Tactful Minne and Arctic Sunshine

For all your exuberance, you were always on your guard. Gently would have worked too. Your minne remained tactful. Even so, I sensed which regions you had turned into with other women. We were looking at a wall that dropped vertically for two hundred meters. Beneath a sky the color of oxidized copper, an ancient ritual unfolded under the signs of the present age. Performed by adolescents in mismatched ceremonial costumes: moccasins and jeans, feather adornments and sneakers. Rarely had I seen anything as archaic as this stamping dance. Every step quoted the ancestors, every gesture corresponded to a syllable in variants older than the oldest map of this region. They danced in order to remember things that had founded a beginning. It was self-evident to them to understand themselves as part of a chain of ancestors. Our individualism must have seemed like a disease to them.

I grew dizzy when I thought about your significance in my life. Later we lay on a stone that reacted to the heat like a breathing body.

“This stone was once sand on the bottom of a shallow, warm sea.”

Your voice made me believe I could see all the way back into the Devonian. I got goosebumps. It wasn’t only arousal. It was a polytotoxic cocktail of sensations. Included was the intoxication of a permeability that was new to me. I was guided by the knowledge that the body is a membrane, not a vessel. My breath was of cosmic origin.

We spent the night at La Estancia del Plata, a mondaine albergue in a historicizing hacienda style. A parade of the museal. Replications of rustic colonial décor: clay tiles, natural stone, half-timbering, Otomí and Purépecha blankets, copper wrought work in the Sonora style, and taxidermy—among them a sleekly stretched jaguar that I can see clearly before me even now. A thunderstorm moved across the plateau. The air was full of juniper aromas. Between agaves and cacti, violet jacaranda blossoms glowed. The ground lay unfolded as if by a geological excitation—an event on the scale of deep time. The illusion of primevality obscured the view of a colossal exploitation of people and nature. Everything torn open here had its origin in mining.

The lodge lay two thousand meters above sea level and offered dramatic views and vistas. It had a salon with a solidly masonry fireplace. It was no fake and yet no more than a chimera of coziness. Impeccably dressed married couples were fulfilling a life dream in this room. A grand seigneur leafed distractedly through an issue of Artes de México. Undoubtedly the youngest couple on site occupied his thoughts. He shaded his interest. I registered the added attention. It offered a secondary stimulus I could easily have done without.

Arctic Sunshine

Two weeks later we arrived in Kiruna. Guanajuato lies in the Sierra Madre; Kiruna is almost at the Arctic Circle, in continuous Arctic sunlight. We picked up the rental car—a Land Rover—and equipped ourselves for the Arctic. In terrain-response mode we drove to the vacation house (with a key deposited somewhere nearby) of one of your eternally invisible friends, on an island in Lake Torneträsk near Abisko. I had already heard of the Abisko spirit: the dissolution of the separation between work and life, a Scandinavian outdoor aesthetic without posing. Raw elegance. Sturdy sneakers with technical optimization. Rough surfaces, clear lines. The materials told their stories. My style matched the local aesthetic—reduced, clear, sober. No coquetry. Coherence was the magic word of the hour.

Abisko was not a place of retreat, not a refuge of worldlessness, but a laboratory in the geological sense—a forward post of long-term processes. Fjäll and bogs, wind and water—and the center of an ecological assemblage. Rural meets research. The codes were organic, data-based, legible in layers, measurement series, and annual rings.

You had so many exceedingly generous friends and acquaintances without my ever laying eyes on a single one of them. You were a master of frictionless processes and lived at two speeds. We often moved at Stone Age tempo. We loved deserts, forests, mountains. Together we felt the heartbeat of the earth and the breath of the wind. At the same time, a mysterious network accelerated you. An email here, a brief call there. Never did you have to remind anyone of obligations or appointments. The flow of money did not dry up. The world responded to you the way a horse responds to pressure from the rider’s calves.

We acclimatized in a landscape modulated by fjäll valleys and moorland lakes. Two days after our arrival, at ten in the morning, we met Annika Mossberg. She was in her early forties, raised in a settlement on the edge of Abisko National Park, the daughter of a ranger. In the roaming territories of semi-wild reindeer herds, the wardens are called Parkförvaltare and Naturvårdare. Annika worked in an educational unit as a specialist for geological learning formats, with a focus on plateau stability and periglacial formations.

The area had once been shaped by glaciers. Then bogs and wetlands emerged. Annika observed a transitional biotope. In spring, moose passed through the valleys. The ground was constantly changing in freeze–thaw cycles. The ranger lived on moving land.

“What does that mean for you?”

Annika looked at me appraisingly.

“That I don’t flatter myself about my stability.”

Later she said,

“I don’t think the park needs me. But I need it. To locate myself.”

I could have hugged her.