On October 10th, a powerful geomagnetic superstorm visited the North.
And boy, was I ever ready for it!
Context: during the last storm on May 10th, which generated fantastic auroras all throughout Canada, the US and even Asia, I made a forecasting error and ended up sleeping through the very hour that it appeared, which was around 11 PM PST.
For months afterward, I was suffering from FOMO. Friends, it’s a real thing. FOMO pushes the limits of your mind and body to the point where you actually start to feel real physical pain. Your heart beats a little faster. You suffer from headaches. You turn into a ball of ugly.
MISSED OPPORTUNITY.
REGRET.
In all caps.
Every day, for months.
Some personalities handle it better than most: I don’t, and never will.
So I joined a few more Aurora chaser groups on social media. And my intel got better and better.
But because I’m complicated as pak, I kept my constraints in place. To borrow from the writer Chari Lucero (Althea – I miss her!) – I will use only the givens of my life to experience this phenomenon.
I don’t have a car, so okay, I will use my feet to go places. I don’t have an iPhone 14 or any them fancy cameras and tripods, so I will use my battered iPhone 6 to capture the Lights. I am in Metro Vancouver, one of the most light-heavy places in Canada, so I will look for the Lights here, even though She hates the competition. I have a sujara gifted by Naheeda (hi sis), so I will lay it out towards the Qiblah and pray for Allah’s Mercy, that Aurora will permit me to see Her Beauty, if only for a while.
On the day of, which was our last work day before the long Thanksgiving weekend, my team had their usual check-ins and shared their travel plans. When they asked mine, I told them about 10/10. My enthusiasm was infectious. One of my colleagues, Lucia, ended up walking around the Royal Oak neighborhood with me that night. Another one, Emme, hurried off to her beautiful cabin and stayed up with her husband to watch the Lights dance across Sunshine Valley. Robert became a kind of expert on the Lights himself, as he observed that they were stronger in the Northwest quadrant.
Working with my intel, I stepped out of the house a little before 8pm to meet Lucia on Royal Oak. It was a chilly five degrees so I had worn a waterproof jacket ON TOP OF a fur-lined hoodie. We walked down the dark road to where it overlooks the beautiful Fraser River and Alex Fraser bridge. The moon was perfectly cut in half in the sky, waxing gibbous and making me wax poetic. Who ate the other half of you, my love? Something silky and milky permeated the atmosphere, but because our eyesight was conserving its energy to see better in the dark, we could not see the colors that well.
The camera then became our pair of eyes. We waved it up to the sky and peered through the screen. Yes! A pinkish glow. Aurora had put on her Blush. Hello there!
We wanted to see more of Her, but we could only see blobs of pink here and there, but elsewhere they appeared diffuse. What I enjoyed more was knowing that Lucia never steps out of the house at night, and that it was her first time to be out of her neighborhood during that time. When we parted ways, me to walk to Metrotown, she towards home, she saw the Lights had gotten stronger and excitedly sent me her photos.
Meanwhile, I was on the prowl in Metrotown, noticing more people in the streets than was usual at that time of night. When one of them waved her phone up the little sliver of sky between two tall buildings in the Maywood area, I knew that she had seen something. I did the same and finally caught my first ever sighting of Aurora. It wasn’t much but I was so happy!
I was already being called back home, so walked back towards Kingsway, enjoying the sights and sounds of the nighttime. The atmosphere was milky yet somehow clear: the stars and the shape of the clouds were visible in the sky. I took the long detour home to pass by Ecole Marlborough, which had a field overlooking a little bit of the Lions and the Garibaldi peaks to the northeast, and Grouse Mountain to the northwest. As I entered the field, my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw a few more people scattered about, their cameras forever fixed to the sky. I felt – yes I felt – a ribbon of silver moving right above me, then disappearing. I pointed my camera overhead, and saw Her again, lightly draped in green and purple.
The Aurora felt like a ghost to me. Without the aid of my camera, She was this cold, silky presence that I felt all around me. She reminded me of my Mama, my Aba, my Mommy Connie, my godchild Maddie, my Kuya Jay, my Tita Nina and Tito Ben, my brother-in-law Clyde, my aunt Puling, my friend Hazel, and everyone we have lost through the years all at once. Like the Aurora, they are present but require the combined technology of our words, love, and time to summon them again and again into being. On the night of 10/10, they all came to say hello and goodbye, and the coyotes howled at the moon.
PA-Q World 