In mid-November, after months of living just outside of the rain-beaten city of Stockholm, my entire school packed our bags and left for a weeklong trip to the city of Kiruna in northern Sweden. Our trip began with a seventeen hour train ride in which we slept in narrow sleeper cars, three beds tall. That night on the train, bristling with anticipation for the next week, I fell asleep to the flickering of the locomotive's lights against the darkness outside, illuminating the trees as we passed, and the next morning I woke up to a burning pink sky against a landscape covered with fresh and sparkling snow. I’ve never been an early riser, much more content to shut my eyes and snooze, but something about the rose hues in the sky roused me to watch the sun rise. Still sleepy, I crawled to the foot of my bed and, resting my arms on the edge of the window, pressed my cheek against the chilled pane and watched my first sight of the arctic roll by.
When we reached our destination, dressed, packed and wide-eyed, I already had high hopes for the rest of our trip. As I stepped off of the train and into the frozen city of Kiruna, my boots crunching the powder beside the tracks, I was struck by how much the small snow covered city reminded me of Yellowknife, a city in Northern Canada which I have been going to since I was young in order to visit my grandparents and cousins. Both were small mining cities and shared similar architecture, layout and overall vibes. The resemblance made my heart feel as though it was about to burst. No city that reminded me so much of a place that I know and love could be anything but fantastic.
As the week progressed I partook in interesting and exciting activities including dog sledding through a snow covered forest with nothing but a pitch black sky full of stars above us, having lunch with a Sami woman named Maria who introduced us to some of her reindeer, the lives of her children and the effects of discrimination towards the Sami people, and watching the northern lights dance across the sky for the first time in my life while standing in the middle of a parking lot. However, the moment that stood out to me against the rest would have to be the night that we stayed in a cabin twenty minutes outside of town in an attempt to view the oh-so elusive Aurora.
The setup of the camp emphasized the area's seclusion from the city and each corner of the location seemed to exude an energy entirely separate from the buzzing of an urban dwelling. Instead everything was still. The sky met the snow in a seamless motion that the trees tried to mimic as they bowed to the ground under the weight of the heavy amounts of powder that sat on their backs. A small smattering of wood cabins, each painted a dark shade of red, dotted the otherwise colorless area and with each step I took I found myself placed dangerously close to falling deeper in love with my environment.
After an evening of relaxing and letting Stockholm slowly soak off of my skin I found myself following the rest of my group down to the shore of a lake. It was frozen solid around the edges and laid across the icy surface was an extra layer of fresh snow. When I first reached the edge, accompanied by a few friends, I spread my arms and fell backwards right into a snowbank. The luxury of a fall with no harm was just too tempting to ever pass up. My friends followed suit and we just lay there for a while, warm in our snowsuits, and looked at the stars.
That was one of the things I was the most startled by in Kiruna, the amount of stars you could see. In New York it’s impossible to see the stars and even if you do see any you’ll be lucky if you see five. My entire life I grew up with the glow of skyscrapers instead of space and I don’t wish it was any different, but, seeing the stars is now one of my favorite things in the world because it feels so rare, so fleeting.
In Kiruna I felt so small. For one of the first times in my life I felt truly exposed to the vastness of nature, under a sky filled with a trillion beaming stars, surrounded by sleeping snow covered forests and swept up in the icy air. The harsh beauty of nature doesn’t care or coddle, but it’s simple being made me feel special, made me feel the roots of my privilege, made me aware of each puff of breath out of my lungs that hung frozen in the air and of how lucky I was to be breathing here of all places. Kiruna made an impact on me, as plain as a footprint in the snow only this time more permanent, fossilized in ice, with no chance of melting.