Though I might not be too inclined to agree that a picture is worth at least a thousand words, a well-taken photograph can usually tell a complex narrative. This one is no exception.
It was a cold January morning and although it was nearly noon, the blood orange sun had just appeared over the horizon. My navigator, Seth, and I had woken up that morning from spending the night in the back of ‘Roxane’ – our rental four wheel dive Mercedes CLA vehicle. While we did leave the sunroof curtain open to sleep under the pretty stars and admire the northern lights, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant night of sleep in the boot of a sports estate vehicle at a chilly -30oC in the Arctic Circle with sleeping bags rated for -5oC.
Due to the cold and discomfort, we decided to wake up at six in the morning to head down south to somewhere warmer after a lukewarm serving of gas station coffee in a green paper cup. Having put Roxane to the test by driving at up to 160km/h on packed ice, we were at half tank by the time we reached the next gas station. I had been driving for five hours already and decided to call a lunch break at Jokkmokk, an Arctic town with a population of just about 2,700 people. Even though we were still in the Arctic Circle, it was a lot warmer at just -24oC.
Naturally, Seth pointed me towards the town’s train station so I could park in the town plaza. We even jokingly called the railway running parallel to the road the ‘Polar Express’, after a popular children’s movie we grew up with. The town didn’t offer much, so we just decided to grab a bite in the train station. The interior of the log cabin restaurant was made from salvaged train parts. The tables were taken from the interior of trains, the windows were taken from the body of passenger cars, and the bar table looked as if it was made from sheet metal from former locomotives. The checkered cloth seats even reclined as if they were still on a train.
Being Arctic Sweden, everything was covered in shrimp, so we both ordered a shrimp pizza just to see what it would look like. It was just as advertised – a margarita pizza with shrimp piled on the top. It looked as if the chef had baked the pizza and boiled the shrimp separately. The pizza wasn’t cut, so instead of being decent diners, we gave up on cutlery and just ate the pizza whole. Due to the casual relationship between the ingredients, shrimp just kept coming off the pizza and rolled onto the plate. We ended up with just two plates full of shrimp by the time we finished the margarita pizza.
We paid the bill and went outside to check out a rail yard with two abandoned locomotives. While Seth was busy photographing the trains, I moved Roxane to the front of the station building so we could take photos of the car. Just as Seth came over to rendezvous with me, a local in a vest and shorts came out of the ticket office with what seemed to be a lit roll of cannabis in his hand.
‘I can take photo for you if you want.’ He casually offered.
‘Sure.’ Seth shrugged and handed his camera to the man, not knowing if he was going to be any good in his state of mind.
‘What are you guys doing here?’ The man asked us.
‘Just going up and down the Arctic Circle being our first time in Sweden.’ I answered.
‘And to see the northern lights.’ Seth added.
‘It’s your first time in Sweden and you’re doing this?’ The man looked surprised. ‘It’s hard to see any lights now, you should have come last week.’
‘We saw some last night.’ Seth told him.
‘You’re lucky, I guess.’ He took a puff from his cannabis.
‘You’re not cold?’ I asked him.
‘No. Who needs clothes when you have weed?’ He laughed.
‘I guess if you have weed, you’re pretty much up for everything.’ I tried to look for an intelligent answer but that was all I could come up with.
The sun hadn’t even left the horizon and it was already on its way back down. It seemed as if it had just woken up to an alarm clock and decided to hit the snooze button and go back to sleep. We bid the stranger farewell and continued down south to Ăre, a town near the Swedish-Norwegian border to spend the night before we return to Stockholm the following evening.
