Ancient Places (2 page)

The fur agent, who grew into a solid geographer and cartographer during his long career, also gained a reputation as a master storyteller. Even though he didn’t write about his experiences on Lake Susquagemow until he was approaching eighty years old, when he was plagued by failing vision and economic hardship, the details of his bizarre encounter with the diving “meteors” remained vivid. Both of the darting globes stand out in the mind of anyone reading Thompson’s memoirs, as do
his experiences with the much more familiar phenomenon of northern lights, or aurora borealis.

Drawing on decades of personal observations spaced across the northern tier of the continent, Thompson commented on the aurora’s relative weakness along the shores of Hudson Bay and west of the Rocky Mountains compared to its astonishing brightness around another fur post where he wintered on Reindeer Lake, a huge body of water that straddles today’s boundary between Saskatchewan and Manitoba at around latitude fifty-seven degrees north. There, Thompson asserted, especially in the months of February and March, the entire sky regularly bathed in a bright glow.

On one nighttime hunting expedition at Reindeer Lake, the brightness of the aurora allowed Thompson to shoot an owl at a range of twenty yards. But it was the warping of human senses that most interested him. “In the rapid motions of the Aurora,” he wrote, “we were all persuaded that we heard them. Reason told me that I did not, but it was cool reason against sense.”

His crew was so enraptured by these displays of sonorous light that Thompson could not persuade them it was an illusion caused by “the eye deceiving the ear.” To prove the point, “I had
my men blindfolded by turns, and then enquired of them, if they heard the rapid motions of the Aurora. They soon became sensible they did not.” Such logic could only override their senses momentarily, however, and as soon as Thompson removed the blindfolds, “so powerful was the illusion of the eye on the ear, that they still believed they heard the Aurora.”

Many of the men and families who worked with Thompson had roots in the Cree culture, and he recorded their interpretation of the aurora. “The Cree Indians of North America call them the ‘Dead’ by the name of
Jee pe ak,
(the souls of the dead), and when the Aurora is bright in vivid graceful motion, they exclaim, See how happy our fathers are tonight, they are dancing to the enlivening songs of the other world.”

Thompson, who might have preferred a more scientific explanation of the dancing lights, occasionally applied the word “meteor” to an aurora event, at least on some level comparing Reindeer Lake’s wavering curtains with Lake Susquagemow’s phosphoric globes of swamp gas. “This [auroral] Meteor seems to affect the great bodies of fresh water, over which they are seen more or less splendid every winter and during the summer seasons every clear night they are visible in the north eastern part of the sky.” He did not, however, raise the possibility that the jellified sounds he heard as he watched the orbs over Lake Susquagemow slap into ice or trees might have been caused by the same sort of sensory distortion that he tried to explain to his men. Instead, he put forth a series of questions about the aurora at Reindeer Lake that atmospheric scientists have spent much of the last two centuries trying to work out.

It’s been several years now since I received my first personal message from outer space. It took the form of an e-mail with the suffix of
nasa.gov
and included an attached photograph that took forever to open. When the image finally unfurled, I saw a pleasant-looking gent in a dark polo shirt, holding up a copy of a book I had written about David Thompson. Behind his shoulder, a porthole framed a view of cirrus clouds spread across a patch of blue Earth that looked very far away. “I’m writing to let you know,” the message began, “that your book has been doing some traveling.” The message was signed “John Phillips, NASA Astronaut aboard the International Space Station,” an address that transported me back to the pulp science-fiction stories and B space movies of my youth.

But John Phillips was real. Over the next few months, he corresponded with me while he circled our planet over and over again, occasionally wiring me photographs of landmark lakes along David Thompson’s fur trade routes west of the Rocky Mountains—the same area where I lived and worked. When Phillips returned to Earth, his travels brought him to the Inland Northwest, and we continued our conversation in person.

Phillips grew up in New York State and the Southwest. His dad was a flying buff who spent many hours touring his kids
through local airports to marvel at the bodies and engines of different aircraft. After graduating from the Naval Academy with degrees in math and Russian, Phillips became a Navy pilot in 1974, but even as he flew jets from bases on land and sea, he always kept one eye lifted toward space. When NASA turned down his first application to be an astronaut, he tried again. And again. He realized that he needed a broader skill set if he was going to get into orbit, and left the Navy to pursue an advanced degree in space plasma physics at UCLA. From there he went on to work at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory for nine years until NASA accepted him into the space program.

When I showed David Thompson’s writings about the two “meteors” at Lake Susquagemow to Phillips, he shrugged them off as swamp gas or good old will-o’-the-wisp—a purely chemical effect. He found Thompson’s aurora experiences around Reindeer Lake much more alluring, however, because during his graduate studies, Phillips had focused on the sun and space environment. There he came to understand the aurora as a plasma phenomenon in which energized electrons collide with gas particles to produce light effects. He traced the discipline’s growing awareness of a correlation between periods of increased sunspot activity, aurora sightings, and changes in magnetic compass readings on Earth. He described the current understanding of
the global aurora as two dynamic, undulating ovals of light centered over Earth’s magnetic poles.

Phillips recalled that one evening during his tenure at Los Alamos, a massive solar disturbance pushed a lobe of the northern hemisphere’s auroral oval deep into the Southwest. He mistook the resulting angry red glow on the horizon for a grass fire until he realized that he was experiencing a diffuse
red aurora produced by a large geomagnetic storm, rather than the curtains of green that are most often seen.

Even though Phillips usually displays a scientist’s analytical mind, he can appreciate the poetry of a moment—this is a man who carried Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
into space. “The first time I saw the passage you sent me about Thompson blindfolding his men to test the true effects of the aurora, it immediately reminded me of Odysseus,” Phillips said. “The way he stuffed wax in the ears of his crewmen, then ordered them to tie him up tight to the forward mast of his ship so that when they sailed past the rocks where the Sirens sang, he could writhe in the total experience.” It’s the Greeks’ own story about watching their ancestors dance, and of singing the body electric; it’s the irresistible lure that connects curious spirits over time.

Phillips’s natural curiosity helped him to thrive on the rigors of NASA’s training regime. One exercise devoted to severe weather skills took place in the dead of winter in northern Alberta, and it involved living in an old-fashioned canvas wall tent while wearing all-wool gear. It was at this camp that Phillips first saw the vivid, graceful action of the aurora at its most sublime.

Around 2002, Phillips hit the north country again when he was assigned to prepare for a future mission of the International Space Station. He and cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev participated in an odyssey of training sessions at various Russian facilities, one of them located deep in a larch forest west of Moscow, at the same high latitude as Reindeer Lake. Three years later, a well-prepared Commander Krikalev and Flight Engineer Phillips formed the crew of the ISS’s Expedition 11.

In total, the pair orbited Earth over twenty-five hundred times between April and September of 2005. The station’s
pathway sliced across the planet at a continuous angle, like a spiral peel off an apple, topping out at latitude fifty-one and a half degrees in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The craft attained a maximum speed of more than seventeen thousand miles per hour, and its altitude varied from about two hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty nautical miles above Earth—not nearly high enough, Phillips pointed out, to see the entire planet isolated in space. Instead, he and Krikalev observed ever-changing vistas, often recognizing familiar details, of their shared home.

All told, their journey covered over seventy million miles. During the course of the trip, John Phillips became one of the most senior American space travelers, with a total of almost two hundred days aloft. Since his mission flew through summer in the Northern Hemisphere, Phillips did not have much chance of observing a strong aurora borealis. Instead, he was able to study the aurora australis of the Southern 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 across
both 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.”

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 of
Thompson’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 sheet of the Pleistocene epoch bulldozed along that trench from the north. As the ice retreated, it left behind a moraine of gravel that bulged just enough to nestle two puddles within the ditch, then pulled the water that leaked out of them north, in the direction of the receding glacier.

When I placed one of David Thompson’s maps next to Phillips’s image, all the same elements marched across the page, from the mountain ridges on each side of the nascent
Columbia’s valley to the low divide that allowed the Kootenay River to rush south while its mother river began a much longer journey in the opposite direction. Thompson, with only tribal information and his own survey data, had created a bird’s-eye view that jibed remarkably well with the camera’s stark image.