A single ribbon of light had appeared from nowhere in the sky above the lake. I squinted. It was barely visible at first, a flickering serpent waking from sleep, but soon it started to move and grow. The ribbon stretched across the lake until, as the minutes passed, both ends disappeared beneath opposite sides of the horizon, and the light sliced the sky in two. As the light inched across the sky in wandering, waving movements, a sliver of blue and green seemingly without purpose or direction, it reminded me of a worm slowly contracting and extending itself as it moves through the soil. And as the ribbon widened, it seemed to harvest colours from all over the world, reflecting the cerulean waters of the Caribbean sea, the lime greens of sphagnum moss, the electric blue of a cobalt crust fungus, the pearlescent aperture inside a seashell. In that moment, the entire universe seemed to be captured, drifting through the sky before me in a glass thread.
Like those brooding swallows back home in the roundhouse, there was something about this sight that fixed me in the present and reminded me that I am but one of many mortal beings the natural world has outlived. How many years had the Northern Lights been dancing across these skies? How many humans had gazed up at them in wonder? I remembered reading an eighteenth-century account of the aurora when I was researching my Master’s thesis on the Nordic landscape writer Knut Hamsun. According to the first volume of the American Philosophical Society’s journal, a correspondent from Pennsylvania recounted his experiences in the Arctic to the board:
That about half an hour after seven in the evening of January 5, 1769, there was seen at that place, a bright crepusculum, rising out of the North … At three quarters after eight, it was so light in the Northern hemisphere, that a person, who felt no decay or infirmity of eye-sight, might easily have read a book printed in Double Pica Roman … At nine o’clock, five columns or pyramids, of a very vivid red, rose perpendicular to the horizon … During the appearance the air was uncommonly severe and chilling; and, though the Heavens were serene and bespangled with stars, the atmosphere felt damp and heavy.
The composition of the earth and its atmosphere has fluctuated since the Big Bang, but these lights have surely been illuminating our night skies for a few million years at least. For a long time this marvel was known only to the indigenous people who first settled here. How much the lights must have astounded polar explorers when they arrived in the Arctic Circle. Would they have thought them witchcraft? A sign from God? Or perhaps energy to be somehow harvested and sold for profit?
For an hour we all lingered on the shores of the lake and watched the display. Then the ribbon dissolved into blurred swathes of light and the sky became a pool of colour, reaching down to the land where the trees formed silhouettes against their kaleidoscopic backdrop. With no wind, the lake was a black mirror, reflecting the aurora and trees and the stars that shone faintly through the lights. In the distance, I could see the Arctic mountains standing in the darkness. These giants are perhaps only properly appreciated in the summer when they are more than dark shapes against a technicolour skyscape. Not yet ready to give up on the lights and shielded from the cold by my salopettes, I lay down in the snow and drank them in like rum punch. After a while the colours started to fade, the ribbon withdrew, and the sky returned to shadows and stars. Dazed and sleepy, I could feel the cold in my fingers and nose – but I had seen it. A rippling, glistening grand jeté from the aurora borealis, it swept through the air and then was gone. Frank and I gathered our things, waved goodbye to our Hispanic friends and started the long walk back to the hostel where warm bunks awaited.
I didn’t see Frank again; the next morning he left the hostel in the early hours to catch his flight. I decided not to set my alarm and instead allowed myself enough sleep to feel revived for a day exploring the city. On waking at ten o’clock the next morning, I peered out of the window to see a darkened street looking exactly as it had the night before. The streets were quiet with few people and even fewer cars, and when I poked my head out of the door there was nothing to listen to except the crunch of snow underfoot as people walked slowly past. I’m not sure what I had expected of the polar night, but I quickly realised that it was what I had seen from my window: a landscape cloaked in dusk.
In the hostel kitchen, I ate slices of fruit bread with jam that I’d bought from a late-night grocery on the walk home the night before. An auburn-haired young French woman called Nathalie was cleaning the kitchen. She explained she had been working in the hostel for a few months, changing the beds and cleaning in exchange for accommodation. We shared a coffee and chatted for a while about our travels and graduate life. She had given up a career as a psychiatrist after experiencing anxiety brought on by her work and now she was slowly wandering across Europe in the hope of finding a new life. I asked her whether she thought long winter nights had an adverse effect on the people who lived in northern Norway. She said she had wondered the same, but after some time realised it was people who had moved here from further south who suffered the most. Norwegians who had spent their lives at this latitude didn’t mind the dark as much because by the end of their summer – the season of the midnight sun – they craved the cosy solitude of winter and welcomed their snow-dusted landscapes again. Nathalie said she had noticed that people who moved here from brighter, warmer climates found the polar night oppressive, even if they were only relocating from a few kilometres south in Bergen or Stavanger. For these newcomers, the polar night could be incredibly hard going.
After breakfast, I stepped out into the quiet streets of Tromsø and looked around at this new landscape. Every surface was heaped with snow except for the roads, which had been salted to ease the passage of 4x4s with thick winter tyres. The streets were peaceful, empty. I walked down into the hub of the city and found coffee shops with high windows decorated with strings of lights and pot plants, anything to keep the blackness of winter at bay. Nobody was in a hurry here – if they tried, they would fall over – so residents half-walked, half-shuffled between their destinations, slow but never lingering. Over everything hung a cloud of evening light, an unremitting greyness that, by the end of my trip, would make me feel tired and confused whenever I stepped outside. I’ve never been brilliant at waking up in the mornings, no matter how beautiful the birdsong is or how fresh the air, and I rely on the sunlight to pour in and remind me that it’s time to get up and do something with my day. Here, although there was plenty to see and do, I never felt revived or full of energy because for five days I couldn’t feel the warmth of sunlight on my skin or the brightness of day in my eyes. It felt like an eternal grogginess, a struggle to kick-start my mind and body.
There was beauty in it too. From 11 o’clock each morning came two hours of what seemed to me like dawn light, lifting the fog of night and allowing a sliver of lucidity into the city. It wasn’t sunlight – the sun was still far beyond the horizon – but it was just close enough for a few sunbeams to creep across the mountains and brush the streets with a golden pallor before the afternoon darkness returned. Without direct exposure to even the smallest ray of sun, it never felt warm, but it was an uplifting feeling to see the city emerge out of the shadows for an hour or two.
In a place like this, trying to avoid the night would mean staying inside for three months. It is impossible to escape it. But walking through the streets past shops, rows of houses, doctors and cinemas, I wondered if you have to claim the polar night in order to live through it; you can’t hide from it, you have to bring it to life and make it your own. The fairy lights strung between windows were a beacon of hope and happiness in the gloom of Tromsø, and hanging from every surface during my trip were white and gold decorations for Christmas, bright stars and Nordic elk outlined in phosphorus to make them glow in the dark. I crossed the broad river that cuts through the city to visit the Ishavskatedralen, or Arctic Cathedral, jutting above the city like a shard of ice. As I walked towards it that day, lines of hooded crows were roosting along the cathedral’s sharp edges, making the building seem like a go
lden reminder to the people of Tromsø that light will always triumph over darkness.
One afternoon I stopped for hot chocolate in one of the cafes along Storgata. Its front walls were made of floor-to-ceiling glass with Nordic inscriptions; inside, raw copper lamps dangled from the ceiling above timber surfaces covered in candles. The cafe was warm and koselig, but its rustic aesthetic echoed scenes I had seen when visiting the Polarmuseet (Polar Museum) the previous day. The museum houses a collection of artefacts from the Arctic trapping and polar-exploration industries that Norway was built on. I encountered sights that horrified me including several dead polar bears strung from the ceiling, a stuffed replica of a seal about to be clubbed, and an exhibition on the famed Isbjørnkongen (Polar Bear King) Henry Rudi, who is believed to have slaughtered 713 bears in his lifetime. I try to stay relatively open-minded and appreciate the complexities of history, but I can honestly say this was one of the most awful places I’ve ever been.
The Northern Lights are perhaps Tromsø’s most recognisable beacon of hope in the darkness. A walk through the town reveals a roaring trade in aurora magnets, postcards and guided tours to the edge of the city to see the lights for yourself, but the residents’ connection with the aurora goes beyond tourism.
The aurora is a wild, uncontrollable light in the dark and, while it can’t equate to a sunny day in terms of warmth or Vitamin D, it is easy to see why the people of the Arctic Circle have celebrated this natural wonder for millennia. Inuit tribes around the world share myths and folk tales about the Northern Lights and the aurora’s connection with a higher power. Some tribes believe the Lights are the spirits of the dead playing football with a walrus head. Interestingly, the Inuit of Nunivak Island in Alaska claim the opposite and instead believe the Lights are walrus spirits playing with a human skull. In Gaelic folklore, the Northern Lights are known as the Na Fir Chlis, or the Merry Dancers, and the displays of light are thought to be epic fights among sky warriors; the stories say that blood from wounded sky warriors fell to earth and caused red spots to appear on the bloodstone rocks in the Scottish Hebrides. The Finns named the Lights revontulet – for revon (fox) and tulet (fires) – because of an old folk tale in which an Arctic fox is running so far into the northern lands that his fur brushes the mountains and sparks fly off into the sky, creating the Northern Lights.
My first night with the aurora had given me a taste for more, so I booked onto a group visit to the edges of the city to go ‘aurora hunting’ by following waves of electromagnetic activity across Troms county in a little minibus. Our group leader and aurora expert, Emiles, was from Latvia. I asked him how he coped in Norway with three months of darkness; he said he spent a lot of time snowshoeing, a recreational activity involving hiking through the snow using specially made shoes.
Emiles had brought snowsuits for anyone not wearing enough layers. After half the group had pulled them on, we all piled into the minibus and drove towards the mountains. The app I had on my phone informed me the conditions were right tonight. Via the app I watched a minute-by-minute update of a map of northern Europe that showed high electromagnetic activity with what looked like a cloud of nuclear waste moving slowly towards Norway. After 20 minutes or so we stopped by the side of the road. The eight of us had been chatting for the entire journey. Most of us were jammed into the middle of the vehicle, so peering through the windows was impossible. As the doors rolled open, out I fell, landing underneath the most majestic sky I had ever seen.
If I were to compare the aurora I’d seen at Prestvannet lake to a freshwater stream with colours bubbling through the ether, this aurora could only be described as a frenzied, blistering river of lava that was ripping the sky into pieces. With the lights of the city far behind us, the air was ablaze with colour. Blues and greens still shone from the core, but along the edges, the burnt pinks and oranges of grapefruit zest and coral, the violet of aubergines and mallow flowers. The sky was open to us all, and our hotchpotch group of travellers from across the globe joined together for one moment to bathe in electromagnetic beauty.
Emiles gathered up a pile of logs from the back of the bus and lit a fire on the icy road, and we watched the ice disintegrate beneath the flames. For the next hour, we took it in turns to wander beneath the aurora, capturing long-exposure photos, observing the ripples and tides of light as it streamed over our heads like rainbows liberated from their geometric constraints. We drank hot chocolate to warm up, huddled by the fire when the cold penetrated too deeply into our bones and sinews. Beneath my ski jacket and multiple layers, I could feel the scratchy heat of my merino jumper against my bare skin as I enjoyed the hot trickle of chocolate working its way to my stomach. A French couple in our group had started dancing to electro swing playing from their phone to keep back the cold. I hopped around the fire with an Australian girl, who explained that the stars looked different on this side of the world.
Eventually, the Lights started to fade and, secretly relieved, one by one we climbed back into the bus and snuggled together for heat. Emiles drove us further still from the city, chasing the electric glow that was now floating away behind the mountains in front of us. Between the wisps of aurora we also watched the stars, which, although not exactly what we had come here to see, were bright and crisp in the Arctic sky. Onwards we went, winding between fjords and jagged rocks sealed over with snow and ice, as we travelled through the night until at last, around two in the morning, the minibus stopped and we all climbed out again. Here there were no houses, no strings of lights in coffee-shop windows. Before us, a midnight blue fjord reached out into nothingness, a mass of salt water cloaked in stars. It was so dark we felt almost blind. Had we driven to the ends of the earth? Not quite, but we had reached the end of the island, marked by a quiet fishing town called Brensholmen just a few kilometres on. We could see the lights of the town gleaming faintly over the peak of a rocky incline, and I wondered how such a community could survive in modern Europe, both geographically and socially cut off from the rest of the country. Emiles told us that fishing and agriculture had been at the heart of this place since the Iron Age, but today the population numbered no more than 300 people. It was a vibrant little corner of Norway, nonetheless. In winter, tourists came here to see the aurora; in summer, visitors on deck of the regular ferry to the nearby island of Senja could watch orca and humpback whales spyhopping in the Norwegian Sea. There are thought to be around 3,000 orca living in the Norwegian and Barents Sea, with pods often working together to herd fish into tight balls to ease their capture. Beluga whales also live in Norwegian waters, as well as seals, sperm whales and polar bears near the coast where sea ice forms.
Brensholmen was our final stop before the long drive back to Tromsø. We stood in sleepy silence and watched the fjord. There, reflected in the water like a shimmering sapphire curtain, a faint cloud of aurora lingered in the sky as if to wave us farewell. It would be the last fragment of Lights I saw before leaving the Arctic and heading back to Britain, and when my tired eyes looked carefully I swear I could almost see a golden city hidden in the aurora’s folds, just as Lyra had seen in the Retiring Room at the start of Pullman’s The Northern Lights. Standing here beneath a Nordic winter sky, it was easy to understand how the Lights had woven their way into so many folk tales, myths and stories. Intangible and unforgettable, I had witnessed for myself how the aurora charges our imaginations with a murmuring, bewitching electricity. Together our group watched and waited until the last glimpse of colour had faded from the air, the final stroke of a paintbrush gone. The sky returned to darkness, a scattering of white stars emitting their own plasmatic radiance once more. Then – cold, stiff and desperate for sleep – we climbed back onto the bus, Emiles pouring us all another steaming mug of hot chocolate, before the engine started and we began the long journey back to Norway’s midnight city.
CHAPTER FOUR
Taxus Baccata
Seep-seep.
Seep-seep.
Two birds in unhurried succession h
ave flown over my head.
Seep-seep.
I can’t see them because it’s 11 o’clock at night, and the thick cloud cover of late autumn means not even the stars can illuminate the garden in which I’m standing. But I know these birds.
Seep-seep.
They have a creamy stripe above their eye and a smear the colour of rusty pumpkin under each wing, and in the darkness they call seep-seep to their friends and flockmates, sharing salty tales of their recent odyssey over the dark North Sea.
Redwings are the smallest true thrush in Britain, and while a handful of pairs breed in Scotland each year, most of our population will not arrive on our shores until October or November. From September onwards, loose flocks of thousands of birds gather along the Scandinavian coastlines at dusk, where they breed through the spring and summer months before launching into the sky on a single 800km nocturnal flight across the North Sea and over to Britain. Many will crash and drown in the waves, beaten by the turbulent weather of an ocean nightscape – so why risk such a journey?
Migration is one of nature’s greatest challenges for wildlife, but a mesmerising spectacle for those of us waiting at the other end with a pair of binoculars and a cup of tea. It was only in the last century or so that scientists started to grasp the complexities of the process; why and how do these birds travel such great distances? Before the theory of migration was developed, some ornithologists believed birds either hibernated in trees and at the bottom of ponds or transmogrified into something else. For centuries observers thought redstarts turned into robins over winter, and some even believed that barnacle geese hatched from barnacles, before someone hopped over to Greenland and found their nests.
Now we know they migrate, we can start to understand the logic behind it. When birds need more food than their breeding grounds can provide, they look elsewhere. In winter the Scandinavian landscape is bleak and covered in snow, so birds fly to Britain for a slightly milder season where they can find the berries and earthworms they need to survive until spring, when they will return north to breed and the cycle will be complete. Some redwings migrate from the birch forests and thickets of Russia and Iceland, all the way down to Portugal, Greece and even Iran. The ability of these species to travel thousands of kilometres and not flop down dead at the end is astounding, but there is something else about migration that my modern brain had been unable to resolve until I returned from Norway that winter: how do these flocks of birds know to transport themselves at exactly the same time, as one beautiful, breathing mass of life? We know birds communicate effectively and we know all species are driven by their biological needs. But what sequence of events follows for individuals to gather along the edge of the sea, leap together into the night and spend six months in a different landscape?
Dark Skies Page 6