I spend most of the day feeling sorry for myself.
By the afternoon I pull myself together and go out to take a look at the town. If it's my fate to be here for three days, I ought to see some of it, at least. I try to summon up all my goodwill, so that I can write something positive about the place, but I'm not totally successful. The town center, if we can call it that, is 50th Ave. ,also known as Franklin Ave. To be more accurate, it is actually just a stretch of 600 ft. along this road. I go to explore the local shopping center - it doesn't require any special skills to find it on this 600 ft. - but, being Saturday afternoon, it is, of course, closed. As is almost everything else as well; though this place wouldn't be that exciting even if its three shops did happen to be open. The tourist guide to Yellowknife is the size of a small brochure. Even listing every event of every season, it's still pretty thin. There are four lakes in the town itself, and
Chapter III.: Victoria Island
Page 14
another two nearby. I walk around Frame Lake, which is the biggest. There's a well-signed tourist path going round it, and information boards point out the things of interest. The town's official buildings are also located on the lake, but, as they are all closed, I can't tell which is which. It is amazing the number of trees and bushes here that live in a form of symbiosis. It might be contrived, rather than an act of nature, but the vegetation along the path is, without doubt, very beautiful. At the start of the trail there's a monument to those miners who died in the NWT mines.
This time I'm not happy to see a Hungarian name: a compatriot of mine named Róbert Mészáros, who was killed in the Giant Mine in 1995. R.I.P.
On the way back I pop into the Black Knight Pub, on 49th St., just a couple of hundred feet from the hotel. Inside, in the semi-darkness, there are a few local characters hanging around. In one corner sit some bleary-eyed old soaks. This is my kind of pub; it will be my haunt during my enforced vacation. (They don't even sell beer in the damn-and-blasted Chateau Nova Hotel ; it's really, really insane. This hysteria over beer is just not normal.) The pub has WIFI: yet another reason to come here, rather than sit in my boring hotel.
I've got an email from Andy Morrison, my excellent Alaskan organizer and friend. He still feels guilty about the cancelled hot-air balloon trip, and asks if a helicopter ride will make up for it. I say yes. When I finally get back to Alaska, this will be the first event on my program.
The cook advises me to take advantage of my nights here by going to look at the northern lights. I must wait until midnight and then walk to the shore of Great Slave Lake; that is the best place to view them.
The northern lights are a physical phenomenon, the description of which I have read many times, but somehow can never quite remember. So, now I'd like to write down all the information I have read about it, word for word, as I can't really enjoy something if I don't fully understand it: Auroras, also known as northern and southern (polar) lights or aurorae (singular: aurora), are natural light displays in the sky, particularly in the polar regions, and usually observed at night.
They typically occur in the ionosphere. They are also referred to as polar auroras. This is a misnomer however, because they are commonly visible between 65 to 72 degrees north and south latitudes, which place them a ring just within the Arctic and Antarctic circles. Aurorae do occur deeper inside the polar regions, but these are infrequent and often invisible to the naked eye.
Auroras result from emissions of photons in the Earth's upper atmosphere, above 80 km (50
miles), from ionized nitrogen atoms regaining an electron, and oxygen and nitrogen atoms returning from anexcited state to ground state. They are ionized or excited by the collision of solar wind particles being funneled down and accelerated along the Earth's magnetic field lines;
Chapter III.: Victoria Island
Page 15
excitation energy is lost by the emission of a photon of light, or by collision with another atom or molecule.
There is a color differential with altitude; at high altitude oxygen red dominates, then oxygen green and nitrogen blue/red, then finally nitrogen blue/red when collisions prevent oxygen from emitting anything. Green is the most common of all auroras. Behind it is pink, a mixture of light green and red, followed by pure red, yellow (a mixture of red and blue), and lastly pure blue.
In rare cases they have even been seen in Hungary.
So much for my little lecture on physics.
As told, I wait until midnight. Before leaving the hotel I ask the receptionist if it's the right time to see them. He points outside and gives me a pitying look. It is pouring with rain, and you can't see the lights if the sky is cloudy. To be frank, I could have worked that out myself...
I can't make up my mind about this place; it's not big, ,it's not small; it's not a town, it's not a village. I shall not be overcome with sadness when I finally have to leave.
I wait and wait and wait...
Room 305
Chateau Nova Hotel