Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (21 page)

I wonder, aloud, how many people end up dragging their sleeping bags into the lobby and am surprised to find that, out of the 200 guests at full capacity, usually only one or two don’t make it through the night in their rooms. I have new determination.

When I finally crawl back into my sleeping bag, I can hear my heartbeat and nothing else
.
The sound is soothing and strong when amplified in my bag. I pull a woolen hood over my matted hair and drift, like a leaf falling in love with gravity, into the depths of sleep.

Soon, too soon, I’m awoken by a voice. “Warm lingonberry juice?” I shimmy toward the small hole of light at the top of my sleeping bag, my breathing hole, and I feel as though I’m emerging from a cocoon. When I peer out of the top of my bag, I see a woman wearing a silver cape. She’s carrying some sort of tray that’s hooked behind her neck, like that of an old-time cigarette girl.

I ask if I might have just a few more minutes of sleep. She’s dubious, but she fills a white paper cup from a thermos contraption and puts it on my headboard, telling me she’ll be back in a half hour. She returns in what seems three minutes.

“It’s eight o’clock,” she says. “We have to prepare for opening.” Shortly, the entire hotel will be opened for tourists, who will pay a fee to wander through the rooms and take photos of themselves on the deerskin-covered ice beds. Including this one.

The morning light has given my room the blue-tinted opalescence of moonstone. Cold air is blowing through a vent hole that’s been made in the domed ceiling. I close my eyes as a breeze hits my face. The lingonberry juice has gone cold. I drink it anyway.

This might not be the most comfortable place I’ve ever slept, but it very well may be the most serene I have ever known. As soon as I leave, the cleaning crew—the actual maintenance staff, of which James is officially a part—will push fresh snow down that ventilation hole. It will be spread on the floor like sand in a Zen garden. The only sign of my stay will be the ring my lingonberry cup made on the headboard, a circle interlinked with others. The pattern is as impermanent as a Tibetan sand mandala. Every year, the river provides material for a clean slate.

 • • • 

Nina Skarpa, manager of the Sámi-owned ecotourism company Nutti Sámi Siida, probably wouldn’t flinch if I told her that I’d taken a drum as a sign that I was supposed to visit Sápmi. She is, herself, here because of a vision. She was living in Norway, working as a nurse in the trauma ward of a large hospital, when an image appeared in her consciousness. She was just going about her business and then there it was: a white, female reindeer. She couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Now, if the image of a white reindeer suddenly popped into my mind, it wouldn’t mean much. But to Nina, this was like a memo straight from the cosmos. She’d grown up among Sámi herders, and it was clearly a sign that some changes needed to be made in her life. “I had a strong sense that the reindeer was a sign telling me to go home,” Nina says.

Just a week after that white reindeer made her feel called back to Sweden, she discovered a newspaper advertisement for a caretaker at Reindeer Lodge, Nutti Sámi Siida’s base camp. When she called the owner of the company, they talked for hours, and she began to feel in her gut that moving was the right thing to do. But, still, it was a painful decision.

She left her eldest son in a Norwegian college. She finalized a divorce. She says, “In modern life, we tend to think the easy way is the best way. We want everything to be happening in the moment we wish for it, but life doesn’t work like that all the time. Things are not always fun, but that doesn’t mean we’re unhappy. Good and bad are not black and white.”

In neighboring countries, Sámi tour operators have taken to wearing the colorful stitched patterns of traditional clothing, but Nina—a strikingly beautiful woman, small-boned with black hair and glacier-blue eyes—is wearing sharp, modern ski gear. The only hint of Sámi fashion is a pointed hat made of goat skin and lined with colorful red wool. It’s the handiwork of Johanna Huuva, a young herder who leads Nutti’s reindeer outings. Tomorrow, I’ll join her on one.

Working at Nutti has reminded Nina of all sorts of things she’d forgotten, things her aunt—the woman who raised her—used to impress on her, things like not picking flowers by their roots. Even reindeer, Nina says, know to leave enough lichen to ward against hunger in the coming, leaner years. “Nature will bring you what you need. It has taken me a long time to trust this Sámi saying—to trust life,” Nina tells me. “You have to let go and look for little signs. You have to slow down your tempo in order to see them.”

We follow the gentle curve of the camp’s corral fencing, back toward the tiny communal kitchen hut where we first met. Nina says, “You know, taking this job, I didn’t totally understand that first reindeer vision that came to my mind until I had one special calf that I cared for at the office, a white calf. It was a sign, a third sign, confirming that this is what’s meant to be.”

Meant to be. It’s a difficult concept to take in, even when you’re writing a book about natural phenomena and you find out that you’ve been unwittingly planning to visit the one point on earth where a fleeting eclipse is going to be visible. Yet it keeps coming up.

Jung explains that rationality demands the assumption that all things have a natural and perceptible cause. “We distinctly resent the idea of invisible and arbitrary forces,” he wrote, “for it is not so long ago that we made our escape from that frightening world of dreams and superstitions, and constructed for ourselves a picture of the cosmos worthy of our rational consciousness.” Yet the power of chance remains, as illustrated every time we utter: What are the chances?

In ancient Rome, if you tripped over your door frame, you wouldn’t be teased as superstitious if you called off all events of the day. It would simply be seen as an accepted sign that you were off your game, with a lack of attention or clumsiness, in a world where even a minor injury could cost you your life. Seeing messages in daily life was as legitimate as reading a scientific study. Not so long ago—in generations as close as my great-grandparents’—an individual’s powers of observation were still trusted.

Historically, nature has been seen as a sacred oracle, in part because individuals—everyday people—were fluent in its language. Laypeople, regular folk, were—by necessity—in constant conversation with all the world.

Nina isn’t wearing a watch, but she suspects it’s about time to start dinner. Locals often use natural cues to tell time—the reliable, patterned sounds of animals and the nuances of wind. Someone will arrive soon to cook for the camp, but after that there won’t be an attendant on-site. She points to phone numbers tacked to the wooden wall of the hut, which has wooden walls lined with reindeer skins. It won’t strike me until later, much later, that I am, in essence, going to be left alone in an Arctic wilderness with no food, no running water, and a phone connected to a source of electricity that I’ve been warned might not make it through the night.

Before she leaves, Nina directs me to a collection of books on Sámi traditional culture. The book sitting at the front of the shelf is, of course,
Drum-Time.
At the start of the eighteenth century, almost every Sámi house had drums. They were mostly used to divine the future. A bit of deer antler or a piece of brass was placed on a deerskin drumhead painted with Sámi symbols. The movement of the antler or brass would give the shaman an idea of where the deer might migrate when other natural-world signs could not be found.

When a Sámi shaman entered the drum-state—with vibrating reindeer skin pressed against his own—he navigated between the physical and spiritual worlds without regard to space and time. The shamans were, in a sense, medicine men. But their realm of expertise was not always nursing the body; it also included reconstructing fragmented souls.

The authors of
Drum-Time
acknowledge that Sámi culture still reveres the instrument. “We believe in the drum as a mirror of the soul,” they explain. “The world of the drum is still in our dreams hidden in our language and in our way of thinking and acting. Hidden little islands inside of us.”

This seems a very Jungian way of looking at things, given his belief that we all share predispositions in our collective unconscious. I savor all the information in
Drum-Time
, but I nearly stop breathing when the authors give an account of a traditional shaman’s journey: “He began to speak of icy rains, fires, rainbows, boiling pools in the ground. All of this he had passed with the help of his protector. He had found the entrances, the doors to other worlds.”

Storms. Lightning. Moon rings. Lava. This feels a little close.

“You too will see the one that rules the wind. Oh, yes, you will see the wind itself.”

As in, the totally visible solar winds?

“Regardless of what you think, my drum will be your map to the other worlds . . . You too will be able to talk to he who controls the winds.”

Oh, my.

It strikes me that synchronicity is not so different from reading the patterns of birds to learn about migratory routes. It’s really just a term for carefully being on the lookout for signs in the context of one’s own life. It’s a way of deriving meaning from the unique and odd as the Sámi did when identifying
siejdde
, sacred places.

The
siejdde
were most often unusually shaped rocks. They were places of beauty where one might go to give thanks for good things. There were also dark
siejdde
, where small offerings would be made to ward off evil forces. But one of the most important roles of the
siejdde
was to provide a place to store the complexities of the human psyche, or soul. But when Lutheran missionaries smashed Sámi sacred sites and burned drums, this animated landscape was smothered, deadened. Earth went from life process to material product. And—if we’re on page with Jung—this meant that all the good and bad that had once resided in the landscape retreated into the individual. Is this why I can’t let the landscape hold some of my hope and fears, let some of my soul seep out of myself without somehow feeling like a flake?

“Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional unconscious identity with natural phenomena,” Jung noted. Rationalism, he believed, has left us with a diminished capacity to respond to the numinous, or spiritual, symbols and ideas all around us. “Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.”

He called this the 400,000-year-old that lives in all of us.

I think I might actually be making contact with mine.

But how do I reconcile my iPhone-toting, e-mail-checking, thirty-something self with my 400,000-year-old one? How do I make peace with mainstream traditions so that I can move more freely along the individualistic path I’d prefer to tread? Sure, Pele’s got my back, but I’m having some seriously mere-mortal moments down here in Alice’s rabbit hole. I’m not sure what to make of all that’s happening to me. I had no idea my little-ole-life had the potential to be so, I don’t know . . . epic. I mean, I just read about a shaman’s mystical, otherworldly experience and it sounded like a rundown of my travel itinerary.

It’s nearly dark when I hear a strange sound coming from outside. I set my book down on a wooden table. Could it be the aurora? I start to rise from my chair, but—once I’m fully at attention—I realize it’s just the frenzied cry of distant sled dogs at feeding time.

 • • • 

It is a bit of an oddity to be a woman traveling alone in the Arctic Circle, even on well-trod European tourist paths. I feel this sharply when, in a dining room the size of a large walk-in closet—where it’s tough to pull out a chair without bumping into someone—I am seated by myself. There’s a group of Germans who do not make eye contact with anyone outside of their party, a young, impossibly proper English couple—the woman has changed into riding pants and pearls in a camp that doesn’t have running water—and another couple in their early seventies. The woman, who has an unruly cloud of gray hair, catches my eye and waves me over.

“Come and eat with us,” she says. “There’s no reason to go it alone!”

George and Yvonne Baker are also British, but they’re still wearing their casual, Nutti-issued snowsuits. They have been in Sweden for several days. Yvonne is excited to share stories of their aurora sightings. She says seeing it last night, over the forest, was spectacular. “The angle made it look like the trees were lighting up.” She cried at the sight of them, not an uncommon reaction.

As we settle into bowls of creamy soup, warm and comforting, I learn that George is a professional organist. This wouldn’t be striking had I not just discovered, in Hawai‘i, that organists are masters of infrasound. When I bring up the little-known phenomenon, Yvonne looks puzzled, but it inspires George to speak for the first time since I sat down. “To create infrasound,” he says, “you need a big organ in a big building. It makes a very deep sound which really can’t be heard. If you’re playing a very quiet piece you add infrasound at the end.”

Yvonne is confused. “Why would you play a note that you can’t hear?”

“Because you can feel it,” George says

He completed musical apprenticeship in Canterbury, England. He remembers it well. His instructor played a note and said, “Can you hear that, George?” He couldn’t. His mentor told him to take a walk down the hall. The instructor played the note again, “Can you hear it now?” He still couldn’t. But it was in his bones. “The floor was vibrating,” George says. “The vibration was just barreling down the floorboards. For infrasound to be grand like that, you need a building that responds to that certain pitch.”

He explains that, with many instruments, strings set the air vibrating. But there’s a signature note unique to each instrument that sets the whole thing to tremor. It’s called the wolf note. “You’ve got to be careful with the wolf note,” George says. “It’s almost overpowering.”