French Ghosts, Russian Nights, and American Outlaws: Souvenirs of a Professional Vagabond. Susan Spano

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СКАЧАТЬ a three-hour snowmobile expedition for the next day and a 90-minute dogsled ride for the morning after that. In all, I planned to stay at the Icehotel for three nights: first in a heated cabin, then in an ice chamber, and finally in the lodge, which has all the modern comforts, including a thermostat.

      No one, it seems, stays in the Icehotel proper for more than a night. It’s camping in the cold at five-star prices, much like an extreme sport you have to psych yourself up for. Afterward, you receive a diploma to prove you’ve done it. I learned all this by taking the tour for people staying in the Icehotel.

      This sprawling, single-story, igloo-like edifice had an arched entry and double doors covered in reindeer skins, illuminated by a chilly blue light. Beyond the hotel entrance was the grand hall, supported by round ice columns about a foot in diameter, decorated with a fiber-optically illuminated ice chandelier that shimmered like diamonds in the dimness. Packed snow corridors burrowed off the grand hall, leading to the domed ice bar, heated luggage room, and toilets, and to the ice chambers.

      Like Room 316, where I stayed the next night, most rooms were small and plain. Standard doubles had curtained doorways and two-foot-high ice-block platform beds cushioned by thin mattresses and reindeer pelts. The suites were grander, individually decorated by 35 artists, with sitting areas, sculptures, bizarre fiber-optic lighting fixtures, and furniture, all in ice, of course. One had a Japanese theme, another African. The Shakespeare suite surrounded guests with ice-sculpted scenes from Macbeth.

      After I was settled, I wandered into the unheated art center next to the hotel. There, Swedish graphic designer Mats Indseth, who created the Shakespeare suite, was chiseling away at a bust of the Bard, intended for a full-scale ice replica of London’s Globe Theater, where dance, drama, and musical productions were to be staged. Indseth said he finds Torne River ice an exceptionally malleable, beautifully clear medium for sculpture.

      The Torne supplies the 8.8 million pounds of ice used in the construction of the hotel, which is also composed of a highly insulating combination of water and snow blasted onto metal frames that are later removed to make the meter-thick walls and ceilings. The result, once smoothed down and decorated by artists, amazes and enchants most visitors, who can tour the facility during the day. The ice bar is open to everyone until the wee hours of the morning. But after 7 p.m., only hotel guests are allowed to wander the halls, dazed, probably, by the prospect of their impending hibernation.

      The tour guide told my group the routine: Once you check in for a night, you drag or kicksled your bags to the luggage room, where you’re given a locker. For the rest of the day, you’re basically homeless, because the ice rooms are too cold and forbidding for anything other than sleep (and even that’s questionable). When it’s finally time to retire, you strip to your long johns and grab a sleeping bag designed for temperatures as low as minus 13 degrees; you take it to your chamber; settle in, and wait to nod off.

      If you’re lucky, the next thing you know it’s 7:30 a.m. and an Icehotel staff member is at your bedside with a cup of warm lingonberry juice. Most guests follow it with a stint in the sauna.

      That’s the ideal Icehotel overnight, at least. Actually, I met one young Englishman who told me he enjoyed 10 uninterrupted hours of slumber in an ice chamber, but his girlfriend said he could sleep like a puppy anywhere. A front desk clerk told me she frequently finds Icehotel refugees sprawled on couches in the reception building. Most people who make it through the night arise with the hollow-eyed look of life-sentence prisoners and practice responses such as, “It was an experience. I’m glad I did it,” leaving unsaid the obvious, that they’d never do it again.

      But, happily, there’s more to the Icehotel than a bad night’s sleep. If you’re lucky enough to be there under the right conditions, there’s the aurora borealis, or the northern lights, a phenomenon caused by electrically charged solar particles drawn into the earth’s magnetic field. For the brave, there’s a sauna that is run by a German nudist on the premises of the Icehotel where you can sit in a hot tub outdoors, then take a numbing dip in a hole cut through the ice of the Torne River.

      Above all, there’s Arctic Sweden, a vast, low-lying winter wonderland of pine trees and birches, so sparsely populated that thousands of square miles are used for rocket and aircraft testing and research on global warming and the ozone layer.

      Together with parts of Norway, Finland, and Russia, the region is home to the vigorous Sami people, gatherers of cloudberries and herders of reindeer, whose history in the frozen north of Europe dates at least to the first century. About 17,000 Samis live in Sweden, where, as an ethnic minority, they have struggled to retain their language, culture, and land as homesteaders from the south pushed into Lapland and the Samis’ nomadic lifestyle has become increasingly untenable.

      Recently, however, there has been a revival of interest in the Samis. The ice Globe Theater has presented an abridged version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Sami language. The village of Jukkasjarvi has a Sami cultural center with displays devoted to the woodcarving, shamanistic religion, and hunting practices of the indigenous people. Several tours offered by the Icehotel’s adventure center introduce visitors to the Sami way of life.

      On my snowmobiling adventure, I met Kjell Nutti, a full-blooded Sami, who led the tour. Nutti spends his free time hunting, and said he’s been able to stay in the land he loves because of the Icehotel.

      He took me and two couples on snowmobiles through the forest and over frozen swamps to a Sami campsite by a lake, where he prepared a lunch of smoked reindeer meat and vegetables, accompanied by piping hot coffee and tea. Afterward, as we stood in the middle of the iced-over lake, rimmed like a fine china teacup with those shades of blue and pink, it became clear why he loves Swedish Lapland.

      Later, my dogsled trip introduced me to the canines of the region. It was led by a young Norwegian, who hitched 12 surprisingly small, spry dogs, all part husky, in front of a wooden sleigh that carried five people sitting astride in a row, including the driver. The dogs howled in disharmonious concert, straining at their halters to get going, and occasionally lapped up snow as they pulled the sleigh over the frozen Torne River. My favorite was Puss, a black female. I’d never seen a dog with such ghostly pale blue eyes.

      Flying past the village, I found it hard to imagine what Jukkasjarvi would look like in the green of summer. Later, when I walked there, bundled up and chugging along like a little engine, I thought that winter actually becomes the place. With smoke rising from chimneys and windowpanes frosted over, the small frame houses seemed quintessentially cozy. In the yard of one home, kids had built an ice palace of their own. And at the far end of town, the 18th-century wooden church, surrounded by a graveyard and a picket fence, slumbered blissfully in a cloak of snow.

      Blissful sleep was much on my mind the day of my stay in the ice room. To kill time before turning in, I had a long dinner in the restaurant, handsomely decorated with Swedish antique cabinets, paintings, and sconces. The meal started with smoked salmon stuffed with cream cheese and the house white wine, from Alsace, France. The entrée—grilled tenderloin of beef in Madeira sauce with a terrine of root vegetables—was followed by a dessert of chocolate mousse. Everything about the meal was exceptional, including the service. When I told the waiter I was sleeping in the Icehotel that night, he advised me to pass on after-dinner coffee.

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