I was raised in a dark forest, though I’m not quite sure anything but trees could ever really grow up around here where the task of the miner was to dig down, deeper. And who could ever grow tall enough to absorb light through such dense clusters of pine needles? Even the trunks of the tallest, cleanest and straightest pines were valuable only to the extent that they could be hollowed into wooden pipelines, destined to redirect the relentless trickle and flow out of the tunnels. Buckets and people were forever being dented, dropped and dragged day after day through the cold and damp underground. Most of the people who managed to live long enough to see the light were soon lowered into the dark corridors of these same mines, to fire, crack, pick, dig, haul and hoist ore into carts and up pulleys that ran parallel to pump lines. I suppose growth in this neck of the woods was never really intended to be equated with height, with grain or vegetables or trees, much less with how tall or wise a human being became, but with the weight of the ore, the depth of a shaft or the height of a mound of discarded stones. A heavy measure of fortune and misfortune.
Nowadays, pine trees seem to bow to the monumental ground swells that mark the depths of these woods, as though honoring the memory of a Viking chieftan. Draped with lichens and moss, and powdered by an occasional snowfall, the stones of these tumuli give witness to the iron filings and the magnetism that iron ore once attracted to this district. All the iron ore that laced the rock from Skottvång Mine went to the nearby cannon forge. Both the adjacent gun and powder factories exist yet, manufacturing, marketing and selling what they have renamed 'survivability'. It is also the privilege of centuries of Swedish monarchs to lie in Stockholm under the slender latticed spire wrought from Skottvång ore.
People who hike in summer along the recreational nature trail that passes through this terrain – along the repetitive traces of rotted railway sleepers – are more stimuated than misled by their daydreams. They can easily imagine grave settings from the late Iron Age and pittoresque forest meres. A few know that they are passing reflections at the entrances to deep waterlogged shafts, where human beings were lowered to slither and crawl only a generation or two ago.
The story I must tell begins here in an abandoned mining district in central Sweden. The terror and cruelty of my story is not easy to tell, because somehow I’ve always believed, like everyone else around here, that everything that I have witnessed in these parts, every fortune or misfortune, is a secret that I have promised to keep. Now I know that it is mine and that I am free to build the imaginary walls needed to reinforce my safe passage, to inject my antidote into sluggish veins and thus become the author of myself.
