Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

The other day I was walking up the hill by the road taking photos of trees, bending down now and then trying different angles to catch the feeling of the light and the snow. A passing car beeped at me, rather aggressively I thought a the time. I looked up to see what it was about, and saw the driver pointing at me and the road as he drove past. It took me a few seconds to remember I was in Kiruna. It turns out he wanted to let me know I’d dropped a glove.

You can have these rather surprising experiences in Kiruna. As if the isolation of the place demands a cooperative spirit, a kind of caring for other people that is hard to find in bigger, more connected places.

A young man goes into a garage shop and buys a sausage in bread and a sweet bottled drink. The next day he goes there and buys it again. And the following day he comes in again.

We’re in the shop at the time and hear the sales assistant refuse to sell it to him.

‘This is the third day you’ve come in here for that sort of food,’ she says, turning to serve someone else. ‘Now go and get yourself a decent meal somewhere else’.

So he does.

A low mist hung over Kiruna as we drove out of town along the Kalix river. We were hoping to break into the bright sunshine ahead – there was a feeling of spring, even though it was minus 30 degrees. Sunlight in February can be fierce in a white landscape and it draws you to it after so long an absence.

We went to a favourite spot, a place on the river where it narrows so much there’s always a stream of open water. People came here in the 1800s to live off the river fish, and this close knit community survives, since most people in the village have the same name, Fjällborg. We like to walk along the river, enjoying the contrast between the thick ice on the river edges and the trickling and splashing water in the middle, shaking particles of ice as it pushes by.

It’s rare to find moving water in winter so it’s a popular place – at least with us and with birds overwintering in the Arctic. Small birds skim the water surface and you wonder how they survive these conditions. Where the water is moving the air above looks like a steam bath, the condensing humidity marking the area of ice that it is unsafe for us to walk on.

We met a man as we walked back to the car. He lives in the village, and he’s the one who drives his snowscooter in strange loops on the ice to keep paths open for bird watchers who come here. He described the birds he sees, such as the white-throated dipper, and pairs of swans that stay here all year round. Then he told us his name. Fjällborg, of course.

Driving into town we drove back into a dense mist. When we reached the main road we wondered if the water leak earlier in the day had been the cause. A mains pipe had burst near the road spewing water across it. A humid mist would have formed above the area, and the water quickly turn to ice. We don’t normally have a problem with ice in Kiruna (because the snow doesn’t melt) but a burst water pipe – open water in the street – is an instant ice rink. It caused a bit of chaos earlier in the day, a car skidding on an unexpected patch of ice, but by the time we were there it had been cleared. An area of frozen mud was visible along the road, and machines were at work heating up the ground and mending the pipes. A thick white mist still hung in the air all around, trapped by cold temperatures above.

Out at the airport an army of Volvo engineers and mechanics were testing new trucks in winter conditions. We only knew this because someone working there was staying with us. They were testing the engines, the brakes, the connections, the power supply, the living conditions in the cabs. Kiruna provides most of the tough challenges of winter, but the one thing missing is ice. They were able create it though, by releasing water onto the runway.

It was a watery, misty, icy kind of day in Kiruna.

As I’ve reported before, Kiruna’s annual ‘Snow Festival’ does little to capture the imagination. This year, perhaps, even less so.

It was a bitter minus 22 degrees in the square, and there were no signs of a crowd forming to watch the snowplough competition (small hand driven snow clearing machines). There was no queue for hot dogs outside the community centre. A handful of tourists were looking for something to do, ideally in the warm. The Ice Hotel offered a seat by the fire, no doubt in return for listening to some marketing spiel about adventure tours they run.

The Film Studio invited people to a showing of the Japanese cartoon film ‘Spirited Away’, but in this showing ‘everyone speaks Swedish’ so visitors gave that one a miss.

There were the usual snow sculptures, a couple of which brought a smile to the face. But otherwise you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d missed the festival, had come too late, too early, or to the wrong place. I don’t know if the snowplough competition ever happened – later in the day we thought we saw a machine moving the snow away that had been put there for the race. There was no-one hanging out in the town square.

On the face of it, it seems not a lot happens in Kiruna these days. An illuminated notice board in town outside one of the venues (the sports hall) advertises ‘Gravel Guts’ and ‘The Dead Cobras’, performing on 28th January. The sign has been there for at least three years. Do Gravel Guts, I wonder, perform there every 28th January and it’s just simpler to leave the sign up?

It feels as if Kiruna has run out of ideas on how to present itself and how to entertain its visitors – or perhaps it has just run out of the will to do so. Abisko draws people in by clever marketing about the aurora sky station, while Kiruna is seen as just a convenient place near the airport. Those of us who live here know that Kiruna has more to offer. It isn’t a pretty Austrian mountain village, granted, but it’s a real town with a dramatic history, and an equally dramatic present. Couldn’t we make a bit more of telling people about it? Couldn’t we try just a little harder to show that Kiruna is a fun place to be?

For example, if at the weekend Kiruna’s visitors had been directed somewhere else, just a few minutes’ walk away from the town square and the non-happening Snow Festival, then they would have seen a more interesting sight: how Kiruna itself is being ‘Spirited Away’.

Now that’s what we locals call entertainment.

You don’t go out to experience minus 25 degrees but to experience what minus 25 degrees does to the world. It can be breathtaking, a landscape made still by the cold. Even a town made still by cold is a kind of miracle. After a day of a thick cold snow mist, this morning there wasn’t a thing in town not covered by frozen snow – every twig, every pole, every fence, every window, every street sign. A layer as thick as three fingers in all directions, not just sitting on top.

It still amazes me, though I experience it every year.

You have to respect the people who work in these temperatures. This weekend at the Snow Festival there were snow sculptors at work, and the only thing that stops me feeling sorry for them is that they choose to do it. Construction workers, or – as happens in Kiruna these days, deconstruction workers – need the right gear, but then they also have small cabins to sit in on the top of their machines, so they’re probably warm as toast up there. In the past though, people just had to manage – building and repairing the railway, for instance, or reindeer herders moving with their herd in winter.

I’ve been reading a recent English translation of what is considered to be the first secular book in the Sami language: ‘An account of the Sami’ by Johan Thuri, published in 1910. Thuri describes Sami reindeer herders’ lives, how the winter migration required stamina, skill and good fortune. Survival was the goal, and anything more than that was an unexpected but welcome bonus. It was a very hard life.

Thuri sometimes describes some part of their daily lives with the word ‘hávski’ – which is translated as ‘pleasant’. It’s a surprising word to find among all the description of hardship.

For things to be ‘hávski’, according to the translator, meant that at that moment, everything was ‘exactly as it should be’. During the winter migrations there were many things that could go wrong. You needed luck on your side, as well as skill to manage the migration and stamina to sustain you. The Sami had to walk long distances with the reindeer, in biting cold conditions with only what they could carry loaded onto a few of the tamer animals. They had to climb mountains, cross rivers, erect tents in freezing winds, and stay overnight in areas without easily available firewood. The animals were liable to scare easily, and hours were spent in the cold herding them somewhere safe for the night. Children had to be cared for, meals prepared, and equipment and clothing dried before the next day’s trek. Despite all this effort, if you managed to organise things well and things worked out as they should, then according to Thuri, life could often be experienced – temporarily at least – as ‘hávski’.

Most of us will never experience anything like this level of hardship, and never have to find the inner resources to survive in those kind of conditions.

I was thinking of this yesterday, when the temperatures went below minus 20 and we were walking on the river. I was testing new boots (my old boots had begun to split and welcome in cold air and snow) and was wrapped up well. On the river it felt bone-chillingly cold, especially as the wind hit the face. Whiteness spread in all directions as an endless expanse of snow mist. Reaching the other side of the river we walked through a low forest where the trees were like giants, cranky white arms reaching out to us and waving their long pointy fingers over our heads.

It was very still, and very silent, and I was aware that my hands and feet were still warm after twenty minutes of walking. I wasn’t fighting the cold, and it was definitely ‘hávski’.

Although people think it must be hard to live so far north there’s so much here to help us through the dark cold months. Diamond dust, for instance.

You glance out of the kitchen window and the street is alive with light, there are millions of floating, dancing and falling ice crystals, gently settling on the window ledge, glittering in pinks and blues as they fall, and then twinkling like tiny distant stars from the snow beneath. As if Tinker Bell has waved her magic wand. Just like when you see the northern lights, it’s impossible to feel sorry for yourself.

January is a time you might feel sorry for yourself so there’s a lot of diamond dust about. Last night Kiruna felt as if it sat in a giant structure of light, with pillars of white shooting up into the black sky all around us. Diamond dust again.

This morning, in a clear sky and temperatures below minus 20 degrees, there was a giant candle flame on the horizon. It began as a slightly misshapen sun, peering over the brow of the hills on the edge of town. Tinker Bell waved her wand and released a ton of diamond dust, and then the ball of orange gradually stretched up and out to form a giant candle flame.

A round of applause for one of nature’s magnificent performances.

Outside the mining company’s hotel, after a meeting to discuss the administration of local land rights.(From left) Olof Olafsson Tuuri, Hjalmar Lundbohm, Mickel Mickelsson Inga, and Mickel Mickelsson Nia. (Photograph, Borg Mesch).

It’s controversial, the setting up of a mining area. Back in 1900 when the big mine was started in Kiruna, people seemed to be able to do what they wanted. It was a challenge in terms of economics, transport, communications, climate, landscape – you can read it as quite an adventure story in a kind of ‘wild west’ frontier environment. On the other hand, the damage done to the landscape and the disturbance to the Sami reindeer herding community was enormous.

In our understanding of this history, one figure is in the foreground – the mine’s first director, Hjalmar Lundbohm. He made all the decisions about developments. He wanted the town to be an ‘ideal society’, with health and social support systems and high living standards, and he seemed to achieve this. It had electricity. Trams took workers to the mine. There were schools. There were public buildings. There was an impressive church. In later years mine wages were above the national average. People came from all over Sweden to work here – it was the city of the Future.

In Kiruna we’re familiar with Lundbohm’s portrait. There are photos of him with workers’ children at Christmas. Photos of him with local Sami, sharing a meal in a hut or out in the wild together. We know Lundbohm argued in wider political circles for Sami herders’ rights, and took an interest in their lives, encouraging research and publications on the subject. He refused to live in a grander house, preferring to look approachable, a man of the people. He was sometimes indistinguishable, it is said, from his workers, and he had to tell them that he was actually the manager.

He could read a situation and knew how to play it to his advantage, how to get the people with the power in southern Sweden on his side. He had friends in high places, knew famous artists, even entertained royalty. He also liked more informal gatherings, to talk and eat with the locals, who were free to wander into his house as they chose. In the early days he needed Sami guides, and he used Tornedal settlers to navigate the difficult rivers he needed to travel on before the railway was built.

So while we know the mining company was ruthless in its exploitation of the area, Lundbohm himself is viewed in Kiruna as someone who in the circumstances did his best for local people and is very much admired, even now.

This Christmas I was given a recently published book, ‘In the Director’s Time: Lundbohm’s view of the Sami and Tornedal minorities in Kiruna’ by Curt Persson. I’ve already read widely on Kiruna’s early history, so reading another slim volume on the mine’s first director I wasn’t expecting any surprises.

This is what I learnt:

“Lundbohm was an early supporter of race biology. He supported the idea that there were lower classes of people who should be kept separate from the pure Nordic race. He used these people to get a foothold here, and then refused to employ any of them – instead importing workers from ‘better’ races elsewhere in Sweden. He promoted the idea of keeping the Sami separate, uneducated, and nomadic, and away from Swedish society. He desecrated Sami sites by collecting sacred stones. He described the Tornedal Finnish farmers as encroachers on the land, a threat to the Sami, and comparable to the much-hated wolf. He supported researchers to measure the heads of Sami and Tornedal people, researchers who defined the physical characteristics of the Sami and Tornedal Finnish as ‘degenerate’, and he arranged for archaeologists to dig up the floor of a local church to measure skulls buried there. He socialised and corresponded with ardent race biologists who would later be key anti-Semites in Swedish society.”

Suddenly, Kiruna’s early history and Lundbohm’s place in it starts to look rather different. His prominent position gave authority to his comments and opinions throughout the rest of the country, and he wrote and corresponded widely on the detail of the lives of the existing communities here – the Sami, and the Tornedal or Finnish farmer settlers. These ideas were around in Swedish society at least until the 1940s, and although race biology has since then been widely discredited, I wonder whether anything has replaced this early writing, correspondence, and law-making, all of which came from the time of Hjalmar Lundbohm. Isn’t there still a lot of ignorance about the history and culture of people living in the far north of Sweden? I know when I lived in Stockholm I never came across anyone living there who had ever been to Kiruna.

Public relations is important for the mining company, and Lundbohm, ‘man of the people’ has been its figurehead. They’ve recently moved his old home to their land at the foot of Luossavaara where they’re building a new ‘company area’.

Where Lundbohm’s home used to be, land threatened by the mine, there’s now a park, and they’ve erected presentation boards with photographs of earlier times. In pride of place is a giant photograph, an image of Lundbohm standing outside the company’s hotel, next to a number of Sami and some Tornedal farmers, on the occasion of a meeting of the local parish to establish the use of land in Kiruna.

Unfortunately I now know that at this meeting the Sami had no voting rights at all, the Tornedal farmers had one vote, and Lundbohm had one hundred votes. It rather changes the feeling of the image.

Kiruna people love their motor vehicles. Every kind – classic cars, trucks, vans, tractors. Such is the obsession that even children have special dispensation to drive – a kind of car which pretends to be a farm vehicle and is supposed to have a low speed engine (usually a very noisy one). And yet, the transport of choice over a longer period has to be the well-named ‘Spark’, truly a transport of delight.

I don’t know how long they’ve been around, but long enough for there to be ‘Spark parking areas’ in town. They are most often used by elderly women, and so are seen as a kind of walking stick in the snow, but they are an extremely practical item for anyone in a climate of cold snow – why carry your shopping when you can slide it home? Uphill a Spark enables you to push shopping you wouldn’t want to carry. Downhill, a Spark delivers your shopping home as fast as a car.

The enemy of the Spark is grit. When the temperature rises and the council put grit on the pavements in case they turn to ice, the grit brings a Spark to a grinding halt. When we first moved here grit was spread on only half the pavement for this reason. These days it’s spread everywhere so the new gritters obviously don’t use a Spark.

I’ve discovered that the best way to be taken for a local is to use a Spark. If you want to blend in then using a Spark will do it. It announces you are not a visitor, and that you’re probably over 70. Cars are even more likely to stop for you. It’s a tremendous disguise for a would-be burglar – no-one would suspect anyone lurking around on a Spark.

So a harmless form of slow transport for the elderly – why would you want one of these?

Just before Christmas our car had a flat battery. We discovered it ten minutes before the shops shut for the four day Christmas break. We realised we had no battery charger. We called the garage who apologised it would take them 20 minutes to come out (as it was a Sunday this seemed pretty good to us), and then we realised if there was something wrong with our battery we would need a charger to keep us mobile over the coming days.

By now it was eight minutes before the shops shut. I kicked off down the street on my Spark. Fortunately, there was no new grit and the Spark flew downhill. Recklessly ignoring the rights of pedestrians on the pavement, I careered over humps of snow, manoeuvring my way across crossroads, reaching the shopping centre at two minutes to closing. After tying up my Spark (one minute) I entered the shop as they were dimming the lights. I made my way to the darkened till, clutching the item to my chest. I felt I had won the lottery. There are times when a Spark is all you need.

Kiruna is on the edge of an area known as ‘Tornedalen’. This region extends from Sweden into Finland (that part was given away by the Swedes to the Russians after losing a battle). The cultural identity of the region is still visible, and although strictly speaking Kiruna isn’t in Tornedal, there are many people from the area living here.

Tornedalen has it’s own language – Miänkieli – a Finnish-based language which has a recognised status as one of Sweden’s minority languages. As with many languages it comes with a pattern of thinking, an approach to life. Tornedal people have traditionally lived in difficult conditions, in small communities, frequently exposed to travellers, in close cooperation with local Sami people, and sometimes in conflict with the authorities. Their approach to life has often been expressed in stories, sometimes in song.

The stories are usually humorous and ironic and it’s hard to pinpoint what, exactly, makes them so ‘Tornedal’. Here’s an example.

Last week in Kiruna, a local musician, Daniel Wikslund, was telling an audience that he’d recently been in a much warmer country. ‘People always want to know what it’s like to live in the cold,’ he said. ‘I told them temperatures of minus 40 degrees can happen and then we tend not to wear flip flops. It can be very quiet in such cold, but wonderful. It’s so cold that things happen.

‘Have you heard about the experiment you can do in freezing conditions? You throw boiling water into the air and the water freezes into particles before it comes down again? Well, (he said), it’s like that with other things too. When you speak in the cold temperatures, the words come out but then they hang there in the air, in giant frozen speech bubbles. These bubbles hover around – you can feel them there, if you reach out with your mittens. Then much later, when the spring winds come and bring the warmer air, and the birds arrive from the south, then the bubbles begin to melt and the words get released. It can happen anywhere. You can be walking past an empty bus stop and suddenly you’ll hear talking, but there’s no-one there! Everywhere, lots of words in the air!’

The audience was quietly smiling, but not laughing. They knew that though this sounds like a fairy story, at another level it’s true. It’s very quiet here in the winter, and it can feel like people hold back from talking. But then later, when it’s warmer, people warm up too, and there’s more talk in the air.

‘So that’s the reason why people in this part of world never talk behind other people’s backs – because you never know when, or where, those words are going to come out.’

It’s been an unusually snow-free winter. There has been snow, but just enough to cover the ground. Not the usual amount that challenges and taunts us into hours of shovelling. All the hours we usually spend in December moving it into piles were now freed up for something else, but we couldn’t remember what that might be. We’ve often looked up hopefully into the sky, just to see if some more might be on its way, and all we’ve seen is a bit of snowy mist, disappearing into the air before it hits the ground.

All over Christmas it was like this and the season rather lost its charm as a result. There’s something unmistakably magical about heavy snow and darkness at this time. I’ve missed that, and haven’t really got into the festive mood. I’ve been keen to move on, to think of January and the coming period of sharp bright cold, rather than hold on to the season of midwinter as as I usually do.

And then, one day this week, the snowflakes looked a bit larger as they fell, a bit more serious, a bit more likely to make an impact. There were lots of them, filling up the black spaces, illuminated as balloons of pattern by the street lights.

Before long we were out there with the snow sled, noticing that snow was falling as fast as we were shovelling. That familiar heaviness in the legs, the feeling of hopelessness, that you can’t keep with it, that it will defeat you and the driveway will never be cleared. The return of hopelessness was an absolute joy. It was dark, and minus ten degrees. The snow swirled in front of my face. I started humming ‘Good King Wenceslas’. At last, Christmas.

It was like the guest who arrives a bit early for your party, when you haven’t quite got all the crisp bowls out yet. No-one else is there, just this early arriver saying, ‘I hope you don’t mind I’m a bit early?’. ‘Not at all,’ you say, ‘come on in, make yourself at home’, really wishing they’d just go away and come back a bit later.

So it was this morning when a strange light appeared in our living room, and peering through the window I thought it looked like the upper rim of the sun on the horizon. It’s a common illusion in winter – the sun’s reflection from beneath the horizon making it look as if it’s really there when it isn’t. And yet – it did look very real.

I consulted the Oracle. It was true; today the sun reappeared in Kiruna after it’s midwinter absence. Three or four days earlier, it seems, than we were expecting it.

Every year I’m a bit unsure of the timing. It can depend on the weather, or where you are looking from. Upstairs in our house we might see it a day earlier than downstairs. But not three days earlier. We’re not ready! We need a few more quiet and dark days, a bit longer to feel the old year retreating, the new returning.

It’s something to do with the inaccuracies of our calendars apparently, the need for leap years. More than that I can’t tell you. Whatever the reason I had no choice but to say, come on in, make yourself at home. The sun settled briefly on our fireplace for fifteen minutes then slipped quietly away again.

It’s a tradition, the trip to the state alcohol shop just before Christmas. This trip ought to be made on the very last day, in the last hours, before the shop closes for the Christmas period – which is Saturday, around 2pm. But we went to the shop in Kiruna today, and while less busy than it will be on Saturday, it had much of the same spirit.

The information about each bottle of wine is extensive, the selection of beers, wines and spirits is vast, and the staff are helpful and courteous. ‘Well,’ says one, ‘ it depends if you are having a heavy sauce with the meat, or something lighter – in which case you might want to choose something like this -‘, she points to a bottle, ‘which will add a sharp fruitiness..’ So many options, so many important decisions to make before Christmas.

The state retains control of the sale of alcohol in Sweden, a charming anomaly in the EU. The aim of the state company is to reduce people’s consumption of alcohol. If that sounds odd to you, then you have to get into the mindset a bit more. This is a shop which doesn’t ever promote any kind of alcohol. It never has ‘special offers’. It’s only open normal working hours. It never makes it cheaper to buy in bulk. It warns you of the impact of alcohol, and provides information about its effects.

Today I saw an additional feature. Right by the tills – where shops are normally desperate for you to make a last, spontaneous purchase – was a large cardboard box with a sign, that read, ‘Ångrat dig?’ – ‘Have you changed your mind? : You can leave bottles of drink here that you’ve decided not to buy.’

A simple invitation to avoid spontaneous, unnecessary purchases – a regrets box. Wouldn’t it be good if all shops had that at Christmas?

The first Sunday of advent is ‘skyltsöndag’ when shops display their goods before Christmas. Really it’s just an excuse for people to gather in town for hot dogs, free glögg or coffee. Kiruna was full of people, buzzing with life, clearly a vibrant, active little town. It was a surprise, and it made me feel happy.

It was a surprise because this was the year the old town centre could have felt dead, or at least dying. The mine has now bought all the buildings there that in the future will have to be demolished. Many of the owners have taken the compensation money and moved on. There were more and more empty buildings where there used to be shops. It was becoming a ghost town.

And yet now it has come back to life. The old supermarket is dead, but another company has filled the empty space. Surprising new cafés and restaurants have appeared, and they are full of people.

I guess the mining company did what it could because it just doesn’t look good, a dying town. So they set the rents low, made life easy for new businesses to move in.

One can’t help but feel wildly, inappropriately, outrageously grateful, to the mine – the company that is actually destroying Kiruna. Funny that.