Wednesday is Halloween so let’s go back to Halloween four years ago. I was in Rovaniemi, in northern Finland. I’d spent the day in town, wandering along the river because everything was blue and white and silver and frozen and yes, I nearly died of hypothermia. Although in hindsight, having survived a white-out blizzard in Iceland in June, I might have to downgrade that to “my legs got really cold, like two chunks of frozen gammon”.
But then in the evening, I went off looking for the Northern Lights. I did have another offer – I’d bumped into a pair of Mormon missionaries in town, and having a soft spot for the breed, I’d stopped to chat and been invited to their fright-free Halloween party. But you can’t go to Lapland and then not go out looking for the Northern Lights.
So off I went. We were picked up in town and taken to the central office where we were properly dressed for the occasion, in huge padded suits, huge padded boots and huge possibly-padded gloves. Plus hats with earflaps lined with fur and whatever the ethical issues, it’s so soft and so warm. But what I was really after was the kitbag we stowed all that in while we drove cross-country for an hour. Rovaniemi is a relatively small place but it’s the capital of the entire region and if there’s one place producing light pollution that you want to avoid, it’s that big city sitting in the middle of nowhere.
So we drove out into the countryside, making a stop along the way to see the Northern Lights. They just showed up while we were on our way and we stopped because you can’t just ignore them. It might be the only time you get to see anything. They weren’t spectacular lights and they showed up much better on camera than you could see with the naked eye. Still not great; they were very low on the horizon and very thin but we took photos.
When they were over, we finished our drive, out to this place that to this day I cannot identify. It’s an abandoned village, or possibly farm, at the bottom of a hill. The name I wrote down at the time just doesn’t exist, not on Google, anyway, which means it doesn’t exist at all. We got changed in a building at the bottom of the hill that used to be a school and is now a restaurant. I kind of wonder who they’re trying to attract to that restaurant, bearing in mind there’s nothing in the area.
We climbed the hill. It was very boulder-covered, it was a bit like climbing over a boulder choke in a cave, only with no roof above my head. Not difficult, not really, but we were nice and warm by the time we got to the top. I lay among the boulders, which can be surprisingly comfortable at the right time, while others in the group set up cameras that cost more than my car and took long-exposure photos of the sky. In which there were no Northern Lights at all. I’m sure they got some lovely pictures of stars but no Lights, not even of the kind you can only see with a really sensitive really long-exposure photo. That’s how Northern Light spotting generally goes. Thanks to three lucky strikes in a row, I’ve now got a reasonable hit rate but at one point I had a rate of once in eight tries, so I wasn’t really expecting to see much by now.
However, our guide, Anthony, wasn’t going to leave us sitting outside in the cold for hours staring at a black sky. There was also a barbecue hut hiding up on the hilltop and while we’d been sitting outside, Anthony had lit a fire in it. We cooked sausages, a special Finnish vacuum-packed variety that you can throw in a hiking bag and carry around for days with no fear of food poisoning. I had some tough chewy cheese that became all the more rubbery for heating over a fire and some oat bread that was nice until I overcooked it and set it on fire. The hot chocolate and sweet bread-biscuits that came next were much better.
But now it was time for the evening’s entertainment. It was Halloween, after all, and we were going to partake in a traditional Finnish ritual, albeit one that’s more commonly practiced on New Year’s Eve. We were going to try molybdomancy – the art of fortune telling by molten metal. Anthony produced little lead (well, mostly not lead, mostly tin) horseshoes, a bucket of cold water and a shovel. We put the horseshoes on the shovel and held them over the fire until they melted, then tipped the liquid into the bucket where it immediately resolidified. Then we took out the results and examined them by torchlight. What we saw would tell us about our futures – and only we could interpret them. This wasn’t going to be a group activity, although of course we all gathered round and commented on each other’s fortunes.
I ended up with two pieces.
If the liquid ended up in more than piece, we were supposed to discard the smaller and concentrate on the largest but it’s hard to tell which of my two pieces is bigger so I looked at both. The one on the left is kind of shaped like Africa, kind of like an elephant, or an arrowhead or an animal head. The one on the right is… a Viking boat? A dragon? Or maybe a mermaid or a chicken? Nothing I could figure out, anyway, whether I shone the torch directly on my twisted pieces of metal or whether I looked at the shadows. Nothing anyone else could figure out either. And the same with everyone else’s fortunes.
It was getting late. The fire was dying away and the Northern Lights weren’t playing so we descended. By this time, the boulders on the hillside were coated in ice – not the slippery kind but the kind that made the boulders sparkle like hundreds of enormous diamonds. It’s also the kind that makes your eyes believe it’s slippery so it was a very slow descent, testing every single one with my foot before trusting my weight to it. I also had to get my fortunes down safely and they’re far too fragile to dump in a pocket so I literally had them sitting on the palm of my upturned hand, which meant my balance was a lot less certain.
We reached the bottom of the hill, crossed the road to go into the schoolhouse – and the Northern Lights came out. We stood for a good five minutes staring up at the sky, while the Northern Lights danced behind a fence of tall silhouetted pine trees. They were pretty good Lights, proper vertical pencil-style ones that danced and yet my camera captured absolutely nothing except a few blurry stars.
When we got back to Rovaniemi, we had to hand back the fantastic kitbags and the nice warm furry hats. I hadn’t realised how cold it had been on top of the hill – between the fire and the climb, I’d been pretty warm and yet when I got back at 2.30am, I was so cold I had to go and sit in a hot shower for half an hour.