The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10
Page 31
“See how kind he is?” she says. “His name is Besten, which means Beast.”
“Not encouraging,” I say. Did I mention? He’s massive. “It’s also means ‘the best,’” she says.
Johanna strokes him and whispers both to me and to him. “You’ll be fine, I promise.” She hands me a brush and shows me how to groom his fur, where to scratch him. I catch him squarely in the eyes. “Friends, O.K.?”
Johanna mounts her horse with ease and rides bareback. She drapes a saddle over Besten, I don a helmet that is too small over my wool cap, and we ride into the woods. I am terrified and exhilarated. The horse trots too quickly over deep snow but soon I settle into his pace and even urge him on faster, over rocks and brooks, past thickets of birch and rows of giant spruce that seem to close in on us. We go up and down a few steep hills, and when my body lurches perpendicular to the ground I love Besten even more for not letting me tumble off. We have ridden a few miles when Johanna leads us into a pine glade for lunch, where we tie up the horses. She reveals cheese sandwiches and a thermos of coffee and we settle into a snowbank. The jagged treeline is rimmed by a blackish sky. I think of nothing but as I am: far, far away.
I envy Johanna’s ease with the horses and the forbidding terrain. I envy her competence and knowledge and clarity of purpose. She has bought a house in Borgafjall with her husband who runs the ski area and simply loves this magnificent place. “So why did you decide to come here?” she asks.
“You mean, and not ski?” I ask. We laugh.“Just for a break,” I say.
“Life is very complex,” she says as we fix our eyes on the frozen horizon and prepare for the hour’s ride back to the stables.
Back at the hotel, I’m restless. I reluctantly eat elk sausage for lunch and feel my stomach churning in the aftermath. I wander outside in my usual cold weather get-up in the direction of the ski trails. My acquaintance in the shop welcomes me with my equipment, unfortunately freshly waxed, that I cart over my shoulder back to the hotel. I dial my husband.
“Hi, I’m in Lapland,” I say.
“You’re what?”
“In Lapland and I just rented cross country skis.” He skis almost every morning on the trails near our house. “Can you give me some pointers?”
“Wow,” he says. He’s never once convinced me to join him, despite asking me daily. He only reluctantly accepts the fact that, even if I live in New England, I hate being outside in winter. “I’m amazed.”
“Yeah, me too. It’s cold but for some reason, it’s not bothering me,” I say. “So I figured, why not?”
“Way to go,” he says. “Lift the heel of the back foot as you push forward on the front leg. The poles are key.”
“Here goes nothing,” I say.
Gertrud directs me to the trails right behind the hotel. Shortly, I’m winded, dripping perspiration, crawling then sliding, struggling to keep my legs parallel and loose and gradually I pick up speed. Strapping Swedes with gaunt cheeks and high-tech outdoor gear whiz past me. The route slopes downward and I accelerate for about two hundred yards before I lose control and fall face-first into the snow. I get up and click my skis back into place, but before long, I’m spent. It is strange to see my feet in ski boots as they trod through the snow. In them, I’m a different person, all legs and strength and heartbeat, without a thought except to walk steady and not to slip on the ice. I see my breath but I don’t feel the cold.
The sky is dark enough to hide Anita Ekberg and at the hotel, I meet up with Johanna, who reminds me of my massage. “You are O.K.?” she asks.
At dinner, four snowmobilers on a guy’s getaway invite me to their table and offer to share their fine Bordeaux.
“You have never been on a snowmobile?” One of them, an executive for a mountaineering equipment firm, asks me.
“You have to come with us tomorrow, we are going twenty-five miles to Saxnos,” another says. We debate it after dinner by the fireplace, over cognac and the local gin. Too dangerous, I maintain. Nonsense, say they. It’s the Nordic way of life!
“Even the Sami people use snowmobiles now,” one of them exclaims.
At breakfast, they’re all there, my drinking buddies, in swell outdoor attire—orange, green, Gore-Tex, microfiber efficiency. “You can still change your mind,” one of them says.
I laugh. “Thanks anyway.”
They leave and I finish my coffee alone. Just how I wanted it, right? But the northern air is clearing my head, making me dare to face something I’ve never braved before: the outdoors. The cold. Air so clean it makes my head weightless.
“Joachim and are going out on the snowmobile to put some restaurant flyers on the trail,” says Gertrud, who sits at the next table. My stomach grips tightly because I know what’s coming next. “Why don’t you come?”
I’m not getting any thinking done, nor have I been able to submerge myself in a pool of isolation. But I’m healthier than I was when I arrived two days ago and it’s easy to see why.
“As long as it’s safe,” I say, thinking of Lake Malgomai and the reckless adventurers. “Please, go slow.”
I hold onto Gertrud while Joachim speeds up ahead. The acrid odor of exhaust wafts around us, and I worry about befouling the virginal air, but not as much as I fear calamity. “Slow” for her is too fast for me, and I squeeze her. When she takes a sharp corner we dip towards the ground like a listing ship, and I imagine the motor slicing into my frozen neck. But always, she rights the machine, laughing, sailing into the white. “We’re fine, don’t worry,” she reassures me.
We park the snowmobiles and climb to a cluster of round wooden Sami huts which are buried under a cap of snow. The blackened remains of fires darken the interiors. They are long abandoned. We climb from one to the other and peer behind the disintegrating doors and soon resume our trek.
Gertrud zooms, allowing me to firm my grasp as we rise higher on the mountain. Joachim hammers flyers advertising specials for the upcoming weekend into stakes. They are expecting a full house and, he tells me, these same trails will be packed. Today, they are empty.
When we stop, the cold, which has already lodged into the creases of my cheeks, nose and lips, wends its way under my coat, even under the ski pants Johanna lent me, even beneath the layer of thermal fabric closest to my skin. The couple has stopped for fika—the Swedish ritual of drinking coffee. We are in a clearing, in full view of the blinding white tits of Anita Ekberg, under a sky so blue and so packed with atmospheric gases that this night, we may see the whole horizon transform again into a halo of liquid light.
Gertrud splashes a drop of milk into my cup. The hot drink relieves the prickly Arctic air that surrounds us in every direction. The cookies, too, warm me, the sensation of sugar against tongue, the comfort of sustenance. None of us rushes to finish our coffee but soon I clamber back onto the snowmobile and clutch onto Gertrud. The elements are relentless, just as they are under a Caribbean sun from which eventually you need to seek shade.
As we ride back, the sky clouds over quickly. There will be no Northern Lights tonight, but I am certain there will be something else to stumble upon and surprise me. I don’t quite recognize the person these people have turned me into over the last days but I’m getting fond of her. In fact, I might like to spend a little time with her—walking, riding, gazing—engaged in anything, actually, but contemplation.
Marcia DeSanctis is the author of the New York Times Travel Best Seller 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go. She is a former television news producer who has worked for Barbara Walters, ABC, CBS, and NBC News. She is also an award-winning essayist whose work has appeared in numerous publications including Vogue, Marie Claire, Town & Country, O the Oprah Magazine, More, Tin House, and The New York Times. Her travel essays have been widely anthologized, including four consecutive years in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and she is the recipient of three Lowell Thomas Awards for excellence in travel journalism, as well as a Solas Award for best travel writing. She holds a degree
from Princeton University in Slavic Languages and Literature and a Masters in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She worked for several years in Paris, and today lives in northwest Connecticut with her husband and two children.
Acknowledgments
“Friends Who Don’t Bite” by Jill K. Robinson published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Jill K. Robinson.
“The Vanishing Art of Losing Your Way” by Sarah Colleen Coury published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Colleen Coury.
“The Marco Chronicles: To Rome, Without Love” by Elizabeth Geoghegan originally published in Shebooks. Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Geoghegan.
“What Is that Thing?” by Michael Coolen published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Michael Coolen.
“Inside the Tower” by Keith Skinner published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Keith Skinner.
“Notes into Lines” by Hannah Sheldon-Dean published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Hannah Sheldon-Dean.
“Into the Hills” by Matthew Crompton published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Matthew Crompton.
“Show Me, Shouyu” by Kelly Luce published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Kelly Luce.
“Fish Trader Ray” by Lisa Alpine published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Alpine.
“My First Trip to the Homeland” by Tania Amochaev published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Tania Amochaev.
“The Tea in Me” by Bill Giebler published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Bill Giebler.
“Code 500” by Stephanie Elizondo Griest originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of the Oxford American. Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright © 2013 by Stephanie Elizondo Griest.
“Diego Forever” by Kelly Chastain published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Kelly Chastain.
“Woman Rain” by Katherine Jamieson originally appeared in 2011 in Meridian: The Semi-annual from the University of Virginia. Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright © 2011 by Katherine Jamieson.
“The Crap Between the Love and Us” by Dayna Brayshaw published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Dayna Brayshaw.
“Neil and I” by Gary Buslik published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Gary Buslik.
“From the Ashes” by James Michael Dorsey published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by James Michael Dorsey.
“Ohio House Tour” by V. Hansmann published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by V. Hansmann.
“I Have a Problem with the Blood of a Woman” by Stephanie Glaser published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Stephanie Glaser.
“Surfing the Millennia” by Jeff Greenwald published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Jeff Greenwald.
“Feliz Cumpleaños” by Lavinia Spalding published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Lavinia Spalding.
“Biko” by Ken Matusow published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Ken Matusow.
“Storykeepers” by Erin Byrne published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Erin Byrne.
“In Search of Dylan Thomas” by Michael Shapiro originally appeared in the August 15, 3013 issue of the Washington Post. Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright © 2013 by Michael Shapiro.
“Found” by Ben Aultman-Moore published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Ben Aultman-Moore.
“Southern Sandstone” by Jessica Normandeau published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Jessica Normandeau.
“The Bloom of Cancer” by Amy Gigi Alexander originally appeared on BBC Wanderlust on August 11, 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright © 2014 by Amy Gigi Alexander.
“The Lapham Longshot” by Peter Valing published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Peter Valing.
“Into the Cold” by Marcia DeSanctis published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2015 by Marcia DeSanctis.
About the Editors
James O’Reilly, publisher of Travelers’ Tales, was born in Oxford, England, and raised in San Francisco. He’s visited fifty countries and lived in four, along the way meditating with monks in Tibet, participating in West African voodoo rituals, rafting the Zambezi, and hanging out with nuns in Florence and penguins in Antarctica. He travels whenever he can with his wife and their three daughters. They live in Palo Alto, California, where they also publish art games and books for children at Birdcage Press (birdcagepress.com).
Larry Habegger, executive editor of Travelers’ Tales, has visited almost fifty countries and six of the seven continents, traveling from the Arctic to equatorial rainforests, the Himalayas to the Dead Sea. In the 1980s he co-authored mystery serials for the San Francisco Examiner with James O’Reilly, and since 1985 has written a syndicated column, “World Travel Watch” (WorldTravelWatch.com). Habegger regularly teaches travel writing at workshops and writers’ conferences, is a principal of the Prose Doctors (prosedoctors.com), and editor-in-chief of Triporati.com, a destination discovery site. He lives with his family on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.
Sean O’Reilly is editor-at-large for Travelers’ Tales. He is a former seminarian, stockbroker, and prison instructor who lives in Virginia with his wife and their six children. He’s had a lifelong interest in philosophy and theology, and is the author of How to Manage Your DICK: Redirect Sexual Energy and Discover Your More Spiritually Enlightened, Evolved Self (dickmanagement.com). His travels of late have taken him through China, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, England, and Ireland. He is also an inventor with one patent to his name and another on the way.