Winter Boreal Diary in a Week / Seven Interlocking Flakes

a long-read after Arctic Dreams (by Barry Lopez 1945-2020)

Feb 15, 2024

The snow this year is deeper than usual, but the freeze not as hard in the rivers and tributaries, though the lakes remain covered and passable on skis. It is hard to know what to think about this. On the one hand, there is plenty more life to see in the old growth forest than in previous years, an indicator that this is undoubtedly easier for the life that remains here over winter. But on the other, well, we know what that means. But if there is ambivalence in my pondering, this is not reflected in the temperature. It is cold, -24C cold, and life pushes on regardless.

Our changing planet is never far from my thoughts, but I also feel the need to keep one foot sliding in front of the other. Oriented to the light over the hill. In previous years I have seen only the hardy, sociable and well-fed Siberian Jays in these forested fells. But this year I have seen the occasional small flock of birds too. Perhaps Willow tit that we hardly ever see at home anymore, or Siberian tits. I briefly convince myself that they are Snow Bunting, but this would be an early return and I hope it’s not the case. Where the water flows, there are also Dippers running the river course with an effortless precision that I could watch for hours were it not for the bone-gnawing cold that pulls on you within seconds of standing still. It is like they are made for their river. As if they, river and dipper, co-create this world together through every season, flowing with a shared consciousness, bringing their entwined selves into a mutually endorsing existence. In more luscious temperate terrains, this exclusive pairing is less obvious, but here when there is only the dark ribbon of water and the dipper running its course, you feel their private dance more keenly. To watch for too long feels like an intrusion.

Further into the woods the cold feels blistering, but beneath three layers of wool and fibre I still hear a tell-tale knocking. It is so loud I wonder if we are being followed by elk, but as I stop and stare into the thickly snow-coated trees I eventually see movement through the black latticework of branch and shadow. Pieces of bark are being discarded with fervour. As I stand in awe watching this surprisingly large bird knock on wood with an energy that is incomprehensible, I realise I am holding my own head in empathy. I feel the reverberation go between us. She (or he, I couldn’t tell) stops briefly and shrieks intermittently and I wonder if it is to tell us to move on, but she continues anyway with a level of industry that feels urgent (life in the deep freeze surely always is) and I stand for many minutes watching her.

As I watch, I catch myself wondering about the ambiguous nature of this attention. Sure enough, the black woodpecker as a species is not rare outside of the UK, but to me she is new, curious and compelling. Is my attention then, simply a vestigial need to ‘name and claim’; that same old frontier spirit that is is hard to rid oneself of? Am I only rapt because she is new to me? It is always perilous to try and untangle one’s intentions into neat piles of ‘self-serving’ and ‘selfless’ but perhaps instead, I can say what I felt watching this bird work?

Which is that I felt her struggle for a moment as she battled against a cold that conspires to keep every animal inside, and every substance solid. I also felt her joy and relief as she liberated each grub from the tree, sating her basic needs to stay well and warm. In that moment, her life was singular and unique and far from being just ‘a black woodpecker’ – that standardised animal on a biologist’s or twitcher’s list – I had for the briefest slip of time entered into this remarkable bird’s umwelt; her own world of being. It was a moment, that is all, but as I watched her, I was reminded that the whole world comes to us like this in fragments of experience and insight into the lives of others. We can never truly know anything of anyone completely. But each little life reveals its own particular struggle if we pay attention, as well as the everyday aboutness of its unfolding. Her unfolding. And secondarily perhaps, my own.

The black woodpecker of these boreal forests, when standardised into a line about her behaviour, is considered ‘sedentary’ owing to her desire to stay. This strikes me to be a poignant misnomer. Not only does the extreme and intense activity of the woodpecker speak against this notion, but in a broader sense we humans are far more inclined to say of ourselves that a desire to stay put is a form of placefulness. This is the language we now use to make a virtue of our ‘in situ’ lives (I write about this in Weathering); it is how we frame a notion of bioregional sufficiency and enoughness. We can think about it as the inevitable outcome of having our needs met where we are. I baulk then, that we call the woodpecker, or the dipper, or the otter as she marauds the small ice-released cataracts, sedentary. For these lives, there is very little sitting still. Their lives might exist somewhat on a knife-edge, but the fact that they can meet the needs of their life here in spite of the great burial of winter, indicates a placefulness akin to our own. Can we extend our lexicon innovations beyond ourselves? I am so often mystified these days by the language of science I once studied and admired.

The opposite of sedentary in this sense, is migratory, and there are many more birds that leave the arctic in the winter, than remain. Humans have always tended to note large migrations as epic feats of endeavour (an echo is seen here in the ‘golden age’ of infamous arctic exploration, of course) but to the animal who departs this is simply born of necessity. This is how each and every animal that covers great distances meets its needs. In the umwelten of the snow bunting or goose, this is likely not remarkable; it is simply what is does and always will do until it no longer needs to for one reason or another. And so I wonder what need does this odd, reverse migration reveal, when we humans flock from the south to the north? What lack undergirds the adventurer’s spirit in lives made ever more physically comfortable? Are we simply troubling the idea of safety that we have long been toiling for ourselves, or is it a yet more basic leaning towards a different sort of light afforded beyond the 66 line?

I have been to this part of the arctic circle six times now, but still no amount of visitation can convince me that one ever knows the arctic; not even this small part of the boreal subarctic (and it is small – the vast majority of the high arctic is found in Canada and Russia). To imagine otherwise, is a conceit of the human imagination that likes to conquer and possess. In reality, all but the native human dwellers, are migratory birds. We fly in, we fly out. We have a taste, we leave. We meet a need, we move on. Which is not to say that ‘visitor knowing’ isn’t a knowledge of sorts – a birds eye view is always something unique – but it is not a complete one. If our time on earth is only brief, then our times in the winter arctic are but a diamond flake that falls gently to the hard ground and is gone. I know my own needs as much as I know this place.

From the bus that runs from the airport to the trail-head town, all you can see is white. The tarmac road is thickly iced, the trees are cloaked, and the terrain is six feet under. It always takes me a while to see that it isn’t really white at all. In fact, the snow is often an ombré of dove grey to pale blue. In Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams this is referred to as ‘close-toned’. A term I love because even the onomatopoeic near-rhyme of the phrase shows what it means. Mostly, the sky strengthens from cool grey to hard peach – a 1980s gradient if you will – sharper bars of which strike the snow through the trees when the sun makes an appearance, which is never guaranteed. When the sun is weak or gauzy with cloud, the forested fells seen beyond the trees seem luminous cream, but are more truthfully a rich, flat ochre. Beneath my feet the snow is often purplish, and when I look around the apparent black-white monochrome of snow on endless trees, is also stippled with the vibrant, sickly green of beard lichen.

I think about the ways we are always colour correcting to make sense of the world as it comes to us. Snow is white we are told. And so, snow must stay white. We don’t question it habitually as an artist must. An artist knows that to render the world real we must move beyond what we’ve been told, into the real colour. In any case, there is no doubt that the quality of light here in the Far North is therapeutic, but the magic is not just in the colour, but also the gentle fade. Gradients are relaxing on the mind, but here there is also a gaussian luminosity that seems to light and blur the world from behind. Which perhaps it is, given that the sun is always so low in the sky and feels always beyond the next fell. The light pulls you forward but creates deception of size and shape. It works in partnership with the capricious cold.

Sunrise at the moment is about 10am. Some days, all that can really be seen are the faint line work of distant tree trunks that indicate which way is up. On others day, I ski out into the national park, just as soft mounds of warm grey are appearing through lazy cloud. On these occasions I stop at the river and notice tracks on newly frozen sections of the river. Otter, hare. A haunting of fells and feet come out of the gloaming as if to meet me.

This trip, I am noticing the way that this singular landscape in its minimality creates a plain alabaster container for my monotonous thoughts. I haven’t experienced this before. In previous times I have been struck by the vibrancy of my thoughts relative to the steady holding pattern of the landscape, but today I circle around difficult propositions – conversations I need to have - over and over with no distraction to divert me away. And indeed, my movement patterns in pre-made cross-country tracks carry me deeper into the rut. We return to favourite places because they are familiar and cherished, but by necessity are also then repetitious.

This is my failure to pay proper attention. A failure to see what is always novel. When you look there is always something new even if it’s simply the way the light falls over a mound of snow, or a tree bent 45 degrees covered in such deep snow with a particular pattern of striations that it looks like a breaching whale. A thing I have always done (and what Lopez does too) is look for similarities and resonances and patterns between things, though this is rarely intentional. It just seems to happen under my gaze. The way colour is echoed between sky and lichen. The way an opening of black water in the frozen stream is the same shape as an otter’s body.

There is a way that the land matches itself and others by every turn, the way an incised valley is the same as the fold at a human elbow. There is a visual fluency in so much of the world that is impossible to ignore if you look and stay open to the possibility that nothing remains alone without counterpart. On dark days it is this echoing across shape, form and light that brings me comfort. The world is not a mismatch of irregularities that don’t belong and rub hard against each other. There is a way that everything matches and flows, fractals that can be seen within us and each other. How can every snowflake be unique, yet fit together? This is the mystery.

Beauty here is absolute and frightening. It is so cold that you may as well be in the arctic ocean, and at twenty-five centigrade below, one is very much out of their depth. The arctic wind in collaboration with the snow, makes a sculpture of the trees, each one different in their burden and form as they lean under the weight of the season. Their load so often looks too much to bear but look again and the dwellings made under their snow skirts are a sanctuary for animals who need shelter. I twang a frond of pine to release it from the grip of snow, and immediately feel regret. The branch is now naked, where before it had protection. I curse my tendency to fiddle and prod.

In Arctic Dreams, Lopez talks about the sharp oscillations of the arctic that become manifest in the mind – the way everything can turn in an instant from summer to winter, carefree to harassed, calm to angry. There is no shoulder season to speak of; no off-ramp. And I feel this too in my own mood. I am all bliss, and then I am as capricious as the weather. I am unaware of the cold and then I am convinced I will never be warm again. I am full of the very essence of life and then I wonder why I am alive at all. For permanent dwellers of the arctic north, this is a perilous oscillation to negotiate. But as a visitor I can laugh it off. This is, afterall, land of the Sauna. If you don’t know how to run hot and then cold and then hot again, you don’t belong here at all.

But the plunge into cold does prevent closeness. In winter, the arctic is a land that keeps you out. It keeps you hunkered into your own clothes, and before long back into the cabin from whence you came. The cold prevents the familiar intimacy of the warm-blooded. What intimacy there is can only be mediated through layers, which so quickly become a barrier to the experience. Yes, you can play merry with bare hands and feet in snow. Yes, you can make a quick ice dip. But were you to make unmitigated contact through your own hairless skin, and were you to survive that, then who else is there to greet you? Intimacy is always relational. For the most part, animals of the winter arctic (including the animal river) have gone to ground, secret hollow, or flown south. Who is left are hardy but preoccupied. I am starting to wonder whether the winter arctic is a place – a dream – only ever imagined on the other side of a glove or a door.

This is surely the only place I have ever been so many times and never once brought home a rock. Prevented because even the humblest shard of Lappish gravel lies several feet beneath me. Earlier, falling in snow that consumed me up to my waist, I was reminded of this false floor of the land. To think I have never known where it really begins, where the ground really is! How unimaginable this would be in any of my home terrains. It occurred to me in one epiphanic moment that I have no idea the true height of the trees. I had perhaps, mindlessly and carelessly, imagined the ground to be very close below – that the depth of things as I see them is as they truly are – so it was humbling to be reminded of this flaw in my perception. To realise that there is a whole metre of so of space flattened, covered and made secret by snow that I do not know. So much has gone out of sight. Thousands upon thousands of square kilometres. Substrate, boulder, seed, rhizome, old cone and berry. Bones and fur. Last year’s footprints. Maybe even a contour line. One can only imagine the vast terrain you lose to your gaze like this, extending what we cannot know in this world.

And so it is now, that I have become near obsessed with finding the openings within this tundra landscape; the warm incursions. Every stream we cross indicated by a sloping snow pile, I look for a place where the snow and ice has opened like an eyelid, providing a window to the dark sandy waters within. I have become hungry for seeing the bottom, unaccepting of my exclosure. These apertures into the ‘missing’ landscape, have an echo in the openings of the human body, I realise. I think of the common vulvic interpretation of Georgia O’Keefe’s giant flowers from that utterly different climate of New Mexico. Our enduring fascination with our own entry and exit points. I wonder if my gaze is curious or intrusive. I become self-conscious of my desire for the inside and pull away.

I have talked before about how coming back to the Finnish arctic makes it neither home nor holiday. But a third place of sorts. At times I have called that an aspiration, but it is also a fantasy. When the upper air temperature is around -16C, snow will fall in perfect flakes. When I first saw these phenomena six years ago, I realised I was deeper in the mystery than I had ever been. So it is, I think, that the arctic is a place that incubates the mystery implicit in fantasy deep within its cold body.

Coming here is at its simplest a break from normal life – here is the basic need it meets, after all – and it allows me to try on a different life for a short amount of time. To breathe the cleanest air in Europe. To try a life in a land where you are obligated to nature in ways that are unavoidable. You cannot opt out of the ferocity of this weather, even indoors. In the temperate world, I have a sense that we can always ‘opt out of nature’ because we have built homes and work-lives and urban spaces and past-times that keep it out. The mild climate allows us to forget. Until there are incursions then it would be clear to any observer that nature is something we do adjacent to life where the land and weather allow it. There is something in this arctic-winter-ethic-of-relatedness to the world that I long for, even though I know I am not truly built for it in the long term. I am a migratory bird of the lower meridians.

Arctic Finland is a personal fantasy for me, but of course a lived reality for its dwellers. Preservation of a fantasy runs last to the existential need, but still, we all need this place to continue. On my last day here, I am thinking about Inuk activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s remarkable petition for the rights of ice to remain cold. I wonder too about the desire of the woodpecker and her right to a full and dignified life. I met her for a moment, and outside of this frame her life will take its course, just as mine must. Will we both be afforded dignity to live according to our own particular needs? What price will she pay for my fantasy of ongoing migrative travels? Soon, I will be in my place, and she will still be in hers. I will blink and she will fly away, the sweep of her black wing my closing eyelid.

This post is the first of two this week. A short companion piece will follow for my paid supporters.

This is the lightly edited diaries from my week in Finland, which I made everyday alongside re-reading Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, and his new and final essay collection Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. As such, his thoughts and enquiries were - in places - a springboard for my own. I was particularly inspired by the way he describes the ‘muscling out’ of the cold, and its sharp oscillations. This year I felt the cold more than ever, but perhaps it also inspired me to pay better attention.

Photos