I had many concerns prior to the morning I spent dogsledding in the northernmost reaches of Finland, but chief among them had not been dog excrement. The intensity of the smell was tempered only by the occasional glimpse of a canine guide lurching to nosh on a hardened nugget of his forerunners’ bodily expulsions.
“Even dogs pulling sleds need snacks!” I tell my daughter, sat in front of me in the sled. I am attempting to distract her from her own slow, cryogenic death. She is six. She makes no sound.
Whoever said, “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing,” has never been north of Winnipeg. Our family undertook this holiday trip to the Arctic Circle in Finland largely because it stood in stark opposition to anything we had ever done. We’d lived in tropical climates for six years; we fantasized about cold, about a honeymoon in Norway’s fjords or Alaska’s islands, about wearing closed-toed shoes. But when I suggested the idea of Rovaniemi, Finland, my then husband offered a meteorology report. “It’s freezing,” he said. “Really freezing.” He had dug ice caves in the military—the warning was for me, not him.
“It’s Santa’s village,” I said. “The real Santa.” It was maybe the last year we could wrangle this trip with our daughter before she realized that we had long deceived her about Christmas, and I believed we should capitalize fully on this deception.
Now here we were, on a dogsled in the Arctic, my husband steering behind us, my daughter in eight layers, including a blanket made of reindeer skin. In December, Rovaniemi has about three hours of daylight. Our guide estimated that it was negative twenty-six degrees Celsius as we drove across a frozen lake bed. “There will be tears,” he had told us on the bus. “My job is to make sure they come at the end and not the beginning.”
This was a lofty goal. The lake bed looked smooth as a mirror in photos, but the dogsled pitched and jarred against chunks of ice and snow. You had to yell to be heard over the scrape of the metal blades. The view never changed: white tundra, hazy tree line. It was impossible to get any sense of time elapsed or distance travelled. My glasses froze within minutes, so I put them in a pocket of my snowsuit. The travel agency had issued snowsuits to each of us to wear over the winter gear and coats we brought ourselves; we were also given wool socks, fur-lined leather mittens, balaclavas, scarves, and giant lined moon boots. We kept this gear throughout our time in Rovaniemi. It was easy to spot a tourist in town.
The guide warned us to remind our children to keep wiggling their fingers and toes. I imagined my daughter’s toes falling off inside her boots. “Wiggle! Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle,” I chanted at her, hoping to salvage her digits and keep her conscious—she had lapsed into a sleepy, semi-comatose state, which is the manner of cryogenic death. It is, I understand, not entirely unpleasant.
Twenty-one hours of darkness is misleading. The darkness has layers that, like the ocean, reflect its surfaces. The morning, before sunrise, can be an indigo-blue, and then, after the sun sets, around two p.m., the mostly gray sky might have a pinkish hue. Other evenings were a slate blue or a deep navy. These darknesses were beautiful and melancholy, vast and hollow, and strangely comforting.
The first evening in Rovaniemi, our guides collected us from our hotel in search of the Northern Lights, via snowmobile. My daughter was tucked into an adult snowsuit and helmet, rolled underneath wool blankets, then wedged into a sleigh alongside other children atop reindeer hides. Her eyes, beneath her ski mask, looked pleading. I asked if she wanted to return to our cabin.
“Northern Lights,” was the muffled reply. She is like me: craving adventure yet averse to physical discomfort.
Our guides told us it was negative twenty-five degrees Celsius—warming right up. The white tundra sparkled, reflecting the purples and blues of the sky. After an hour or so, we arrived at a teepee in a clearing where the sky was black. My kid’s sleigh pulled up. “Wiggle!” I shouted to her. “Don’t forget to wiggle!” She ignored me, because she had made a new friend, an Australian boy who lived in Singapore.
“Now,” said the guide, “we wait.”
A hazy swath of white flashed across the sky. A tourist said, “The Northern Lights!” We all fumbled to extract cameras from our many layers. The guide said no; it was just lights from the city center.
I couldn’t feel anything from my ankles down. What I was doing to my child and myself could only be rationalized if the Northern Lights appeared. We were on the Arctic equivalent of a whale-watching trip.
Meanwhile, the children played tag, falling into the snow, laughing hysterically. They kept toppling over, unable to maneuver surely in their layers and moon boots. The ground was uneven, pitted and mounded, and it was too dark to see much. One boy said he had to pee. Right now. This minute. His mother managed to extricate the necessary equipment with impressive efficiency, and for the next twenty-four hours, this moment sustained my daughter. “He put his penis in the snow!” she screamed, then collapsed in giggles.
Three of my daughter’s top highlights of the Rovaniemi trip: penis in snow, dogsled poop, sledding in parking lots.
Another tourist pointed to the sky—the Northern Lights! The guide said no; it was a swale of cloud. It occurred to me, just then, that I didn’t really know what the Northern Lights were supposed to look like.
When they came, about two hours later, they were as unmistakable as rain. Photographs can’t capture the movement of the Northern Lights, as if the sky were breathing. The green elastic band of light curved and stretched across the horizon, and it seemed almost possible to make out the spherical shape of the Earth. I was struck less by the color and more by this movement, the celestial equivalent of a dancer’s body as she glides across a stage, leaps, lands silently, turns and begins again.
Even at their young age, the kids knew they were seeing something special. They all stopped and stared above.
On Christmas Eve, the sky turned pink—the first sun the town had seen in weeks, a guide told me. The white clumps of snow atop every branch and needle looked iridescent. Music piped through the whole of the little village and giant ice sculptures were everywhere. Elves, some of elfin height, wandered around. We went to the wood cabin where Santa Claus receives visitors, which looked a bit like Willy Wonka’s notion of a haunted house—dim lighting, giant cartoon gears shifting and turning, a two-story pendulum counting down to Christmas.
The room where we met Santa had the hallowed feel of a mass. Rich tapestries were draped along the walls in reds, golds, and greens. Santa sat on a platform several steps up, beneath a spotlight. He looked tired. He held out his gloved hand to shake ours as if we were at a cocktail party. He mumbled something, and then my daughter mumbled something else that Santa seemed not to hear, and I could sense the moment escaping us. He reached behind him and pulled out a gift, handing it to her. “How did you do that?” she exclaimed. “You didn’t have that in your hand at all!” Santa mumbled, “Magic.” He was phoning it in, if I’m being honest. My daughter told him we cleaned out our fireplace just for him, but again he seemed not to hear. I leaned toward him. “We cleaned out our fireplace for you,” I said.
Later, when we were reading the gift we had bought in advance for Santa to give to my daughter (a book about himself—narcissist!), we would learn that, when Santa arrives at a Finnish house bearing gifts, instead of diving into the chimney in the dead of night, he arrives at the very reasonable dinner hour and knocks at the front door, where the whole family greets him.
