Five Days Before the Bars
Or, my bike trip from Copenhagen through rural Sweden
Partially on a whim and partially to see if I couldn't, I decided to bike the Kattegattleden trail up the west coast of Sweden. When I pitched this to the DIS media team in hopes of their financial support (secured, thanks guys) I waxed on about “the bicycle removing nearly every barrier between me and Sweden,” and wondering “what happens to your understanding of a place when there is nothing separating you from the effort required to cross it?” Well, let me tell you.
Day 1: Copenhagen to Ängelholm
The wiry man who leased me my bike at Cafe Parfource in the Klampenbourg train station seemed just as excited as I was for my trip. “So beautiful” he said, vaguely gesturing north, shifting back and forth on the balls of his feet with the energy one likely needs to own a bike shop. I was euphoric as I biked off to catch the ferry to Sweden, drunk on that ambrosial melange of Adventure and Independence and Self-Sufficiency that is so potent at the outset of any trip taken alone.
It's lazy rhetoric to say that the Swedish countryside is indescribably beautiful, and I am getting paid to describe it to you, but I had about seven hours today of biking to think of adjectives and came up dry. Lanky, sleek cows kept me company, and though the offshore wind wiped up over the potato fields and slowed me down in a frustrating and chapped way, it was so damn gorgeous I couldn't be upset. Everything was a fuzzy, saturated green that made the sky seem a different color aside it. Yet, the bucolic fields and hills left me wondering one thing…where was everybody? A stack of pumpkin filled pallets and smoke in a chimney, a basket half full of apples. The whole scene was defined by human touch, and bizarrely devoid of it. It was as though everyone had just set down their needlepoint sampler, stood up and poof–walked into another century.
The people I did encounter in these long, long stretches of Swedish farmland and coast were at large beautiful, elderly, and sometimes smoking. The women were tanned and wore thick sweaters and stood with their arms crossed across their chest watching me as I biked by. If you told me they were awaiting their viking husband’s return on a longship I would have believed you.
Angelholm was a picturesque little town with a walking street, a river that ran through it. I had a room at the hostel Villa Ronne overlooking said river. I slept heavily.
Day 2: Ängelholm to Mellbystrand
In Bastad I stopped at a sauna in the ocean. It suited me perfectly because it was nude and on account of light packing besuited I was not. I love women-only naked bathing situations because it is rare that you get to appreciate the fabulous variety of the flesh in such a placid setting. It’s reassuring and genuine. Clothing and wires and layers sort of hold us all into relatively the same shapes, and it’s easy to forget how dimensional the female form really is. Bobbing around in the Kattegat sea with ten naked Swedish ladies of every contour and age is an easy way to remember.
I am in every way an extrovert, and I think I’ve been truly by myself for about two hours in my life. I thought I might go a little nuts not being around or talking to anyone for so long, but in the sauna I liked this particular way of being around other people. Nobody needed to be interesting, there was no requirement to introduce myself or explain where I was going. We could just be some women in the ocean.
I left feeling healthful in body, mind and spirits, and after a little fika at the cafe next door I moved north to my place in Melbystrand.
Day 3: Mellbystrand to Falkenberg
There is a particular sense of Friday night ennui in these small Swedish towns. It’s the kind of ennui that anyone who grew up in a little American town knows well, the kind where you find yourself hanging out in a closed Starbucks parking lot with your friends through a series of events you can't quite pin down, thirty minutes after you told your mom you’d be home. It is a feeling that I felt intensified around me when I walked about at sundown. Roving packs of teenage boys furtively clutching beers grouped and disbanded like the twisting murmurations of starlings in the sky. One guy that I talked to in a coffee shop in one of these towns asked where I was going, gesturing to my super low-profile cherry red saddlebags. I told him. “Hmmm” he said thoughtfully, in that lilting Swedish accent. “Summer places.”
And summer places they were indeed, half shuttered and silent. The places where I stopped to sleep felt like an exhalation, these summer places breathing in their summer breath until they emptied their autumn lungs. The people who lived here year-round had a little bit of a left-behind air, and when a tall girl on a big bike rolled into town I could tell by their open curiosity that I was well past the prime season of biking the Kattlegattleden.
Not to say the stillness wasn't welcome. The expansive silence I spent this trip in reset some of the dials in my brain and spun others completely loose, like the ones that prevent you from singing 80s pop ballads at the top of your lungs as you bike through a forest, not having seen another human in hours. I think the cows like atonal Madonna though.
Day 4: Falkenberg to Kungsbacka
There’s not a lot to write about 31mph headwinds when you bike. It sort of stripped me clean of any creative faculties and many of my eyelashes. I had a little temper tantrum in the parking lot of a boarded up exotic reptile emporium (butik och utställningslokal för exotiska reptiler, if you were wondering) somewhere between Björkang and Glommen (it just rolls of the tongue I know). There was nothing to do except keep going north, but the wind was so incredibly wretched and I was so tired that I felt like I had nothing in me to keep biking. It is hard not to laugh a little in moments like that though, and the humor and futility of the situation was not lost on me. I swung violently between badly wanting my mommy and smirking at myself. I threw some rocks at the giant plastic lizard guarding the empty utställningslokal, ate a granola bar, peed in some bushes, and moved on.
Day 5: Train from Kungsbacka to Copenhagen
I spent three hours in the cargo car of the Øresundståg next to a rotating cast of mothers with strollers and a elderly Japanese man who, every few stops, would nervously lean over and ask me if we were at the Copenhagen airport. I reassured him that we were, in fact, not even in the right country yet. The blissful release on his face when I told him we made it to the airport was enough to make me feel relieved too, and I wished him safe travels back to Tokyo.
Through the Øresundståg windows I watched four days of rubber on gravel, photo taking, snack breaks, coffee yearnings, yoga on the beach, tasting the wet Swedish forest air and the beachy miasma for hours on end, joyful whoops and frustrated groans all collapse into three hours of a train ride. This was the first trip I’ve taken where, in any true sense of the word, there was no destination. Every kilometer had its character, whether it was joyful or a slog, and my trip became a colorful patchwork blanket of experiences rather than a point A and B. I was overwhelmed sometimes with happiness, glad I had five free days to bike, glad I had knees and a back that let me bike for hours, glad to be with the cows and glad to be in the big rolling blue expanse of the Swedish coast. Somewhere in the Laholm Bay I pulled off the road and lay making snow angels in a frothy field of yarrow, looking up at the trees. There was still a long way to go, but I wasn’t in any hurry to get up.
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