Arctic Circle

Time was, when folks drove east on Route 22 past Churchville, food, cars, golf and good times were available in abundance. The Big M Drive-In and Outdoor movies folded and the Aberdeen Cattle Auction is no more. Still, one Churchville landmark - the Arctic Circle - continues to draw crowds. The Arctic Circle began in 1966 when Ellis Reeves stopped selling ice cream in Washington and took over the soft ice cream stand. "I had tough times, no work, so I went to work for Freezey Palace driving an ice-cream truck in the nation's capital.

It's a crisp, cold morning. Inside our recreational vehicles, we don fleece jackets and sweatshirts as the temperature hovers just below freezing. Ice has formed on one of the kettle ponds we are parked alongside in the vast Arctic tundra. As we step outside, the red and yellow colors of fall are all around us. It is August in Canada's famed Yukon Territory. Few vistas in this world are as spectacular as the land above the Arctic Circle. The tundra is truly a magical place, stretching as far as the eye can see, a place that few people ever experience.

"Lovers of the Arctic Circle" is an exceedingly graceful and absorbing iteration on a theme that has been all the rage recently: the element of chance and fate in bringing potential lovers together.This has been explored with perky inventiveness in movies like "Sliding Doors" and "Next Stop Wonderland" and with New Age earnestness in tear-jerkers like "City of Angels," but director Julio Medem takes a more sophisticated tack. He infuses "Lovers of the Arctic Circle" with fable-like wonder, romantic innocence and subtle eroticism.

FLOATING RESORTS. YOU CAN KEEP THEM. You know the kind of cruises I mean: tropical cocktails, gift-shop islands, sun-and-deck chair afternoons. When I'm at sea, I want adventure. Cresting waves, puffs of wind, the works. This is why I find myself onboard a Russian icebreaker that is hardened to cut through icebergs and glaciers and is churning north. Next stop: the Arctic Circle and the coast of Greenland. Polar bears will be there, I hope, and maybe some whales and snowy owls. If we make it, I will down a shot of Smirnoff with the crew, not a pina colada.

FLOATING RESORTS. YOU CAN KEEP THEM. You know the kind of cruises I mean: tropical cocktails, gift-shop islands, sun-and-deck chair afternoons. When I'm at sea, I want adventure. Cresting waves, puffs of wind, the works. This is why I find myself onboard a Russian icebreaker that is hardened to cut through icebergs and glaciers and is churning north. Next stop: the Arctic Circle and the coast of Greenland. Polar bears will be there, I hope, and maybe some whales and snowy owls. If we make it, I will down a shot of Smirnoff with the crew, not a pina colada.

Ellis V. Reeves, whose double-thick milkshakes and soft ice cream cones kept the crowds coming for decades to his Churchville drive-in, died of heart failure Saturday at Union Memorial Hospital. He was 88. Mr. Reeves was born in Sparta, N.C., raised in Bel Air and graduated from Bel Air High School in 1936. After working as a Harford County dairy farmer and driving a Freezey Palace ice cream truck in Washington, Mr. Reeves teamed with his brother-in-law in the 1950s as co-owner of the Twin Kiss soft ice cream stand on Martin Boulevard.

ROVANIEMI, Finland -- It all started in Asia Minor, now Turkey. A good-hearted bishop named Nicholas, the legend goes, saved poor girls from prostitution by throwing bags of gold coins through their windows and down a chimney.Over the next 1,700 years, with a little help from Dutch settlers in North America and poet Clement Clarke Moore, St. Nicholas became a merry old gent with a white beard and red suit who spends most of Christmas giving heaps of toys to good little girls and boys.Today, any child can see Santa by taking a short ride to the local shopping mall, from Tokyo to Towson.

A couple of years ago, life for Adam Kikpak in the Canadian Arctic Circle town of Kugluktuk was about little more than what he called "bad stuff" and "bad people." The teenager lived on a steady diet of drugs and alcohol, dropping in and out of school and stumbling into minor trouble. Then he picked up a lacrosse stick. "It really changed my life around," said Kikpak, now 18, sober and resolved to graduate from high school in 2005. "You feel good when you go back to school and you play sports."

So you've been sending those letters to Santa Claus to the North Pole. Ho! Ho! Ho! Maybe that's why you didn't get what you wanted for Christmas.According to the Finnish Tourist Board, Santa's official address is Arctic Circle, 96930 Rovaniemi, Finland, on the Arctic Circle in an upscale artisan center and entertainment park within sneezing distance of Rovaniemi, capital of Finnish Lapland. Remote as it is, it draws visitors from Asia and North and South America as well as from all over Europe.

Thirty years ago people probably would have said pianist Helene Grimaud "plays like a man." That's because the 24-year-old French musician often chooses muscular pieces once considered practically off-limits to women -- such as Brahms' First Piano Concerto, which she performs this week with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. And she plays them with a passionate lack of inhibition that would have been hard to accept before the feminist revolution of the 1960s."Some people may still be surprised that a woman [pianist]

Ellis V. Reeves, whose double-thick milkshakes and soft ice cream cones kept the crowds coming for decades to his Churchville drive-in, died of heart failure Saturday at Union Memorial Hospital. He was 88. Mr. Reeves was born in Sparta, N.C., raised in Bel Air and graduated from Bel Air High School in 1936. After working as a Harford County dairy farmer and driving a Freezey Palace ice cream truck in Washington, Mr. Reeves teamed with his brother-in-law in the 1950s as co-owner of the Twin Kiss soft ice cream stand on Martin Boulevard.

Time was, when folks drove east on Route 22 past Churchville, food, cars, golf and good times were available in abundance. The Big M Drive-In and Outdoor movies folded and the Aberdeen Cattle Auction is no more. Still, one Churchville landmark - the Arctic Circle - continues to draw crowds. The Arctic Circle began in 1966 when Ellis Reeves stopped selling ice cream in Washington and took over the soft ice cream stand. "I had tough times, no work, so I went to work for Freezey Palace driving an ice-cream truck in the nation's capital.

Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air, by Gregory Dicum. Chronicle Books. 175 pages. $14.95. Overriding current anxieties of commercial flying, Dicum celebrates the joys available by choosing the window seat. "The food might be utilitarian, the seat cramped, and your neighbor annoying," Dicum writes. "But the sheer pleasure of contemplating our planet from 35,000 feet (about 6.5 mi., or 10.7 km) in the air is worth any price. A century ago, nobody on Earth could have hoped to see this view."

A couple of years ago, life for Adam Kikpak in the Canadian Arctic Circle town of Kugluktuk was about little more than what he called "bad stuff" and "bad people." The teenager lived on a steady diet of drugs and alcohol, dropping in and out of school and stumbling into minor trouble. Then he picked up a lacrosse stick. "It really changed my life around," said Kikpak, now 18, sober and resolved to graduate from high school in 2005. "You feel good when you go back to school and you play sports."

AKUREYRI, Iceland - It is nearly midnight at the Akureyri Golf Club - the northernmost 18-hole course on the planet - but you'd never know it from the activity. Small throngs of diehard golfers, from a group of six alcohol-fueled Reykjavik businessmen to electrical contractor Jim Boudreau from Worcester, Mass., are intently whacking little white orbs deep into the nighttime sky. Local wildlife is acting a bit strangely, too. Birds that should be sleeping scratch in the dirt, and shaggy-maned Icelandic horses gallop in nearby fields.

HAFNARFJORDUR, Iceland -- This can be a tough country for blasting out a foundation or constructing a roadbed.Never mind the boiling geysers, wind-blasted precipices or frozen barrens. It's not the razor-sharp lava rock that daunts builders; it's the hidden people lurking below."There are all sorts of beings beneath our stones," says Brynjolfur Snorrason, a folklorist often asked to advise contractors on how best to avoid the lairs of Iceland's elves and other seldom-seen creatures, whose presence nonetheless seems to permeate this far northern island nation.

Travelers on a Lapland Safari sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution's National Associate Program will skim across the snow north of the Arctic Circle on reindeer sleighs.The ride through the wooded wilderness, reindeer driving lessons and lunch in a traditional tepee near the town of Enontekio in northern Finland are part of an eight-day tour that departs New York Feb. 23 and will focus on the culture of the Laplanders.From Helsinki, visitors will fly to Roveniemi, just south of the Arctic Circle, which was rebuilt after World War II.The tour will visit the Enontekio and Lake Ounasjarvi area, where participants will be provided with snowsuits.

Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air, by Gregory Dicum. Chronicle Books. 175 pages. $14.95. Overriding current anxieties of commercial flying, Dicum celebrates the joys available by choosing the window seat. "The food might be utilitarian, the seat cramped, and your neighbor annoying," Dicum writes. "But the sheer pleasure of contemplating our planet from 35,000 feet (about 6.5 mi., or 10.7 km) in the air is worth any price. A century ago, nobody on Earth could have hoped to see this view."

"Lovers of the Arctic Circle" is an exceedingly graceful and absorbing iteration on a theme that has been all the rage recently: the element of chance and fate in bringing potential lovers together.This has been explored with perky inventiveness in movies like "Sliding Doors" and "Next Stop Wonderland" and with New Age earnestness in tear-jerkers like "City of Angels," but director Julio Medem takes a more sophisticated tack. He infuses "Lovers of the Arctic Circle" with fable-like wonder, romantic innocence and subtle eroticism.

ROVANIEMI, Finland -- It all started in Asia Minor, now Turkey. A good-hearted bishop named Nicholas, the legend goes, saved poor girls from prostitution by throwing bags of gold coins through their windows and down a chimney.Over the next 1,700 years, with a little help from Dutch settlers in North America and poet Clement Clarke Moore, St. Nicholas became a merry old gent with a white beard and red suit who spends most of Christmas giving heaps of toys to good little girls and boys.Today, any child can see Santa by taking a short ride to the local shopping mall, from Tokyo to Towson.