Our year of auroras

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On the first big night of the auroras, I fed my children too much ice cream and drove them north, seeking a place outside the gauzy veil of city lights where the dark sky could open up in front of us like a stage. We ended up at a county park outside North Branch, squelching through the sodden grass at the edge of a lake, gobsmacked as a tent of purple and green appeared above our heads the moment darkness fell.

It was, indeed, awesome. But one of the parts that sticks with me most about that night back in May happened after we turned our attention away from the sky and toward the lights of the road on our way back home. It was 11 p.m. The kids were now cranky lumps in the back seat, completely unconvinced by my millennial, child-of-a-hippie belief that Pink Floyd is great music to sleep to. And that was when I noticed something strange.

There we were, still a good 30 minutes outside Minneapolis, late on a spring Friday night … and the northbound side of I-35 was absolutely packed with the kind of traffic usually reserved for summer afternoons. Hundreds of pairs of headlights pointing north toward the dark lakeshores we’d just left, like a shift change at the wonder factory. We had driven away from the city to get a view of nature, but the city had come with us. Or, anyway, the people had. The northern lights, an experience usually associated with loons and lakes and lonely forests, became a party.

It’s been a good summer for that kind of shindig. We’re currently in the midst of an 11-year peak in solar activity, leading to the kind of geomagnetic storms that produce intense auroras at latitudes visible across Minnesota. If you didn’t see that big, multiday extravaganza in May, perhaps you made it out for the one last week. There will likely be more opportunities through early 2026 — potentially even some as powerful and widely visible as the one in May. More chances to watch cars pack the parking lots of small town lakefronts and line the ditches on the sides of county roads. More city-zens plunking down their folding chairs at sunset while children run wild on the high of late bedtimes and strange play equipment.

And, to be clear, I think this is a good thing. I think the crowds enhance the auroras, not detract from them. It’s one thing to see some lights alone on the edge of a dark bog. It’s another to hear people gasping, squealing, even clapping as darkness settles in the east and the colors that had already been there, all around you, are suddenly visible. There’s something special about being able to turn to a stranger and make eye contact and silently know this is the most amazing thing either of you has ever witnessed. Guy with the beard, wrapped in a plaid blanket, you know what I’m talking about.

People drive north not just to see the auroras but to be a part of the collective experience of seeing the auroras. If they miss the first night of a storm, they’ll try the next. If you follow aurora hunter groups on Facebook, you’ll see them overflowing with newcomers who don’t know the lingo or the technical knowledge, but still regularly ask, “Is this going to be a big one? Will this be the night everybody goes out?”

Personally, I blame the pretensions of Henry David Thoreau for convincing generations of Americans that nature is something you do by yourself. One of the best parts of having a good high school English teacher is learning that Thoreau was getting his laundry done by his mom and regularly throwing the Victorian equivalent of keggers on Walden Pond. Even he was not a loner in nature.

And on the whole, our species never has been. We are, after all, the descendants of apes who clawed their way out of relying on claws for survival with the help of relationships, communities and shared beliefs. The very fact that we ever built cities at all tells you something about how humans want to be together and how that desire has shaped our development as a species. But there are also some truly awesome echoes of this in the way our bodies respond to sharing an experience with other people.

When humans share an experience, we start to match facial expressions, body movements, and even heart rhythms with other people in the group whether we know them personally or not. Scientists have watched those changes ripple through the crowd at concerts and religious rituals. There have been studies that show we have more pronounced unconscious physical reactions to music when we listen with others than when we listen alone. There’s even a few studies where the enjoyment of sharing an experience was distinct from whether or not people actually liked the thing they experienced. It’s as much a delight to trash talk a terrible play together as to collectively praise a good one.

Knowing all that, it’s no wonder that a thing like the auroras can bring us together. We want to see the cool thing in the sky, sure. But it’s not just that. It’s looking at the cool thing in the sky in a crowd. It’s watching social media to ogle others’ glorious photos and feeling the tug of FOMO to hop in the car and spend a couple of hours stomping around a field with strangers. Those things aren’t just a fun side effect. They’re also the thing we’re after.

There’s an irony to this, of course, in so much as the band of light pollution created by the Twin Cities is the thing that makes seeing auroras an experience you usually have to drive an hour to do properly. If you’re watching the Space Weather Prediction Center and see a storm brewing, it’s best to make plans to get out of the city glow. Opportunities to watch the aurora from a parking garage downtown are rare, though the May storm shows they aren’t impossible. But either way, those other people creating the light pollution also make the experience more worth it. There’s just something about the way we sync up over the course of a day, wondering who is going out, checking message boards for tips and tricks, building tension that drives us to leave town … together.

And if you miss the action, well, at least you have the shared experience of the internet to turn to instead. Like the meme says, “I didn’t see the auroras, I just like to be included.”