Snow, silence and a village of lights

There is a week in early December when the sun stops bothering to rise above the hills around the village where I stayed. People here call it kaamos, the polar night, and before I arrived I imagined it as a kind of permanent midnight. It isn't. For three or four hours around noon the sky goes through a long, slow twilight, pink in the south and deep blue in the north, and then quietly gives up again.

I came for that light, and for the quiet. The village is a scatter of wooden houses along a frozen river, a shop that doubles as the post office, and a small church whose bell I never once heard. At night every window glows orange, and with fresh snow on the roofs the whole place looks like something drawn for a children's book.

On my first afternoon I walked out along the river road to a low ridge covered in spruce. The trees up here grow narrow and tall, shaped by years of snow load, and in the last light they stood against the sky like rows of dark candles. I set up the tripod in knee-deep snow and waited for the colour to peak. It took about twenty minutes and my fingers were useless by the end, but the sky went from peach to rose to a violet I have never managed to reproduce honestly in an edit.

A practical note: batteries die quickly at minus twenty. I kept two spares in an inside pocket and swapped them every half hour. Breathing anywhere near the viewfinder fogs it instantly, so I learned to hold my breath for each frame, which turns long exposures into a surprisingly physical exercise.

The second day was grey and windless. Out on the open bog behind the village the snow was so flat and even that the horizon simply disappeared; the ground and the sky met somewhere I couldn't quite locate. I photographed almost nothing. I just walked, listening to the snow squeak under my boots, and turned back when the blue started to deepen.

On the last night the clouds finally cleared. No aurora (the forecast had been hopeful, the sky disagreed) but the stars were extraordinary. With no moon and the nearest town an hour away, I could see the faint grey smudge of the Milky Way running down towards the trees.

I walked back towards the village around midnight with the camera still on the tripod over my shoulder. From the top of the hill the houses looked tiny, each one holding its own small square of warm light. That is the picture at the top of this post, and the one I've been looking at most this winter.

Next time I will stay longer, bring better gloves, and maybe learn more than three words of Finnish.