Freelance journalists (and to an unfortunate extent, their spouses) choose to live in poverty. But sometimes we meet interesting people and do interesting things. The Swedish Foreign Ministry brought me to Stockholm so that I could conduct a series of interviews about climate science and international energy policy with top officials. The trip included a two-day visit to Jukkasjärvi, site of the internationally renown Ice Hotel, an 80-room structure built entirely of snow and ice.

Big media prohibit their reporters from taking "junkets." These rules are far stricter than congressional ethics laws, if that phrase isn't an oxymoron. A colleague from the Washington Post paid for her travel and lodging out-of-pocket, with income promised from the Post for a magazine article to be published next winter. We freelancers are different.

Freelancers are bound by their own judgments, or more likely, budgets. I am writing a mainstream book for that is narrative nonfiction but not journalism. Freelance writers often accept free travel to gather material otherwise out of reach. If they declined trips, they wouldn't be freelance writers. They would be "journalists," the technical term for unemployed news-gatherers. Besides, if you don't believe I can take a trip to Sweden on the taxpayers' Kronor and not come back brainwashed, then first, bite me, and second, find a trustworthy media institution that is perfectly uncompromised by advertisers or some fear of burning influential sources.

Third, and the reason I emphasize this disclosure, bloggers increasingly think of themselves as journalists, although as far as I can tell, few have ever traveled for an "entry," or picked up the phone to ask someone questions. News-gathering is extremely expensive and time-consuming. Bloggers are able to write freely because they are not gathering news. Until journalism's broken business model finds new life, I'll take the junket. (Of course, earnings from articles written about the trip will go to compensate the junket sponsors and mitigate against any perceived conflict of interests.)

Muckraking is difficult but not impossible on a junket. If I wanted to move to Stockholm and rake muck, which I would love to do, I now at least know where to begin. Where there are human beings and money, there is corruption, incompetence and poor judgment. Sweden is no different in this regard from any other nation that has ever fenced in a perimeter and called it home. Still, on a scale ranging from "Best civilization ever!" to Nazi Germany, Stalinst Russia or Maoist China, Sweden trends toward the former.

And what a junket it was! Stockholm is decisively cold. It's the kind of weather that has gone missing of late but that I remember warmly from Chicago in the Seventies. Snow adorns cafe awnings and caulks together cobblestones. Swedes brave slush as if their feet repel water. They do. My Sauconys absorb it. Stockholm is close to what I imagined. It's dark early. Snow muffles pedestrian traffic though public squares. Stockholm's crass Euro-brand artiness oddly complements King Carl XVI Gustav's stately urban isle.

In Jukkasjärvi, 120 miles north of the Arctic circle, hot lingonberry juice flows from Ice Hotel's plastic blue pitchers as easily as Tourne River water winds through the Laplands. The hotel melts every spring and is redesigned and rebuilt every November by Ice Hotel's founders, local workers and an invited team of international artists. I stayed in a 23-degree room designed to look like "an early Arabic bathhouse," created by French artists Patrick Dallard and Santo Magonza. Internally lighted, classical columns of ice appear to support arches of snow. I later learned that instead of bearing the load of the white walls, they are decorative. The reindeer skin-lined mattress "floated" in the ice "bath." There is no quietness competitive with an igloo: Silence is not the absence of sound. It is the absorption of sound.

I've had an awful cough. The Arctic dryness did not help. I woke up, sweating in the heat-retaining sleeping bag, and felt intense soreness in my throat, as if I'd swallowed a snowmobile helmet in the Ice Bar the night before. Time is not of the essence in Jukkasjärvi. Fifteen minutes or so after my requested wake-up time, an Ice Hotel staffer came in with a cup of steaming lingonberry juice, which dissolved my laryngeal helmet like water absorbs sugar.

Lingonberry juice! Lingonberrries! They covered my crepes in Stockholm and reindeer steak in Jukkasjärvi. The tingly sweetness is equidistant from your typical berry, at one end, and pure sugar at the other. My souvenir budget was limited. (Please see aforementioned comments about freelancers and elective poverty.) At 50 kronor-just north of six-and-a-half dollars-the artfully slim, wine-red bottle of lingonberry juice glowed from the shelf. What would lift my wife from the January blahs more than a piping hot cup of lingonberry juice! I could not afford to bring my wife (or myself) to the Arctic. I could bring her a bottle of Swedish crimson pride. I also managed a 30-kronor glass icicle, a concrete sculpture she didn't quite take to, and even less romantically, sample iron pellets that were mined from the world's largest slab of subterranean iron, in Kiruna.

If the word "Sweden" connotes one thing in some Americans' minds, it is "taxation." Taxes are paid in Sweden in volumes that none but ex-pat Americans would ever abide. Part of this tolerance toward government-and the northern climate-was cogently summarized by one of my Foreign Ministry hosts. The ground is crumbling under Kiruna after a century of mining iron. Unlike mining communities in the United States, where all hell breaks lose when underground mining destroys a town, Kiruna residents apparently accept the situation. They are figuring out how to deal with the situation efficiently, not protest its cause. "We are not like that," she said of knee-jerk protesters. "We are raised to like the situation," to work with it. Otherwise, the climate would create unhappiness as deep as permafrost.

Aware that visitors might not share this tax tolerance, tourists receive back their nearly 10 percent sales tax upon exiting the country. I charged about $53 for my wife, who deserves better. Once refunded, the sales tax would amount to less than five dollars.

I filled out "duty-free" paperwork in the Ice Hotel's souvenir store. The gift-store clerk taped the bag shut and sealed it with a code number that identified it to the bureaucracy as my purchase. At the airport, visitors present their paperwork, are refunded the sales tax in cash, and go on their merry way. I schlepped the sealed bag for two days, from the Swedish Arctic back to Stockholm, to Arlanda airport, for the flight back to Washington.

Packing posed an interesting dilemma. The lingonberry bottle was slight, but contained far more liquid than European Union airport security accepts. This means that I needed to pack it. Only I could not pack it because by opening the sealed bag I would lose my five-dollar tax refund. Incidentally, five dollars is more than I have received in refunds from the U.S. federal government in recent memory.

There was nary a soul at the airport's information desk. A voice through the courtesy phone instructed my Post colleague and I to pass through security and collect our sales-tax refund inside the terminal. Bad move.

In fairness to the Keystone Swedish transportation Kops I am about to pitilessly malign, I completely forgot that the bag contained more than a squirt of lingonberry juice. After two days of schlepping around this sealed white bag with fun things for my wife, I had come to think of it as nothing more than a sealed white bag with fun things for my wife.

Out of the x-ray and into the fire! A balding, middle-aged man picked up the sealed white bag. He smirked at me, in the way that sad, powerless men smirk when they find themselves in a position of authority over someone a head taller than they. "You bought this two days ago," he said, as if his context were apparent. He also questioned why the bag was sealed, which sealed bags generally are-I think by definition. He said that I could not bring the bag past security, because the transaction occurred two days prior. Duty-free rules only applied to day-old purchases. He was unable to explain the logic of this, particularly given that Swedish stores from the 55th parallel to the 68th, from Norway to Finland, hand out sales-tax refund slips as if they were social services, or water. But Swedish and EU laws together demanded the bag be simultaneously opened and sealed. Schroedinger's cat would have loved my lingonberry juice. I asked if the Swedish government would reimburse me for confiscating sequestered material that it required I sequester.

Then a funny thing happened. The man disappeared-poof!-and with him went the rule that two day-old sales-tax collections reside irretrievably in the Swedish treasury.

Replacing him was a humorless, sexless woman who, when incited, argued that the bold-type name on her security badge was not public information. I found this line of argument unconvincing, for two reasons. First, her security badge broadcasted her name for all who can read. Also, seconds prior, I was made to remove my shoes in public as strangers catalogued everything of value that I own on a government-owned color monitor. She seemed to miss this irony and demanded my name, a reasonable quid pro quo, yet in the end absurd since she was holding my passport and boarding pass. She scribbled my personal data on to a piece of paper, as if airline computers had not anticipated my arrival that morning and then logged it electronically when I presented my documents. Backed-up computer records and continuous airport video surveillance notwithstanding, paper copies are nice, too, sometimes, I suppose.

The Norse gods intervened when she handed off my paperwork to a delightful, levelheaded colleague. He ushered me into the terminal and carried my bag of violations. I was grateful for his Zen-magnitude calm. He escorted me to the duty-free counter, where I received my sales tax refund: four dollars and a pocketful of Kronor. From there, we walked to the departure gate, where he handed off my white bag of red juice to a flight attendant, who stored it in an undisclosed location on board. "You must be the guy with the lingonberry juice," a cheery SAS flight attendant said on board. "Sometimes they follow the rules too closely," he said, in a welcome fit of sanity and humor.

Upon arrival in Denmark, the flight attendant handed me the white bag. But my stopover in Copenhagen meant the lingonberry juice-or depending on your point of view, everyone else-was still in jeopardy for the flight to Washington. Defeated, I took out the lingonberry bottle, scribbled "Skål!"-pronounced SKO-ahl, Swedish for "cheers"-on the label and stealthily handed it to him. He made the bottle disappear faster Casablanca's Captain Renault stuffed ill-gotten roulette winnings in his pocket. Whether the flight attendant put it away for later enjoyment or impounded it remains a mystery. He was a good sport, and I never would have gotten the bottle past the Danes, our NATO allies, who I imagined, are even tougher on lingonberry than their northern neighbors.

The Copenhagen airport does not re-screen all connecting passengers. But I was a marked man. At the gate, two airport security personnel signaled for me to enter a private screening area as passengers boarded. They checked through my things methodically and professionally. The intrusion angered me. After a five-minute cool down I realized that if there had been a threat even more dangerous than lingonberry juice-say, Toblerone- I would have been grateful that the surveillance and second-search were conducted.

Lingonberries are an imagined threat. Terrorism is not.

I witnessed the World Trade Center murders of Sept. 11 and gagged on the towers' dust. A February 1996 bus bomb in Jerusalem killed the most thoughtful and pious humanist I have ever called a friend. Countless thousands of police, security agents, screeners and miscellaneous surveillance workers in five and a half years have made a Sept. 11 copycat attack a virtual impossibility. Thanks to the near-perfectly idiotic liquid restrictions, terrorists are dissuaded from potential triacetone triperoxide bomb attacks, like the one foiled in August 2006.

But my lingonberry episode is hard to bear. The generals are always fighting the last war. Airplane and shipping cargo do not vote, as air passengers do, and therefore receive less or no scrutiny at ports of entry. Politicians have made the terrorist threat abstract, either as a cynical political tactic or because the small, localized risk of catastrophic terrorism absorbs attention from other preventable causes of death that kill by the millions: car accidents, civilian gun violence, seasonal flu.

As a result, we now live in a world where Swedes see threat in a lovely bottle of lingonberry juice.

On the other hand...

Whatever good, air-travel karma I earned from Schroedinger's lingonberry was exhausted on the flight to Dulles. I'd decided to carry around by hand another souvenir for my wife-the delicate glass icicle-so that it would not shatter in a carry-on or the overhead compartment. In a fit of absent-mindedness epic even by my own standards, I lost track of it at one point. Flight attendants rightfully panicked when they found the wrapped glass icicle in a bathroom: a long, slender package, just long enough to suggest its contents could be a stick of dynamite.