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| Photo by Joakim Eskildsen, from James Lasdun's "Glow" |
In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is James Lasdun's wonderful “Glow” (April 29, 2019).
In this memorable piece, Lasdun travels to northern Scandinavia to see the aurora borealis. Of course, the aurora borealis being a natural phenomenon, there’s no guarantee it will appear when he’s there. The question of whether or not he’ll see it propels the narrative.
First, he stays at an igloo hotel, the Aurora Village, in the town of Ivalo, Finland. His room is called an Aurora Cabin. Lasdun describes it:
A glass-panelled dome loomed over the north-facing end of a single room, with luxe bedding and a complimentary drinks tray arranged below, like the furnishings of a tastefully debauched starship. Slipping under a reindeer-fur coverlet, I found myself facing the first conundrum of northern-lights tourism, which is that the more comfortable your viewing situation the more likely you are to be insensate when the lights appear. I was eager to see them, naturally, but not obsessed. I had a whole week, and, from what I’d read, at the time of my visit there were good odds for a display on most nights. With this comforting thought, I fell asleep.
Lasdun doesn’t see the lights that night. The next day, killing time until evening, he goes on an ice-fishing safari. He writes,
The fishing rods seemed absurdly short and bendy, like something that you might use to win a prize at an amusement park. We squatted at our holes, dipping and raising as instructed. The flat landscape around us was more built up than I’d expected this far north, but pleasant enough under the fresh snow, with the wide sky showing different pinks and yellows every time you looked at it. Now and then, dogsleds carrying tourists hurtled by; each time, we laboriously took off our mittens and glove liners and rummaged for our phones, in order to take photographs.
That night, he’s back in his glass igloo, staring up at the night sky. He falls asleep. Something wakes him at three. He writes,
Groggy and myopic, I caught a promising green blur overhead and grabbed my glasses. The color of an aurora depends on which atmospheric gases are being pelted by solar particles. Oxygen emits a greenish hue and, occasionally, red; nitrogen emits violet and blue. In this case, the green turned out to be emitted by a light on the thermostat—its glow was reflected in the glass dome. Nevertheless, the sky had cleared, and the stars glittered promisingly above the snow-gloved spruce trees. I stared up for a while. Gazing at the sky at 3 a.m., however, in the hope of being granted a vision of dancing emerald lights is an activity that quickly starts to feel absurd, even delusional, and I soon passed out again. In the morning, I learned that I hadn’t missed anything.
The next day, he decides to go farther north and stay at a hotel on the vast frozen lake of Anari. He signs up for Aurora Camp, “which promised warm drinks ‘while waiting for the sky to show its magic.’ ” At eight o’clock, he joins a dozen other campers. A snowmobile tows them across the lake in a train of open sleds. He writes,
Once we were on the other side, a guide lit a fire, draping reindeer hides over logs for us to sit on, and hung a kettle to boil. The simplicity of the arrangement appealed to my sense of how these things ought to be conducted, and even though there was thick cloud cover, I felt optimistic. We had two and a half hours to kill, and the weather, as we reminded one another at regular intervals, was unpredictable in these parts.
The sky doesn’t clear. The temperature drops. Lasdun begins to doubt whether he’ll ever see the lights. He writes,
No surprises occurred overhead, but an earthly one did: a woman suddenly slipped her arm through mine and began murmuring in my ear in Italian. I looked at her, and she gave a shriek: she’d mistaken me, in my snowsuit, for her husband. Peals of unnerving laughter broke from her as we sledded back across the lake. The incident gave concreteness to the dim sense of cosmic disfavor beginning to take hold in me. The nature of these wonder-chasing trips is that your success rate sooner or later gets entangled with your feelings about what you deserve. I had four more nights, so there was no cause for serious alarm, but I’d started entertaining irrational thoughts all the same. Was I unworthy in some way? Could I be harboring attitudes unconducive to the granting of heavenly visions?
A couple of occurrences the next day deepen his unease. On a three-hour ride from Inari to the airport in the Norwegian village of Laksely, his taxi hits a reindeer. Here’s his account of the incident:
As we drove northwest, the landscape and the sky merged into a white haze, with only the dark-etched undersides of branches to distinguish one realm from the other. It was beautiful in an unearthly way, as if the world had become a silver-nitrate photograph of itself. Road signs grew fewer and farther between, with Sámi place-names appearing under the Finnish. The road was covered with packed snow and the driver was going fast. On a long, straight, desolate stretch, we came over a rise and saw five reindeer galloping straight toward us. The driver cursed in English: “Shit.” I braced myself, felt a slam, and saw one of the animals thrown into the air. It had antlers, and, as the previous night’s guide had informed us, a deer that still had them in late winter was female, and probably pregnant. We backed up and found it lying, dead, in the snow. The taxi was dented but drivable, and after reporting the accident we continued on our way, both of us badly shaken.
When he arrives at the airport, it’s closed. The taxi is gone. Lasdun finds himself alone in the arctic cold. He says, “I was a fool about to freeze to death in pursuit of a high-end tourist fad.” Eventually an airport worker appears and opens the doors.
Still chasing the aurora, Lasdun flies to Tromsø, Norway. He signs up for a night with a company that takes you out to a wilderness camp and leaves you alone until morning. He gets on a sled and his guide, using a snowmobile, hauls him across the frozen surface of Lake Kilpisjärvi to a dark hut, raised up on sled runners, on the ice. The hut has a transparent section of roof above the bed for viewing the night sky.
Lasdun and his guide go for a walk along the shore and make a campfire. They witness a faint green bar of light in the sky. The bar grows brighter, but then clouds move in and obscure it. Lasdun writes, “I could now say truthfully that I’d seen the northern lights, and I was happy, though my happiness had more to do with relief—mission accomplished—than with joy. It had been a very minor spillage of the green grail.”
The guide leaves. Lasdun returns to the hut and gets into bed. He wonders how he’ll respond if he should see a major display of the lights. He writes, “When an industry is focussed so determinedly on the commodity of wonderment, it spurs thoughts of resistance—at least, it does in me.” But as it turns out, he doesn’t have to respond. The aurora doesn’t appear.
For his final evening in Tromsø, Lasdun books a seat on an Aurora Chase. At the appointed hour, he joins the crowds heading down to the waterfront, where the chase vehicles pick up passengers. He hears a coach driver mutter, “Not the best weather outlook tonight.” He writes, “The prospect of spending the next six hours driving around with little hope of seeing the lights was deeply unenticing. I was about to bail on the adventure when a burly Norseman barked out my name from his roster. I meekly boarded his sleek black van.”
An hour into Finland, they pull off the main road and park. Lasdun disembarks, with fifteen companions, into the freezing dark. Camera tripods are set up, a fire is built. Lasdun is skeptical that anything is going to happen. Then a crack appears in the clouds directly above them. Lasdun writes,
It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain.
Lasdun is blown away by the experience. He says, “You develop the overwhelming impression that some cryptic but staggeringly powerful intelligence is staging a performance expressly for you, even as you remind yourself that this can’t be the case.”
Back on the bus, the photographers in the group compare images. Lasdun had attempted to take some snapshots with his phone, but they turned out to be terrible. He’s relieved to discover that one photographer had taken nice pictures of each of them, “including one of me with the stunned look of a nonbeliever witnessing a miracle.” I relish that line. It beautifully captures Lasdun’s conflicted perspective on northern-lights tourism – mostly skeptical but, in the end, enthralled.
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