19 July 2021
It was described as a nice one hour walk through forest, up a hill and down a canyon. Skurugata turns out to be a rather nice walk, and I’m actually not alone, there are other people as well, some of them completely badly equipped, walking in sandals or even barefoot!! I’m wearing my hiking boots and have even taken the lower pole-part of a parasol replacing my left-at-home walking-stick – and I’m glad I have it even though it may look l a bit ridiculous! The part in the canyon is truely over sticks and stones.
I then continue on a small gravel road through very peaceful Swedish landscape, past a few farmhouses, all painted in the same falun-red colour and have lunch in the very small village of Rydsnäs next to a wonderful, clear lake.
I’m sitting there for a long time, lying in the grass looking onto the lake imagining what it might be like to grow up in such a place. There is space, but there is also the feeling of lostness, at least to me, who has never experienced to live in such a place for long. Interestingly enough exactly here I get approached by a guy with a Border Collie – in Swiss German: „Da gseht mehr nöd viel Schwitzer, scho gar nöd Zuger,“ he says and tells me he was retired, from Lucerne and happens to live in the next hamlet because he has found a house there. He has been living here for the last four years or so. Eksjö, when I’m back in the evening, seems to be a „big town“.
It is a pensive evening, I’m thinking about Sweden, how some parts of it, like the forest path in Skurugata or also the lake I have had lunch at recalled pictures of Switzerland. Yet, there is this abundance of space which you feel immanently and everywhere. So far there has never been a parking problem, for example, which I am always so afraid of, especially driving into towns, and places are not crowded – Sweden is pure space compared to crowded Switzerland. But what makes it special is that even though there is so much space you never feel lonely or forlorn, as there is always a farmhouse somewhere nearby. And there are actually people living in these farmhouses scattered about the countryside. I recall places for example in France where there is lots of space, too, yet the villages seem to be abandoned and thus there is a gloomy, oppressive feeling lingering in these places. You wouldn’t want to settle down there.
I’m glad when Maria calls me and we fix details for the next day. I will be happy to join her company after these days on my own in a friendly, vast, beautiful, yet for me still inapproachable country.
When I’m lying in the toproof of my van in the evening I hear the deep rather stuttering reverberation sound of an old American car driving off followed by the high pitched screaching sound of the renowed two-stroke engine of a 125-motor-cycle.
In the morning my heart is pounding.
