In another lifetime, as a young pup (so you know it was a long time ago), I was stationed at SondreFjord, Greenland, ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle while working in radio and television as a member of the US Air Force. Our station was three miles from the base, up the side of Mount Ferguson as we called it, near a glacier lake whose name if it had one I never learned.
This time of year forty-five years ago when I was there (told ya it was long ago) it was total darkness, the sun never rose above the horizon (and was still weeks away from doing so) and when that finally happened we had a party which lasted for a lot longer than the amount of daylight we were celebrating.
I hated the snow and the cold and the dark and the winds that screamed coming off the Ice Cap to our north and crows so big they had six-foot wingspans and rabid arctic foxes that had lost their fear of humans and followed you everywhere at all times of the day or night.
But I did like one thing. I'd bundle up when we had one of the 'canned' programs from our headquarters on the airwaves, and go out on the deck the Danish engineers had built on the back of the station, overlooking the lake and I'd watch the Northern Lights play for hours and hours without, as near as I could determine, ever repeating themselves.
There was nothing to hear, just the frozen expanses surrounding me but the lights were spectacular and now thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope I can approximate that feeling of 'alone in the universe' with, amazingly enough, a form, if you will, of the music of the spheres as data sonification (yeah, a real word), adds a soundtrack to the movie of the farthest reaches of heaven.
You better inhale because you're about to have your breath taken away. And there's a whole universe, literally, waiting for you to hear.
-bill kenny
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