Light Drops from the Great Space
On three Aurora Borealis sightings in 25 years
Loch Eil
It’s 9pm on a mild September evening in the late 1990s in the Highlands of Scotland. As we are about to leave the Crannog restaurant, perched on a jetty on Loch Eil, a prickling feeling rises up my neck and over my scalp. I say to my husband and our friends, apropos of nothing, ‘I think we will see the northern lights tonight!’
As we walk onto the jetty leading to the shore, I turn my back to Fort William and face north. There above us are the Merry Dancers, the aurora borealis, met by their reflection in the still waters of the loch. In my head I can hear my nan, born and raised to the east in Aberdeenshire saying, ‘They were like bright green silk curtains, drawn across the sky, billowing in a silent breeze…’
I ask my husband if I can borrow his Ericsson phone and call my nan in Bournemouth before she goes to bed. Mum picks up and after a brief hello, goes to get nan from the living room.
‘Nan,’ I blurt, ‘It’s just like you said it would be! The Merry Dancers are out, right now above the loch.’ We speak for a few minutes about how she saw them in her youth as a farm girl in the early 1900s, as they shimmered above the Hill of the White Horse outside Strichen. She says she only ever saw them that once and how glad she is that I have now seen them, too. I bid her goodnight and walk slowly, awestruck to the shore to re-join my friends. We watch the sky, firefly green above the Cairngorms before heading back to the cottage in Fassfern, bellies full and eyes wide.
Forgue
It’s the early 2000s and the dream of living with our band is beginning to fall apart, (it no longer being the 1960s). Tensions are high in the house, wives, girlfriends, babies, guests, cats, dogs, WWOOFers1 and visiting musicians come and go. In the recording studio is our friend and colleague Mark Beazley from the band Rothko, here to write and record an album with me. At about ten pm, someone shouts in from the garden, (perhaps it was even me, I can’t recall), ‘The northern lights are out!’
Everyone rushes out to stand on the one flat bit of grass, the drying lawn, a common feature around the back of traditional Scottish country houses.2 The sky is alive and pulsing with red lights like giant search lights. Soon, it changes to become a spiralling green light show, almost turquoise and approaching psychedelic in its intensity. Everyone is on the lawn together, pointing and laughing, ‘wow’ing or comparing the visuals to an acid trip of their youth. Beers are passed around, we open a good whisky and all have a dram. For an hour we crane our necks and wrap ourselves in blankets and shawls to take in the drama above the hill. It not yet being the time of digital cameras or camera phones, no one takes any photographs at all, but we revel in the moment of simple shared bonhomie.
Mark goes back to the recording studio in the old steading, (a ‘U’ shaped stone-built barn we’d renovated to make space for creating art and music, or to host guests.) The next day our album begins to take shape, including this piece.
For full song on Spotify click here. For YouTube link click here.
We continue to see the lights in several forms for the rest of the winter: red glows, white beams, green spirals. We never get tired of them, but that first time at home stays fresh in our minds like a newly-painted talisman.
New Tripoli
This week, Saturday 11th May 2024, I was camped on a hill top in Pennsylvania, USA. It had been a long day of tanning hides in the rain and I was tucked up reasonably warmly in my cot. At 3.33am there was no more avoiding it, I just had to go outside for a pee. I clumsily kicked on my flip flops and found my glasses, unzipping the tent door at my third attempt. It opened due north and each clear night I would orient myself to The Plough, find the North Star, and then turn a little extra to the right to find northeast and send my love back to someone hopefully still sleeping soundly in Yorkshire, England.
As I rose and looked up at the sky, I realised it was not light pollution from a nearby town, nor strange tractor headlights from a late night field-ploughing farmer over the next hill. I was seeing the northern lights again, but paler, almost white. Light green and faint purple-red were visible in the moving shapes, but to the naked eye, though beautiful, they were not overtly colourful. I went back in the tent to get my phone and to wake Theresa. We stood and watched the sky for 10 minutes and I took the photographs you can see on this post that night, using three second exposures. The colours are more intense than we saw them, but are accurate as regards hue. It was a joy to still be able to see The Plough3 and many other stars above us even as the lights morphed beneath them. Cold and tired, we made our way back into the tent. I took an hour to get back to sleep, energised by gazing upwards into directionless infinity through the fine gauze of Earth’s exquisitely responsive gaseous mantle.
I awoke on Sunday to find that friends in even more southerly places had also seen the lights. I thought of my nan, my old band mates and friends and how we had all looked up together over the years for a glimpse of this beautiful, uncontrollable and un-summonable event. To stare upwards in this way is utterly human in a way all of our ancestors would recognise. We may tell ourselves different stories about them now, and nod wisely about solar flares and energised particles, but the fluttering hearts and sharp intakes of breath at beauty are the same, down the aeons, for all humans. May it always be so.
This week is a between-essays week. Back next week with an essay, a good thing and more, once home in Blighty. Apologies for late posting by 24 hours this week, heavy rains delayed our journey south by many hours.
If you have seen the lights, feel free to share in the comments.
Complete with a flat-topped box hedge always trimmed to about waist height on which to lay linens out in the sunlight to bleach them.
or The Big Dipper, or The Great Bear, or The Stars of the Literary Gods, or…
Yes, and I remember the early 2000s spectacular seen from our vantage point on the Scottish Border. This time I was in bed starting the first cold in more than 5 years, but on being roused managed outside in wellies into our rural dark. It was fainter and pale this time. Our daughter was very pleased however with this was her first experience. Yes, her phone images captured the colour frequencies better than the eye. I was told in the morning that later there was a setting crescent moon far to the north.
I again found the curvi-linear streaks an odd perspective, inside a tent thousands of miles across. The same was true of the Hale-Bopp comet a while back which took many days and nights to pass. I likened the comet at the time to Kronos galley, a silent thresh of oars.
PS This has been a mundane reminder as we peep out from under the protective screens provided by our magnetosphere and atmosphere, that there are less than clever plans afoot to put a lot of rocket debris up there in the next decades.
Spare a thought also for Jupiter, bless him, who has fielded some mighty fragments of comet in the past. His continuing role we can assume is a good thing. 😊
Beautiful, Caroline.