Reflections: The Green Light

A novelist muses on the myth of the green flash.

written and illustrated by Daniel Wallace

Here’s some science for you: At sunset or sunrise, the top edge of the sun will sometimes turn bright green. The green color lasts for less than a second, and so it has come to be known as a “green (or emerald) flash.” Very few people have actually seen it. But to have even the slightest chance of seeing it you have to situate yourself before a distant horizon—an ocean, say—beneath a cloudless sky. And then just wait for the science to happen: atmospheric refraction, or the bending of sunlight as it passes through the air. It’s similar to the way a prism works, taking pure white light and turning it into a rainbow. Science, my friends. Now that you know this, feel free to forget it. I have.

Because this isn’t important, not if your goal is to actually see the flash. And you do want to see it, because this flash is more beautiful than almost anything you have ever seen before—at least that’s what my best friend’s cousin told me. So, if all you want to do is discuss the science behind it, talk to this scientist guy. If you want to see it, listen to me. Here’s a step-by-step guide.

The beach. You have to be on the beach. Hypothetically, you might see the flash from the prairie, but who wants to see a flash from the prairie? You want to be on the beach. In Destin, maybe, where you made your first sand castle, where you got your first sunburn, and—remember?—where you were almost lost at sea as the raft you were on was pulled farther and farther away from shore, and you looked back and saw this little speck of a person that was your mother, waving frantically at her son.

Go there.

Don’t look. Many people who look for the green flash make the mistake of actually looking for it. If this is your plan you might as well stay home. To look for the green flash would be like saying, “Tonight I’m going to fall in love.” It’s not going to happen that way. It happens more like this: It’s Wednesday night, and you want a cheeseburger. Love is the furthest thing from your mind. You go to a place called Crooks, where they make some great cheeseburgers, and you sit at the bar with a magazine and a beer. Crooks’ bartender, you can’t help but notice, is quite beautiful, but you never flirt with bartenders because it’s their job to flirt. It’s meaningless. There’s something different about this one, though ... Still, you leave.

The next day you happen to run into her downtown, and now she’s not a bartender; she’s a normal, and incredibly beautiful, woman, and you ask her out and she says yes and you end up fall-ing in love, all completely by crazy accident.

Look for the light in this same way.

What to bring. Bring a thermos and a blanket. And you know that woman you met by crazy accident and fell in love with even when you had no idea anything like that was ever going to happen? Bring her. I would. (I would bring her, but you can bring him, if it’s a him you fell in love with. But for me, it’s her.) I would bring her down to this beach you visited every summer when you were a kid, and you can point out the things that have changed and what’s stayed the same, and you can show her where you were when you built the sand castle, and the horizon you almost touched.

You’ll tell her you thought about bringing a scientist with you—to talk about refraction and all that, and how the green flash is something real, and not some mythic creation or drunken invention—but at the last minute decided against it. Without a doubt she’ll agree with you; leaving the scientist behind was a good idea.

Lastly, prepare. Prepare for the flash. Easier said than done. How do you prepare for something that may or may not happen when you happen to be looking and when it does happen lasts for less than a second? You can’t. It’s impossible. All you can do is sit on the blanket, on the beach, with the woman or the man, drinking from the thermos, talking about the past and the future until you fall, by natural inclination, silent. And wait.What are you waiting for? Not the green flash. Or yes, maybe the flash too, but really you’re waiting for whatever comes next. Because you’re definitely not looking, right? You are not looking for the flash. And then you wait a little more, still not looking. The wind blows softly. A little sheet of sand travels past your ankles. And then you do look—but not out, toward the horizon, where the sun is setting all yellow and blood red into the ocean. You look at her. The wind blows a wisp of her hair in her mouth, and you take it out. She says thanks.

Then something happens. There is this green flash. Honest to goodness. It’s real. Had you brought along that scientist, he could have told you it’s real. And you see it. You see it through the reflection in her eyes.

Editor’s note: The green flash, a phenomenon in which the top edge of the sun briefly turns green just before the sun sets, is caused by a refractive effect in the atmosphere. Because this is rarely seen by the naked eye, it is a rich vein for both myth and contentious scientific debate. When approached to write a story about the famous green flash, Daniel Wallace—artist, alligator wrangler, and author of Big Fish and other fine novels—insisted on, well, making up this whole story.