Ancient Places Read Free

Hemisphere winter. Orbiting the earth every ninety minutes, he often saw some trace of the aurora. “If I could get to the viewing port right as the ISS cut over Tasmania or New Zealand, and looked beyond them into the Southern Ocean, the effects were there,” Phillips said. “Usually we had to glance at a downward angle to see the aurora, but occasionally we would pass directly through it.”
    Experience had taught him that the auroral oval is brightest just inside its perimeter. If you are standing on Earth near Reindeer Lake, and there happens to be an intense episode of geomagnetic storms, you are likely to witness bright-green sheets “dancing” just as the Cree described. Sometimes the intensity of the light can overload the sensory receptors of your brain, where neurons built for sight and hearing lie very close together. As the visual input from the aurora spills acrossboth types of neurons, you believe that you are hearing as well as seeing the northern lights. That is the same kind of synesthesia that Thompson and his fur trade crew experienced, and may account for the “tossed jelly” sounds that he described at Lake Susquagemow.
    If, on the other hand, you are on a spacecraft orbiting Earth, you have a very wide field of view that extends for many hundreds of miles. That slows the cycle way down. When the craft passes through an aurora or straight over it, observers on board usually detect only a diffuse green color, as if they were inside a pale cloud. On the ISS, Phillips found that he had to look askance, toward Earth’s horizon, to see the bright coherent sheets. Even then, because of the great distance, they appeared to vibrate on a very slow period of activity. The color patterns would remain static for fifteen seconds or more before reconstituting themselves into some new form, then hold still for several more beats. “After a while, it wasn’t that big of a deal,” Phillips said. “With the aurora, it all depends on where you are.”
On the Ground
    Whenever the northern limits of the space station’s orbit were above western Canada during daylight hours, John Phillips found himself in a perfect position to observe the geography of David Thompson’s western journeys among the tributaries of the upper Columbia River. These conditions occurred about every forty-eight hours. The astronaut began to time breaks in his required duties so that he could return to the single viewing port that looked directly down on the planet. From that vantage, just as the ISS was approaching its maximum northern latitude for a particular swing, Phillips soon located several ofThompson’s touchstone waterways—lured to them, really, by their luminous reflections.
    As the ISS passed over southeastern British Columbia, Phillips spotted the two source lakes of the West’s great river, partially obscured by scudding clouds. Two days later, there he was again, leaning against his porthole, willing to coast through many more orbits in order to see the scene clearly. When his camera finally captured those twin lakes to his satisfaction, Phillips forwarded the image to me through the electric fluid of space.
    Two centuries earlier, following the advice of Kootenai tribal elders, David Thompson built his first trade house west of the Rockies at the north end of those source lakes. In an attempt to absorb that landscape, I had walked myself footsore retracing his meanders along ancient Kootenai trails. But John Phillips’s photograph instantly provided me with a much deeper sense of context. Time and space seemed to move within it, providing a taste of the slow collision of one tectonic plate against another during the Late Cretaceous period, around seventy million years ago. I could suddenly see how the uplift of the Rocky Mountains related to the long narrow trench where the Columbia flowed north along the range’s western flank.
    The photograph also captured the scars of more recent geologic events, after the great ice