Thanks for sticking with the Awe & Aurora mini-series. It’s something I’ve thought about for many years and wanted to share with people. The main thrust of the whole series is the importance of having awe-inspiring experiences in our lives, embracing how small we feel in a vast existence, and allowing that to nourish us. The aurora is just one way of having such a peak experience.
While I don’t intend these Tangents to be of a blogger’s nature, describing personal experiences for others to read, that’s the nature of this one. The reason for that is specific: I want you to have just a mild taster for what seeing the aurora is like, ready for Part 4 where I explain how you can best try to see it for yourself. Hopefully you enjoy this at least a fraction of what I did.
(Heat and Lights – near Tromsø, Norway)
I never intended to be a stowaway.
My partner and I had gone on a cold holiday in Tromsø, Norway (holidays should either be properly cold or properly hot). It was relatively expensive there, and our whole budget was based on self catering. When we raised some fair complaints about our room, they had no comparable alternative to offer. The result was the most ridiculous upgrade we have ever had. Our new home in Tromsø was a grand suite full of beautiful Nordic artwork spanning several rooms, one of the largest chandeliers I’ve ever seen, a huge brazier fire with a wrought iron sliding cover and what I can only describe as a sauna jacuzzi disco suite.
We celebrated by cooking enough tuna pasta bake to get us through the next few days.
Now, we had a few boxes we wanted to tick on this trip: get a boat across a fjord, travel to an island with a hill to climb and, of course, get far enough away from city lights for a clear view of the Northern lights. This activity schedule was why our food budget was tight.
On our first morning in Tromsø (with a fridge full of tuna pasta bake, don’t forget), we stepped into town feeling pleased with ourselves and followed our feet exploring. A huge ship had docked and my partner assured me that it’s possible to get a ‘port pass’ and wander about the ship as a non-paying random. Despite my complete reservation about this bizarre activity, it’s actually a thing. We explored the ship and realised that if we were to join its voyage to the northwestern-most tip of Norway and back, we could complete all our holiday goals and still get some time to enjoy the apartment of our dreams in Tromsø. They left in one hour and had a spare cabin…
One catch: we could afford the cheapest cabin (barely), but not meals on board.
Dashing back across town to abandon the lushest holiday rental we’ve ever stayed in, we packed a suitcase with all the food from our fridge, including an enormous bowl of tuna pasta bake (covered precariously with clingfilm and balanced inside the suitcase at an angle carefully calculated for the run back to port). Charging across town while trying not to spill our precious bounty, we made it just in time.
It happens that cheap cabins don’t have refrigerators, even small minibar fridges, so the suitcase became a warm larder for our bread, ham, cheese and lettuce. The one concession we allowed ourselves was a tiny overpriced cruise-branded thermos mug that entitled the holder of said mug unlimited hot drinks from the self-service tea and coffee area.
That night was due to be the best night for aurora hunting on our whole trip (I’ll reveal how I knew that in Part 4). So, armed with a small thermos of coffee and sandwich bags of room-temperature tuna pasta bake in our pockets, we found a place on the top deck of the ship where we could bask in the modest warmth offered by the ship’s exhaust. People came and went, but we stuck it out together in the freezing Arctic night.
After a long wait, we could finally see some clouds that looked faintly glow-in-the-dark. They weren’t moving much, but they were visible in the dead of night, so must be luminous.
A couple of photos on my tripod-mounted camera confirmed they were green, so this was it: the aurora borealis. Not much of a show, to be honest. But we continued. Taking shifts to refill the sandwich bags and thermos, we made a night of it and watched as more and more people tapped out, relying on the ship’s captain to send a wake-up alert to their room in case of auroral activity (more on that in Part 4).
Chatting, laughing and, above all, waiting, we watched these clouds, noticing slights changes in their shape over five to ten minutes. Not thrilling, but whatever, it was exciting being stowaways with our secret larder and coveted coffee.
Mostly to get some movement and warmth, I walked over to the opposite side of the deck to have a mooch over the side of the ship when all of a sudden the sky lit up. I shouted to my partner to leave behind my camera and the expensive lens I’d hired and run to come see.
Green shafts of light rippled above and folded in a curtain directly overhead. They rolled and swirled around far quicker than I had expected, and moved in a way that was so natural – it is, after all, forces of nature at play – and yet so completely unfamiliar.
Nothing else that I know of moves like that: the way the overall mass of light twists on a huge scale; the way the individual fingers of light ripple next to each other within each little part of that whole; the way at once it seems like a uniform wall of light, then the next second it’s directly overhead and you can see inside through the internal structure of that wall; the way one section of the light fingers hurriedly plays the great piano of light in the sky allegro and the other gently swirls at a barely moving andante; they way there’s too much going on at the macro and at the micro scale at once for you to be able to fully be aware of it all at the same time; the way that, even as a small part of you realises your jaw is dropped, and another part of you grins at that fact (with jaw still dropped, created a presumably gormless-looking effect), the whole display still finds new ways to surprise and amaze you.
I will try, and fail, to do it some justice.
Needles of light, standing tall as the sky, drive down and up – not in unison but somehow connected. At times, they follow each other like a Mexican wave. At others they seem out of sync yet, somehow, still naturally connected. There is nothing on Earth that can be that large, that fast and that varied in its motion. The scale, speed and variety of it all is incomparable to anything else. Light moves with comparable speed when the low sun’s rays dapple off an ocean, but these are small flecks appearing and disappearing on the distant waves, predictably unpredictable. Mountain ranges give us a comparable sense of scale when a wide expanse stretches beyond our summit to the horizon, but they don’t move.
Nothing combines the speed of one with the scale of the other. Only mountains of light could be so fast.
Better than that, it’s all a living demonstration of the great magnetic field keeping us safe from the force of nature at the centre of our solar system that both gives us life and threatens us with death. This beautiful display, utterly ephemeral in nature, giving us passing microseconds of joy and wonder, slips through the moments of our conscious as it dances overhead and as we struggle to comprehend its every detail, desperately drinking in every morsel to the very end.
Ten seconds.
Vaguely glowing clouds remained.
Ten seconds and it was all gone.
I looked to my other half, grin still plastered on my face.
Ten seconds and a lasting impression that will stick with me forever.
Experiences of awe like this, what Maslow called peak experiences, are important. All these thoughts are mere tangents, fragments that together start to build up a circle around the unanswerable black hole of life’s central question. I add this one recognising that some of the small, incremental questions and answers must be conceptual others must be non-conceptual and experience-based.
Peak experiences of awe help us comprehend the scale of the unknowable mystery at the centre of it all. This is just one of mine, and I hope one day it can be one of yours, too. Mindset is as important to this as the experience itself. I can direct you towards one, and will do my best to prepare you for the other.
(Needles Playing - near Tromsø, Norway)
With careful planning, guided by my 5 Aurora Hunting Principles in Part 4, you too can plan a trip with very high chances of seeing the aurora and having your own lasting experience of awe.
(Post Script: In case you were wondering, we finished the tuna pasta bake, and the warm ham, lettuce and others in our suitcase, treated ourselves to a single, delicious meal onboard and bluffed our way through the awkward questions of “Where do you usually sit in the restaurant? I’m afraid we don’t recognise you…” We also crossed many fjords by boat, some of which in a hot tub, and even climbed a hill. We still have the Hurtigruten-branded infinite-coffee mug.)