The bare truth
Högvålen
May 17
Slept in Högvålen, Härjedalen, Sweden’s highest situated village. A lot of uphill towards the end of the day when I crossed the water-divide and left the river Ljusnan’s catchment area and into Dalälven’s. The river Göta Älv also has some of its sources up here so I am on the roof of Scandinavia.
But it was a wonderful walk despite the trip’s first use of the rainclothes. I am happy that the buds haven’t burst yet up here. Now it feels like I will be able to meet the spring all the way, a leaf at a time, a step at a time. And the birds are arriving in a wave of wings. The marshes, which can be very desolate up here, have exploded in movement and sound. Just a couple of months ago everything was deep frozen. Now sounds that I really don’t associate to the silent moores are ringing constantly; Curlew, whimbrel, snipe, crane, shanks, ducks, divers, pipers, terns, gulls, cucko, thrushes, warblers… Can’t you here the music just in pronouncing these names, as many of them reflect their calls?
To be able to walk towards this soundwave and meet it head-on is a musical experience that defies anything else I have experienced in a concert format. Like being washed clean by a tsunami of tones. The boreal spring is a soundinstallation of creation surpassed by nothing on the planet. I have longed to be able to take it in as much as humanly possible and this way of approaching it, by feet a step at a time, gives me the optimal conditions.
To walk alone this week has also got its advantages as I don’t need to explain my behaviour to less excentric fellowtravellers when I park a few minutes in front of a firtree just because this redwing has got an interesting dialect compared to the one I listened to yesterday.
In Högvålen I stayed with Lotta and Stig in ”City”, as the label on the centrally placed house of the village boldly proclaimed. They took care of me in a way no other City-hotel has; and I was offered a ”sandwich-cake” as a welcome-treat. Stig quicky showed me the antheap on the property that just had been marauded by the bear. He was sincerely concerned about me not knowing where to sleep next night and that I had hinted at sleeping in the wild. He had already found me another bed 30 km further down my route. And he kept telling me the one scarier bear-story after the other.
Stig and the bear-marauded ant-heap
- Ok, so what do you do if you meet one, I asked.
- You shit in your pants.
Came to think of an occasion when I was out on the yard in front of my house. All of a sudden I was struck by a fear that threw me paralyzed to the ground. I was petrified by dread, the only thing I could move was the outer joint of my fingers. And with there help I crawled, I clawed my way inch by inch back to the doorsteps of the house and in to the safety. There my fear subsided and I could see what had caused it. Outside in the yard a big bear appeared. But I was not scared anylonger and when the bear came up towards the metal grid of the door, rising on his hind legs roaring, I just stood in safety a few inches inside receiving his whole roaring breath, his whole power, in my face. I was not afraid any longer. I had seen my fear and was no longer its victim.
His power had become mine.
Dream, fantasy, reality?
Well, I can’t really recall any longer, and maybe that is not the point.
The story is as I experienced it so it has to be true on some level…
One Response to “The bare truth”
Leave a Reply
| 
Intressant att läsa om dagens vandring..