Northern Lights
Ever since leaving the city of Vancouver when I was 5 years old, moving to neighboring Richmond, I considered myself a small-town guy. Everything is relative, of course. At the time Richmond had a population of around 90,000 (today it's much more than double that), but given its enormous size and relatively concentrated population, I could ride my bike with friends during summer vacation and easily reach wild areas where we could walk through fields and catch garter snakes. Of course, we only did that during the day. That means that nighttime was spent with streetlights and all the light pollution that they come with. It never occurred to me to look up and expect to see anything more exciting than the big dipper. When I was 13, we moved to Ontario, to a city of 130,000 outside Toronto. Comparing my environs to Canada's largest city nearby, I was still able to tell myself that I was small-town. (Flash-forward to me as a 30-year-old, living in an Israeli village whose population ...