
Illustration: Daniel Bjerneholt - Haus Society AB
The Wild Tour
Can energy plants be made graceful and beautiful?
What if we moved out almost all the people from Northern Sweden's inland and it became a place mainly for nature and power production?
Read the story about the nature guide Anders who comes into close combat with mutated bears, Teddies. A story about different people's perspectives which opens up for discussions about northern Sweden's role in the transition.
The Wild Tour
By Andrew Dana Hudson
Anders brought his snowmobile to a stop and checked the tracks. Fresh. Fresher than the light powder that had drifted down early in the morning, adding to the heavy layer of wet kramsnö vortex-dumped a week back, which had first turned the vast Norrlands from green-brown to white. The animals were close.
Anders powered down his snowmobile, its electric whine going silent. The whoosh of the cold breeze filled his ears, along with the chirp of birds—they fled south later every year. The tracks led toward a tetherpark, the bulk of which Anders could hardly see through the dense trees but which he could feel was there, a slight charge in the air from the superconductive rods carrying energy south, always south. His quarry were probably heading there to see if the last maintenance crew had left any trash behind. Shouldering his rifle, Anders continued by ski.
When he got close, Anders used his poles to propel himself as stealthily as possible into the open clearing of the park. It was a totally engineered landscape, a square 40 meters on a side. Thick cables—braids of mostly polyethene, as wide as his head—stretched up into the sky from reinforced concrete anchor points. They creaked with tractive tension, pulling on the winch-generators that let them out achingly slow, centimeter by centimeter. And, high above and a little to the west, the kiteswarm. Hard to spot if you weren’t looking for it and didn’t have the lines of the tethers to guide your eye, the swarm consisted of donut-shaped aerostats, cloud-like in their bulbousness, spaced out by a spindly, light-weight frame. Each torus contained an airborne turbine, spinning in the high altitude currents. Even higher than these, swooping and diving in an algorithmically guided dance, was the control kite. Really an engineless droneplane, it connected all the tethers and provided both stability and, with its huge dragonfly wings, a last, desperate surge of lift. The kiteswarm strained at its tethers, and the buried generators turned that force into electricity—the north’s very sky harnessed to feed the hungry south.
It always took Anders a minute to adjust his forest eyes to the scale and weirdness of a tetherpark, and so he noticed too late the round, mottled forms rapidly closing on him. They came out from behind one of the anchor blocks, four of them, and rushed with surprising loping speed for his legs, sharp teeth eagerly bared, faces a picture of kawaii cuteness. They only came up to his knee, but after the long summer feeding season they had packed on fat. Each one would easily bowl him over, crush him under its soft, cuddly belly.
Teddies, they were called, after the toy. For decades bears had been sliding from their traditional hunting-foraging niche into that of scavenger at the edges of human settlements, rooting through suburban trash bins and campsite dumpsters. Like dogs. And, like dogs, this role shift had come with physical changes: smaller bodies and shortened snouts, a boldness towards humans and an intelligence about things like car doors and fences. And, like dogs, people—Americans, at first, and then quickly the trend-obsessed Chinese consumer class—had liked these changes and had aggressively bred the emergent subspecies to amplify them. But, unlike dogs, loyalty and obedience toward humans had never cemented itself in the animals’ psyche. Finally, like dogs, teddies traveled in packs.
For much of Anders’ life, teddies had been a curiosity, a half-unreal figment of untrustworthy foreign media. But in the last ten years they had slipped their leashes and reproduced out of control, swarming north toward the planet’s remaining chilly climates, devastating ecosystems by eating everything in their path.
Anders would have liked to pick the teddies off one-by-one from afar, as was his usual modus operandi, but he didn’t have that luxury this time. Still, this wasn’t his first tussle with the diminutive, invasive, bears—far from it. Acting on blind instinct, he brought his rifle up and fired at the closest attacker. The barrel let out a soft pfft and planted a dart between the lead teddy’s beady, black eyes. It went down with a snarl that turned into an adorable yawn, like Winnie the Pooh realizing it was bedtime.
That lucky shot was about all the luck Anders would be allotted, however, because his next shot went high, and then the teddies were at his feet, their yellow teeth snapping at his boots. He hadn’t had time to step out of his skis, so when he tried to step away his legs nearly buckled, skis tangling. If he went down, he knew, he would not be getting back up.
So instead he tried to use the awkward skis to his advantage, swinging them at the flattened faces of his attackers. One reared away, spitting with hate. The other was booped in the nose and comically sprawled on its back, stubby legs waving in the air. Calling on years of practically living on his skis, Anders found his balance and aimed his weapon. Darts hissed out, piercing the fuzzy tummy of the downed one and catching the other in the leg. The latter made one last lunge for him, then slumped.
Anders exhaled in relief and kicked out of his skis, sitting down on the loose snow. His heart was racing. He let out a barking laugh. To think, he had almost been too cautious, almost ignored the tracks when he found them. Now he would have a fine payday to supplement his usual guide income: three bounties from the Sámi herders for culling the pests that preyed on their reindeer, plus three pelts to sell, and the fatty meat of three teddies to add to his winter stores.
Three? Hadn’t there been four?
Tiny jaws bit into his bicep. Anders howled in pain. The fourth teddy had tacked around behind, the cunning beast. Now it had him, the long claws on its pudgy paws raking at his back, shredding his clothes. He wrenched himself away. Had this been a full-sized bear, its grip on his arm would have been absolute. As it was he got free, stumbled forward, kicking up snow behind him.
His gun was out of reach. Instead he pulled his hunting knife from its sheath on his belt. He spun on his knees and faced the teddy.
For a long moment, the tetherpark was silent except for the moan of the massively taut cables and the hush of the wind. The teddy smiled at him, panting, tilting its head almost quizzically, Anders’ blood dripping from its mouth.
Then the beast bounded toward him, letting out little high-pitched yips. Anders had only one move, and he took it. He swung his knife underhanded and plunged it, to the hilt, up through the teddy’s neck into its skull. The animal slumped into his arms, and for a second he was holding it to his chest, as though it really was an oversized, stuffed toy.
Anders shoved the dead thing aside and collapsed onto his back. The cold snow felt good on his cuts. Under the adrenaline, it occurred to Anders that he might be losing a lot of blood. Something to worry about later, another part of him said, after a nap. Above him the tethers stretched up and up, and the kiteswarm swayed in the breeze.
#
Anders awoke to the whir of engines. He was facedown now, and his back was slimy with nanoderm gel. The pain was numbed, but his skin felt tugged and taut where his cuts had been glued together. He groaned and pushed himself up.
“Wow, he’s awake,” someone said. “Rough and tumble bastard, isn’t he?”
He was in the cabin of an airship, compact and efficient. Out the slanted windows, splotchy dark clouds drifted by. Anders had seen many such vessels in the skies above Norrbotten Sweden: setting up turbines and tetherparks, deploying kiteswarms, and picking up and dropping off the work crews that maintained it all. He had never, however, ridden in one. He had never wanted to.
Three men and a woman got out of seats and came over to where Anders was laid out on a bedroll in an aisle. They all wore yellow high-vis vests harness-vests, gear for rappelling down from their floating construction platforms. Name patches on their vests gave their names: Lykke, Bo, Mohammad, and Daniel. Workers, then, not Anders’ usual clientele.
“What happened?” Anders asked.
“What happened is you’re the luckiest loner in the whole damn north,” the woman whose vest read ‘Lykke’ said.
She had a Danish accent, and her face and hands were striped with trendy stick-on moodglow strips. Anders looked at the others. Under their workmen’s clothes, their hair and beards and tattoos bore the stylings of southern fashions.
“We were doing our usual rounds and happened to find you,” Mohammad explained, in crisp, educated skånska Swedish. “Had we shown up an hour later, either you’d have bled out or your furry friends would have woken up and finished the job. As it is we used about our whole first aid kit patching you up. Who are you, anyway?”
So Anders told them his name and his work leading eco tours across the inland north.
“That’s perfect,” the one called Bo said. “We’re nearly finished with our circuit, and the four of us were talking about kicking around in the snow for a few days before the sun really starts to go. We get such a limited view from up here, just a big empty frontier with a lot of turbines and tethers and powerlines. You can ride with us while you recover, and then take us out to see the real north!”
Anders did not like this idea. He wanted to go home and be left to lick his wounds. But what could he say? He did need time to heal, and he wasn’t sure he could make the multi-day trek back to his cabin on his own, even if they were kind enough to let him off at his snowmobile. More importantly, he owed these southerners his life. So, doing his best to hide his reluctance, Anders nodded.
#
For the next several days, Anders mostly kept out of the way, sitting gingerly in a padded seat waiting for his wounds to close and for the pain under the numbness to subside. He ate the packaged meals they heated up and suffered through more applications of the first aid gel on his back and shoulder. It was tight quarters, like a ship at sea, and while there weren’t waves the currents of the atmosphere did occasionally buffet them about. This led to stumbles when he did get up, and doubled the odd vertigo he felt whenever he looked down out of the windows or thought about their suspended position.
Meanwhile the four southerners carried on with their assignments. Lykke piloted the airship from one tetherpark to the next. Each time they would use a drone to connect them to the kiteswarm and tether them to the ground. Then, in a feat that seemed to Anders so daring he had to be impressed, two of the workers would ride a powered zipline from the airship over to the cluster of torus balloons. There, clipped always into their titanium-weave harnesses, they clambered around the frame, replacing and tightening ties, patching leaks, oiling ball bearings, checking for signs of wear and strain, and generally making sure the floating machinery was in good, functioning order. Finally they would return to the airship and rest while the other two rappelled to the ground and did a similar checkover of the generating station and the anchor points.
Maneuvering around the frame, securing one’s body during tasks, fighting the wind—it was all incredibly taxing and athletic work. Or so Anders gathered from the southerners’ impressive climber’s physiques and the way the ship-team closely monitored the away-team for any signs of fatigue, checking in verbally and watching their biometrics via sensors in their hightech harnesses. Despite the difficulty of the job, the team worked well together. Anders gathered that they got paid very well too.
“How’d you get into the guide business?” Bo asked Anders while they both lay back recovering—Anders from his injuries and Bo from a particularly blustery excursion to a kiteswarm frame.
“Not much else to do out here anymore. Other than this, I suppose.” Anders indicated the cabin around them. “How’d you get into this?”
“Trapeze,” Bo said. Anders looked blank, so he explained. “I did circus arts in gymnasium, but never wanted to join the circus. This job, however, it’s kind of legendary. For a while, it was really trendy for kite workers to stream video while they worked, until the utility made us stop. It looked like the greatest adventure. And I thought, ‘I can do that.’ So I bootcamped the electrical engineering requirements and applied. The others all did it the reverse way around. EEs who proved they weren’t afraid of heights.”
“It’s better than changing out rooftop solar or fiddling with crystals in some startup lab,” Lykke said, joining them. “We fly in, work for one month, get paid enough to travel for three. We get to soar over the earth. What a life!”
Riding in the airship was strange for Anders. This was not only because it meant being thrown into a peculiar and (at times) intense interpersonal situation; even Anders, anti-social as he was, could tell that the four young workers had some kind of complicated sexual vibe going on between them. No, what gave him such conflicted feelings was what the airship represented.
The airships were the key to the grand bargain of the north: an expansion of all the infrastructures the south desired, without the inconveniences that had once gone with them—people and roads. The world had been desperate for clean energy, and the sudden development of lossless transmission had meant they didn’t need to sully their own backyards to get it. Liquid crystalline “superwires” could bring electrons to the fast-growing global superconductive grid, no matter how remote the turbines or panels producing them were. So as they had during the great hydroelectric buildout of the previous century, Stockholm had looked to its huge, underpopulated frontier to the north to solve its power needs. The north had enormous wind energy potential, but fully capitalizing on that potential would have meant massive exploitation of otherwise largely undeveloped lands. There were objections from Sámi herders and hunting enthusiasts, from nature lovers and tourism companies, as well as from southerners who did not want to lose the cheap energy, they were used to, to a more industrialized north. In particular the world was undergoing a painful reckoning regarding the treatment and rights of indigenous lifeways.
But the transition was a time of great experimentation and innovation, and so the reindeer problem was taken as an engineering challenge as much as a social one. How to harness the mighty force of the wind without the sound pollution that (conflicted studies showed) potentially disturbed ecosystems? How to build out wind capacity without disrupting animal migrations with roads and rail lines? Several proposals were floated, but in the end the winning idea was the one that, well, floated.
Anders knew the history well, and had spent many years looking up at the sky as the airships soared past, pondering what it meant, how it had shaped his own life and the person he’d become. His independence from that system of extraction was important to him. Now here he was, indebted, eating that system’s food and drinking their vodka.
Not all at once, but slowly, as his back healed, he came to a decision. These brash, young southerners wanted to see the ‘real north’? Well, he would show them.
#
They started on the coast, tying in to a swaying docking tower in Piteå. The airship would be passed on to the next team heading out on a month-long maintenance tour. Anders was glad to put the cramped cabin behind him.
“Home sweet fuck-me-up home,” Lykke said as they disembarked, and the others all laughed.
“Northman,” Bo said, using the nickname the four had given Anders. “Don’t suppose they have Max Gourmet vending machines out where we’re going? I’m craving a messy vatbeef burger after all that airline food. And messier company to split it with.”
“No,” Anders said, ignoring the group’s guffaws. “If you have need of vices, get it out of your system here.”
“Way ahead of you,” Mohammed said, rubbing his gloved hands together.
In Piteå they spent a night in one of the crowded, unruly dormitories that housed the industrial workers who flew in and flew out every week or two. Most workers were either foreign climate migrants on tentative temporary visas or—more likely this time of year, as the northern hemisphere finally cooled off from the scorching summer—southerners like his companions, doing hard, dangerous, precarious work for quick, hefty paydays. Drink, drugs, sex and occasional violence seemed to slosh freely around the thin-walled building, a bacchanal for high-wire workers and out-of-pocket family men. The night was too shouty for Anders to sleep properly, but he was glad at the chance for a hot shower.
The next day they walked on foot through the slush-filled streets. Anders remembered when Piteå was a cozy residential town, elders stopping in the streets to gab in Pitemål dialect. All that had been swamped by factories, warehouses, docks, and train yards. Piteå had become a major port for sending iron, steel, timber, fertilizer, and biofuels to Europe, now that the sputtering AMOC currents left Narvik iced in for much of the winter; the Bay of Bothnia had a longer tradition of using icebreakers than their shipping rivals in northern Norway.
At the inland edge of the town was an outfitter Anders knew well. Roads beyond the coast were unreliable now even in the summer. In the oncoming winter, travel was best done by ski, snowmobile or airship—or by more exotic vehicles, gyroscopically walking robot platforms that strided over the land like Baba Yaga’s chicken house. They rented a trio of heavy-duty electric snowmobiles, sledges to haul their gear, and a compact kite-power kit.
“Can’t we just charge at the tetherparks?” Daniel, usually the quietest of the four, asked. He was balking at the price of the kite-kit. “Or clip into high-voltage lines we pass?”
“Easy to do if you fly over the land as you please,” Anders replied. “But things are not always so easy on the ground. In my experience, it is better to be safe than sorry. Many factors might keep us from being able to maneuver the snowmobiles up to chargepoints. Fallen trees, sinkholes, animals.”
“Animals like teddies?” Bo said. “Looking for a rematch, Northman?”
“No,” Anders said truthfully. Then he stopped his loading of the sledge and stared down the four. “Do you want to see the real north or not? If so, you must be willing to venture beyond your safe, engineered extraction points.”
“We’re willing,” Lykke said. “Lead the way.”
#
And so they were off. They took it slow, at first. Despite their athleticism in the air, the southerners had not spent much time on snowmobiles. After an hour or two, however, they got used to the controls and the weight of the machines, and started racing each other, taking little hillocks at speed. Anders waved them down and scolded them like children.
“You think safety is only necessary in the air? This now is the most dangerous part, when you have the confidence to gun the throttle but not the experience to correct your balance if you start to tip. Do you know what one of these machines would do if it rolled over you?”
They grumbled, but Lykke eventually said, “The northman’s right.” After that they let Anders set a slower pace.
Still, they made good time. They cut through the forests and over the hilly clearings, around ponds and little lakes, following hunting trails and animal paths, or simply winding painstakingly between the trees. Occasionally they’d come out onto an old highway and follow that for a while before cutting off again. Most asphalt roads had been pulled up for rewilding, but a few remained simply unplowed and rarely used.
It had been a while—and a strange while at that—since his last job. That one had been a glamping retreat for a group of Moroccan politicians, organized by one of Sweden’s big, prestige ecotourism firms that often hired Anders. Mostly the dignitaries had drank tea in their hexayurts, with not much for Anders to do but liaise with the nearby Sámi siida to let the Minister of Interior pet a reindeer calf. It had been good, easy money, but it had left Anders frustrated, wondering what exactly this business of his was for. So, though there were always opportunities for a man of Anders’ reputation, he had listed for a few months, focusing on hunting and photography, enjoying being on his own. He might have gone on like that for a few months more if not for his run in with the teddies.
Despite being rusty, Anders nonetheless found himself easily slipping into his practiced guide mode. He pointed out animal tracks and rock features and rare lichen. He pointed to the hibernation burrows of hedgehogs and foxes and hares. He stopped and made them walk into the rot-groves where sub-arctic trees had died off en masse in heat waves, covering the ground with a thick, uneven layer of pulpy decay, in which more temperate competitors were trying to take hold. And he started to explain about the Rewilding+Renewables policy regime that had shaped Norrbotten for several decades.
“You might not believe it, but I remember when people had thought global heating would mean everyone up here would become farmers. Shorter winters would mean longer growing seasons. Easy access to Norwegian phosphorous. Drain the marshes, and we’d be the new breadbasket of Europe.”
“Hard to imagine all this as wheat and vegetable fields,” Bo said. They were stopped for the night in a stand of particularly old trees, their tents arranged around a small fire Anders had made. “It’s so…primeval.”
“Yes, a dark forest now. With reindeer and killer bears and a few rugged country loners.”
“Sounds about right,” Mohammed said, and nodded to Anders. “With all respect to present rugged loner company.”
Anders stabbed at the fire with a stick, but continued.
“But then came the wildfires across Germany, France, everywhere. And the tree die offs. Europe became desperate to have and grow forest that wouldn’t simply burn year after year. Both for the carbon storage credits and to assuage their guilt and solastalgia. We had the weather for it, and the land, and so, as we had with much of the green transition in those early days, we became the experiment, the first place to be rewilded not in small pockets but across an entire region. And thanks to your airships, we provide Europe with clean electricity and sustainable timber at the same time.”
“It’s beautiful,” Lykke said. “Down south, everything has sharp edges when seen from the air. Fields and roads and property lines. Here there’s none of that. It’s smooth and clean. We drove all day without ever being blocked by a fence.”
Another common assumption by southerners, but the truth was Anders had taken some of those fences down himself, in his years of roaming the neowilds. When the population had drained away, many properties had simply been abandoned, a mess for no one to clean up.
#
The next day they made a brief detour on ski into the string bog. This was tough going, as the wetlands were not frozen solid yet, and what solid ground there was could be narrow, maze-like, and treacherous—the mossy, spiraling “strings” that gave the primordial biome its name.
“Now this I liked a bit better from above,” Lykke said, huffing with exertion.
Silently Anders enjoyed that his otherwise fit aerialists struggled to keep pace with him on skis. He didn’t dislike them, exactly. They were fine company, and more “rugged”—to use their word—than many of his clients. But he wanted them to understand.
When they returned to the snowmobiles, they cut north. On the third day they found fresh reindeer tracks, and the four insisted on another detour. An hour later they caught up with the animals, slowly nibbling their way into their winter feeding grounds.
It was a big herd, vast even. An order of magnitude larger than the average herd a generation or two ago. The brown bodies covered a whole hill and disappeared into the trees beyond. The Sàmi people were doing well by the Wilding, and Anders thought that on balance that was a good thing. The reindeer were one of the only success stories amid the barely halted sixth great extinction. But it had taken an intense, single-minded policy focus to overcome the ecological disruption the climate crisis brought to the sensitive, semi-domesticated species. Much new habitat had needed to be opened up for them, a grand reversal of centuries of settlement and indigenous decline.
While the southerners cooed nervously at the edges, Anders went ahead and paid respects to the Sàmi family that watched the herd and had watched them approach. He had met the eldest before, and the woman was warily friendly. They talked of the late-changing weather, his clients, and the encroaching teddy threat.
“Five, you said?” the herder asked.
“Four, I think,” Anders said. For a moment he didn’t know whether she was asking about the teddies or the southerners, but it didn’t matter; the answer was the same.
“Pests,” she sniffed, ambiguously. For all they had benefited from the rewilding, for all their rangelands had expanded, some Sàmi still remembered the early days of industrial expansion in the north, before the kiteswarms, when new roads and power lines had cut into reindeer migration paths. Together with the changing climate, the boom of construction had threatened to make life for herds more difficult. The kiteswarms were not so clean a fix as many in Stockholm believed. They still represented a fundamentally extractive relationship to the land, the north as a place from which resources were taken for the benefit of the south, and the world. A necessary extraction, perhaps; the world was struggling to contain itself within planetary boundaries, and needed energy, timber and ore. Still, it was not unreasonable, Anders felt, for the Sàmi to resent the grand deal that had afforded them an existence. After all, they should never have had to bargain for their existence in the first place.
#
“So where are you from, anyway?” Lykke asked that night around the fire.
“Suoltikasvaara,” Anders answered. It had been a good day, ranging over the land with a freedom of movement few were afforded in the modern world. The presence of the southerners did not take away from the joy he felt at that.
“Never heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t have. It was small before, and empty now.” Inhabited since the Stone Age, Anders thought, and somehow his generation was the last, for now.
“And you just, what? Never left? There were buyouts, weren’t there? Moving grants? Why stay out here alone?”
“I like being alone,” Anders replied, and it was true, though that was only part of it.
Anders liked being alone, but he was also lonely. And he felt guilty for enjoying his freedom and solitude, since it had been predicated on the emptying out of a county that had once been home to tens of thousands of people. On nights like this, he often felt the ghosts of their presence, though of course they weren’t dead. Most had gone on to live happy, productive lives elsewhere.
Looking at the southerners, Anders wanted to shout at them, scold them. He wanted to tell them that their naivete had wrought all this, that the north was the way it was now because southerners like them had made it conform to their visions and expectations: norrland not as a real place but first as a kind of fantasy frontier, and then as a sacrifice zone to atone for the nation’s sins. His family, now scattered to the winds, had not chosen that destiny. He had not chosen it, no matter how much it suited him.
“You want to know where I’m from?” he said, startling them with his sudden emergence from reverie. “Tomorrow you can see it.”
#
It was still here. Suoltikasvaara. Anders hadn’t been sure it would be. It had been a couple years since he’d visited, and every summer a few strapping young workers like his clients came to the north to break down this or that abandoned settlement. With prybar and buzzsaw they cut houses into pieces, pulled roads out of the ground, broke down and stacked all the various bits and bobs of human habitation. And, week by week, they loaded it into lift boxes, to be hauled away by passing airship drones. It was, for those who did the work, a public service, a satisfying summer spent in near nature, contributing to the global effort to create biodiverse spaces that were wild and free of people.
But Suoltikasvaara had not yet been churned into the earth. It was simply overgrown, run down, windows broken, paths moss-eaten, roofs rotten and buckling under the weight of the snow. Anders pointed to the dilapidated buildings as he led his clients down the main drag.
“That was the bakery. And that was the elementary school I attended.” For once the chattering southerners didn’t say anything. He led them on. “This is where my family lived. I was born in this house.”
The ruined structure was one of a small string of houses, running down what had once been the largest of the village’s residential streets. The village had only ever had a hundred or so residents. He trudged into the snow-covered backyard, kicked at the skeleton of a trampoline.
“This was the real north,” he said. “And I miss it.”
#
The following day the southerners caught a ride back to Piteå from a passing airship at a nearby tetherpark. Soon they would board a plane and fly home. Anders helped them load their rented snowmobiles into the vehicle’s cargo bay. Then he set his own snowmobile south, toward his cabin. Above him the airship slid silently up into the murky clouds, until the sky was only gray.
Anders wondered if he had gotten through to them. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure it had even been his goal. They had all been children when the rewinding began, if that. It wasn’t their fault. They had never known a north full of people and promise. Few did. But Anders remembered. Maybe that was enough.
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