Pain from the north

The wind here is unrelenting. It’s magical on those 30° summer nights, but that seems a world away still. For now, it remains painful on my hands and ears. A reminder of the north.

Walks through a hilly neighbourhood and up into the mountains gives a little peace to my mind, and the opportunity for endless nose sniffling out loud. I stop at a backyard to give the most beautiful cat some love through it’s fence. And then cross the steps into the nature trails, passing the sign that warns of rattlesnakes. I hate snakes.

The skies here never stay the same. Sunset and twilight over the mountains feels so magical. It’s an intense feeling. The sunset kept changing to become more and more beautiful. For only minutes, low fast moving clouds would light up in pink sunlight against varying depths of blues, and then so quickly those clouds lost their pink. It was magic.

I was taking the same photo over and over again, convinced each one was the most beautiful. These are good evenings, but I can’t wait until it’s truly warm and my ears don’t hurt in the wind.

A breath of fresh air

Rains

Waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of a pouring BC rain through a cracked open window is just so beyond perfect. I wish I could go back to that moment over and over and over again.

Of course it’s easy to be so in love with the BC rain when you’re away from it for the better part of a decade. It’s the low cloud, misty, constantly drizzling sort of weather that I do deeply miss after a winter of -40 and endless ice and snow.

"Of course it's easy to be so in love with the BC rain when you're away from it for the better part of a decade."

Walks through the forests reawakened my senses. I dug my fingers into every rain-soaked moss, ran my hands through massive ferns, and stared completely mesmerized at their newest fronds still wound tightly. I must have touched hundreds of leaves, every branch within arms reach, transferred every little water droplet hanging off the edge of a leaf onto my finger.
The most delicate leaves bounced at the impact of raindrops and light gusts of wind. The sweet forest smells overwhelmed me in ways I could never describe. They stopped me dead in my tracks. I became obsessed.

It was not just a reawakening of my senses, but of my soul too. Every walk, I never wanted to leave.

What's good isn't only happy

April 14 at last, -23°

Ethiopian one last time for dinner because there could be no better ending than that. Back home, it felt like forever laying on my back. Just staring at my ceiling, but I eventually fell asleep on my old sofa. The northern lights still danced outside every window. The serenade was of course perfect too.

A restless night ended to low, orange sunlight pouring in the windows. I made a small, spacey walk around the house running my fingers along random walls. I held back tears for all of about 4 seconds inside my long idling car, and finally pulled away for the last time, looking back more times than I can remember.

Running into the night

Just 2 nights before the movers would come to take everything and I had the kitchen turned completely upside down. Cardboard boxes, tissue paper, kraft paper and bubble wrap were everywhere. Dishes pulled off every shelf and out of every cabinet. Total chaos.

The kitchen lights were bright and harsh overhead.

There was so much more to be taken care of, but out of nowhere and in a moment, I broke. It was like I just became paralyzed standing there in the kitchen. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t pack another dish. Everything just hit me.

All at once I became so overwhelmed with heaviness, I just dropped the packing paper I was holding onto the floor, wiped my eyes with my sleeves, grabbed my phone, flicked the kitchen light switch off and went down the stairs. I changed my nightie for not nearly warmth enough clothing still. I flung my camera bag over my shoulder, picked up my tripod and drove immediately out into the countryside.

It was the fastest and most careless I’ve ever left the house. Like I just couldn’t be another minute more there and I had to get out.

"It was like I just became paralyzed standing there in the kitchen."

The wind outside was violent. It was gusting 53km/h, but who knows how much worse it was completely open across a lake. It felt especially fitting.

As soon as I cracked the car door open, the wind would grab it and try to fling it hard back, and if I stepped out to try to stop it, the wind would just push me against the door fully extended too. The gusts easily caught me and slid me back along the ice. It howled around my parka and ruffled the fur of my hood. I felt it intensely against my body through my clothes. It was freezing, but the exact kind of raw, numbness I needed right then.

A heavy heart

I came to Yellowknife for the first time on 25 February 2011. I had chosen Yellowknife because it was the northern most destination on WestJet’s route map. When our plane touched down in Yellowknife and taxied to the terminal, veins of snow blew violently but beautifully across the taxiways beneath us. The sky was overcast.

Both of the next two nights, we walked some metres out from behind our B&B, and watched the northern lights dance.

By the end of that two nights and three days, I wanted to move here. A for sale sign was in front of a condo across from the B&B where we were staying. I looked it up, and the price was more than triple what I was expecting. I felt disappointed, but in a way indifferent over it.

Four years and three months later, I did move here, but two years later than I had planned, and in a completely different life.

Hidden in plain sight

Just a handful of people know this story, and even fewer the raw depth of it, but in 2013 with my then girlfriend, we had made a deposit on a half duplex in Yellowknife. We got to make small changes in the design and choose our finishes. On one of our dozen or two trips to Yellowknife over a few years, we walked to visit the site where we would build.

"It is my most painful heartbreak and my biggest regret."

We stood at the edge of our soon to be home, but for now barren and snow covered lot, when our future neighbours of the duplex which was already built next door arrived home. We introduced ourselves and chatted for some time. They warmly invited us, total strangers, back later in the evening for a cosy visit with tea and cake when they could show us around their place, which was designed and constructed by the same builder we were with. It was a beautiful evening, and we vowed to stay in touch.

Then just months later, hearts were broken and lives were in total upheaval. It is my most painful heartbreak and my biggest regret.
Our relationship ended, and with it, our Yellowknife dream.

Some one and a half years later, I had reflected enough to know I needed to go back to Iceland to find both peace and closure. In the back of my mind was Yellowknife, but I knew I needed to take care of my heart first.

Now back home, I was fully tunnel visioning on Yellowknife. I partnered with the same builders as before to build new, but for months we stalled over finding a suitable lot to build on. There finally came a time I needed to have a decision if we were going to be able to build, or if I would begin searching to buy on the market.

In the end, the project couldn’t go ahead, but in less than 48 hours from that decision, the just 3 year old duplex I was supposed to be living beside, was now listed as for sale.

I called the listing realtor, offered the asking, and bought the home from 2,300km and two provinces away. The family we had tea and cake with a couple years earlier, were now my shared wall neighbours. And immediately on my other side, the very house which was almost ours, that has our fingerprints all over it.

It was in a way a full circle and one of the most surreal things I’ve ever lived.

“You need some green!”

Those shared wall neighbours, before they sold some years ago to move back to Sweden, and before I had any houseplants, left me with their aloe plant. The planter and saucer stick out like a sore thumb in my decor, and now I love that so much. It’s still thriving, in it’s original pot, sitting on it’s mismatched saucer. It’s one of those things in someone’s home that feels so out of place—that you feel it in your bones—there must be a beautiful story buried away in there somewhere.

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A broken soul

This is the part I don’t know how to write. Every time I begin, it leads to the same place; a dark place I don’t want to go back to. I don’t even want to say it, but you know what it is. Over the last two years, I have woken up countless nights in cold sweats. For hours unable to self soothe or come back to relaxed breathing. I have been in tears so many times.

“I don’t think I want to come back here.”

The last two years in the Northwest Territories has torn me apart—my life and my soul. It has killed the part of my soul that was head over heels in love with this place, that couldn’t imagine leaving, and was so in love with this life. It’s taken me this whole two years through single weeks, months, sometimes just days by day and hours by hour, to kind of deal with this and come to terms with it.

I need to move on and to rebuild—financially, emotionally and mentally.

And I think the end just kind of comes at a perfect time when I’m ready to kind of make the next steps that I need to make, to leave my feelings of this territory behind and hopefully leave my broken life behind.

I can begin to sense a certain peace in me.

Maybe the best times of the last two years for me has been the hours spent just listening to the singing ice.

60.72°N

I am leaving Yellowknife, and I’m moving to Whitehorse, Yukon. This spring marks the end for me here.

Beginning in August, I will continue chasing the aurora as my career in my new home of Whitehorse, with such cosy small groups as ever. I want to keep the core of my business just as it’s always been.

In a way, this is so nostalgic for me. It’s the warmer, more dynamic weather and expansive highway infrastructure leading to real aurora chases through mountain scenery and cloud fronts. It feels so much like where I ‘grew up’ chasing the aurora in northern Norway, and I’m just so excited and so nervous to hit the ground there and to begin again. I really, really hope you just might come with me on this journey too.