An Unexpected Sighting

A stealthy visitor came to me in the Finnish countryside this weekend...

The phone call from the neighbor came right after we finished dinner at the summer cottage in the Finnish countryside. When our host hung up the phone, my husband, our friends, and our host dropped everything and ran outside to see something we've always heard about but had never seen, until that night. As we ran through the darkness, I wondered if it would look like the pictures in my schoolbooks and if it would even be there at all when we got to the right spot. The only audible sounds were our dogs answering the barking of other dogs and the crunching of leaves under our feet as we ran blindly on a path in the woods.

When we reached the top of the hill and saw the glowing green arc across the northern sky, we started incredulously, marveling at our good fortune of being able to see something so unexpected and fleeting. It looked like a neon green plume of supernatural looking smoke, changing shapes, curving its way across the sky. Many Finns I've talked to said that they have seen it only once in their lives, if that. Many visitors come to Scandinavia and Finland, hoping they will see this extra terrestrial phenomenon, but its elusive nature means that you can never guarantee a sighting, even under the most perfect conditions. It stayed for about five minutes, and then slowly dissolved into the ink colored sky punctuated with tiny bright stars. There we were, standing in a Finnish forest, less than 30 kilometers from the Russian border, and we had seen something I had, ironically, ranked less than three days ago in my last blog posting as the number one reason to visit northern Europe in autumn. The aurora borealis, the northern lights! If only I had my camera.