The Santa Claus Express, South Again

Before the train, there was Santa Claus Village, lit up purple and red against a sky that had gone fully dark by mid afternoon the way it does this far north in December. The actual Arctic Circle marker stood in the middle of it, a red lantern post with ARCTIC CIRCLE lettered straight down its length, a small lit Christmas tree propped beside it like a stand-in for scale. Further in, a triangular wooden building with SANTA CLAUS ARCTIC CIRCLE lettered up its peak turned out to be exactly what it sounded like: an office, apparently, for a man who technically lives at the exact line separating one hemisphere's worth of latitude from the other.

I stood at the marker longer than the photo itself actually needed, less because there was anything more to see and more because it felt like the kind of place a person is supposed to stand still in for a moment before moving on, an invisible line in the snow that somehow still deserved a pause.

The train back toward Helsinki carries an official name, the Santa Claus Express, which felt like the correct way to leave a place that had spent the last two days living up to its own marketing rather than undercutting it. Overnight again, the same rhythm as three weeks of trains before it, Rovaniemi's version of a splurge already receding into the kind of memory that does not need repeating to stay vivid.

One splurge behind me, and one delayed flight still ahead.

I spent most of the ride the way I had spent most rides on this trip, slumped forward in a reclined seat with my head down somewhere around the tray table, half asleep, half watching a landscape I could not always name go past a window I was not actually looking through anymore.