A spectacular spectacle

The sound of water tumbling over rock, the feel of warm soil, the scent of a wild rose, the taste of the season’s first morel, the sight of a sunlit rooster pheasant bolting from cover — all the sensory delights that earth bestows upon us have lately had to compete with the celestial glories that have shone round about us.

In the sere November, when the flowers have gone to seed, when most of the pretty birds have flown, when the formerly brilliant fall foliage lies crumpled on the ground, celestial events have more than compensated for the loss.

The full Beaver Supermoon, the year’s closest supermoon, reached peak illumination on Nov. 5, just 220,000 miles from my appreciative eyes. About 8 percent closer than a normal full moon, it appeared about that much bigger and brighter.

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As I watched it ascend over the backwaters of the Mississippi River, it cast its reflection in the still waters of Shore Slough and my dark, distinct moon shadow on the ground behind me.

The following morning the same sky that showcased the super moon and the same water that reflected it glowed red, orange, yellow, pink and blue with a breathtaking sunrise heralding a perfect fall day.

Because we see them so often, we tend to take for granted the rising and setting sun’s almost daily glorification of the horizon. Not so with the rare and dramatic light show that thrilled Iowans on Nov. 11.

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Until then my experience with northern lights had always reminded me of my wolf sighting during a Lake of the Woods ice fishing trip. It was dusk, and I could not be sure it was a wolf, but I said to my companion Dean Baragary, “I’m gonna go ahead and say I saw a wolf,” and Dean, ever ready to back up a good story, said, “I’m gonna go ahead and say I was with you when you did it.”

That’s how it was with the aurora. My phone camera could see them, but I was never quite sure that greenish glow along the northern horizon was not just the lights of Winthrop.

Until the night of Nov. 11 when my phone lit up with a Facebook notification from Katie Hund, the ranger at Cedar Rock State Park north of town: “Wow. The aurora borealis is impressive tonight. Look north, people.”

I told my wife Corinne, who is even more of a northern lights skeptic than me, that I would take a look and come back for her if there was anything to see.

It was borderline. A treat for my phone, maybe, but not much in the way of human eye candy. I returned and reported that I could kind of see them but it was nothing spectacular. We then drove the same route together, and she too could kind of see them.

Then, as we drove disappointedly back to town, Corinne exclaimed, “Oh my God, look.” There they were: vivid red pulsating columns and curtains of high-altitude excited oxygen atoms.

It was Alaska in Quasky, with (as Johnny Horton sang in 1960) “the northern lights running wild in the land of the midnight sun.”