Portage River Farm

Friday evening was the Fall Festival at Aidan's new school. He and I had a nice time playing games, eating donuts, listening to a local Celtic band made up of kids, taking a hayride, touring a local fire truck and police car. He was especially pleased with the cupcakes that he won in the cake walk and couldn't wait to get home to sample them. Janet and the other children were away for the weekend so we drove home to a dark and empty house.

Our farm is located far from any large residential areas and can be very dark at night, so dark that the University of Michigan has an observatory on a hill just southeast of us. On clear evenings the stars come out by the billions. Before sending everyone off to bed, we often gather the whole family on the deck to lie back in the chairs to marvel at the beauty hanging above. We always remark on the massive Milky Way, the big and little dippers, the Pole Star. We have watched meteor showers and wondered at the strangeness of satellites drifting silently past.

We pulled up our bumpy driveway and came to a stop in front of the house. I exited the car and started walking toward the front door. Aidan hurried to catch up with me to calm his uneasiness about the darkness around us. As I reached out to place a reassuring hand on his shoulder I glanced upward to take advantage of this brief opportunity to see the night sky.

Immediately my eyes were drawn to something unusual to the northwest. I stopped walking and involuntarily said, "what is that?" Aidan gripped a hand-full of my jacket and followed my gaze upward and repeated my question with an edge of alarm in his voice. A massive vertical column of white light shone down from the sky. It looked a bit like a ray of sunlight breaking through the clouds or perhaps as if someone were shining a huge spotlight straight up into the night, except that the sides of the column were perfectly parallel rather than spreading as light tends to do.

A quick scan of the rest of the sky told me the identity of the mysterious apparition and I quickly reassured Aidan that we were looking at the Northern Lights. The column turned out to be one of many that dotted the night sky above us. Most were on the horizon where they joined to form vertical curtains of ghostly white light. His apprehension immediately turned to wonder and we walked around the house exclaiming how beautiful they were and wishing that the rest of the family were there to share it with us.

I had only seen the Northern Lights once before. We used to own a sail boat and spent our summers exploring the Great Lakes. One night in late fall found me out in the middle of Lake Huron as I sailed south to move the boat to its winter berth. The lake is so massive that it takes more than a day to cross and is far too deep for anchoring, leaving little choice but to sail on through the night. I remember observing a pale curtain of greenish light that spanned the northern horizon and seemed to follow me for nearly the entire night. Since it was my first time observing them, it took me a number of hours of staring at them before my mind finally sorted out what I was seeing.

Aidan and I finally tore ourselves away from the display and we went inside to resume our nightly bedtime routine. After putting him to bed, I returned again and again to check on the lights. The show lasted for about four more hours until the sky finally cleared of all but stars around 2AM. I made many attempts to figure out how to capture the lights on my digital camera with very limited success. Hopefully you will be able to make out the faint vertical smudges of light above the trees that do little justice to the silent beauty of this eerie phenomena.