When the Snow Fell

Just before the silent snow begins to fall...

Stories have been told about Joel before now. About him growing up in a little town in the north of Sweden. It’s the 1950s. Such a long time ago. But it seems very recent even so.

He grows up in a house with walls that creak in the very cold winters. It’s on the bank of a river with clean, clear water flowing to the sea he has never seen. He lives with his dad, Samuel, a lumberjack who doesn’t say much. Samuel used to be a sailor, and still longs to get away from the gloomy forests and return to the sea, but he can never bring himself to move. They live together in that house, Joel Gustafson and his father. And both of them dream, in their different ways, about Joel’s mum, Jenny, who simply vanished one day. Packed a suitcase and went away. She is out there some where, but she’s gone, she’s left Joel and his dad to look after each other. Nobody knows where she is.

The spruce forests are silent.

One night Joel sees a dog running through the cold winter darkness. Something has woken him up. He sits on a window seat, looks out and suddenly sees the dog. It’s trotting on silent paws, heading for some unknown destination. Joel sees it for a couple of seconds, and then it’s gone.

Joel can’t forget that dog. Where was it heading? Where did it come from? Where is Joel heading? He forms a secret society to look for the dog. Or perhaps it’s to find out who he himself really is. A secret society in which he is the only member. But the dog never returns. Joel never finds any tracks in the snow. It dawns on him in the end that the dog is heading for a distant, nameless star.

A dog on its way to somewhere beyond Orion. Heading for a constellation that maybe doesn’t even exist. That only exists inside Joel’s head.

The Winter of the Dog is a winter Joel will never forget. It’s then that he begins to understand that he’s himself, and nobody else. But he grows up, he grows older, he becomes thirteen. And he forgets about the dog. One day he’s run over by a bus. He experiences a miracle. He falls between the wheels of the bus and is not injured at all. He discovers the hard way that a miracle can be very difficult to understand. But he learns. And everything else has suddenly become much more important than that solitary dog.

To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child. He has realized this. And he doesn’t want to become a grown-up like that.

He visits Gertrud, a young woman without a nose, more and more frequently. She lives alone in a strange house on the south side of the river, on the other side of the menacing railway bridge. He shares a lot of secrets with Gertrud. Lots of fun. But also sorrow and disappointment.

Time refuses to stand still.

It continues to run past.

And Joel runs alongside it. From his panting breath comes day after day, month after month. The snow melts, and up sprouts the new spring, when the ice thaws and breaks up on the big, wide river, and logs start to float past once more on their long journey to the sawmills by the sea. Then comes another summer, when the mosquitoes whine and the sun never seems to grow tired of shining. Then it’s autumn, when the lingonberries ripen, when the leaves fall and the frost crackles under the rubber tires of his bicycle. Joel cycles a lot. He rides nonstop through the streets, searching for the unexpected. Perhaps it will be round the next corner. Or the one after that. Or the one after that.

There comes an autumn when he is looking forward to his fourteenth birthday. Now he is fast asleep in his bed. Somewhere inside the wall, right next to his ear, a mouse is gnawing away. But he doesn’t hear it. Nobody knows what he’s dreaming about.

Outside, the silent snow starts to fall through the night.

There’s a long time to go before dawn.