Rainbow Smelt and Aurora Borealis

 The frailties of the human mind are revealed in these two stories.

When we came to Thunder Bay in 1979 I was eager to try smelting in the spring. With the first warm nights, everyone, it seemed, would stay up late at night along the shores of all the rivers and creeks and dip out the small silvery fish that had come ashore from Lake Superior to spawn. They were so abundant that in our first smelting trip, Brenda, our four-year-old son, Matt, and I discovered that one swoop of the net got more smelt than we had use for.

They made a good fish fry when fresh but weren't our favourite after they had been frozen. In the couple of years that followed we just kept those fish that Matt could catch with his bare hands. He would stand in the creek in his little rubber boots with me steadying him while the fish flashed by him by the millions.

By the time Matt was 6, however, we just couldn't repeat the performance. The smelt only run for about a week, so we thought we had just picked a bad night. However, when he was seven and eight, our bad luck continued.

I was an outdoor writer for the newspaper at the time and so asked the fisheries biologists if they could shed light on the subject. Actually, they said, there were no smelt runs occurring in the Thunder Bay area at all.

The runs take place in a pattern that circles the big lake about every 10 years. So, there might be a small run one year in Thunder Bay, followed by a tremendous run and in the third year, a small run. Then nothing for about a decade while the fish made their way around the world's largest lakeshore. Even though I reported all of this in the newspaper, most people seemed to not have gotten the news. They went smelting every year.

"Hey, Dan! Are you going smelting this weekend?" they would say, during those years when the run was happening on the other side of the lake, in Michigan.

Uh, no, I would reply. Are you?

"Absolutely! We go every year. We just love it!"

How did you do last year? I would ask.

"Last year? Hmm, I think we missed the run."

And the year before that?

"We seemed to have missed it that time too," they would say.

But the fact that they didn't catch anything, anything at all, hardly seemed to matter.

The banks of the creeks were lined by laughing, drinking revellers, dipping the empty water by the thousands, night after night, year after year. What great fun! Getting wet in the icy water, then drying off by a bonfire with a beer in hand.

It just never occurred to any of these people that there actually weren't ANY smelt out there. To them it just seemed chance when they "hit the run." They never noticed that event was 9, 10 and 11 years apart.

Now, what about the Aurora Borealis or the Northern Lights?

I grew up with the Northern Lights overhead at night. Not every night but frequently. Sometimes they were spectacular; sometimes they were faint. But they were fairly dependable at making an appearance.

Not any more. I saw a faint display a few nights ago and that was the first time I have seen them in about three years. People just refuse to believe this is so.

"Oh, you are just getting old. You go to bed early before the Northern Lights appear," they say. Or, "when was the last time you had your eyes checked? Maybe your eyesight is failing."

I do go to bed early but I also get up early, frequently before sunrise. There are no northern lights out there. Not here in Northwestern Ontario anyway.

If you want to see what northern lights look light, watch the flames flickering in the wood-burning stove while the Steel Drivers sing a bluegrass song. That is about as close to the real thing as you are going to get.

How can this be? The Aurora Borealis are gases at the outer edges of our atmosphere that are energized by radiation from the sun and fluoresce. That particular ionizing radiation is released when there are lots of sunspots which are storms on the sun's surface. Guess what? There are no sunspots occurring!

This isn't unheard of. In fact the sun goes through regular 10-year cycles of high activity and lulls. Incidentally, besides intense Northern Lights, the highs are marked by hot weather extremes here on Earth. These often mean bad forest fire years in Northwestern Ontario.

We are currently in a lull but it is not the usual 10-year doldrum. It's a multi-decade lull of near-historic proportions. The last time the sun was quite so quiet was during the last mini-ice age. In other words, the climate that we are currently experiencing -- the climate that is getting dramatically warmer -- is actually taking place during an exceptionally cold time for the planet.

Wait until the solar activity returns. "We ain't seen nuthin' yet."