Today I’m posting two columns of yore – both about unusual presentations in the sky. Welcome to some old newspaper columns that are not about the election.
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Northern Lights
October 17, 1997
Did you see them? Last Friday night our part of the earth was favored with a visitation of northern lights, it was the second time in my life I have witnessed the ethereal show. As a friend who also saw them said, “They are the most beautiful thing in the world. I think they’re what heaven looks like.”
Our family was spending a long weekend in Michigan and we’d happily squandered most of the day hiking around Manistee National Forest. The trail we walked was the cusp of everything. It was the meeting grounds of northern pine woods and southern hardwood forests. The dirt there is a mingle of rich dirt and glacial sand. We walked with trees to our east, dunes and Lake Michigan glimmered to the west. Nature’s luminaries - mushrooms, clumps of velvet moss, colored leaves, fallen pine twigs - swagged the edge of the path.
After a while we went into town for lunch. When we got back the kids played Good Guys and Bad Guys along the lakeshore while my husband and I relaxed into Lake Michigan’s bean bag chair - the dunes. (As in, you just squish your bottom around a bit until it fits.) And then my romantic husband presented me with - not an “eternity” diamond ring - but a Styrofoam cup of coffee he’d bought back in town and got the kids to hide in their cup holders at the back of the car. (I’m only mentioning this because certain folks have made remarks of a personal nature regarding the devotion with which we drink coffee. I hadn’t realized this was so humorous to some of you.)
We watched the lake, listened to the rush of the surf and the shrieks of our kids. We breathed in the cologne of Great Lake and piney winds. We sipped the tepid coffee and remarked to each other that moments like these outweigh hundreds of pounds of worry, fretting, unraked leaves, and leaky bathroom plumbing.
That evening we met relatives for dinner at a local restaurant so it was very late when we finally returned to my aunt and uncle’s home south of Ludington. That’s when I realized the gossamer lights across the sky were more than moonlit clouds.
“Are those northern lights?”
My husband, the guy who took astronomy classes at the University of Chicago as a “fun break” from physics, almost drove our minivan into Uncle Ken’s cornfield.
He said, and I quote, “Whoa...”
He put the car in reverse to back up to the highest point of the driveway. We watched the Aurora Borealis trip the light fantastic over the midnight cornfield.
The kids, who had been chattering non-stop for twelve hours, shut up. One of them said, “I’m scared.”
My husband murmured back, “Yeah. Me, too. Sort of.”
I leaned out my window, breathed in the frosty air, and watched.
The lights were mostly the curtain kind. The entire horizon ebbed and flowed with pale drapes of misty white light. When I was a little kid, my mother hired the neighbor lady to sew pearl white fiberglass drapes for the wall of windows in our living room. I remember how much I loved to fiddle with the pull cords, drawing the curtains back and forth across the windows.
That’s what the northern lights looked like. Like some enormous celestial child playing with its mother’s new curtains. Sometimes the light bunched up in one spot, sometimes they were pulled even across the sky, sometimes they rippled into folds and pleats.
Occasionally pencils of light shot up into the highest sky. They glimmered red, almost green, then white again. They pierced the starry night like arc lights advertising the latest strip mall.
The encyclopedia says most auroras occur 60 to 600 miles above the earth. Some, like the ones last week, extend thousands of miles across the sky and are visible over great chunks of the earth’s geography. I know folks who were in southern Michigan who saw them. Our friend Dave said he saw them in Iowa.
Northern lights come from sun storms. Violent solar winds of electrically charged particles blow away from the sun. After traveling through space, some make their way to earth’s atmosphere where they become trapped in our magnetic fields. Since the magnetic fields approach the surface of the earth in the north and the south, that’s where the greatest concentration and displays of the aurora borealis (in the Southern Hemisphere they’re called aurora australis) occur. When those charged particles strike atoms and molecules in our atmosphere they give off energy that appears as the northern lights.
That’s the scientific explanation. Actually, just knowing this much is comparatively new knowledge. The magnetic “Van Allen” bands that trap the sun’s particles were only discovered in 1957. Guess what the name of the guy was who did the discovering.
It’s such a moment when it happens. You’re speeding through the night in your car. You feel guilt that you kept the kids up so late. You wonder if you remembered to pack the toothpaste. You wonder if the client called the office while you were away, if you remembered to turn the lights off in the kitchen.
And suddenly the sky is moving and it’s a celestial slam. We remember we’re on the cusp here. Emerald moss at our feet. Starlight weaving pearl curtains over our head. Our job is to see it.
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Genealogy and a Comet
March 14, 1997
It’s tricky to get the right perspective on one’s place in the universe.
I have a cousin whose last name is - you guessed it - Danielson. He and I didn’t know each other extremely well as kids. I see him even less as an adult so it was quite a shock to walk into a family gathering to discover there is a judge in our family! I learned he’s interested in genealogy and has traced the Danielson family tree back several generations. I asked for a copy of his research. I’m impressed that the original Daniel - the guy who gave the rest of our name - was born in 1699 in a place called Skog, Sweden which, yes, sounds like someone trying to clear their throat.
My cousin also sent a copy of an extremely funny and slightly informative speech about genealogy that he presented to his Rotary Club.
First he explains the wildly exponential mathematics of genealogy. Everybody has 2 birthparents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-greats and so on. Every generation you go back doubles in size. Go back 400 years, you now have one million relatives. Go back 12 centuries, you now have 25 trillion ancestors.
Of course, the snag is that there have only been 100 billion people who are now or have ever lived on Planet Earth. The solution to this mathematical conundrum is called the “pedigree collapse”. (I didn’t make that up but I wish I did.) Experts say no one has more than about 2 million ancestors so at some point we are all semi-related. In plain speak, that means along the line folks have been unwittingly (oh, maybe some of them were “witting”) marrying relatives. The human race has certain similarities to a slew of six-toed kittens out in the barn.
The second interesting point my cousin makes in his speech is this. Study your family tree for a while and you will begin to think that the point of history is you. All those great-greats and great-great-greats got together so that your family could bloom into the full glory of you.
I went to sleep that night with a smug little grin on my large Scandinavian face. Just think, 300 years of Swedish potato farmers ploughed through history in order to produce a weekly columnist in the Upper Midwest.
Several hours later I awoke to the not-so-small sound of my husband padding about the house. I heard him in the hall. I heard him clomp (he can clomp barefoot) down the stairs to our son’s bedroom. I heard the front door open and close several times. I sighed, got up, and literally ran into him as we both rounded the corner in the family room.
“What are you doing?” You can imagine the wifely tone in my voice.
He looked sheepish and defiant at the same time. This a look seventeen years of marriage will often teach a man.
“The comet. You can see the comet so I got the kids up to look at it.”
“Oh.” Many feelings ricocheted through me including the sense that perhaps his family’s pedigree had collapsed before mine.
“Want to see it?”
Well, I bit back all the amazingly acerbic things one could say to a fellow who rouses children at 4:00 AM to look at the sky. I followed him into the living room.
And right there, out the middle of our window, was one of the strangest and most awesome sights I’ve seen in my life. A blurry fist of light. An arm-long path of light suspended from it. My breath caught in my lungs. For a second there, I was pre-science and I was frightened by the beautiful wrongness of the sight.
I whispered, “It’s scary.”
My husband put his arm around me and murmured back. “Yeah, comets always scare me, too.”
Two million ancestors behind us, each one a person who lived and breathed, who took what was given and yearned for more.
An infinity of space and stars around us. Whipped through by orbiting comets of dust and gas.
It’s tricky knowing our place. But I think it’s worth our imagination to remember we are not a beginning and we are not a turning point. That everything we have is random and is a gift.
I loved reading about your family seeing the Northern Lights, Mary Beth. I've been in places where the Northern Lights were expected - even in Fairbanks, Alaska two years ago - and there was no wakeup call from the front desk of the hotel. I hope to see them before I die. Especially since your friend commented that this must be what heaven looks like. Will I get a preview - ever???
Both excellent stories. I love northern light tales!
Coffee story made me laugh. I remember spending the night at your house in Chicago, and finding out that you had a coffee maker in your bedroom. I still think that is totally awesome. 😃