The Night the Tiers Caught Fire

We had last been at the Honeycomb Caves with Grammy and Fran, on the final night before the parting, and coming back up that road felt stranger than expected. The clearing was the same. The Great Western Tiers still filled the southern horizon, unbroken from one end of the camp to the other. Only the count had changed: two of us now instead of four, in the place where the four had ended.

Others were already in. John was eighty and travelling in a motorhome he clearly loved, with the energy of a man half that age and a supply of stories to match. Sam was young, South African, a commercial diver only recently arrived in Tasmania and impatient to get at it. We talked into the evening the way you do with strangers who turn out to be easy company, then went our separate ways to bed.

Anth checked the Glendale app before turning in, out of habit more than hope. The forecast stopped him. The largest solar storm in two decades was arriving, and it was arriving now.

Batteries on charge. Camera out, tripod out, the fumbling business of getting ready in the dark while trying not to hurry so much that something essential gets left behind. We walked to a clear part of the camp where the view south was open and stood with our necks tipped back.

For a long while there was almost nothing. A faint wash low on the horizon, the kind of thing that shows up on a long exposure and disappears when you look at it directly. Sam and John drifted back to their camps. We stayed, mostly because leaving felt like giving up on something.

Then Anth wandered further south, past the last of the trees, and the western sky caught fire.

He shouted. Sal was running before she had processed why. What came up over the Tiers was not the pale green smear the cameras had been coaxing out of the dark; it was red, structured, and moving, columns rising and collapsing at a speed that made no sense for something that size. We rang John and Sam and told them to get out here, and the four of us stood in a rough line on the wet grass while it built. Even the cloud that had been massing all evening pulled apart and let it through.

Sam had a few beers in him and lost whatever grip he had on composure. "Are you guys seeing what the hell I am seeing," he said, to nobody, several times.

Sal had wanted this since she was a girl. She had read about it, looked it up, understood on some level that it was mostly a thing that happened to other people in colder places. And now it was overhead, in Australia, in colours no photograph had prepared her for. She did not say anything. She stood with her head back and her hands at her sides and let it go on, and after a while Anth noticed she was crying and did not mention it. Some things do not need to be witnessed out loud.

It ran for hours. We lost track of how many. When it finally thinned out and the sky went back to ordinary stars, we walked to the bus with the particular stiffness that comes of standing still in the cold for half a night, and lay there too wired to sleep.

The next morning gave us the size of it. The aurora had gone as far north as Queensland, our own home state, which should not be possible. In the northern hemisphere the Borealis had done the same in reverse, hanging over places that had never seen it. Half the world had been outside at the same time, looking up at the same storm from opposite ends of the planet. There is something in that which is hard to put down properly: the sense of having been part of a night that belonged to everyone.

John left first, then Sam, both back to their own routes. With Sam there were promises made about crossing paths again before we left the island, the kind of promise that gets made warmly and honestly and then takes its chances with the road. Before we came away we had worried, quietly and separately, that this life would be a lonely one. Nearly five months in, that fear looked increasingly foolish. The road kept handing us people.

By the fifth day the batteries were struggling. Too much tree shade, too little sun at this latitude in autumn, and cloud that had settled in and stayed. So we packed up early and pointed toward Deloraine to charge, with a night somewhere in between and Launceston after that.

Ordinary problems, in other words. The solar panels did not care what they had failed to catch, and the week still needed managing. We drove out past the clearing where we had stood, which was also the clearing where Grammy had hugged us both and got into the Hiace, and neither of us said anything about either of them. There did not seem to be a way to.Read more