Star Queen Memoirs #4: Northern Lights

While I held expectation at bay before arriving in Alaska, I had a list of things I wanted to do and see while I was there. The first one being to “live on a boat at some point in my life”. There were so many others. Nearly everything was crossed off by the time I left and there were dozens I couldn’t have conceived of.

One small disappointment was the Northern Lights. It stays pretty cloudy in the Inside Passage, but I know they can be seen if you’re diligent.

The work was physical and I had to drink more water than ever before (ironically—since there was nothing but water all around me). This caused a couple pee-breaks in the middle of the night. Everyone was sound asleep, so I’d pee off the upper deck, which gave me a perfect opportunity to look for the magic lights.

One week would pass, then another; I was accumulating great experiences but I still hadn’t seen the Northern Lights.

It was our second day moored at the harbor at Anan Creek; a Tuesday. I woke up at midnight, on schedule and walked onto the deck. As I peered over the edge, a shape began to emerge. I rubbed my eyes, half dreamy. The upper deck was thirteen or fourteen feet off the water line so I was looking down, steeply. Still, I saw a pearlescent shape in the water.

I blinked, trying to turn it into something sensible. A Beluga whale, perhaps? But it was glowing. So, I just saw it for what it was: a great serpentine form submerged eight or twelve feet beneath the water. And it was moving deliberately, towards the Star Queen. I watched the head of the creature disappear under our hull, thinking there may be an impact. When there wasn’t, I scurried to the port side, ducking the davits and rushing around the smoke stack to see it reemerge. It spanned the entire beam and still had twenty or thirty feet of its head and tail fully visible on each side.

It was every bit as big as the Star Queen and swam right under her. I thought I had to be crazy. It continued towards the mouth of Anan Creek, then did the most peculiar thing. It changed shape, as though its’ tail caught up with its’ head and ran into itself, the way a jug of milk does when slid across a table. As it pooled in the shallows before the entrance to the estuary, moonlight illuminated a texture on the water. I couldn’t make it out at first.

Watching closely, I realized they were dorsal fins and the tips of tails. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands of them, writhing in the water. This creature wasn’t ‘a’ creature at all; it was a great school of Pink Salmon, congregating, nearly home. And as they showed up in a wave, in the darkness, they swam through phosphorescent water, releasing a million light-bursts trapped in plankton and algae, illuminating their collective form.

I never did see the Northern Lights; not the ones in the sky.