By Geoff Carter
Photos by Geoff Carter
My wife and I went up to our cabin in the Wisconsin Northwoods about a week ago to enjoy the fall colors and to relax a little bit. The leaves were a little past their peak, but it was still beautiful. Golden ash, scarlet maple, and yellow birch trees, interspersed with majestic northern pines and tightly packed hemlocks, ringed the lake in a grand garland of color.
The loons and geese had already gone to their winter homes, so the woods were even quieter than usual. We only saw the occasional chipmunk or squirrel, nothing bigger. We found deer tracks on the beach every morning but only rarely saw them.
The days were cloudless, the sky as blue as a robin’s egg, but it was brisk, warm in the sun but a little chilly in the shade. The nights were cold, cold enough to see your breath, and the night skies were as sharp as the evening cold.
We used to spend summers at our lake when we were young. They were glorious. One of my favorite things to do was lay out on the pier at night and gaze at the stars. Once your eyes adjusted to the dark, the stars would reveal themselves one by one, then in groups. Constellations were recognized and the outlines of the Milky Way would slowly appear out of the darkness. Planets glowing steadily red and yellow, not flickering like stars, rose in the south side of the sky. Every now and then, a bright object would move across the sky, not quickly like meteor, but at a constant speed. My brother told me it was man-made, a satellite.
We spoke about the huge distances measured in light years. Trying to fathom the distance a beam of light could travel from one birthday to the next was daunting. I once stood at the door of my bedroom flicking the light switch on and off, trying to see if I could see the light moving from the overhead bulb to the floor. It was too fast for me.
Alpha Centauri, the closest star to our system, is 4.14 light years away. As I lay on the pier, I thought about what I was doing four years ago, when the light I was seeing at that moment flew off that distant star. Then I thought about the more distant stars on the far edge of our universe, thousands or perhaps millions of light years away. That starlight may have started its journey when the Aztec Empire was at its peak or when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. I realized I was staring straight into the past.
One night last week, after my wife and I had dinner, we walked down to the beach and watched the sunset. Jupiter and Venus were already visible. We went back up to the cabin and waited. We had heard that a series of solar storms had been erupting and that the Northern Lights might be visible from our location.
I went back down to the beach after full dark. A bank of what appeared to be greenish gray clouds lay on the horizon—nothing very spectacular, at least to the naked eye. Taking the advice of TV meteorologists everywhere, I started taking pictures with my smartphone. When I viewed them, I was treated to the sight of red and green shimmering curtains of light. As my eyes adjusted, I began to detect some color without the aid of my camera.
I was able to see the lights move, too. Sometimes they rippled like curtains touched by the wind. Sometimes they flared straight up, like a flame licking a log. Once or twice tendrils of lights shot over my head faster than any shooting star. I wondered how big that tendril was—a hundred miles wide? A thousand? It took up a good part of the visible sky.
Northern lights are caused by charged particles from the sun—the solar wind—interacting with the magnetic field of the Earth. These solar particles are drawn to the poles where they collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere, causing them to release energy in the form of light, green, red, blue, purple, and even white. As I stood on our beach gazing up at the spectacular light show, I was struck by the irony that this huge display, visible for tens of thousands of miles across the globe, was caused by the collision of subatomic matter too small to be seen, even with our most powerful microscopes. This stood in contrast to the colossal stars whose lights were strewn across distances almost too great to be imagined.
Unlike the starlight that had journeyed across the vast reaches of space, these northern lights were produced right in the neighborhood, closer even than the sun. This angry sky did not belong to the vast firmament of space. It was ours.
I went back up to the cabin to get my wife. We came to the beach and watched the lights together. They ebbed and flowed with the rhythms of the solar wind, moving much like our own clouds. Eventually it got cold and we went in.
I woke early the next morning and stepped onto the porch. In the early morning, just before the dawn, wisps of fog hung over the lake, stretching before the sun ushered them out, resembling small versions of the giant tendrils racing across the sky the night before.
There is a symmetry here. According to the Elizabethans and their concept of macro and microcosms, everything in the natural world is reflected on multiple levels. There is some truth to this—reflected even in modern science. Embryology demonstrates that genetic development begins in very similar places. The veins of a leaf resemble the human circulatory system or a river and its tributaries. The Elizabethans saw this and named it “the great chain of being” and even incorporated it into their political system. The royal order was seen to be as a reflection of the cosmos: Jupiter was king surrounded by lesser entities representing earls, dukes, and barons.
Light is illumination, color, and energy. Metaphorically, it can mean truth, understanding, clarity, and life. To watch lights in the sky is to begin to reach an understanding of what we are and—a much more difficult truth—what we are not. The stars reflect not our relation to the cosmos, as the Elizabethans believed, but our profound insignificance. We are nothing compared to the denizens of the night sky.
The northern lights, on the other hand illustrate another truth—they illuminate the beauty, the joy, and the wonder of our existence. They are truly awesome.
The stars don’t guide us, but we are guided by their presence, and the northern lights can show the world from a different perspective, a different light, if we only open our eyes.
Notes
- https://science.nasa.gov/sun/auroras/
- https://www.enotes.com/topics/elizabethan-drama-fs/questions/what-microcosm-macrocosm-how-do-they-relate-one-314706#:~:text=Student%20Question-,What%20are%20the%20microcosm%20and%20macrocosm%20in%20Elizabethan%20drama%20and,highlighting%20cosmic%20and%20societal%20order.