TROMSO, Norway — Last night I slipped on ice. While rushing out the door to meet friends, I skipped the tedious donning of ice-gripping microspikes over my winter boots. After all, it’s early spring, and just a few hours earlier the streets had been clear and wet. But my first step down the steep hill into town was as dizzying as a step into clear space. After a few seconds of speed-skating, and a glimpse of bright-studded sky, I landed on my left shoulder with an audible crunch. I couldn’t tell if the sound was ice or bone.
“In Norwegian, we call it hålke,” a flaxen-haired emergency room doctor told me this morning after I woke up limp-armed and took the 20-minute bus to the north end of Tromsø island. Hålke is the extra-thin, slippery ice that forms over roads and paths when temperatures drop, she said. Blindhålke is the kind you can’t see. “In this season, cases like yours are very common,” she told me sympathetically, handing me a referral to the X-ray department.
So on this brilliant late March afternoon, I’m beginning this dispatch from a plastic chair in the hospital waiting room. Around me, over the mechanical beep of instruments, a handful of fellow infirm are speaking in the rough northern dialect that, after eight months of Norwegian lessons, I’m still learning to follow.
Since the first snowfall last mid-November, I’ve also been training in the languages of ice and snow. Every day seems to deliver fresh vocabulary. With each first step out the door, my eyes and feet work together as clumsily coordinated instruments, like a child tracing novel ink-shapes with an unsteady fingertip. Those early winter days began with caution: first a heel-roll to sense for ice pebbles that are slippery as marbles, then a toe-push to feel for either slick ice or the easy give of slush. Only then would I proceed, my body testing its unsteady rhythm over ever-novel surfaces.
I come from a landscape that does not so thoroughly reshape itself, seasonally growing and molting its layers. In Northern California, phase changes arrive in subtler flavors, with the taste of autumn rot or the greeny smell of winter hills. When I moved to the Northeast for college, the first winter stunned me. At night, I would step outside, drop my head back, and watch falling snowflakes until they seemed to reverse direction, pulling me headfirst through outer space. I remember the moment I first reached out a finger and realized that a flake’s perfect paper-cutout shape was, indeed, visible to the naked eye. For so many strange structures to tumble from all over the stratosphere and not only adhere to each other, but reconstruct an entire topography, seemed like an impossibly audacious collective infrastructure project.
Over the past half-year of stamping, sliding, shoveling and skiing my way through this Arctic city, ice and snow have defined my mobility. Yet these precipitatory forces are themselves mobile, and each phase change reshapes how I traverse the surface. Winter creates a remarkably kinetic landscape; it can in a single afternoon white-dust the world and then, in the extraordinary increments of flake-following-flake, utterly transform it.
To navigate such a shifting scape is to live in conversation with it. Some mornings, I can hardly push my door open and have to dig for a shovel-handle to carve myself a narrow prisoner’s escape. Other mornings, particularly if I’m rushing, I’ll get away with a few boot-filling leaps. But if I delay, I know I’ll pay: A fresh fall forms an aerated pile, still aloof and unattached. As the day progresses, I know, its crystals will familiarize and condense into firm and shovel-resistant matter. (Snow physicists call this process—in which hexagonal crystals change structure and become round and adhesive—“destructive transformation.”)
In an Arctic winter, ice is the protagonist. And like any good character, she’s dynamic and evolving. I should have known as much before I trusted a clear, wet street, in all its spring-heralding promise, to stay that way for long.
At 4:30 one early March morning, flashing lights flooded my third-story window, and an industrial beep was followed by a teeth-shaking metallic scrape. I pushed aside my curtain and groaned at the sight of two yellow trucks gathered in the white-tinged darkness below. Their task was to clear the roads before the first bus. To meet it, they were pushing all the snow from this street—and this entire town, it seemed—into a pile directly under my bedroom window.
That pile is a snøhaug, or snow mound: a landmark of a snowed-in municipality. Throughout the day, yellow diggers and their snow-carrying companions buzz through town, scoopers skinning black pavement with an impressive guttural drag. All that snow has to go somewhere, and unofficial pile-points—outside the movie theater, the library, my house—usher a new and unexpected topography: mounds and hillocks, dirty and lumpy and ever-changing. As the days of snowfall succeed each other, the pile under my window grows up toward me. In case of fire, I thought, at least I have an escape route.
That is, if it’s not already claimed. One Saturday morning, I opened my curtain and was eye-to-eye with a narrow blue squint set in a pale ruddy face. Later, I learned, it’s a common game for local kids: Kongen på Haugen, or king of the hill, in which the first to summit the snøhaug peak can claim it. My haug had its kong, and for the next few weeks he guarded it fiercely. In the early evening and on the weekends, trudging up the slick hill, I learned to expect this small neighbor-boy perched territorially atop the pile, peering grimly down at me from his sentinel. When I waved, he watched me unmoved, as disciplined as the Queen’s Guard in a puffy blue parka. Fair enough, I figured. He already has much more claim to this place than I do.
In the language of ice, Arctic children are true native speakers. One afternoon, while seated in my living room, I watched out the window as a gaggle of preteen boys in hoodies assembled at the top of my hill. Pushing each other for the lead place, they lunged, half-turned, then slid sideways, sneaker-first, clear down three precipitous blocks of black ice, gaining impossible speed before easily hopping left onto the sidewalk at the hill’s bottom. Their ease at velocity made a strange kind of sense: Like surfers on a lethal wave, they seemed to master the dynamism of ice by moving at the pace it demands.
It’s a grace I’ll never achieve. Much like with languages, months of progress seemed only to reveal the extent of my ignorance. Most days, I pull on those microspikes just to make it down my hill, and learn to habitually remove them at any doorway out of respect for interior floors. Even as I’ve gained confidence, a few arm-swinging near-misses have checked my pride. I take small comfort in the sight of tourists grasping each others’ shoulders and shuffling, even over the clear, heated streets of the town center. Once, while looking out my window in the depths of a blizzard, I saw a woman crawling on all fours up the hill before climbing into the safety of her car.
It comes as no surprise that the Norwegian language has a richer vocabulary than ours for kinds of ice and snow. Skare is the thin, hard ice that forms after a thaw and refreeze. Speilblank is mirror-smooth, glassy ice, most slippery of all. Some terms feel adaptable to the English language: Stålis, or steel ice, is best for skating, while Kramsnø, cram-snow, is the best for packing into snowballs. And, comically, snørrføre (literally, “snot-snow”) perfectly captures the dirty, wet slush of early spring. To me, it’s a dictionary of hazards.
Dangers don’t lurk only underfoot. One dark January morning, as I passed under the low-hanging roof of my garage, I experienced something akin to the warning system of thunder and lightning: First I heard a glittering windchime melody, then felt the painful thud of what seemed like three heavy carrots dropping on my head. I yelped, ducked and only then saw the long line of icicles (Norwegian: istapp) dripping from the tin roof-edge, the first three shattered at my feet. So I learned to walk closer to the wall and watched, with time, as the long, sharp tendrils grew back, reaching toward the ground like winter’s ivy.
Icicles, istapper in Norwegian, melting on the author’s roof
* * *
The Sámi people native to this high North landscape count eight seasons. Four of them involve snow. Slicing finer than the blunt concept of “winter,” these seasons mark distinct climatic phases as they correspond to a reindeer’s life cycle: through migration, mating, calving and slaughter.
From late October to December, Čakčadálvi is akin to autumn-winter, the period right after mating season when snows begin to fall and food becomes scarcer, ending with a migration inland to winter pastures. Dálvi, from December to February, takes place on these fields, where cold and high winds produce a light, dry snow—easy for a reindeer snout to dig through for lichen. Giđđadálvi, or spring-winter spanning February and March, can bring wetter snow, more challenging to graze. Then Giđđa marks the transition between April and May, when the snow begins to melt and herders follow the reindeer back to the summer calving lands along the coast (including many of the islands surrounding Tromsø).
In a landmark 2012 paper titled “The Silent Language of Snow: Sámi traditional knowledge of snow in times of climate change,” the linguistics scholar Inger Marie Guap Eira established for the first time that Sámi reindeer herders have the world’s richest snow-terminology—even more complex than that of the Inuit. In Kautokeino, a majority-Sami town settled around winter grazing pastures, Eira asked hundreds of herders to keep field diaries of the conditions they witnessed and experienced. With those texts, she identified and mapped a remarkable 318 unique snow-related terms—all specific to this region.
Eira observed that herders take two distinct linguistic approaches to identify types of snow. The first is more familiar to Western scientific tradition: describing snow by its physical properties, including consistency, structure and temperature. The second approach may feel less intuitive: describing snow specifically in terms of reindeer survival. Terms like those have to do with the snow’s amount, density, load-bearing capacity, snowfall conditions—all told in a reindeer-herding context.
Strung together, the individual words create “snow concepts,” which, Eira writes, are “complex categories” that “contain and include many factors simultaneously, such as information of snow, snow conditions, snow physics, weather, temperature, location, time and impacts of animals and humans.”
The single word Guoldu, for example, manages to capture what we’d need a sentence in English to describe. Roughly, it’s snow blown up by the wind, creating a loose, swirling and disorienting flurry. Ciegar is soft snow with a deceptively hard crust, to be avoided when traveling by sled.
Such snow concepts present a remarkably sophisticated codex of knowledge. And they reveal a highly dynamic method of observation and interpretation. According to these structures of the Sámi language, you can’t cleanly separate snow from reindeer, or reindeer from humans; rather, they are mutually influencing forces, understood in relationship to one another. The keen observations compiled by this “specialist language,” Eira argues, is both a climate record and toolkit to observe and respond to future change. For that reason, she writes, “reindeer herders’ traditional knowledge…must be included in adaptation strategies for climate change.”
In the 13 years since her paper’s publication, climate change has continued to challenge the limits of language. In February, I drove five hours southeast to Eira’s town of Kautokeino to meet Anders Oskal, secretary general of the Association of World Reindeer Herders. To my untrained eye, Kautokeino’s flat white scapes seemed just as suited for winter grazing as Eira described. But Oskal corrected me: That week, high temperatures and wet snow had created a “grazing crisis.” If reindeer can’t get under the snow to the lichen below, they will starve. So herders had resorted to feeding the animals—a last-ditch practice they abhor since it fundamentally alters a 10,000-year-old transhumanistic relationship.
Oskal said that reindeer herders are “hit twice” by climate change. First by the transformation of the environment on which they depend, and then by climate mitigation, as Europe’s green energy development concentrates around the north. “If one mountain is iced over, we would typically go to the next mountain. But if that mountain is occupied by a mine, or windmills, or tourist cabins, it’s challenging,” he said.
Now more than ever, Oskal told me, we need Sami ways of understanding to navigate the challenges of the unknown future. But in the state’s attempt to curb its worst effects, it is paradoxically threatening the foundations of this knowledge.
“We reindeer herders know a few things about climate variability, and we are not inherently afraid of nature or what it’s capable of,” Oskal said. “But now the climate is changing beyond that natural variation that we understand. It’s an open question where this is headed.”
* * *
Norwegians call it Førrefall, roughly meaning “snow decay,” or the period when spring begins to win over winter. After the March 21 equinox, a switch seemed to flip, and the floodlights of the midnight sun season returned. I dug out my blackout sleep mask and relearned to slumber through the incessant bray of seagulls. And I felt the reverse of autumn’s rapid darkening. Over just a few busy weeks, a 5 a.m. sunrise leapt back to 4 a.m., and an 8 p.m. sunset stretched to, and well past, 9 p.m.
Absent clouds, the sun doesn’t just illuminate snow; it annihilates it—revealing nearly forgotten textures and hues. The effect is similar to scratching at a coat of paint to expose a vibrantly patterned wallpaper. After months accustomed to squeezing through a crowded, bleached-out front porch, I found myself surprised to re-encounter its deep resiny color and roomy dimensions.
Day by thawing day, I watched ice migrate across that porch like an accelerated glacial drift. Over the course of a week, high winter walls shrank down into low-sloping shoulders until just a few white mounds on slick, dark wood chased each other over the edge of my balcony and exploded on asphalt three stories below.
Still, spring is a temperamental season. Around town, hopeful pots of tulips enjoy one day sunning and the next packed with snow, their yellow buds cresting like the mouths of baby birds in a frozen nest. On one of the last days of March, 15 hours of whiteout suddenly cleared to a strange 9 p.m. dazzle that, after dinner, tempted me outside to enjoy a much-belated afternoon.
Spring snows are the most dramatic, mutating a Christmas-postcard image into something more absurd. Over just a few days, the sheer weight of snow turned municipal structures Seuss-like: street lamps capped with stately top hats and benches bulging with rounded bodies. Then sudden warmth melted them into surrealist shapes, tipping over and slipping away from themselves in mobile, lopsided death.
But these changes are themselves part of a longer timescale of accelerated instability. Arctic temperatures are rising an average of four times faster than on the rest of the planet, and with those swings come even more erratic weather. Spanning the long archive of Tromsø winters, the last few years have been going off-book. December brought record-setting precipitation, then March did, too. On the surrounding mountain slopes, unpredictable melts triggered an unusual number of avalanches this year.
Ice is also at the center of a global story. Arctic sea ice, which helps regulate planetary temperatures, is currently going extinct—and the Arctic Ocean may experience its first ice-free summer day as soon as 2027. As this cooling mechanism disappears, our oceans and atmosphere are changing in ways we still don’t understand, with some consequences we know and many more we can’t foresee.
* * *
Two weeks after my fateful fall, I got a call from an orthopedic surgeon. My shoulder was in fact fractured. Luckily, it wasn’t displaced, so all I have to do is wait four more weeks until it’s healed. The important thing is to not slip again. So, after months of gaining confidence traversing the lingua glacies, I’m treading even more carefully over the shifting ground. In the waking liveliness of this season, it feels wrong to slow down. But it has given me an opportunity to watch the patterns of this Arctic spring.
Just yesterday morning, I stopped to sit on a bench in the snow-rimmed town square. It was a bright and biting day, and I held my collar high against a fresh, expansive wind. Just a stone’s throw from the harbor, I could hear barking seagulls and the occasional ship-horn as I watched passers-by rush to work, sudden gusts lifting their scarves behind them like sails.
Then a great hooded crow touched down next to me, dropping a green tennis ball-like object from its mouth. After a few hasty pecks, it flew off. As the object rolled toward me, I realized it was a spiked sea urchin, its fleshy center pecked out. As the fisted shell settled at my foot, it tossed up a fragrance rich with sea-complexity. If this was a sign, it was impossible to read. Is spring in Tromsø the crow’s urchin-eating season? Or was this a summer cue, arriving in this erratic world far too soon?
Without the context of prior Arctic springs, I could only guess. So I chose to take it as a more neutral reminder: to try my best not to miss the revelations of this novel world as it emerges around me.
Top photo: Tromsø in early spring
