Night Bloomer
On the chase for the Northern Lights
“There,” Julien, our guide, pointed. “Just above the treeline.”
In the middle of the road, he was setting up his camera. I looked up to see the sky so clean, rid of the city’s light pollution, but only a ghostly gray band stretching across the horizon, a sunrise drowned of color.
We had stopped four times already looking for a view of the Northern Lights, now deep in the woods of northern Finland. The first time, he led us with his headlamp toward a river but, doing a trust test on the ice bank, said it wouldn’t hold us. “Let’s go back. I don’t want to die tonight.”
Over the ice-clad streets, Julien flickered the van’s headlights, dipping his head down to inspect the sky. “It really is like hunting,” he said. “We’re racing against the clouds.”
Tonight they moved fast south, coveting the stars, which meant they would block our view of the aurora borealis, he explained. We had to beat them by going faster and farther south out of Rovaniemi, the urban outpost rebuilt after the Second World War to resemble a reindeer’s head. The roads form its antlers, its eye a sports stadium.
My partner’s mom and step dad sat in the middle seats, my partner and I shivering in the backseat. It was so cold that my handprints made no mark on the window. I had to hold my hand to the glass, chilled as an ice bucket, for ten or fifteen seconds before pinholes appeared where my fingertips were. I peered through them, straining, not knowing what scraps of light to look for outside.
I had on three pairs of pants and over those, a snow suit. My toes still crisped over, as if the cold were climbing through me from the floor of the rattling van.
A main condition of the tour was that it didn’t guarantee we would see the aurora borealis. Julien reminded us of that but said he would do his best. To the Italian couple in the front seats, he couldn’t convey this sincerity, speaking Finnish, Swedish, French, Icelandic, and English. They spoke Italian.
When he set up his camera tripod on another frozen bank, whatever he saw in his camera wasn’t promising. The next time he stopped, he didn’t ask us to get out of the van, his confidence shaken. He was tracking where the Northern Lights would appear on his phone, checking one app called Windy and both forecasts from Finland and Norway. He lost service at one point. Getting back into the driver’s seat, his window wouldn’t roll back up. He punched the handle.
Light swept into the dark room of Julien’s camera now. It was taking in more light than our eyes, he told us. Soon his first long-exposure shot was ready.
“They’re not Instagram worthy,” he joked.
In the display window, a black meadow in the sky bloomed in lime drifts, fields of lush electric growth, a forest just past my imagining. To Julien, this sight was easily rivaled by other nights in his youth. A true traveler though, I would come to embody this divine darkness for just one night.
One of my bucket list things to see. SO beautiful, friend.
Damn Jayne. Your imagery is incredible