"Our Creator be praised, Brother Pheasant," thus Francis addressed the rare bird, which a well-wisher had sent him, and the pheasant stayed with Francis and did not want to be with anyone else. — Saint Francis of Assisi: a Biography, Jørgen Jørgensen
Last week, the Space Weather Prediction Center predicted that due to a geomagnetic storm, people catch a glimpse of the Aurora Borealis, under clear skies, in lower than usual latitudes
Skies were cloudy in the Black Hills, so your SDPB Outdoors Correspondent headed north to the Slim Buttes area where the skies were clear, and the landscapes are always striking.
By the time I reached the Reva Gap campground, @SpaceWeather had downgraded their predictions. "The sun did release a burst of energy, called a coronal mass ejection," reported livescience.com, "but the bulk of the particles released zipped by Earth instead of hitting the atmosphere directly."
There I was shorter of breath, one day closer to death, with an unpunched ticket to the Solar Spectacular laser light show in the sky.
Your correspondent searched the heavens for the slightest whisper of green till I dozed off, and woke up to the unannounced Dawn Solar Spectacular.
In brisk autumn Slim Buttes mornings before the snow, when every blade of grass is iced out as if sunstruck out of rapstar dreams, the sun doesn't arc over the horizon like an autarchic orb, it permates the land in a gauzy diffusion of glitter, a million twinkles pinkly ensconced in amoebae.
The mist that shrouds the valleys huffs and puffs to heave its soft underbelly aloft, over the prickly pear and yucca, a doughy cocoon heaving with larval day.
Then the sun bursts through, Kool-Aid Mannish (oh yeah), fractalizing every fixture. The blade-borne ice crystal chandeliers shatter into silent mist. Day spills like tej from its marshmallow cocoon and goldens every dewy, shimmering strand.
No coronal mass ejection required.
Friends and followers of these Outdoors entries (all 3 or 4 of you), all this superfluous content will go dark one day. These devices are built for the screech chorus and porn. Like passing a car crash, it's hard to look, and hard to look away. What if you miss the moment it's all about to blow and consequently forget to pack some sandwiches?
The earth beneath your feet is not growing, the spaces between us are. You may have passed the ghosts, a thousand times, of certain places that brought people together, maybe in a time you can remember. Now those ghosts multiply like the spaces between people, like the calendar days between the days that had some communal value.
And some may wonder what will be left, one day maybe soon, beyond the shriek chorus and the porn.
Only all of creation. Your correspondent, summoned by some Twitter noise about the potential for some once-in-a-lifetime solar magic dutifully went out to Slim Buttes, to find that here, out of tweet-range, the solar mundane, the any given autumn Slim Buttes morning glow is good enough to defrost and reawaken what's been lost.