Here was Bergman’s pure distillation of the elements he’d been seeking: “We found a stony shore facing infinity.” Later, he reported of the pine trees he’d come to know: “They sort of become friends. I’ve become very good friends with the rabbits as well.” I’d been there only a week but I felt, at least, on speaking terms with the trees and the shore and the rock formations, and I would have liked to have gotto know the aloof sheep and those freshly baked cardamom buns better. 90 DEPARTURES A pastoral scene on Gotland our lists even if what a place really asks for, to know it best, is simply to be quietly within it. Fårö is such a place – rugged, windswept and wild. In 1960, the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman arrived in Fårö, more or less by chance, to scout a scene he’d hoped to shoot elsewhere. Smitten, he stayed. In thrall to the landscape, the people, the solitude of an island twice removed from the rest of the nation, he made Fårö his permanent home. After crossing the Fårö strait – eight minutes by car ferry – you drive north towards the Bergman Center, a museum and cultural centre that opened in 2013. An oversized board with chesspieces on the lawn awaits impromptu reenactments of the game between Death and Max von Sydow’s medieval knight in The Seventh Seal. In the lobby, there’s an oddly affecting triptych of photographs showing the auteur buying a newspaper from a local kiosk. On this tiny island, the photos attest, is a citizen, dignified but normal in all ways, performing an utterly pedestrian act. Bergman lived among the locals as a neighbour and friend. “I spent an entire winter on Fårö just with my dachshund,” Bergman once told an interviewer. “It’s almost uncanny how nature can be engulfing, how you become friends with the trees on the seashore.” The beauty is stark and all-encompassing. The treeless, alvar-covered limestone leads to haunting sea stacks at the beach at Langhammars. Dark, woolly sheep graze meadows that are marked by low, crumbling stone walls. The swimming beach at Sudersand, with its wide tracts of velvety sand and cheesy little waterside yoga offerings and thatchedroof snack shacks, has an end-of-the-world vibe. Gotland’s flag, flapping proudly on poles everywhere, shows a magnificently horned ram with a yellow cross against an endless field of bright Swedish blue. The blues on enchanted Fårö feel moodier. A melancholic, sometimes eerie calm and beauty pervades the place. W ildflowers crowd the roads in Gotland. Near Fröjel, I turned off the highway at an old barn that houses the Scarlett Gallery, a pop-up. Anthony Hill, an English photographer and one of the gallery’s founders, had been coming to Gotland for a while with his Swedish wife when the idea came to him to open a spot for the summer. He showed us prints by Swedish illustrators like Annelie Carlström and a cardboard sculpture by the Montreal artist Laurence Vallières. Next door, we met Barbro Tryberg Boberg, who’s lived on the island for several decades and has written a small, handy, illustrated guidebook. She also designed a picture book on the movie houses of Gotland. For an island, it has a surprising number of cinemas, including some in barns. One of Boberg’s designs is a tea towel with a cheerful pattern of ships and buoys interspersed with a maritime weather report transcribed from the radio. “They announce the maritime report four times every day on the radio in this monotone way,” she said. “To me, it’s like poetry, these words.” The poetry of the tides. A book on small-town cinemas in a language I don’t speak. Pretty pictures in an empty barn. I felt myself settling into the slow, sunbaked pace of the place. On our last night on the island, we had dinner at Krakas Krog, an elegant little restaurant in the village of Kräklingbo. The young chef, Joel Aronsson, I’d met years ago at Fäviken in central Sweden and again, weirdly, when he’d come to cook with the chef Magnus Nilsson at my house in Brooklyn. It was both nice and strange to see a familiar face so far from home. Joel’s cooking is worth travelling for: whole roasted cauliflower with a sauce made of butter and a seaweed that tastes distinctly of truffles. Last winter, while the restaurant was closed, he found the truffle-scented seaweed in the cold waters off the Lofoten Islands in Norway. Sometime between the lamb’s liver with grilled beets and the dessert of local yogurt topped with twin granitas made of blue Gotlandic dewberry and green meadowsweet, my son had had enough. Wrapped in a wool blanket, he fell asleep in a hammock. But the sun itself, mellow and honeyed, wasn’t quite ready to give up yet on another blessedly uneventful Swedish summer day.
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