(no subject)

[dherblay]

It is 1:45 in the morning in Ivalo, Finland, 300 km north of the Arctic Circle and ten days past the solstice; I've lost track of the sun as the northern horizon is obscured by trees and clouds but I've grown to accept that it's just never going to get dark. The south of Finland was shockingly green. We flew in over lightly undulating fields a brilliant shade of green. Not jade, or emerald, or malachite; the best analogy from my experience would be pond scum. Not the most appealing of associations but perhaps I'm talking about the expensive pond scum you buy from Tricker's for your ornamental pond. The land is largely flat -- we had to get a hundred klicks north of Rovaniemi before seeing anything like a hill -- and the borders of the lakes are more fractally arbitrary than a permanently rounded edge. I suspect that much of what we overflew was spongey. Bright green, full of lakes, infested with biting insects: I think I now understand why the Finns liked Minnesota so much. Up here there's a little more orange mixed into the green, a little more heathery. And the flora feels like the Sierra Nevadas without being all that far above sea level.

My attitude changed from "Oooh, Lapland! I sure do hope we see some reindeer" to "Get out of the god-damned road, you god-damned speedbumps" in about thirty minutes. They're everywhere. Down near Rovaniemi they're tagged and molting, but up here where it's on the whole chillier, they're less motley, and seem to be roaming free in herds of eight to fourteen. I have yet to see any dead along the side of the road, but I suspect that's due to some stereotypical fastidiousness I have just invented from whole air and imputed to the Finns without cause than to any shyness on the part of the reindeer.