The first time I drove a sled on snow, through a winding trail near the school, I tipped over seven times. Each time, I got dragged, my hands gripping the side stanchions, my arms aching, my mittens slipping loose, my pants filling with snow. I could think quite clearly, being dragged. I gazed forward between my outstretched arms, between the runners of the sled, at the quick back feet of the wheel dogs. The team careened around corners. Don’t let go. And each time, somehow, the dogs slowed enough that I could clamber back onto the runners. There was something thrilling about the transition, about climbing to my feet on the moving vehicle, the vehicle with six bodies and minds, the vehicle that moved whether or not I was on it, and gliding once more over the smooth terrain.
The trails wound around mountains, across fields, alongside frozen rivers, and the runners made a whispering sound over the snow. The dogs ducked their heads and leaned into their harnesses and bounded through drifts as if they would never want to stop, as if there would never be any reason to. While they ran, while we ran, I practiced reading their movement, noticing the subtle glances and postures with which the dogs communicated. When we took breaks, they bit snow and rolled over and licked my face. There were moments when I felt I would never learn enough, never be good or tough or confident enough to drive the dogs well. And there were many more moments, standing on the runners or sitting in the snow with huskies piling onto my lap, when I was gripped with an astonished joy, and could scarcely remember being happier.
Together with the other students I learned to tunnel into the snow, to sleep sheltered against the wind, to curl up in the dogsled in case of a storm. To build a fire from wet wood in a blizzard. To force movement when my limbs were numb. We went to the Sand River in our long underwear and, one by one, walked into the frigid current and swept downstream until a classmate threw us a rope. The worst thing about cold water was the shock, Tallak told us; the best thing was that it prepared us for future cold. If we practiced submerging, we’d be better equipped if we fell through ice in an emergency.
The temperature dropped to twenty, thirty below. We slept outside two nights a week, then four, then seven.
I learned to grab the dogs by the ruff and yank their strong bodies toward me, pin their hips between my knees so they couldn’t get away. If my hands were numb from touching the frozen metal clasps on the gangline, I could slip my bare hands into the soft pockets of the dogs’ armpits, until the feeling seeped back into my fingers. I could kiss their bucking heads through my balaclava.
December came, and with it the last sunset of the year—the Time of Darkness, when the sun did not cross the horizon for fifty-seven days. The outside world was lit only by campfires, headlamps, and the pulsing, snaking aurora, which at its brightest cast the mountains a marbled green. Time passed without measure, an endless dusk punctuated by sleep, so that even I forgot what we were waiting for.
It seems almost too obvious to emphasize how much I was scared. In the morning, during the day, at night. I was often acutely frightened—of a sharp turn in the trail, of a tricky river crossing, during storms—and I lived, too, with a deeper fear: that the winter was only starting, that I had so many minutes and hours and days of cold and risk and potential injury. But it was refreshing to be afraid of something concrete. I was no longer scared of some unknown force, of confusion; no, I was afraid of hypothermia. I was afraid of being stranded in the wilderness. I was afraid of crashing the sled. I was as afraid as I’d been in Far’s house, maybe even more, but suddenly that fear didn’t make me crazy: it made me brave.
In midwinter, Tallak decided that we were ready for longer trips. He called them expeditions, and announced the plans with just a few days’ notice. One day he declared that we were going to dogsled to Finland. After consulting some maps, he changed his mind: we would drive the school bus through Finland into northern Sweden, bringing the dogs along, and, upon arrival, we’d build a base camp for day trips. Northern Sweden had cooler temperatures than coastal Norway, as it was farther from the Gulf Stream, but until we stepped off the bus, it was hard to understand what this really meant.
This was not the damp cold by the fjord, the—yes!—perfect ten below that had come to feel comfortable enough that students walked between buildings in T-shirts. No, this was a new cold, a cold that assaulted all the senses: burning the nose and throat, glazing the vision, turning each step into a cacophony of squeaking snow and crackling fabric. Whenever I blinked, my eyelids stuck together. Someone said forty below, someone said fifty; the exact temperature was irrelevant. How cold was it? Fucking cold. Too cold for mistakes. Our breath trailed behind us like footprints.
We set up camp in the forest near Jukkasjärvi, Sweden. A day’s walk away, travelers wrapped themselves in furs at this year’s incarnation of the Ice Hotel, a palace made of ice blocks from the nearby Torne River. They drank at an ice bar under ice chandeliers, prayed in the ice chapel, slept in artist-designed rooms on ice beds covered with reindeer fur. Inside, the Ice Hotel was heated to 23˚F. It seemed downright tropical.
We put out piles of hay for the dogs’ bedding and set up a lavvo, a cone-shaped tent, in a clearing. It was my job to mix food for the dogs, but as I worked, I couldn’t help but glance back at the bus. It seemed so solid, clean—as if, by entering it, I could take myself back somewhere warm. The truth was, we were stuck. The bus wouldn’t even start in weather like this. The cold seemed to demand something, and I wasn’t sure what to offer.
Some of the boys built a fire in the lavvo, and smoke streamed from the tent. Earlier the sky had been appealingly pink, but by now, early afternoon, the midday twilight had passed; snow fell from a mass of gray, and a wind was rising. The smoke was a comfort, but a flimsy one. Some of the others had finished their jobs and were warming their hands by the fire, and here I was, stiff with cold, still trying to break apart the dog bowls that had frozen together. Finally I managed to kick them apart, not caring where I dented the metal. What did it matter? They would just stick together again. I scooped hot tripe gruel from a cooker into the bowls, where it immediately began to freeze.
I was feeling sorry for myself. I could hardly see in the blowing snow. My nostrils burned; my joints ached; I hadn’t felt my feet in over a day. I was thirsty, but drinking would make me have to pee, a process I didn’t want to deal with. Why was I here? How long had I wanted it? It was too cold to remember. The dogs were glad for their food. They ate it in a few bites, then curled up as tight as knots. One dog ignored her bowl. A bad eater—one of the worst traits for a long-distance sled dog. I set her food in front of another dog, who scarfed it.
“That’s what you get,” I said. I tried to put my hands in the dog’s armpits, but she growled and rolled over.
Why was I here?
This was all Far’s fault. His fault that I’d been scared. His fault that I’d wanted to prove myself.
His fault that it was so cold.
His fault that I didn’t have a nicer snowsuit.
His fault that the dog bowls were stuck together.
His fault that we weren’t cozied up in the Ice Hotel.
I started to laugh. “It’s not my fault,” I told the dog, whose ears perked up. The hairs on her head had frosted white like an old man’s, and I brushed them clean with my mitten. “It’s not your fault.”
Behind me, through the blowing snow, came a commotion—the rising grumble of a snowmobile, which stopped in the center of the clearing. A very short man in an enormous parka climbed off and removed his helmet. A few students stood to greet him, but Tallak called them off and approached the man himself. Before long the two were yelling at each other in Sami, gesturing wildly with their arms. In a huff, the short man turned to address the watching students in Norwegian: “You shit-cursed Nazis! I’ll have you all arrested.” Then he got back on his snow machine and drove away, still shouting over his shoulder. Tallak, watching him go, ran a hand over his hat.
“What happened?” someone asked, but Tallak only shook his h
ead.
A few minutes later, though, a police snowmobile pulled up to our camp. Tallak spoke to the driver at the edge of the clearing. At one point his voice grew sharp, and he gestured at the air around him, but he seemed to contain himself quickly; and when the cop departed, Tallak sent him off with a polite nod. When he turned back to us, though, his face was grim.
The news he reported was brief. The short man had threatened to have us arrested unless we left his land immediately—and his family owned much of northern Sweden. It was one thing to camp on the land, he claimed, but that we had the audacity, along the way, to defecate on it—well, the Nazis were the last ones to pull that trick, and look what happened to them. “We have to leave,” said Tallak, looking around at the sleeping dogs and the taut, smoky lavvo, which was already coated in a layer of soft snow. “We really don’t want to mess with the police here.”
I could think of nothing less appealing than setting out into the rising storm, and the other students grumbled as they dismantled the lavvo. But under the grumbling was a real tension—leave camp, in this weather? There was no question of how we would travel—we could come back for the bus later. But for once even the dogs were reluctant. Some of them refused to uncurl from their knots, crouching even in their harnesses. We had six sleds between us and decided to drive two and two with six-dog teams. I’d travel with my friend Oda, an unwaveringly cheerful lesbian who liked to walk around the school showing off her favorite boob shots from porn magazines. We took off to the west.
Within minutes Oda and I had lost the others. We rode through a treadmill of darkness, our only view that of the trotting wheel dogs, which was as far as a headlamp could illuminate in the blowing snow. We let the lead dogs find the way, trusted their sense of the trail. I was grateful for the darkness that pressed in around us. It was better that way, better than thinking about the vast space we were passing through. For a while I drove, scootering between the sled runners with one foot, while Oda sat in the sled basket with her sleeping bag zipped to her neck. Then we switched places. Sitting in the sled, bundled and passive, was warmer than standing. But it was also dispiriting. The dogs trudged, leaning into the wind, glancing back over their shoulders as if to ask what the hell was going on. All we could see, for a half hour, an hour, was the same lit beam of snow and steam from the dogs’ breathing. There were no more trees; at some point, in the darkness, we passed onto the tundra. Gradually the snow fell harder, and our path—a single trail through drifts—began to fill up. The dogs went more and more slowly, sinking to their ankles and then their elbows in the snow. Finally they sank to their armpits, and the sled gathered a mound before it like a snowplow. The team stopped.
I climbed from the sled and waded toward the front, falling to my knees twice before taking my place in front of the lead dogs. There, I trudged one step at a time through the deep snow. Each step I gained, the dogs followed. I walked until I couldn’t, sweat running down my back, and then Oda took her turn in front and I pushed the sled from behind. A glow rose behind us; another sled appeared briefly in the dark, then sank away, and we were alone again. So we were all still moving forward.
It was not even worth thinking about the cold.
I halfheartedly suggested hunkering down, digging a hole to stay the night. But somehow, somewhere, there were other people moving with us. If we stopped, we’d be alone. We’d wake up alone. We’d be somewhere on the Swedish tundra, alone.
Hours passed. The snow stopped falling. The wind stilled. Oda and I drove the sled together, each balanced on a single runner, kicking our feet in unison. The sled was narrow; the sides of our bodies pressed together. It was warmer where we touched.
After a while we tossed chunks of meat to the dogs, calling out praise. A few tails wagged. We pulled food from the sled bag—homemade “bombs,” nuggets of oatmeal and seeds, designed to deliver the most calories in the least offensive package—and swallowed bites as we pushed the sled. The bombs were frozen, but it didn’t make much difference.
“Where do you think we’re going?” Oda asked.
“Probably to a hotel,” I said. “It’ll have real walls. We can take off our snowsuits.”
“They’ll have hot showers.”
“And beds.”
“And dinner.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “Dinner. What do they serve for dinner?”
“Cake,” said Oda, popping another bomb in her mouth. She chewed for a long time before swallowing. “Marzipan cake. Fresh apple cake, with whipped cream. Maybe brownies.”
“And a big salad.”
Oda hesitated. “You can have the salad.”
“Okay.”
We pushed on. There were no stars.
“What about the beds?” said Oda.
“They’re huge,” I said. “Big soft mattresses with down blankets. Enormous pillows.”
“Clean white sheets.”
“Whiter than snow.”
We laughed.
“They’re waiting for us right now,” she said. “We’re close. They’re already heating the dog food and laying out the hay.”
“Hey, dogs, you smell that?”
“They can smell it.”
Oda switched off her headlamp. The sled kept moving through the dark. I closed my eyes.
“Are you scared?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Oda.
“I don’t know, either,” I lied.
“Yeah.”
“Hey, remember warm feet?”
“Don’t remind me.”
We traded runners and drove for a while. Then we switched runners again.
“Blair,” she said, “there’s a star.”
But it wasn’t a star. It was a light.
The dogs saw it, too, and trotted faster. It was a small change, but after so many hours of the same pace, it knocked us both off balance and we scrambled to regain our footing on the runners. The light twinkled on the horizon, ahead and to the right. Gradually we came closer, making out the shape of buildings, the sound of howling. By now the dogs were running. The light was attached to a house. There was no road.
Most of the other students had already arrived, and had stretched out chains for the dogs. A few tended a roaring fire, heating dog food. It was morning, they said—we had run all night. It turned out that the property belonged to a Sami family, friends of Tallak’s, who had agreed to let us crash in their gamme. The gamme was a round building made of sod, half-submerged, its roof domed with snow. Oda and I pushed open the wooden door and found a smoky round room, illuminated by a central fire pit. Around the edges was a sleeping platform, piled high with furs. Someone held out a plate of dried meat.
Oda pressed a piece into my hand. “Cake,” she said.
We fed the dogs hot gruel and put them to bed on the piles of straw, where their bodies steamed, tendrils rising through the beam of my headlamp. They curled with their tails over their noses, yawning. No worse for the wear. And neither, I realized, was I. After a few hours of dead sleep, I ventured back outside into the pink twilit hours of midday to find the dogs all howling at once, a sonorous and overwhelming howl that rose as a single voice. In the distance slid the black dot of a snowmobile, and above the horizon shone the dim sparks of military rocket tests. Along the opposite horizon, a brown line grew into a shifting wall—a thousand reindeer, like the pictures in my mother’s books, covering the land we had just crossed.
A few weeks later, I stood in the dog yard shoveling. It was almost noon, the day after a heavy snow, and the huskies had been trapped in their houses by the drifts; their heads emerged like so many clams on a tide flat. As usual they were barking, a sound so steady and cacophonous that I no longer heard it. It was fun to dig them out, moving the snow until the dogs burst out one by one, shaking powder from their fur and wagging their tails.
I felt the sun before I saw it. I was dislodging a stubborn ice clump when suddenly my vision snapped off and a sizzling feeling filled my skin. In another instant I cou
ld see again, and the landscape—the frozen fjord, the mountains behind the school—caught like a candlewick and exploded around me in a blaze of white fire. The dogs fell still and my throat choked shut, and then they were howling and I was laughing, and in another minute the day was over and the sun sank back down as if it had never been. My ecstasy was illogical, uncontrollable; I felt as if I’d been slipped a drug, and could no more control its chemical effects than I could force the sun to resurface. I sank into a snowbank, stunned, and did not move for another hour, until the last blush faded from the southern horizon.
Each day that week the sun stayed up for a few minutes longer, and each day I was shocked and elated, wiped out by the force of my own body’s reactions to the light. I was unable to separate the chemical emotions caused by sunlight from my own mind. I wrote in my diary, “It is no longer physically possible for me to be unhappy while the sun is up,” and I earnestly believed that this would be true for the rest of my life.
That spring, during weekends and on school vacations, I started working at a tour kennel a few hours away. There, I helped care for seventy dogs while their musher, Eirik, was off training for races, and I was surprised to learn that the violence I’d taken for granted in Tallak’s kennel—the dogfights, and the force with which he broke them up—was not universal. If at the tour kennel a team got tangled in its gangline, and it took me a few minutes to pull the dogs apart, nobody would lose an ear; when I walked an individual dog through the yard, the other dogs wagged their tails rather than tried to attack it. The gentleness was a relief; I had not liked being hard. And although it felt odd to be in a kennel alone, without the company of other students, I found that I appreciated the intimacy with the dogs. I could hang out in the dog yard all afternoon, petting the huskies and enjoying the sunlight. Whenever I wanted I could hook up a team and drive by myself down a nearby frozen river, moving silently through crystalline, snow-draped forests lit rose by the ever-low sun.
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Page 7
