ABSTRACT
In late July, Jämtland turns a deep green, the kind that almost hurts your eyes. To visit my aging grandparents, I would take bus 40’, with a final destination far north of this inland northern Swedish province. Fifty familiar kilometers of poorly kept roads and endless pine forests, occasionally interrupted by a glimmering lake, pass by my window. Not a single billboard, only an occasional car. Jetlag, now from a decade of regular transatlantic trips between the Jämtland of my childhood and the America of my higher education, throbs in the back of my head. It is ‘after’ I have completed my formal fieldwork ‘at home’ and ‘returned’ to an institution that is far away, that I hear the silence here. After months on ever-expanding highways, criss-crossing northern California, this road to my familiar past forms a ‘now’ that makes my history and the uncertainty of my future meet in an embodied dissonance, a spurred and bracketed surreal sense of place. A rooted echo, a yearning inside me, makes me again question (my) uprooting and lack of life direction.
