On my last night in Lapland, a reindeer pulled me on a wooden sleigh across a frozen landscape. There wasn’t a star to be seen in the overcast sky, but even so the forest glowed, as if the snow all around us held light. It was an old-fashioned sleigh, high at the back and scrolled at the foot, and its old-fashioned noises—wood slats groaning, iron runners squeaking against ice—were like echoes from a bygone past, when getting from Point A to Point B required bundling oneself in multiple woolens, tucking beneath a mound of animal hides, and getting on with it, chilled to the bone.
I had known Lapland would be cold. I hadn’t dreamed it would also be my own enchanted fairytale.
Growing up in coastal Massachusetts, I spent the coldest months outdoors, skiing, sledding, ice-skating—all followed by steaming mugs of hot cocoa beside a roaring fireplace. Ever since, I’ve possessed an incurable nostalgia for all things snow, from the shrieking howls of a wicked Nor’easter to the magical stillness that descends the day after, when all the world is digging out. But in adulthood I moved to the comparatively milder clime of Brooklyn, NY, where snow, when it comes, exists most lastingly in its lesser forms, more challenging to love: frozen street-corner ice chunks grimy with car exhaust; sloppily shoveled sidewalk passages rivered with dog piss. Over time, I slowly deaccessioned my old L.L.Bean sweaters and tried to accept that, thanks to global warming, winter is different now everywhere, for everyone.
The thing is, I never could accept it. I long for the blissful whiteout of snowfall and snowbanks the way others long for white sandy beaches. By late autumn I’m craving the bracing shock of freezing winds, the glint of icicles dripping treacherously from tree branches, the singular sensation of crossing over from impossibly cold to improbably not, then stepping out of sodden layers and into warm, dry pajamas, maybe mixing myself a Manhattan—all of which is repeatedly promised by much-heralded “Snowpocalypses” that only sometimes arrive.
New England transplant Herman Melville nails this physical sensation in Moby Dick, when Ishmael and Queequeg reunite at the Spouter-Inn and tuck in for their second night as bedfellows. “We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors. The more so, I say, because to truly enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast,” Ishmael muses. “The height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
There’s an existential component as well. When everyday life is erased by a foot or more of snow, an otherworldliness descends. We become aliens in our own land. Disguised by a puffer coat and fur hat, my brisk city walk slowed to a trudge, I’m forced into a new relationship with my surroundings, and even stripped of delusions, made to remember that though humans are destroying the planet, nature itself will outlast us.
Eventually it became clear that the only way to guarantee myself the winter experience of my idealized remembrances was to get on a plane and fly very far north—for instance, to the highest reaches of Finland, where winter starts in October and lasts for seven months, and temperatures are known to drop to -22 Fahrenheit.
Merely packing—generally the very bane of my existence—was a delightful trip down memory lane. Digging into the very back of the closet I unearthed my old snow pants, ski parka, smart-wool sweater, and silk long-underwear set, all of it unworn for at least a decade. Wool socks, check. Snow boots, check. Balaclava, check. One of the great things about sub-zero temperatures is how simple they are to dress for.
The Fantasy, In Real Life
On an overcast, mid-40s Saturday in February I flew from New York City to Helsinki to Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, a city of 62,000 just a few miles south of the Arctic Circle. I knew I’d come to the right place when I couldn’t stop photographing the view from inside the tiny airport: a flat, empty tarmac, and just beyond, thick rows of conifers completely covered in snow. Within minutes, I was actually part of that landscape, being ferried by a hotel representative in a giant SUV along snowy tree-lined roads.
Now seems a good moment to note that for all my outdoors-woman bluster, I am primarily an indoors-y sort, for whom a hotel room is never a way-station between activities but the foundation of my existence. Along with romping around in my ski pants, I intended to spend a lot of time snuggled in bed reading a long novel (Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus) and taking naps, doing my best to perfect a cold-hot fantasia the way a good pastry chef masters the marriage between salty and sweet. I’d booked three nights at the Arctic Treehouse Hotel during a late-night internet wander, but you know how it goes with online photos—always better onscreen than in real life.
The moment we turned onto the property, the verdict was in: Had I the training, vision, talent, and money, I’d have invented the Arctic TreeHouse Hotel myself. Picture a hotel deconstructed into its component parts. The main building is a five-pointed snowflake housing reception and the RAKAS Restaurant & Bar, with a massive fireplace at center. Upon entering I was handed a hot mug of glogg—the mulled-wine ambrosia native to Northern European countries—and encouraged to sit by the fire while my suitcase was delivered to my room. All around me, guests milled about and chatted, warming their hands by the flames, the glogg’s cinnamon-and-cloves scent mingling with woodsmoke.
The rooms themselves are just a short walk away, a smattering of individual units tucked into the forest alongside a slope. Each is a self-sufficient box on stilts, two rooms apiece (bedroom and bath), with the north wall a single pane of glass, to best view the Northern Lights (which, alas, didn’t appear on my trip). They are tastefully furnished in minimalist Scandinavian fashion: whitewashed wood walls and floors, all-white furniture and bedding, and a pair of copper reading lamps flanking the bed. The bed faces the glass window. When I crawled under the covers for my inaugural nap, I felt as if I were actually outdoors, in the forest, but cozy and warm. Dear reader, I remained abed until dinner.
It’s said that in Finland there are 200,000 reindeer and 180,000 people. Because of this, I didn’t feel too bad dining on reindeer seared and smoked that evening. The RAKAS Restaurant & Bar proved to be as excellent as the lodging, equal parts original, traditional, and uncommonly fresh.
And so it went: For the next two days I lived as if within a snow globe, never venturing beyond the limits of the hotel’s property, which had everything I could possibly need, including loaner snowshoes.
In the mornings I’d enjoy the wholesome breakfast buffet (cold cuts, salmon, yogurt, oatmeal, lingonberry juice), then spent the brief daylight hours tromping up to the highest point on the fens, where I’d unbuckle my snowshoes, climb to the top of the ice-encrusted lookout tower, and survey my winter wonderland—snow-blanketed forests all the way to the horizon, and not another person in sight. From that vantage, it wasn’t merely everyday life that was erased, but time itself. No sounds, no smells—just a blank, muted stillness in every direction, my thoughts free to roam wherever they wanted. Somehow, for all its vastness, the view felt comfortably constrained, as if I could feel the boundaries of this small nation even if I couldn’t quite see them.
When the dull light began to fade into pink, and then gray, I’d find my way back to my room, skiwear drenched through with sweat, necessitating dry pajamas and a late-afternoon nap. Dinner, of course, required fortifying myself with as many local delicacies as possible: more salmon, delicate pale-orange cloudberries (sprinkled into a salad and also made into ice cream), and a delicious latke-like buckwheat pancake smothered in sour cream, caviar, pickles, and a smattering of little yellow flowers. That’s the other great thing about sub-zero temperatures: You really must eat a great deal.
Guilt-ishly, given that I’d been eating them, but also uncharacteristically adventurous-ishly, I reserved a spot for my final night in the reindeer sleigh caravan, led by an external outfit on a farm ten minutes away. I felt silly being such a shameless tourist. The next morning I’d fly back to New York having seen only the narrowest, most luxurious swath of this country I’d never been to, and knew next to nothing about. And yet, sleighing through that silent forest, colder than I’d ever been, I knew I’d be carrying this new memory of wonder and contentment with me for a very long time.