Ammi Midstokke: Finally, the splendor of the aurora

Of all the elusive phenomena of nature, none has been more successful at eluding me than the aurora borealis.

It is not for lack of aurora or lack of my willingness to drive to mountain tops at 2 a.m., but rather some kind of cosmic antagonism I induce when stepping outside.

I can be lying in bed while social media blows up with images of skies alight and comments such as, “My back yard RIGHT NOW,” but if I step out the door, all wonders of the world temporarily cease to exist or transport to some fifth dimension. The magical cast of green, blue and pink is not to be found. Just the glow of streetlights and a sense that I was the only one the gods did not invite to the party.

This happened another time in my life. Remember in the 1990s when people were selling coffee table books of those 3D images? Magic Eye, they called them, and families sat around staring at their pages until someone exclaimed, “Ooh I see it now!” I have never once in my life seen “it.” But I lied because I didn’t want to get sent to a special education classroom or be prescribed glasses (which everyone knew was the precursor).

I assumed the part of my brain that believes in 3D magic is the same part that believes in the value of decaf coffee, and suffered the same stroke of disillusionment at about the age of 8. And that my lack of depth perception meant that, while I never fork up an extra $3 for glasses at the cinema, I will also never see the aurora borealis. There’s no science that connects these two things, but science has been out of fashion since COVID anyway.

Trust me, believing whatever I want has been refreshingly liberating. When in doubt, a well-formed internet query will confirm even my most precarious of stances. Sometimes I wonder what we all had to do to validate ourselves before Google did it for us.

So imagine my surprise when I stepped outside last weekend on a starry Montana night to discover the sky undulating like a heavenly watercolor come to life. Like I was standing beneath the bubble bath of a celestial being. Like someone might emerge in a robe and sandals (ubiquitous fashion of the holy) and impart wisdom or perhaps carnage or grant wishes from a super-terrestrial throne. At any moment, I expected lasers and a booming voice. I hoped it would be a woman’s.

Here’s a tragedy of our light-flooded existence: It takes our cones about five to 10 minutes to adapt to the dark. Then it takes our rods closer to 30 minutes or more to adapt further. If we give ourselves time, we can see more of the night. Yet when are we in the dark for that long anymore? Have I missed these nighttime displays of the deities because I’m impatient and unadapted?

I stepped deeper into the forest, away from the lingering lights of the lodge and toward the black tips of tamaracks that seemed to be pointing toward the center of a silent color explosion above. I read that the aurora borealis does make noise, and although I could not hear it, I guessed this must be what sound looks like. A symphony of chromatic shades above the canopy of forest.

The Sami people say it is the noise of their ancestors. I imagined these souls, visible to us only in ever-moving wisps of particles and light, the soft pops and cracks probably just their feet crunching against the floor of the heavens. Are they stepping on asteroids?

Is it the equivalent of landing on a Lego in the living room?

One should not whistle or sing back, they say, lest the lights come down and snatch them up. And while I’m not Sami, I respect their wisdom on the matter because I’ve lived long enough to know there’s a lot I don’t know.

The long-exposure shots on social media do this marvelous sky no justice. It is an ever-changing, whimsical movement. A streaking and smearing, a dance between matter and magnetics that plays out on the stage of the atmosphere, each gas offering its own hue of pinks, blues and greens. And just as one thinks this moment, this moment is the most beautiful, it morphs into another somehow more majestic iteration of itself.

The aurora is fleeting and fickle and does not care that we’ve lost our appreciation of the disparity between darkness and light or the proximity between living and dead. Some things intuitively know their worth and celebrate their existence even without us humans valuing them. Why else would nature carry on this way while we’re all staring at our phones?

It doesn’t need us.

Unfortunately, the same is not true for humans. We do need nature.

Maybe all these years I couldn’t see the aurora borealis because I couldn’t appreciate its extraordinary celestial beauty, its singular and impermanent art. Or maybe I just hadn’t taken the time to try.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com