Aurora Borealis

The night the lights went on in California

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

11/7/01

I have a friend who is a devout Christian and who was home schooled. She pretty much ruins the stereotype that home schooled devout Christians are humorless and ignorant. Of course, a lot of her friends, who tend to be humorless and ignorant, are mildly distressed that she hangs around with a tabernacle-mocker like me, but nonetheless, she is not humorless and ignorant. Home-schooling and a particularly stifling branch of Christianity not withstanding.

So when she saw the Northern Lights roiling and coruscating in our dark mountain skies last night, she thought, "oh, cool!" and made a note to ask me if that was as bright as they got up in Canada and Scotland. (Short answer: Yes. Long answer: I have to depend on photos and anecdotal evidences, because I was screwing around on the computer and missed the show).

However, she has this cousin who went through the same home schooling and attends the same church. She’s 22 years old, and from what I gather, she’s never entertained a thought for a moment that she suspected might have been sent to her by Satan. Unlike my friend, she didn’t emerge from home schooling with an unhealthy curiosity about what evolution might really be, and was carefully kept away from anything scientific that might interfere with the perfection of her biblical beliefs. Twenty two years in California, and she had never been to Disneyland or Hollywood, considered cities with more than two stop lights to be dens of iniquity.

As a result, she was about as emotionally and intellectually prepared to encounter the Northern Lights as a flock of chickens is to encounter Godzilla.

She glanced out her window and saw a deep crimson glow across the northern sky, and while many people might associate deep crimson glows with unsavory characters who torment Arabic traders and made wagers with Daniel Webster, she decided it was the second coming. She immediately ran to her front yard, fell to her knees, and started praying and hosannaing to beat the band.

There’s a "Darwin Award" story, almost certainly an urban legend, making the rounds on the internet about a girl who saw an inflatable sex doll escape from the back of a pick up truck and go flying in the air currents over the freeway, and subsequently decided it was Jesus flying around above the freeway traffic. I’m happy to report that in this case, the cousin didn’t rip off her clothes and start running down I-5.

Being as good a cousin as she was a Christian, she had the presence of mind to grab her cell phone on the way out, and between gusts of religious ecstacy, phoned her cousin to let her know the Rapture had occurred, and the end of the world was at hand. It seemed the neighborly thing to do.

After a while, the lights in the Northern Sky faded, and the world was still there. No majestic voices roaring across the void, no Angels with vials, not even a lousy dimming of the stars. If the oceans dried up and the mountains fell, she didn’t notice. In fact, our resident mountain was still right were it was that morning.

Even worse, she could see non believers, the hell-bound, peacefully going about their business. The local bookstore still sold Harry Potter books, the Catholic Church remained intact, and Zepp’s Political Commentaries was still on line. This could only mean one thing: the Rapture had occurred, and she had been Left Behind.

My friend had intuited that a cosmic aberration might bring about an emotional crisis in her cousin, and had hopped in her car and driven over. It took a few hours to get her calmed down and oriented to the reality that the Rapture had, in fact, not yet occurred. My friend reported that by about ten o’clock, the cousin was twitchy and somewhat oriented to quotidian reality, which struck me as a fairly apt description of how she was before the Northern Lights came along, so I suppose we can describe her, with some mild reservations, as being back to normal.

While her reaction was probably the most extreme, Mt. Shasta, by virtue of its unique demographic make up, ran to three major types of reactions.

For the folks in McCloud, directly south of the mountain, who noticed the red glow, it had to cause a few minutes disquiet. When you live next to a 14,192 foot volcano, you do not want to look up and see unexplained red glows emanating from behind the peak. I’m sure some people spent a few moments contemplating the horrible possibility of a volcanic eruption. For lack of a better description, let’s call that the rationalist reaction. Since I didn’t hear any reports of anyone getting killed while east bound at a maniacal rate of speed on State Highway 89 (it being generally agreed that that route is the only way out in the Event Of), I’ll assume that reaction along these lines was generally mild.

There is the religious response. The cousin, as noted, was an extreme case. Most people so inclined merely marked the presences of the lights, recognized them for what they were, and thanked the Diety, Philosopher, or Ascended Master of their choice for sharing it with them. In a town where Baptists find themselves fighting for space in the letters to the editor column with Buddhists and members of the Church of the Ascended Master St. Germain, the religious response is not, on the community level, going to be monolithic.

Then there were the responses of the seekers. These were probably the most varied, since the mountain is considered a focal point for native religions, Harmonic Convergences, ley lines, UFOs and all manners to things relating to mysticism, crystals, and, illogically enough, dolphins. (Now think about this carefully – when was the last time you saw a dolphin on a 14,000 foot mountain?)

We have one fellow who likes to write in to the paper to talk about the "ship clouds" over Mt. Shasta. These clouds form to hide the mother ship. I’m quite sure he does it merely to bait some of the people over at the college, who show up in the paper the following week to explain that those are lenticular clouds, formed by orographic uplift resulting in adiabatic condensation formed into a funicular by the prevailing yada yada yada. But of course, a significant segment of our population does believe they are ship clouds. In a community where there are people considering public office who believe they are the living incarnation of the Ascended Master Yeshua Sananda, and oh, by the way, also the incarnations of Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Jefferson, or think they are the Archangel Gabriel, or that the Pleiaiadians have, for unknown reasons, put implants in their brains that allow them to control the weather, responses to the Northern Lights should provide a variety of interesting stories. I imagine over the next few weeks, I will gain such insights and illuminations into the wonders and majesty of the human psyche and how it perceives the universe that I will be profoundly sorry I ever asked.

The lights were visible all the way down to Los Angeles, and California being California, most people responded normally enough, while a small, but noisy percentage, looked at those innocent dim lights doing their cosmic dance, forgot everything they had been taught in Sixth grade science class, and completely lost it. An amused press reported panicked phone calls to local authorities reporting nuclear war, terrorist attack, and Rapture. It seemed the neighborly thing to do.

When I was a kid, living in the North, I used to slip out in the evening during the long winter nights and, oblivious to temperatures twenty, thirty below zero, spend an hour or so just watching the lights. I would come in, cheeks chapped and sore, feet numb, chest sore from the dry cold, and feel like the universe had reached down and touched me.

But it wasn’t anything a cup of hot chocolate wouldn’t solve. And then I would sleep, and dream of riding magic carpets of light.

I’m sorry I missed them this time, but I’m glad the rest of America got to share the North’s most wonderful night secret.