Tromsø. Four Hours of Nothing. Forty Seconds of Everything.

This edition turns north. Lobster Bob is in Tromsø, a Norwegian city 350 kilometres above the Arctic Circle, sitting on the seventieth parallel. The track is Air. The type is Wonder. This is the first European destination in the Postcards canon. The vehicle is El Cóndor YV-528, the Cessna bush plane Lobster Bob has flown across six continents. She has waited above more horizons than most pilots will see in a career. She does not mind waiting.

What follows is the postcard from a plane that was patient when Lobster Bob was not.

Hola Mijo! Lobster Bob here...

We took off from Tromsø Langnes airport at half past eleven in the evening. El Cóndor YV-528 had been on the apron for two days. She had been quietly absorbing the temperature without complaint. I had been complaining about the temperature.

The plan was simple. Climb to four thousand feet. Get above the cloud cover that had been sitting over the city for a week. Find the aurora. Land before the fuel ran low.

The cloud cover broke at three thousand five hundred feet. Above it was a blackness I have not seen anywhere else. No light from below. No light from above. The stars were so clear I could see them in the colours they actually were. Some of them were blue. Some of them were almost red. I had not known stars came in colours before.

El Cóndor settled into a slow circle at four thousand feet. The temperature outside the cabin was minus thirty-eight degrees. The temperature inside the cabin was minus eight. I had brought a thermos. The tea was already cold by the time I poured it.

We waited.

After the first hour I checked the instruments. After the second hour I checked them again. By the third hour I had started talking to El Cóndor about whether she thought the aurora was coming. She gave me the impression that she had asked herself fewer questions in her career. I had asked her more questions in the last forty-five minutes.

Thirty years ago in Caracas I told her something. I would never ask a plane to wait for something that might not arrive. I had broken this rule four times before tonight. Tonight was the fifth.

At three twelve in the morning the aurora arrived.

It did not begin gently. It began as a green line across the entire northern horizon. By the time I turned my head, the line had become a curtain. The curtain crossed the whole sky from one horizon to the other. The curtain moved. It rippled like a sheet on a washing line in a strong wind. The sheet was the entire sky. The wind was solar wind from a star ninety-three million miles away.

Then it turned pink at the edges. Then purple. Then red at the top.

Forty seconds. That was the whole thing. Forty seconds and the sky went back to being black.

I sat in El Cóndor without speaking. She had been right. I had been wrong. She did not mention it.

The school-yard fact is this. The aurora you see above the Arctic Circle is the sun touching the Earth. Solar wind leaves the sun and arrives here two days later, travelling at over a million kilometres an hour. It hits the magnetic field around our planet. The field bends it down into the upper atmosphere. There it crashes into oxygen and nitrogen atoms and makes them glow. The green is oxygen. The red is also oxygen, higher up. The purple is nitrogen. A child can hold that on their fingers tonight.

We flew back to Langnes at half past three. El Cóndor handled the descent at her own pace. I logged the flight in her book. I wrote the time of the aurora. I wrote that it had lasted forty seconds. I did not write what I had been saying to her during the wait. She did not ask.

The plane was on the apron the next morning. She was doing what she does when she is not flying. She was being patient. She had nothing to prove. She never had.

I have stopped asking her when she thinks anything will start.

The World is Your Classroom. Humility is Your Compass.

Passport ready, mijo? The world is not going to wait forever.

Lobster Bob, Founder & Scenic Tour Operator

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