CHASING THE NORTHERN LIGHTS

A visit to Canada's Northwest Territories in search of a primeval encounter with nature

- Sallie Tisdale FROM Harper's

BY THE TIME I finish dressing and walk into the lobby of the Explorer Hotel in Yellowknife, it's 9 p.m. There is a crowd of Japanese tourists wearing identical red parkas and black polar boots the size of toasters. Outside, in the black Canadian winter night, four yellow school buses pull up. The Japanese group fills the first three, and the rest of us, a mixed dozen from several countries, climb into the last.

The bus bumps on to the dark highway. It is February 2020, and it's almost as cold inside as out; the windows are already icing over from our breath. Our guide is Céline, a petite Frenchwoman. "The prediction is clouds tonight," she tells us. "But a prediction is just a prediction. So we will be hopeful."

After about 20 minutes, the bus turns down a narrow road toward Aurora Village, a collection of teepees and small buildings beside a frozen lake. The few lights are dim and downcast to protect our night vision. We follow Céline's blinking red head-lamp, the only way we can tell her apart from the crowd. More than a hundred people are plodding from the parking lot along hard snowy trails between dark trees. As we emerge from the woods, Céline points out the path to the heated, 360-degree-rotating recliners (extra fee required). We find our teepee at the edge of a field-a place to warm up and rest, but not to stay. We aren't here to be indoors.

The clouds lift. The teepees are in a small bowl, and trails lead through the trees to low bluffs with longer views. I join a crowd of silhouettes. I shift from foot to foot. All winter, Portland, Oregon, where I live, had been unseasonably warm. I longed for cold, the kind that would make me sit up and pay attention. I went north for the aurora, but also this: the dark, the sky, the ice.