Readers Digest Australia Sampler 2022

waited. The intensity of the aurora depends on many factors: the rough- ly 11-year solar activity cycle and its many effects; whether the solar wind is steady or gusting; and the sun’s ro- tation in relation to Earth’s. Once you are in the right place at the right time, all you can do is wait. AFTER LECTURES, we mingled in the lodge, an artificial family. I joined games of Trivial Pursuit. I hung out with a doctor from Melbourne and talked to a retired social worker from the US. About 9.30pm, someone would say, “It’s starting.” We would get dressed and go out, and move slowly from one viewpoint to another. A few gentle arcs would gradually widen and join and become an arch with trailing ribbons, wavering, glowing, seeming to shimmer. Before I had seen aurora borealis, I had imagined it erupting above me, an abrupt display of light spilling out of the sky. I put myself in the centre. But I was just spinning slowly be- neath an enormous event. It is hap- pening all the time, this torrent of ionisation and spectral light; mostly we don’t see it. For a few hours each night, I was granted a fractional view of cosmic forces, by the benevolence of darkness and a clear sky. The days were clear and bright and flagrantly cold. After breakfast, peo- ple would break into pairs and small groups to go on snowmobile rides or ski across the lake. I read, napped, played more Scrabble. I went for hikes, stomping along snowmobile tracks in several layers of insulation. The trails passed through mounds of glittering snow dappled with velvet-blue shadow, broken by the marks of other travellers: snowshoe hares, caribou, lynx. Walking was cacophony; every step a chorus of squeaking snow, swishing pants and creaking ice. But when I stood still, silence. A single bird’s note. Then silence again. “It’s starting,” someone says. This is our last night at the lake, and the temperature is -32°C. We stand at the ice’s edge under the black sky. The snow, which is everywhere, reflects the faint fog of starlight, and yet we see one another only as shadows. Above us the sky is a white wash. The wash glows, widens, brightens and begins to spin over my head, a luminous cyclone of pearl and dove and alabaster, suddenly so thick and near I could pluck off a tuft in my hand. Faint flashes of pink and green and blue, barely there, gone. We spin and crane our necks, gasp and laugh. When I first arrived in Yellowknife, I kept reminding myself that I might not see the aurora at all, that it wouldn’t look like the pictures, that the real thing would be less than I expected. And I was wrong. I am not sorry that I couldn’t see what is in the photos. I am sorry that the photos don’t capture what I could see. readersdigest.com.au 11 Chasing The Northern Lights