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Ingvar Loco Nordin & Anna Nygren
Anna with Loco on the screen with Anna on the screen ("I'll let you be on my screen if I can be on yours!")
Anna and I had met one time in August of 2009, at the Nallo hut, and spoken briefly about the Šielmmávággi shortcut between Nallo and Tjäktja. After that we had no contact until August of 2010, when we met again at the same very spot at Nallo! This would have been rather peculiar for any two persons, but it proved much more peculiar in our case, after a while, when we found out how much we had in common, and how well we socialized. This did not dawn upon us in the summer of 2010, though, when all we did was to hike from Nallo to the Unna Räita hut, where we had a meal and then parted, when Anna went back to Nallo and I stayed the night at Unna Räita, one of my favorite spots in the Lapland wilderness. During the fall of 2010 Anna and I had some scattered email correspondence, which got denser along the line. Anna lived on her own property on the outskirts of a small North Bothnia village, with some horses, dogs and cats, and worked as a physiotherapist at Sweden’s most modern hospital, which looks like a space base from above, checking it on Google Earth. Anna told me she was planning to go skiing in Lapland in April, and said I’d be welcome along, even if that, I must say, seemed pretty far from reality at the time, since I didn’t have the winter equipment I thought was necessary, like certain clothes, and the particular skis and boots you need for the Lapland winter. April is considered winter up there, or perhaps spring with remaining winter conditions. A message from Anna that skis and boots could be rented at the Abisko Mountain Station lifted my mental roadblock, though, and I got on the phone at work and rented the stuff right off, and also got my train tickets. This was 26th January, and the hike would begin on 2nd April, so we still had some tough waiting time. It seemed like an eternity to me, but Anna had a more accepting attitude to the passage of time. I tried to apply her patience to my restlessness, and soon enough the day for departure approached closely.
Anna in earlier days In the meantime I did get some necessary stuff, like glacier glasses, which you must wear in the overwhelming whiteness of winter Lapland, even on shady days. I had to get optically cut glacier glasses, since I always wear correctional lenses, but that was easily done by buying a pair of French Julbo glacier glasses at AddNature in Stockholm, which I left with my optician, who had my correctional lenses inserted in the special bows, which blocks out light also from the sides. Of course the lenses were treated to become just like the original dark, uncut glacier lenses, which came with the Julbos, class 4. I also had a class 3 Julbo pair equipped for summer sunny day biking at home. Anna and I hadn’t met in person since 18th August 2010, so I was becomingly tense as I took a cab down to the train station in my hometown Nyköping, Sweden, on 1st April 2011. Anna and I would meet at the Boden train station the next morning at about 7 AM. On the platform in Nyköping I was approached by a man I faintly recognized. He asked me if I was I, and I couldn’t deny it. Then I suddenly recalled who he was. I had met him and talked with him one time at the Singi hut in Lapland. It had been during my hike of 2006, and this man was a treasurer from the town of Uppsala, who’d been hiking with his daughter in 2006. He told me that his daughter reads my Internet site, and I thought to myself that it was a good omen – or a case of synchronicity – that this treasurer, who didn’t live in my town, but was there on a tax mission, appeared before me just as I was to mount the train north.
The Uppsala treasurer (picture from 2006 in Singi) In Stockholm I spent most of the time just sitting on a bench in the Central Station, part of the time talking with a communicative older woman who was heading to Jordan on vacation with her husband, who finally turned up. She was 70, but I would have guessed perhaps 60. The Lapland Arrow (Lapplandspilen) pulled in to the station on track 4, and I mounted with my heavy backpack, which I placed outside of the compartment, in the aisle where there is a place for baggage and skis and stuff, after I’d taken out valuables like money pouch, camera etcetera.
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