Silence falls as the sky contorts. Above my head, enormous beams reach upwards, stretching miles and miles. They are blue, and red, and pink, the reds and pinks so bright that I do not need my camera to see them. I do not need anything, because I’m floating. I’ve slipped, somehow, into another reality, where language fails, and tears take over.
***
I arrived sometime after 10pm. That was, perhaps, a mistake, as the moor was flooded with people. Every parking space had been taken. Cars were abandoned along narrow roads. Lines of torches headed up hills. I took one look at Hay Tor and knew I couldn’t go up there. It was too busy, the torches too bright. I drove on.
I found a space further along the road and climbed out. The dusk sky was brighter than usual. I could hear beating drums and music nearby, as if I’d stumbled upon a secret festival. Excitement permeated the air. There were shouts, laughter, whoops, car after car; a great, spontaneous gathering of people in the darkness.
I took a photograph and saw that all the sky was aglow with diffuse aurora, pink and green. I had no idea where to go, but it was too busy to stay by the road, so I found a pony track and followed it into a clearing where the grass was short, circled by a ring of Gorse. I could see Hay Tor and Rippon Tor on the horizon. More cars passed. They just kept coming. A great snake of lights. But they were far away now. Somehow, amidst the commotion, I’d found a place to be alone.
I watched the many lights climbing over Hay Tor as the sky glowed. Close by, unperturbed by the activity, I heard a drumming Snipe; a goat-like bleat created as the male falls through the air with tail feathers spread. It was close to 11pm, and I wondered if the brightness in the sky was encouraging the Snipe to display later in the evening than usual. In the distance, a single, plaintive whistle announced the presence of a Curlew.
And then reality began to bend and shift. The aurora reached further southwards, sending towering beams into the night sky. People stopped talking, all of us collectively holding our breath. Only the Snipe broke the silence. As I stared, one of my favourite birds, a Nightjar, glided past me; a noiseless silhouette before curtains of light.
I tried to take photographs, but the light pillars were so tall that I couldn’t fit their entirety into the frame. There are ways to fix this, stitching images together in Photoshop, but I felt like I’d be betraying my eyes if I concentrated entirely on my camera instead of the aurora. So I lay myself down on the short grass, still dry from the heat of the day, and gazed upwards. The light pillars were unfathomably tall. I almost felt as if I could touch them, and if I did, that they could suck me straight into the sky. Neon red filled my vision. It danced in the pillars and glowed on the east and west horizons. I tried to record a video on my phone, but I had no words. Language evaporated, and time ceased.
The auroral corona moved over my head. I couldn’t fully comprehend what I was seeing. The light pillars, bright and huge, looked as if they were all converging to a single point directly over me. Below this, bright beams of light were sliding across the sky. I stood up, looked in every direction, tried to compose photographs. On my camera’s display screen I could see a rainbow of colours. Colours were flowing down from the sky all around me: vertical shafts of purple, pink, blue. It felt like a dream, like another dimension, like I was transcending into the otherworld. Myths held more sway than science: Valkyries searching for souls to take to Åsgard; the deceased contacting the living; lights that could take me away. Under a display as immense as this, caused by back to back solar flares, folklore becomes defensible. You can know that gases in the atmosphere are being excited by particles from Earth’s magnetotail, consequently lighting up in an assortment of colours, but that doesn’t capture the wonderment of the phenomenon like mythology can.
At close to midnight, cars began moving again. Some people shone their headlights out across the moor, highlighting Hawthorns and rocks. I should have felt tired, and cold, but neither sensation had found me yet. I was too overwhelmed. To the west, the waxing crescent Moon was about to set: a golden orb lit with earthshine. A Barn Owl called towards Emsworthy Mire, a strange hiss like a lost soul. I wondered if it would be warm enough for me to stay here on the short grass under the aurora all night, or if the lights would take me away. The boundary between matter and spirit felt thin.
The sky continued to flare. The corona faded, but beams, patterns and colours came and went. And always, there was a bright glow. During the Carrington Event of 1859, the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, gold miners in the Rocky Mountains, thinking the light they were seeing was the coming dawn, began to prepare their breakfast. Once, I had struggled to understand this, but it made sense to me now. The glow was constant, and strong – strong enough to make my head torch unnecessary. It looked, as the miners had thought, like Aurora approaching, Roman goddess of the dawn.
Perhaps that is why, at 1.45am, I heard a Cuckoo. Three times its clear voice rang out: “Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo”. My first of the year. There are many superstitions around this first encounter. Hearing a Cuckoo in your right ear is, according to Irish folklore, better than hearing it with your left. If you have money in your pocket, it should be turned for prosperity. If you are looking down when you first hear a cuckoo it is unlucky, and if your feet rest on hard ground your year will be difficult. Even the direction you are facing has meaning, for that is the way you will be heading for the rest of the year. At the monastery of Cluain Mhic Nóisre, in Ireland, a Cuckoo calling at night heralded fair weather. But none of the folklore mentions hearing your first Cuckoo under the aurora borealis.
Hopefully it is auspicious.
Later, I learned that people around the country heard a Cuckoo calling that night, too. The bird which, in Celtic mythology, could travel into the spirit world and summon the souls of the dead. The Gaukr (old Norse), or Gowk in Scottish, synonymous with fools, specifically fools whose foolishness stemmed from encounters with faeries. A wandering voice under the numinous sky; a sky which felt like it stopped time, and transported me to the edge of the otherworld.
‘Go mairimíd beo ar an amsa seo arís. Amen.’
(May we live to see this day again.)
To the Cuckoo
O blithe New-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice.
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?
While I am lying on the grass
Thy twofold shout I hear;
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
At once far off, and near.
[…]
Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery;
[…]
O blessèd Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial, faery place;
That is fit home for Thee!
~ William Wordsworth.
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