Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

Every town has its suburbs, even small towns. The natural after-thought of the town when it’s already established, the suburbs are where people live in relative ease, away from busy roads or industry, getting on with their lives in relative peace and quiet.

In Kiruna the residential areas are as near shops and facilities as in the older part of town, but they have a different character. You see this in the street names. In the older town you move between streets named after political heroes of the 1920s (Adolf Hedin Road), mining heroes (Hjalmar Lundbohm Road, Hermelin Street), significant town activities of the early 1900s (Railway Street, Mine Road, Drillers Street, Drivers Street), important town buildings (Church Street, Library Street). Some streets in town still have no name – ours for instance (Crossing Street).

In the later, more clearly residential, developments the street names refer to natural phenomena (Aurora Road, Solar Wind Road), new activities (Satellite Road, Rocket Road, Radar Road), and features in the landscape (Birch Path, Forest Road, Rowan Square). These, more ‘suburban’ streets, follow a familiar pattern – they are named after the trees that were cut down to build them.

Perhaps it’s only when suburbs are built that people start see that development is about loss as well as gain, and feel the need to mark the lost land with a name that will always bring to mind what it used to be.

What to do, then, when you are relocating an existing town, as we are in Kiruna? Will this follow the pattern of early town behaviour – glorious heroes and worthy occupations – or the suburban model of marking natural phenomena and landscape?

It’s a question that has to be answered when it comes to building ‘the New Kiruna’. However, we’re a long way off that yet. The sign has been up for two years claiming the New Kiruna is being built, but still no new buildings to be seen.

To be fair, the council, responsible for the development, have had its problems with the chosen site. First there was an existing business there that refused to move until it was offered a reasonable relocation site. This matter went to various higher bodies to decide, and has only just been settled.

But after that came another problem. The site was partly owned by the mining company (LKAB) that had a mine nearby, now not in use. It turned out that the land was rather more poisoned by the presence of old metal compounds than anyone had anticipated. LKAB had pointed out to the council when the site was chosen that it was still in the area where iron ore existed, and they were not, for that reason, very keen on it as a site for the new town. But they were overruled (and one wonders if LKAB didn’t know just how poisoned the land was). Now there will be a process to remove these metal compounds from the land. We are assured this will solve the problem and the land will be fit to build on. The work will begin this summer.

Meanwhile, it hasn’t gone unnoticed by the people of Kiruna that currently sitting right next to the site for the New Kiruna is a giant rubbish tip. A minor matter to move, you might think.

However, for some reason, since the site was chosen the council has failed to search for and apply for permission for a new rubbish tip site. Achieving this now will take some years. One can only wonder why this wasn’t thought of earlier.

But now, making the best of a bad situation, the council are applying for permission to keep the rubbish tip where it is. In the new town, they claim, things will be so advanced that chutes will bring rubbish directly to the site. Oh brave new world! How modern and admirable that will be! They won’t need to move the rubbish tip – we can instead all be glad it is so handily nearby. We’re not sure that the higher authorities, who must give permission, will agree with this vision, but at the moment it’s hard to see any alternative.

So we are trying to picture the future.

Should we imagine heading for the town hall in the new town’s central Copper Square? Going for a coffee in Oil Street, a short walk from the bank in Cobalt Park Avenue, and then returning to our flat in Heavy Metal Road? The supermarket might be in Mercury Street, and the town’s main hotel in Lead Lane. From there, visitors to the town might head out for a meal in one of the fine restaurants on Rubbish Tip Avenue.

From ’68 degrees’ we have a view out over town, over the road to Narvik, to an edge of town development of housing – Lombolo – and, beyond that, to the hills, and the sky. Standing rather too proudly in the foreground, a flagpole erected by a nearby neighbour, flying the blue and yellow pennant, just in case we forget this is Sweden.

During these midsummer days when the sun shines in the night, it always shines on Lombolo, the buildings glowing orange against a backdrop of fresh green birch bushes. We are always reluctant to go to bed, seeing the distant sunshine.

Our house is in the lee of the hill that Kiruna is built on, and so at midnight the sun disappears behind it, which is indeed a blessing if you want some sleep. For most of Kiruna the sun at night is hidden by another hill – Luossavaara. It is part of the genius of the original town plan of 1910.

But we do like to see the midnight sun glistening on Lombolo. Even when the weather is cloudy, it seems to shine down there. As if Lombolo is the chosen one, the heavenly city of sunshine, floating on hills of green.

It must drive the people there nuts. Not only do they have to live with 24 hours of daylight, but their homes are sunniest at midnight. Perhaps there’s a topsy turvy world down there, people sleeping in the day and breakfasting at night. As we head off for bed, perhaps the people on the edge of Lombolo are out sunbathing on their balconies, sipping cool drinks through a straw.

Midsummer day (taken as the Friday nearest the 21st of June) is big in Sweden. People get together, lavish meals are prepared, drinks drunk, photographs taken. You remember what you did last midsummer, and if you don’t, then you remember you drank too many schnapps. A proper midsummer celebration means a long light night, sitting outside, flowers in your hair, herring and schnapps.

Some people emailed us from England wanting to come to Kiruna this year to experience a typical Swedish midsummer celebration. They’d figured that as midsummer was about light nights, going where the night is as light as you can get must give you the most authentic experience.

I had to explain that they’d be better off going somewhere further south, where a bit of darkness increases the magic, and the climate brings something which actually looks like summer. Here it’s early days, the snow hasn’t completely gone, the flowers are mostly still under the earth, and we have so much light that, frankly, it’s hard to celebrate it – it doesn’t ever go away so you don’t really notice it’s there.

A little less light please, and then we could appreciate it.

However, I wanted, if possible, to have some kind of midsummer celebration this weekend. Elsewhere meadows are rich with colour and there’s plenty to choose from, but here there wasn’t a single wildflower to pick and the temperature wasn’t going to let us sit outside in the sunshine for herring and schnapps either.

It was clearly pointless trying to recreate a southern version of midsummer. So instead, we put on some warm clothes and went to the fjäll in search of – well, we weren’t really sure what. But I thought we should aim to adapt to what was on offer, rather than mourn the absence of what wasn’t.

We stopped the car a short distance from Lake Torneträsk and wondered if the land next to it would be dry enough for us to walk on. Fortunately, it was, and before long we came to a huge area of brown and red, dotted with small white flowers. It was a rich area of moss, covered in cloudberry plants which had just produced tiny, fragile white flowers. This was a midsummer meadow, northern style.

These flowers were not for the picking though – if you picked one it fell apart in your hand. We were content to leave them where they were. The moss was resting on waterlogged land but was completely dry to walk on, and it sank under our feet like a luxurious pillow.

Down by the water, trees hugging the edge of the lake had spread their roots out horizontally along the surface, and grown low to be near the warmth and the moisture. They had adapted perfectly to the environment, and now that we had picked our way between them to sit on a rock, so had we.

It’s June, nearly midsummer, the sun is high in the sky and it’s there for 24 hours a day – but the air is cold, and the trees are only just beginning to sprout a light, vivid, spring green. It doesn’t feel right.

It takes a while to accept that this day goes on for a couple of months. The adult comfort blanket of day and night is removed and each day is weirdly unstructured. The result is strangely exhilarating.

The sun moves around above us in a circle, and the long hours of light are mesmerising. Sometimes I feel like a rabbit caught in the headlights – it’s a shock – what to do next, what to do first? I might want to do any number of things at any time of the day and night, and, alarmingly, I can.

It might sound rather stressful, all those options and opportunities for activity – but no. When you can do something at any time you find you can always do it later. These are perfect conditions for enjoying moments, or hours, of pure inactivity.

Sometimes the inactivity can be forced on you. Travelling along some parts of the trails in the mountains now you would find yourself ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’. The lakes are no longer ice but they are not yet water, so crossing them on foot or by boat is impossible – it’s a no-go area. Hikers are very disappointed to find they can’t walk from A to B as they’d planned. They are advised by local tourist and hiking organisations just to wander where they can, on circular day trips. It’s a lesson, surely.

If the seasons of Kiruna are like a giant rollercoaster – gathering speed, unexpected turns, lots of ups and downs – then after the vertical loops, interlocking pretzel turns, and zero-gravity rolls of the winter, in April we’ve finally reached The Brake Run.

The seasons have gone in a flash. Just as we understood what the conditions were, what clothes were needed, and what activities were possible, each season roared out of reach leaving us panting to catch up.

Spring-winter, the last season, we all love – ice lakes, warm sunshine in cold air, and lots of opportunities for skiing and picnicking on the lakes. Then around the start of April the temperatures begin to rise, the skies fill with humidity, and the big melt begins.

When the drip drip starts you can only sit indoors and watch the snow piles shrink. Cycling is possible, if you look out for ice on the path. There isn’t much to see – the days can be misty, the clouds hang low and grey, the snow is slushy or icy, depending on last night’s temperatures. You clear up the winter debris around the veranda. The outdoor Christmas lights are still trapped under the snow and you wait for the cables to reappear, their secret trails revealed beneath bushes along the house wall. You start thinking about the garden, wondering where you left the flower beds.

But spring isn’t a season to be hurried. The rollercoaster has temporarily lost its kinetic energy and is just trundling along the track. Its occupants are looking around them, taking stock, noticing nothing much is happening on this stretch, while still remembering the thrills behind. It’s The Brake Run.

The speed won’t pick up again until it’s reliably plus degrees 24 hours a day. When that happens it will also be light 24 hours a day and the season of spring-summer will do a hammerhead turn, a double dip and double up, and we’ll be hanging on again, breathless.

In the meantime it’s frustrating, watching the temperatures hover here, the wet snow fall, the grass refuse to peep through green.

We were a small audience in a village hall on the banks of the Lainio river, watching a performance of ‘Tosca’. At the close of the opera, Mario steps outside the prison to be shot. His lover has reassured him the executioner will use blanks and he just has to pretend to die.

It was ‘Tosca’ without the trimmings. The singers (who were really good) were accompanied by a piano – there was no orchestra. There was also no elaborate scenery. Instead, at the end of each act our chairs were moved so we faced a different direction and view. For the last act that view was the frozen river, white snow glimmering in both directions, with small dark fir trees lined up along the horizon and a mid-blue sky as a back drop.

Mario opened the door from the village hall to the river bank, and a cold wind blew around our legs in the third row. There was a gunshot, and Mario slumped through the doorway. Tosca was unable to rouse him, and, realising he really was dead, turned towards the river and shot herself. It couldn’t have been a more dramatic setting, and we didn’t miss the expensive extras people usually expect at the opera.

On the way home we had plenty of time to talk about what a good experience it had been. The road from the small village of Lainio is a very long one, a straight route through low pine and fir forest in a flat snow-covered landscape. You have plenty of time to think about ‘Tosca’ – you have space, as Thoreau has written, for your thoughts ‘to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they get into port’.

You also have time to wonder why there’s a village in such an out of the way place.

It doesn’t take long to realise it wouldn’t have been thought of as out of the way when people first settled there (in the 17th century). What fools us is the road system. The current roads aren’t following ancient tracks – they’re much later additions. Finding your way through what was then ‘Lappland’ meant paddling a small boat up rivers, carrying it through rapids, and letting it drift through wide lakes. In the winter the route was passable on the ice, where the snow would be blown away and you could pull a sled behind you, or if you were Sami you would ski. Settlers in Lainio would have come in the summer by boat, and the reason they lived there was because it was a rich fishing river, and it was on a good route.

The day before we’d decided to go skiing and take a picnic out on the Torne river at Kurravaara, an area of houses which was a settlement long before Kiruna existed as a town. For the same reasons as Lainio, it was on a good route (the river) and provided fish all year round, and there was land there to live off. Now it’s a mixture of permanent housing – some people living there work in Kiruna – and what is called ‘summer’ housing, though this kind of temporary housing is used all year round.

It was the Thursday before the long Easter weekend and Kiruna had already started to empty. The Torne river is thick ice by this time of year and snow covered. Snow had fallen recently and hadn’t had time to harden, so we had to ski on the snowscooter tracks. I’m not a fan of snowscooters, but they do provide the service of pressing down the snow so it’s possible to walk or ski on it.

After an hour’s skiing we saw a rock to one side which we reckoned we could use to sit on and have some lunch. Making our way there through the trackless snow was heavy going, and removing the skis was a challenge because without them you sank deep into the snow. But we managed, and were feeling very hot sitting in the sun. The view of the river was spectacular, the sky so blue, and the air so still.

Still, that is, except for snowscooters whizzing by. We seemed to be at the junction of a major snowscooter highway. The noise and the smell carries quite a distance, and seems at odds with the tranquil setting. About every five minutes one went past us, most of them pulling substantial sleds carrying provisions for the coming weekend. It was entertaining to watch their dogs, tearing along the path beside them, or in most cases running far ahead, impatient with the slow progress of the snowscooter behind.

They were all heading the same way up river, where there are no roads but many small houses and huts. These would have been traditional settlements, long before Kiruna was built. The only way to reach them is snowscooter, or boat in the summer. At holiday times the old transport routes become alive again, and the new ones are abandoned.

Not all the traffic was disturbing. We saw, at a distance, other ski-ers, moving noiselessly and slowly along the river. We met one woman coming on skis towards us. We stopped to talk. We agreed it was hotter than expected, and we were wearing too many clothes. She described where she was staying – her ‘summer’ house by the river. It was always lovely to be here, she said. She used the skis to visit her daughter who had a house further down the river. Of course it had no electricity or running water, but she’d just bought a device for charging her mobile phone which made life easier.

Minus degrees, no water, and no indoor toilet. But, as we discovered in Lainio, worse things can happen to you by a frozen river.

At the end of March the winter tourist season officially comes to an end. It’s the last snowmobile tour, the last ‘Sami experience with reindeer’, the last ski lift up to the sky station to see the northern lights.

We wonder why. The snow is still on the ground, the ice thick enough on the lakes for ten ton truck, and the days are light and (can be) warm with sunshine. Weather permitting, the northern lights are usually active and easy to see. But the tourist companies have shut up shop and the town is empty of visitors.

In fact, the town is empty generally because the locals have gone to the fjäll. It’s the fishing season, the time for being out on the frozen lake in your ‘Ark’, spending days in your ‘summer’ house, or skiing in the long, light days. Let no-one say it too loud, but Kiruna is taking a holiday.

It’s taken us several years to work out that now is the secret, winter season for locals. There’s another life beneath the surface, somewhere out of sight, somewhere only the locals know about.

Take Kiruna’s big fishing competition, ‘Kiruna Hugget’ (the snap bite of a fish), which was this weekend. We saw the ads inviting people to register for the competition by paying a small fee. We saw the date. We saw the time. We wanted to go and watch. But nowhere in the ads did it say where the competition would take place because we were supposed to know already.

It wasn’t hard to find though. From the main road out of Kiruna we saw a mass of dark figures huddled out on the lake. People in pairs, alone, in family groups. People sitting on beach chairs, standing with their backs to the wind, fishing with one hand and pushing a pram with the other. People lying flat on the ice, their head in the hole working out how to lure a passing fish.

Contrary to people’s hopes and expectations, it was not a warm spring day but a cold, windy, snowy one. Still, hundreds of people, had decided to go and sit or stand there, like King Penquins hatching eggs in Antarctica. Curious really.

Even more curious when you learn that the biggest fish caught that day could have fitted into my coat pocket. And my coat pockets aren’t big. So, you’re wondering, why? Why put yourself through this, for the chance of a very small fish?

The answer is, because it isn’t really a fishing competition at all. It looks like a fishing competition. It feels like a fishing competition. It even smells like a fishing competition. But it’s not really about fishing. It’s about prizes. Lots of prizes – in fact, 287 prizes (we checked). That’s maybe more prizes than there are people entering the competition.

In my family, where gambling is frowned on, the idea of a lottery is not popular. But a lottery where first you have to hand drill a hole in the ice that’s a metre thick, then sit or stand in minus temperatures slowly raising your arm up and down for a couple of hours? That’s working for your good fortune, and we’d say, good luck to you.

If you’re the lucky winner and have actually caught a fish worth weighing, you claim your 30,000 SEK, or your electric ice driller (makes fishing very easy the rest of the season), or your special tool for attaching your snowscooter trailer to your car. You might be lucky enough to get an electric saw, or a compressor. Or a waffle-maker, an electric toothbrush or a battery recharger. Or a coffee percolator, a rucksack, or gift voucher from the DIY shop.

Yes folks, it’s the luck of the draw, but Everyone’s a Winner.

We usually like to remember our guests, though in the height of the winter season with people coming and going all the time that can be a challenge. Sometimes, though, you remember people for the wrong reasons.

A few weeks ago some guests put some food from the supermarket in the fridge for cold suppers while they were here. Only they never touched the jar of herring.

I can understand that. Most Swedes like it though, at least if there’s some schnapps available to wash it down with. Perhaps that was the problem for our guests – no schnapps.

Anyhow, there was the jar, found in the fridge just after they ‘d gone to town to catch the bus to the airport. It was a virgin jar of herring. If I’d had any sense I’d have chased the guests up the hill and given it back to them. ‘No, no,’ they’d have protested, ‘you have it!’ ‘No, no,’ I’d have replied, ‘it’s yours, please!’ And they’d have taken it, very reluctantly, and stuffed it in their bag – planning to leave it by a rubbish bin in the airport.

But unfortunately I didn’t do this. I just stared at the jar in my hands, knowing it was a ticking bomb.

If people leave food behind we usually throw it away – unless it’s clearly unopened and is something we normally eat. The jar was sealed, but we wouldn’t have eaten it in a million years. Only we couldn’t throw it away either. The glass jar was recyclable, and you aren’t supposed to put recyclable materials in the ordinary bins. So the herring would have to be removed from the jar first.

Only, what to do with the herring? You can imagine the smell. (Or perhaps you can’t – lucky you.) You can’t just throw it in a bin. Our rubbish is collected every fortnight, and even at these temperatures I wouldn’t be too happy about herring in the bin.

For as long as the jar was sealed, it was ok. Like a bomb, ready to go off, but not yet triggered into activity. It sat in our kitchen, waiting for a decision. All that congealed raw fish, daring us to do something. We tried not to look at it. Even looking at herring is an experience to be avoided. There it was, day after day. We tried not to think of the guests who’d left it for us – the association in our minds between them, and the herring, was hard to forget though.

Then we had an idea – perhaps the neighbour might like it. We didn’t want to insult her by giving her a cheap jar of herring, but it would solve our problem. Only every time she was out in her garden, we forgot to mention the herring.

By now the jar had been moved into the hallway, to try and remind us to speak to her about it. Only then we thought perhaps it didn’t look too good for our guests, so each time someone came to the door we had to take the jar back into the kitchen – and then it was forgotten again.

In desperation one day I put the jar outside the front door. It got left there, like some strange talisman, perhaps warning guests not to stay here. The next morning we found it, deep frozen. Now what would happen to the herring? Perhaps frozen pickled herring really is inedible. We might have to live with this jar of herring for the rest of our lives.

And so the days passed, the jar coming in and out of the hallway, in and out of the kitchen.

Finally, the neighbour was asked. No, she couldn’t eat anything in vinegar – but her son would take it. When next he was visiting. The jar continued to be moved around the house, always where it shouldn’t be.

Then one day the conjunction of the planets was just right, the son and the neighbour and the jar came together, and the jar of herring disappeared from our lives. But the guests who left the jar we will always remember…

There’s chaos in our supermarket. I don’t like shopping so I have a list, and a plan, and want to be in and out the shop as fast as possible. Now it’s having a dramatic makeover – shelves taken down and the goods left stacked in boxes in one place, aisles completely dismantled in another, some items stacked in one part of the shop and the same items stacked elsewhere. Parts of the shop are empty and other parts are under construction. Shopping is now a very lengthy process. It’s as if they’ve set up an elaborate treasure hunt, leaving us searching the aisles desperately for clues.

Feeling confused and insecure because I didn’t know where to find the frozen peas, I wondered if this is a practice run for the relocation of the town.

The new town centre is still a sketchy thing, with reindeer playing on the steps of the town hall and children making snowballs in the square in the architects’ imaginations, but not yet in any kind of reality. In the meantime we think businesses will probably move to the area where this supermarket is – a shopping centre currently on the edge of town, and the site of a very large car park. Or if they don’t move there they’ll stay put for as long as they can, daring the mine to evict them. Or they’ll move somewhere else temporarily, half way between the old and the new. Or they may just pull out of town altogether – who knows? When all this happens and we need an optician, or to find somewhere that sells, say, camping equipment, it might feel a bit like walking up and down the aisles of the supermarket, wondering which end of town they ended up in.

And that’s not the only similarity. Once you’ve found the right aisle for the item you’re looking for, the problem isn’t over. Take my search for red lentils. I thought I’d finally tracked them down, only to discover they’d been repackaged and re-priced and were hard even to recognise as red lentils. I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay more for a fancy packet, but I needed the lentils so I took them anyway. Later I found my favourite red lentils in a side aisle, in a familiar packet, much cheaper. So I did a swap, picking up the old favourites and leaving the new packet behind.

It’s not just red lentils that are in two places. The cereals are on shelves on both sides of the store, the cheese is spread out among different chill cabinets, the cleaning fluid is stacked both with the washing powder and elsewhere with the dishcloths. Don’t they know – we didn’t want the supermarket split into two shops!

The chaos continues. Like in the new town, it’s taking an age to get those aisles sorted. To stem the tide of impatience among its customers, the supermarket is inviting us to take part in choosing which Kiruna streets should appear as the names of the newly constructed aisles. We may not have been consulted about whether we wanted the reorganisation in the first place, but we do get to choose which street the biscuits section is named after.

I’m listening to the sound of silence. Not unusual in these parts, but unusual on a Saturday morning outside our house next to Adolf Hedinsvägen.

The silence tells me a lot of things. It tells me that it’s a Saturday in the middle of March. It tells me that Kiruna is a society where traditions are strong. It also tells me that most people who live here own a snow scooter – or six.

Whereas most days of the year you would make the short five minute journey out of Kiruna into the landscape to experience silence, this is the day when everything is turned on its head. You want peace and quiet, stay at home this weekend.

About 25 kilometres out of town is an area and a lake called Rautas, the name of the river flowing through it. An area of outstanding beauty, today it will be alive with petrol fumes, the roar of engines, and the hum of hundreds of people looking for fish.

A long traffic jam of snow scooters will be snaking their way along the bumpy snow scooter track from the E10 road out to the Rautas lake, another 20 kilometres or so away from the road. It’s the start of the fishing season in this particular lake, and by tradition, a ‘Kirunabo’ will want to be there at the very beginning, at the very first hour that fishing is allowed. Along with hundreds of others. Just because they always have, and their parents always have.

It’s also, perhaps, for young men of a certain age, an initiation rite, riding for the first time on their very own snow scooter. By law you’re only allowed to do that when you’re 16, and if you have a special licence, though most children have been driving scooters under parental supervision long before that. But as a teenager, at least as a young male, the feeling of having your own snow scooter must feel like the moment of adulthood.

(You see these coming-of-age youngsters wandering around town, baggy trousers fashionably falling to their knees, peaked cap turned rebelliously in the wrong direction. They walk by swinging their legs forward from the hip, leaving a wide gap between. It looks as if they’ve just leapt off a horse, or perhaps the horse has just run away from underneath them and they haven’t noticed. Only in Kiruna it isn’t a horse – it’s a snow scooter.)

However Rautas ‘Premiär’, as it is known, is not just for young men. It’s for young women, for families, for children hunched up on scooters behind their parents. It’s a family event, a journey, a hunt for food, and then a meal – fish cooked over a smoky fire and eaten under the stars – Kiruna’s version of a Thanksgiving dinner.

The journey out to Rautas is no walk in the park. It’s a long uncomfortable ride along a bumpy snow-packed path. When you arrive it’s glorious nature, nothing else. So you need to bring everything with you – a tent, cooking equipment, warm clothing, firewood or gas, and something to eat and drink with the fish, (which you assume you will catch), something to sit on, something to sleep on, something to sleep in… Only this will be no communing with nature because the rest of Kiruna has come with you.

As someone who doesn’t own a snow scooter I’m excluded from this event. I’m not complaining though. If I had a snow scooter I wouldn’t go – travelling to one small area with so many others doesn’t appeal, but mainly it’s because I’ve not grown up with the tradition. I see it as an outsider, and like so many traditions (mine included) it looks strange from where I am. I think of Kiruna rushing, lemming-like, along a river to a lake, the mass following of a primal instinct, to celebrate the First Killing of the Fish.

Viewed from above, the gathering of black-coated scooter riders, tents and campfires must look like some secret satanic ritual. Why this out-of-the-way place? Why so many people? And all for a fish?

It was Harvest Festival here yesterday. The harvest is ice, and all will (soon) be safely gathered in, and stored in warehouses over the summer in preparation for building next season’s Ice Hotel.

Most harvest festivals involve participants consuming some of the produce that has been harvested, but I didn’t see anyone popping ice cubes in their drinks yesterday. But we did see some Ice Hotel waitresses apparently tied together and forced out to collect them, or maybe this was just the ritual of releasing the ice with dancers in floaty clothing – it was hard to tell.

There was a party down on the frozen river to celebrate the start of the harvesting season, with music, games, performances, and, of course, lots and lots of tractors.

I hadn’t thought of ice as a crop that winter gives you. I’d felt it though – ice is both beautiful and practical, connecting stretches of land and communities in inaccessible places. It’s a stage for winter walking, exhilarating journeys by dog sled or snow scooter, or just for standing in the emptiness and listening to the silence. It’s a safe platform for ice fishing, and it’s a road across the river (please don’t fish in the road). Like the snow, its positives far outweigh its negatives, and when others elsewhere are longing for spring, in the north here we are looking sadly at the rising temperatures, wishing that nature would not take all the beautiful stuff away.

The thaw is what takes it all away, and I read this week that a dialect word in eastern England for it is ‘to ungive’. Yes, ice is a gift.

Harvesting the ice doesn’t take it away though – only in the area marked out over the winter as an ice field. This area has been kept free of snow so that the ice is kept clear right through. By March the ice crop has grown about 80 cms deep and is ripe for the picking.

First comes Excalibur (given to the Ice King, according to ancient myth and legend, by the Lady of the River), attached to a tractor. With the help of a man on the ice, Excalibur carves out a block weighing two tons. Then comes another tractor – lets call it Lancelot – which picks the block out of the water with its forklift, turns, and places it on the surface of the ice. Then comes another tractor – let’s call it Guinevere – which positions itself opposite Lancelot. Guinevere stretches out her forklift in greeting. Lancelot bows in response, picks up the block with his forks and waits, respectfully, while Guinevere deftly positions her forks between his. There is a moment of perfect union, then Guinevere slowly withdraws with the ice block, turns, drives off the river and disappears deep into the dark entrance of a nearby warehouse, leaving Lancelot alone on the ice.

Lancelot and Guinevere – we could have watched their courtly dance for hours. So we did, until the workers called time and went off for their coffee break.

Driving out of town I’m heading for the sea. It’s far away but I’m sure – so sure – that it’s just over there, just round the corner. The sky is huge, the clouds fast and scudding, the sunlight shimmering into a distant glow. I feel the joy of a child setting out for the treat of a day trip to the seaside.

Out on the frozen river or lake there’s a wide sun soaked beach. The hard winter has formed tiny grains of snow that drift like sand, settling in dunes and patterns, shifting beneath your feet, blowing ahead of you. Other people are far away, dark silhouettes walking on the lake’s pale surface, flat and glistening like wet sand after the tide has drawn the sea away. A dog plays ahead of the walkers as they throw a stick, and then the dog hurtles after it. You hear their voices distantly, and laughter as they chase the dog. You get out the deckchairs and enjoy a picnic, face turned to the sun.

Along the beach edge are a long line of beach huts. All different shapes and colours, some with windows and some without, made of steel, or wood, or plastic. There are buckets and fishing equipment stacked outside them, though you can’t see a soul. Further out to sea, towards the middle of the lake, there are other huts dotted around, in splendid isolation.

These are Kiruna’s ‘arkar’ – shelters from the wind for ice fishers. They line up along the shore when not in use, and are pulled out to a prime position for fishing. There are some figures by the huts, far out on the ice, sitting or standing, lying down even, and sometimes you see an arm slowly, repetitively, moving up and down over the ice, trying to attract a very cold fish.

Accidents can happen, though there aren’t many life guards on duty on Kiruna’s beaches.

Back in Kiruna, waves crash against the roadside, white surf riding on the crest of the wave.

Beach volley anyone?

A low mist sits below the town, and, rising from the mist, small hills appear as islands.

A wide harbour curls around the foot of the town, and resting there is the largest, most majestic cruise ship you’ve ever seen. Queen of the Northern Seas, HMS ‘Kirunavaara Mine’.

The passengers have left the ship and are roaming round the bars and restaurants on shore. This ship never leaves the harbour – perhaps it can’t navigate its way out again from such an inland sea, or perhaps everyone’s just too happy to be landlocked in Kiruna. It’s part of the town now and when the ship sinks we’ll all know it’s time to leave.