Musings on a Sleepless Flight

I am a notorious travel sleeper. Put me in a car, plane, train, or covered wagon and I am fast asleep before you can say, “are we there yet?”. This has served me extremely well in the past; sleeping through turbulence resembling a roller coaster, near death experiences while driving with my father, and sibling squabbles in the back seat of a family road trip. I have slept across Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado, Italy and Kenya. But for some reason I cannot sleep across Canada.

It can’t be because of the view. Looking out of my window, I am staring into the depths of the night that fell early. The sun set behind a dense bank of cloud as I landed in Edmonton in the early afternoon, and night fell shortly after. But the quality of night is different here. It’s somehow deeper, more dense, and yet crystal clear. A crisp quality that is perceivable through the windows and in the drafts that followed me onto the plane from the jet bridge. The crispness of the air manages to transfer itself somehow into the black of night that fills the empty chasm of the sky.

The sky contrasts sharply with the ground, blanketed in white. A think layer of cloud adds to the illusion of a perfect white pillow top that stretches indefinitely into the distance. With little topography, the whiteness below me and the blackness above stretch to meet at a horizon line, simultaneously black and white, indistinguishable from one another.

In the monotony a few landmarks shine through. Orion the Hunter lies along the wing of the plane, directly below the brightest moon I have ever seen. It’s light reflects off the metal of the wing, offsetting the dull gray of the plane from the black of the sky and the white of the ground.

But perhaps it is not what I can or cannot see that is keeping me awake, but the prospect of what I could see. As I fly north, I get closer and closer to the aurora oval, the area of the most aurora activity. Though they have been known to stretch down through Canada and sometimes into the States, especially in a peak year, the best viewing is within the ovals surrounding the poles. Flying north I am neither more or less likely to see the aurora than I would be if I were on the ground, but I would give anything to see them on my first night in the North.

Though the chances are slim, I’ll stay awake for this flight, just in case. I am eager to add a little color to the monotone pallet stretched around me.