At two in the afternoon a text came from the airline: blizzard, the Lofoten-to-Tromsø flight cancelled, the next day to be confirmed. By the original plan, the clients were to have sailed out from Tromsø that night in search of the aurora.
When they telephoned us, their voices held that carefully dignified kind of disappointment. We asked them for forty minutes.
What happened in those forty minutes: the guide re-routed the car to take the E10 the following morning — if the snow stopped, it is the loveliest stretch of road in Norway; the seaside cabin, booked for a single night, was extended to a second; and dinner shifted from a restaurant in town to a pot of cod soup the cabin’s owner had agreed, on the spot, to make.
The snow fell until midnight. A little after eleven the owner knocked on the window and said only two words: come out.
The wind had torn a rift in the cloud, and there in the rift was the aurora, green beyond all reason. No sailing out, no chasing; it had come of its own accord. The guests stood in the snow in their pyjamas, and no one said a word. The next day they took the E10 under a clear sky after snow, the fjords looking freshly washed.
Every winter since, this party has sent a single email, and it always opens with the same line: this year, will there be luck like that again? And our reply is always the same: luck we cannot promise, but we will always keep a place set for it.