Finding Petronella

When I met Petronella van der Moer in 2013 and learned of her legendary 1949 adventure across Finland’s Arctic Circle, somewhere deep down I recognized I’d just touched something I badly needed.

It has taken five years, but we have arrived: to the place where my skill as a writer meets the story.

“It was not a bad highway, as highways go—long and flat and lined with evergreens and small houses—but it was a far cry from the serenely wooded trails of my imagination.

“These are people who live close to God, their god, the river.

3/14/18 I’m standing in the meadow, soles of my feet slowly freezing, wishing the body did not have limits.

The Sami woman named Leena looked me up and down.

For those of you Finnish speakers, your moment has come.

Saturday October 11, 2014 It is somewhere way deep down in the morning before the light, and I am awake.

This is it, I thought.

“You are still here!”