After bopping around Helsinki, we boarded the day train up to Rovaniemi. The views from the train alternated between modern bustling cities, idyllic hamlets or villages, and a whole bunch of lakes and forests. What there wasn’t was hills; it makes for efficient train-ing, but a certain sameness of the scenery.

The next day, we took a hired automobile further into Lapland, along a well maintained highway—that at one point doubled as a runway, with six times the normal width and painted markers on the tarmac. The whole area up to Kakslattenun still presented as level, or with trivial grades. Then, on the final push to Ivalo, something new: we started up a pass near Magneettimäki (Magnetic Hill).

We were rising at the same time that the trees were shrinking. Just a little ways to the south, the pines and birches reached the same 40′ that we’d seen hundreds of km south on the train, but now both varieties tapered from that height to 10′, then 5′, then to almost nothing. Near the summit, both sides of the road bristled with outsized snow fencing; these fences aren’t your run-of-the-mill Wyoming snow fences, nah: these were 12′ high, in multiple stretches aligned to multiple azimuths. The arrangement looked not so much haphazard as reactive, as if after the first blizzard blocked the road they put in fences to defend for it, but the next blizzard came with winds from another direction, and that too prompted new fences, and so forth for the next blizzard. The hillsides, scrubbed of trees, and of small shrubs, could barely hold on to the low tundra coverings.

We came down the other side of the pass and the normal pattern returned, the trees regained their stature, and now the mild relief of the land seemed different, no longer mundane, but showing that the forest is a badge of success, that plant life has progressed as far as is possible.