Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

We’re getting used to looking out the window in town and seeing a moose. That is, we see neighbours the other side of the road and mentally we draw a moose between them, satisfying ourselves they are keeping the required distance. Some people’s idea of a moose is more calf than adult, and other times the moose must be standing on its back legs, but usually there’s a moose there.

On the other hand, driving out along the Kalix river road the other day there were few actual moose to see. There were few people for one thing, but also few animals. They must all have been taken into town, we thought, for the purposes of measuring out helping us keep safe distances.

Perhaps you could now collect one as you entered a supermarket, bringing it with you to keep people at bay. First collect a trolley from the Trolley Park, and then a moose from the Moose Stall, attaching it to your trolley with the red ribbon provided.

It’s no easy task to manoeuvre a trolley and a moose, but it’s worth practising until you have the knack. The trolley must go ahead of you down the aisle, and then, trailing behind you, your moose. As you lean in to pick the jar of gherkins off the shelf the moose swings its heavy neck to the side, discouraging the approach of a careless youth, who is neatly diverted to another aisle.

Moving to the till area you’ll need to pull your moose tightly in behind you and discourage it from eating till snacks, browsing the magazine racks or befriending other moose in the queue. After paying you can return your moose to the Moose Stall ready for the next customer, feeding it some crunchy birch bark and stroking its nose before you leave.

In town moose might now be wandering the streets, moving between feeding stations, creating a natural distance between people who have to avoid them. Sometimes they  lie down, creating interesting barriers on the pavement. Moose on buses and trains might be encouraged to lie down over a row of seats, ensuring passengers are kept apart.

Perhaps some jobs could now be done by a moose, enabling more people to work from home. Information at the tourist office for instance. No-one comes there now anyway and even if they did it would just be their next instagrammable moment.

Late April in Kiruna, we’re not often here. Not around to watch the slow melt of metres of snow around the house, or see the fall of more snow, or then watch the melt of that snow, and so on. So repetitive, and all in that damn bright light. It’s called ‘spring tiredness’ in Sweden.

Feeling rather tired we were slumbering in the middle of the day, taking a break from reading news of the world crisis, or taking a rest from one of our many self-improvement projects (music theory, drawing skills, book production, bird watching, whatever). Then there was a shake of the house and a muffled bang.

At a time when our world feels increasingly uncertain, a sudden ‘expected seismic event’ from the mine – an earthquake basically – can make us shudder in our shoes. The house shakes and the air thunders. The sky is falling the sky is falling! Oh – no -it’s just another ‘expected seismic event’, no problem. We slumber on.

But then, a steady tick, or gentle groan, repeated at irregular intervals. Unnerving in view of seismic events and cracks appearing in the basement, so we survey the room to check everything is still at right angles. It is. But still, tick tick. So quiet, not an earthquake, hardly anything really. The ear strains to the source of the sound, which is behind the floor-to-ceiling wood burner. Tick tick. Yup, that’s a drip.

Upstairs a pool of water in the bedroom leads us to the source of the leak from the roof. Up there a whole winter’s worth of snow is melting, and the path of least resistance for some of it is apparently through two of our ceilings.

That leads us to the really bad news: this means trying to find someone in Kiruna to mend it. Our previous attempts to get specialist help usually follow this pattern: ring a few companies and they all say they can’t come until tomorrow; the next day no-one comes; the next day we ring again and they say they’ll send someone, but no-one comes; we ring again – they say they can’t do that kind of repair and we need to look somewhere else; the next day we do a crash course in electrics/plumbing/drainage and work out how to do it ourselves. But this time it’s the roof, and if this is following the usual pattern, we don’t want to go there.

So today here we were, patiently, hopefully, waiting for our man. The required credit card in our hand. He’s never early – he’s always late, one thing we have to learn is you always have to wait. Waiting for our man.

Rolf waits, I go out for a walk, and when I return miraculously there are two men on the roof of our (wooden) house, smoking cigarettes. (Just remember this image when you next read something in the press about how sensible and law-abiding Swedes are.)

Rolf had appeared out the house and seen an empty vehicle and no-one there, and not thinking they might already be on the roof had returned inside.

Turns out there’s – you’d never guess it – there’s a hole. Tomorrow, one of them says – tomorrow he’ll come and fix it. Well we’ll still be here, waiting for our man.

You don’t get a lot of information about living in a world crisis in Sweden. Swedes are a stoic lot. One of my first experiences here was in Stockholm when someone on the platform deliberately smashed their arm through the window of an underground train as it pulled out the station. People around me in the train compartment had glass and blood on their faces. Nobody said a word, and at the next stop everyone calmly walked off the train.

Here in Kiruna, living alongside Covid-19, I haven’t noticed a crisis. Nothing seems very different, except that, unusually for us, we’re still here mid-April, as the ice is melting in warm sunshine and otherwise the snow is still falling. And falling. And falling. As it’s spring, the winds are strong, so the snow is blowing. And blowing. And falling.

We were due to do our once-a-week food shop, keeping our (one moose) distance from others, and stocking up where possible to avoid to soon a return to the shop. For this we need a car. The one currently held captive at the bottom of the driveway.

So yesterday I was up to my waist in snow, clutching a snow shovel and fighting my way through to the ice-covered driveway. The snow-packed wind whistled through my hat. Was this really a good way to spend Easter?

For an hour or so I loaded my shovel and pushed the heavy snow up the driveway to the side path – the only place left to dump it – slid back down to load it again, repeat. The wind bit into my face and it all felt quite a struggle.

I know, there are worse things happening in the world. But please. We don’t need no more trouble.

Perhaps for the first time in our lives, we have lost the freedom to travel where we like.

First, when there was the closure of borders on three sides of us – north and west, to Norway, and east to Finland. After that the airlines began grounding their planes, and soon ‘escape’ from the country was no longer possible. We find that we too are grounded, for the time being.

So it was a particular pleasure to meet a large flock of Whooper swans today on the open river. They had stopped by to breed, after a long flight from the south. They were bobbing up and down and dancing on the ice, and feeding deep in the water. They were still free to fly across borders, and follow their instincts. This was some consolation for us, the grounded ones.

This breed of swan have especially long and elegant necks, and they create perfect mirror images of one another as they act out their courtship rituals on the ice. I can see why they might have inspired a ballet. They were rather more elegant than I was this week, following a ballet class on Zoom in one of our now redundant guest bedrooms. Strange times.

Looking out the window at the loops and strings of tracks lacing the garden this morning it was easy to identify the run of an arctic hare. Given the number of them, probably two arctic hares. Not only that, given the wild repeating circles, back tracking, and leaping over snow piles, definitely mad March arctic hares.

This time of year, the mating period, arctic hares are active chasing one another, and deciding who to partner and where. They’re marking out territory, and though it looks a bit mad and frantic to us, to the hares it’s just what happens in March.

We’re all experiencing a bit of March madness. There’s a world crisis and in the local newspaper this week it was announced that Kiruna is giving out ‘pyssel’ packets. ‘Pyssel’ is a Swedish term for fiddling around making unnecessary things – in this case, Easter decorations to put in the window. That’s what you need during a world crisis – ‘pyssel’, and plenty of it.

Focus on ‘pyssel’ is a fairly common Kiruna reaction to a crisis. For very many years we’ve had what you might call a bit of a crisis locally, with the mine eating away the ground under our feet. Faced with the prospect of the loss of the whole town a few years ago, local people were encouraged to come up with fanciful ideas for their future, a bit of ‘pyssel’ for the mind. No problem – they imagined a sky lift across the landscape, and a tropical jungle environment underground, and all this no doubt helped a lot. Designs for a new town were called ‘Kiruna 4 Ever!’ with a tone of celebration more suited to a birthday or anniversary party than the wholesale destruction of a town. Hardly a voice was raised in anger or despair.

So people in Kiruna have had lots of practice at facing massive uncertainty and the destruction of everything they know. They are well placed to handle the threat of the current world crisis. They know a ‘pyssel’ packet is just the job.

In Sweden the Public Health Agency is managing all the country’s decisions about the crisis, and so far it has limited itself to telling the over 70s to stay at home and encouraging everyone else to carry on enjoying themselves. You’d think people would spot the flaw in that plan but we haven’t noticed that they have, so far. The threat to the general population of a fast spreading and potential fatal infection is as nothing, it seems, to the average Swede.

Take the Government alcohol shop, for instance. Just yesterday, after reports of rising infection and mortality rates, there was a strong recommendation from the Public Health Agency that people should practice social distancing (at last!). They even suggested that retailers should ensure that customers were able to do this in their shops, and should introduce measures to enable this.

Did we find this new distance in the Government-owned alcohol shop in Kiruna yesterday? We did not. People came up behind you, beside you, towards you, even over the top of you. At the till your bottles flowed freely through and piled up on the other side, everyone’s purchases piling up together. We were reaching over and around and behind one another to collect them, like mad March hares.

Creating a safe distance between people is easier out of town. Once we had contact with someone across the other side of the river, who we could barely see, who’d noticed us with binoculars and waved. Thoreau claims people, like nations, benefit from having ‘considerable neutral ground’ between them (in ‘Walden’, 1854). He found it a ‘luxury’ to talk with a neighbour across a pond.

It makes you think, when you’re lucky enough to be out and about, what sort of distance from other people is just right. Two metres, they say now.

I’m judging it all the time. Would an extra metre feel better? At what point do you lose the feeling of connection with someone? In a supermarket queue two metres never feels quite enough.

Living in his small hut in the woods Thoreau wondered how much space we need between us. There was no room to entertain people as a group – he was glad about that – and he decided to have only two chairs. The issue for him was getting these chairs far enough apart.

Distance, he explains, gives space for thought. You need room for thoughts to move around a bit before delivering them to the person you are talking with. If all you want to do is talk a lot without thinking, then you can be as close you like. But if you want to speak thoughtfully you need to be further apart, not to feel the pressure – both metaphysical and physical – from the other person.

Talking, he wrote, is like throwing stones into calm water. If two people speak too loudly, or are too close, it’s like throwing stones into calm water so close that they break each other’s outward moving ripples. More distance allows your thoughts to spread without disturbance.

I try not to be awake in the night but in these difficult times sleep is sometimes hard to come by.

Last night both of us were awake at one point. This can sometimes because we’ve been disturbed by a fall in the mine, a dull thud and vibration or a sensation as if a car has just driven into the house – an ‘expected seismic event’ as they like to call it. By the time you’re awake, though, it’s hard to know for sure what is was – all is quiet.

Our conversation in the night starts from random points of thought. Thinking of where we are, what was happening, trying not to panic. Was it the equinox today, I asked? Yes, at 04.50 today. I looked at the clock: it was 04.52. We were woken, it seems, by the equinox.

The equinox is the moment when here everything is turned on its head. Our expectation of more darkness than other parts of the world becomes instead an expectation of more light.

But today we know, everywhere in the world has (almost) the same amount of daylight. It’s a day of perfect balance, where the angles of the world make the rays of sun feel equal distances to our land masses. Not too much, not too little, just right – ‘lagom’ as they say in Swedish.

Seeing a slither or red along the horizon I sighed. Soon the light will come screaming at us, face up against the bedroom window at 2 in the morning. There will be no darkness to lull us to sleep and the daylight will be relentless, like a toddler demanding constant attention, if we should open half an eye during the night.

Conditions for skiing along the river were perfect. The air was cold and bright, and the snow felt smooth beneath our skis. Where the river narrowed there was water flowing alarmingly close to our track. Swathes of ice crystals glittered between solid ice and water. Birds flew low nearby, silently dipping beneath the water’s surface in search of food.

Apart from birdsong the air was still and silent. We skied for an hour before resting in a fishing hut and then returned along the same stretch. It seemed a marvel to discover such peace and isolation.

There was a moment’s disappointment, then, when a figure came striding towards us. We were revelling in our isolation, so someone else on our track reminded us our universe was, after all, a shared one.

As we approached one another, the walker flung her arms open and exclaimed, ‘How wonderful to meet someone here!’

Indeed it was. It was truly wonderful to meet someone who believed it was wonderful to meet someone.

Tourist organisations in Sweden are business clubs – tourism businesses promoting their own interests. So it shouldn’t be a surprise when you hear that Swedish Lapland tourism board is looking forward to the development of ‘luxury tourism’ in the area.

Let’s just back track a bit here. Swedish Lapland needs a bit of explanation. The concept is entirely for a tourist, since nowhere in Sweden is called ‘Lapland’. There was once a geographical area that had the name ‘Lappland’, but that disappeared long ago along with many other geographical names, the same time use of the word ‘Lapp’ – an old term for the Sami, with negative associations – went out of fashion, for obvious reasons.

None of this bothers Swedish Lapland. They have to explain the concept themselves: well – they say in their press pack – it’s a bit of this and a bit of that. The thing that links the different regions in the area, they say, is the ‘arctic’ cultural lifestyle. Whatever ‘arctic’ means. They claim it isn’t clear what ‘arctic’ means, which makes it a bit easier for them to fudge the issue. I thought it was clear – at least it should mean a place that’s above the arctic circle, surely? But no, to Swedish Lapland that doesn’t matter. Above or below the arctic circle, coastal or inland, it’s all called ‘Swedish Lapland’.  It’s a bit puzzling.

It’s true, they admit, that the area they call ‘Swedish Lapland’ is also called ‘Sapmi’ by the Sami – though ‘Sapmi’ is a larger region, crossing several national borders. How very confusing and complicated, they suggest, and inconvenient. Much easier to stick with an area they’ve defined themselves and call it ‘Swedish Lapland’. Though to the Sami there’s nothing at all confusing about their ancestral lands having been carved up by several other countries, and it makes perfect sense to call the area ‘Sapmi’. But the tourism businesses aren’t going to use the term ‘Sapmi’, because it isn’t what they want to promote.

So now we know that ‘Swedish Lapland’ is an area agreed on by a group of tourism businesses and marketed as a concept to tourists. You could almost say it’s a fantasy land, a region that exists in the heads of tourists but not in the head of anyone who lives here.

It’s no surprise to learn, then, that Swedish Lapland is very keen to encourage ‘luxury tourism’. Luxury naturally means more money, more per visitor head expenditure, more profit. That goes without saying. But what else does it mean?

Trying to find out about it by reading around I learn that it certainly means more expenditure – specifically it means shopping. It also means offering tourists what they feel is a unique (‘luxury’) experience. And it means offering the best quality in terms of accommodation, food, and comfort.

Getting a picture of the Swedish northern landscape here? An area where there are few towns, lots of mosquitoes, and lots of snow? No? Me neither.

To offer ‘luxury tourism’ in this part of the world requires investment and development. Places for people to spend money. Shops selling unnecessary luxury items. Hotels a cut above the average. Restaurants catering for every expensive taste. Nothing wrong with that, you might think. But wait a minute, what about Swedish Lapland‘s commitment to Eco-Tourism? Doesn’t that mean protecting the environment from development?

It’s a tricky juggling act but they’re doing their best. Colour brochures and websites sell a funny kind of hybrid tourism that’s friendly to nature, and yet, ‘luxury’. Ideally you keep your luxury tourists away from how local people actually live, and provide them with a small Disneyland of their choice. If there’s development, then you make it look as if it isn’t.

For example, there’s a very attractive development in the forest near Harads. (That’s fifty kilometres south of the arctic circle, but apparently it’s in ‘Swedish Lapland’.) Here there are ‘tree rooms with contemporary design in the middle of unspoiled nature’. There’s a building on hand to provide fine dining in the evenings, and it’s only a ‘short stroll’ from there to your tree room – that has only spoiled nature a little bit then.

Or there are cabins at a new luxury arctic spa hotel, where the designers have ‘incorporated the surrounding nature’ by using stone, wood and leather. Well I get the stone, but wood is in short supply above the tree line, and as for leather – have you ever seen a cow in the arctic? But it all looks very tasteful and commands a high per-night price. It also comes at an environmental price, but that isn’t mentioned in the marketing.

It seems to pass some people by that the most eco-friendly building is one that’s already there. No amount of bio fuel and solar panels make up for the damaging nature of wanting to be in your own private universe.

But to really understand the absurdity of ‘luxury tourism’, look no further than a company selling ‘ecological’ domes. Cleverly, these buildings avoid classification as development because they’re registered as boats. They can be placed on the ice on lakes, so there’s no need for planning permission. For the people sitting inside the view is perfect – that is until there are lots of other domes littering the lake view.

Described as ‘eco-friendly’ with solar panels and bio fuel heating, there’s naturally no mention of  the environmental costs of constructing them. It’s unlikely the guests will ski or hike out to them, so non-environmentally friendly vehicles will be required to bring them there, and back. It will be hard to leave them somewhere for any length of time because of the changing ice conditions, so each time they are transported they will need to be towed by a snow scooter or motor boat, and to go any distance will need to be towed by car. (I saw one on the road today – they are so wide that the towing vehicle was preceded by a warning vehicle – so moving them actually takes two vehicles.)

They’re marketed as an easy way of running a tourist business. Photographs show a couple lying inside the glass bubble, bare toes wiggling in the warmth, watching aurora through the panes. No need to go out in the cold, no need to meet anyone living there, no need to walk anywhere or experience any hardship. No exposure to the real environment necessary – luxury!

Snow ploughs were out in the centre of town this weekend. There’d been very little recent snowfall but there they were, moving every bit of snow from pavements, parking areas, streets. Meanwhile, in our own street, we and a few other neighbours were also active, moving snow.

It might have looked as if we had nothing else to do. As if we missed having snow to shovel so even when there was none falling we couldn’t stop ourselves from moving it from A to B, just for the hell of it.

We were moving heavy blocks of snow from deep in our garden out to the public snow pile. Dragging snow icebergs up the driveway was hard labour, and our reasons for doing this were not easy to see.

Looking down our steep narrow driveway we’d created several roofless tunnels far out to the side, each with a sloping end, like a ski jump. Elsewhere tunnels opened up into open areas, like hidden caverns.

We’d all read the forecast: continuous snow for the whole week. Driveways and parking areas fill up fast with non-stop snow and minus degree temperatures. Where were we going to put it all? We were already full to the brim around the house, snow pushed right to the limits of the space. But now we had places to push it, pile it, store it – the week ahead felt much more manageable.

As the snow falls now we’re grateful for all those spaces. We’ll be doing shifts outside every day, moving and piling up the snow around the house.

It’s meditative, moving snow. At least, that’s what I generally focus on, rather than feel exhausted, or cold, or bored. It’s repetitive, literally. You move the snow – it reappears – you move it again. You get to think.

It feels creative too, the shape of your snow piles, the tracks in the snow. As you make another tunnel you think about escape routes more generally. The snow forces you to think ahead, and it might be good to do that in life too. Not wait until you get squeezed in a corner but prepare a short escape route to store yourself, your problems, your thoughts, just in case you need it.

How you manage the snow triggers your wider thinking. The annoyance of snow falling off the shovel as you push, the snow that is lost, that you have to go back for – these are all familiar experiences in other forms in daily life.

You need patience and persistence for the up and down distances you have to cover to collect the snow, and ingenuity to amuse yourself while you do this (how straight is my line of travel? how arty is the curve of snow left behind?).

You learn to appreciate cooperation between people (one person makes a low pile and the other pushes up on top of it) and you’re grateful for the work that was done before you.

You find out that, as in life, the most useful and necessary thing to do is probably not the most obvious; you need to create space before you can fill it up.

A local ‘storyteller’ performed in Kiruna library this week. A stranger approached him in the street and said, ‘Have you ever been to Valluskoski?’ He replied that no, he hadn’t. ‘Pity,’ said the man, and walked away.

Some things are just too hard to describe – you have to be there. Nacreous clouds for instance.

These ‘mother of pearl’ clouds up in the stratosphere are very bright, wavy, multi-coloured patches in the sky. At new year we got talking to some visitors out on the street and a woman there was really keen to tell us about them. Yes yes, I assured her, we had seen them too. But she just had to show us all the pictures she had on her phone, and tell us what the clouds were. Yes, I said, they really are wonderful. But she still wasn’t absolutely sure – had we really seen them, the same ones as her? It’s as if, once they’re gone, they’re just unbelievable.

They’re so high up they don’t appear to move sideways much, though they slowly spread and shrink into shapes that merge and part over a few hours. A bit like a lava lamp, only slower, and more colourful. Or maybe, not at all like a lava lamp.

The sky can look like it’s broken and through the hole you see colours and shapes. This is indeed what has happened, since this is where the ozone layer is much thinner than it should be.

They’re visible around dawn and dusk, and as these periods are very long this far north we have more chance of seeing them. They’re formed by winds flowing over mountain tops – that’s what creates the wavy pattern. It has to be cold too, very cold.

They might look to some like UFOs – they often have a saucer shape, and they look unnaturally, eerily bright. Long after the sun has set they are beacons of light in the sky. Your brain can’t quite accept a cloud as source of light rather than something that dims the light.

I’ve been enthusing over these light effects for years and claiming they’re just as amazing as the northern lights, but they’re hard to describe, and photos of them never do them justice.

Have you ever seen nacreous clouds? You haven’t? Oh that is a pity.

I like the sign by the till in the government alcohol shop – it points to a ‘Regrets box’. Here you leave that extra bottle you picked up, just in case, the one you didn’t really need. It’s unusual to have a shop encouraging you to buy less, and we all need that at Christmas.

One way to buy less is to return things afterwards. I don’t mean after you’ve used them, but the presents you didn’t really appreciate.

I bought myself a present this year. Studs for my boots in case of icy conditions. I’m a bit traditional so even though I bought it myself, I saved it for Christmas. When I opened my own present and tried it on I realised I really didn’t appreciate it. I don’t know what kind of boots these studs were designed for because there’s no way they would attach to mine. They had to be returned.

I hunted for the receipt, a purchase made in a flurry of last minute shopping the day before Christmas Eve. Of course, those small pieces of paper had quickly been pushed out of the way to make space for everything else and were long since consigned to the bin. There was only one thing for it. Send Rolf back to the shop to plead for a refund without a receipt.

At the shop, Rolf pointed out that the studs must have been made for people with very very small feet, and the sales assistant willingly agreed. However. No receipt was a bit of a problem, so he began to search the till records to try and find the right one.

Rolf wasn’t absolutely sure of the date. Did he remember, he asked, what I’d bought at the same time? Rolf had been out of the shop at the time because, although I’d come out clutching a present for myself, I’d really been in there to buy ‘stocking fillers’ (small items to put in a sock) for him. He now had to rack his brain to remember what inconsequential items I’d given him.

Then he had a light bulb moment: well, no, he said, he couldn’t remember the items, but he did know that they would have been blue. The sales assistant looked doubtful. No really, he insisted, we gave each other a colour code this year, to try and help the buying process, and I told her to buy only blue items – so the other items on the receipt would have been blue.

Rolf and the sales assistant looked at each other for a moment.

To his eternal credit the sales assistant calmly proceeded to look for receipts which featured studs, where the other items listed could have been blue. It was probably the first time he’d ever had this particular task. It might have been the most interesting thing that happened to him at work all day.

(I hope everyone in the queue behind, waiting to pay, were making a mental note to remember the colour code idea for next Christmas.)

He was triumphant when he identified a receipt featuring studs, a blue parking card, and a blue ice scraper. I got my refund.