Living for a few months as a nine year-old in southern Sweden nearly twenty years ago, I used to cut out the newspaper weather reports and keep a daily record of the winter temperatures of different towns in Sweden. Places like Kiruna — some 250 km above the Arctic Circle — fascinated me with their “exotic” statistics. Minus 30 degrees celcius — it seemed incredible and unimaginable to a city boy from England. Other kids dreamt of being famous footballers; I wanted to be a meteorologist.
Alas this never happened. But since having moved to the far north of Sweden from Stockholm, the dormant amateur meteorologist in me has reawakened. One of my first acts upon moving — apart from buying heaps of winter clothing — was to buy a trusty thermometer and nail it to the wall outside. I consult it almost religiously at least four or five times a day, willing the needle to drop precipitously (partly so I can boast of how bloody freezing it is to my friends down south, I admit, but also out of a primordial fascination — and fear — with cold).
As I sit down to write this in my (heated) apartment, the frozen moisture in my nostrils is starting to thaw. Fresh snow lies deep on the sidewalks on the way back from the town library from where I have just trudged. Mountains of snow some four meters high stand outside the frontages of people’s houses. My thermometer registers minus 21 degrees — a bit colder than your average domestic freezer — though with the wind chill factor it’s even chillier.
Weather here is not a subject for small talk. Everything outside of my apartment is the weather — the cold pierces the lungs every time you breathe, it is visceral making you aware that you are a physical being. Your body, aside from the obvious dangers of frostbite and hypothermia, also does funny things in extreme cold: growth of chest hair reportedly slows in extreme cold; while touching metal objects with your bare skin is likely to leave an epidermal souvenir.
“It’s not too bad,” a little girl told me earlier in the day as I shivered in the cold. And she’s right, this is meat and drink to people up here living above the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden, a place further north than most of Alaska; where the snow arrived at the beginning of October last year and hasn’t budged since.
There’s still a chance that the Swedish record of minus 52.6(!), registered in 1966, might be broken this year, but that’s unlikely. Conditions of minus 40 and below used to be a fairly regular occurrence in the north I’m reliably informed, but it is rare these days that temperatures sink quite so low. Probably it is global warming at work and/or that the Gulf Stream is more active than usual in these parts. Thank God for small mercies some might say.
Many people further south in Scandinavia are put off by the cold up north — their version of Siberia or Alaska — a frigid wasteland to soft Stockholmers or other urbanites “who wouldn’t know what cold was if it bit them on the behind,” as a northern dig at the south might go.
But for the people up here, after a summer filled with the whining of mosquitoes and a landscape of impenetrable marshes, the big freeze gets them outdoors on their snowmobiles or cross-country skiing, ice fishing, even doing their daily errands around town on kick-sledges, and, for the creative-minded, fashioning ice sculptures.
As a Finnish friend of mine once said, “we like our winters. I don’t understand those people who go abroad for their holidays in the winter.”
An all-expenses paid beach holiday to Thailand? Not for me, thanks.
Photo by re-ality
