The Swedes go off to commune with nature

UN-NATURAL
The Swedes Go Off
To Commune With Nature
By Jeanne Rudbeck

On a summer weekend Stockholm looks like it has been the victim of a plague that wiped out the entire population except for 15 museum guards and a handful of tourists wandering around with puzzled expressions on their faces and maps of Oslo in their hands.

The Swedes have gone off to commune with Nature and heed rural sounds.

The evacuation starts on the first nice Friday in May, with frantic rushing back and forth between apartments and cars, the carrying of portable fridges and bicycles, huge cartons of canned ham and herring. And beer. On Sunday night the operation is reversed, minus the beer, herring and ham.

I asked my neighbors why they spend the weekends loading and unloading the car. Clucking with sympathy at the plight of this poor soul stranded as though behind enemy lines, they replied: "To go to Nature."

Nothing--not herring nor aquavit--is as vital to the Swedish soul as escaping to an island populated by fewer than ten people who hide in the woods peeking out at the other nine from behind trees.

I first became acquainted with this Rousseau-ist mania when I was a student in Paris where I rented a room in the Swedish house at the Cité Universitaire. On the first Friday night of that fall we foreign students, wearing black turtlenecks and bearing the existential burden, headed for the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to smoke strong cigarettes and discuss the Meaning of Life. On our way out, we'd cross the Swedish students burdened only with backpacks heading for the train station. Grabbing one by his knapsack I asked why he was fleeing this most beautiful of cities.

"I am going to find a forest. I must walk in Nature," he replied, in a voice as desperate as Greta Garbo's when she moaned: "I want to be alone."

"Don't you want to come with us to the Café Flore, where Sartre wrote "Being and Nothingness?" I asked.

"I have to see flowers and birds," he shouted back at me, running as though pursued by demons.

Swedes know about flowers and birds. When asked to identify certain objects of nature, I answer tentatively: "Bird?" A Swede will be able to assure you it's a yellow-bellied thrush.

Wishing to observe at first hand the object of all this passion, I accepted an invitation to spend a weekend with Ulla-Britt and Lars at their country idyll somewhere in the paisley map of the islands in the Stockholm archipelago. Visions of a peaceful day in a hammock with a book vanished when, right after breakfast, the first of several walks in the woods was proposed. Here is what I learned about Nature:

Nature provides no benches for resting on when you're ready to collapse after hours of tramping about in a semi-crouched position to find 23 wild strawberries.

Nature does not provide running hot water. Country life means preserving the breakfast dishwater all day as though it's liquid gold. You walk to a stream to rinse off your dirty lunch dishes in order not to dirty the breakfast dishwater.

Nature has pollen that makes you sneeze and bugs that make you itch.

And worst of all, in Nature you can’t get a latte.

Here's my dirty little secret. I like cities. I will never again leave the urban jungle to return to that state of nature that human genius spent thousands of years to struggle its way out of. And when the neighbors return at summer's end and parade their bronzed bodies before my pale eyes, I'll try not to look smug when I tell them I spent the summer lying on the sofa reading Proust.