Kjell

High Lands

I found you standing in line,
the curvy outsoles of your shoes
like a seaboard. 

“I’m walking on air,” 

you said and I believed you. 

I set myself on this journey
a while ago.
Did you? 

Imagine, we began 

somewhere up there,
a settling mist,
one drop of rain
upon another
forming a river,
a confluence
of rivers,
a sea and all
the waters
always
moving. 

Let me wind it back a little. 

So, we began.
It was a downward journey,
even as we were told
it was skyward. 

We started in the high lands
as we threw ourselves
off the cliff edge
and moved much
like a lover facing the ground
of the one she loves. 

We made our way into life. 

I turned my ear
towards you to hear
you through the noise. 

I tried to make out your words
but it was loud, we were
standing
too close to the source. We were
too much water. 

Thus we stepped onto shore
to listen
to what the other had to say
about the place we came from
and what we each had seen
along the path. 

When you opened your mouth,
there was the sound of
water crashing into rock — 

still, you spoke
a language too wild for the
time I was resting upon. 

I watched you speak though
and it was music. 

I put down the branches
from which I’d usually arrange
letters to bridge
the space between us.
I broke
their bonds, the strands
as firm as the one
we were standing in. 

I offered them
to the fire
around which
we could gather
for warmth. 

We burned the wood
and the words were gone
but the lines were not. 

“Take me back to
the start.” 

Kjell

Zero

Rooted at the centre of this tightly fenced rectangular garden, the old apple tree had given me the confidence we too could make a life here. It was autumn then, it is early summer. The crooked wooden chair, which I pulled by the side of the tree before twilight, is sinking into the ground as the bitter truth permeates my body. He is standing in front of me knees bent, our feet on the grass we sowed together, and after all the late night conversations, which dragged winter into spring, words finally escape us. 
I don’t remember the sky ever looking this pale. A touch of pink, a blush, a wound, upon a clear expanse this evening. I don’t know when I adopted the belief that soil and I are incompatible. He, on the other hand, has a way of approaching the garden head-on, at once determined and constrained, as if going into battle: armed, ready to bleed. I admire his certainty. The book I had intended to read falls from my lap, the scent of lemon balm makes me sick to my stomach. I kneel on the remains of a home thrown into question.

Through a cloud of exhaust at midday, the frantic roar of a South East London road in the background, I hear the word “Lapland.” A colleague raises a cigarette to his mouth, a pitch-black Scarabaeus tattooed to the back of his hand, and I flip through my memory with only faint imagery from tourism adverts to refer to. Isn’t it curious, even as I grew up along the Gulf of Finland not far from the region he is calling into our conversation, it takes a man from Colombia to bring its name, though not its true name, to my attention.
He exhales an introduction to a school in the Swedish Subarctic.
I don’t know where his cigarette smoke ends and traffic fumes begin, yet notice a subtle and persistent pull forth, upward, as if by a rope tied lightly around my heart.
“Why don’t you visit this coming month?” he extends an invitation.

One

The northward journey from Stockholm to Luleå unfolds above a 726 kilometre-long organic weaving of blues and greens. Water interlaced with land. On the ground, a further four-hour bus ride, folded in half when travelled by car, leads through forest reserves, vast pine and spruce plantations, to a small village 50 km below the Arctic Circle. In mid-July, the sun hovers over rose-gold lakes all the way through bedtime. 
“So swift?” My colleague is surprised to hear about a return flight I have booked seven days from my arrival. As much as I’ve been drawn to come here, an unsettling feeling lurks at the back of my mind. I hurry myself. Yet as the days unwind, generous and calm, water, air, sun, I begin to unfasten from the pace of London.

The first time I meet Kjell, I observe he has a similar build to his teenage son: tall, big-boned, round belly and a lively full moon for a face. “Ohhoo!” he sounds, pale blue eyes wide open, as we stand in the school’s sunlit parking lot and I tell him about a childhood landscape. “A friend once brought me a tin of smoked sprats from Estonia, I adored them!” he says. 
He is from the county below, a single dad, a wilderness guide. 
I find it difficult to place his age, yet settle on mid-fifties, given his practically bald head. In near perfect English, spoken through a Swedish accent and a child-like excitement, he shares stories about nearby hiking trails, as if the land afforded infinite adventure. Notably, the experiences he describes often entail being in one’s own company, in which the encounter with the sounds and silences offered by the region is most intimate. 
“There’s a hut not far from here, built on an old Sami dwelling. I can take you!” he offers and it strikes my fancy.

A few days later, a small red car pulls up in front of the school with Kjell squeezed into the front seat, a big smile on his face. Gabriel, a Spanish artist visiting at the same time as me, crawls to the back and I lodge in the passenger seat as we make our way out of the village. 
Every turn leads onto a narrower road. Even as Kjell has now slowed the car down to almost walking speed, we are repeatedly thrown into air, driving on a rugged track through a field of short evergreen trees and boulders, each stone adorned with bright red lichen. Gabriel, sitting on the floor amongst hiking gear (the car only has two seats in the front), has one hand up against the ceiling centimetres from his head and the other pressed against the back window. “I’m fine!” he assures us, through a quiver. 
“Otherworldly! How did these rocks get here?” I ask in bewilderment as I take in the surroundings framed by the car window. 
“Hmm.. they came with the melting ice, at the end of the last ice age,” Kjell says. 
I contemplate that this place has likely remained unchanged for 12 000 years, if not more. Then, we pull up on the side of the shelter: a modest wooden hut overlooking a lake.
The weathered hut wears an ash tone. I push the front door and walk into a room that has clearly been inhabited numerous times. Set up as a shelter for travellers, there are beds, a table and chairs, wood for a fire and a few random items left behind by hikers. Its generosity defies the manner in which we are accustomed to monetise space in the cities. 
“Wilderness huts and closed shelters, such as this one, are common across Sweden, Finland and Norway — some stop by for a quick rest, others spend the night,” Kjell describes the way in which the hut welcomes the comings and goings of those in need of refuge. 
I step back outside and as I turn to take in the view, the sun reflects upon the lake as if a star had dived into the water for a radiant moment. 
“Sami reindeer herders used to set up their camp here,” Kjell explains as he follows my gaze. I wonder if they were as struck by its beauty as I am. The Sami people, indigenous to these lands, are still here, not a phenomena of the past. This place, however, evokes a particularly ancestral presence. 
The three of us wander off in a slightly different direction, seeking a solitary meeting, perhaps because the quiet is so deep. I walk down to the golden shoreline that shares in the lake’s luminosity. Inhaling deeply, lungs fill with an aromatic blend of blueberry and pine. 
Further afield, Gabriel is attentively examining the vegetation, his bearded face just another delightful bush in the landscape. Kjell has sat down on a bed of moss with his back against a pine tree, hands upon his round belly rising and falling, eyes resting on the water, then closing. 

Two

Skábmamánnu, the Northern Sami word for November, has darkness in its name. I return to Sweden mid-month, met by a long tail of moonlight upon Bothnian Bay as the sun sets shortly after noon. 
“I’m studying to be an organist,” a young woman called Evi introduces herself from the backseat, her soft voice slightly muffled by the engine. 
When I arrived in Arvidsjaur in the early evening to catch a ride to the village, I learned that Kjell has taken a job with the school for the winter. He is tending to the boiler, the heart of the house (we later come to name the boiler Boa, after the snake in Little Prince, because of its insatiable hunger). Living and working alongside him are three volunteers: Silvio, an Italian architect in his late 30s and two German high school graduates, Evi and Sabrina, both knowledgeable in church music. 
It appears that the girls have made connections in the village by attending the local choir. The older woman, also German, who is driving the three of us, is heading to practice. 
The road is smooth, seamless charcoal-coloured timber forest on either side. 
“I fell ill. It happens when it’s time for change but you don’t listen,” Aceso, the woman behind the wheel, tells me. In her expression, straightforwardness balances a humble wisdom that one acquires through befriending one’s share of suffering. She left her home in Germany and moved North over a decade ago “to start her life over,” as she says. The healing she received here, she now passes on to those who seek it. 
“I made a sign and people find me.”
After a short pause, eyes focused on the barely visible road ahead, she adds: “there is a sense of community here.” As she speaks, I read her words against the extremity of the subarctic climate — in winter, temperatures can drop to - 50 degrees Celsius, contrasted by a height of degrees in the summer. Many live in relative isolation and depend on their cars to get around, thus ties in a community are, at times, a matter of life and death. 
We reach the familiar parking lot late in the evening. 
The women head to church for choir practice and I drift through the school’s empty hallways. Every now and then I peek into a classroom: coloured pencils piled on half-finished drawings, exercise books stacked on shelves, toys... It feels as if it had only been a moment ago that children played here, I can almost hear the echo of their footsteps. In truth, the school was closed down over a year ago. This appears to be a common development in the region, as young families choose to live in proximity to large cities and the villages are left deserted. 
“Why am I here?
...one of the darkest and coldest places on this Earth.”
The ache of groundlessness gives way to an anxious clench, seasoning my mind as I meet the reality I’ve led myself into. This time a one-way ticket. A call of winter that I can’t fully explain, accompanied by a knowing that I’d rather not be anywhere else.
I find the bedroom I’m due to stay in (a former office converted into a sample hotel room), grab a candle I had packed and place it on the windowsill. 
“Hello,” I whisper an intuitive prayer to make my presence known and light the match. The flame extends itself through the quadruple-glazed glass, casting a group of bonfires into the distance. 
Soon night falls, pulling a blanket of stars over my thoughts. 

“Silvio and I are going fishing!” 
The announcement comes through the open door to my room one morning in early December. Over the course of the weeks preceding, if not on one of my outings in the region, I have established a routine of withdrawing to the writing desk, surfacing for walks and meal times. Living as part of a small community has made me feel seen in a manner I don’t particularly enjoy. I retreat into solitary work more often. 
As I turn around, I find a red-cheeked Kjell, ski pants pulled over a woollen jumper, holding up a pair of ice skates in my size. 
The snow remembers me in a trail of footprints as I track to the back of the school. Tying the strings, I see two big dots toward the centre of the lake, twisting a third smaller dot, a kind of long cork-skewer, into the ice. The clear blue sky faces itself in the frozen mirror. 
Blades scratch the ice like the sharp tip of a pencil telling a winding story. Soon, the dots reveal their human form: Silvio, in jeans, shivering from the cold and Kjell, sweating, even more red-faced than at my door earlier. I circle them a few times, then head in the direction where this part of the lake opens into another, taken with the symmetry of the sky to the lake, a strip of forest green in between, a gentle mountainous curve. Freedom may well be the crisp winter wind caressing my face whilst gliding forth the whole body engaged. 
In that moment, I don’t yet know that the following summer my father will send me a document listing all the known ancestors in his mother’s line of the family and that the story begins in the 16th century when, during an unprecedentedly cold winter, a man skates across the frozen Baltic Sea from Sweden to Estonia. The sea warms before he notices to return, so he stays and marries a local woman. 
Suddenly, a voice that I can only equate to that of thunder growls beneath the ice, sending shivers down my spine. I turn around quickly and head back to where the two men are still peering into a small hole in the ice. 
“Any luck?” I ask as I approach them. 
Silvio shakes his head, scarf pulled all the way to his eyes. Kjell, however, seems content in a manner that says: catching fish is obviously not the main reason for fishing. 
“Did you hear the cracking?” he asks instead.
“I did, it shook me for a moment. Where did it come from?”
“The ice is expanding and contracting, you see.”
Alina, a villager originally from Russia, has come out on skates. Her two toddlers orbit her like moons around a planet. 

Three

As we near the winter solstice, young people flock to the school from as far as Japan and Mexico via rural volunteering schemes. Our days have been on a different schedule, yet as the community grows — we are about fifteen now — we begin a daily ritual of eating together around a large table and take turns cooking.
“There you are,” Kjell says, as he finds me in the kitchen preparing a pot of curry, joyful and engaged. It’s true, whenever I cook for the whole community, I feel myself slowly arriving.
At breakfast one morning, it is decided that we are going to make a bonfire in the communal gathering spot and invite anyone who wishes to join.
“Great, we shall go door to door and deliver the invitation in person!” Kjell suggests.
A few days later, I hear cheerful murmur as I near those huddled around the flames, drinking gløgg poured from an iron pot. There are locals here I haven’t met before.
Men tend the fire, especially a young Frenchman, Lucien, with runes tattooed on his hands. During our hikes earlier in the month, I’ve noticed him take pride in the skill of starting a fire from as little material as possible. Each rune on his skin bears a particular meaning.
“See this line here, how it continues into this one?” he says, following the curve with his other index finger. “It shows you the connection between the realm of the dead and the realm of the living.”
The temperature is below -30 degrees Celsius. In humorous desperation, when hopping from one leg to the other does not suffice, we remove the shoes from our feet and stick our legs closer to the flames. This generates a simultaneous freezing and burning sensation, yet laughter warms us from the inside.
The hours turn and whilst most of the group gradually disperses, I, alongside a handful of others, stay quietly gazing into the fire. Vision travels deep into its dance, the timeless eye in each one of us appears to be at home there.
Later, as I unclothe myself for sleep, I realise I’ve come to cherish the smell of smoke lingering in the fabric.

“The Sun is a God,” Alina told me once, as I sat in her living room amongst piles of plates and toys. I’ve started to comprehend why she would liken the sun to divinity. One easily slips into despair as the day sinks shortly after noon. At the school, we keep a candle near, but sometimes fail to tell each other apart from the darkness that envelops us. Indeed, the capacity to generate warmth has acquired a kind of sacredness.
Lit by the radiant Milky Way we gather around steaming food for comfort and companionship. Yet in the depth of the night, when sleep is scarce, each faces the dark alone in their own little body.
In the evenings, Kjell and I often talk in the kitchen. I like to ask him about his love for the land. On one of these evenings, he pauses longer than usual. I trace the outline of a sorrowful face disclosed by candlelight.
“I haven’t spoken like this in a while, since my wife passed,” he admits, body now slightly collapsed, eyes pointing downward. I sense his longing for her — it feels like leaning forward, being met by nothing but an inversion of what used to be a resting place.
Kjell grew up in a small town and developed a passion for motorcycles early on. It was a kind of fixation on pushing his limits, touching danger. When he married, they moved to the north of Finland to train dogs and build a family of their own. It sounds like she transitioned early, leaving him behind with their son. “I learned a thing or two from raising dogs, you know,” he says.
It had been shortly after dawn that his body was cast, like an offering, into the air. Thrown off the motorcycle, he landed into pieces but his life remained intact, if only by a thread. This was followed by a long road to recovery, coupled with a subsequent addiction to subscription drugs, painkillers, that was more difficult to shake.
“Where I live, a river runs through the village. Some company dumped toxic waste there, now it’s sitting at the bottom, contaminating the whole river, can you believe it!” he shares with a mix of regret and fury. “Sometimes, when I lay in bed at night, I think if only I was able to clean it... Now that would be an accomplishment! Something of value for his future,” he says, referring to his son.
For a moment I wonder, whether he’s speaking of the river in his home-place or of the toxicity that circulated in his own bloodstream. I quickly realise there is no difference. They are, in fact, one and the same.

“How to make one’s way through a time of darkness?”
“By tending the tiny fire within you with kindness. By holding a torch up for others.”

Four

Early one morning at the beginning of the new year, I stand waiting at an empty bus stop, until a neighbour opens his window and calls out in English: “You know there is no bus today, right?”
Even if someone were to drive me at this point, due to the time it would take to prepare the car I would have already missed the transfer between Arvidsjaur and Luleå, thus also my flight down to Stockholm and the one to London after that. I extend my stay by a few more days and join a hike up Jeärjjá, a nearby hill 560m above sea level. The journey is led by Kjell and Birger, a grey-haired local who spends his retirement between a home here in the village and the Arctic plains.
On the side of Luvlliejavvrie, a lake at the foot of the hill, we unload two snowmobiles, skis, sleds, coffee and everything else we might need on a long hike with a group of eleven. Some get a head start on skis and begin crossing the lake. I climb up on a large chest fixed onto a sled and strapped to the back of Birger’s snowmobile.
“Hold on tight!” he raises his voice over the roaring motor as he straightens the snow-glasses on his nose. The first few slopes make the purpose of his warning clear.
A gush of terror gives way to joyful exhilaration as we reach the lake. Racing through a pale landscape, white as far as the eye can see, the feeling of freedom expands in my chest once again.
At the edge of the forest, we begin our way up on foot.
After only a few metres, the challenge of climbing a snow-covered hill pools attention to the present: this step and now this one.
At times, I catch up with someone and we hike together for a little while, sharing a few words, but mostly silence.
On the third hour, resolution beckons. I arrive at the peak where two wooden structures stand side by side: a small hut and a watch-tower. A few of us climb up to catch the sunset.
Vast slate-coloured earth, bearing wide strokes of white, unfurls far and wide, the blue sky with a generous touch of violet. From here, Sápmi looks untamed and awe-strikingly majestic. “Sápmi, is this your true name? A body stretched across four nation-states.”
I exhale as eyes sweep across the horizon.
With a continued sense of wonder, I observe my fellow hikers as they too are taking in this spectacular view, their skin painted varying shades of scarlet. I study their faces, each one a reflection of the landscapes their ancestors travelled — different angles of the sun telling their story. We are visitors here, including Kjell, yet Sápmi holds us, speaks to us in an elemental language, as if we were her own, as if we were made from her bone. “What does it mean to belong, after all?”
We make a fire to warm up the hut and rest. Coffee is passed around along with cinnamon buns straight off the stove. Seated at the end of a long stool, arms and head on the table, I drift into sleep, sheltered by the sound of familiar voices.
By the time we begin the descent, it is dark outside. I feel a strong burst of energy and spring forth, quickly losing sight of others. As my phone battery has died, there is nothing but the moonlight to guide my way. By now I’ve grown accustomed to darkness.
With acute focus, I discern footprints on crossroads until, in a duration difficult to measure, I reach the stillness of an empty Luvlliejavvrie. The snow glitters upon the ice as does the immense night’s sky above, the Milky Way clearly defined. My feet sink into the snow with each step, my heartbeat the only other sound.
To my own surprise, I erupt into laughter.
I feel small, vulnerable, and yet as if I’ve been here for 12 000 years or more. What a paradox, to be both momentary and perpetual. To have this body inevitably wither, one day collapsing back into the ground from which it rose. Soon, wood is gathered and a new shelter is built with the slowly changing, if not unchanging, beneath it. There is a quiet wisdom informing the choice of its location. “Here.”
The last stretch between the lake and the road is most challenging. In waist- high snow, I go ahead with fear in the face of getting stuck. When I finally struggle my way out, I hear the speech of my fellow hikers behind me in the distance and to my left a pair of lights approaches: it is the small red car, it is Kjell.
How is it that he arrives just in this moment, I will not know.
I climb in and we drive back to the school in silence, both tired from the journey.

Five

The day before I’m due to leave (Evi has agreed to drive me to where I’ll catch a bus to the airport) I wake up earlier than usual and head to the kitchen to make coffee. I haven’t turned on the lights and so startle Kjell as he comes in and does not expect to find me sitting in the dark.
He grabs a cup and joins me at the table. We sip quietly for a little while. Then he says:
“I had a dream tonight.”
“Did you! Would you like to tell me about it?”
“Well, there was this rope, a big one, made of car tires and it hung from the sky. I held on to one end of it and knew that the other end reached into where the ancestors live. They are so close! I pulled the rope lightly and could feel them there, on the other side.”
“How interesting...” I respond, contemplating the rope I had felt all those months ago in London, gently pulling me to the far North.
“Yeah, isn’t it...” Kjell says and takes a sip.

The school is still fast asleep when Evi and I drive onto the main road. We had woken up hours before to warm up the engine and clear the car from a thick layer of ice and snow. All the way to Arvidsjaur, a bright moon and an even brighter Venus accompany us.
Three months later, whilst visiting a family home, I receive a text:

unfortunately I have really
bad news....
aceso told me that kjell got
a big brain bleeding and died
yesterday morning

The ice cracks beneath me. I fall through, flooded.
A light flickers underwater, a flame lit at sundown.
I swim onto shore.
Beside the lake, bathed in summer’s glow, I see Kjell sitting on a bed of moss with his back against a pine tree, eyes resting on the water.
“Our ancestors truly knew where a shelter ought to be built. You can feel it, can’t you, the peace that’s present,” he says. Then, he turns towards me and asks: “And you, how did you come to be here?”

“I was made from the North, drawn from the wandering coastline and coloured, with stark contrast, by the scarce yet sharp winter light.”

Epilogue

The image of the black Scarabaeus is associated with the god of the rising sun, Kephri, widespread in ancient Egyptian religious and funerary art. The dung beetle was said to carry the sun through the underworld at night and roll it over the horizon at daybreak, thus conveying the ideas of transformation, renewal and resurrection. Loss, whatever its degree, may appear as a gateway to winter, a long night, as we know it in the northern hemisphere.
Our shared world continues to expand, contract and expand again in predictable and profoundly unpredictable ways. How do we centre ourselves in a swiftly shifting world seemingly thrown off its axis?
What is home?
Territories and human bodies are alike in that they are made and remade, drawn and redrawn. The relationship between them is an uninterrupted conversation. Let's name this conversation “land”.
During my stay, and in the years following, I observed the emergence of a new image, new to a Western framework, of what it might mean to belong. This appears to be a belonging that redraws preconceived borders and resides as much in an extended territory as it does in movement itself. When I witness those on the frontlines of the climate crisis forced into migration, I think back to Sápmi, its people, their traditionally nomadic way of life, cyclical worldview and appreciation for the ancestral realm. Sápmi spoke even through those visiting. It sung about bringing one’s life into rhythm with the climate, with season, however inhospitable it may first seem.
We are allies in each other’s homecoming.
After all, the resilience of an apple tree resides in the pathways of mutual connection, the seamless streams between the seen and unseen, it weaves in and across the ground beneath.

Self-published in London, United Kingdom, 2022.
All the names of the people who feature in “Kjell” have been replaced.
Thank you to Northern Sustainable Futures and Arts Council England for supporting the 2018-19 travels to Sápmi.