Tints of Majesty

Have you ever been to Norway?

I have.

I was born in a small village outside of Tromsø, well north of the Arctic Circle. Here, during the summer, the midnight sun bathes the town in perpetual daylight, from May to July.

And in the winter, the sun never rises, the sky shifting hues from stygian blue to the sort of twilight-tinged light blue that hints at an approaching dawn. A dawn which doesn’t come until the middle of January. The only light comes from the innumerable stars and the aurora, shifting green and blue lights bathing the sky in a glowing neon watercolor.

Of course, I never understood that as a kid. My grandmother would call me outside to see the lights, and I, begrudgingly, would tear myself away from my Super Nintendo or Sega or PlayStation 2 to come watch with her. As a small, small child, of course, I was captivated by them. But back then I could be captivated by a set of jingling keys. As I grew older, the lights became less and less special. Less and less captivating. Big deal, I thought to myself, I can see them every year. And they’re always the same.

These were the things I said, and thought, before I grew up. Before I went overseas, to America, and saw the sky the way the rest of the world did. I spent my college days in New York City. The sky was illuminated by a million lights, but none of them stars or solar wind. The neon of Times Square, the dotted lines tracing the streets below my balcony, the sporadic sprinkling of lights across the skyline as a million people came and went through those rooms, turning lights on and off as they went. With all of the lights on the ground, and in the thousand Towers of Babel covering the landscape, even the moon was lucky to push through the glow to the ground, let alone stars. The sky was silent and still. The color of a TV, tuned to a dead channel, I recall one author describing such a sky. As if all the activity on the ground had robbed the sky of its energy, so that it sat, inert and silent over us. Perhaps there was beauty to be had in a sky silenced by mankind’s noise, for some cyberpunk aficionado somewhere, but for me, the New York sky was dull, and dead, and ominous. Like a rotting tree. One could almost imagine the decay finally bringing the sky down upon us. Then again, maybe it fell long ago, and the buildings were holding it up. It certainly appeared that way, from the ground.

As I got used to life in America, I had to learn new ways to tell time, my old ways tied to my old home. Super Bowl displays in the grocery stores meant that the polar night was ending. Memorial Day deals meant that the midnight sun was about to rise again. Labor Day ads meant— Good God, does this country have any holidays not celebrated via a display at the end of the aisle?

As I graduated, and sought work, I abandoned my plans to return to Norway. There was nothing in Norway, I remembered. Nothing worth returning to. At least, that’s what I told myself. That’s how it felt at the time. New York City was alive and bustling, Tromsø was sleepy, borderline comatose.

My work took me all over the United States, my new home. I found myself in the swamps of Louisiana, the forests of Oregon, the prairies of Nebraska, and the deserts of Utah. It was there, in Deseret, in that forgotten promised land of pioneers, that I remembered the sky, the way it had been. The towns there were small, and the spaces between large. So, on a quiet, clear night, which, in the desert, you have a nearly infinite supply of, you can drive out into the desert, park on the side of an old gravel road, and see the sky like it really is. Like it’s supposed to be. With the whole of the Milky Way splayed out before you, stars and planets and constellations and comets and meteors and nebulae all painted onto a single scene.

But no watercolor wash of green and blue neon over top.

No aurora, not way down here.

It was after one such drive that I returned to town to find that I had a missed call from family. Now the missed call was hardly surprising, I often lost service between towns out here. As I said, small towns, big spaces. So I called back, like any good prodigal son would. They asked me how I was doing, how America was, which city I was in, and which state that was in, and which state was that, again? They asked how work was. They stalled for as long as they could, before they finally broke the news.

Grandmother had passed away.

I felt a shock as I heard that, and understood it. Then a second sort of aftershock at the fact that I had been so affected by it. Grandmother was old. She had died peacefully. She had lived a happy and full life, and had left behind a legacy, and children, and grandchildren like myself. Everything had gone exactly as it should have. As it always was supposed to. Everyone dies, and she had had the good fortune to live a long and healthy life, and to see the labors of her youth bear fruits, whether those were with her hobbies, or her family, or… Pretty much anything else. Grandmother had a Midas touch, of sorts. A way of leaving every thing she touched, everyone she spoke to, every place she visited, better than she had found them. And she had lived long enough to see those works flower. So then why was I so shocked that she was gone? I hadn’t talked to her in years. Maybe that was why.

The next question came, and I should have been ready for it, but wasn’t: would I be back in town for the funeral? Of course, the easy answer would have been “no”. No one would have blamed me. International travel is hard to do at a moment’s notice, and expensive besides. And I’m just a twenty-something-year-old honorary American, trying to scrounge up a savings while paying off my “college debt”, a concept that my European relatives were finally beginning to understand. So I’m sure they were as surprised as I was when they heard my answer.

I said my goodbyes and ended the call. I stared up at the night sky, remembering those nights when I had been young. The stars were still bright here, though dimmer than they had been out in the desert. But that was to be expected, this wasn’t a large town, but it was a town. The speckling of streetlights was marginal at best, but enough to mute the skyscape above me. There’s probably something poetic or philosophical about that, I thought to myself as I stared at the sky, the idea of the light from these massive fusion engines, intense furnaces with the masses of a thousand Earths, spewing light and heat and radiation into all directions, millions of miles, to be blotted out by a 60-watt bulb on a street corner. As I mused over what I was convincing myself was a very philosophical thought, indeed, perhaps my magnum opus, something peculiar happened. I’m not going to try to explain it, or justify it. It might not have even really happened. But I’ll tell you what I saw, as I saw it. If I’m wrong, then, I’m wrong.

I saw green light.

Just for a moment, just long enough to really notice it, but not long enough to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.

I’m not going to try to explain it and tell you what it was.

Maybe it was a God-wink, a sort of tongue-in-cheek reminder from some higher power that they were watching. Hopefully a hint that I had made the right choice.

Maybe it was my grandmother’s spirit, visiting me, checking on me, thanking me for choosing to go to her funeral. Not that I did it for her. I’d like to believe I did, but unfortunately, I know that it was a selfish decision. I needed the funeral to assuage my own guilt. I needed to visit home, to see the lights again. But I’ll tell myself it was for her, like we all do when we go to someone’s funeral.

Maybe it was the northern lights, somehow impossibly traveling halfway to the tropics just to be seen for a moment by the likes of me.

Maybe it was a UFO, and I just witnessed an abduction. Maybe I was abducted, and they just wiped my memory.

Maybe someone in town launched a firework, and its glow illuminated the dust in the air.

Maybe it was a Ghost— not the spiritual kind, but the meteorological phenomena. Of course, those are supposed to accompany Sprites— again the meteorological type— and are supposed to only happen during thunderstorms. But strange things happen in the desert when no one is around to see.

Maybe it was a hallucination triggered by acute depression, the sudden shock of loss.

Or maybe it’s some natural or spiritual thing that the natives in this area once had a name for, that we Europeans never noticed, noses in our screens.

Whatever it was, it haunted me as I walked up the steps to my small apartment over someone’s garage, booted up my laptop, and bought the plane tickets.

Now I’m sitting in the snow, in that little village outside Tromsø, gazing up at the night sky, and remembering. My family is inside, doing the sort of family-comforting things you do in this sort of situation. Mostly, that means making food. My grandmother, of course, isn’t in there. I’d like to believe that she’s out here, with me. Or up there, in the aurora. The green and blue lights are dancing once again, just like they always used to.

I hear footsteps behind me, and turn, almost expecting to see her there. Instead, it’s my youngest cousin, his nose buried in his phone.

I bid him to come over to me.

He glances up, unconvinced, face underlit by the backlight of the phone.

I tell him to put the phone away and come watch the lights.

He rolls his eyes, much like I did those days in the ‘90s and ‘00s. I expected as much. I give him a stern look, and he huffs, locks the phone, and walks over to me, sitting in the snow beside me.

Together, we look up at the northern lights.