Calling Home from the Arctic Circle

At the 66th parallel, I shudder with the revelation of frostbite, the memory of winter alive from my childhood.

Lappish traditional house in Rovaniemi, Finland. Taken by the author.

In the darkened room of a Helsinki museum, I’m greeted by two sisters. The girls’ silhouettes swim over the walls, making their descent into a sunken sea palace. Trapped by a lonesome creature named Hunger, one sister dons the head of a dragon. The other escapes as a skyward fish, wings erecting from her fins until she spans across every wall. She engulfs the room in night.

It’s our last day in the city before we head to the Arctic Circle. A cab driver tells me and my partner that Helsinki sees sixteen hours of sunlight in the whole month of November. In the northern outpost of Rovaniemi, where we’re headed, the sun falls not long after lunchtime. 

“You coulda gone to Hawai’i,” Uncle Fred had joked.

But I’ve sought out this blunt cold, the fierce flounce of snow. I have come in search of the uninhabitable. When I step off the plane at the 66th parallel, I shudder with the revelation of frostbite, the memory of winter alive from my childhood, before the ski season shrank and snow began to vanish after only a day.

Where I grew up in Colorado, we once had an abundance of snow days, taking to the hills with sleds, piling snow from our driveways up into half-pint mountains. Past elementary school, I can’t recall ever having enough snow to sincerely call off plans and wade waist-deep in the roaring white fields. We still had snow days, but they never returned in scale.

It’s 5 p.m. by the time we get in to Rovaniemi, the sun long gone. We walk out to meet the city after dinner. Behind the hotel, a patch of snow twitches; an arctic hare flits out of sight. I’m wearing the wrong boots, not my rubber bottoms. I pull my neck warmer over my nose, the cold anonymizing me.

Since I was young, I’ve dreamt of a town jeweled in ice. I skate down the streets, gliding through marketplaces and parks. It’s reminiscent of ice skating’s origins in Scandinavia where my coach said it was not for sport but an earnest means of transportation. And I wake with nostalgia for this place I haven’t lived. 

I’ve mourned my home changing, become homesick for icebergs. This evening is an indigo, undark and backlit with the snow. For once, I recognize the sky.

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