Leviathan
The river was angry today,
as it twisted like an anaconda,
heavy of mind,
impossible to placate, to calm;
violence seething just beneath the surface,
ominously,
directly after we put in at Trummselet;
its dark unrest apparent
after our winding passage
beneath the shadowy arch of the Route 356 bridge,
the surface spilling over in little whirlpools;
larger dark vortices threatening
& spontaneously rolling,
suddenly roaring waves arising
out of nowhere, in magical emergence,
while we thought we could sense shadows
like the hungry movements of a lake monster
beneath our kayaks:
the river’s ill temper in heavy surges
For so long it had pretended to be well-behaved,
sluggish, sensible, mediocre;
even sanguine, indolent & bloated —
but now it had stopped pretending,
drunk on a century’s worth of rain
& the draining
of all Norrland’s bogs & tarns,
which intoxicated it on the essences
of fly agaric & water hemlock
and made it restless & intractable
The river, with its historically vast capital of violence,
was violent today, the violence hidden
beneath its seemingly serene surface at a distance,
though in the depths full of heavy movements;
dark shadows tumbling,
all the way down
through the relatively facile Storststrycken passage
and the more easily maneuvered life in Stryckmellan,
until the river took command again,
and grabbed at our kayaks as with octopus tentacles,
twisting & wrenching them unpredictably downstream,
this way & that,
as we struggled
to free ourselves from its grip,
until the masses of water increased almost pyramidally
in the narrow passage
between Näsudden Point & Lillstrycksudden Point,
and sent us flying down in free-fall catapult acceleration,
irresistibly; the paddles merely rudders
as we streaked like surface-skimming missiles
over the water’s foaming emotions,
until at last we could tear ourselves from the river’s grip,
round Lillstrycksudden Point,
and save ourselves into calm water,
passing up the chance of an excursion
into the little inlet at Lillavan,
feasting our eyes on the broad, calm surfaces
of Niemiselet,
where neither violence nor anger reached,
but could only be seen far behind us,
as a roaring white streak
in the distance
We made our way past Viknäsudden Point,
deep into Notviken Bay,
where we rested
just below Rånevägen Road,
before our impending maelstrom battle
back upstream,
for which we were both keyed up & tense
On our way back toward the boisterous Lillstrycksudden Point,
across the water we had rested on,
we met the Athena-radiant star of heat,
standing high in the pale blue,
blinding as a blast-furnace ladle
with its single caldo-eye,
as stern as the eye of God which no one,
according to legend, can face and live –
and in this light Anna floated in her kayak,
the paddle in the dazzling contour
of the polarizing sunglasses from Fiskejournalen
dancing against the light like a pair of butterfly wings
in a dream,
and soon we were there
round the rounded wooded point,
in the onrushing fury;
just as matter-of-factly furious –
but now for us to outwit
by sneaking tight up
along the shoreline,
where the blindly whirling & raging temper
in the main current
was replaced by many smaller little sallies
& italicized expressions of water
which I forced my way up through,
between Näsudden Point and Lillstrycken
with my paddle,
forward-leaning & determined,
constantly on the verge of being wrenched out
into the wild water-rage of impossible resistance,
which had only one thought: down down down!
while I silently shouted: up up up!
– and I made it past Lillstrycken’s fury
without being able to look back,
but safely above the passage
I turned around
and saw Anna farther down,
out in the middle of the current,
paddling madly with all her strength,
without moving at all,
as on a treadmill,
her upstream movement
exactly matching the river’s flow downstream,
while I bellowed to her over the roar of the water
to make for the riverbank
and claw her way up there,
as I had done
I gesticulated,
and at last
she managed to break off her futile attempt
to defeat the river in esse on its home ground,
out in the current,
and instead, like me,
to hack her way up along its flapping gabardine trousers
Now I thought everything was easy as Tony Curtis,
but no...
Once back up at Storststrycken
I fell behind Anna,
who had already fought her way up along the shore,
while I instead got stuck
in a tremendous downstream current,
which, despite my wildly hacking paddle
rotating like a biplane propeller
in a Biggles book by Captain W. E. Johns,
actually carried me backward,
farther and farther away from Anna,
who had triumphed over the black-faced Leviathan,
and wondered in astonishment what I was doing...
Summoning my last reserves of strength
I struck & clawed my way in
toward the wooded shore,
only to be rivered up
onto a gang of gray-backed boulders
that lifted the kayak’s hull
and tossed it & its bewildered captain
far too high for healthy balance
At the risk of wrecking the paddle,
without which I wouldn’t have been worth much,
I planted it in the head of the leading boulder,
and broke free,
at the cost of being river-shot back farther down from Anna,
who sat silently at a safe distance and watched...
With brand-new blood blisters in my hands
I managed to tear & hack the kayak upward,
tight against the brush along the shore,
& reunite with the now-rested Wildwife!
But the dark, swelling resistance
was by no means broken,
for up toward, and beneath the Route 356 bridge,
he excelled in all manner of current-tricks;
jerked the kayaks this way & that,
and stood firm against our last reserves of strength —
but with the goal in sight
we found the new strength we needed,
and could fever-paddle our way up onto the shore
in the calm home cove at Trummselet,
while the dark flow-count
raged on in his mighty darkness,
ten meters out
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
Written on 2026-09-07 at 15:37
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