New Year in L.A.

northern lights

Photo is from here

Solved this Project Euler problem at the Toronto airport. Our flight ended up taking off an hour and a half later than its original scheduled time. HOWEVER, thirty minutes into our return flight tonight, the pilot informed everyone that the AURORA BOREALIS was visible from the right side of the plane.

My goodness!!!! Few things send shivers down my spine, but being within shouting distance (ish) of these lights was an otherworldly experience, albeit one that lasted only a few minutes as the plane veered southward and the lights faded. I never thought I’d see these lights in my life.

But, my god! A whole length of lights arrayed themselves along the horizon, faintly glowing blue-green, faintly resembling the illustrated curtain folds I remember from the Childcraft books I pored over as a kid. I could also see the Big Dipper (handle pointing down) shining clearly and distinctly overhead.

The last time I remember feeling this way was when I drove myself back to my Branson, MO hotel in June. The road had some slight curves and was barely lit, and every so often a bolt of lightning terrifyingly lit up the horizon. This closeness with the skies and with the raw forces that cause such light to rain down - whether with the intensity of a bolt or as gently luminous folds - I barely have words to describe how they make me feel - awe, goosebumps, terror.

They’re natural phenomena, perhaps even mundane to many people, but the way they manifest themselves feels like something I would only conjure in a dream. They are raw, primordial displays of the earth’s forces, forces that presumably continue long after we die. I suppose they’ll end once the earth ceases to exist, too, and I suppose that they inspire such intense awe in me because they’re a near-palpable reminder of the vastness within this film we call the sky and the atmosphere. And we know the sky and atmosphere to be finite, yet they seem to blend seamlessly with infinitude and the bottomless darkness beyond, things we can barely comprehend.

DEEP STUFF

As I finish writing this, I find our plane flying over Green Bay, WI. A telling absence of lights defines the edge of the bay. Twenty minutes later, we’re flying just south of Minneapolis and St. Paul, thin patches of clouds faintly aglow with the orange city lights below; they form a sort of floating quilt.

Half an hour later, we’re flying over South Dakota; it’s as sparsely lit as one would expect (at times, nearly overwhelmingly dark), but there are still small clusters of towns that peek through the clouds, glowing like small nebulae.

Twenty minutes later, we’re flying past Laramie, WY. Seventy-five minutes later, the dramatic blot of Las Vegas against the vast, flat desert. Twenty-five minutes later, Riverside, San Bernardino, and then L.A. sprawl into each other. The mountains are mysterious black masses.

I can make out Griffith Observatory, Burbank, those concrete sticks in downtown (the same Ritz-Carlton building we can see from our balcony),  the sprawling San Fernando Valley to the northwest. Thousands of stationary, shiny cars in parking lots gleam like nail polish.