On Stockholm’s Island Insects and Literary In
came to Runmaro to meet a peculiar entomologist with a gift for digression, and to try to understand the secret life of the
island he has lived on for nearly 30 years — a place just one hour away from Stockholm but accessible only by boat, whose complicated natural and literary history is encoded in a landscape of deceptively simple beauty.
But first I had to survive the Swedish Midsummer.
This annual bacchanal — pegged to the solstice, dressed up in folk costume and steeped in Viking meaning — happened to coincide with my visit. I remember the herring and the new potatoes, the ring-dance around the maypole, some song about a frog, the fetching girls with wildflowers in their hair, the shameless boogieing to Abba. The rest is gone, washed away in a river of aquavit and brannvin.
The next morning, emphatically hung over, I awoke to find Fredrik Sjoberg puttering away in his Wellington boots. He invited me into his study. I tried not to make too much of the fact that he keeps a bottle of cyanide on his desk (his preferred method of killing the bugs he traps and then pins down). His collection numbers 211 species, all found on the island, all hoverflies.
Fredrik is exclusively interested in this family of insects, syrphidae, which is distinguished by an uncommon flair for disguise. While harmless, they’ve adapted to look like stinging or biting bugs, mostly bees or wasps. To capture them, Fredrik uses a net and a long tube called a pooter, a kind of fiberglass straw into which he quickly inhales, sucking the fly down into a cylinder backed with a mesh filter (which prevents it from continuing down his throat).
Fredrik wrote about his entomological exploits on Runmaro in a thin, wry, at times poetic memoir called “The Fly Trap.” As far as books about bugs go, this one was a minor sensation — selling 30,000 copies just in Sweden, leading to popular translations all around Europe, and to two more books in the series. In June, “The Fly Trap,” which came out in 2004, was finally published by Pantheon in the United States.
When not hosting Midsummer ragers, Fredrik lives a quiet, rusticated existence with his wife, Johanna, who runs a bookbindery out of the simple cottage they bought on Runmaro in 1986. They raised three children here in an environment of pastoral grace and occasional privation; water came from a well, they showered with a bucket. “We were young and stupid,” Fredrik told me. “People thought we lived this way because of the romance, some environmental nonsense. But the truth is we had very little money, and we really struggled.”
Today, Fredrik said, his little cottage has grown in value 10 times over as Runmaro, along with many other islands in the Stockholm Archipelago, has become attractive to city-dwellers who can pay a small fortune for the Swedish dream, a little rust-red house by the sea.
The archipelago consists of a few thousand islands in a 50-mile-wide band that buffers the Swedish capital from the Baltic. No one can agree on how many islands there are; published reports vary from 10,000 to more than 50,000, although many of these are little more than limestone skerries, destinations for only the curious seal. About 100 are linked by a network of efficient, state-run ferries.
These islands have long been a kind of escape hatch for Stockholmers, something like a Nordic Cape Cod. This is where Benny and Bjorn from Abba went to write songs, where Mikael Blomkvist hid out with the girl with the dragon tattoo, where Swedes of every stripe indulge in national pastimes: camping, sailing, skinny-dipping.
On approach, Runmaro looks like any other isle in the archipelago. Little docks shoot out every which way from stone outcroppings. Walking off the ferry, you’re quickly surrounded by pastures of wildflowers, clapboard houses painted in the distinctive matte red called Falu. (Made from a natural pigment derived from a copper mine, this paint became popular because it was so cheap; now it’s fashionable, part of the Swedish heritage brand.)
Runmaro was among the first islands in the archipelago to be exploited as a resort. Many artists, particularly writers, spent their summers here. Among them is the dark and dangerous playwright August Strindberg, who wrote a novel here and conducted a tempestuous affair with his Danish lover; and Tomas Transtromer, the Nobel laureate who died in March. Transtromer, who was the 20th century’s most-translated poet after Pablo Neruda, grew up on Runmaro and spent most of his summers here in the same house that his grandfather built in the mid-1800s; the island is written all over his work, especially his first collection, “17 Poems.”
Today Runmaro is more popular among orchid hunters and lepidopterist than writers. Its calcareous soil ha produced one of the richest concentration of natural life in Scandinavia. Herbaceou forests of young pines covered in lichen give way to bogs concealing rare species o carnivorous plants.
Fredrik has become an authority on the island’s microclimate. In summer you can find him standing perfectly sti in the sun, sometimes for hours, perched atop raspberry thickets or wild chervi Passers-by might suspect he’s lost in meditation; as he says, this is not wholly inaccurate.
After breakfast, Fredrik leads my wife, Yana, and me on a hike to the mos remote of Runmaro’s nine freshwate lakes. We take the road past the tiny schoolhouse where Fredrik’s children wen to kindergarten and pass the island’s sma cemetery and open-air chapel. I ask if all o Runmaro’s former inhabitants are buried there. “Not everyone,” Fredrik says. “Bu it’s an option.”
The path curves around cottage fenced in by rows of conical candy-colored flowers and empties out into the forest Somehow, the smell of seawater is sharpe here, just as Transtromer observed. Thi is the Baltic, “sighing in the middle of the island.”
Our destination, Silver Lake (Silvertrasket), takes its name from local legend. When Russians raided the archipelago in the 18th century, fearfu residents apparently sunk their silver in the lake. Once out of danger, they tried to dredge it up, but the silver was never found so the lake was presumed to be bottomless Later, fishermen reported ghost sightings and as a result no one fished the lake, and no one built houses around it. Strindberg folded the legend into a short story that he set here, written in 1898 and later published in the German avant-garde journa Quickborn with eerie illustrations by the