There once was a town that moved.
This town had existed, in one form or another for thousands of years, about 1,500 miles south of the North Pole and fewer than one hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. The town had a pretty red church, reindeer herders, elk, and a river that ran through the heart of it. A mine operated deep beneath its surface. Sometimes magical lights of green and gold danced in the sky above the snow, winter sprites that didn't feel the cold. The ice held sparks of moonlight like fallen bits of stars.
The town didn't move because of this magic, however; Kiruna moved because of the mine.
In January 2023, I stepped off the plane into snow and ice and polar dark. The air was so cold the insides of my nostrils fused together on my in-breath. Everywhere, white. The mountains in the distance, a chiaroscuro study, the Earth, a mysterious and alien planet. I walked carefully across the tarmac to the Kiruna Airport building. Snow squeaked under my boots, eddied in front of my face.
Inside the airport, I stood in a puddle of snowmelt while Johan went to get the rental car. Johan is a friend of my daughter, Sadie, who had graciously offered us the use of his studio apartment in Stockholm for our stay in Sweden. In return, I had invited him to accompany us to Kiruna where I hoped to see the Northern Lights and to experience this part of the world before climate change rewrites the story of the Far North.
Johan unplugged the car from a device—a block heater, he explained—that prevents the parked car's engine from freezing in arctic temperatures. On the drive to Kiruna, he had an issue with the rental car. In Stockholm, he drives a Skoda with manual transmission. Now, he was affronted by the rental car's bells and whistles. He argued with it over the control of the steering wheel, complained about its tendency to drift to the left. Sadie figured out how to turn on the heated seats.
At first glance, I assumed that the solitary mountain visible in the distance from our route along Road E10 was a ski slope, but the shape of it was odd, flattish on top and longer than it was tall. Instead of rows of lights running vertically along ski runs, they wrapped around the mountain horizontally, like lights around a Christmas tree.
"I think that's the mine," breathed Sadie.
LKAB (Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag) has been mining iron ore in Kiruna for more than a century. In early 2023, The New York Times reported that state-owned LKAB had uncovered "rare earth metals" that can be used in the development of green technologies and thereby decrease Europe's reliance on China for these rare earths held deep inside our planet. In the meantime, all this activity has reportedly released uranium into the rivers.
The mine, the largest of its kind in the world, provides a source of employment for the town's residents in this area where the polar night lasts for most of the month of December and townspeople use sparks, or handheld kicksleds, to walk and glide across the ice and snow.
Inside our rental car, the windshield wipers swished and clicked; the tires squeaked against the snow-packed road. The lights of the mine shone up into a blue-black sky.
We had hours to go before our 4:00 Airbnb check-in, so we drove on snow-packed roads to Jukkasjärvi, a locality of 600 residents that is part of Kiruna Municipality. Our first stop was Nutti Sámi Siida, a certified eco-tourist destination celebrating Sami culture. We parked in the lot at the nearby Icehotel, which offered warming blocks to plug our car into, and then opted to walk the half mile to the Sami museum. Half a mile in New York City is a matter of blocks, but in a place where the cold finds its way into all your many layers, it seems much longer. All along the road, machines growled and gnashed at the snow, shoving it into high banks on either side, slicking the surface to glass. Whole families passed us on the sidewalk, gliding by on sparks, pushing off with one foot to slide effortlessly along while no matter how carefully I stepped, I had to catch myself from falling again and again.
Nutti Sámi Siida offered up a railing to guide us down a slippery pathway to the area with the museum's outdoor exhibits. At 1:00 in the afternoon, the sky was the inside of an oyster shell, the kind you pick up from the sand on a Fire Island beach and turn over and over in the palm of your hand. Snowflakes drifted down as if they had all the time in the world. We wandered through displays of artifacts of traditional Sami clothing (gákti) and tools, a replica of a dwelling, a wax family around a paper fire. In the reindeer pen, I was a little scared when the animals jumped up and butted us with their antlered heads. "Keep your arms down by your sides," the workers said. I pulled off my glove and brushed my fingers against the creature's warm breathing side as it rushed by to get food from Sadie's hand.
After exploring the open-air museum, we browsed the handicraft shop and then warmed up in the lavvu, a tent-like structure made of reindeer skin that served as the museum's café. In the center, an open fire threw sparks up into the pointed roof. Days later, on the plane back to New York, I could still smell woodsmoke on my hoodie and it made me smile.
There was a window for ordering food and picnic tables with reindeer fur-covered benches set up for shared dining. Johan ordered a reindeer burger; I got the vegan soup, and Sadie the hot lingonberry juice and a lemon muffin.
"Your soup looks good," said Sadie.
"Do you want to order your own?" I asked, taking a bite of gahkku, a delicious flatbread smeared with herbed creamed cheese.
"No, thanks. I'll just have a taste of yours."
Johan's burger was already gone. Sadie sighed happily over another spoonful of my soup. I tipped my head back to watch wreaths of smoke rise like wraiths out through the opening of the lavvu's apex, while a hidden sound system played traditional Sami music with drumming and singing-chanting called yoiking.
"I like your knife holder," I said to one of the workers, a Sami woman about Sadie's age, blonde with round cheeks flushed from the fire. I nodded at the holstered sheath on her hip, which was ivory-colored with a curved tip. In the dim light of the lavvu, I couldn't make out the decorations, but could see they were in colors of blue and red.
"It's a funny story," she said, picking up the now empty soup bowl. "I found it in the kitchen drawer at my mother's house. I asked her where it came from and she said she didn't know."
She didn't laugh so neither did we, although the story seemed to have come to an end.
"What's the strangest question you get from visitors here?" Sadie asked.
"I've been asked where the Sami are as if they expect them to be kept in pens like in a zoo," she said. "I've also been asked if they can pet the Sami." She sighed in a small way.
We thanked her and she went about her business as we drank our hot lingonberry juice by the fire.
The Sami of Sápmi are primarily reindeer herders, but since LKAB first came to Kiruna in 1900, the Sami way of life has changed. They are indigenous to northern Fennoscandia, which extends from parts of Norway, to Sweden, Finland, and into Russia, and which is still referred to by the Scandinavian name Lapland, a designation that carries a derogatory connotation. Once, they herded their animals on foot; today, many of them use pickup trucks, quads, and snowmobiles, an upgrade that places financial pressure on this way of life. The herds are guided up to the hills to graze in spring-summer. The Sami have eight seasons to the four that structure the years of my life. The herds are separated until breeding time in spring-winter. In autumn-summer, the reindeer eat and eat to store up enough energy to get through winter. Reindeer milk is used to make cheese. Their hides provide warmth for outerwear, floor coverings, and bedding. Every part of the animal is processed, a practice that harkens back centuries before trendy nose-to-tail dining.
These days, construction and drilling tear up migratory paths and destroy grazing lands even as the changing climate shifts seasonal growth patterns of alternate feeding grounds. Protests to the Swedish government have been met with half-promises and assurances. The Sami accommodate themselves to the mine, adjusting age-old patterns for the mining of iron ore that is used to supply the steel industry. Arctic anthropologists call this "scientific colonialism," an it's-for-the-greater-good-flavored philosophy that exacerbates the quotidian colonialism that is the ice beneath the snow. Not only have the Sami been displaced by the mine, but they themselves are the subject of the kind of cultural mining that provides "authentic" Sâpmi local color.
The visual presence of the actual mine is a reminder of the permanent environmental impacts that belie the promise made by the cold stark beauty of the arctic. As a tourist, I am aware that my ideas about this part of the world are constructed by tales I've read of exploring derring-do, the movies, and literature. That said, I took pleasure in the regional culture constructed for me by the area's tourism industry. Travelers like me bring with us our spending power, but we also bring our expectations and a way of life geared toward consumption and acquisition, as exemplified by the number of one-star reviews on TripAdvisor and the like I came across when planning the trip that complained their Northern Lights dog sled tour had not yielded a sighting of the famed Aurora Borealis. That Western tourists view the mine as separate from this discourse is ironic as it is an integral part of this boreal wilderness. Although a tour of the mine was listed in articles and on websites as one of the tourist-forward activities, my travel companions and I never even considered it. Looking back, I realize that the mine was indeed a blight on my expectation of the Far North's pristine wilderness.
After lunch in the lavvu, we used the museum's outdoor restroom, which, if you've never done so in subzero temperatures, is an experience you will not soon forget. Across from the toilet, at the end of the cul-de-sac, stands a Sami church, a small wooden structure painted red with white trim. Inside, a triptych mural, "Laestadiusreliefen," painted by Bror Hjorth in a primitive style reminiscent of Gaugin, depicts the conversion of the Sami people by evangelical Laestadians. The painting was gifted to the church by LKAB in 1958.
We then slipped and slid past the church to stand on the frozen River Torne. By now, at 2:00 in the afternoon, the sun had started its descent toward the horizon. We were not the only ones walking on the river. Dog people in ski pants and parkas trotted along behind their beasts. Snowmobilers roared by in a spray of snow and exhaust. The moon was high in the sky.
It was cold.
This cold. It was somehow thrilling. My layers kept my body warm, but my feet were freezing despite two pairs of socks. Our breath froze on our hair, Johan's beard. It was so cold that we laughed and laughed. To the east, the sky still showed traces of gold and pink, but to the west, it had no color, not gray, not blue, but a pure clear ice-sky against which the mountains stood in sharp black-and-white contrast.
It was the color of cold.
Sadie and I rarely argue, not in the way my mother and I did--may her memory be for a blessing--but in the planning stages for our trip back in New York, we argued over the Icehotel. I tried to make the case for staying there, but she refused to sleep on a slab of ice even though the Icehotel website promised subzero sleeping bags and reindeer skins. We finally decided to go on the tour but spend the night in a cozy cabin that she found on Airbnb.
The hotel is a place to stay (they have actual cabins in addition to the ice rooms) as well as an art exhibition. The mine may have created the town, but the Icehotel made it a tourist destination. Our tour of Icehotel was the most expensive entry fee of any place we visited—$80 USD for the three of us. Inside the edifice, our voices were thin and flat, absorbed by snow and ice. We were inside, but it was outside-cold. It was like being inside a child's imagination, or a cathedral made of winter, or the Snow Queen's palace. Each hotel room was its own work of art: moose, "an emotional map," abstract sculpture, selkies, mushrooms, A Midsummer's Night Dream. We met a family with their luggage as they entered the "Toybox" room designed by Danish artists Wouter Biegelaar and Viktor Tsarski. No, the parents replied to my question; they were not worried about being cold during the night. The two children gazed open-mouthed at the child-sized rabbit made of snow, huge alphabet blocks carved from ice.
According to the Icehotel exhibition at "The Gallery," the hotel, which we learned had opened its snowy doors in 1989, is constructed from blocks of ice taken from the Torne, on the banks of which the place stands. Each winter, construction starts. Artists from all over the world design and create the space. The hotel is the water from the river, the snow that falls from the clouds in the sky. Like water to ice, it changes with the season. I thought then of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, remembered how he perched on the bank of Walden Pond one winter's day and tried to describe the color of ice: "Perhaps," he wrote, "the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation." Walking through the Icehotel's blue-white stillness, you can feel how solid the structure is, yet how impermanent this experience can be from one moment to the next. The frozen floor doesn't remember your footprint. It is as if you were never here.
After dropping off our bags at the Airbnb, we arrived at our next activity, Kiruna Sleddog Tours, at 7:00 PM. Dogs barked and howled their greetings. I walked around and petted as many of their heads as I could. The dogs were huskies, but not the blue-eyed Siberian variety. One of the guides explained that they were a particular breed of husky. They were large dogs with triangle-shaped heads and waggy tails, some plumed, others not. There were black-and-white dogs, short-hair biscuit-color dogs, and shaggy dogs with white ruffs. It was so cold that when I took off my glove to give a pet, I had to put it back on right away before moving on to the next one.
"You can gear up in there," called one of the guides, pointing to an outbuilding open to the elements. In the changing area we saw jackets, bib overalls, and boots. We wrangled them over our own down parkas and the layers we were already wearing, and then waddled back outside, giant children stuffed into snowsuits.
Two more people had arrived. They were lithe in slim ski pants and brightly colored cropped puffers. The one in pink wore a beanie over her long hair, which whipped every which way in the wind. Her partner, a shorter, wider person held a phone mounted to a tripod out in front of them in one hand and a ring light in the other. She shook her head at the guide's urging to "gear up." "No, thank you. We are fine!" she yelled and turned toward her partner who was struggling to hold the tripod still in the wind.
"It's me again, Delilah, your intrepid traveler," the woman said to the phone. She held her hair away from her face with two mittened hands. She smiled over one shoulder, and then the other, bending one knee and then the other.
"Great stuff, Del!" shouted the person holding the equipment.
From the kennels down the hill, the dogs howled as if in agreement.
The guides went from cage to cage, selecting dogs for three sleds. The ones that weren't chosen howled their disappointment. The Chosen Ones barked and yipped at the guides to hurry up and get them into place. One of the guides glanced at Delilah, who was still talking to the camera. "You'll want to put on weather gear," she said. "It's going to be cold."
The guides directed our little group to the narrow wooden sled in front, Delilah and partner to the one in the back. Each sled was harnessed to eleven dogs: five pairs and a lead. The dogs jumped and lunged in their harnesses, creating quite the ruckus. "Sit up straight," the guide said to us as we lowered ourselves onto thin planks covered with reindeer skins. "Don't lean back. Don't put your feet on the ropes."
I hoped I was doing it right because I absolutely couldn't bend down to see where my feet were as I sat my padded bottom between Johan's legs. Sadie sat in front. There was nothing to hold onto or lean against. Then we were off.
Once they were running, the dogs stopped barking. It was snowing lightly. The beam from the guide's headlamp made the snow sparkle like diamonds. The world was so big and unknowable with its sky and its mountains, its ice and snow and wind. The sled shushed against the snow. Sometimes one dog would nip at the shoulder of the one next to him. The big guy in the second row bit the snowbank to his right about every third stride. Sometimes, a dog would poop while running and the smell was foul and made everyone laugh. I flashed then on the long pandemic days of lockdown. I remembered sitting in my one-bedroom Queens apartment watching one day melt into the next, crying and not-crying, and my eyes filled with tears up there near the top of the world; I was in my own once unimaginable future.
After about an hour, the sleds stopped in front of a lavvu for the time-honored Swedish tradition of fika, a convivial coffee break. I uncricked my body and waded through the snow. Everyone was petting and thanking the dogs, taking selfies. The ones who hadn't thrown themselves on their sides in the snow wagged themselves silly at all the attention. I put my arms around the white ruff of the largest dog and she bathed my chin in wet kisses. A pink-clad person was lying dramatically in the snow. Was she hurt? But no. The holder of the equipment assured everyone that Delilah was fine.
Inside the lavvu, we sat around an open fire. A blackened teapot sat on an iron grate set over the flames. Delilah and her partner ducked through the opening and took their places on the bench in front of the fire. The guide passed around a box of teabags and then filled the cups with water. Delilah looked at her cup. "We are drinking tepid lemon water," she said to the phone her partner was holding up to her face.
The guide passed around a container of homemade cakes, which tasted of warm spices, sweet apple, and woodsmoke. Delilah looked at hers and passed it to her companion who ate it in one big bite.
Back on the sled for the second leg of the ride, I settled myself in position.
"Are you from here?" Johan asked, calling up to the guide who stood on the sled behind the seated passengers.
"I am," she said. "Most of our parents work in the mines, but our generation doesn't want that for ourselves." She praised Mats, the owner of the kennel, for taking good care of his dogs. When he races them, she said, he uses a metal sled, not these wooden ones. He's raced the Iditarod, she said with pride.
She told us that climate change has touched every aspect of life in the area, pointing out how the dogs were struggling, at various points, to pull the sled through pockets of light, fluffy freshly fallen snow. "Usually by this time of year, early January, more snow has fallen and the snowpack is firmer," she said.
"What's this about moving the town?" Johan asked. "That can't be a real thing, can it?"
"The town has to move because of the mine. No one likes what's happening."
"How do you move a whole town?"
"Carefully," laughed the driver.
I tilted my face to the night sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights. Falling snow kissed my skin. The dogs ran in silence. Mountains stood black against the snow-lit sky.
The dog sled driver had been joking of course, but, I thought later: how does one go about moving a town? Turns out the answer is complicated. In 2004, LKAB announced their plans to move the town, claiming that the mine had made the ground upon which Kiruna stood unstable. Too, the mine might also be hungry for what lies beneath Kiruna. By spring 2016, The New York Times reported that 400 families had already moved. The video, "This is Kiruna: How to Move a City," a documentary produced for the Swedish Institute, shows a father and daughter, grinning and waving in anticipation of the move of their store, which has been in their family for three generations. "I've lived here all my life," says the woman later, looking up at her apartment building that was scheduled to be demolished in pre-pandemic 2019. Everyone in the video is smiling.
Despite disruption to the land as well as the people on it, LKAB has reportedly never considered closing the mine. The town center could be moved or rebuilt in a different location. Houses could be lifted up by cranes and deposited in lookalike neighborhoods a distance away. The reindeer can go around the operation, or find new places to graze. According to a European Planning Study published in 2022, "the economic value of the natural resources was ranked higher than other interests such as health, environment, built heritage, etc." The mine as a producer of material resources that propel the engine of human existence on the planet holds more value than the actual humans who live on the planet. It's the shortest of short-term thinking.
In the nearby mining town, Malmberget, this cycle of extraction, construction, and land reclamation has, over time, significantly decreased the town's population. Malmberget, a 130-year-old town, will be "terminated" by LKAB by 2030. Kiruna, on the other hand, has diversified its economy to provide other sources of employment. From the Icehotel to the Sami museum, eco-tourism is today's call of the sustainable wild.
We stopped at Jukkasjärvi's one-room grocery to purchase food for dinner and then headed to our Airbnb, down one snowy road, and then another. The directions said to make a left before the yellow mailbox in between the two pine trees. We were driving through lots of pine trees, which engendered a discussion of spruce versus pine, or were they all pine, but then we saw the yellow mailbox and made the turn.
The ceilings were low and wood-paneled like the walls. I recognized the sectional from various trips to Ikea over the years. A wood-burning stove in which Sadie stoked a fire immediately upon entrance. The Airbnb host had left store-bought spiced biscuits that we ate with mugs of tea in front of the fire. A reindeer skin-covered bench for sitting and removing boots. Two bedrooms. I made us a quick dinner of salad with smoked salmon and lit all of the tealights. Sadie had downloaded a Northern Lights app, but it was too cloudy to see anything. Finally, we bid each other good night. I fell asleep, hard, only to be woken up at 5:30 by my daughter whispering for me to come right away. By the time I got to the window, all that was left of the lights was the glow of the full moon behind the clouds. We stared out the window, but they didn't reappear. Sadie made coffee and we sat in the dark, watching for the magic to happen. At about eight, the sky began to brighten, slow, slow light, turning the horizon from black to somewhat less black.
We ate breakfast and cleaned the cabin. We had almost a whole day before catching the night train from Kiruna to Stockholm, an option we had chosen for its promise of romantic charm as well as it being considerably less expensive than flying. Now the hours stretched before us, cold and white, so we decided to spend the day exploring the old and new Kiruna. On the drive from Jukkasjärvi, the car's nav got confused, maybe because parts of the town had moved while the signage, curiously, had not, or because of the magnetic force of the mine. We made it to the old city. Empty houses, empty storefronts, empty streets and parking lots. It looked like a movie set awaiting actors to take their places upon the stage.
"Look," Sadie said, pointing. "I think the church is open."
A tall building of wood and multiple wide steeples, the church was painted that distinctive Swedish red, falu red, a warm, bright burst of color against all that white. It stood open and alone here in the deserted center of the old city, although it had been slated to move some time in 2016. Inside, the church was dark wood and stained glass. Opposite the pulpit, a pipe organ soared high up from the floor to the vaulted ceiling. Two people sat side-by-side in one of the pews, heads bent. I thought they were praying, but when I walked by, I saw they were both scrolling on their phones.
Back outside, we walked the empty streets looking for the Visitors Center so we could get directions to the new city. The nav led us to a closed movie theater. Across the street was a storefront with a sign: Kiruna Tour. They were the only place open so we traipsed inside to get out of the cold. Turns out, the Visitors Center was in the movie theater but, the worker told us looking at her watch, it had closed at two. I bought a pair of handicraft Sami mittens, and Sadie, foot warmers to put in her boots.
Directions in hand, we drove three kilometers from the original city to Kiruna 2.0 and parked in yet another enormous parking lot. Kiruna's new town center was a tight cluster of modern office tower buildings. We looked for the two handicraft shops we had identified as being of interest, but when we found them, they were closed for Epiphany. It was impossible to tell which part of the ground was sidewalk and which was road, but it didn't matter because the very few people we saw (dog people, construction workers) walked straight down the middle; the very few cars on the road drove slowly on the snow-packed streets, and because everything was so flat, the vehicle could be seen well before it was close enough to be a threat. Another movie set, still and silent, ready to spin into motion.
Our map apps told us that there were three restaurants. Our first two choices were closed. That left a little counter service place where at least we could sit and get out of the cold. No one was hungry, so we got tea and drank water that tasted of minerals and earth while Johan and Sadie figured out the route to what the map identified as the "temporary Kiruna train station," which, when we arrived, turned out to be another series of parking lots. Mounds of snow. Black, black sky. Johan drove around looking for a sign that would tell him where to drop off the car. We saw none. He called customer service. A recording answered that the number had been disconnected. The temporary train station of Kiruna was the end of the road, a postapocalyptic coda to the experiment of human existence on Earth.
We got out of the car to look for someone, a sign, anything that might let us know what to do with our borrowed vehicle. We finally encountered two men coming out of a concrete building with one lighted window. They told Johan, in Swedish, that there was a drop box on the side of the train station, and pointed to a small wooden building next to the railroad track.
Relieved, we emptied the car and dropped off the key. By now, it was half-an-hour until the departure of the SJ Night Train to Stockholm on which we had reserved a "couchette" for the fifteen-hour journey. The tiny station was packed. Hikers' backpacks were piled high in the corners, taking up much of the space. A baby cried; a child whined. The signboard listed our train as arriving on Track 11 and I wondered where Tracks 1-10 could possibly be.
There's a Sami folktale about murdered babies whose spirits haunt the forest. The howl of the wind through the trees is the eppers' cry. In some tales, the epper avenges their death by killing their mother and crippling their father; in others the spirit becomes a human child after being bathed or christened.
In this realm, however, the dead don't reanimate. Today, even in this part of the world, winters are warmer, snow comes later in the season. Spring's renewal is less predictable, more precarious. From rising temperatures to vegetation growth, to natural resources required by reindeer migration patterns, nature struggles against anthropocentric forces that shatter the earth's crust, pollute her waters, and chase away wildlife. Once the ground is torn, the rivers irradiated, and a hotel melts back into the earth, we don't have a record of success for bringing the dead back to life. It's an old story. Or not an old old story, not as old as that tale of murdered baby spirits that haunt the woods, but old as far as the short attention span of a consumer-driven public goes.
As I write this essay on my trusty laptop with its metal body and battery-powered hardware, I think of how easy it is to cast the mine as the villain in this story. The situation, of course, is complicated. The town grew up around the mine. The mine has provided jobs to people for over a century in a place where nighttime lasts for thirty days and the temperature can drop as low as nearly thirty-degrees below zero degrees Fahrenheit. The mine has yielded up resources that can help develop technologies that will make the world less reliant on fossil fuels. Families live with their dogs and reindeer, snowmobiles and sparks. That said, what's the endpoint here? Are we going to keep burrowing into the earth to extract from it all we can get our hands on and then, quite literally, move on? What happens when the mine is eventually exhausted? What about the river and the fish who swim in it and the animals and people who eat the fish? What about the reindeer herders who are forced to stand aside and then stand aside again?
On our last day in Kiruna Municipality, we checked out of the Airbnb and followed a boot-worn path to the frozen river. I saw the haunches of some large animal disappear into the trees. The sun rose into clear sky and a fat gold moon balanced on the tops of the trees. We stood on the ice, turning slowly in a circle. A red wood structure someone had dragged out onto the ice hovered in an expanse of white. The horizon glowed orange and pink and a clear light that is almost impossible to describe—blue-white, sky-water, ice-cloud.
After exploring Kiruna's old city and the new, we returned to the river to watch the sun set at 2:00 PM. The pale sun melted into the mountains slowly, slowly... and then—all at once—the ice, the snow, and the sky were a luminous, pure blue. The truest, sweetest blue. Those who live in this part of the world call this time of day "the blue hour." And then it was gone and night bled into the sky, pearl and silver and finally, a deep indigo. The low round moon watched over it all.
I never did see the Northern Lights.
