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A few things keep my mind focused and tantalized these days: time passes, things change. This is obvious, but how often can you feel it to the marrow? Plans crumble and the present takes their place, for better or for worse, but always in the relentless honesty of life – and under all this surface observation there is a web of circumstances, a framed structure; a latticework – which you might call a higher or deeper order, and which might be sensed at times, when the most peculiar coincidences hit home in the midst of your doings, but which may not be coincidences at all, but hints from life, the way writer and philosopher Deepak Chopra puts it in his book SynchroDestiny (and in other works of his), which I brought along as reading material on my recent 2008 Lapland hike, which I just returned from. John Lennon said that “life is what happens to you, while you’re busy making other plans”. That is the same insight and the same observation of how life unfolds, which anyone without habitual blindfolds will notice. I will go through the hike briefly here, with a few photographs for illustrations. I took the boat up into the Vistas Valley on 13 July; a little earlier than I’ve usually gone hiking before; I think the earliest I ever went. We were just two passengers in the small open boat; I and the husband or boyfriend of the hut hostess at Vistas. He was going up to the Vistas hut to be with his woman on the last week of her assignment. The driver was one of the famous Sarri elders, breezing in and out of the river bends, making strange curves across the river to stay off sand banks just below the surface. We had noticed the profuse presence of mosquitoes already on arrival in the Sámi village Nikkaluokta, but as we sped across the water no insects bothered us. As Sarri let us off 12 kilometers up the winding river, at the outlet of the jokk Márffigorsa, the mosquitoes attacked, though, so we unloaded and hoisted our heavy backpacks in haste, starting to move through the underbrush up to the path from Nikkaluokta towards Vistas, after having applied overdoses of repellants.
My backpack was too heavy. This sounds pretty amateurish. I did carry a heavy pack last year too, though, with success, i.e., without pain or suffering, after having adjusted the shape of the back/back-pack interface and the height of the pack on the back, but this year the weight seemed sterner, gravity more focused on me as I trudged along the trail, which winded through the mountain birch thickets. These mountain birch stretches along some valleys, like the Vistas Valley, are a nuisance. They make it impossible to see anything beside the trail, let alone any of the breathtaking views. You can only see the path right in front of you, and on this day it had rained, so the branches hitting your face and head sprinkled their drops over us without intervals. The mosquitoes seemed to ignore the poison we’d drenched ourselves with. Mad itching spread along the length of the body… We didn’t stay together. We were heading in the same direction, but had nothing else in common, and I felt as bit grouchy and wanted to be alone, so the distance between us grew until we didn’t see each other at all. At times I passed my fellow hiker as he took a break, or he passed me as I sat down to drink water or chew a piece of a power bar. We exchanged polite sentences.
I had made the fatal mistake of not checking my facts 100 %, so I had the misconception of a much shorter walk on the first day. I had thought that the boat would take me higher up the Vistas River than it actually did. Finally I got so tired that I decided to pitch my tent and stay the night out on the trail. This I did close by the first big jokk crossing, where the bridge has been moved up the jokk a few hundred meters and where you might get lost a while if you don’t notice the markings that other trekkers have left on the ground, telling you in what direction to go, like a pile of branches across the path not to take. In spite of the notorious mosquitoes I cooked food on my Trangia spirit stove, where after I quickly ducked into the Hilleberg Akto one-person tunnel tent and slipped into my warm and cozy sleeping bag and dozed off. There are brown bears in the Vistas Valley, but they’re so shy that they’ll keep miles away, if they hear or smell you. I didn’t even think about them at the time. During the night it rained, and the tent didn’t quite hold up. Later I was informed by other Akto owners that this tent, though very good and light, might produce some condensation on the inside of the inner tent, but that you can stroke it off with a sponge. The inner tent must also not touch the outer tent, because then the rainwater might transport itself through the fabric. |
