Now that I’ve set the stage, I figure I’ll dive in and start recounting life here in Härnösand with a longish story.
One day, about a month after we moved in, I found myself home alone on a beautiful, sunny August morning. Annelie was in her office preparing her classes. I needed to do some work, but it was so nice out that I decided to go and work somewhere outdoors. I packed up some work, a lunch, a thermos of coffee, and my recently acquired Swedish cell phone. I got on my bike (no car yet) and decided to head east across the island to Gånsviken, a beautiful little bay with a fishing village.
Six kilometers later, a bit winded, I arrived in Gånsviken, stashed my bike in the tall grass, and decided to take the path that leads along the forested south side of the bay, opposite the north side, where the fishing village is. I had a vague idea that this would take me into the Härnöklubb nature preserve, which sounded good. There’s a beautiful lake in the middle of the nature preserve, but I’d only ever been on the south shore, so this was new territory.
I started up through the birches and spruces, listening to the birds and stopping ridiculously often to eat blueberries, which are everywhere here in the summer. In fact, I found the best blueberry patch ever, though I probably shouldn’t tell you about it. At any rate (or rather, a slow one), I eventually came to a point where a sign marked the boundary of the nature preserve. Much to my puzzlement, not long after I spied (and spied on) a little compound a ways up the hill with a couple of cabins and a sign saying in English, “Welcome to Bedrock, the little town on the hill, population 3″. There was nobody there. It was a bit eerie.
I turned back and continued down the trail, visions of sandwiches dancing in my head. Soon the trail turned inland, and after a while, I arrived at the north shore of the lake, Klubbsjön. It is a gorgeous place. Walking past a fellow who was sitting and fishing, I found a nice, high, rocky spot with a good view over the lake and unpacked my lunch.
There were loons on the lake, two adults and a young one. They were flying around and making otherworldly howling noises almost like coyotes. I was mesmerized, until I noticed that they were occasionally flying through big patches of smoke over the lake. Smoke? Like a good naturalist, I had my binoculars, so I scanned the far side of the lake. Sure enough, there was smoke coming out of…something. The more I looked, the more it seemed that the smoke was all emanating from a single point, and that that point was a tree right on the shoreline.
I didn’t know what to do. I looked at the smoke, I looked at my sandwich. I looked at the loon–he was no help. I decided to go and talk to the fisherman, who said he had seen the smoke but thought someone was having a picnic with a grill. I let him use my binoculars, and we agreed that the smoke was coming from a tree. In fact, I saw a flash of flame. He said there had been a bunch of kids right there a few minutes ago, but they had disappeared.
Oh, no. I’ve always been the first to get involved when something goes wrong in public (I’ve actually used the term “citizen’s arrest”), and I could tell that my sandwich was going to lose. But what to do? Suddenly, I remembered my new Swedish cell phone. To my surprise, I had a perfect signal, so I called Annelie and explained to her about the tree and the smoke. She agreed that trees should not smoke and said she would call the park office and tell them about it.
Much relieved, I went back to my sandwich. After a surprisingly short while, I heard voices from across the lake–two burly-sounding men asking if anyone had called about a fire. I was too far to answer them, but I thought I heard some young people on the far side of the lake saying that no, there was no fire here.
I winced. As fate would have it, the smoke had died down a fair amount, and I realized that the rangers might miss it. I decided to go make sure they didn’t just leave. I stashed most of my things in the bushes and took off around the lake. It only takes ten minutes or so to get around to the other side, but by the time I got there, the men had gone. I found the tree, and sure enough, it was still smoking. I went closer to investigate.
The air around the tree was hot. The tree, an old whitebeam, had been hollowing out over the years, such that the trunk had a large cavity. Into this cavity, someone had apparently thrown a cigarette, and the tree had caught fire. How, in this country with twenty gazillion trees, anyone can be stupid enough not to put out a cigarette properly in the woods, I don’t know. The tree had largely stopped smoking–because the trunk was now turning to embers.
The rangers had clearly not looked very carefully. What should I do? Would the fire die out? Or would it keep burning, and spread? The ground was covered with dry pine needles. I looked around at the beautiful woods, turned, and sprinted down the path toward the parking lot. I wanted to show those stupid rangers what they had missed. But mostly I wanted their bucket.
Running down the path, I had two visions: One was of my picture in the local paper, the newly arrived American declared a hero for saving the woods. People on the street clapping my back and ruffling my Bozo wig. The other vision was of a newspaper story about a crazy Yankee who makes crank phone calls to the park service to waste their time. People glaring at me in the supermarket and spitting in my food in restaurant kitchens. I had to catch those rangers.
As I got to the parking lot, a park service car with two burly men in it was just pulling away. I ran after them, waving my arms like someone scaring away crows, but they reacted like crows and took off. Damn. Now I had an endangered reputation and a burning tree to worry about.
I walked quickly back up the path, entirely bucketless. The tree was still smoldering. Looking around the area, I was, for the first time in my life, happy to see some litter: a plastic bag. It was perfectly intact! I took it to the lake, filled it with water, and poured the water into the tree. A great hissing and sputtering began, and charcoal-smelling steam enveloped my head. I repeated the procedure a few dozen times. By the end, my hair smelled funny, but my plastic bag technique had improved considerably, and I was able to squirt water up into the tree to get the higher parts of the cavity.
I sat there for a while, to see if the rangers would come back. They didn’t. I called Annelie and asked if she had heard from them. Yes, they had called to say they had checked the place out and found it to be a false alarm. Sigh.
Once I was fairly convinced that no part of the tree was burning anymore, I hung the plastic bag from the tree, picked up my pack, and started back around the lake, to where my coffee thermos was stashed in the bushes somewhere.