To Ease the Passing of Time

It was more than fifty years ago. I was hitchhiking between Ottawa and Montreal. I guy stopped to give me a ride. He was a rough looking middle aged man. He spoke French with the accent of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec. On the back seat of his car there was a construction hat and a big toolbox. After asking me my name and where I was going, he asked me if I had ever seen the Northern Lights. I said, “No, I’ve never seen the Northern Lights.” He said, “You have to see the Northern Lights. If there’s one thing you don’t want to miss in this life, it’s the Northern Lights. You gotta see the Northern Lights.”

And he talked to me about the Northern Lights for the next two hours. He told me about the first time he saw them when he was working on the construction of a dam near Chibougameau. “It was beautiful”, he said, I’ll never forget.” And he told me about the time he was driving through northern Manitoba to start a new job in Churchill Falls. It was in the middle of a cold night. He stopped by the side of the road, took out his sleeping bag, and lay on top of his car in it to have a better view of what was going on in the sky. When he described it to me, he was like a kid talking about Christmas. He was not a rough looking man anymore; his face was like the paintings of the saints you see in churches, looking at something that only they can see. He said, “It was a mix of colours and shapes dancing in the sky, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The blue and the green were waltzing together like a couple of lovers.” And he told me about the Northern Lights he had seen in all the places he had worked: Alberta, Alaska, the Northwest Territories and Yukon. He said. “They are all different, but they are all so amazingly beautiful.”

When we got to Montreal, before I got out of the car, he looked at me in the eyes and said, “You gotta see those Northern Lights.” I never did. It‘s a long way up there, where you can see the Northern Lights, and it’s less expensive to fly to Cuba or Mexico. But what I learned that day was more important than the Northern Lights, even though it was very interesting; it was more about passion and a sense of wonder that you can keep long after you are no longer a child. That’s the lesson that man taught me that day, more than fifty years ago. I still remember it today.

P.-S.: I said I never saw the Northern Lights for real, but I saw them on YouTube. It’s true that they are amazingly beautiful. I can only imagine what it would be like to see them for real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0UCYUfvcBw