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A boy sprints with an invisible line slanting up in the sky where his wild dream of the future flies like a kite bigger than the suburb.
Tomas Tranströmer, OPEN AND CLOSED SPACES
The Loop was deep underground. It was an enormous circular particle accelerator and research facility for experimental physics that stretched around northern Mälaröarna, from Hilleshög in the east almost all the way to Härjarö to the north; it continued west across Björkfjärden and around the west side of Adelsö, to pass underneath Björkö and its remains of civilizations past. The Loop’s presence was felt everywhere on Mälaröarna. Our parents worked there. Riksenergi’s service vehicles patrolled the roads and the skies. Strange machines roamed in the woods, the glades, and the meadows. Whatever forces reigned deep below sent vibrations up through the bedrock, the flint lime bricks, and the Eternit facades, and into our living rooms.
The landscape was full of machines and scrap metal connected to the facility in one way or the other. Always present on the horizon were the colossal cooling towers of the Bona reactor, with their green obstacle lights. If you put your ear to the ground, you could hear the heartbeat of the Loop: the purring of the Gravitron, the central piece of engineering magic that was the focus of the Loop’s experiments. The facility was the largest of its kind in the world, and it was said that its forces could curve space-time itself.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LOOP PROJECT
The revolutionary powers inherent to nuclear technology became apparent at the end of World War II. It was obvious that comprehensive research within the field of fundamental physics would lead to breakthroughs of great military and civilian importance. In the Soviet Union, the seemingly random discovery of the magnetrine effect had given birth to the wondrous magnet ships, and it had completely revolutionized the transport industry. These events seemed to indicate that broad research would pay off; a wide array of experimental research programs were initiated in Sweden, including in the field of fusion. It was in those pioneering days in the early ’50s that the plans for a government owned and operated particle accelerator were hatched. Soon it became clear that it would become the biggest accelerator in the world, more powerful even than the one that had been completed in Nevada a few years earlier.
The project was named The Facility for Research in High-Energy Physics, but was often called the Mälarö facility or, more commonly, the Loop. Construction began in 1961 and took eight years. It was operated by the newly formed Riksenergiverket (National Energy Agency) and consisted of around twenty research teams with a total of 129 scientists and science students. Including service personnel, the facility eventually had several thousand employees. The Loop was inaugurated in 1969, and the first experiment was conducted in July 1970. The capacity of the facility was increased over the years, and the Loop remained the world’s most powerful accelerator until its decommissioning in 1994.
The illustrations in this book focus on my generation of Mälarö children and the environment we grew up in. As to the facility itself, its machines and other technology, I have tried to illustrate it all in detail. I have based my illustrations and descriptions on a massive amount of my own field notes and photos, but also on documentation from vendors and subcontractors. I have also gone through a lot of reports and documents pertaining to the Loop project that have been made available by Riksenergi. The goal of my work has in no way been to depict the rise and fall of the Loop project objectively or exactly; rather to give a personal, subjective, and sometimes simply entertaining look into how the project, and Riksenergi, affected the people and the landscape, and how it was to grow up in that environment. Sometimes I even leave Mälaröarna to describe other places and memories that I have considered to be pertinent to the mood and tone of the book.
The stories I tell here are mostly based on the memories of myself and others: especially my childhood friend, Ola, who possesses a near-eidetic memory and has been able to recall all our schoolyard stories down to the smallest detail. I am eternally grateful to him for his help with the content of this book.
Simon Stålenhag, Kungsberga, spring 2014
THE HULK AT BASTLAGNÖ
The magnificent hulk of MS Ancylus could be seen from Svartsjölandet if you went out on Göholmen’s northwestern point. She rose above the horizon, far away and on the other side of Björkfjärden. From a distance, and through the blue haze over the water, she looked like a South American plateau—a horizontal rectangle above the treetops of the islands. The hulk was a constant part of our plans for expeditions as soon as the ice formed in the winters, but I can’t remember us ever daring to go there.
MS Ancylus was constructed at the Wiman shipyards in Sundsvall in the early ’60s, and was one of the first magnetrine ships with a single turbine. She was constructed with the express purpose of ferrying ore along the tundra route, but was bought by Riksenergi when the Loop project commenced. Between 1962 and 1968, she conveyed huge amounts of rock and soil out to Prästfjärden where the artificial group of islands called Mälarkransen were built. After she broke down outside Alholmen in 1969, MS Ancylus was taken out of commission and towed to the Bastlagnö shipyards. A protracted judicial process delayed her retrofitting and, when the Wiman shipyards went bankrupt in the wake of the Ural Crisis in 1978, the matter was in limbo until Riksenergi, after pressure from the locals and Naturvårdsverket, finally came in and demolished the hulk in the spring of 1995.
THE AXLE AT STAVSBORG
One day Olof got a black eye during recess. He wanted to run away from school and I went with him. We ran across the fields and hid in the groves to avoid being seen by the teachers.
Olof was always on an adventure and never seemed to want to stop playing. Darkness was falling when we arrived at Stavsborg. A weird piece of junk jutted from the earth in the field, and we ran to it. Of course, Olof wanted to start climbing it, but I felt frozen and tired. I stood and watched while Olof held the fort against a horde of attacking teacher-cyborgs. After a while we got into an argument: I wanted to go to Olof’s house and watch a movie, but Olof refused. He even wanted to build an igloo and spend the night in the field. Somehow our argument became an actual fistfight; I can’t recall why now, but I remember us rolling around in the snow, pulling hair, and hitting and pinching each other. Later we sat, exhausted and bruised, in the snow. I helped Olof get something out of his eye, and then he told me his father was depressed. Finally, we went to my house and played Sonic the Hedgehog instead, and this time I taught Olof the cheat codes.
THE BONA PLANT AND OSSIAN
The three cooling towers at Bona were a constant presence in the landscape on Mälaröarna. They rose from the fields far out on northern Munsö, in the small community of Bona. The main function of the towers was to release heat from the Gravitron, the core of the Loop that provided the facility with the enormous amounts of energy it required. The middle tower was an impressive 253 meters in height, and the towers were a characteristic landmark visible from all of Mälardalen.
The signal sounded at six o’clock every day. It started like a deep vibration in the ground that slowly rose to three horn-like blasts, followed by a drawn-out echo that reverberated across the landscape. The sound was the result of the daily reset of the towers’ fifteen huge demis
ter valves. The Signal had eventually become a practical part of Bona families’ everyday routines, not far removed from that of church bells of old; you knew it was time to head home to the dinner table when the Signal sounded.
I heard the Signal up close in August 1991. It was one of those one-time things. The Bona boy Ossian had lured me from the youth center with the promise of playing with his Incredible Crash Dummies, but it ended in tears.
Our newly found friendship quickly deteriorated once we arrived at Ossian’s house. Ossian assigned all the best toys to himself, and I was soon ostracized when his brother, Oliver, came home. Their mother was downstairs in the kitchen preparing our meal when the Signal sounded. The floor vibrated and I was scared. Ossian and Oliver, heroes of the moment, told me that the Signal was a warning heralding an imminent meltdown in the Gravitron and pushed me into a closet, telling me I had better stay there if the Earth itself was sucked into a black hole. Then they rushed down into the kitchen and gorged themselves on all the blood pudding.
I felt a shameful relief when my father appeared to take me home. During the ride back to Svartsjölandet, my father assured me the Earth would not be sucked into a black hole at all. Despite that, I became more and more anxious, and for weeks I walked around holding my breath, awaiting the end of the world—especially at dinner time.
THE ARCH TOWERS AT KLÖVSJÖ
We went skiing in Härjedalen during Easter break in 1991. On the way there my father told us about the amazing arch towers we would see when we arrived. He spoke in awe about these monuments to Swedish engineering. They had been constructed to transform the force of downdrafts into electricity, and would enhance the effect a thousandfold using the magnetic charge of the bedrock. We could glimpse the towers beyond the peaks at the horizon an hour before we arrived. My stomach fluttered every time we drove up a hill because I anticipated seeing how much bigger the towers had grown on the other side of the crest.
One night, in the caravan, a strange noise woke me up. I sat up, wide awake, and listened. All around me in the dark I could hear the others sleeping, but there was something else there as well. Distant howls, almost like screaming, penetrated the thin walls of the RV. I looked out the window toward the campground and, between some pines, I saw the valley and one of the arch towers. Small flares of light swarmed above the mounting around the tower. They danced in the cold air, emitting soft siren calls that echoed in the valley. I was scared and woke my father up. He explained that the flares were ball lightning that leapt between the steel of the tower and the iron ore in the ground, created by a lingering charge of static electricity, and that it was completely safe at this distance. I didn’t really understand what it meant, but it was comforting so I went back to sleep.
THE REMOTE GLOVE
As the robot thundered across the rye field towards the police van, I realized a line had been crossed, and that it had been crossed many hours earlier that day. Maybe it happened when we broke into the warehouse down in Sätuna, when Olof dragged out that peculiar backpack. Strange that I didn’t notice it then—when Olof slipped his hand into the big glove and the Thing under the tarp came to life. Or did it happen even earlier, when we ran away from home before lunch? Summer days are an intense series of events; it’s hard to remember how it all connects. Maybe we passed the line that morning, when we poured baking soda and flour in the kiddie pool. The fact that it was a bad thing to do became readily apparent from Olof’s father’s reaction. He squeezed Olof’s cheeks together and yelled right in his face. Afterwards we sat in Olof’s room, rebellious, muttering about the injustice of life. Olof’s eyes were red and he was massaging his cheeks. Then we snuck out unseen and disappeared. It’s strange how such an event can feel so far away only hours later on the same day.
In that terrible instant in the rye field, the moments in Olof’s room felt like a distant memory from another life. Some days are like jittery, malicious clockwork—sometimes things freeze mid-movement and we age several years in a few seconds.
THE ECHO SPHERE
The mighty Uppsala Ridge once ran along the eastern side of Munsö. It was an esker, consisting of billions of tons of gravel and sand that had been deposited by ancient ice sheets. Centuries of gravel extraction had drained the esker and, at the end of the first half of the twentieth century, Munsö’s eastern side had been transformed into a desert landscape. Then came the ’60s and the construction of the Loop. The gravel pits became an assembly site and access point for the huge machines that were used. A lot of the machines and buildings were simply left there when construction was completed.
I have a vague memory of my grandfather taking me to Munsö once, when I was around four. I remember a big, hollow steel sphere. We walked into it. My voice echoed in there like I was in a church.
From Svartsjölandet we saw the scrap metal left behind sticking up over the ridge on the other side of the water. Beyond it all the mighty cooling towers of the Bona reactor reached for the sky. That other side tempted us all (every audacious Färingsö child made grand plans to go across the water and go on an expedition in Nordic Gobi), but there was one person whose fascination went far beyond that of everyone else.
Jenny had a dim-witted brother called Percy, and as soon as the ridge on Munsö was visible he went completely crazy. Jenny and I used to take Percy on walks, and when you least expected it he would blurt out a shrill “KISCHWOOOIIING!” It sounded like he was trying to imitate a buzz saw. Then you knew he had seen Munsö for a split second behind the trees—Percy’s head was like a compass needle pointing that way.
The sound he made was well-known. Sometimes when Jenny was about to read out loud in class, or present an assignment, you heard someone call out “KISCHWOOOIIING!” Morgan Pil, the class clown, based half his material on imitations of Percy.
Later that year, at the end of summer break, our fathers told us we were no longer little children. Real life was about to begin. We celebrated this by borrowing Olof’s father’s boat without permission, and we rowed across the water to Nordic Gobi on Munsö.
The echo sphere lay there in the gravel pit. A faint tune hummed from within the sphere when the wind resonated between the steel walls. Kalle and Olof immediately ran inside and started shouting to test the echo. A pair of nervous ospreys wheeled above the sphere. I remained outside, reminded of that first day there with my grandfather. Thinking back on it now I realize that this is probably my first memory of experiencing nostalgia. Odd; a summer’s day and three nine-year-olds, one of whom was stopped in the middle of playing by a childhood memory.
Afterwards, we went swimming in the emerald green ponds, of course. Olof used heavy round stones to weigh himself down and walked along the bottom of a pond like an astronaut.
I swam away from the others quietly and rounded a headland. Beyond it the gravel pit opened up and a desert of abandoned machines stretched towards the horizon like an elephant graveyard. Something floated to the surface: not in the water, but within me. I whispered quietly, “Kischwoing.”
The silence was broken by Olof’s cry:
“I’VE FOUND A CAR WRECK!”
I quickly went back to join the others.
THE MAGNETRINE DISCS AT SPÅNVIKEN
Nowadays, during the winter months when the trees are bare, with good luck and an effort of will you might be able to see an old, rusted valve from a pump station rise above the water in the reeds off Göholmen’s northern point. It really doesn’t look like much of anything, but up until sometime in the mid ’90s the awe-inspiring outlines of massive magnetrine discs rose from the water in the middle of Spånviken. These were not the regular small-diameter discs you could see under Riksenergi’s locomotive ships. The diameter of the biggest disc in Spånviken is supposed to have been over 30 meters. They were constructed to carry 10,000-ton Gauss freighters along the tundra route to the north. The discs in Spånviken fascinated us; we drifted off, and in our imaginations we were on adventures in the tundra—maybe as captains of a Gauss
freighter in distress, hijacked by barbarian pirates from Norilsk.
The magnetrine discs in Spånviken were remnants from an age that the Mälarö children of my generation never experienced. Up until 1979 there was a factory on Dävensö that built and repaired magnetrine discs. After the Ural Crisis in the ’70s, Swedish ore exports declined and demand for magnetrine technology dwindled, and the Dävensö plant had to close. The employees were fired or transferred, the inventory was sold, and the plant itself was left to be reclaimed by nature.
SKETCH BOOK 1: VEHICLES
INVASIVE SPECIES
There was talk of prehistoric monsters in the woods. Eddies swirled in space-time, portals between our time and the past, in the wake of cosmic energies. A bridge had been created, allowing creatures from another time to travel to our world. Someone had found an empty lot covered in desert sand. A shoal of trilobites lay twitching on the roof of the school gymnasium. There were even rumors that the boy who lived with his mother in the lonely house, down by Lennartsvägen, had a pet dinosaur in the hen house.
I have a very clear memory of Olof and Kalle crossing the schoolyard on a hot day in September, their arms filled with ice cream boxes. They’re both talking at once and their clothes are stained with melted ice cream. The story they told was phenomenal.
Kalle had woken up in the middle of the night, awakened by a sound he instantly recognized. The melodic signal of the ice cream truck echoed through the unusually warm September night. Odd—who wanted to buy ice cream in the middle of the night? Something really felt wrong.
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