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me, Nutty Alaskan for Rhonda, both excellent. They've got a good bartender at Chena
Hot Springs, and a good thing, too.)
After which we retire to our room for a nap, because Joe has us booked on the 10 p.m.
aurora watch. We foregather in front of the activities center at a quarter til, and Big Al
Miller bundles us into a trailer hooked behind a Snow Cat and we're off up the hill.
You forget when you live in a city how much competition the stars get from street lights
and traffic lights and car lights and building lights. You forget until you go to a place like
Chena Hot Springs where on a dark, clear night there is only a faint glow on the south-
western horizon to indicate the city of Fairbanks, and the rest is a diamond-pierced
blanket of black velvet.
It was -16°F when we left the camp and I was very glad I was wearing my dad's parka.
When my nose and feet started to go numb I went inside the yurt, erected specifically
every year for aurora viewing, where I warmed my outside next to one of two propane
stoves and my inside with hot chocolate.
The aurora obligingly made their appearance at half past midnight, a thin green band on
the low northern horizon. Over the next hour and a half they smeared themselves across
the sky from north to south. They're green this night, a chill adventurine that has never
seen a hospital wall, and they're moving, swirling and dancing and gliding back and forth.
They aren't close enough to hear, but they're all over the sky.
Now, I admit, I'm pretty blasé when it comes to the northern lights. Been there, done
that, about a zillion times. It's going to be hard to top that night in Seldovia the year I was
a junior in high school, when after the Sweetheart Ball my friend Sheri and I vamped
Danny Peterson and a member of the band from Ninilchik into taking us for a midnight
stroll to the Outside Beach. (Yes, this was in February, don't start with me.) I've never
seen the lights out like that, before or since, red, green, white, blue, moving and popping
like the band was still playing, a full moon behind them with a ring around it, and Kache-
mak Bay like a sheet of glass beneath. That night is one of the reasons I'm going to die a
happy woman—I was there, and I saw it.
But tonight is special, too, because watching with me are a young Japanese couple with
little English but very nice smiles who are obviously thrilled at what they see, and a rice
farmer from California who has what must be a frost-proof camera and is intent on getting
