The weekend when a solar storm created the possibility of Northern Lights a Ballard friend invited me to her house on Whidbey Island for the weekend.

The ensuing weekend was a social whirl with a large cast of artists and former Ballardites now meeting to “collage” together and prepare food grown in gardens overlooking Puget Sound. Over a dinner that included gigantic Romano beans and pickled plums the host Tom Blumer shared something he thought might be of interest to his Ballard guests.

“We had a bit of disaster when we were in Ballard for a dinner party night before last,” he said by way of introduction.

Some at the table responded to the word disaster while others thought the real question was, “What were you doing in Ballard?”

Blumer let the story unfold. He and his wife Poli Davila were in Ballard to attend a dinner party with friends from California who were in town for a wedding. The dinner party was in the common room of their friend’s son’s apartment building just across from the Ballard Market.

“The one that was Sunset Bowl?”

“No, other side of 15th,” Blumer responded patiently. “After dinner we went up to the roof garden to look for the Northern Lights.”

“You got locked out?” (He ignored our attempts to guess ahead).

“After a while we were all ready to go in so we went back to the elevator and pressed the button for the first floor. The elevator started to go down but then it just stopped.”

Blumer had us listening now. “We pressed buttons. We pressed an alarm button and a call button. Finally we used the telephone in the elevator and explained the situation to the man who answered.”

“Was he in India?”

“Texas,” Blumer said. “Houston.”

We groaned, realizing they were doomed. “It was so hot,” Blumer’s wife Poli Davila chimed in, fanning herself as though the memory itself was overheating her. “They had it padded. There was no air.”

“We were surprised that we couldn’t contact a building manager,” Blumer said. “I did a search on my phone for how to escape from that model of elevator. We tried pressing every button and hit the alarm until someone in an apartment came out to talk to us and tried to summon the elevator from their floor. Didn’t work. We called on the phone again. The company in Texas had said it would be about an hour before they could get someone to us.”

“One of the young men got the padding off and climbed up to open up the ceiling. That helped,” Davila said.

A breeze blew over the long dinner table, up over the marshland above Mutiny Bay where I’ve seen Snowy Owls in the fog. “We got tired of waiting,” Blumer said, wryly. “We called 9-1-1 and about three minutes later firefighters pried open the door and were standing about a half floor above us. They didn’t have a ladder though so we still had to climb up half a floor. One of our dinner party had a boot on her foot so it was a bit harder for her to escape.”

With that Blumer produced his Smartphone and showed us photographs of the event, including one that he subsequently emailed to me with the subject line: The Eleven Survivors. My favorite was the one of his friend Patty Reed in a prone position just after extraction.

After the grilled nectarines (Ballard Farmer’s Market, thank you very much) we said our goodbyes and headed for the ferry. Once home I looked at the 9-1-1 Fire Dispatch for that night. There was the familiar description that I’d never thought much about before: “Rescue Elevator.”

They happen all over the city, every day. But imagine a dinner party of 11 people. Say that a California couple’s two sons have both moved to the Seattle area; one working in maritime cargo and the other in the wine industry. A local wedding sets the stage for old friends to converge while visiting parents meet their oldest son’s girlfriend for the first time. The mother (with a longtime broken foot) cooks dinner for 11 people in the common area of an apartment of a newish, but not newest, building in Ballard. After dinner they all go to the rooftop garden to look for the Aurora Borealis. The son who lives there rarely takes the elevator; he lives on the first floor.

They are stuck between floors in a padded elevator for almost an hour, before realizing that waiting for an unknown employee dispatched by Houston is not a good use of their time. They may or may not know that Station 18 is just around the corner and that fire units respond to “elevator rescue” every day. This dispatch doesn’t go through Texas.

Most of the dinner party attendees are able to climb out. One man waits with Patty Reed. He pushes while the firefighter pulls. Everyone takes the stairs back to the common room and regroups for a survivor photo. Patty Reed tells her son that he should let management know the elevator has a problem. There’s no word from Houston. The next day some of the survivors breakfast at the Hi-Life, Ballard’s Fire Station #18 in 1911. Against her better judgment, Patty Reed with the broken foot, takes the elevator upstairs to the restrooms. There is, as ever, no sign of the Northern Lights, but Station #18 is on-call.