15 Dec Sweden — Fire Codes for Igloos

Something Darwinian seems to have been going on in the far north. Swedes forced to live through long, Arctic nights have developed an unwholesome tolerance for tedium. Anybody who’s suffered through the I Am Curious movies waiting for sex to happen, or Wild Strawberries waiting for the damn thing to just end, already knows what I’m talking about.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Swedish Lapland where every winter hotel workers venture out onto the frozen Torne River and quarry blocks of ice to drag ashore. They stack them into walls, smooth them into floors, arrange them into barrel-vaulted roofs and, come December, have a hotel ready to accept its first guests. By late February the hotel has grown to include a main corridor opening onto four long hallways, each lined with rooms. Then spring comes the whole thing melts back into the river.

For the few months the hotel is there, it’s not just the building that’s ice: Everything about it is ice.

Chilling with Mr Fuzz at the bar in the Ice Hotel. The walls, ceiling, floor, bar, stools, Mr Fuzz, chandeliers and glasses are all made out of ice.

The crystal chandeliers are ice. The bar. The bas relief of a lion inscribed with the words “Mr Fuzz” that watches over the bar. The bar stools. The whiskey and champagne and akvavit glasses. The decorations in the guest rooms: the filigreed screens and monstrous birds and mermaids lifting barbells. The Six-foot tall, freestanding jellyfish, the altar with a very pagan-looking deer, the Babylonian columns, the dancers and the angels, all fashioned from ice. The beds are ice, too. The one in our room was set inside an ice cave atop a curved staircase, also made out of ice.

One thing our room did not have was an ice closet so, come bedtime, we disrobed in a heated building, draped a double sleeping bag around our shoulders and raced 300 yards through the howling Arctic darkness to the hotel. Inside, the air felt warm. Or, at least it felt warm compared to the minus 29 degrees outside.

Part of the deal was that we’d be awakened the next morning with a steaming cup of hot lingonberry juice. The only thing I knew about lingonberries was that hot juice sounded really good, and that at our local Pancake House Swedish pancakes come with lingonberry syrup, and who doesn’t like Swedish pancakes? However romantic being awakened this way would have seemed in a more traditional hotel, the guy with the juice did not come in wheeling a cart with a crystal decanter and cut-glass cups. He knew better. He was from Lapland and showed up in a fur parka. Then cautiously worked his way up the ice staircase, pulled out a couple of paper cups and half-filled them with dark liquid from a tank strapped to his back like a North Pole pest exterminator.

Besides rebuilding a hotel that melts into river water every year, Swedes have an abnormal willingness to put up with the kind of bureaucracy that drives citizens of most other places to the barricades. And I’m not just talking the thousand unnatural shocks that cradle-to-grave socialized living inflicts on people. I’m talking fire codes because, each winter when they rebuild the Ice Hotel room by room, ice-block by ice-block, they chisel niches into the sides of the corridors. Niches for fire extinguishers.

One of many fire extinguishers cooling their heels in niches in the ice

IN CASE OF FIRE, BREAK ICE  And those niches aren’t the only places they have fire extinguishers. Scroll back up to the first picture . . . the one with Mr Fuzz at the ice bar . . . and notice the fire extinguisher frozen into the wall.

Fire extinguishers! The entire building is made out of water. Frozen water, but water none-the-less. You couldn’t set fire to this place with napalm. But if I’m remembering right what the football coach who taught eighth-grade general science told us, with enough heat – I’m thinking a thermonuclear flamethrower – you might be able to ignite the metal in the fire extinguishers.

There you have it. The only flammable objects in the entire place are the fire extinguishers – except, of course, that by the time you got them hot enough to catch fire they wouldn’t, because they’d be at the bottom of a river of melted walls, ceilings, floors, chandelier crystals, bars, bas reliefs of Mr Fuzz, bar stools, drinking glasses, filigreed screens, monstrous birds, mermaids, barbells, freestanding jellyfish, altars, pagan-looking deer, Babylonian columns, dancers, angels, ice caves, beds and curved staircases.

If any of you Fellow Ramblers have access to a nuclear-powered flamethrower and want to try this, let me know. I’ll buy you a ticket and arrange for a film crew. It would make the best movie ever to come out of Sweden.