A game of football in the sky.
Window seats were a must, back in those days when each flight was a chance for discovery. Before repetition brought boredom, before jetlag-induced migraines, before laptop times, before I switched to aisle seats, every long-haul carried the promise of adventure and demanded – no, required - a seat by the window.
The thrill, to mis-quote B.B. King, had gone. At some point flying had become a means to an end, a crowbar with which to pry open the world’s treasure chest. And that was the state of affairs until, on a sunny Sunday morning in Tokyo Haneda, the thrill came back on.
The wave of excitement that irradiated up my back, from the hips to the neck and then back down again, was like a surprise visit from an old friend. I grinned behind the surgical mask that Japan still mandated and sped down the jetway, jogging towards the awaiting plane.
Soon Tokyo’s skyscrapers receded behind our tail and, with them, most of the planet's population. The first of two sunsets we were to witness on this journey started to set the sky alight, and a light turbulence lulled us as we cut across the northern Pacific. Everything was calm and the only noises above the hum of the engines were the clinking of tableware and the occasional champagne cork popping in the galley. I might’ve partaken with a flute, or three.
I must’ve dozed off at some point after lunch because, when I was suddenly jolted awake by the thought of having forgotten something, the tray table had been stowed away, my seat was reclined and a blanked had appeared on my lap. The cabin was empty, a few screens punctuating an otherwise dark space. Time had lost all meaning: to know that it was late evening in Tokyo, or mid-afternoon in London, bore no relevance; elapsed flying time was all that mattered, and five hours had gone by since taking off in Haneda. A glance at the map showed that we were approaching the point where the frozen coast of Yukon met the frozen waters of the Beaufort Sea. But that wasn’t what captured my attention.
A green river flowed noiselessly from the horizon to right above our heads and, possibly, beyond. I’d left the windows un-dimmed and that allowed the soft light to ooze into the cabin, casting an ethereal glow on the dark panelling around my seat.
The night sky was painfully clear. I could make out the pinpricks of light from dozens of stars; a satellite cruised in our opposite direction. Down below, there was nothing. No roads, towns, lampposts, lone petrol stations; nothing disturbed the spectacle taking place up in the upper atmosphere and no one but us was there to witness it.
The aurora danced on in happy indifference, a masterclass of shapeshifting to an audience of just a handful of people. One moment she was ribbon-like, solid like a sinuous anaconda; then she morphed into a row of curtains flapping lazily in an imperceptible wind. Moments later she would collapse in thousands of slow stars, falling in closed ranks like the teeth of a comb. Colours changed too, ranging from quail egg to a green of such vibrance that I could almost make out features on the frozen coast thousands of metres down below.
I sat cross-legged on my seat for hours, witnessing the slow ballet in the sky and letting my mind wander around, as if propelled by the same solar winds whose particles ignited the whole spectacle. I hummed songs to myself and navigated back in time, to a rainy afternoon in the cavernous library hall hidden in the bowels of my university. A day when I was meant to be working on my dissertation, but I was finding all sorts of reasons not to.
How I found that paper, I’ll never know; after all, anthropology wasn’t on my curriculum and there wasn’t even a passing chance that I could shoehorn anything about ancient cultures in my work. Regardless of that, I somehow stumbled upon a digitalised copy of a South African article on the various meanings associated to the northern lights. Aurora Borealis.
It was all quite on-brand and, frankly, forgettable. Ming chroniclers described them as cracks in the sky, and those Medieval catastrophists penned pages filled with fires or battles, or dragons. But what stood out, and what remained in my mind, was a paragraph about the Labrador Inuit. The green dancing lights in the sky, they thought, were something else altogether: not dragons, not battles, not cracks but torches, held by their forebears, as they played a game of football in the sky, a walrus skull as ball.
The frozen Yukon gave way to the Beaufort sea and I drifted back to sleep, wishing that the afterlife existed and that it involved football in the sky, Inuit-style.
NB: The photo of the Aurora were passed on to me by a fellow flyer.
