He Stepped Outside for the Recycling and Didn't Come Back for Four Hours. His Wife Called the RCMP.

We live just outside Whitehorse, twenty-eight kilometres past where the city lights stop pretending to be city lights. The sky here doesn't have to compete with anything. It just is.

I'd seen the aurora hundreds of times. You stop counting after the first winter. It becomes scenery, the way a coastline becomes scenery to people who grew up beside the ocean. You wave at it without looking.

But that night was different and I knew it three steps out the door. There was a green that wasn't a green — a colour the eye keeps trying to translate and can't. It moved like something was breathing it.

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I sat down on the bin. I don't know why. I just remember thinking, if I go inside I'll lose this, and if I lose this I'll have lost something I didn't know I was allowed to have.

My wife thought I was being passive-aggressive about the recycling. She gave me an hour. Then she texted. Then she called. Then she put her boots on, walked out, and found me sitting on the bin in the same spot, looking up, my phone face-down in the snow.

She did not find this romantic. She went back inside. She gave me another hour. She came out again. I was still there. She tried to physically move me. I asked her, quote, ‘can you please be quiet for a minute’. We have been married eleven years. This was a mistake.

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By midnight she'd convinced herself I was having a stroke. I have a family history. She called Yukon's non-emergency line. They sent an officer because the dispatcher knew us — Whitehorse is not a big town and my wife is a paediatric nurse who delivered the dispatcher's son.

Constable Riel showed up at 1:02am. She got out of the cruiser, walked up the driveway, looked at me, looked at the sky, and said one sentence: ‘Yeah, that'll do it.’ Then she sat down on the porch step and watched with us for twenty minutes before saying anything else.

The thing tourists fly here for is real. The thing locals don't talk about is also real — that the aurora can occasionally do something that resets you, and there is no polite way to explain to your spouse that you forgot you were a person with a kitchen and a bedtime.

We have a rule now. If either of us steps outside and doesn't come back in fifteen minutes, the other one comes out, doesn't talk, and brings a second coat. The bin still lives by the back door. We've left it there on purpose.