…….

When morning comes we’re somewhere above Skellefteå. A railroad employee breaks the night-long intercom silence to announce an upcoming stop and I slide sleepily back into the rhythmic sound of train against track. We’ve been plodding north for 12 hours. Outside our cabin window everything is very cold and very still and I see the first peak of light blue light creeping slowly up the side of the fishbowl.

The train slows to a stop. Another empty station. Some people get off for good and others only for a chance to smoke, the latter taking a gamble because the train could leave in 20 minutes or 30 seconds, no one knows. The night before my two fellow travelers and I spent nearly a half-hour drinking wine on the empty platform of an unknown city, joking about breaking a bottle over the engine car to christen our safari, but this morning I barely jump back up the stairwell before the train starts rolling again.

Long-distance trains in Finland have smoking cabs.

This isn’t Finland.

I go to the restaurant car for a coffee but they can’t break my bill and tell me to wait a half-hour. The clerks appear to be well-rested. They probably got on at the last stop. I’ve had four hours sleep and so I envy them. Outside at the next stop men in bright orange jumpsuits shovel snow off flatbeds with hand-held plows. I don’t envy them.

We get off at Murjek and are pleasantly surprised that the tiny cantina not only sells coffee, but offers it in real mugs you can take outside while you wait for the bus to bring you across the Arctic Circle.

On the bus something typically Swedish happens. In the middle of nowhere, without a house or building in sight, amidst snow drifts and frozen lakes, at a barely noticeable bus stop, somebody gets on. This happens all the time in Sweden. People get on the bus at the most isolated stops, inexplicably popping up miles from the nearest city or settlement as if they just climbed out of the ground to catch the bus. Stranger from a strange land in tow, we rush past the Polcirkeln sign and onto the top of the world.

Soon enough we’re in Jokkmokk, our destination, a small little frontier town in Swedish Lapland, a pastel outpost with a population of 3,000 or so. For more than 400 years the town has hosted the Jokkmokk Winter Market, an annual event which 1) provides opportunities to sell handicrafts and stock up on necessities for the Sami, the indigenous northerners whose territory stretches across Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway, and 2) generates tax revenue for the Swedish government.

My girlfriend and I dump our gear at the apartment we’re renting while our friend heads over to the high school that’ll be his home for the weekend, then we meet up and hit the town. Finally here – I’d planned this trip for months because it afforded the only excuse I could find to see northern Sweden in the dead of winter short of skiing or stalking the Northern Lights, neither of which seemed to justify 15 hours of travel each way.

I’m not disappointed. The market is fantastic - where else can you stock up on bear sausage, elk salami and fox hats while perusing aisles of gorgeous homemade Sami knives and mounds of fox, mink and seal pelts? Where else do reindeer - with their meat, pelts and racing abilities - serve so many human needs?

Out-of-towners swig vodka and meat is cooking everywhere; vendors hawk country western CDs, concentrated juices and socks, gloves and slippers, while the Sami, festooned in their traditional Day-Glo colored garb, wander from stall to stall. Everybody comes with their best furs on. The market shuts down more or less when the sun sets.

Nights, we soon learn, are best spent in the complex of teepees that serve as downtown Jokkmokk’s drinking hub during the market weekend. Hundreds of people gather inside the tents to drink 55-crown Norrlands Gulds and sway to American rock and Sami tunes. There’s mud and ice underfoot and massive heaters that look like jet engines blow hot air around the clock.

The market is known to beckon tens of thousands of visitors to this rural community but the night festivities appear to be popular amongst the locals themselves; almost everybody I meet is from Jokkmokk.

Outside the teepees a Sami girl asks me for a cigarette in Swedish and gets halfway into conversation before I apologize and tell her I only speak English; another woman, a nurse actually, tells me the Sami are now proud but not too long ago – “like your Indians” – were heavily stomped upon by the powers that be, and that many only drink during this festival weekend; several people tell me how warm it is compared to usual; a guy about my age ridicules the overkill police presence (there were three cops outside a tent) and says there won’t be any fights – “If there is a fight, it takes place behind somebody’s home, where the police cannot see.”

At one point a young local blonde puts her hand up the back of my five layers of shirts and shakes her head adamantly in the Arctic air. “Really? You don’t mean Brad Pitt?” my girlfriend asks.

“No, I mean Steve Buscemi,” she says, pronouncing it BOOSHemy in her Swedish tilt and rubbing my back furiously as she does so. “He is much hotter than Brad Pitt.”

Her boyfriend, easily seven years my senior, nods from across the walkway but says little. All around us revelers are drinking and laughing over fire pits and lit cigarettes, and the queue to pass security and enter the teepees is snaking through the lot. “You should write him a letter,” my girlfriend offers. “He’d probably sponsor your American citizenship.”

Another friendly conversation begins as a group of teenagers encircles my girlfriend and peppers her with questions about covering Dropkick Murphys for a music magazine. They can’t believe they’ve found a kindred spirit, let alone one who has seen the band live and enjoyed special access at their shows. When they find out she’s seen Flogging Molly too, they all but fall to their knees in the snow.

“Why did you come here? How did you hear about Jokkmokk?”

The teenagers make us promise to meet them at a local drinking hole after the teepee nightlife dies down. But we don’t. It’s important to have your appetite whet.

The next afternoon we’re walking toward the market when a massive, low-set automobile eases into my peripheral vision and begins rumbling up the snowy street toward us, moving slowly like it’s stuck in a primitive stop-action movie.

We’re above the Arctic Circle.

We’re 16 hours by train from Stockholm, the only sincerely major Swedish city.

We’re in the cold middle of nowhere, in a part of the world only shared by eight countries, in a part of the world only two people I’ve ever met have been to, and coming right up the street toward me is an early 1970s Cadillac.

The windows are fogged up but I can tell it’s full of people. I stare as it rumbles past, forgetting to take a picture though my camera hangs about my neck. What the hell is a Cadillac doing here? As it passes we realize it’s not only an early 1970s Cadillac, it’s one with old-style plates from Oregon, United States of America.

We’re so far from the Pacific Northwest I don’t know which way is quicker – up through Alaska, across the Bering Strait and northern Russia, or across the states, onto a ferry and up through Europe to the Arctic. It turns out of view and we hit the market, where we buy bear meat, elk meat, reindeer pelts and Sami handkerchiefs. But for the rest of the night, I’m only thinking about the Cadillac. How is it here? What’s the story?

Later that night a Sami girl outside the teepees invites me to a traditional dance. For whatever reason, I’m absolutely certain that I’ll find out the story of the Cadillac if I go. So I don’t.