It seems that my bucket list grows by a few lines each year — a bit faster than I can keep up with it at this stage in life.
One item that has been on that list since I was in middle school is to one day see the Aurora Borealis.
I remember watching a movie on TV when I was in eighth grade in which the Northern Lights played a key part in the plot. It was a two-part series called “The Langoliers” based off a Stephen King novella.
It was the first time I remember learning about the Aurora Borealis — the stunning ribbons of green, pink, dark red, blue and purple light that so many saw in northeast Indiana this past weekend.
My parents had recently bought us our first PC; I remember getting online with our dial-up modem and going to a search engine (probably Yahoo back then) to learn more about the Northern Lights.
Seeing the Aurora went on my bucket list that night back in 1995.
When I woke around 4:30 a.m. Saturday and started my daily check of the headlines, I was shocked to see news accounts of so many Hoosiers who saw the Northern Lights Friday night. When I opened social media, my feed was full of stunning photographs that my Facebook and Instagram friends had posted.
“I can’t believe that I missed it again,” I must have yelled, as my wife woke startled and confused about what I was trying to tell her before 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning.
“The Northern Lights — we could have seen them Friday night! I missed them again.” Let’s just say that she wasn’t as disappointed as yours truly.
I lost count of how many social media friends had posted their magnificent images from all around northeast Indiana as early as 11 p.m. Friday. If only I had stayed up a bit longer perhaps we could have seen them.
It was the second time I was so close to seeing the Northern Lights but missed them by going to bed too early.
After college, some friends and I made a two-month road trip from Arizona to Alaska and back. We spent nearly 60 days visiting a myriad of state and national parks in both the western United States and Canada as we drove to Alaska. We camped for two months in tents and made our meals on backpacker stoves.
One of my hopes on that 2004 trip was that we would see the Northern Lights, as we drove as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska. A month into the trip, however, we still had not seen them as we started our journey back to Arizona.
On our way home, we decided to take a ferry from Juneau, Alaska, to Prince Rupert in Canada. We spent two nights sleeping on lawn chairs on the ferry’s deck as we admired the beautiful sky and stars.
I was certain we might see the Northern Lights as we made our way south toward Canada.
We tried to sleep in shifts but the ferry’s comfortable lawn chairs (aka our beds) were the closest thing to a mattress we had been on for more than a month and we quickly dozed off that first night. When we woke the next morning, however, several of the other passengers asked if we had seen the amazing lights last night.
“Didn’t you hear the captain make an announcement about the Northern Lights being visible?” someone asked us. We had slept right through his announcement and the Aurora Borealis.
Twenty years later, I missed them again because of falling asleep too early Friday night.
When I saw there was a good chance of seeing them again Saturday, I reached out to a friend who is a professional photographer to see if he was interested in trying to observe them Saturday night. We drove to rural Leo-Cedarville around 10:30 p.m. Saturday to one of his friend’s house in the country and started out Northern Lights stake out.
We waited.
We drove to a new spot and then decided to come back to where we started.
We waited some more.
We saw beautiful stars, the Big Dipper and several planes. We heard frogs, the occasional Canada geese and some fish in the near-by pond.
We saw some occasional headlights from cars but we didn’t see any ribbons of light that even resembled the Aurora Borealis.
We returned home early Sunday morning disappointed but satisfied that we at least tried to catch a glimpse of such a beautiful phenomenon.
Looks like I’ll have to cross that item off my bucket list another day.
jdpeeper2@hotmail.com
