Northern Lights

 

The Northern Lights put on a spectacular show across vast swaths of the northern hemisphere. This included Minnesota. 

But you can't see the Aurora Borealis worth beans from the light polluted cities, or even from the small cities.

So everyone hopped into their cars, late at night, and drove off as far away from everything that they could get!

And when they got there they found that everyone else came with them, and they were crowded horribly together on the sides of the road and in the tiny parking lots of the small muddy lakes of forgotten regional parks. 

And cars came and went, their blaring headlights flashing over the masses tramping through the mud. And the trampling masses could hardly get all mad about it, because ten minutes ago they were the ones blaring the lights!

And so the poor wonder seekers had to go farther and farther. But they only found other cities and other people, all gathered together in great bunches to get away from everyone else!

But yeah, they saw some Northern Lights. And it was neat, vaguely, like, kind of neat. It depended on how far you drove.

Yes, I was there, with my dear and intrepid wife.

We drove and drove like we were going to a ballgame or a giant concert or something. And even though we did not know where we were going, everywhere was the destination that everyone else was headed to as well.

It was less awful than I have made it sound.

And not as good now as you might imagine.

Yes, it was right there in the middle with most things.

If you saw some pictures you may have been enviously amazed!

But pack up your jealousy for you won't be needing it. You have missed less than you thought. It turns out that the cell phone cameras see totally differently than the naked eye, and they produced far more colorful and amazing pictures than anyone could see with their simple, puny meat eyes.

In short, the pictures you might have seen of the Northern Lights were hideous lies that people downplayed the inaccuracy of to feel less bad for driving in traffic to nowhere at midnight!

Here is a rendition of kind of what the scene we were at looked like, but only according to what a phone camera might show of it:

Sorry, no, there wasn't a flying saucer. That is just something only cameras see also.

But what, you might wonder, did the Northern Lights look like with the naked eye?

Not as good as this, above, but,

BUT,

And this might be important:

You had to see it.