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
