Arctic Circle Getaway

We drove up the snowy, winding road towards the cosy A-frame cabin. Clouds of snow, like dust, fell from under our pyörät, that is wheels, wild animals kurkistanut, or peeked, from behind mounds of frozen white only to let us enter their witness grounds. It was cold, that is little below zero, counted rather in dozens, mid-December, but our warm hearts and hands were on fire. Cold heat, heat cold, we could count endlessly for hours stretching like noodles.

It hurt to sit. I, that is Michael, was driving because Emma had only a provisional and was still scared to start succinct driving lessons despite passing the theory. She clung to my arm like a leech and wouldn’t let go, as if petrified by white knights made of winter trees. She was like a sister to me, my little Emma, scarcely hundred pounds of skin and bones suspended from cold, trembling legs.

The branches of the roadside bushes bent under the pressure of snow, as if someone had pinned them to the ground with a heavy tool that could not bear the resistance. A young roe deer kurkistanut with her brown eyes from behind the fence separating the road, ready to let us into her winter kingdom. After all, we were just tuntemattomat, that is strangers, in her world, not the vice versa.

When it gets dark much earlier than usual, everywhere seems to be kauempana, that is further, than during the day. The distances extend to enormous proportions like the cars of freight trains. Tap, tap, tap. The snow sliding down the branches of the coniferous trees often sounded like the clatter of wheels on rails. Mahdottoman, that is impossibly quiet but loud in our ears.

We sang along to some horrid Finnish rock from the radio, soaring on the FM waves like birds in the air, intertwining with a broody presenter sifting through words like through a stuck pipe. It wouldn’t have been can-do in the tunnel we just passed, stretching for two hundred and fifty miles like a Tube, there was no internet then, no radio connection within that distance, so we were unwinding it now on a straight span of road.

Emma and I were still in our thirties, but that code was about to change, four ahead. I’ve been sober since I started driving again, which was the last fourteen months. Being homeless is associated with many consequences, including being on the lam ever so often that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to finally have a free ride. With my little baby snuggled up against my käsivarsi, that is arm, as a teddy bear, the whole world seemed trouble free for that one moment. Did the world have any more worries?

‘It hurts me belly. Can we stop?’

My little Emma suddenly sounded like Peppa Pig when she grazed her knee.

‘Don’t give me the shakes, beibi. Not now… Maybe in ten miles. Minkä värinen sielu on, beibi? Kuuletko minua?’

She didn’t reply, just twisted around and turned to the other side, mahdollisesti, that is possibly, to feel more comfortable, more cosy curled up like a cat in the passenger seat, wrapped in a veil of hopelessness. Her cheek pressed against the glass evaporated in a spiritual mist. I held back tears. A bone-chilling cold froze our bodies. The heater was broken, but the GPS showed no more than twenty-five miles, so I rolled up my sleeves a little over the legal limit. After all, our car had a foreign registration, not easy to spot on their roads.

The piles of snow on both sides of the road seemed to grow larger with each approach, like snowmen in human clothes melting at the sight of us. I tried to keep us going without a clear polku, that is pathway, leading to the cabin. Board was not included in the room rate so we were hoping to get a supply as soon as we arrived. But when will it be with just me driving? We were running on nothing but chocbars and coke, both used to hunger since childhood: Emma as an abandoned child, never sure if orphaned yet, and me as a domeless bum sleeping in cartons on the streets, an alley cat rather than a human being in that era.

Tiheä, that is thick, oil-like atmosphere hung in the ilma, that is air, like a snowslide. Liikkumattomaksi pelosta, that is immobilised by fear, I watched a piece of the road slide off into the abyss, for it was not a piece of road, but a bluff. Kadonneen maailmani, my lost world. We didn’t see daylight for two days after darkness encroached our little gumption of life. Polar night was in its full blast.

Dew condensed on the windshield from the lack of proper heating in our Volkswagen Passat. I couldn’t see clearly to guide us at this point, but one thing was certain – we were going down.

‘Taistele ja pidä kehosi lämpimänä, beibi.’

‘Huh?’

Emma, awoken from her dream, was rubbing her eyes like a windshield that wasn’t intended to keep us safe.

‘Fight and keep your body warm, baby! Kulta, se on vain elämää…’

‘Huh?’

‘Darling, it’s only life.’

‘Since you started learning Finnish, I don’t get you, Michael. Not like I ever got you, but…’

‘Ehkä siksi rakastat minua, kulta?’

‘Come again…’

‘Perhaps that’s why you love me, darling?’

‘How are we going to communicate there, M.?’

‘I speak in tongues, don’t worry, babe.’

I've worked as a driver all over Europe, so E. knew what I was talking about. Papers, documents, sometimes even help in packing and releasing life stories into the foreign air – this has been my speciality for the last two long decades. Despite the fact that my biological father was a sailor, I suffered from seasickness so many times and deeply despised eating fish. Such an antithesis.

I never told my baby what was going on then. That we were going down, not knowing exactly where: into an airhole or a bluff. I didn’t know it myself.

Slides from the trip flew through our heads in this moment of terror. We were kept on tenterhooks whilst waiting for the rescue dogs from the Arctic Circle Husky Rescue. My GPS babe came in handy again, this time without bitching around the bush.

We woke up in a hospital in Helsinki, all covered in celadon paint, as if the walls were trees weathered from overexposure to the sun or snow. The glass igloos on the log cabins at Kakslauttanen Resort in the province of Arctic Lapland, however, were not for us. The aurora borealis turned to the hospital's halogen lights before we settled softly into our beds.

After all, we did not need to communicate there. My Finnish, learned with the precision of a surgeon, was not needed in the hospital, where we were both unconscious but alive, and after a swift transfer to English soil, all troubles spilled out after a spoiled weekend.

– THE END –

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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