On Stockholm’s Islands, Chasing Insects and Literary Inspiration

I came to Runmaro to meet a peculiar entomologist with a gift for digression, and to try to understand the secret life of the Baltic 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 […]

I came to Runmaro to meet a peculiar entomologist with a gift for digression, and to try to understand the secret life of the Baltic 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 lepidopterists than writers. Its calcareous soil has produced one of the richest concentrations of natural life in Scandinavia. Herbaceous forests of young pines covered in lichen give way to bogs concealing rare species of carnivorous plants.
Fredrik has become an authority on the island’s microclimate. In summer, you can find him standing perfectly still in the sun, sometimes for hours, perched atop raspberry thickets or wild chervil. 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 most remote of Runmaro’s nine freshwater lakes. We take the road past the tiny schoolhouse where Fredrik’s children went to kindergarten and pass the island’s small cemetery and open-air chapel. I ask if all of Runmaro’s former inhabitants are buried there. “Not everyone,” Fredrik says. “But it’s an option.”
The path curves around cottages fenced in by rows of conical candy-colored flowers and empties out into the forest. Somehow, the smell of seawater is sharper here, just as Transtromer observed. This 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, fearful 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 journal Quickborn with eerie illustrations by the painter Edvard Munch.
We take off our shoes as we approach the lake and step into a squishy bog. A flask is passed around. Fredrik calmly points out the purple pitcher plant, which traps bugs in its long, curved leaves. It’s not difficult for me to imagine him, wading contentedly through the swamp, as the protagonist in Strindberg’s story, a man of the world who stumbles onto this very lake after a forest walk during which he passes through “a whole compendium of miniature landscapes …”
The ground becomes wet; wild rosemary and cottongrass have come here and young pines stand as straight as fencepoles. … There is a knocking, as at a nighttime door by a latecomer: it is the woodpecker. There is a whimpering and moaning, as of a woman in childbirth: it is the wood dove. He knows all the sounds, he knows all the plants and animals, so that if he heard or saw something unfamiliar, he would take it as an affront.
Fredrik spends a lot of time in his book joking about flies, how no sensible person is interested in them, “or anyway no woman.” He connects his hoverfly-hunting to a pedantic impulse to know one thing, any thing, inside and out (what Strindberg derisively terms “buttonology”) and to the pleasure of “exercising slowness” in a world that’s moving ever faster. Ultimately, he says, none of that is quite right: the flies are actually metaphors, “glosses,” a way of not merely looking at nature, but reading it as if it were a book.
This nature-as-language theme is his great takeaway, a kind of challenge not just to be captivated by the superficial romance of the outdoors but to practice “landscape literacy,” to understand its constituent parts. “I’m afraid,” Fredrik writes, “that our path to what is beautiful must first pass through what is meaningful.”
We bid farewell to Fredrik, intending to spend our last few days in Sweden island-hopping. The 10-minute boat trip from Runmaro gives us barely enough time to reminisce before we’re dropped at Stavsnas harbor. A quick taxi ride takes us to Djuronaset, a resort complex that dominates the island of Djuro, one of the last sections of the archipelago that can be reached by car from Stockholm via a series of small bridges.
The hotel is by turns luxurious and austere — call it sanitarium chic — designed around the natural features of the island: Hammocks hung between tall pine trees, benches nooked into moss-covered rocks. Some accommodations are made to look like the traditional cottages you see on islands like Runmaro. All this — and the proximity to the harbor, where you can catch boats to take you to islands farther afield — makes Djuronaset an excellent base for exploring the archipelago.
The islands beckon but so does the hotel’s birchwood-fired sauna, perched in a spacious shack at the water’s edge. A small dock leads to the brackish, bracing waters of the Baltic. When we have enough heat, it’s time to jump in. We rinse and repeat several times, before throwing on robes and collapsing on wooden chaises.
We eat a simple dinner in the dockside restaurant across from the sauna. She takes the seafood stew, I order a sausage from Gothenburg named Glenn (glennkorv) because — our waiter insists — there is an unusually large number of people in Gothenburg named Glenn. It’s nearly 11 now, the sun plays footsie with the horizon, and we take pictures of the vista that are so straightforwardly beautiful we’re too ashamed to post them on Instagram.
The next morning we taxi back to the harbor and board a boat to Sandhamn, the fanciest and most remote of the islands in this section of the archipelago. We scurry along the port, escaping yachts blasting techno, and stop by a bakery for fika, a kind of second breakfast, a wonderful concept that Sweden should export to the rest of the world in lieu of a trillion tons of particle board.
We take our coffee and our fresh cardamom buns to the terrace, bound by a red picket fence. The sun, a coy little tease during most of our trip, finally emerges. Everything is perfect. But then, a wasp menaces, landing on our table. I remember Fredrik’s disquisition on hoverflies, how they masquerade as stinging insects, but you can read their true nature in the number of wings: syrphidae have two, whereas bees and wasps have four.
“Don’t worry,” I say, counting the wings, or maybe just pretending to. “That’s only a hoverfly.”
IF YOU GO
Runmaro and the islands in this section of the archipelago are accessible via ferry from Stavsnas Vinterhamn, a harbor that’s about an hour by bus or car from downtown Stockholm. The website of the state-run ferry company Waxholmsbolaget posts schedules in English (waxholmsbolaget.com).
Commercial life on Runmaro consists of just one bakery, a grocery store and a seasonal restaurant and bar, Svangen, that serves pizza. For those who want to spend the night, consider Anders Olofsson’s lovely if rustic accommodation, Tarnviken, which is surrounded by a rose garden. From 230 Swedish kronor per night per person (about $28, at 8.25 kronor to the dollar, as well as a one-time charge of 40 kronor per person for linens); tarnviken.se.
Djuronaset
Located on Djuro, a five-minute drive from the Stavsnas harbor, this sleek Nordic spa resort is an excellent base for exploring the archipelago, complete with a dockside restaurant, a birch-fired sauna and accommodations styled like many of the little cottages you’ll find throughout the islands. Doubles from 1,790 kronor a night; djuronaset.com.
Sandhamn
Popular with the moneyed sailing set, Sandhamn is one of the few islands in the Middle Archipelago with serious hotels and restaurants. The fresh-baked cardamom buns at the Sandhamns Bageriet, at the northern tip of the port, are alone worth the ferry trip. At the other end of the port are Monrad’s (monrads.se/sandhamn), a cafe that sells provisions for sailors and serves delicious house-cured gravlax and bleak roe, and the elegant, nautical themed Sandhamn Yacht Hotel (from 2,300 kronor per night; sandhamn.com).
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate