Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  In an attempt to give the place its due, we wandered the mall talking to shopkeepers, all of whom spoke several languages with alacrity. A man minding a boutique full of diamonds and fine crystal told us that although things had fallen off considerably through the global downturn of the last couple of years, the village was still expecting to top four hundred thousand visitors for 2011. And that was in-person visits. Santa’s Post Office would handle that number of letters and more during the Christmas season alone. People, he said, came singly or in couples and families by road. Meeting the “real” Santa was, of course, the big draw. Riding a real reindeer sled was a close second, although some visitors did carp about finding one plodding old reindeer, instead of a full team of Santa’s handsome first-stringers, drawing them not through the snow-dusted forests of Lapland but around a dirty little track next to the parking lot.

  “We’re open 365 days a year, and sometimes that presents problems for staffing, especially when we’re some distance out of town,” the shopkeeper added, “but it is a business model that is working.”

  “Is the draw here Santa or to be on the Arctic Circle?” I had to ask.

  “Both,” he replied, surprised at the question. “But they likely would not come to the Arctic Circle if the village were not here to enhance the experience. Some of our biggest customers are people from the U.K. and central Europe who take advantage of one-day package tours offered by Thomas Cook and other travel wholesalers. They bring whole planeloads of people—parents, children, grandparents, aunts and uncles—just for the day. They leave a place like Manchester early in the morning. Guides warm them up with songs and stories on the three-hour flight to Rovaniemi. There they board Santa Express buses, and in three or four hours they get the full package: Arctic Circle crossing ceremony, reindeer and dogsled ride, lunch, meeting Santa, and, of course ‘exploring the village,’ which basically means shopping. Depending on the season and the carrier, I think the current price for that one-day package is about 350 euros [C$480].”

  “Do Sami people have an interest in the village?”

  “No, not really,” he replied. “The village is a cooperative owned by the individual store and business owners, some of whom are Sami or of Sami extraction. We’re all sort of in this together. And likewise there are all kinds of people who work here. Some are from the Rovaniemi area, which would certainly include Sami descendants, especially in the reindeer ride area. There are tourist operators in Finland, though, who have gotten into trouble with the Sami for dressing people in fake gákti—that’s the Sami traditional garments—and performing rituals that are not really authentic. That is something we try to avoid here if we can.”

  “Would this have been Sami land originally?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he replied. “I don’t know.”

  Back outside, thinking it might be time to move on down the road, we stumbled into what turned out to be the most interesting and instructive aspect of the village. Napapiirin Maja, Arctic Circle Cabin, explained a lot.

  Set apart from the other buildings and apparently right beside what was the bed of the original Arctic Ocean road running north through Finland from Rovaniemi, Napapiirin Maja was a tidy little cabin made of the slender conifers that grow at this latitude. Less than forty square metres, with a traditional Sami acorn-shaped clay hearth in the corner, the place had a homey and welcoming, almost cozy feel, more so than any other building in the village. This structure, we learned from a welter of trilingual interpretive panels, was where this entire installation at the Arctic Circle had begun in 1950. That was when Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, visited the site as part of her postwar work with the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, strange as that might seem.

  During the waning years of the Second World War, after occupying Scandinavia for its iron ore and other strategic assets, the Nazis in retreat destroyed with brute force and fire just about every building and scrap of infrastucture within reach. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was set up to help rebuild the homes and lives of affected people. Although there had been a stake on the side of the road before that time to mark 66°33’N, it was only when Roosevelt planned a visit to northern Finland that a piece of land was purchased and the cabin built, in the hope that the project might boost tourism as a postwar industry.

  Napapiirin Maja was built in a great rush. Legend has it that the logs, which were floated down the Kemijoki River, were taken from the water on a Saturday and the cabin was built by the following Saturday. The last timber framer involved in the last-minute construction flurry put the last nail in the trim around the front door just in time to open it for the distinguished American visitor on June 11, 1950. Crowds lined the road and came to the site by bus, as they did, as they do, as they will.

  Eleanor Roosevelt kick-started tourism at the Arctic Circle in Finland. Who knew? I wondered if Mrs. FDR also inadvertently kick-started an American-style consumerism and way of doing business there. In hindsight, the coincidences and congruencies were portentous.

  A month before Roosevelt’s much heralded visit to Napapiirin Maja, the May 15, 1950, issue of Time magazine featured a story about how Coca-Cola was taking over the world. On the cover was a very striking illustration by Boris Artzybasheff showing an animated round red Coca-Cola sign feeding Coke to a globe cleverly portrayed as a person. The caption read, “World & Friend—Love that piaster, that lira, that tickey and that American way of life.” The story, entitled “The Sun Never Sets on Cacoola” (Cacoola is Coke’s name in Cairo), went on to detail the Coca-Cola Company’s rapid expansion around the world, and the fizzy sweet brown beverage and the mega-marketing messages that went with it. As Roosevelt was cutting the ribbon at the Arctic Circle, Coca-Cola was flooding the world with the American way.

  The first few decades of the company’s growth were taken up with making Americans familiar with the soft drink cooked up by an Atlanta pharmacist in 1886, and the marketers had convinced consumers that it was a good thing to drink year-round. But one of the drawbacks of selling an “ice-cold” beverage was that winter sales, especially in colder locales, typically fell off quite dramatically. After the First World War, however, the company was eager to expand, and that was when it started a search for a way to convince consumers that drinking Coke in the winter would be a worthy and fun thing to do. That’s when Coca-Cola turned to Santa as a pitchman.

  Ads in the 1920s toyed with the idea of Santa as a character played by a regular guy. The ads worked, but not all that well. And that was when the company called upon Haddon Sundblom, an American-born artist with Swedish parents. Borrowing the likeness of a jolly friend of his, he created the first of many generations of Coca-Cola Santas who took the world by storm. Building on the poem by Clement Clarke Moore, first published anonymously in 1823 as “A Visit from St. Nicholas” but perhaps better known as “‘Twas the Night before Christmas,” Sundblom drew not a man playing Santa but instead the man himself, the “jolly old elf.”

  Unfortunately, of all the renditions of Santa that the Finns might have employed—including deep Sami traditions associated with late harvest, the winter solstice, and the sun’s promise of return from the darkness of the twenty-four-hour Arctic night—the creative minds to whom it fell to develop programs for the increasing number of people who visited Napapiirin Maja chose a Santa mythology and image that looked strikingly similar to Sundblom’s Santa, then “Coca-colonizing” the planet.

  And that was the conundrum. All of Scandinavia having been decimated by the terrible years of war, people everywhere were in need of physical and economic “relief and rehabilitation”—among them the Sami, who were particularly hard hit by the war after a couple of centuries of conquest and assimilation. All of Scandinavia needed parts to build a new economic engine. Tourism was a likely place to turn. And in the strangest irony of all, the hope that arrived at Napapiirin Maja that day in June 1950 was attached to a way of thin
king about development, a way of building an economy based on consumption, that would eventually be indicted for atmospheric changes that would melt the very snows to which people were drawn so they could experience authentic northern life at the Arctic Circle.

  Worse still was the fact that the Santa character that the builders of the Finnish village chose to propagate included the image of cartoon little people, who looked in many of the drawings suspiciously like real little people who happened to live in that locale, with their reindeer, and who lived some kind of magical and happy life detached from the realities of pollution, oppression, and racial intolerance; people who seemed only too happy to stow their own cultural identity for one imported from the minds of poets and admen in the United States of America. In so doing, they bought into the consumer myth of a Santa cooked up to sell, sell, sell.

  I went there to understand how people along the Arctic Circle were coming to terms with climate change. I’d come to learn and to appreciate what was going on culturally in these sparsely peopled northern lands. And what had I found? A most disturbing importation of a way of thinking about the world, with the chap in the red suit as its poster boy. Where I had hoped to find northerners, especially the Sami, tenaciously hanging on to their age-old traditions and connections to the land, I found a cartoon,a co-optation of a once-proud people and way of life feeding lines on a retail ledger. And it got worse.

  The world changed. It got warmer. And like every advertising campaign, Santa got tired—or people got tired of Santa. Something happened, and Coke began looking for another image to boost those winter sales. Enter the polar bear and those impossibly cute ads that showed the animated bear family frolicking in the Arctic. Scrolling through YouTube, wondering when the connection was made, I tracked back to the transitional moment in 1994. It was a thirty-second TV spot that showed the bears on skates, whirling around and around on a rink shovelled out on an ice floe. One little fellow gets a bit tired and separates himself from the family. And … wait for it … into the frame comes Santa, who hands the cub a Coke. One thing leads to another, and the next thing you know the bears have walked right onto the can, and they’re being served at ten thousand metres as flights cross and recross the Arctic Circle.

  On the outskirts of Rovaniemi we passed a billboard with another very familiar brand. Come visit “the northernmost golden arches in the world,” it said, in English.

  “Do you think their Big Bacon Happy Meal is made with road-killed-reindeer patties?” Gail asked.

  Somehow that would make the whole situation more palatable, I thought darkly.

  5: HIDDEN TRUTHS

  Finding our way east along the line from Rovaniemi into western Russia was complicated by the fact that our rented car was not licensed or insured to leave Scandinavia. Finland shares a long border with Russia, but we could not drive over it ourselves.

  The alternative was to head up the Scandinavian peninsula and catch a bus to Murmansk from Ivalo, Finland, or Kirkenes, Norway. The Ivalo schedule didn’t fit ours (we had been invited to a special Canada Day commemoration of the Russian-Canadian alliances on the Murmansk Run, the route used during the Second World War by Allied sailors to keep supplies flowing to Russia via the ice-free port of Murmansk), so we opted to drive straight north through Finnish Sápmi and into Finnmark, the most northeasterly county of Norway, to catch the Pasvikturist bus.

  Driving up Finnish Highway E75 evoked boreal Canada, except for the heavy traffic at times, made up largely of reindeer, which seemed to be enjoying the relative absence of biting flies and mosquitoes on the road. We had learned about sameby, the groups in which the Sami herders are organized, economically and geographically, so we knew that every single one of these animals belonged to someone. More often than not, the reindeer with their big feet and ungainly gait would be gambolling down the middle of the road, and as we slowly drove by, often on the right shoulder, we would be close enough to see the nicks in the animals’ ears that indicated where and to whom they belonged.

  In the closeness of the car, there was ample opportunity as we rolled along to revisit what had happened in Laponia, either in conversation or in the privacy of our own thoughts, which brought us both to the conclusion that underlying the happy stories of cooperation and collaboration was a disturbing passive aggression toward the Sami. In Sweden, at least, the government had set in law that the Sami had perpetual rights to the land, but when any non-Sami came along with an alternative plan for the reindeer pastures, the Sami always seemed to have to move aside. The Sami didn’t own the land; they had the right to use it, but what happened on the land seemed to be determined by everybody else. The Sami seemed to end up with what was left.

  We arrived in the village of Inari, where the clear cold waters of the Juutua River empty into the expanses of Lake Inari, Finland’s largest lake, and it didn’t take long before we found ourselves in front of an impressive architectural work-in-progress to be called Sajos, the Sami parliament and cultural centre. Set against the clear blue of the northern sky and the sound of the rapids roaring in the distance, the strong vertical lines of the concrete walls and the gentle curved horizontal lines of the roof were strangely resonant with the place.

  Finland was the first nation to establish a Sami parliament as an arm or agency of the federal government, back in 1973. And this brand new meeting place for the twenty-one elected representatives in the Sámediggi certainly added architectural gravitas to that original idea, which was to give the Finnish Sami, who live in Enontekiö, Utsjoki, Sodankylä, and here in Inari, a voice in Sami-specific economic, social, and cultural affairs, particularly education, language, and schools. Of the roughly ninety thousand Sami throughout Sápmi—formerly Lapland—ten thousand are in Finland, fifty thousand in Norway, twenty thousand in Sweden, and two thousand in Russia. Finland’s move in 1973 was one of the first concrete steps, instituted in law, to devolve control of monies transferred from the state to the Sami people themselves. Although the Sami have a strong attachment to the lands and the waters, the Nordic states retain control of all Sami lands.

  Norway created a Sami parliament in 1989, and Sweden eventually followed suit in 1993. A winsome young Sami woman in her colourful gákti in one of several duodji outlets in town cut to the chase: “I was disappointed when I learned in school that the parliament doesn’t have much say, really. It is, after all, a central government agency, and I think it is mostly there to make the government look good. The government still takes most of the decisions. We are very pleased to have a new building and maybe now things will change. Who knows.”

  Wandering through the town itself, we visited several duodji shops and turned over in our hands reindeer carvings and exquisite bone tools, many of which were patterned with the most intricate scrimshaw designs. Slowly, it dawned on us as we met and talked to the storekeepers that what we were appreciating was both a product and a process, both of which were part of modern-day indigenous life, particularly here above the Arctic Circle. The process of keeping these duodji going allowed master craftspeople to pass on the skills and traditions to the next generation. And the product was a source of outside money in a cash-driven economy.

  Still, as we continued on our way, swinging west onto Highway 92 and over the border into Finnmark, it seemed a little sad to see aged Sami men and women huddling against freezing summer rain in roadside stalls offering genuine Sami goods for sale to anyone who happened by. As we entered Karasjok, home of the Norwegian Sami parliament, we realized that in all of our discoveries and conversations in Sápmi, not one person had said anything about climate change.

  It was cultural change—perpetual efforts to claw back the control that their ancestors, for better or worse, once exercised over their nomadic lives—that was front of mind for all of these people. One woman selling dried reindeer meat on the side of the highway said it this way: “We are the professionals who know how to manage changes in nature with our reindeer, but can we manage the challenges created by man? No.
”

  We finally made Kirkenes, a Norwegian harbour town full of aged Russian trawlers. The town of 1,672 was clean, orderly, full of fresh flowers in well-tended borders and brightly coloured houses in neat streets of cobbled stone. Once we learned that we could park for free at a harbour hotel while we were in Murmansk, we took a room and splurged on a late dinner of rare reindeer fillets with lingonberry reduction and red wine, having no inkling of how much things would change in the morning when we boarded the Pasvikturist bus for the five-hour, 230-kilometre ride into a very different world.

  The “bus,” an aging white van with sealed windows and broken seats, turned up two hours late, because of an accident involving another of the company’s buses on the road we were about to take. The delay was lengthened by some administrative hassle the driver got into at the border, which left all eight passengers in limbo between Norway and Russia in a duty-free store that sold cigarettes, a few types of vodka, and an undrinkable whisky called King Robert Scotch. Once we’d tried it, we saved it for window-washing fluid for the rental car.

  Once the border was behind us, any concerns we’d gathered earlier about errant mining practices, the aging atomic power plant we’d heard all about from Ingrid, and decommissioned nuclear-powered submarines quietly rusting away in an Arctic estuary were doubled and redoubled by the sight of the real thing. Pristine lakes and boreal rivers running through verdant forests in Norway were replaced almost immediately by nasty concrete-block houses, smokestacks, military checkpoints, and razor wire running atop fences that stretched out onto a treeless post-apocalyptic landscape. And if the eighteen-year-old soldiers, with their Kalashnikovs at the ready, who poked their pimply faces into the van demanding to see our papers weren’t scary enough, then the town of Nikel’, with its faceless grey concrete flats and belching red and white stacks—where, they say, the sulphur dioxide effluent from the nickel smelter is so thick that the resulting acid rain will eat through an umbrella—was a crystal-clear indication that this Arctic was a world apart from anything we had seen or experienced in Scandinavia.