Grey Skies and Night

LUND--The local paper's weather section read that in December there had been EIGHT HOURS of sunshine. This somehow came as no surprise and January has been little different. There probably has been a little more sunlight but it all comes in the morning and can be gone by the time you look out the window, see that there are blue skies, throw on your boots and parka and walk down two flights of stairs.

Yesterday, there was no sunshine at all but we decided on a little adventure anyway. I have always been fascinated by the edges of places, the periphery, borders, farthest points and little visited places on the edges of maps. I am fully aware that there is usually nothing in these places but I find a certain satori in the physical mapping of land beneath my own two feet, to trace the edges of a land by foot.

We set out from Lund in the car bound for the southernmost tip of Sweden in the town of Smygehamn. We drove through small villages on back roads, villages not unlike rural Midwestern communities although possessed of fewer churches. Skåne is much like Ohio, as I have written before, meandering country roads and small towns surrounded by farms. Each small town even seems to have one house on the outskirts whose yard is littered with junked cars, cannibalized farm equipment and other detritus of human living. A slow rain fell from the uniform grey skies and the closer we got to Smygehamn and the actual point at Smygehuk, the stronger was the wind.

The village was a small, seaside town filled with artisan shops and closed restaraunts, shuttered hotels and campgrounds that in summer are undoubtedly full of life but in this season show their age and wear. At the point there is a monument and a small harbor and a snack shop that didn't advertise itself as the last chance for a herring burger before Germany and Poland. It was obviously not run by an American who would have been unable to resist a "Southernmost Snack Shoppe" sign.

We walked to the point and there is the obligatory monument. This one told us in granite that Moscow and Paris are as far away, more or less, as the farthest point North. At the far tip of Sweden in January the waves roll in and it is grey. There is no color. The sea is grey and the land is grey. The grass is grey; the sky and clouds are grey. The docks and boats are grey. Only the caps on the waves are not grey. They are white. Near the point there is a sculpture near an old lime-kiln. It is the masts of a ship coming out of the ground. It is grey as well.

You can feel the weight of the long phallic forested rock of Sweden leaning on top of you. Or maybe you can't. But you can feel that North is only forest and rock and cold, cold lakes and down there, down across that grey, flat water is land worth conquering, invading, pillaging. No reason to come here. We shall go there.

I crawled through the old lime-kiln, into its heart where the fire once was, and thought how cold it had become. We met in the middle and for a moment it was not so cold. We crawled out and walked down the beach and I found that some of the rocks had smooth holes drilled though them by time. I took a lot of photos and then found that the Summicron lens of my Leica had a fine beading of water over it. I haven't seen the film yet but I am expecting an unexpected soft focus.

We left there and drove to Ystad. On the way we stopped at an ancient stone rectangle. Yes, rectangle, not circle. And a very nice rectangle it was. Grey.