by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)
“Oh, that’s fine. I’m just happy to be here.”
“That’s good,” said Lapham leaning back in his chair.
I mustered up the nerve. “Last month I sent you some of my writing. It was in a blue duotang—stories about monks and boxers and pigeon catchers. Odd sorts.”
“Oh yes, I remember those. You’re a talented writer, Peter.”
A warmth spread through me like a drug.
“And you have many years ahead of you.”
The phone rang again, but Lapham let it ring.
“So what would you like me to do for you?”
I told him that I was making no progress in Canada and that I had sent portfolios to some big magazines in New York but had not yet pursued face-to-face contact with any editors other than him because I had received no response.
“No, don’t go knocking on those doors. You won’t get anywhere that way anymore.”
He paused.
“You say Granger is still at Esquire?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a pitch for him? I could give him a call.”
“Not at present,” I said, cursing myself for not having prepared for such an opportunity.
The phone rang again, and Lapham ignored it.
“I’ll tell you what. Just leave this in my hands, and we’ll be in touch.”
What did this mean? Whatever it meant was much more than I had expected. My gratitude translated into an intense urge to leave this man alone to catch up. We shook hands, and I passed through the glass partition.
I was halfway out of the office when I realized that I had nothing to commemorate this special moment but my word. Then I noticed a box of Lapham Quarterleys in the corridor by the elevator.
“May I take one of these?” I asked the secretary.
“Certainly.”
It was the Sports & Games issue, and among the contributors I immediately counted Ernest Hemingway and A.J. Liebling.
I did an about face and walked back into Lapham’s office. He put down the phone.
“Thanks for this publication, Mr. Lapham,” I said. “Would you sign it for me?”
He uncapped his fountain pen and wrote:
NYC 7/6/10
Lewis Lapham
Peter Valing is the author of the unpublished memoir of living in Belize with his family, Caye Caulker. His story about boxing in Africa, “Where the Fighters Are Hungry,” appeared in The Best Travel Writing 2005.
MARCIA DESANCTIS
Into the Cold
Sometimes the chill warms you up to possibilities.
“This is one of the deepest lakes in Sweden,” says Joachim, indicating to the right—towards me—in the passenger seat. It hardly seems like a body of water, but rather like a boundless prairie blanketed with snow. “Many people have drowned here on snowmobiles and they completely disappear under the ice.” We are driving along the shore of Lake Malgomai on a February day and the scrape of tire studs beneath our Subaru wagon clashes with the Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull duet thumping on the radio. The horizon is a rainbow of grays—dove to steel to charcoal—like a Benjamin Moore paint strip.
“Do you mind if I turn down the radio?” I ask. The noise level makes it difficult to give the icy gravesite its due. Joachim taps off the power button and silence inflates inside the car. “How deep is it?”
“One hundred seventeen meters,” he says. Several fishermen are planted in cleared-out spaces on the surface. They are bundled under earflaps and bulk and their poles stick out from holes drilled into the ice. “And forty-five kilometers long.”
Thirty minutes ago, Joachim collected me at Vilhelmina Airport, a one-room outpost in Southern Lapland. He was the only person in the “arrivals” corner of the enclosure and since he was picking up a stranger, his gaze was cautious. The whole scenario should make me wary: I—a lone woman—pile myself and my bags into a man’s car, whereupon he tells me of frozen bodies that float somewhere under the lake just a guardrail away, and proceed to drive with him 200 miles on a snow-packed road deeper into forest to the hotel he manages. But I know my instincts well enough to trust them and with few exceptions, those I encounter when I travel alone. Besides, I’m elated to be in the opening moments of a brief disappearing act, the kind I’ve come to crave and even require. Joachim has no idea that he’s in collusion with me as I fade into the folds of Lapland’s forlorn geography for a few days, with no plans for anything except to be out of reach.
I’ve come to Sweden to do a roundup on spas for a glossy monthly, and have spent the last four days in Stockholm getting scraped and pummeled, kneaded and oiled with extracts of birch and lingonberry. I can’t lie, it’s a peach of an assignment but while there I still inhabit my own familiar skin—of the artist’s wife, preoccupied mother, the well-shod magazine scribe under constant harassment from a smart phone.
Until I moved to a wooded corner of New England, I spent my adult life in New York and Paris, or on the road roaming Istanbul’s bazaars or Singapore’s teeming streets. But as I get older, it’s the remote I seek, the far-flung counterpoint to my rural existence, total sequester to erase the static. The more I wander the world’s most crowded places, the harder it is to shake the burdens that have become a part of me: of middle age, of ailing parents and growing children, of perpetual financial doom, professional incertitude and—what is perhaps most unbearable—technological overload. It’s a time of life that requires contemplation, which I can achieve neither in the context of my home, where I stew and ponder and spin domestic wheels, nor in a nervous urban swarm of bodies all racing to get somewhere. It is a conundrum: I’m seeking to remedy isolation with greater isolation. Some people call it a getaway. I call it salvation.
It bears mentioning, however, that a few hours striking distance from the Arctic Circle would not be my normal, chosen paradise. I loathe the winter, which, in northwest Connecticut, lasts from November to April. At the moment, though, a beach is a hemisphere away, so I plan to stay indoors and wrap myself in reindeer skins for a few blissfully lonesome days. My lackluster enthusiasm for outdoor adventure—or for being outdoors at all—clearly bewilders Joachim and I find myself a touch embarrassed by it.
“You don’t want to ski?” Joachim asks, incredulous.
“I never learned how,” I say.
“What about the snowmobile?” he asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say, meaning, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Joachim tries not to look confused. “We can take you in the Caterpillar up to Mount Klo verfja llet, or you can go in the helicopter. That would be very nice, to ride in a helicopter. It’s very beautiful to see the mountain from the top.”
How many more ways can I—politely—say, “No, thanks?” He’s the owner of a winter resort and his new charge is disinterested, a complete dud. I want him to believe that I’m happy, and that my sense of adventure, however paltry to the naked eye, is already satisfied by this excursion north. I don’t need to chase powder on a Catski, courting avalanches and frostbite. No one except a friend in Stockholm knows my whereabouts. I don’t require much more.
“I’ll think about it,” I say. “Does the hotel offer massage?” I’m not sure my muscles can withstand another beating but at least it’s an activity.
Joachim lights up. “Yes, in fact we have a new person starting today,” he says.
“That’s great,” I say.
“You can also go for walks,” he says.
“Really, I’ll be fine.”
It’s mid-week, so, Joachim tells me, the hotel is all but empty. There is a fireplace that I can curl up next to and stoke for the next three days. “You will be very happy in the restaurant,” he says. “We have a nice wine list and we carry a small-batch local gin which is wonderful.”
“Now, you’re talking,” I say.
Joachim fills me in on the region. The indigenous Lapp people, known as Sami, have changed along with the rest of the world. Many still herd reindeer, the cornerstone of t
heir livelihood, but instead of doing so on foot across the wide Arctic expanses, they use trucks and helicopters. You may still find dogs and sleds, but the culture is less nomadic and population much dwindled, and the virgin expanses of Lapland are largely for tourists.
Eventually, Joachim takes the exit ramp towards the town of Borgafjall, a sprawling flash of electric white even more intense than the landscape we’ve just traversed for the past three hours. He points to two distant peaks that are the town landmarks. “That’s Klo verfja llet,” he says. “Locals call them ‘The Tits,’ or more often, ‘Anita Ekberg.’” Clouds obscure one of them, the right breast perhaps, but they are wispy ones, like linen curtains on a spring day, and the sky otherwise is sapphire blue. It is not yet eleven A.M. and the sun is low on the horizon.
“This is good for tonight,” he says. “You can see the Northern Lights only when the sky is clear.”
“What are the chances of seeing them?” I ask. It’s the middle of February and because the air tends to be less moist than earlier in the winter, it is, in fact, the optimal viewing time. Borgafjall is in Vasterbotten County in Southern Lapland, about sixty miles from the Arctic Circle. When electrically-charged solar particles collide with atmospheric gases as they are drawn to the North Pole, this creates the Aurora Borealis. In fact, I learn, the eleven-year cycle of solar activity is predicted to peak in what is dubbed the “Solar Maximum” right now in the winter of 2013—so the auroral activity, according to Joachim, has been in full disco throttle. But he knows better than to promise a guest a show. I look warily at the sky.
Hotel Borgafjall is a low-slung yellow structure built by an English architect, Ralph Erskine. Inside, there is a pleasing midcentury vibe—a bright seating area around a mod white wood stove. Joachim’s wife Gertrud leads me to my room and I pass a vitrine where stuffed wildlife from the area is on display: an Arctic fox, a lynx and a snowy owl with its disturbing gaze both cross-eyed and direct.
I had heard there are some clean, modern rooms but I don’t get one—perhaps I overstressed my limited budget in my correspondence with Joachim. It will be fine for sleeping but it is awkward in a kind of vertical way—very tall, very narrow and very small. I make my way across the dorm-like upper floor back to the aesthetically fascinating main part of the building. There is a funky, suspended staircase and painted white I-beams bisect the rooms and ceilings, which jut and angle in no particular direction. I have found my home: the dining room, as welcoming as my little quarters are not.
Gertrud, who also works in the kitchen, obviously got the dope from Joachim on their boring new guest.
“You would not like to go to the slopes today?”
She places warm bread and butter made, she says, locally, on the table. The fire sparks invitingly.
“Actually, I have a lot of work to do,” I lie. Another woman approaches the table and introduces herself.
“I’m Johanna,” she says. “We have horses. Would you like to go riding in the forest?”
“That’s so generous of you,” I say with a smile shellacked on my face. By now my apathy has insulted them, their hotel, and in fact the entirety of Lapland if not Sweden. “Actually, I don’t know how to ride horses.”
I’ve been on a horse exactly once—the same number of times I’ve been on skis. I begin to wonder if there is anything I actually do know how to do.
“The horses are very nice and gentle,” Johanna says.
“Old and close to death would be better,” I say.
They laugh. “Tomorrow then.”
There is no point in any further refusals, so I accede to their persistence. “Maybe a short ride.”
The afternoon passes slowly so I venture outside for a quick walk. Johanna tells me it is very cold, so I depart in mittens, a hat and the boots I carried overseas for Stockholm’s snowy sidewalks. Still, the air deals me a body slam when I open the entrance door, as if it’s something tactile and in need of wrangling. I speed up to generate warmth. There is daylight, dim and crystalline. I pass by a small church designed by the same architect as the hotel and peer inside. The drifts are higher than I am and under my footsteps, the road makes a sound like creaking floorboards. At first, the air is so pure I burst into loud hacks when I inhale, the city expunging itself from my lungs. My face grows numb while the brief stroll turns into two hours, then three. My body is moving, heated, propelling me forward, further from the hotel. My head is uncluttered and I don’t pass a soul on the road.
There is little to see but a bleached landscape embellished in parts by a green-black treeline. Though the vista is uniform, every new angle from every corner turned startles me just the same. Sweat prickles my stomach and back and pools in the waistband of my jeans when I veer towards foreign territory: the ski area.
It was strange to grow up in New England and never learn to schuss down a mountain. My father is an Italian from Tucson who worked every weekend of my childhood. While my friends hauled off for Vermont on Friday afternoons, I stayed home and baked Toll House cookies, waiting for our annual getaway to St. Croix or Barbados come February. Skiing wasn’t in his, or subsequently our, vernacular. So when we moved to the countryside, I was determined that my kids should tackle what I had not. For a few years, I dragged them on Wednesdays and Sundays to the mountain near our house and had them kitted out for lessons. At one time, I thought I’d join them, but instead, opted to toast my bones in the lodge by an ancient fireplace at tables encrusted with ketchup and grease. I always worried until I saw their little bodies at the bottom of the run.
Inside the ski shop, the surroundings are familiar from when my children were small. Skis line up wall to wall, kids with pink faces trudge in boots. I even recognize the wet, worn carpet underfoot. Behind this equipment rental room is a snack bar, with antler chandeliers poised above the tables full of skiers exuding the hale flush of exhaustion. I wished for a fraction of their spent physicality. My lips unfreeze to sip hot tea and nibble on a slice of chocolate cake, and passing back through the store, I turn back and head for the counter where a man is bent over a metal contraption waxing skis.
“Do you offer lessons for cross country?” I ask.
“Yes, but our teacher is away for the week,” he says.
“Is it hard?” I ask, “I mean, to do?”
“Once you get used to it, it’s like walking but you’ll need to practice,” he says. “You’ve never done it?”
“No,” I say. “Can I reserve a pair of skis for tomorrow?”
I fill out a form, leaving my name and a deposit of SEK 100, and depart the lodge with a written commitment to teach myself to cross-country ski the next day. I’m no longer brooding when I get back to the hotel, where I plunk down in the lounge and never crack open my book. There are only a few of us at dinner, including the new massage guy whom I had booked for the following day. The meal is magnificent—even the sliced reindeer. I’m ashamed to tell these nice people that I don’t eat meat, either, or fish, but I swallow all of it, as well as Arctic char from Malgomai and my wine, happily. It’s been an entire day since I’ve checked my emails or my dwindling bank balance. No texts from the kids far away at school. Exhausted, I drift off to my room to get ready for bed.
Just before switching off the light above my bed, I remember the Northern Lights and Joachim’s prediction that the conditions were ideal. I’m warm, buzzed, deliciously at peace but I force myself into boots anyway, as well as my coat, mittens and hat. The hotel bar is hopping, and I pray no one glances outside to see the woman with a down coat thrown over her nightclothes looking up at the sky.
I walk around, filling myself with freezing air, seduced by the thought of the warm bed I just abandoned, tempted by sleep. I jog to the road to fight off my apathy, to promise myself a deep slumber if I can be patient for once, to persist in this bitter cold a few more minutes. Instead I go inside and slide into bed. It’s ten o’clock. I can’t fall asleep.
To see the Northern Lights requires commitment I don’t
feel obligated to muster up during this, my time to clear the head and shun responsibility. But I lurch out of bed again anyway, begrudgingly, and pile on the layers, slip on my boots and leave without a hat. The wine has leeched from my system and now I’m colder and emptier. I stroll briskly to the road. I spin around and observe the waif of a new moon and the stars, chrome studs shimmering against a deep violet sky. The chill lodges in my joints and my ears tingle from the sharp, windless air. I wave my arms to keep the blood flowing.
I know, the Aurora Borealis is a crapshoot, like spotting a pod of whales in a boat off Cabo. I cannot fight my fatigue anymore so I wander back to the front door, buying a little time with my slow, deliberate steps. My neck aches from craning it skyward. The air crackles so softly it almost hisses, and I turn to the source of the noise. To the north, above the hotel apartments, I see a corner of the heavens illuminated with a swoosh of green light, ghostly and ethereal. The colors seem to brush against my frozen face and undulate against the pitch-black stretch of horizon. I hear a bustle of people and voices, including Johanna, the staff closing out the kitchen, who emerge to watch the spectacle. We all stand silently as it flares to reveal a rolling arc, watery flashes of neon green and pale blue still isolated to one fragment of the sky. The lights contract from a brush stroke to a thin yellow-green ribbon and when it disappears, I dare to breathe again.
The next morning, Johanna insists on taking me for a horseback ride. I try to refuse her but there is a softness about her insistence and frankly, I’m somewhat worn down. The lethargy I desire looks like a problem to them, a petulance that needs rectifying with bucking up, Swedish optimism and more suggestions. As she drives me to the stables, Johanna confirms it’s been a banner season for Northern Lights. “It was a small one last night,” she says, “but I never get tired of seeing it,” she says.
The wind blows in icy puffs, yesterday’s sun has vanished, and I’m about to mount a horse for the second time ever (the first being behind a resort in Tucson, rattlesnakes and all). It smells of hay and the cold, and the animals, of the Northern Swedish breed, are enormous. She introduces me to my ride and I love him immediately, despite the fact that he’s a giant and seems hearty and not at all dead. I don’t reveal to Johanna my next piece of bad news: that I’m allergic to cats, dogs, hamsters and yes, horses, the latter of which have always rather scared me. I did have an urge to ride, once, when my daughter started taking lessons, but I suppose I chickened out and bagged that, too.
