Tales of the beautiful everyday from the North
Freezing long nights and familiar comforts
Outside the car, the ice still sings
This fall was the warmest one I’ve experienced here, yet it is the earliest I saw the lakes become passable by car. Now the nights are freezing, and after six hours I feel like I can barely function despite spending much of that time tucked away on a dramatically reclined heated seat, with hot tea, and some lebkuchen sent lovingly from halfway across the world in the most perfect ever care package.
The ice layer on the moon roof eventually melts and clears, and the stars become visible overhead. Cloudy weather comes and goes too. The night changes a lot through these hours.
Quiet and alone
One of the best things for me in such cold nights is the usual rogue snowmobiles and party bonfire scenes on the lakes are much less. The time quickly becomes so late that no one else is crazy enough to still be awake and out anyway.
Probably not halfway through the night, I really reach the point where there is no coming back to real warmth. My fingers, my toes, my face… They all just reached the place of being cold in their bones, and a little past 3am that numbing cold becomes too much and sends me back to my warm bed and gives a good sleep for the night.
A lesson from the ice
“This business kills the part of life that is essential… The part that has nothing to do with business.”
There is a scene at the end of The Big Short, my favourite movie, where Michael Burry writes to his investors announcing that he must close down the fund. He has finally been proven right, but a part of him is broken.
"For the past two years, my insides have felt like they're eating themselves."
The temperature was -36°C. I never had heard the ice so loud and violent. The sharp thundering you couldn’t imagine. The vibrations of the ice travelled into my body from my tripod and camera. I felt a crack form under my feet in real time.
Each rumble sent shivers up my body and made my heart beat more noticably, but I was standing in the middle of a frozen lake, on ice I had no idea the thickness of. Centimetres of snow covered the ice, and for hours before the aurora covered the sky, it was just in starlight. The power of nature was overwhelming, and the beauty of a moment was strong, but there was something much more too.
I didn’t for a moment have any fight or flight. No instinct to even move. The ice would be what it would be, and I would just let it, and take from it what beauty I could. I was in the middle of it, the literal middle, and I had no control, and it actually felt really good. Like something I needed. A broken soul, reaching maybe just a place of acceptance.
"People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar."
When the pale light fades
62.45°N
It isn’t as far north as I would love to live, but it is still an environment I love a lot. The days are short by any normal standard of living, but I wish they were shorter.
Waking up after 9 and getting a cup of hot coffee in my hands to stand at the window and watch magnificent winter sunrises that last forever is something I will always cherish of this place.
Finally some centimetres of snow fell over the weekend, likely burying any last remaining clear lake ice. It feels so wrong that we reach winter solstice in under one month already. Like the short days of always golden sunlight, orange clouds, and midday twilight just don’t last long enough.
How can you make sense of this overwhelming love of winter? The deprivation of sunlight giving deeper meaning to the presence of it maybe. Feeling the sunlight hit my face this time of year is magical. Just like all of winter, those little moments slow me down to absorb more. Molasses, ginger, cardamom and allspice bring this comforting warmth inside, and I am sure coffee never tastes better. Warmth of a candle or a car vent mean so much. I crave to sleep a lot, and to be wrapped up in soft and cosy fabrics.
So for this feeling of home which the depth of winter brings me? Maybe it is the sharp contrasts leading to greater recognition. More conscious recognition and loving-on. The dark and the light, the warm and cold, like drinking a hot coffee sitting in -33°. Maybe it is something more innate, something in my bones or my soul, or something picked up somewhere along my way.
But for right now with tired eyes in dim lighting, I tuck away in my linen bedding, pushing aside half a mountain of pillows, and in 7 hours maybe I’ll be awake for sunrise, but maybe I’ll sleep right through it. Either way it’s okay, because winter is for slowing down and staying cosy. So let the winter winds blow, the snow drifts grow, and the dim window lights continue to glow.
The aurora, moonlight, and singing ice
"I really think that is the most calming sounds I've ever heard in my life."
There was nothing in the world that could have made me more happy for these hours. I could hardly sleep this night after.
Listening to such beautiful sounds from the ice the whole night, and to feel this beautiful moonlight all around while the northern lights are dancing so slowly. Like life was passing in slow motion, in this surreal, perfect calm. I just wanted to lay there forever. I could not have been happier if I had just won the lottery. Truly not.
The ice was only ever silent for seconds at a time. Sounds would come whistling from the other side of the lake. The loudest ones echoing after. I wondered how the people in their cabins on the shore could ever sleep. It may have been negative 20 something, but how could you resist leaving your window open just the smallest crack to listen all night.
I thought the whole world needed to be in on this. The aurora and the moon — they hold their own beauty, and it is one that is extraordinary. It was the slowness of the aurora for so much of the night that added a further calming rather than overwhelment. And despite my unwavering love of darkness, the moon gave life to all of this. It would not have been possible, not in this way, without it. So as much as I love the new moon phase, the hour by hour of pitch black outside, and the darkness of winter as a whole, the moonlight was indeed perfect. With my face resting down on the ice, I move my head ever so slightly and in that second, dozens of snowflakes just in front of my nose would catch my eye with a twinkle by moonlight.
Beautiful moments on beautiful moments.
Cautious steps out into a singing ice
For more than 24 hours, as I sit beginning to write this, the wind has been gusting strong. Definitely it is not relenting from last night in the centre of a lake. Specific edges and corners of this perfect little home allow through the most subtle drafts if you are sensitive enough. The wind audibly rumbles along the exterior walls, and the windows shake a bit in the strongest gusts. It wakes me in the middle of the night.
I don’t mind it at all. It’s the exact winter I love most, such harsh conditions outside and the cosiest safe place inside.
"I knew within seconds of stepping out of my car; I was severely underdressed."
That safe and cosy place sometimes is nestling right into my parka in an otherwise open and exposed, brutal environment. The fur trim of my hood wraps up and around my face, always catching my peripheral vision.
Despite tucking my chin right down into the top of my parka zipped all the way up, my poor little nose could not be spared. A balaclava would have been nice. There was little doubt I also should have had mittens instead of gloves, and my mukluks instead of hiking boots.
My fingers and toes froze, but I just couldn’t bring myself to tiptoe back across the ice to the car to properly warm them up. The aurora was too beautiful, and in that obsessed-with-the-power-of-nature kind of the way, the brutal wind was too special. It was raw. But even still, moments of turning away to shelter from the wind felt less of a conscious choice than pure instinctual reaction.
"Facing the wind head on was the only option if I wanted to watch her dance."
Like a cross between a wind tunnel and whales communicating
The ice sung all night, and it was even more beautiful than the few nights before. It was the most perfect company—an ultimate soothing in the chaos of the wind.
Usual high and low pitch bubbles of sound were consistent throughout the night. They were gentle and soothing, and as if you were listening in super slow motion. It’s comforting far more than it is unsettling.
