Life in the Deep Freeze in Sweden
My vision of hell has often been snowy and icy. It’s not a conventional vision of hell as visions of hell go, but it’s mine. The only possible thing that could make it worse, in my imagination, would be to be trapped in snow and ice, and for an accordion player or a harpist to show up. That would make it a sort of super hell.
Temperatures in Halsingland, Sweden plunged to minus twenty-two last week. It was all new to me. I was anticipating the worst. I am unfamiliar with such extremes of cold. I’m Irish. Our climate is temperate. And damp. In my family we have a running joke that whatever time of year it is, it is probably about twelve degrees outside. So, it might be twelve degrees and raining, or blowing a gale, or it might be dry and sunny. In any case, it is liable to be about twelve degrees. In Ireland, the difference between winter and summer, is the number of hours of daylight you get with your twelve degrees.
For the Irish snow and ice means chaos. Travel is often severely disrupted. Schools close. Parents have to take the day off work. Severe weather warnings are issued and getting anywhere becomes a magical mystery tour, with detours and sagas about how long it takes to get anywhere by comparison with the norm. One might get to work, or one might not. Snow is trauma. Ice is drama. We simply can’t cope. We dont like it and we talk about it alot. It perplexes us. We shake our heads in disbelief. We resort to feeding the birds as a great act of heroism, a show of our own sense of agency, defiance and fighting back. ‘Yeah. Take that in the eye, Snow!’
The Irish tendency therefore, is to sit inside, light the fire, look out at it all, consider it a novelty for a day or two and just wait for it to be gone. The ‘winter’ passes in a day or two, when, or indeed if, it comes at all.
In Halsingland, I felt like I was Alice and that I had come to, miniaturized, on top of an old fashioned Christmas cake. When I was a child, the Christmas cake always had a snow scene of icing. Great drifts of hard icing, onto which plastic snow-covered pine and yew trees were stuck… and suddenly here I was, tiny, gob smacked and just a bit overwhelmed in the middle of it.
Banal old Christmas tunes interrupted the peace and quiet outside my head, by showing up as relentless earworms inside my head. Bing Crosby and the gang were singing, ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas….’ and ‘Walking in a winter wonderland.’ I was glad when a flock of punkie looking Bohemian Waxwings showed up. My brain could then make a knight’s move to Freddie Mercury, singing, “Mama, I just killed a man…” and so on. Good old Freddie; I was losing the run of myself. He could also mitigate the chances of any unwanted interruption by earworms of harp or accordion music.
Halsingland is rural and right in the middle of Sweden. It is not as far north as it is possible to go in that country, but it is on a similar latitude to Alaska. The darkness closes in quickly. The sun, when it appears, keeps a low arc over the landscape. While the days are short, the light maximises, reflecting off the snow and frozen lakes. The early morning has a ‘blue hour’- cobalt light which gives way to startling white brightness later in the morning. When we were there we had a full moon. It made such magical mysterious light, that was unexpected, romantic and persistent.
The Swedes don’t have curtains on their windows or if they do they don’t close them. That surprises me, for they are private people who respect personal space. The houses, which are traditional pine-clad log cabins are far enough apart for privacy. Somehow, unlike us loud and garroulous Irish, they strike a delicate balance between privacy and connection. Lights hang in every window. The days are so short, but it is as if the lights call out across the darkness, harmonizing with each other, ‘Here I am. I can see you’re there. Here I am.’
What was unexpected in this cold, snowy and icy place was the sense of peace I experienced. It felt as if the earth itself was in a state of deep rest. The air was dry. Hands froze quickly. My own hair developed a crust of ice from my frozen breath, but the earth was so quiet. So peaceful. So still. So welcome. It was as if the outside word was resonating the exact sense of being that I needed to feel on the inside. I was far from home, far from the frenzy I associate with normal Christmas and instead able to enjoy the festival season slowly and very simply instead.
Far from the ice and snow being hellish, my experience was quite the opposite. I know it isn’t the same in Ireland when the snow comes – especially when there are deadlines, jobs to be done, driving required, but sometimes, just sometimes, the world offers us exactly what it is we need, at exactly the right time, but in an unexpected way. I am a convert.
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