, and insists, “Don’t worry; I have only the highest regard for him. But you looked like you were channeling Eeyore dubiously checking out the spot where his tail should be.” His expression is serious but his eyes tease her.
Anna notices something in the sound of his “Don’t worry.” At the risk of admitting too much in common and getting tricked into a date, she tells him, “We’re both from New York, by the way.”
“No kidding. How could you tell?”
“The way you said ‘don’t worry.’ Your cadences gave you away.”
“And here I thought I’d gotten rid of the accent with years of rigorous practice. You’re good. Okay, so where’d you go to high school?”
She tells him, and they play the name game awkwardly and unsuccessfully for a few minutes. They go through the motions of expatriate New Yorkers, comparing where in Seattle to find such things as mediocre bagels, tolerable pizza, and the pastrami she occasionally lets slide by her more vegetarian and fish-eating tendencies. The game is less about locating the foods locally than it is about expressing dissatisfaction with these diaspora imitations. She lets a lull happen, and looks the other direction, back across the crowds. The woman she’d admired is gone, and Anna feels the familiar comfort of regret from not having spoken to her.
“I’m Noah, by the way.”
She looks back. “Anna. Hi.”
He looks like he’s trying to find whatever she’s hiding behind her eyes. She blinks. He says, “Do you have a pen?”
Anna has one in her jacket pocket and has handed it to him before she’s thought to lie. He takes it, gently dislodges the red flyer from the fingers of her left hand, where she has been crumpling its corner, and writes his name and email address. He hands the paper back to her. Noah Bernstein. She realizes he’s Jewish too. She doesn’t say anything about this other trait in common, doesn’t want to be someone’s Nice Jewish Girl.
He says, “Send me an email sometime, if you want to get lousy bagels or something.” She nods, withdrawing behind her eyes. He looks up and says, “Hey look, a sun break!” before smiling and riding away. She raises her head and notices the faint strip of blue in the sky.
She doesn’t throw away the paper, but has no intention of emailing him. She has a distaste for flirtation, and yet wishes she had the courage to do it, to approach the woman in blue, to converse with her, to ask for her email. She resents Noah, is certain he’s now down the street having the same conversation with a different woman. She has no idea that Noah Bernstein has never in his life had the courage to give a strange woman his email address.
Now, Jane Austen would like this to be a love story, but the reality is that Anna is probably not ready for love, whether with men, with women, with sunspots, or with anyone else. Jane smiles when she hears that, but then again Jane has yet to see what Anna did to the geranium she received from the woman she had a crush on nearly a year ago. She was ecstatic to receive it, thrilled to have it live intimately in her house, leaves gorgeously releasing the regurgitated oxygen of her crush-recipient’s breath. She stole sidelong self-indulgent glances at it resting on the kitchen windowsill among her sunlit blue glass bottles while she stood at the stove scrambling eggs. Unfortunately, plants, unlike cats, do not meow for their supper. Only every month or so did she notice, while gazing lovingly at the geranium and stirring the eggs, that the leaves were getting tiny and sparse, and remember that geraniums benefit from occasional drinks of water.
It had never even occurred to her to ask the woman out.
_______________
The sun can drown us in the right ingredients for aurora borealis, but Earth has to be receptive in order to close the deal. The sun may send us the queen of all solar flares, but if the sky is clouded, the likelihood of eager human beings, tail-less donkeys or tall trees seeing the auroras is limited. The sun’s coronal holes may blow messages to us along a solar wind stream, but, unless our magnetic field is receptive, the skies will remain quiet. The auroras may appear, but only the aurora chasers in time zones where it is dark during the window of opportunity will get the pleasure of their company. Harmony and timing are essential catalysts.
The sun can be a tease too; its sunspots may hurl aurora dust tantalizingly the wrong way, off into the galaxy rather than aiming it directly at Earth, two-day priority mail.
Sometimes the skies clear. The magnetic field is tilted just so. The solar flare is sent on a direct flight to Earth, with no plan to change planes in the outskirts of the solar system. The sky watchers are awake and poised in dark, open spaces awaiting the sun like a lover. On those nights, the aurora chasers are captivated as the skies dance and dance.
_______________
It wasn’t Rabbit. It was Pooh. Anna wakes with a start in the middle of the night, realizing this. Her moment of awareness comes in a flash, intense as the suddenly clear night sky outside the window by her bed. Noah Bernstein was wrong. Rabbit does not find Eeyore’s lost tail. She fidgets under her blanket for a while, sending the cat scurrying to the floor, before actually getting out of bed, turning on the light, retrieving her worn-out hardback of Winnie the Pooh and confirming the correction. It bothers her. The rest of her sleep is fitful, as faintly green light and shadows dance across her face.
In the morning, she has forgotten all this. Avoiding the clouds and rain that have returned outside, she is cleaning out the pockets of yesterday’s jeans and preparing to do laundry, when she finds the red paper with Noah Bernstein’s email address. The correction floods back. She perches on the edge of her desk, moving aside a stack of black poster board from a forgotten and unfinished project. She is certain that a respect for accuracy and a love of children’s literature is all that is occupying her thoughts. It wasn’t Rabbit. It wasn’t Rabbit. She knows it will stop bothering her only if she tells him, reassures herself that this could not be construed as flirtation, just an expression of respect for precision. Ten minutes pass before she drops her laundry, opens her laptop, and launches her email. It’s important to her not to sound too charming or interesting, lest he actually want to respond to her email. Twenty minutes more pass before she has composed and actually sent:
Noah –
This is Anna, a woman you met yesterday. I had brown hair and you said something to me about Eeyore. I’m writing because it occurred to me that it wasn’t Rabbit who found Eeyore’s tail. It was Pooh. He found it at Owl’s house, where Owl was unwittingly using it as a doorbell. Anyway, I wanted to email you while I still remembered because I figured you’d want to know. Not that it matters, I guess.
-Anna
Trying to ignore the feeling that she’s done something really foolish, she assembles and loads her laundry, notices and actually waters her geranium, and crawls back onto her bed with her laptop. She browses websites of The New York Times and Seattle Times, glad to have the distracting topic of children’s literature off her mind.
The news of the war is discouraging as usual to her. Four GI’s were killed in a roadside bomb. An attack on a city left countless Iraqi civilians dead. Soaring costs. Profiteering American companies. The president’s optimism. She feels herself sinking and clicks away to another page.
An article in the Seattle Times catches her eye – it is about the aurora borealis, or northern lights. The article says that the aurora borealis was visible over Seattle last night during a break in the clouds.
Anna is captivated. She has never understood what the northern lights were, exactly, but has always felt drawn to the idea of seeing them, underscored by a fear that somehow her life will pass by without the opportunity. She stares at the picture of bright green waves and spirals in the sky above the Space Needle and Elliott Bay. She Googles “aurora borealis” and is rewarded with over a million hits, some for sites displaying pictures of what looks like glowing spilled paint feathering the nighttime sky.
On spaceweather.com, she reads that the previous night’s auroras were caused by an enormous solar flare, an “X-class” one, and that solar flares are what happen when sunspots – magnetic blemishes on the sun – erupt. A solar flare sounds to her like a sunspot having an orgasm. She lets herself get lost in the website’s photographs and explanations, absorbing all she can. She learns that auroras can occur not only when Earth basks in the protons of a solar flare but when Earth’s sails catch the sun’s gustier winds or even when our planet’s own magnetic field hiccups in just the right way. She scrolls through pictures from last night’s auroras: green, purple and red swirls over an array of the world’s nighttime landscapes. She’d always thought auroras were restricted to Alaska and the North Pole, but when she realizes the previous night’s geomagnetic storm caused the skies to burn in Arizona and Texas, she knows she has to see auroras herself, and that she will make it happen.
His email back is titled, Good Morning. If it is a good morning. Which I doubt. She recognizes the Eeyore quotation and can’t help the feeling of a smile if not exactly the muscle movement of one. She reads:
Anna –
“Not that it matters, I guess” you say? Could there BE a sentiment more worthy of Eeyore? Excellent. And yes, after I’d ridden away, I realized my error and was mortified. Nice to meet someone else who still takes the anthropomorphized inhabitants of children’s classics seriously.
If you’re still online, will you come have bagels with me for lunch? If there’s anything more worthy of an Eeyore’s pessimism than the value of protests during this political time, it’s the quality of bagels during this epicurean time.
-Noah
Still thinking about the aurora borealis, and wanting to tell someone about it, she hits Reply without any premeditation and writes,
Sure. Meet at Noah’s on Broadway at noon? And have you ever seen the northern lights?
He replies quickly:
Yes, Noah’s for bagels sounds great. No, I’ve never seen the lights. But I’d like to do both. Oh and I assume you mean “Noah’s Bagels” rather than any place belonging to me. :-)
She blushes. Shit. The lights fade out of her mind again. Auroras last only so long.
_______________
They are sitting at a small table with bagels and whitefish salad perched in reusable baskets, discussing the travesty of bagels that have been steamed rather than boiled. “The worst ones taste like marshmallows,” she laments.
They chew.
“So, you’ve never seen the aurora borealis?” she finally asks him.
“That’s right, you’d asked about that. My sister saw it out the window of a plane once. For a while I’d look for it if I flew somewhere at night. How come?”
“So, I learned this morning on a website about auroras that you don’t have to go way far north or up in the sky to see them. If the timing is right, you can even see them down here or as far south as Arizona.”
“Arizona? Seriously?”
“There was a picture of these red swirls in the sky over Monument Valley in Arizona. Right there mixed with the stars in the night sky.”
“Holy shit. So how do you know they’re coming?”
She thinks for a moment trying to remember the details. “Well, if I remember right from what I was reading, it’s because the sun gets sunspots that pop up for a while and then fade away. Sometimes one of them explodes, and if what explodes out of that sunspot hits Earth, and we’re lucky, we get auroras. This one website said last night’s auroras here were from a really huge explosion.”
“Wait, there were auroras last night? As in, here in Seattle?”
She nods. “There was a picture in the Seattle Times.” She realizes she’s been bursting to share all this with him, has nearly forgotten who he was yesterday.
He is looking at her intently. “And you read about this on the internet? That’s the most gorgeously dorky thing I’ve heard all morning.”
She is quiet, taking in what she knows is a compliment.
“What?” he asks her, his eyes on her.
She feels like all this talk of auroras has made the air around them too intense too quickly. She retreats back to familiar territory.
“Okay. You want dorkier online behavior from a New Yorker? Here’s a confession for you: I peruse pictures of smoked fish on the Zabar’s website like some people look at porn. You should see the pictures they have on there – freshly sliced nova, hunks of whitefish… it’s too much. I can barely stand it, but I can’t stop looking.” She blushes and sits back in her chair.
He laughs. “Very nice, Anna; that’s beautiful. Sexy whitefish hunks.”
“You think I’m joking.” She nibbles a few onion flakes off her bagel.
“No, no I really don’t. I’m relating more than I care to admit. I’ve had those dark days myself. Anna, do you realize how little decent pastrami porn there is on the internet? One good picture on the site for Katz’s Delicatessen. Nothing to speak of on the Second Avenue Deli or the Carnegie websites. What does a guy have to do in this world for some shots of hot, juicy pastrami dripping with mustard and stacked on fresh rye?”
“I can’t believe you just said ‘pastrami porn.’” She bites her cheeks.
He smiles.
A few sunbeams penetrate the window to have a look.
_______________
The appearance of sunshine in the greater Seattle area is not so rare as reputation would have it. There are sun breaks nearly every day, even if just a small fragment of blue and ray of sunshine appear over, say, the Fremont neighborhood or perhaps White Center. Seattleites are trained to look for sun breaks, to savor and appreciate flashes of azure sky that residents of sunnier climes, Colorado or perhaps Arizona, might not even notice on their greyer days. Seattleites are treated to whole weeks and even months of sunshine in the summertime, a lush hiatus of bright days, enormous berries, blue-eyed lakes, and lazy cats tapping their tails idly on sun-warmed front steps.
This mutual game of hard-to-get only feeds the attraction between Seattleites and the sun, making for tantalizingly brief encounters that so rarely get taken for granted between lovers who pretend indifference in dry spells. We revel in the sunshine, yes, but only allow ourselves to do so by professing pride in a preference for the comfort of grey, cooler clouds. After all, we, like Jane Austen’s heroines, have a reputation to uphold.
_______________
Noah and Anna slide between their safe topics, growing relaxed within those bounds. Noah has brought his laptop over, and they are sitting on a rug in her living room as daylight fades away outside, eating almonds and raisins from plastic bags and browsing aurora websites. Each has a grandmother whose favorite snack is almonds and raisins. They will never learn this fact in common.
They sprawl comfortably, leaning on pillows, comparing information they find. Noah notices, but does not comment on, Anna’s stacks of magazines and newspapers – The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Mother Jones and others. He can guess at Anna’s habit of paralyzing herself by internalizing hopeless world news. He has seen the difference in Anna’s eyes when she talks about politics and when she talks about her dreams of aurora chasing.
They are slowly becoming fluent in the language of auroras, but have not yet seen any. They are learning that sunspots produce the most common and predictable northern lights, with solar winds flowing from occasional coronal holes representing the second best source. They have found websites that show the placement of the sun’s current spots, and which explain the complexity of each spot’s magnetic field. The more complex the magnetic field – especially of a nice, large sunspot – the greater the likelihood of that spot erupting in a solar flare. If the spot happens to be smack-dab in the middle of the side of the sun facing Earth on the day it erupts, aurora chasers everywhere make plans to throw blankets in the car and head for the dark, north-facing spaces to await magic. More often than not, however, the sunspot rotates back over to the other side of the sun, decays, or taunts aurora chasers by remaining quiet.
Anna and Noah have been watching one large sunspot, Sunspot 486, which measures seven times the size of Jupiter across and has a magnetic field just ripe for juicy M-class or X-class solar flares.
“It says here that October has been one of the busiest months in a long time for solar activity,” Noah tells her. Anna looks up and crawls over next to Noah to grab a few more raisins and peer at his screen.
“Why’s that?” she asks.
“Hmm.” He keeps paging through the website’s text. “Have you heard of solar minimum and solar maximum?”
“Not yet.”
“So it sounds like there’s actually an eleven-year cycle from solar maximum, when there are tons of sunspots, to solar minimum, where there’s a dry spell. But the thing I can’t figure out is that solar maximum already happened, back in 2000, which means it’s been three years, and the sun’s behaving like it’s solar maximum, all over again.” He is quiet for a while.
She stirs the almonds in the bag. “That means in a few years it’s going to be even harder to see them. I wish I had known about this stuff earlier. What if the other night was the last show for years and years, and we missed our chance?” Her eyes are open all the way as she looks at him closely. He glances at her eyes and back at the screen.
“That would suck,” he agreed, “but I don’t think it’s the case. Besides, think about all those people who randomly come across them and don’t even know when to look. We’re giving ourselves the best advantage we can.”
“I suppose if they were commonplace they wouldn’t have such an aura of mystique.”
“Or an aurora of mystique,” he quips.
She laughs, groans, and throws an almond at him, which he deftly catches in his mouth. He throws one back at her, which she tries to grab with her mouth and misses. She scrambles across the rug and turns to pelt him again but sees at least two more almonds fly her way. She catches one with her hand and eats it triumphantly.
“You’re terribly cute with almonds in your hair,” he says, trying to sound dry and looking back and forth between her and his computer. She looks down to see an almond perched in the ends of her hair.
“Are you making fun of me?” she asks, trying not to sound serious as she eats the raisin.
Noah moves his laptop off his legs to the floor by his side, leans his head back against the sofa and looks at her. He speaks slowly when he says, “No. No, actually I’m thinking about how much I want to kiss you. But I’m weighing that with the knowledge that if I do, you’ll think I’m some sleazy guy who just feigns interest in sunspots to get all the pretty girls to notice him.” She looks at him, her hand gripping the rough edge of the painted coffee table.
He holds her gaze. “Between this and my appetite for pastrami porn, have I revealed too much to stand a chance?”
Anna is a little afraid of what she’s about to do, but knows she will make it happen anyway. She slides slowly over the rug until she is next to Noah. She places one hand on the side of his face, and her lips on his mouth. Their kisses are small and quiet, sweetly present. The computer screens go into sleep mode as the room grows dark, too dark for Jane Austen to be scandalized by the behavior of two twenty-first century un-chaperoned aurora chasers.
Jane may not notice their movements in the darkness, even when Anna takes Noah’s hand and leads him out of the living room, but the moon watches knowingly through the windowpanes. The moon has seen this all before, and it never gets old. Full moonlight is an aphrodisiac of unrivaled power, provoking senseless sensibilities in chasers and chased alike.
On some clear nights, after all, aurora chasers travel to wide-open north-facing spaces and open themselves up in anticipation, only to find that the geomagnetic storm never comes. On such nights, when the moon is allowed to keep watch over her charges without solar interruptions, aurora chasers under moonlit blankets may find other ways to spend their solar anticipation, urgently searching for beauty or just trying to stay warm. Their excuses make no difference to the moon. She is on nighttime watch, and all is well.
_______________
It has happened. Sunspot 486 has unleashed two colossal solar flares, one after the other. They are X-17 and X-11 class, respectively. They punctuate the sun’s abundance of impressive displays this month, and are sizeable enough to be extraordinary in the grand scale of solar activity; the X-17 class flare is among the top ten largest in recorded history. The aurora chasers begin their delicious wait.
It takes approximately one to three days for a sunspot’s coronal mass ejection (or sunspot ejaculation, Anna can’t help thinking) to reach and impregnate Earth’s atmosphere. Anna’s eyes are shining. At her temp job during the day, she continuously refreshes the screen of a website she has found that shows an ultraviolet image of the northern hemisphere’s auroral activity. When auroras hit, she knows the small green blob hovering above the polar region will explode into a large red mass extending further south, past her magnetic latitude, and tempting her out into the darkness. Everywhere the red circle covers, there will be a possibility of auroras.
So far, the weather is cooperating and giving her mostly clear skies. The sun has noticed Anna’s pleasure from its rays, but senses Anna wants more from it than sunshine. She has that wild look in her eyes of a new aurora chaser, and the sun can tell.
_______________
She makes the call at 10:24 pm.
He answers, “Yes, my palindrome?”
“It’s here.”
“It’s here?” His voice changes from playful to serious.
“Yes. The blob of activity level is enormous and red. I didn’t know it could get this big. I think they’re getting auroras in Greece.”
“My car?”
“Yes. Bring your passport, just in case.”
He arrives in his old Volvo in less than twenty minutes. He has brought almonds and raisins, a sleeping bag, a flashlight, an atlas, his passport, and assorted garments made of fleece. She has assembled sandwiches, and pulled the grey blanket from her bed.
He kisses her and touches the blanket, teasing, “I don’t know, that blanket looks kind of like cloud cover. Might not want to risk it.”
“Don’t even joke about it – avoiding the clouds is going to be tricky. A few fronts are coming in. According to the clear sky clocks, our best bet is going to be to head up north toward Mount Vernon or Bellingham, and then out of the light pollution, or to hit Canada if there are still clouds. It’s supposed to be clearer over B.C.”
They check the websites one last time to make sure activity is still happening. There are dots on a map to indicate where aurora chasers have already been seeing storms happening across the country. “Illinois,” she says. “And Nebraska. Noah, let’s get moving – it’s going to hit here soon.”
They steer a few blocks on Aurora Avenue North (no relation) and cut across 45th Street to I-5 where they can speed northward as far as they want. Anna feels breathtakingly free.
“How are the skies?” Noah asks quietly.
Anna peers up through the sunroof, the windshield, and her own window. “Cloudy with some clear spots.”
“Check out that glow. Do you think that’s anything?” he murmurs.
“Everett,” she sighs. “We’re still south of it, so that’s probably just the city’s lights.” A New Yorker at heart, she chokes a little at referring to Everett as a city. “Everett might have its charms, but I doubt it parallels the beauty of northern lights, so I suggest we keep driving.”
They are quiet. They snack on almonds and raisins. He rests his hand on her leg and she lets herself play with his fingers.
North of Everett, he comments, “That glow’s still there. I think it’s something else.” The northern sky is lit with a fuzzy haze.
“I can’t tell,” she admits.
“I think it’s our lights.”
She looks up and around at the sky. There are clear spaces and cloudy spaces. Nothing unusual. Sharing a sandwich, they continue driving north.
By Mount Vernon, there are still too many clouds, so they don’t exit the freeway just yet. They wind through the hills approaching Bellingham. When the hillsides of trees open back up to reveal wider landscape, Noah murmurs, “Anna, the glow is still there. That’s definitely our glow.”
Anna looks forward and then up through the sunroof. She gasps, “Oh my God.”
“What are you seeing?” His voice matches hers.
“There was a streak, and now it’s gone. I thought it was a cloud, but it pulsed in and out, just like the descriptions say. And there are more. Oh my God, Noah, we’re seeing auroras.”
Noah leans forward and looks up through the windshield. “Holy shit. You’re right.”
“Don’t crash! Do you want me to drive for a little bit?”
“No, that’s okay – let’s get off at the next exit.”
They exit, but find themselves tangled in Bellingham, with too many bright lights and no open views to the north. They are still seeing faint streaks in the sky, but know this is not their destination. “Canada?” Noah asks her.
“Canada,” she replies.
They get back on the freeway. Laughing and holding hands, they head north.
“I’m going to call in sick to work tomorrow. There was a huge solar flare and I unfortunately I had to flee the country.” He is grinning.
They slow down at the border and hand over their passports. At this point, the streaks shooting and fading above are growing bolder and more frequent, and there are faint pulses of white around the night sky.
“Where do you live?” the border guard accepts their passports and looks inside the Volvo at the two eager aurora chasers entering her country after midnight.
“Seattle,” Noah replies.
“And what’s your business in Canada?” She looks at Anna.
“We’re chasing – we’re looking for a good view of the aurora borealis, the northern lights.”
“Ma’am, you have to drive really far north for that, up around Prince George or Prince Rupert.” Anna can’t tell if the guard is amused or suspicious, but Anna has limited patience.
“One of the largest solar flares ever on record happened thirty-six hours ago, and the northern lights are visible down here tonight. You could see them right here, if not for the electric lighting. We’ll only be here a few hours, and then we’re coming home.”
The guard shrugs, returns their passports and waves them through.
“Prince Rupert and Prince George, eh? I didn’t know we needed permission from royalty to see solar phenomena.”
Anna ignores the comment and gives Noah directions to Highway 1, which they hope is their best bet for ending up somewhere dark and clear. They drive a few miles out on the highway and select an exit. Noah takes a series of turns, each time driving as far away from the light as he can. He turns into one road to find it is actually a bumpy dirt lot at the entrance to a large farm. He starts to turn around and then pauses, killing the engine and headlights.
“Sky check,” he says. They get out of the Volvo, look up, and shriek almost simultaneously. The dark sky is filled with feathers and pulses, streaks and waves, curtains and flashes, all glowing the color of icy jade.
Anna is ecstatic. “This is it! We’re not going anywhere.”
They dance around in a field of what looks like collard greens or cabbages, utterly awed by the sight above. They hop onto a wooden fence and hold on to its logs, leaning back and howling. When she can tear her eyes from the sky for even a moment, Anna runs to the car and pulls out the blanket, sleeping bag, and snacks. They bundle onto the ground, warm and squealing, holding each other and staring upward. The auroras have taken over the sky, and the aurora chasers are rapt, displaying enough devoted attention to please even the sun.
Anna and Noah grow quiet. A celestial rain-curtain of green light takes over the northeast quadrant of the heavens, pouring magnetic magic in glowing streams down to the horizon. The sky directly above pulses and rolls in ocean waves of light, feeling close enough to fall on their heads. A swirl of pale emerald sends spirals east across the illuminated darkness. Stars play in the magnetic field’s seductive hair. Human-made fireworks are put to shame as the heavens spill forth unpredictably fluctuating beauty, green feathery lights wafting in magnetic winds. Anna and Noah lie among the cruciferous rows and bask in light unlike any they have ever experienced.
After an hour, the displays are growing quieter, and the lovers, colder. They lie close together. Noah feeds Anna raisins, one by one.
“And to think,” he says, “I would have been content with seeing some lights out the window of a plane. Not the blinking ones on the wing, of course. Those don’t count.”
“Noah, I never would have been the kind of person to do this, even to think of it, like, three years ago. Not even a year ago. I’d have wanted it, but I wouldn’t have done it.”
“No?” He strokes her face.
“No! I mean I guess I’m not exactly your archetypal upper middle class Jewish girl from New York, or I’d never have moved out of the City.” She feels her cheek growing hot as he continues stroking it, aware that it is the first time she has admitted she is Jewish. She almost clarifies that “the City” means “Manhattan” until she remembers that he knows, that he too felt stifled by and left a city he will also always love more than any other. She continues, “I think I sometimes watch life happen, instead of making life happen. Live in my head. You know?”
“Yes.” His voice is quiet. He does not share more.
“I don’t want to do that any more, Noah.”
He takes her hand and snuggles in closer to her. They are quiet. The sky is still pulsing faintly, the afterglow panting sighs of a geomagnetic storm fogging up the windows of the atmosphere with the last small breaths of light.
The aurora chasers drive home, silent and full.
_______________
Anna calls in sick to work. She can’t get out from under her blanket. This is all too much, too fast, too open. So recently, she rekindled her dream to see the northern lights, and here she is, someone who has seen them, opened herself up to them, drowned in them. Now what? She can’t move.
She lies in bed and reads the news. How can she be thinking about the sun at a time like this? How can she do anything? How can she consider herself an active participant in the world, and not just a spectator, when there is nothing she can do about the war – or anything else that matters? Even as an aurora chaser, she is nothing more than a spectator. Everything is at once too big and too small. Her cat cuddles next to her, sniffs her, lies on her, ignores her. She can’t move.
Two days pass. So far, she has returned neither Noah’s phone calls and emails, nor those of other friends, wanting to chat, unaware of the turns Anna’s life has taken. She has crossed international borders to witness spectacular celestial phenomena and taken a nice Jewish boy from New York to bed. Things have shifted a little lately. She can’t move.
In the late afternoon, the phone rings again, and it is Noah. She breathes in and finally answers it.
“Hey.” He is surprised to hear her pick up.
“Hey.”
“So I found this tail, and I was wondering if it belonged to you.”
Anna is quiet.
“Okay, I just wanted to make sure you’re doing okay.”
“Mmm.”
“You haven’t gotten out of bed, have you.”
It’s not fair that someone she has known so briefly can tell this over the phone. She is quiet.
“Anna, there’s a sun break outside, and we’re close to sunset. I’m dragging you outside to see it if I have to. Or at least I’m petitioning your cat to if you need some breathing room from me.” He is worried about her, knows that this is about more than what has been going on between them.
“Look,” she grumbles, “I don’t need some Mr. Darcy to come rescue me. I’m doing just fine. Besides, sun breaks happen nearly every day.”
“So do auroras, this month, Miss Elizabeth.” he shoots back. She is thrown off for a moment, realizing he understood her reference to Pride and Prejudice.
“Well, I like the clouds.”
“I like the clouds too. That’s not what I’m talking about. Anna, we look for sun breaks when we’re being optimistic. You blew away the limits of optimism and said to hell with the sun breaks; let’s look for auroras. You got me to chase those auroras into another country, and find them. You’re amazing, Anna; you woke me up.”
Anna starts crying and doesn’t know why.
“I’m sorry,” he says into the phone.
“Thanks for calling me,” she chokes. “I need to sleep.” She hesitates. “Wait, Noah?” she murmurs.
“Mmm hmm?”
“Go look at the illustrations of Eeyore after he gets his tail back. He frisks around and stuff.”
“I know he does. Sleep well.”
Anna hangs up and closes her eyes.
While Anna is sleeping, Jane Austen comes to sit on the edge of her bed. She strokes Anna’s loose hair, dries the tears on Anna’s cheek, pulls the blanket up to tuck her in. Jane is concerned, alarmed even, for this girl who is so far from any comfort of her own family and with no fortune of which to speak. Jane wishes with her whole heart that Anna had a sister, the solace-bringing presence to whom a young woman might turn when her woes are due to matters of the heart, to overwhelming change, or to extraordinary geomagnetic phenomena. Jane is unaware that a precocious Anna at age ten, having actually read Pride and Prejudice, promptly began imagining Miss Elizabeth Bennet to be her own sister, talking to her at night when she felt alone in a city apartment, with the distant sounds of sirens and garbage trucks for company.
Miss Jane, however, is wise and patient, despite her alarm for Miss Anna’s health. And so, dear reader, she reassures you of Anna’s resilience and wellbeing. In place of a sister, in place of the Elizabeth Bennet Anna never really had, Jane Austen now sits with Anna through the night, witnessing the fortitude Anna’s face shows when she’s not hiding anything. The skies outside are clouded and still.
In the morning, Anna gets up to feed the cat. It is the weekend. The daylight feels fresh and new. She stretches and walks through the kitchen. She is hungry, and slowly gets out everything she needs for eggs and toast. Jane Austen stage whispers, “ cup of tea!” loud enough for Anna to think of it, and Anna makes herself some earl grey with soy milk – a remedy of which Jane approves, despite her puzzlement over soy milk. Anna takes her breakfast into the living room, begins to pick up a magazine, looks at it, and puts it aside. She eats on the edge of her couch, looking through the window at the last yellow leaves on a tree. Her mind is still.
When she opens the door to retrieve her mail and feel the fresh air she is craving, there is a brown paper shopping bag on her doorstep. Its handles are tied together with a piece of string, to which is attached an envelope marked:
Anna, a.k.a. Miss Elizabeth Bennet
She carries the bag inside and closes her door. She sits on the couch, looks at the bag again, and pulls off the envelope. Inside is a note that reads:
Dear Anna/Miss Elizabeth,
As Mr. Fitzpatrick Darcy is unavailable at present, having dashed off heroically to attend to some poor quality bagels in the Midwest somewhere, I have stepped in to scribe this epistle. Please, then, accept this humble gift as a thank you for exposing us to a superiour display of aurora borealis. While we were so fortunate as to experience fair weather in our venture to the north country, Prince George, Mr. Darcy and I were quite concerned that your own grey quilt did resemble cloud cover to so great an extent as might impede your future luck in such undertakings (which, for the record, are quite scandalous for a young woman to be taking unescorted with a gentleman of no known connexions). Please, then, accept the enclosed gift as a token of gratitude and concern.
Yours, etc.
Prince Rupert
She peers in the bag and pulls out a blanket. It is shockingly soft, jet black and sprinkled with an abstract patchwork of green and white. She wraps it around her shoulders, and then unwraps it and looks at it again. It is hardly real – and, yet it is unmistakably their sky. She picks up the card and looks at it again. She holds the quilt and card close, sitting on the couch, and looking outside at the maple’s yellow leaves.
Reader, she called him.
Certainly, she tells herself, she is calling not only because it is polite to thank a friend for a gift, but because she needs to correct a most egregious error.
“Hey, there.”
She pauses. “It’s Fitzwilliam Darcy, not Fitzpatrick Darcy. And thank you for the blanket, Noah. It’s amazing. I don’t know what to say.”
He laughs. “I know it’s Fitzwilliam, Miss Anna. But I couldn’t be entirely sure you’d call me unless I made such an egregious literary error.”
She finds herself blushing and then smiling. “How did you even find something like this? It’s really perfect.”
“Well, I found myself walking alone down by Pike Place Market yesterday before I called you, and before that sun break happened. It’s one of my favorite places to go and think. I went down to watch the ferries on the bay from Victor Steinbrueck Park. I was also looking for a sun break and there just wasn’t one. I guess I felt really small and stupid – it’s kind of arrogant to stand there and assume the sun’s going to give me a bit of blue sky, just because I, one poor schmuck out of many, ask for it. And it wasn’t a good kind of feeling small. The other night when we were watching auroras, that was a good kind of feeling small. I felt like a piece of dust, one proton in a cosmic conversation, and it was beautiful. But standing there at the park, I just felt like a schmuck.”
“So I walked back through the market, and ended up passing this quilt shop. And that blanket was hanging in the window. I couldn’t stop staring at it – it was our sky, Anna. It was perfect, right at that moment, not only because it was our sky, but because it was yet another experience of walking along, expecting the mundane, and stumbling serendipitously upon the mind-bogglingly beautiful. So many people sleep through the night, and never realize that the mind-bogglingly beautiful is going on right over their roofs. They forget to look for, and usually don’t notice beauty. It drives me crazy, especially when I’m the idiot who’s doing it. So anyway, yeah, I bought you the quilt. You really like it? I can take it back if you don’t.”
“I love it, Noah.”
“I’m glad. You sound good, by the way.”
“Thanks; I feel good. Are you doing okay?”
“Ehh. Suffering from some vitamin deficiency brought on by lack of pastrami, but I’ll live.”
“I’ll dig up some pastrami porn for you. Just don’t open it at work.”
“You’re the best.”
They get off the phone. Anna opens all her windows and cleans up her breakfast dishes. She looks around her kitchen, takes the geranium off the windowsill, trims off its dead branches with her sharp kitchen scissors and gives it a good drenching. She cleans the kitchen and returns to the living room, where she begins picking up the magazines strewn about. She carries them to her kitchen for recycling, noticing for the first time how many colors can be found in one magazine page. She places them on her kitchen counter, rearranging them, tearing out pages and covers. Sunlight streams through the window onto the pages, illuminating the vibrancy of their colors.
Anna retrieves from her bedroom a piece of the black poster board nearly forgotten on her desk, an old glue stick from a drawer, and her laptop. She finds her favorite aurora photograph on spaceweather.com, one taken in northern Ontario during the recent storm, and in which the skies are red, yellow, pink and green all at once, shaped like the geomagnetic lovechild of a tornado and a waterfall. She spreads the magazines out on the floor in a pool of sunlight and begins cutting tiny shards and curls of color from their pages. For hours, deep in concentration, even after the sunlight shifts off her work, she cuts fragments of color and glues them in place on the poster board. When she is done, she has a mosaic aurora, matching the photograph on the website, with even tiny pinpoints of white paper to fill in as stars.
There are over a thousand separate bits of paper in her swirling display. Inside this image, she lets herself fly. There is no going back.
As her artwork dries, she removes her now-drained geranium from the sink and replaces it on the windowsill. Looking at it, she thinks of Amber, the woman who gave her the geranium and whose phone number is buried in the scraps of paper that have accumulated by the kitchen phone. She digs up the right scrap and makes the call.
They are sweetly nervous at first as they chat, each of them shy of flirtation. Anna does not mention her obsession with the geranium. Amber does not admit that she still wonders if Anna hates geraniums, and if this is why they did not stay in touch.
Anna does tell Amber it’s great to talk to her. She confesses the self-avowed dorkiness of her new interest in northern lights, and hears Amber’s story of once seeing the lights on a trip up the British Columbia Inside Passage, of how the lights reflected on the water.
They talk about activism, about finding meaningful projects on a scale small enough to have an impact, thereby balancing out the issues that are overwhelmingly impermeable. Accepting that there are some phenomena beyond our control makes it paradoxically easier to work on them. Anna thinks of auroras, of how intensively she’s interacted with and been energized by something she cannot shape. She broaches this with Amber, who reminds her of quantum mechanics, of Schrodinger’s cat who is still both alive and dead until someone looks in the box and risks getting scratched. Reality is ambiguous until it has been witnessed.
They continue talking into the evening.
_______________
We make decisions about our lives, feeling confident that certain chapters are neatly closed. These beginnings and endings seem clearly delineated, just as we know a sunset marks the close of a day’s brightness, which will not return until the next day’s sunrise.
Yet, the universe is playful place, which frequently has other plans. Sometimes the sun returns in the middle of the night. Sometimes a once-in-a-lifetime solar flare is just a beginning. And so it is that Anna, just days later, takes a peek back at spaceweather.com, breathes in sharply, and quickly dials Noah Bernstein.
“Oh palindrome, my palindrome,” he answers, trying hard to sound nonchalant.
“X-28 class.”
“Excuse me?”
Her heart is pounding. “Sunspot 486 which we thought would be decaying by now? Yeah, it just unleashed an X-28 class flare.”
“Anna, there aren’t X-28 class flares. They don’t come that big.”
“This is the biggest solar flare ever on record. They’re only guessing at the X-28. It overwhelmed the instruments they use to measure the flares, so it might end up being quite a lot larger. The astronomers are peeing their pants.”
“Holy shit. So does this mean we’ll…”
“I don’t know if we’ll get auroras. It wasn’t even Earth-directed; it might send craziness off into another part of the solar system. But it was big enough that we may get storms anyway.”
“Shall we try?”
“I think we have to.”
“Emergency aurora chasers meeting at Noah’s Bagels?”
“I think so. I’ll bring my laptop, because you absolutely have to see this solar flare, and I’ll also bring something I made for you.” She pauses. “I’ll also call the princes and Mr. Darcy, to see if they can join us.”
“Alas, I think they’re otherwise occupied. Something about rushing off to rescue a heroine from some rascal who was attempting to destroy the honor of literary accuracy.”
“Well, let’s have our meeting anyway. We’ll send them the minutes. And maybe we can take a walk if we get a sun break; I’ve decided I don’t want to miss out on beauty any more.”
“Hmm, that doesn’t sound like Eeyore, but I’ll take it. Though let’s be cautious: if you’re going for breathtaking beauty and perfection, we might not want to be eating bagels in this city. Is it worth the risk?”
“I suppose. Not that it matters, of course.”
_______________
Aurora chasers know the importance of living in the moment and of patience. In the fall and spring, the high months for auroras, and especially during the busy years of solar maximum, aurora chasers revel in an abundant harvest of lights, storing memories for the long, dark nights of solar minimum.
Auroras remind us to let go, but never to become inert. The sun is in control, yet every aurora chaser knows that even during solar minimum there will be nights of extraordinary lights, sent from one lone sunspot who couldn’t help but get up and dance, from a hiccup in Earth’s magnetic field, or from a coronal hole that blew open and sent forth a solar wind to a perfectly-poised Earth. The aurora chasers are at peace with their solar cycle, awed by the months which knock over the charts with record-setting flares, and accepting of the quiet stretches of a more dormant sun. They never stop looking, just in case.
The sun both pays them no mind and licks their faces for caring, these aurora chasers at once tiny specks of irrelevance and quantum witnesses to beauty. Any illusion of finality, like the eventual closure of one month’s breathtaking auroras, is just one of many marks in the endless cycle of solar activity and human awe.
And so, dear reader, the story has no end.
posted by Debs at
12:19 PM
4 Comments:
Keep writing! Keep posting your writing! It's beautiful.
-Tegan
Wonderful, Debs. The story felt very connected, as it wove together science & emotion, flirtation & allusion, and the cultures of two very far apart cities. Your prose is elegant. I very much like it!! It's always the sign of a good story when you want more, at the end... when you're disappointed that you can't see more into the characters' lives. You're inspiring me to want to write something of my own, to start gathering thoughts, and perhaps put together next fall!
very well done...
LT
Have I told you I miss you? I do.
This was lovely. Thank you for sharing it.
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