Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (19 page)

I find James McClean at the start of his coffee break, wearing the only orange hard hat in a sea of yellow ones. When I tell him Marjolein has sent me, he waves his coworkers on. They retreat into a small wooden shed, and we remain outdoors. James has a handkerchief knotted around his neck. It bears the symbolic colors of the Sámi flag, which is recognized here in Sápmi, the culture’s traditional region. He’s known among the ICEHOTEL artists as Mr. Aurora, though his job—officially titled Builder of Ice and Snow—has nothing to do with the sky and everything to do with sweat-inducing manual labor.

James is a U.S. citizen in his forties, here on a work visa, and he’s spent most of the past decade working odd jobs that will keep him within the aurora oval. The stubble on his chin matches the dark bristle on his head, which is just peeking out from underneath his fleece-insulated hard hat. He is a stout guy—that’s clear, even though he has on untold layers of gear—and he has the nose of a boxer. At forty-five, he resembles Bruce Willis in his younger, scruffier years.

James is an archeologist by training and—prior to his decision to live his life in accordance with the aurora—he hunted for Stone Age artifacts. His last gig was as a pool guy at a resort in Alaska, where he moonlighted as an apprentice to an ice carver in preparation for his current aurora-friendly job. But, despite his long-term dedication to the northern lights, he tells me that he’s really more of an eclipse man.

He’s traveled to Egypt, Easter Island, and all sorts of far-flung places to see the moon overtake the sun. But total solar eclipses only happen every few years, and, for a while, the in-between times left him feeling disconnected from the universe. That is, until he started spending his off-seasons within the aurora oval. James tells me that, outside of total solar eclipses, the aurora is as close to seeing the sun’s corona—or outermost surface—as one can get.

James calls it the breath of God.

“The corona is the source of what you’re seeing with an aurora,” James says. It is the origin of sun flares, or coronal mass ejections, which spew the plasma that creates solar winds. “The corona is the breath of the sun itself. It’s an exhale,” he tells me. “The sun breathes just like we do. A coronal mass ejection is like a sneeze.”

He explains: When those sun sneezes hit the earth’s magnetic field—which is produced by the planet’s Pele-churned core—they stretch it to its limit. When really strong solar storms hit, the outer section of the magnetic field is flung to the other side of the planet like a rubber band. Once the storm is gone and the field snaps back into its point of origin a few charged particles manage to slip in at the poles. Those particles collide with the earth’s atmosphere to create visible light. When they hit oxygen, they turn green. When they run into nitrogen, they turn red. Voilà: the northern lights.

“It’s actually pretty mundane when you look at it like that,” James says. “But something happens when you see it. Because it’s beyond the realm of ordinary human experience. When you see it, all the mundane stuff gets blown out of the water. You cease to be a lawyer or a banker or a builder or a cardiac surgeon. That’s all gone. You become just a child of God staring at creation.”

He believes this happens with auroras and eclipses. It’s a realization he had in Egypt—home of Ra—in 2006, after he’d snuck onto a military base to ensure he was in the eclipse’s narrow swath. He and a small group of fellow eclipse chasers had been approached by soldiers just before the eclipse, but when shadow overtook sun, the infantrymen put down their weapons and raised their hands in the air. James pumps his arms in the air to demonstrate what he saw, his palms open toward the sky. He jumps up and down ecstatically. A few hotel guests who’ve wandered to the frozen shore of the Torne River, just a few feet from where we stand, turn to stare. He must look like a wild man. He sort of is.

James grew up Protestant, but he got turned on to Buddhism when he was twelve. He also regularly goes out of his way to talk spirit shop with Hare Krishnas and Muslims. He likes to refer to God as “The Universal Being.” He says, “Most people think in terms of you, and I, and that guy. They think of God as this separate entity, too. But the real truth is that it’s a continuum of stuff. You can’t separate yourself from it. You don’t have to wait to go to heaven when you die. You’re in heaven right now.”

I survey the landscape around us—cloud-white as far as the eye can see—and I tell James that I was raised Lutheran, though I’ve developed a totally blurred-boundaries view of divinity. He gives a guttural chuckle and says, “Welcome home!”

As it turns out, northern Sweden is a hotbed of Lutheranism, though few people claim to be religious in this region where Christian missionaries simultaneously conducted revivals and horrific witch trials. Martin Luther himself saw Sápmi as the home of dark magic, evil. This was not in small part due to his view of the animistic and shamanistic power of the traditional Sámi drum. It seems terribly ironic that what Luther—founder of the institution I was raised in—saw as devilish is the very thing I have been drawn to as a sign of the sacred.

I’m the first American James has talked to in months, and he likes what I’m up to. My project is, in essence, a miniversion of the magical mystery tour that is his life. He’s curious to know what phenomena I’ve chosen, and he listens carefully when I tell him. He’s experienced all but coral spawning and the Catatumbo lightning.

He shoves gloved hands into the pockets of his work pants and asks: “So, where’s your eclipse? You’re missing the most fantastic phenomenon known to man!”

James tells me officials are expecting 300,000 people—including 60,000 travelers—at the next eclipse viewing site. The idea of that many people from all over the world and all walks of life going to the impractical effort and expense to see the moon overtake the sun is one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard. It is also, strangely, one of the most hopeful.

I’ve got friends who—upon hearing about these seekers—will say things like: “Must be nice.” I’ve come to read this as an unintentional
Who do they think they are
? But my time on the road has made me think those pilgrims aren’t necessarily any more privileged than anyone else. It might be nice, but it won’t be easy. They’ll be people who sold their houses to make the journey, people who duck the status quo in an effort to live the sorts of lives they want to lead. They’ll be regular people trying to figure out a way to be true to the spirit within themselves—their innermost passions, their bliss. They’ll be bound by the fact that they have been moved to pilgrimage for weeks, over thousands of miles, at great, impractical effort, in order to bear witness to a two-minute show of universal perfection.

That’s right: two minutes. It is, according to reports across the scientific community, almost exactly how long the next total solar eclipse will last. And the whole thing has the potential to get rained out.

“So, from where, exactly, is the eclipse going to be visible?” I ask.

“Mostly over ocean. The only place it will touch land is around Cairns, Australia.”

I start laughing. Cairns. Gateway to the Great Barrier Reef. Site of coral spawns that create reproductive egg slicks large enough to be seen from space. This is, and has always been, where I planned to end my phenomena tour.

“When?” I ask.

“November.”

I can’t laugh this time. “You’re telling me that the next solar eclipse is going to be visible only on the other side of the earth, at the very spot I’ve been planning to visit in October?”

“You had the place right,” James says. “You just had the time wrong. Now you know.”

For the last year or so, my life has overtly revolved around the cycles of moon and tides. Not in an astrological way, but in a hey-this-phenomenon-usually-happens-eight-days-after-a-full-moon way. I’ve unintentionally started to read the universe like I read my calendar. This, maybe more than anything, has opened me to the idea of a divine pattern in seemingly random things. The universe is spontaneous, but—like the human body—the closer you look, the more it seems there’s a loose, underlying pattern behind it all.

I’m in Sweden right now because it’s an equinox month, and the equinox has historically proven to be a time of exceptional solar activity. I try to be diligent with my planning. But ocean temperatures and migration patterns are hard to perfectly balance in my brain, day-to-day, alongside concerns like: Does Archer, who’s just started preschool, have a protein and vegetable in his lunch bag?

When I look into the specifics, I find that the full moon, used as a scientific indicator of the elusive spawning, might occur in October, but the eight-day window in which the coral spawn is expected pushes the phenomenon’s annual appearance into the month of November.

It’s when I was supposed to be there all along.

To catch the next total solar eclipse, I’ll need to extend my already-planned stay in Australia by just one week. Really, my whole life has started to feel like a series of happy accidents, a wealth of synchronicity, defined by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung as “the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.”

For something to be considered truly synchronistic by Jung, a convergence of events must have startling, staggering improbability strong enough to knock a person off her rational axis. It also has to have personal meaning. Running into someone you haven’t seen in years:
coincidence
. Running into someone you haven’t seen in years the day after you’ve had a dream about them:
synchronicity.

Jung is best known for his interpretation of dreams as meaningful messages from an individual’s subconscious, and he saw synchronicity as a sort of waking dream, a way of viewing life as a sacred text to be interpreted. It was a kind of road map presented by the convergence of consciousness and subconscious. Is synchronicity the result of selective perception, as a rationalist might offer, or is it a glimpse of an underlying universal wholeness, as others might suggest?

Maybe, to the individual, it doesn’t matter much.

Jung saw synchronicity as an observable expression of a deeper order,
unus mundus
—one world, a unified reality. He viewed these moments as opportunities to marvel at connectivity, the realization that we all come from the same source and ultimately return to it. Moments of synchronicity, when recognized, are portals of transcendence, a chance to accept that there’s something mysterious and larger than the individual at play. In some theologies, like Christianity, synchronicity is known as a blessing, or grace. In traditional Hawaiian culture and to many Buddhists, it’s just the way life works. To me, even now, it’s mainly an opportunity to blubber:
What are the chances?

The classic example of synchronicity that Jung often used was one he witnessed during a session with a client, someone he thought of as über-rational. She gave stock answers to his probing questions and was resistant to opening up emotionally, but one day, she told him that she’d had a dream the night before in which someone gave her a golden scarab necklace, which is a symbol of rebirth in Egyptian culture. While she was talking, he heard something at the window. When he went to open it, he found a scarabaeid beetle. He gathered the insect—with wings appearing metallic in the light—and told her, “Here is your scarab.” He wrote: “The experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance.”

Isn’t this what the sensation of wonder always does, in a sense? It punctures holes, makes stars in the domed roof-shell of what we know, and it makes us marvel about what’s beyond. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger once wrote: “We are all in reality sides or aspects of one single being, which may perhaps in western terminology be called god.” Science, in this way, harmonizes with the ancient religions of the world in finding connectivity.

One of James’s coworkers pulls up on a forklift. Coffee break’s over. James has to get back to work. He tells me that there’s potential for the lights tonight. There was activity on the surface of the sun a few days ago, which is a good indication that a solar storm will be reaching earth soon, though scientists can’t say exactly when or where the aurora will appear, or if local conditions will be clear enough to allow the light to reach us. But James has been watching the sky. He has a feeling that the night will be exceptionally clear. This is exciting, since the stars
and
the earth’s atmosphere have to align if one wants to see the breath of God.

James was planning to spend a few hours waiting out the solar winds with his camera tonight, even before we met. “You’re welcome to join me,” he says. Then he slips me an unconventional business card, his contact information printed on a pair of fully functional eclipse glasses.

 • • • 

When we meet up later that evening in a wood-built, heated dining room, I tell James that as much as I’d like to see the northern lights, I’m also hoping to hear them. Every year, thousands of people report that they’ve heard the aurora. I’ve met nearly half a dozen witnesses myself, all in the space of a few days. What they claim to hear isn’t the impossible-to-make-out waves of infrasound that have been recorded in the aurora at high altitudes. No, they claim to have been witness to the yet-to-be-recorded or scientifically explained, totally audible phenomenon that is the lights’ signature song. There is ancient precedent for this. The Sámi word for the aurora is
guovssahs
, which roughly translates as “the lights that make noise.”

James is skeptical. “I’ve spent thousands of hours with the aurora and I’ve never heard it before,” he says, temporarily distracted by a young man who’s come into the dining area. James watches as the guy whispers to a group of diners, who rise from their seats. Swedes aren’t known for loud proclamations, and James knows what this might mean. Even when you’re not outside, you have to be on alert if you want to catch the lights. He gets up and motions for me to follow. We’re joined by an increasingly wide stream of people as we rush toward the doors. I have never felt more like a stereotypically loud American in my life, but I can’t help but shout to a curious-looking couple as we pass their table: “Northern lights!”