Northern Lights

Somewhere above the Great Plains of North Dakota, our flight back to Montana slipped overtop a massive lightning storm. Below us, and extending northward to the horizon, black clouds pulsed and strobed with brilliant flashes of light from within, bringing startling depth and detail, in the form of white and blue thunderheads, before falling back to black again. The flashes from below caused the wings of our jet to wink platinum in varied cadence. Above the clouds, hard to our north, the northern lights appeared and rapidly fanned-out between the storm horizon and wide blast of stars above. The lights began to accordion back and forth, streaking upwards, dropping back again, dancing and swaying to sun-driven rhythms. Everyone peered out the windows.

We gradually drew away from the lightning and the aurora borealis. As the storm and the northern lights dissolved back into the night, lights below began to pool into familiar towns: Bozeman, Three Forks, and then Townsend. Our descent brought us into Helena and the mountains grew imposing as the lights rapidly gathered all around us. Home.

I woke today in my own bed with one cat sprawled on the blankets beside me, another hunched at the open door, and cool, pine-scented air spilling inside from an open window. After dressing and brewing coffee, I stood at my bay windows to appraise the coming day, as I so often do. Beyond the blonde and fading green of bunchgrass prairie, the russet-brown of raw earth where farmers have flayed their wheatfields to fallow, and beyond the up-rise of open foothills, the Elkhorn Mountains stacked together in bluish layers. Nearer, my Mayday tree seemed as if fluffing itself, shaking and preening its own branches the way a brooding partridge might. Only after closer observation did I finally see, within the thick mesh of branches and leaves, cedar waxwings, robins, and chickadees jostling back and forth, feeding on the ripening berries.

For a time, quite foolishly, I thought that I owned the Mayday tree. Not so. The tree, the soil that sifts through my fingers, my wife, now gone for these three solid months, the come-and-go storms, and the northern lights—none of these can be held for long. I thought again about the northern lights. Scientifically, the lights are the end result the place where magnetic lines of flux and charged particles dance together. Below all of that, where we live, that is another kind of dance, one where we must cling together for as long as we can.

--Mitchell Hegman