When it was all over, sneakers finally dried on our San Francisco stoop, I saw what we’d done: gone to Sweden for a whiff of California. At some level, anyway, and hard to say who should be more offended by that. I’m sorry! (I’d do it again.)
In June of 2023, we’d rented a car in Oslo, Norway, and crossed the border near Ørje. Sweden is instantly 100 percent Sweden. The meadows and ponds weren’t just pristine but solemnly so; there was a rigor to those tidy lines. Then the landscape shifted, and we beheld what we’d come for. Trees.
Only trees. One trillion trees, filling the frame. Not a careless American variety of trees—just pines, straight as telephone poles, a child’s drawing of a forest.
“So what, exactly, do we do when we get there?” my younger child had asked.
A surprising thing you do as a parent is review multiple times rather basic facts that you’ve already covered extensively—why, for instance, you’ve just flown 13 hours to another continent. Nevertheless, I reviewed for the back seat contingent: We were going to build a log raft and then drift down Scandinavia’s longest river for a while.
“Do we know how to build a raft?”
“No, but they’ll teach us.”
“Who?”
“These people in Värmland. Vildmark i Värmland—that’s what the operation is called. Wilderness in Värmland.”
“What do you mean ‘operation’?”
“Like, a small business. They give you logs and rope, and some canvas for a wigwam-like structure on one end of the raft, and provisions to live on. That’s it.”
Satisfied, the lad grew quiet. Neither child asked why, but I was ready.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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Per nautical ordinance, I’d have explained, the following cannot happen on a small, motorless raft: Typing. Scheduling. Carpooling. Doomscrolling. Not even much parenting. Cora wouldn’t need to get from school to Margalo’s house and then home in time for babysitting. Casper wouldn’t be off refining his corner kick, and then needing a ride to drum lessons, but don’t forget that dentist appointment we already rescheduled twice. Amy and I wouldn’t be scrambling to finish work before cooking (pasta again) and planning so-and-so’s birthday dinner (pasta sounds good) and remembering to look at that thing on Rosie’s paw (what are we, veterinarians?) and maybe having a second to discuss the state of the world (all fine, no notes) before nodding off.
Much of the carping above could be carped by anyone anywhere. But the California taxpayer is legally entitled to an extra helping. Something we signed up for long ago is fading.
When I moved to the West Coast at the end of the millennium, I agreed to the old unspoken deal: In exchange for insane rents and dismissive East Coast sneers, I would be excused from some of society’s more bourgeois trappings. Life was looser and more interesting here. While elsewhere they charted a tight course, here we surrendered to the current. You kept your eyes on the horizon, ran aground at times. In other words, California was—let’s pretend I saw this before now—a raft. It was janky and impractical, but it basically held.
I dismiss a good deal of Golden State exceptionalism as misplaced nostalgia, or else the residue of privilege. But real or otherwise, our mythology gave rise to actual ways of being: a deeper connection with nature, a penchant for seeking, bouts of abandon. You got in over your head here and there. When it went well, you glimpsed a new part of yourself, or at least had a great weird night.
I’m hardly the most Californian Californian. But I like encountering those who are, and I don’t do so as much anymore. Something is encroaching—a pace, an ethos, maybe just an economy that slots you into more familiar orthodoxies. We work more now, worry more, plan more, optimize more. Of course you can still find wildness on the West Coast; I’ll still never experience a fraction of it. But what I find more often is that old California getting brokered into immersive experiences, feverish startups, lifestyle brands. Our poor raft! And so you raid the savings and pilot a rental car deep into the Swedish interior, with a vague idea about finding something you’ve been missing.
Some people got no problem. Some people got every problem,” the man was telling us.
This seemed accurate to me in a general kind of way. The man was speaking more specifically about the possibility of running into sandbanks. Or rocks. Or a backwater. Or successfully skirting that backwater but then coming too close to shore and snagging your wigwam on a tree and your whole raft comes apart beneath your feet.
We all nodded. Lasse is the sort you nod at: tall and hardy and commanding, with close-cropped gray hair and light blue eyes. At one point, a horsefly landed on his temple as he spoke—zero reaction. We’d arrived at Vildmark i Värmland’s headquarters, a KOA-ish campground surrounded by, yes, trees, half an hour from the not-quite-a-town of Torsby. We’d stashed our stuff in a primitive cabin and walked out in the afternoon sun to a patch of grass by the end of the property, where a handful of fellow rafters had assembled—all from Scandinavia or other parts of Europe, all decent English speakers like our raft teacher. Our journey would start the following morning. For now, we had to learn the art of not having every problem.
Lasse continued. After years on this river, he was an authority on raft success. First commandment: Build your boat right. Learn the knots he’d show us, do not deviate from the knots, and—actually, that was the gist of it.
Second commandment: Somehow understand the dark and swirling ways of a foreign river you’ve never even seen until you set out. At Lasse’s feet sat an old wooden crate. Inside were the crackers and coffee and pasta(!) and camping stove and other items we’d live on. Lacquered on top was a detailed map of the Klarälven River. Amy and the kids and I leaned in as he pointed out areas of interest and peril.
“It is difficult!” he said cheerfully. “Sometimes at the end of trip, a couple will…drive in separate directions?”
He did the universal mime of two people dissolving their marriage after a challenging rafting excursion.
“But mostly it makes a family more…how you say?”
“Close?” I guessed.
“Close!”
The company’s other instructor, Jan, took over. Jan, clearly from the same manly showroom, was tall and hardy and commanding, with close-cropped gray hair and light blue eyes. He got down to business, telling us the distance we would travel: about 35 kilometers. We weren’t really trying to reach a specific destination; that’s just how far you can go in three days.
Our craft would be six meters by three meters and weigh 7,000 pounds. Once more for emphasis: seven thousand pounds, nearly the weight of a shipping container. Our average speed would be just over one mile an hour. Crawling would be faster.
Another key figure: 70 percent. That’s how much of Sweden is covered by forest. (We’re at a mere 33 percent in the States. The rest is Dollar Generals and Chick-fil-As.) The kingdom’s boreal wealth was central to its economy by the Middle Ages. And in time, one of the world’s great paper-and-pulp operations would take hold here. As it did back home in the Pacific Northwest, logging became such a part of the culture here that it sprouted its own culture. Kids sang songs about lumberjacks. There was lumberjack poetry, lumberjack style, lumberjack cuisine—kolbulle, a bacon-and-lingonberry pancake cooked over an open fire, was a staple for its high fat content.
A winter’s day would be filled with the sound of towering pine trees crashing to the snowy forest floor. The lumberjacks would then slide the trees—now logs—out onto the frozen Klarälven, where they’d remain until the ice melted in spring. At that point, they would commence floating down the river to mills in the south. Impossible to say how many books and thank-you cards and paper airplanes and receipts and paper towels have emerged from these parts. (If you are reading these words in print, you might well have a little bit of Sweden in your hands.) At the season’s peak, one would peer out from the bank and see not water but an unbroken carpet of fallen pine, bobbing mindlessly south.
In 1980, some enterprising folks had a thought: Why let the trees have all the fun? A husband-and-wife team calling themselves Vildmark i Värmland struck a deal with one of the local timber companies. Soon they were helping intrepid travelers build massive rafts out of the logs, after which the travelers would drift down the river like those logs.
So it went for a little over a decade. Then, toward the end of the 20th century, history began to catch up with the logging industry. The advent of just-in-time production required faster transport, and paper companies now wanted their timber as soon as it fell. Sending logs down the lazy current happened less and less; more and more, the silence of the forest was broken not by the voices of loggers but by the roar of trucks, which could reduce that tree-to-pulp journey from months to days. In 1991, the last log floated down the Klarälven. The autobahn of Swedish timber was suddenly empty—save for the occasional Vildmark i Värmland raft, keeping alive a tradition born of a tradition.
Jan and Lasse wrapped up their history lesson just as evening fell. We retreated to our little cabin. The kids fell asleep first, then Amy and I, and then it was dawn. We dressed, gathered our stuff, and stepped out into the misty morning. While the land-dwellers of the world slumbered—cozy, dry, blithely confident they’d hoist no enormous trees that day—the four of us lugged our packs into a van and rumbled off to the river.
Awaiting us at the build site was a pine forest in log form, arrayed in sun-bleached piles atop a steep embankment. Down the slope lay the river, broad and slow. The enormity of what was to come washed over us.
“That’s a lot of logs,” Casper finally said. Someone had to.
We got out. Back home, the next phase would’ve revolved around signing waivers, listening to safety lessons, agreeing to lift with our legs. Lasse and Jan simply put us to work.
The next six hours were just phenomenally hard. Each of those massive logs had to be pried loose from those massive piles, all without crushing any cherished body parts. Then came the lifting—arms around the damp, bark-stripped surface, legs braced, a dead lift that involved back muscles previously unknown to me. Step by step, we’d wobble down to the river’s edge.
Sploosh. In the water, the logs floated this way and that, ungovernable. (Construction can’t happen on land—getting a 7,000-pound boat into the river after it’s built would be impossible.) Cora and Casper waded out into the cold shallows. One on each side, they began holding logs in place while Amy and I tied them. Each log had to be lashed to the next, tight but also loose enough to flex with the current. Our hands worked continuously, twisting and looping rope around one end of each log and then the other.
Altogether, we’d build three platforms, one on top of another, to create a three-ply deck. It would have a bench at each end and an A-frame structure at the rear, covered in canvas.
Jan and Lasse guided us but did not spare us. It was exhausting. You strain and shove to get one log into place, then discover that its neighbor has meandered off. A loop between logs two and three, a half hitch around the top log, a twist, another loop, another hitch. Our backs ached, our hands ached, our rope-minds ached. Different pattern when you get to logs four and five, which are now floating away. How many people die each year from log- and knot-related exhaustion on the Klarälven? I’m sure the Swedes bury the records. At least it wasn’t raining.
It started raining. Tighten log eight. Swap log nine for seven to make it fit better. Twist, then back under. It had been hours, but they kept coming: 12 logs, then 20, then 30.
You never forget the first time you cinch your last knot and shove off in a floating homemade rudderless tank into a major river with your most valuable loved ones. We waved goodbye to Jan and Lasse, then began to drift. A couple of other rafts had set sail earlier and were quickly out of sight; we were alone. The rain drummed the canvas of our shelter. Otherwise, everything was silent, the flurry of the past six hours replaced by a profound calm.
It goes without saying that Huckleberry Finn hangs over any log raft journey one undertakes. Which brings me to this: Huck did not build his raft, whatever you remember. He and Jim found it, premade, and moved in. This explains why half of the book isn’t devoted to him simply marveling at his handiwork from different angles. For the first little while, we did just that, gawking at our new home from over here and then over there. It was a prehistoric, emphatically handmade-looking thing. It was also beautiful. And massive. Those three crisscrossed layers of logs formed a wide, knotty platform, riding just at the waterline. Across the crook of the A-frame lay two immense wooden poles for gondolier-style steering. Tied to the side of our raft was a canoe for excursions to shore, a.k.a. the restroom. Stashed here and there: rope for mooring, two of those wooden crates bearing our provisions, four paddles, bags containing clothes and books and other essentials. Anything hooklike was for hanging rain gear and hats and jackets.
“Lasse said we need to name it,” Cora reminded us. In guilty homage to our dog back in San Francisco, we christened our vessel the SS Rosie. Our sole duty complete, we turned ourselves toward river life. Every half hour or so, we’d veer too close to the shore and would have to paddle furiously. Otherwise, the gentle current kept us in the right place, and we were free to just watch the scenery go slowly, slowly by. With its endless forests and rolling hills and very occasional farmhouse—thin wisp of smoke, stone chimney—this part of Sweden looks like parts of America probably used to look. It probably looks like a lot of places used to look, which gave the raft a time machine–ish air.
In turn, we naturally adjusted to 19th-century entertainments. Here was a pair of starlings swooping and banking and skimming the water for food. How long do humans typically watch starlings? Thirty seconds? A minute? We watched for 10! The urge to move on, to turn to the next thing, was vaporizing.
I’d first heard about this whole adventure from a Danish friend. They just turn you loose, he’d said: no hand-holding, nobody piloting your raft for you, just you and this wild, lazy river. Danes, Germans, the Dutch—they go crazy for this kind of thing, he said. Americans not so much: It’s far away, it’s hard, it’s a little dangerous.
Sold. Amy and I take seriously our obligation to inflict uncertainty and mild hazard on our heirs. But the trip appealed for its potential to remove things from their lives, too—activity, namely, chief affliction of the North American child. At any given moment, Cora, 15, is making an art project, or practicing guitar, or studying geometry, or working at her job, or busing across town to meet friends. Eleven-year-old Casper’s world is soccer—but a tight focus consumes no less. If we’re not looking for lost shin guards (they’re under the couch), we’re schlepping to ever-farther-flung games or rescheduling our lives around the next tournament. I’m pretty sure we’re blurry in all of our photos.
Now, out on the water, something was different. I snuck glances at my crewmates. Cora had taken a seat under the cozy canvas—pat, pat, pat—and was sketching. Casper had his pocketknife out and was working on a stick he’d plucked from the water. Amy was reading inside her sleeping bag. OK, they were still doing things. But they were doing them mellowly, in first gear instead of third.
We were—I hope I’ve established this by now—on a river in Sweden. But floating around on a timber raft, you also inhabit a kind of ur-river, summoned by Mark Twain and other chroniclers of drifting adventure. Those stories had seized my childhood imagination. I scribbled boat designs on graph paper, pondered specific logistical questions. If I was, say, roasting hot dogs out on the Mississippi, would the breeze from the river blow out the fire I’d built?
I was 11 when my friend Erik and I went through a particularly acute Kon-Tiki phase. Kon-Tiki, of course, was the experimental balsa raft that Thor Heyerdahl sailed to Polynesia in 1947. When our winter break came around, we got our hands on some scrap lumber. Out on a cold patch of dirt behind my house, we began hammering. It had taken Heyerdahl’s crew three months to build their craft. Erik and I were done in three days. On a frigid January afternoon, we dragged our vessel out to the creek in our Virginia neighborhood.
Ice lined the banks, but the middle hadn’t yet frozen. Heyerdahl had set out for the Polynesian islands from Peru—4,300 miles. The widest part of our creek was considerably narrower, but we agreed it would suffice. Having been selected to take the maiden voyage, I climbed aboard, and Erik shoved me out to the center of the creek. The raft sank immediately.
My weird raft enthusiasm was undiminished. To this day, you’ll find garbage bags full of milk jugs, collected from neighbors, in our garage back home. When life gets a little less busy—any day now—the plan is to fasten them to some planks and test my buoyancy all over again.
Standing now in the light rain, not sinking, I finally experienced this feeling I’d imagined for all those years: We were sovereign. Not in that pinched, don’t-tread-on-me sense. A raft is a thing apart from cities and nations, Heyerdahl said. A raft is freedom, Huck said. We were joyfully, capaciously sovereign. Civilization and its wants and needs and quirks—all fine but distant from us now. We were our own thing, untouchable, untouched even by the wish to steer. Come what may. Was this not also the California fantasy, however fantastical? To live apart and free? There had been much expense and effort, but here we were, touching it for a short while.
The river doglegged to the east around dusk, as foretold by our map. Three on the starboard side and one on the port—a formation that let us gradually turn without full-on spiraling—we began paddling. Bit by bit, we peeled away from the river’s center and made it to the edge.
Hugging the shore, we drifted until we spotted a clear section of the bank ahead. Amy and I stepped across the creaking logs and climbed into the canoe, startlingly nimble. With just a few strokes, and connected by 20 meters of rope, we pulled ahead of the lumbering raft and our increasingly small-looking children. When we reached the clearing, we jumped into the silty shallows. Rope in hand, I clawed up the muddy bank and ran it around the nearest tree. Amy joined me and, pulling hand over hand, we coaxed the raft to shore.
We could’ve slept on board that night. In a fit of curiosity plus laziness, I’d checked the box where the Vildmark i Värmland folks would cook a primitive dinner for us, after which we’d camp. The kids disembarked now, and we proceeded to explore this exotic thing called land. Before us in the dusky light was a large meadow, cleared for either cattle or farming. To our left stood a rough wooden structure, with corrugated roofing and a large firepit underneath—a way station, it seemed, for travelers. Stoking a fire in the pit were Jan and Lasse, in the first stages of moose burger prep.
Soon we and the other rafters—they’d arrived just before us—were warming our feet around the fire. What to talk about? Finance? History? Astronomy? We talked about logs. Fresh ones don’t float as well as those that have been lying around, a confident Dane claimed. Someone else told us that the old loggers broke up log jams with dynamite. Thanks to these logs, an older woman said, she was noticing little things again: How sunlight looked. How clouds looked. Tiny curling eddies in the water.
Not a lot of eddy-noticing back home these days, someone observed. Everyone nodded. It was one of those moments when the conversation could veer easily into How Bad The World Is Now. From exchanges here and there, I can confirm that all of us felt a new level of teetering back home, wherever home was. But we resisted the urge to talk about it, and I was grateful when one of the rafters changed the subject.
“What is…allemansrätten?” he asked Jan, who’d been stoking the fire pensively.
The Swedish right of public access, Jan explained, grants Swedes the freedom to roam their beautiful country, regardless of whether this forest or that mountaintop is private property. This happened to be a niche interest of mine. Nuts, berries, mushrooms: Eat them! The actual Swedish government encourages its citizens to enjoy the actual fruits of the land. With this right comes a set of responsibilities Swedes hold sacred: Take care of nature, take care of the wildlife, show respect for landowners, show respect for your fellow travelers.
“You must protect this right, or it is taken away,” Jan told us.
Absorbing this, we ate all the burgers we could, then trudged off to our tents. Casper and I slept in one, Cora and Amy in another. We lay silently. My thoughts turned to the old lumberjacks—they’d have been right here, right where we were now. There must have been a last day on the river for each of them, a last log even, and then the next year it was over.
Casper’s voice snapped me back to the present.
“I can’t believe we woke up this morning and the SS Rosie didn’t exist,” he said.
“Can you believe we actually built it?” I asked. Rhetorical question. Nobody could’ve believed we’d built it.
I ’d thought we might drag our feet the next day, having tasted the moose-flavored luxury of land life. But morning brought a renewed appetite for drifting. The rain had stopped, and we’d dialed in our cruise activities. Once back in the current, Casper inspected the inside of Amy’s mouth with our binoculars. Cora convened a family meeting about how many people she could have over for her 16th birthday party, in November—her sketchbook contained several architectural renderings of our small house, with room occupancy estimates. Amy made coffee on our cookstove, then developed a novel way of peeing off the back of the boat, no canoe trip required. Casper and I took out our fishing rods, did some casting—I had a joke about Swedish Fish all ready to go—but no luck. We hung our rain gear from one of the A-frame beams and put it on again when the rain returned.
We drifted. The river narrowed, the river widened. Amy nodded off. A bird in a birch tree jabbered in urgent Swedish—something about how sturdy and attractive our raft was, by the sound of it.
Here and there, on stretches where no paddling or cooking or talking was required, a ghost note of embarrassment sounded somewhere in my consciousness. This trip is ridiculous. The kind of thing I’d roll my eyes at if someone else was doing it. Wasn’t there a Greek myth about the family that spent too much money flying 10 hours in order to go spend time in nature?
All I can say is I was in the grip of something powerful—that old sense that time is fleeting, windows are narrowing, children are getting ever closer to the day they can no longer be dragooned onto a Swedish maritime adventure. The brass tacks of this parenting business are that it’s all so shockingly finite. The bedtime songs, the tying of shoes, the holding of hands to cross the street, the battles over onions touching carrots—all of these at the time feel like they’ll never end, but that’s exactly what they do. Realistically, I’ll sleep in a tent with my kids, what, two dozen times? Get your head around this gloomy math and nothing is too capricious or irresponsible.
It was afternoon when we lost touch with reality. Without our noticing, the Rosie slipped off the main current and began drifting toward the western shore. Amy and I looked around and beheld a worrisome array of sticks and leaves floating stock-still: a backwater.
We reached for the massive poles, and the kids grabbed paddles. Frantically we tried to get ourselves into the current, but the wind kept pushing us backward. The sky had gone gray. We were blowing toward a marshy bank thick with high grass—the kind that grows in sand. More urgent paddling, more jabbing of poles into murky depths. It was no use. Amy and I exchanged an All of Lasse’s warnings have come true look. Our 7,000-pound raft was beached on a sandbar.
The next hour was a blur of exhaustion and mounting despair. No amount of paddling or pole work could free us. Amy and I jumped into the river in our clothes and began pushing. Our feet sank into the muck below, the cold water lapping at chest level. On cue, the rain returned.
“Is this bad?” Cora called to us between pointless strokes.
Amy and I threw our shoulders at the stern. Nothing. Then we tried lifting upward while pushing. Nothing.
“How bad is it?” Cora asked.
I summoned a parental noise meant to reassure yet not speak untruths. I was not worried about true catastrophe. I don’t think you can maroon yourself to death on a beautiful Scandinavian river. But what would happen to us?
“What if we jump?” Cora asked.
At first I thought she was preparing to abandon ship. I looked up from my pushing and saw she just meant they should jump straight up, see if that lessened the load enough for a successful shove.
We tried it, tried it again, tried it a third time. We could barely see at this point, the downpour was so intense.
“Again!” Casper called.
I don’t know if it was the diminished weight or them dislodging something upon landing, but when we shoved this time, something seemed to shift. We tried it again and felt the unmistakable sensation of mass sliding over sand. For the next 20 minutes, we did this routine again and again—jump, shove, jump, shove. Each time, the raft moved perhaps a millimeter. At last we shoved and felt not friction but glide: We were clear! We whooped! Amy and I hauled ourselves back on board, and we paddled like maniacs until we reached the current again.
We more or less remained in the current for the rest of the day, and that night, and the next day, and so on. There were no more surprise sandbars. We watched the river, intervened periodically, played games, read books, cooked pasta, had pressing conversations under the canvas.
“Why do people say ‘head over heels’?” Casper asked. “Isn’t it always over your heels?”
The final stretch was a long straightaway. Some birches had gotten themselves mixed in with the pines along the banks, and they hissed in the breeze. I could see what was coming. In 15 minutes, we’d reach Björkebo, where, on the eastern edge of the river, Jan and Lasse and the others had already gathered. The kids would say “Björkebo” in different voices and then leap off the boat and swim the rest of the way.
In chest-deep water, we would dismantle our behemoth, knot by knot, in the driving rain, of course. It would be exhausting all over again, freeing each log and floating it down the river, where a timber trap would collect them all for a future voyage. As you read this, some other family is admiring its knots, starting to downshift, cooking pasta, beginning to wonder how life could be more like this.
We’d fly back to San Francisco. We’d tell our tale whenever we could, sharing the most noble-looking pictures of the Rosie, gathering all available acclaim for our exploits. You get about a week of this before you need to move on. On day seven, I’d find myself chatting with a friend at a party in Oakland. She’d heard about our trip, wondered how long we were out on the water.
“Three days.”
Her nose crinkled, presumably in preparation for some extreme admiration.
“Only three days? Why not longer? ”
The question walloped me. Why not longer? Somehow it had never occurred to me: Why not live like this? Wouldn’t that be the most California thing we could do—ditch California and find a way to live our days on a ramshackle raft?
But there was another way of seeing it, too.
Perhaps a few days on a ramshackle raft are how you jump-start the old engine. Sure, California has changed and maybe you’ve changed, too—the undertow of responsibility tugging harder as both of you age. But if you’re determined enough to lash 7,000 pounds of logs together, surely you’re capable of bringing some of that spirit back with you. Those milk jugs are still in our garage, buoyant as ever.
This was all coming, but we were still on the river a few more minutes, still among the hissing birches on that final stretch. The rain was just starting. Cora, not yet off the boat, pointed out how the drops hit the water, how they expanded and vanished in the same movement. Amy said it was sad how we’d surely never see Lasse and Jan again, having grown rather fond of them—we’d be home doing whatever and they’d always be here. I told everyone my last remaining bit of Kon-Tiki information, which is that one of Heyerdahl’s men woke up with an eel-like fish on his pillow and then a second fish emerged from the first one’s mouth.
We were autonomous, answerable to no one.
“Björkebo,” Casper said.
“Björkebo,” Cora said.•
Chris Colin’s work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. He produces the podcast Longer Tables with José Andrés.
