Hyperborea

February 17th 2023

a land beyond the northern wind, where the sun sets and rises only once a year, and the people live to grow a thousand years old
I'm taking my weekly zoom call from some empty-ish wing of the pharmacology building at UiT today (world's northernmost pharmacology building, probably?). They have a gallery of square windows leading into the lab, where you can observe white-coated students struggling with their lab assignments.
Afterwards I sneak into the cafeteria in the medicine building, which has a bit of a lingering chemical smell to it, but does offer totally legitimate UiT students like me a cheap lunch.
It's been cloudy ever since I got to Tromsø, which is troubling because, let's face it, no one comes to Tromsø for its cloudy skies.

So I pray to many a forgotten deity for a change in the winds as my last night here approaches. And in what has to be one of the more spiritual moments of my life, the clouds actually part, just as I step outside of the university.
Behind the scattering clouds the sun is already setting, and I get some beautifully dramatic skies through the bus windows on my way home. I stay there just long enough to put on some more layers, then I'm off again to meet Karolis, who will chase the aurora with me and a bunch of french folk tonight.
I've just gotten into his minibus when I get a frantic message from Sharada, my host: its northern lights out and, four minutes later, please check it.
And sure enough — Karolis, constantly checking five forecasts and even more webcams on his phone, pulls over on the side of the road and we step out into the snow to see the first whisps of green light hovering above.
If I had one krone for every French person trying to shine their phone flash at the northern lights, I could buy eight müsli bars.

(this is a statement about many things, not least of which that my favorite müsli bars seem to be on sale here)
We soon move on from the side of the road to an even darker place, just at the edge of the forest, looking out over the mountains and the stars (so many stars) and the aurora. We stare up into the sky, sit on the mossy forest floor around a campfire, drink hot chocolate and eat some fish-and-vegetable thing.
And there's that cynical part of my brain that says this is all a performance — Karolis likes to point out the tourists in the big buses along the way, but what does that make us? — but the campfire in the woods is still a campfire in the woods, and the fish is still warm and tasty and the lights still hang in the sky above us, and it's all very good.
I come home smelling like fire and starlight.