Walking with mosquitoes

It's not so easy to behave like a nomadic reindeer herder when all the mosquitoes in Northern Sweden have decided you are today's life source for them.

I  landed yesterday at Skelleftea airport en route to a storytelling conference in the Vasterbotten region of northern Sweden.

Today, I am deep in a forest studying the way of the Sami people with local guides.

So too are millions of flying tormentors, sent by the ancient gods to drive men insane.

Sami nomads followed their reindeer herds across Northern Europe as a way of life. Many of the modern Sami are wonderful storytellers; many still mind reindeer.

Mosquitoes do not seem to bother them as much as they do us Europeans from further south.

But no more than our own midges, mosquitoes do not like smoke, so a smoking fire is left smouldering all day.

The Sami inhabit an Arctic area, covering parts of far northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Kola Peninsula of Russia, and the border area between south and middle Sweden and Norway Their portable dwellings were covered with the skins of their charges.

Modern Sami are recreating the old way of life, notably at Koppsele, an area newly won back for restoration.

We walk through the woods with a guide who points at protruding stones and says here was a home.

Sometimes you take these things on faith.

All I see are random rocks breaking the surface of the path; but no doubt they were someone's  pride and joy at one time.

Meanwhile, our blood is being sucked from us.

We cross a wooden bridge over a mountain stream.

We drink together, my friends and I with cupped hands.

Returning through the woods later we re-cross the same stream.

The woods look different now.

Something has happened.

Mystical day.


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Training Apaches

The scissors platform is raised high above the swelling mob on the big wide avenue that is the backbone of Phoenix Park.

On it are a man and a woman facing in opposite directions.

The day is warm for a foot race but this pair tell people they will warm them up for the event.
Many seem overjoyed at this news.

Humans jump up and down in response to the shouted commands from on high.

It's hard not to believe that, to a visitor from Mars, humans are a strange species, not to mention to any passing Messiahs, during Lent.

Mass obedience to shouted instructions is the order of the day.

These people have raised funds or paid an entry fee to participate in all of this.

They seem to think it very important to warm up when told to do so.

After all, they will run 10 kilometres around the leafing roads to arrive back here, warmed up and panting, to receive a goody bag of branded goods from various sponsors.

Camera crews are positioned around the course to relay the participants' efforts to a television audience happily sitting down to Sunday roast at home.

Everywhere you look, in hollow or glade, atop mounds of green grass, people gather in bright colours to prepare for the event. They stretch bits of their bodies in different directions to make them more supple.

It is difficult not to think of them as wild Indians preparing to descend in marauding groups on the capitalist intruders all around them.

Would the race entrants move faster if they were told the Apaches were after them? Someone should take a breath and shout a warning.

I may, when the elevated people cannot see who the mischief maker is in the crowd of jumping people.

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Investing in an Ark

                            
A man wants me to invest in an ark with him. 

More to the point, he wants to build an ark and I will pay for it to be built: which means financing his wages and materials and anything else that comes up; like some housekeeping money for his wife.

Why I ask, not unreasonably I feel.

Because it may never stop raining, he says with patience. Animals can only swim around for so long and then they drown: whereas humans can sit on a roof for a long time: pending cessation of the downpour.

We, meaning he, will do  it and I will pay him to gather a pair of every animal there is to be found locally and bring them into the ark.

When all is dry once more we, that is he and I, will produce them like a magician producing many multicoloured rabbits from a hat and declare we have a monopoly on all the animals left on the earth and they are all ours, now.

This he seems to believe will lead to effective world domination by him, and me, in no time at all.

Which is a good thing, he says without saying why or spelling out which of us will arise first in the morning to do the ruling of the world.

He gives pause for thought when I point out that pairs of animals are like to mate and that if the rains last for a long time the new animals may very well take over the ark and decide to sail away to an  new Animaland across the sea, without us.

While he considers this possibility, the sun comes out and the rain stops.

He is terribly sad at this turn of events.

He goes home to explain to his wife that climate change has thwarted their ambition.

Once more.

I put my rain hat in my pocket and walk on.

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