Greta Thunberg - Our House Is on Fire - Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

Greta sits down a few metres from the others. She takes out her glass container of boiled bean pasta and her fork, and takes a deep but almost imperceptible breath. Then she starts eating.

It is the first time she has eaten in the company of strangers in almost four years.

She is making her way towards the time before OCD and eating disorders.

Or rather.

To the time after.

‘I’ve lived here for over thirty years,’ the woman from reception says as she sets out fresh porridge for the breakfast buffet, ‘and I’ve never experienced anything like it. The temperature was over twenty degrees the whole night. That must be unique.’

‘If the temperature is over twenty at night, I think that’s called a tropical night,’ Svante replies. ‘That must not happen very often north of the Arctic Circle,’ he says with a laugh, so as not to repeat the mistake made at the last hotel.

But here the heat is not received with the same unchecked enthusiasm as down in Luleå. Here there is cautious concern about the extreme summer temperature, and the staff don’t really know how to answer the guests’ questions about where one can hike in the shade, how hot it will be on the bare mountain top today, and whether it’s possible to make it up to Lapporten in this heat.

Svante fills a bowl with porridge and refrains from asking for oat milk, because the odds that there would be any don’t seem strong enough for him to risk being seen as someone who thinks they’re a little better and more sophisticated than everyone else.

Someone from Stockholm, in other words.

As if that wasn’t already obvious from the extension cord between the makeshift charging point and the electric car that is itself squeezed between the parking lot and the restaurant’s little wooden deck.

Greta eats in the minimalist bedroom with Roxy. Pågen’s wholegrain rye, sourdough and lingonberry bread, as always. Plain.

It’s hot on the restaurant patio. The butter melts on the bread and Svante might as well have been sitting in Rome or Barcelona. He pours his fourth cup of coffee as the last guests depart, and the hotel staff sit down at the table next to him and take their morning break in the sun.

They talk about the heat, not unsurprisingly. And who said this and did that in the village. There are four women, one of whom is from further south. From Hälsingland. She seems to have the hardest time handling the heat and they poke fun at her. She ought to be used to it, and so on. She’s the same person who advises the guests about where they can find shade when they’re out hiking in the heat.

‘Almost best to stay indoors,’ she says, without the slightest hint of irony.

The roar from a helicopter taking off or landing on the helipad above drowns out the conversation from time to time. The air smells of kerosene, fresh coffee and pressure-treated wood.

After a while a man joins the women. They are well acquainted. He’s a helicopter pilot and the conversation drifts to what it’s like at the other hotels and cabins around the mountain area.

‘It was twenty-five degrees at Kebnekaise yesterday,’ and ‘Have you heard that the south peak is no longer the highest, because the glacier has melted so much?’

It wasn’t news.

Business is good in the helicopter world, but he’s far from content. He wonders whether he could increase the profitability for everyone if he lowered his prices sharply so that in theory he’d be losing money on fuel and the helicopter, but if everyone pitched in to cover the costs it would mean they could get many more people out to the cabins, and more people in circulation means more income for everyone.

They all think it’s a great idea.

Svante is of a different mind, but he keeps his thoughts to himself.

This is a part of Sweden that has paid for almost everything. The ground has been dug out. The rivers have been tamed and the forest cleared. And the money has always ended up in wallets further south. Fat wallets.

Very fat.

Greta and Svante prepare their lunch and finish packing for the day’s hike. They walk across the hotel’s gravel yard. Roxy runs ahead and pauses for eye contact every ten metres. The staff’s breakfast is over and three of them are gathered around the air-source heat pump outside the restaurant, passing the user instructions from hand to hand. They read out loud to each other and cautiously finger the panel with its buttons and digital display.

‘It should be able to pump cold air too,’ the woman from reception says. ‘Like air conditioning.’

The thermometer outside the supermarket shows 31.7°C and they don’t really know where to go. They’re panicking slightly. Up on the bare mountain top it’s probably cooler but there’s no shade. The snow on the peaks all around has all but disappeared in three short days.

It ought to be cooler along the river, they venture, and they’re right. There are also patches of shade to be found in the low-growing mountain forest. Periodically they stop by the rapids and splash themselves. The trees, the ground, the grass, the plants and the marsh smell like nothing they’ve ever smelled before. After several days in the intense heat a new environment has emerged. A brand-new world with new scents, new colours and new living conditions. Sometimes they stop and get on their knees, noses to the earth and the moss, and just smell.

They take a break by the river beneath some white boulders. The water is green and white from the rapids, which are strong along the middle channel and against the opposite shore. If Roxy were swept away by the current she wouldn’t stand a chance. She’d be taken down the river and the falls five kilometres to Torneträsk. So they stick to a little cove near the shore.

The river is cold. But not too cold. They take a dip and drink the mountain water they’re swimming in. They guzzle it down. They dry themselves in the sun on the stones until it gets too hot. Then they jump in again.

Greta finds a black stone on the shore that’s shaped like a heart. A perfect, coal-black heart.

‘Like Knight Kato,’ she says. ‘A heart of stone. We ought to throw it into the water like in Mio, My Son .’

‘Go ahead,’ says Svante.

But Greta hesitates.

‘But imagine, it took millions of years for this one stone to end up here on the shore. And what if it would make some other person passing by happy to see it?’

‘Eh,’ Svante says quickly, ‘we humans have so much to be happy about and grateful for. We don’t deserve more.’

Greta clutches the black stone and throws it with all her might out into the middle of the river. Roxy perks up and is about to chase after it, but stops on a dime and stays on the shore and watches the ripples from the splash disappear into the rapids’ whirling roar.

The next morning it’s much cooler. It’s drizzling outside and a different weather system has moved in over the mountains. They take the trail up towards Trollsjön Lake and Roxy zigzags up and down the mountain slopes. The landscape is a cross between The Sound of Music and Lord of the Rings , with gigantic stone blocks resting in the green grass between the rock walls that reach into the sky like skyscrapers on both sides of the valley. Yellow flowers are blooming everywhere.

Greta’s energy increases with each passing day. She talks about the school strike and keeps asking how to go about it.

‘Whatever happens, you have to do it all on your own,’ Svante says for at least the tenth time. ‘You have to be able to answer every question. And you have to know all the arguments and answers. The journalists are going to ask you about everything.’