Magic in the Not Quite Longest Night of the
Year
Sunday night Ann and I attended a Christmas
party in the neighbourhood, one that’s been thrown some 25 years running. The
talk throughout the house this year was of grown children, grandchildren,
retirement plans, all-inclusive holidays in hot Third
World places, bad knees and hip replacements. We thanked our hosts
and then slipped away a little after 10 o’clock. We swiped back a couple of the
beers we’d brought which we’d left to chill on their rear deck. We walked home
through the curving back lane, smoking and sipping from our tins, the snow
squeaking beneath the soles of our boots in the cold. Brrr.
Ann said, ‘Look up.’ I saw the pale yellow
half moon in the navy sky. ‘No, the other way.’ Wow. Two, no three, no two
massive columns of blazing emerald green light danced like the stilts of Atlas
in some kind of cosmic street performance. The spectacle easily trumped the
synth-synched lasers at a Who concert. We watched the great mantis legs
dissolve and then reassemble themselves within seconds into a rippling ribbon
that arced across the night sky into infinities beyond the boundaries of a
compass rose.
We stood transfixed as our beers gelled
into 7-11 adult Slurpees. We reminded each other not to lick our tins. Ann said
that she couldn’t remember what caused the northern lights. I tried to think.
Colour is a function of light. Light is made of particles, photons. ‘I think,’
I ventured, ‘white light hits the polar ice and is reflected back into the
atmosphere which acts as a sort of cut crystal or prism or something. Like the
cover of that Pink Floyd album.’ There, that sounded pretty authoritative for
somebody who’s often uncertain of the colour of the sky in his own little
world. ‘Green’s somewhere in the middle of the visible spectrum.’ I recalled
overseeing the production of elaborate marketing materials and a few seasons’
worth of player cards for the Seattle SuperSonics and added, ‘It’s a bastard
colour to print.’
Later I stood outside shivering on the
front porch hoping for an encore aurora. Instead I heard the deep who-whoo hoot of Alberta ’s provincial bird, the great horned
owl. It was very close, almost overhead. I did a quick mental inventory of the
cats: the tabbies were inside curled up asleep after figuring out that the paw
quivering cold out the back door also existed out the front door. I called Ann
outside to listen too. Tingling from the sound and hoping for another sighted
tick mark in our Birds of Edmonton
book (last summer I spotted a bald eagle), I went down the steps to the
driveway and peered up at the midnight blue seeking a black silhouette. The who-whoo-ing faded, the creature had
flown and was evidently now hovering somewhere above the nearby woody river valley.
No comments:
Post a Comment