fika by firelight
I wrote this for my travel writing class i took when studying abroad in Copenhagen about an experience i had seeing the Northern Lights. I love writing about travel- enjoy!
“Good show, uh?” I’m not sure if good show is how I would describe one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen, but Oren seems quite understated about the whole ordeal as he lights a cigarette.
Earlier tonight, a van took us further into the north, chasing what at the time was nothing more than an idea to me. The two tour guides, who has introduced themselves as Robin and Oren, are quite opposite in looks and personality. The further we drove, the sparser the scenery became- this means more when your starting point is a place like Kiruna, which has a grand total of one restaurant that we visited earlier in the night. They served things like chili and olives and had one white wine on the hastily scribbled chalkboard menu on the wall.
There’s no way to know for sure if it will be a good night for the lights or not. You can never know, Robin says, you can just wait and hope. Still, we drive North in hopes that we get lucky. When we arrive on a frozen lake, there’s already a faint ribbon of light stretching across the entire sky, pretty much directly above us. We carry reindeer skins and supplies for a fire, and there’s lots of sticks and brush to watch out to not trip over, but all of our eyes are trained on the sky above us.
In true Swedish fashion, Robin doesn’t speak much, and when he does, it’s quiet. He makes a fire on a snow-covered embankment next to the frozen lake we are standing on, fashioning a sort of conversation pit by digging into the snow and laying the reindeer hides down around it. In comparison, Oren’s voice booms across the lake any time he speaks.
I borrowed a barely fashionable one-piece snowsuit and balaclava from our hotel, and it makes me feel like a Danish toddler wandering the streets of Copenhagen holding hands in a line. It does, however, keep me very warm, along with the multiple layers I meticulously packed for the trip. Leggings, wool sweaters, and thick socks are spilling out of my travel backpack back at the cabin.
It’s incredible how many shades are present in the sky- like a sunset, but more surreal. What began as a yellowish shade of green has changed effortlessly into a bluer hue, with edges of pink and purple. The only sources of light out on the frozen lake are the great expanse of the Northern Lights above us, the warm glow of the fire, and Oren’s now second cigarette.
The air is so crisp and cold that it sends a satisfying sting into my nostrils every time I breathe, so I amble over to the fire on the edge of the lake. Just as Robin warned, much of the beauty of the lights disappears when even the smallest bit of light pollution such as the fire crowds your view. More of the group follows to the fire, and Oren trudges over with a thermos of lingonberry tea. The sweetness of the tea and the smokiness of the fire are warm, calming smells, creating a true sense of what the Swedes call “fika”- a break to have a warm drink surrounded by family, friends, or in our case, a particularly interesting outdoor guide.
In the light of the fire, I get a better glimpse of Oren’s face. Everything about it is extreme. Extremely red skin on which extremely wide-set eyes sit. An extremely thick beard almost succeeds in hiding an extremely deep scar in the skin under.
This extremity only makes more sense when he tells me about his life. He lives here, in Kiruna, for half the year- what most would consider the bad half, or maybe just the extreme half. Here in Lapland Sweden, he tells us, the temperature sticks below freezing. Polar Night, which the locals call kaamos (or “night”), is when the sun doesn’t rise at all during the winter. Even for the part of the winter when the sun does rise, it doesn’t get very high in the sky, and doesn’t stay up for long.
“Isn’t that depressing?” I ask him. It sounds like hell to me, someone who is their most productive and happy in the warm sunlight.
“It’s part of life,” he says, “but lots of people find it depressing. There’s mental health and alcoholism issues then.” The community experiences a shift in the winter- everything is a bit slower, quieter, sometimes even sadder. He doesn’t find it depressing though- to Oren, winter in Lapland means ice fishing, hiking, snowshoeing, and camping in the less crowded natural spaces. His favorite is driving out to the middle of nowhere, where civilization can’t be seen for miles, and camping for a few nights.
“It reminds me how small I am,” he says, “like, how can I be caught up in myself when there are things so much bigger than me?”
The summers, during the time of year that locals call the midnight sun, the sun is up for a couple months straight, never dipping below the horizon. But that time of year, Oren spends in a village just north of Barcelona. They live in the same small village where his wife grew up, spending their time swimming and fishing and drinking wine, and from what I’ve seen of him, probably smoking lots of cigarettes.
I wonder what it’s like to live half of your life in such extreme cold and darkness, spending your days in the barren and cold landscapes, just to pack up and go to the heat and sea breeze of summers in Spain. I wonder if the two halves of the year feel disjointed, like two pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite fit but can be jammed together nonetheless with a bit of force.
Robin yells from down on the lake, meaning there must be something happening in the sky. We scramble away from the light pollution of the fire to see that there are several small but intense ribbons of light low in the sky. In the absence of the fire, my toes have begun to feel disconnected from the rest of my body, even under two pairs of socks and a comically large pair of boots. I begin shuffling around like penguins do and Oren remarks, “Oh come on, it’s warm out!” but he still pours me more lingonberry tea. It burns my mouth when I drink it, but it warms me right up.
When people say the northern lights “dance,” they aren’t lying. You can see them disappear, reappear, and move around each other. And Oren is right; everything else, my worries from my “real life,” my anxieties about the future, seems to fade away.
