When I was a child, I thought that I could see the other side of the world across the ocean.

I never believed myself to be superhuman in this endeavor; on the contrary, I believed that it was something everything but my (at that naïve age) old mother with her ‘failing eyesight’ could see. It was only just sitting on the horizon; a whole new experience just waiting to be reached. Sitting on the beach by my grandparents' house in New Hampshire, the world seemed so small—if I hopped on a boat I could be in another continent by noon, and there were no doubts in my mind that I would someday make that trek...

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Northern Lights (Nuuk, Greenland)


23:42.

The clock blinked, signaling another minute closer to midnight—another minute closer to turning a quarter century old. I sank lower in the Ikea-imitation blue couch provided in my apartment when I moved to the country, semi-entranced by the fact that for the first time in months, it was actually dark outside the nearby glass doors. I’d gotten so used to the sun barely dipping below the horizon during the arctic summer that when the sky turned to darker shades of blue instead of bright hues of red at the deepest hours of night, I felt a bit of fear within my soul that reminded me of being afraid of the dark as a child. How the Greenlanders made it the reverse, the months without seeing the sun, was a mystery to me despite having friends and coworkers try to explain the psychology behind it.

23:51.

The bottle of champagne I had been given at breakfast had been shared with the office and finished off before the noon hour hit. With the price of alcohol sky high even compared to where I had been living in Washington, D.C. and with the only other American in the city, Sarah, in one of the northern cities for work, I could not justify buying a bottle of wine for myself. Instead I sipped on boxed milk and gnawed on an apple flown in from abroad, and wondered idly if the couple who were couch surfing at my apartment would be back before I went to bed from their excursion to experience the nightlife of one of the northernmost capitals in the world.

It had hit me that, like most other places I had lived or traveled abroad, you don’t really have time to reflect or appreciate what you’re living until you’re back at your ‘home base’ and can compare it to what you have in front of you. Again, the surreal nature of living and working in Greenland seemed more than I could put into words or even a coherent thought process—I had walked through a mountain to get to work every morning, had seen a lady wearing an 80's prom dress while dancing and singing in broken English to Mambo No. 5 at the bar, had watched whales swim by my office while working on tax data. Until you leave the aura of uncertainty and the new, you cannot fully synthesize and break it down into understanding—just collect more ‘data’ for use later.

These images slowly, quickly passed through my mind as I watched the clock. The luck and experiences I had both worked hard for and been blessed with over the past years weighed heavy on my mind, though I couldn't put a finger on what emotion I was feeling. Apprehension for the coming months of leaving Greenland, backpacking through Europe and returning to the US unemployed perhaps, or just the gravity of the last few months and trying to make sense of something that made none.

23:58, 23:59.

I raised the glass of milk to the black television in a salute. From outside in the distance I heard some slight commotion, and seconds later a loud banging on the apartment door behind me. Josh and Laura came barreling into the common area, and wordlessly Josh had thrown open the door to the porch and jumped outside. Noticing me out of the corner of her eye staring blankly at the two excitable Canadians; Laura, half short of breath from racing up the stairs, said I need to get outside that second, right now, they were here.
The realization of what she meant and the hope I hadn’t misunderstood her melded into one as I leapt from the couch and briskly walked to the door, stopping only to turn around my first step outside and note in an ironic disbelief that, despite this being reality (or some variation thereof, Greenland tends to make you question that), the clock had just with my eyes on it, turned to midnight—it was my 25th birthday, the same second as I first saw it. 

Above us, in a very faint green hue, were the Northern Lights dancing in the sky.

There was little to say in those first few minutes. Josh kept repeating the word ‘amazing’, Laura said a number of soft ‘oh, my God’s, and I’m sure I let out a few sighs of disbelief with ‘wows’ of my own. On the rocks below us some locals had stopped to watch the lights as well, and I noticed in the far distance that a car had even stopped in the road for the passengers to get out and watch the sky. Tourist, transient, and locals alike were frozen with our eyes to the sky, all resolved to speechless and smiling humans, watching something beyond our comprehension.

Even knowing the science behind them, the reaction that people have experiencing them cannot be explained.
After a while, Laura began to snap photographs and Josh took off to the nearby rock face to try and get a better vantage point. I watched the lights and recalled back to my few weeks in Denmark, when I had provided voice for one of the short promotional videos for Greenland—a two minute spot showcasing the Northern Lights, with my voice providing the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ when the camera spanned upwards to the glowing green sky. I had felt silly sitting in a windowless white room in (hot) central Copenhagen with an Australian-Danish producer, shoving a fluffy microphone into my mouth and mimicking for me to sound more excited, be more audible. After all, I was ‘seeing the walruses play football in the sky from a cabin in Kangerlussuaq with the Inuit people hosting me’, not sweating in a cosmopolitan European capital city trying to block out the sound of construction equipment building a bridge across the harbor outside. When the spot had been developed and sent to our office as a test run a few months later, I was already in Greenland and felt foolish when I heard myself. It worked for the video perhaps, but my voice had always sounded forced or odd to me in that clip.

It wasn't until those minutes standing outside with only the sound of Laura’s camera snapping beside me and a far off Josh’s loud and constant exclamations that I understood, even then, that experiencing something like this couldn't be faked. The soft, breathless sighs from my couch surfers next to me on the porch earlier seemed so much more full of life and understanding than my terse ‘it’s so beautiful’ in the video.

To this day I don’t know why I became (and still am) obsessed with the Northern Lights. Until my last day in Greenland I would sit outside from midnight on during any clear nights, hoping to catch a glimpse of the increasingly brighter green through the wisps of clouds. I even slept in the living room of the apartment with all the blinds drawn so I could watch the sky as I slept through the glass doors, and wake up from dreams of the lights to seeing them softly turning above me.

Even now, nearly a year later and living in one of the world’s capitals, I dream of them above me; of glancing up above, only to notice that the sky was on fire.





-View from my apartment in early September 2012