The Biggest Treason

I was awakened at 4:30 this morning by Rye, coming indoors from the wall tent in which he’d spent the night. I found him sitting on the rim of the kitchen woodbox, quietly sanding the blade marks out of his latest spoon. He smelled like fir boughs. I lit a fire and just sat for a while, lulled by the building heat, the early hour, and the rhythmic scratching my boys’ work. It was his first night sleeping out alone, something he would not have done even a few months ago. So this is how it happens, I guess.

The air feels soft this morning, the calm before the storm. A foot of snow, some sleet, maybe freezing rain is what they’re saying, so I passed much of yesterday cleaning up our small log yard in anticipation. I stacked and stickered the 2×6’s I milled over the weekend, laid old roofing tin atop the pile. I wrapped a tarp around the sawmill’s motor, cinched it tight. I called Melvin and offered as much of the bucked-up slabwood as he could take and he came and twice filled the big bucket of his New Holland. Today I will head to the woods to drop and skid as many sawlogs as possible, because while it’s preferable to have some snow on the ground when working the woods (keeps the logs clean, for one), a foot on top of what we already have will equal about a foot-and-a-half, and that’s about where things start getting cumbersome for a little one-man, tractor-logging outfit like myself.

•     •     •

As most of you know by now, I really enjoy Andrea Hejlskov’s writing. I discovered it when I followed a link from a comment she made a while back. I must confess to not reading many blogs regularly. In truth, Andrea’s is the sole exception to this rule-that’s-not-really-a-rule, and there are two factors at play. The first is as I have already said: I like her writing. It is not like mine, and it is not how I would like mine to be, but it is exactly how I would like hers to be, if that makes any sense. The second is that I’m drawn to her story. She and her husband Jeppe and their four children fled the city life, and with it, their increasing sense of desperation and isolation among the masses. They moved to the forest in Sweden with little more than what they had on their backs and few skills to rely on. I think I’m drawn to their story because it helps me believe I’d have the courage to do as they did.

(She wrote a book about it all, but it’s in, I think, Mexican, or maybe French, or whatever language unAmericans speak while they’re measuring things in Celsius and centimeters and smirking about their government-sponsored healthcare and 50mpg diesel hatchbacks, so you probably can’t read it. But it was a best-seller in her homeland of Denmark and she got sort of famous. If any American publishers are reading this, you really should drop Andrea a line).

For the heck of it, Andrea and I asked one another a few questions. Here are the questions I asked her, with their respective answers. Actually, I’m going to milk two posts out of this, so here are some of the questions I asked her. Part II tomorrow.

BH: Please tell me a little bit more about your life before you moved to the forest. What compelled you to leave it behind? 

AH: I worked as a child psychologer spending my days observing kids I could’t really help- because the problem was never the kids, the problems was the life we give them, the time we take away from them, the distance between parent and child, the expectations we rise them to have. And I could’t change all that. Dwelling in things you can’t change makes you apathic. We had become apathic. All of us. Satellite family. The children hiding behind the screens in their rooms, Jeppe and me eating frozen pizza while watching cooking shows on tv.

A life of unconscious choices and coincidences, not at all what I wanted when I was younger. I wanted to matter! I wanted to live my life on purpose!

One day my husband said “It is the biggest treason to have realised something and not react on this knowledge.”

So we quit our jobs, threw out all of our belongings, took the children out of school and drove to the deep forest of Värmland, Sweden where we settled like pioneers and built our own log cabin.

BH: What do you miss most about your life before the forest? 

AH: Nothing.
(maybe junk food)

BH: Tell me about your book (which myself and most of my readers can’t read) and about the response it has generated. 


AH: My book is about our first year in the forest. It’s our story. What happens to a modern family when they leave modern society and immerse themselves into nature? (I’m looking for an american publisher so HEY MY NAME IS ANDREA YOU WANNA PUBLISH MY BOOK?)

I’ve published several books in Denmark (in the genre of nonfiction/autofiction: writers writing books about themselves) but this book was different because the response was…. colossal.
A lot of anger. A lot of admiration. A whole lot of reaction actually and that was strange and weird because I had left all that behind and lived a quiet life in the forest, a real simple life. On one hand I want to offer what I have to offer, my stories, my perspective, my thoughts about sustainability, I think it’s important that people know that alternatives exists, that it IS possible to do something else if you want to (not easy- but possible) On the other hand it´s so easy to lose yourself in the mainstream, it´s tempting to let ego rule, it´s difficult to handle that you LOSE power (over your story) when a book is published- people will go on assuming all kinds of things about you and you can´t really say anything because suddenly you have “an image” and stuff like that.

I know my book has touched a lot of people. As a writer I am not allowed to complain about what happened regarding my book. I got to stand on scenes the most prestigious places and I still get to talk about capitalism and existentialism, my book is read by real live actual human beings and it means something to them. So I should really suck it up and just enjoy it… but I lost words. I lost my words until one day I began talking to you, Ben, and you gave me back my words and I´m eternally grateful for that. Which only goes to show, in my humble opinion, that we as a species NEED each other.
We left the modern capitalistic society because we felt it was killing us slowly- but we didn´t stop needing people and we didn´t stop wanting to give and add to the collective spirit. We are hermits and weirdos living in the forest, yes, but we are also artists (Jeppe is a musician) and I needed to come to terms with both my creativity and my need for other people. This has been a process with many ups and down. I´m happy now though. Glad that I went through it.

BH: Why do you share your stories in such a public way? What have you gained and lost from doing so?  


AH: 1. Because it’s wired into my existence and I could’t stop even if I wanted to.
2. Because I’ve come to realise that I do important work (as do you). The stories of our cultures are too narrow not leaving enough room for people to move, change, think differently, examine alternatives, question everything. I believe we, as a species, need to broaden our stories if we are to face the challenges of our times: climate change, rising social and economic inequality, the loss of meaning. I think we need to work on our stories- also our stories about alternatives.

It gives me a lot to feel that I work for US.

I lost my sense of self. But then again, isn’t that what writers do? We flex between the self and the community, we move between the stories.


Sorry about the formatting; wordpress is not letting me add spacing to the interview. I edited to bold the questions, which should make it at least a little easier to read.