Under the Pinball Moon and Sun

The arctic is famous for what it does to light--holds onto it all summer, refuses to let it near in the winter. Mirages, flares, the northern lights.

The first week in the arctic, in Vuntut, the sun did not set at all, although it did go progressively further behind a mountain each night. The last evening, it was far enough back that it simply lit the entire chain of hills a bright red, pure magenta, really.

Earlier that day, I'd been walking on the mountainside, and it suddenly got dark--sun moving behind a cloud. I looked up, glad for my eyes having a moment's rest from the constant light, and somehow, the sun had lit the edges of four or five clouds with rainbows--the color simply followed the cloud contours.

In the Alaskan arctic, the moon would shoot straight up, but not very far; then it would move sideways across the sky. One night, it rose huge and red between a cleft in two mountains, while loons yelled at it.

Earlier that day, I'd gone for a walk--not an easy thing to do, with my knee not working, but I found if I stuck to the trails carved across the tundra by caribou (oh, how I wanted to take home that caribou skull I found, nubs of antlers still attached), it wasn't too bad.

At the far end of the lake, sitting on a nice rock, surrounded by those fresh water snail shells that seemed more delicate than the origami my brother does, I was suddenly aware of a strange shadow behind me. The sun had moved behind a cloud that was puffy on the edges, smooth in the middle. And in the middle part, the light had gone nacreous--how often do you get a chance to use that word? Pure mother of pearl light, or the light from an ocotoscope aimed at a screen door in summer.