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A town on the move

Kajsa Törmä
Kajsa Törmä and her friends Victoria Björnström (left) and Julia Tano (right) expect to move away from home, at least for a few years. For her part, however, Kajsa has no need to make detailed plans for the future. She wants to keep her options open.

“What I dream about…? Well, not so much about work and what I want to be, anyway. I dream about moving from here, for a while, having my own place, doing what I want, not needing to clean up the house every Saturday morning. Meet Kajsa Törmä from Kiruna.

Location

Kajsa Törmä likes climbing up hills, and in Kiruna they can hardly be avoided. Dry snowflakes blowing horizontally along the street only make the walk from the centre of town to the dinner table at home even more challenging. There’s no reason to dawdle and let the food grow cold, for both of her parents are good cooks. A 17-year-old schoolgirl who’s still living at home enjoys certain creature comforts; one of them is being able to go home nearly every day to an already set dinner table. 

She doesn’t like the idea that her hometown’s steep slopes will soon have to be abandoned. For in the mineral-rich town of Kiruna, the very bedrock has begun to weaken – literally.  

Kajsa’s family isn’t directly dependent on international business cycles in order to be able to lead a secure and stable life. But the prosperity of the town they live in is based largely on commodity prices on the other side of the globe. As long as the world’s big, new economies flourish, things will continue to go well in Kiruna. The community stands or falls on the price of iron ore. Ore is ore, the miners say, only when there’s a demand for it. If there’s no market, it might as well stay in the ground.   

Demolish, move, rebuild
The Chinese are paying well for iron from Kiirunavaara right now – so well that it’s being mined at record speed down in the miles of underground corridors, which are stretching deeper and deeper. Directly underneath Kiruna is one of the world’s largest continuous iron-ore deposits, and the mine itself is the largest and most modern on the planet. Kiruna’s future should be golden, but there’s a hitch in the whole thing – or a weakness, to be more specific.

The enormous hole in the mountain, after more than a hundred years of iron mining, has made the ground under the town unstable, and in many places it’s begun to collapse. This means that over the next few years the entire centre of Kiruna will have to be abandoned, demolished, moved, and rebuilt a few kilometres to the east. Roads, railways, electricity, water, sewers, homes, office buildings – everything. Kajsa has grown up with the debate about moving the town. 

“This is really hard to take in. I was just a little girl when they started to talk about moving the town and I didn’t think about it so much. I would probably have given it more thought if it were coming up now, when I’m more aware of what’s going to happen. We’ve lived with this debate for such a long time, and so far nothing has happened that really affects us in practice. So we don’t take these plans entirely seriously, I think.” 

Still, in 2014 the moving process will begin – seriously. It won’t just be Kajsa leaving her childhood home – although her family’s house will probably be allowed to stay where it is. But in 2014 Kajsa may move anyway.

The dreams
“What I dream about…? Well, not so much about work and what I want to be, anyway. I dream about moving from here, for a while, having my own place, doing what I want, not needing to clean up the house every Saturday morning. But I don’t have any clear idea as to whether I’ll come back here to live and work. It could also be…I feel, in any case, that I’ll always want to come back to Kiruna. It’ll always be home, because this is where I grew up. But living here the rest of my life? I don’t know.” Kajsa is a little bummed out, and a bit envious, because some of her friends have already made specific plans about their future jobs, spouses, and children.  

“It seems, like, so simple for them. But I don’t make plans like that myself. I want to leave my options open. My friends and I say that the most important thing, no matter what, is to be rich and famous,” she chirps with a hearty smile.  

“My mother’s mother was educated as a chemist, and she worked as a school guidance counselor and later as a pastor. I think she’s a good example of the fact that you don’t need to know everything beforehand, plan everything. In any case I don’t want to be like my mother who studied cultural and intellectual history and now just sits in an office working as an administrator.” 

Too expensive to drive around
Among small-town Nordic kids, it’s a common practice to race their cars around town just for fun, making sharp turns at high speeds and burning rubber. It’s called råning and the kids who do it are called rånere. Several of the kids who drive around the square next to Kiruna’s community centre are Kajsa’s age. But they drive slowly. Rånere here don’t take unnecessary chances. Their cars are too expensive and new to risk getting them banged up while råning. After all, when you’re nineteen years old and pulling down 23,000 Swedish kroner a month working in the mines, you want to drive around in style.

In Kiruna it’s not the vehicle that distinguishes the executive from the mineworker. If you have a job excavating iron ore and the Southeast Asian economy is going like gangbusters, you’re no longer dependent on your folks. And it’s possible to take advantage of the fact that some of that iron is returning back to where it came from, in the form of Volvos and BMWs – and that you’ve got the cash to pay for them. 

When, over dinner, somebody implicitly raises the question of whether it’s really so healthy for someone who’s hardly an adult to earn so much, Kajsa rolls her eyes. The Törmä family is clearly used to asking questions, and in Kiruna there’s probably a good reason to question a number of things right now – for example, the fact that Kiruna is doing well while elsewhere in Sweden one in five workers under the age of 24 is unemployed. Will such depressing statistics affect Kajsa’s career choice?  

“No, it won’t. But I think a lot of people in Kiruna are putting off fulfilling their dreams and are instead taking jobs at LKAB (the mining firm) since there’s so much money in that business right now. Because right now there’s no problem finding a job here. Also, there’s always a call for “clean-up boys” – everywhere. If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, you can get a job, and I think that’s true in the rest of Sweden, too. I think a lot of young people are too picky when choosing jobs. There are always job openings in the health sector, for example.”  

One leg to stand on
When the mine is doing well, it’s easy to forget that the town basically has just one leg to stand on. That being the case, the leg should be able to keep standing for a pretty long time. That’s why LKAB is constantly investigating the possibility of digging even deeper into the mountain. There are still plenty of reserves, but they’re located so far down that it’ll be expensive and demanding to bring them out into the daylight. Also, other mines in the area are about to open. In other words, growth, growth, and still more growth – in any case, for the foreseeable future. The lack of housing is acute and may soon become chronic, causing housing prices to rise.

The demand for labour is also high, and kids Kajsa’s age can often walk straight into a good-paying job. It’s no wonder that the rånerne are just shadows of themselves. 

Kajsa Törmä isn’t fascinated by shiny cars. On weekends and holidays she works in the Kiruna bookstore, which her father helped start. She feels at home among books and writing paper. In her free time she shops and goes to cafés with friends, and plays football in the Swedish third division.

“And I also spend a lot of time with my sister, Minna, who is 20. When we were little we fought and argued, but we’ve gradually become better and better friends as we’ve gotten older. She’s the one I can hang with when I’m not up to being sociable with others, when I don’t feel like chatting, but would rather just be quiet or watch TV. Minna and I went to London once, just the two of us. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.”  

The Törmä family would rather spend money on travel and other such activities than on the house, car, and snow scooter. Kasja’s parents have told her that she won’t need to worry about taking out a student loan. They don’t want her to start her adult life in debt.  

“Mummy and Daddy give me a regular amount every month now that I have to get by on, in addition to what I earn myself at the bookstore. I like it this way. It’s my problem if I don’t have any money to buy new clothes or other things I want.”  

Not everything was better before
If you view Kiruna from the air, in the dark, the town looks like an island of light in the middle of a desert. At present, it’s an island of prosperity. What the future has in store for Kiruna and other places built on non-renewable resources is a question nobody can answer for sure. Some places like this have made adjustments – and survived. So far Kiruna hasn’t need to go that route – it just needs to move. Kajsa feels that the changes will destroy the town. 

“They’re going to move everything down to the plain east of the center of town. It’s ice cold down there. For me, Kiruna is a place with hills, always steep hills. I want it to continue to be like this.” 

Says the girl who is thinking of moving.

This portait interview is a cooperation between BarentsObserver and the author Arne Egil Tønset and photographer Ingun A. Mæhlum that recently have published the book Barents Portraits - A Journey Across Borders.

Translated from Norwegian by Bruce Bawer.