Aurora

We were driving down the Eisenhower Expressway, headed into the darkness of Western Maryland, when Pam spotted the bright glow off to our left.  At first, we just dismissed it as the lights from Cumberland bouncing off the clouds, but Cumberland was behind a mountain range, and still an hour or so away. 

“Could that be the aurora?” Pam wondered.

Suddenly, everyone got very excited.  “IT’S THE AURORA!” we cheered, pressing our faces up against the window, shielding our eyes from the glare of headlights.  What else could it be?  There are only a limited number of explanations for an enormous glow in the northern part of the sky at 9:45pm.

“We have to take a picture,” I said.  Pam pulled off onto an exit, but it was still behind some trees.  “Pull into the Sleep Inn parking lot up there!” I yelled, but we missed the turn.  Terrified that the lights might disappear or prove to be only a trick of our imaginations, she turned into a side street and pulled up into what seemed to be somebody’s driveway.  “Go go go!” she yelled, and S and I took off, running over people’s driveways and backyards, too excited to remember our coats.

The road rounded the corner, and we finally got our first clear view of the lights.  Pam ducked into a cornfield next to the road and motioned for us to follow her, all the while staring up at the strange sky.  We stood there for a moment, mouths gaping, before I remembered I had a camera.

Taken with a 15-second exposure, which, along with the cold, explains the blurriness.

Soon, our teeth were chattering, and the wind began to pick up, so we trudged back towards the car, which, thankfully, no one had noticed.  We followed the lights along the highway for as long as we could, past tour buses of people gazing up at them and accidents presumably caused by someone craning their neck a little too far. We finally lost sight of it, several miles before Cumberland.

When we arrived at the house, it was already close to midnight, and in the sky, untouched by the light pollution of Baltimore, shone with thousands of stars.

I’ve seen Northern Lights before in the Arctic, which undulate and shimmer in streaks across the sky, seeming more like silk curtains than a solar phenomenon.  The lights in Western Maryland weren’t nearly as magnificent, but there is something about finding things in the places that you least expect them that makes them magnificent, irregardless of the way they look.  Staring up at the cold, cloudy sky, you remember why you love this crazy universe, because just when you think everything will fall apart, the sky starts shining.

(It turned out that we weren’t completely crazy, because NASA observed a massive solar flare right around the time we spotted the aurora.  There are a couple of reports about it floating around, some saying that it wasn’t visible in the US, which may be true.  Still, it’s not every day that you get to see the sky light up like a football stadium.)

Places

Omaha, NE doesn’t get enough attention. When I told people I was going there this weekend, some of them didn’t even know where it was.

“Seriously?” I said. Then, five minutes later, “Really? You don’t know where Omaha is?”

“What is there to know about in Omaha?” they asked.

The sad part was, I didn’t really have much to tell them.

“Um… bison?” I offered.

Driving through the downtown area, I gazed out my window and watched old warehouse after old warehouse pass by, the original, whitewashed names barely clinging to the sides of them. They looked like giant Lego structures, laid out on a child’s playset that hadn’t been touched since the 1950s.

Walking under the overhangs of the Old Market on uneven streets, I ducked into a store with modern furniture in the window. I walked past the chairs and lamps, and through another door at the back into an atrium made of crumbling brick and wooden staircases with leafy green plants hanging everywhere. I walked into the bathroom and saw a man sitting on the floor with a wallet, then quickly left, realizing that I had entered on something that I probably should have dealt with.

In the Durham Museum, I stared at Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs and their stories as trains rumbled by the old station and shook the floor. The building’s Art-Deco ceiling overwhelmed me as I walked out into the lobby, looking up and down the length of the hallways.

On the drive out of the city, passing old houses that actually looked old and signs for gas stations long forgotten, I thought it was strange how these things hadn’t become the victim of modernization. How had somebody not turned this old shop into a quaint corner store? How was this factory building not upscale loft apartments? I blinked at them. They stared back at me, broken panes in their windows.

As the interstate cut a swath through the undeveloped landscape, we passed a tall group of silos. I held my camera out, but missed them. When our car passed to the other side, I realized that they were covered in murals, making the unnatural object seem animate. Watching them recede into the distance, I smiled.

“What you should know about Omaha?” I asked my friends. “It’s quietly beautiful.”