Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (22 page)

Vibration and rhythm—both infrasonic and detectable—are fundamental to ritual across cultures. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg believes that humans are biologically driven to act out myths, to bring the abstract into experiential form. He writes: “The fact that the unifying effects of ritual are generated by basic biological function explains the pervasiveness of ritual activity in virtually every culture . . . It also tells us why ritual ceremonies still have such power for so many, even in this rational age . . . Rosary group . . . prolonged ceremonial dancing . . . these unitary states . . . are triggered by the sensory effects of repetitive rhythmic behavior—that is, they begin with physical activity, and progress, in bottom-up fashion, to the mind.”

Like, say, the instinctual knowledge of the
piko
rising to the intellect? It’s what happens when shamans hit their wolf note and fall into a trancelike state, striking their nervous system, submitting to
unus mundus
. Our sense of spirit has always been evoked by dancers, shamans, musicians, and nature.

“So, do organists hold allegiances to any one denomination?” I ask George.

He shakes his head. “This one doesn’t.”

“You’re sort of a freelance shaman, then?”

George gives a sly smile. “I suppose you could say that.”

Remembering the first time he saw the aurora, George says, “I was in Shetland. It was like the spoke of a wheel circling above my head and I swear it was humming. People call them the Merry Dancers there.”

“What did it sound like?” I ask, excitedly.

Johan Aldermam—a twenty-something Nutti representative with a handlebar moustache twisted at the tips—answers before George has a chance. “It sounds like this,” he says, approaching our table. He extends his hand toward my face and wads a paper napkin in his hand to create white noise, static. “I’ve heard it plenty, and I’ve seen it a million times, but I still can’t get tired of it. It’s like looking into a fire. It’s just hard to look away. I can’t explain it. I can’t try to describe it to someone else. It’s almost impossible. The Sámi believed it was ancestors and gods looking down. The mythological part of the lights depends on what culture you’re in, but it always goes back to spirit. It always comes back to something greater.”

We return to our meals, picking at our plates until it’s time to catch the night’s sky show. The aurora is subdued. We watch it from the snow outside of the common hut, sprawled on fur-side-up reindeer hides. The low-lying arch of green disappears behind the trees without even a hint of pink. It isn’t revealing itself as intimately as it did last night. We muse that it might be over Finland. Wherever it is, it seems far from here.

George and Yvonne go to bed early, retiring with mugs of spiral-steaming tea from the communal kitchen, and I’m left with Johan, who’s begun preparing for breakfast the next day. He arranges cheese on a platter and slices red bell peppers, a Swedish morning mainstay.

Nina introduced Johan as Swedish, so I’m surprised when he tells me that his ancestors were reindeer herders, a traditionally Sámi occupation. His family was one of many that converted when missionaries began to burn Sámi drums. “At that time it was thought that being Sámi was somehow dirty,” Johan tells me. “My family bought into that.”

Unlike Nina, who self-identifies as more Sámi than Swedish, Johan isn’t quite sure where he stands. All he knows is that he wants to live in accordance to the land, nature, the creativity of life itself. His great love, his passion, is making traditional Sámi-style jewelry of deer hide intertwined with tin and brass. “When you were born back in the day, the Sámi tradition was to give a baby a brass ring. Brass was considered protective. It followed that child through all of his life,” Johan says. “You would wear it on your belt. It had a holiness to it, that metal.” I notice for the first time he’s wearing a traditional Sámi belt covered in tiny brass circles, spaced like the metallic studs of a biker belt.

Traditionally, Sámi used to mix brass fragments with soap to use on infected wounds. “It would heal them,” Johan says. “For a long time, people tried to figure out why it worked, because it did.” Not long ago, he explains, researchers found out that brass is a metal with antibacterial properties. Its protective powers were suddenly something that could be measured, and therefore—in a mechanical world—considered real.

He says, “I don’t think things should be valued because of monetary worth. If something has healing power, that’s beyond economic value. It’s something I got from my grandfather. He doesn’t worry about money. True riches are about what you surround yourself with.”

I say, “Isn’t that sort of a Sámi way of looking at things?”

Johan stops cutting. The kitchen knife hovers over the board. He exclaims, “You know what? It is! It is!”

I go back to scratching away at a notebook with my pen. Johan keeps cutting peppers. I start to feel a little awkward that I haven’t gone back to my tiny sleeping hut like the other guests. “I hope it’s okay for me to linger,” I say. The hut is still warm from the oven, and it smells of caramelized onion. It’s hard to think about returning to my own abode, with its sub-zero sleeping bag, until I’m ready to dream.

“It’s good that you’ve stayed. You’re part of everything here now,” he says. “You aren’t hiding in your cabin waiting to be served.”

“But I’m not really doing anything,” I protest. He’s waved off my offer to help.

“Yes, you are. You’re observing what goes into the making,” Johan says. “You’re paying attention. That’s the important part.”

 • • • 

When I wake the next morning it is already light outside. Accompanied by George and Yvonne, I find Johanna near the reindeer’s enclosure. She’s finishing up a feeding of store-bought lichen, which is stored in mesh bags. Her long white-blond hair has been pulled into braids, and she’s wearing a red Sámi scarf tied intricately around the outside of her snow jacket.

The first thing I notice about the animals is their feet. They have onyx hooves that spread out like snowshoes when they rest their feet on the ground. But it’s their ears that give them away. Johanna wrangles a nearby reindeer, hand-to-horn, and points at its ear, cut into slits that look like the torn wings of a monarch butterfly at the end of its migration. “We use knives to mark them when they are small,” she says.

Every year, reindeer are born in May. All community members have their own unique symbols for marking the deer under their care, even children. Johanna says of her animals’ pattern, as if it were on her own body: “My mother has nothing on her left ear. I have four marks.”

She turns her attention to the group that’s closest to us. These animals, considered well-suited for sledge work, roam freely in summer. “These deer are calm,” she says. “But they are not tame.”

We move the animals one by one to a line of sledges that are sitting along a fence line. I keep a steady pace, but my deer wants to snack on everything. He sniffs around at stray bits of lichen that fell during the morning feeding. He stops to chomp on snow. I get him to his sledge just as Johan arrives, bounding up on a snowmobile. He pops off the vehicle and sets about helping Johanna with the reindeer’s gear. First comes the hand-whittled wooden harness. Then leather straps adorned with Sámi-colored wool.

Almost every local I’ve met wears an engraved, antler-handled knife on his or her hip. Johan pulls his from a sheath on his belt and begins to chip away at a patch of jagged ice that’s formed on the top of my right sledge ski. “It’s a beautiful way of transportation,” he says, “but you really have to be firm with the animals. Use sharp sounds. Act crazy. They’re still wild animals and they will do as they wish. When they look back, you’ve got to wave your arms to show them that you’re active. Pay attention to what’s going on with your reindeer; don’t worry about any of the other animals.”

We start out at a snowmobile crossing, which is as traversed as any major highway. Johanna takes off. I’m next in line. My guy doesn’t budge. He’s still crunching at a bank of ice like it’s a giant snow cone.

I yell. I tap with my harness rope. I wave my hands. I jump around, putting my elbows on the back bar. I act crazy. Finally he moves. A few feet. I make it to a tiny snow bridge over a stream that has begun to melt. Then he stalls again.

Given the fact that I live with a wild two-year-old who takes twenty minutes to put on his shoes, I should be used to this sort of challenge. I should be patient. But I’m not.

My reindeer-sledge shouts become elongated screams. In desperation, my harness taps become pulls, which are counteractive. It’s an action that tells the animal to stop.
Just. Go!
I can actually feel the tips of George’s reindeer horns touching the outer layer of my clothing—like long, dull swords against my back. I’m at a loss about what to do next. I start to sweat.

Even though it is a warm, sunny day, perspiration is dangerous in the Arctic. I strip. My hat. My outer suit.
Leave it to me to freeze to death from sweat
,
I think.

We’ve got hours of travel left. I get back on, though I’m not sure I want to.

Aye, aye, aye!
I copy Johanna’s calls to her reindeer. I jump and wave. My frustration becomes anger. This isn’t going the way this was supposed to go. But how would I know how this animal is
supposed
to act any more than I know what the weather is
supposed
to be?

Johanna grinds the metal brake of her sledge into the trail we’re following and walks back to see what is wrong. “What am I doing wrong?” I call out in desperation.

“Nothing,” she says, shrugging. “Maybe he is tired.”

It’s only then that I realize how ridiculous it is to blame myself for this wild animal’s behavior. Like it’s about me. Like any of this is about me. But I suppose this is because I can’t quite accept that—once I’ve done all I can do—I’m still at nature’s whim. If I want to trust nature, to trust life, I can’t always be trying to control it. Haven’t I learned this by now? Isn’t this, like, a main rule of parenting? Will I ever really be able to just do the best I can and then just
let go
?

“You should sit,” Johanna says, her head cocked to the right.

“Is it easier that way?” I ask.

“You’ll find out,” she says.

Earlier this week, I asked a local how residents know when the Torne is thick enough to drive on for the season. I was thinking about municipal announcements, posted warnings, scientific confirmation. But the Jukkasjärvi resident just looked at me, like I was a complete idiot, and said: “You have to go out and test it for yourself.”

How long is it going to take for me to get this?

Everyone is standing at attention, big and brave on their sledges now, except me. I’m embarrassingly laid out on the floor of mine like the queen of Sheba. This is, as it turns out, exactly what my deer needed. The disbursement of weight has somehow reminded him that I am here. It’s as if he’s just begun to recall what he’s promised to do. He is moving.

The faster we go, the more fierce the day’s wind. It hits my face, bursts blood vessels in my eyes. We break out of the tree line and onto the clean palette of the Torne.

When we stop to rest the animals at an embankment alongside the river, Johan hops off his snowmobile and walks over to say, sympathetically, “It’s no piece of cake.” He turns his attention to a traditional trading route in the distance and explains that winter, which is isolating from a modern view, has always been a particularly social time for the Sámi. It is the season when impassable swamps and rivers freeze. The whole mucked up, muddy, isolating landscape becomes solid, concrete, passable again.

He gestures toward our reindeer. “These guys used to walk for thousands of kilometers. Back then, you didn’t rush,” he says. “You took it as it was.” When we get back on our sledges I consider standing, but I don’t. What do I have to prove? There is a Sámi saying that, left unheeded, is sometimes used to explain jet lag: Never travel faster than your soul.

We’re off again. My reindeer goes from standing to full-speed in three steps. This time, the sledge is living up to its smooth-sailing promise. And, because I am sitting, I hear for the first time the crunch and clip of his feet against the ground. The song is made by a special bone on hind feet, a trait that allows the deer to hear each other when they cannot see each other, shrouded as they often are in snowstorms and mist. They provide a steady bass beat to the static hissing of the sledge runners.

Now that I’m not so concerned with controlling my reindeer, I can more fully witness his movement. And, because of the shifting of weight, what I’d seen as a sort of relinquished power, he can now fully sense me. I put my weight against the wooden slats of the sledge’s backboard. The snow softens distant sounds so that all I can hear is my reindeer’s tap dance. We’re surrounded by unbroken sheets of ice, coated in snowfalls that glimmer like glass shards.

Johanna’s animal momentarily loses focus and begins to snip at a patch of bark that’s peeling away from a nearby tree. “
Aye, aye, aye
,” she shouts.
“
Oye, oye, oye
.” That’s all it takes. Yvonne, pulling up the rear, mimics all of Johanna’s calls. But I just sit there. Silent.

Tiny tufts of lichen roll across unbroken snow like miniature tumbleweeds. In addition to digging for lichen, the reindeer also eat it off trees. I can see it now, like a fragile version of Spanish moss swaying in the afternoon’s mounting breeze. It’s everywhere. On twigs, on bark. It looks like fur.

Suddenly—and I do mean suddenly—my reindeer breaks into a gallop. He senses what I don’t have experience enough to know: We’re close to camp. Reindeer legs, spindly as birch branches, crisscross in a pattern of perfection as he picks up speed, huffing and puffing as we fly across the remnants of a shattered sky. Behind us, his crystallized breath trails like the tail of a comet.

 • • • 

“If you play with the fire,” Johanna says, “you will go blind.” We’re now in the camp’s
lávvu
—a tipi-shaped, canvas-wrapped structure—and Johanna has just stoked the fire with the end of a stick. I cough a little as a spire of smoke lifts toward the small air vent above. Johanna heard this Sámi saying as a child. Even now that she’s come of age, it reminds her to pay attention to the burning center of the
lávvu
. It doesn’t instill fear as much as a deep sense of respect.