I spend a fair amount of time looking at the sky, for the sky is nearly always full of magic. Storm clouds churning, autumn leaves flying, birds performing the never-ending miracle of flight. Often at night, I am looking for the moon. Who could fail to love the moon, magnificent in all its guises, shining coolly in all its reflected glory?
What I am never looking for is the Northern Lights. I have spent nearly every day of my life in the American South. By definition, there is no reason to expect a light display down here. Even with an extreme solar storm underway, as it was on May 10, the news seemed unlikely to affect us here in Nashville. “Northern lights become visible further south as solar activity rises — but not in Tennessee,” read the headline in Nashville’s daily newspaper. To long for a glimpse of the Northern Lights in Middle Tennessee is not a helpful exercise for the muscle that performs hope in the human heart.
Besides, early media focused not on the possibility of beauty but on the potential disruptions to the power grid, or to communication and navigation systems. On May 10, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center issued a rare G5 storm warning, the highest level that space officials assign to solar storms. The last G5 storm occurred in 2003. That one knocked out power in Sweden and damaged South African transformers.
This month’s G5 solar storm caused the navigation systems in farm equipment to break down, delaying planting during the height of seed-sowing season. Otherwise, its main effect was widespread astonishment.
There wasn’t so much as a pink streak in the light-flooded sky above my house in Nashville, but out in rural Dickson County, Maria Browning, a writer who knows a thing or two about darkness, was mesmerized. “Can you see the Northern Lights at your house?” she texted me on Friday night. “Spectacular.”
I was already in my bathrobe, but I ran outside to look anyway. Still nothing. But when I pointed my phone into the sky, the camera could see what I could not: a starry field of streaky purple right above my neighbor’s house.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about a profound beauty that I could experience only indirectly though I was in its direct presence. How was this any different from seeing the Northern Lights in a photograph made by someone else?
Because boy, were people making photographs! Across the country, nearly everyone I follow on social media was erupting in joy. “I almost passed out,” wrote Aimee Nezhukumatathil, a Mississippi-based poet and nonfiction writer who was on book tour for her new essay collection and might have missed the whole show if she hadn’t taken a break to come home for Mother’s Day weekend.
“I never thought I’d see the Northern Lights from my home in Kentucky, but the world is full of wonder,” wrote the poet and novelist Silas House.
Indeed it is, though not everyone could find the words for this particularly extravagant version of wonder. Hank Green is famous in many fields of endeavor, chief among them science communication. Nevertheless, all he could write on Friday night was, “YAAAAAALLLLL.”
On Saturday, with more solar-flare activity expected, my husband and I packed some folding chairs and went in search of darker skies. We were looking for an open field on public land that was likely to be at least somewhat free of light pollution. We settled on the model-aircraft field at Edwin Warner Park. As we sat in our chairs at the far end of the field, a meadowlark was singing out the day just as a bachelor mockingbird was flinging his profligate song into the setting sun.
Many other Nashvillians had the same idea. As the sun dipped lower and the sky dipped closer to dark, car after car pulled into the parking lot that ran the length of the field. When night fell, people began to get out of their cars. Singly and in pairs, some with sleepy children in tow, they felt their way in the dark over the uneven terrain. Some of them were murmuring to one another, but most were silent. Dark figures barely distinguishable from the darkness, we were all peering into the sky, looking for something that we had been told was wondrous.
It reminded me of another time I stood in an open field in Percy Warner Park (the other half of a contiguous pair that make up 3,000 acres of public land), waiting among strangers for something miraculous to happen in the sky. In 2017, I was waiting for the moon to move across the surface of the sun and send the daytime plunging into night. This time I was waiting for the darkness to erupt into great rolling waves of light and color, a magic that is no less magical for having a perfectly scientific explanation.
In both cases, I felt small, which I expected to feel, and untroubled by my smallness, which I did not. Standing beneath the open sky, pondering an event that was happening so far away as to be incomprehensible, reminded me again of my own infinitesimal role within a system whose magnificence even the most brilliant of my kind can understand in only the meagerest measure — if only briefly, such moments have a way of making my earthly worries seem more manageable.
But even more than the reassurance offered by any reminder of the scale of the cosmos, and even more than the chance for people whose wildest dreams do not include traveling to Iceland to share in this celestial wonder, there is something heartening about simply standing in the cricket-singing dark with an untold number of other people — in the model-aircraft field at Edwin Warner Park and in the world over — who are standing quietly together, their hushed faces turned as one toward the dark sky, faithfully waiting for some shard of color to break through the darkness.
The Northern Lights did not reappear that Saturday night, but no matter. In her 2016 poem “Letter to the Northern Lights,” Ms. Nezhukumatathil writes, “Of course you didn’t show when we went / searching for you, but we found other lights: firefly, / strawberry moon, a tiny catch of it in each other’s teeth.”
On this impossible, glorious planet, any creature who is tuned for beauty will perforce behold it. Sure enough, a gleaming crescent moon rose in the dark sky above the model-aircraft field. Around it glittered a thousand stars. And along the tree line, rising from the cooling grass, were the first lightning bugs of summer. I had to wonder if even the Northern Lights could touch the beauty of summer’s first fireflies rising up from the dark grass.