Please note, however, that the whole trip is just one click away. This year I published NOTES FOR THE AURORA SOCIETY. A full and complete account of my 1500 mile walk across Finland.

Currently, NOTES FOR THE AURORA SOCIETY is available on amazon.com, at the Brown University Bookstore (Providence, Rhode Island, USA) at The Bookery (Pueblo, Colorado, USA) and at Moby Dickens (Taos, New Mexico, USA). I will be sure to keep you up to date when it comes available in other locations.

I will be making edits to the site over the coming weeks. Mostly, this will be additions to the photo gallery.

Also, be sure to scan the event calendar. I will be doing about one book signing a month.

Enjoy the site. Please feel free to comment or email me!

Jim

By the end, I finally knew what I was doing. I was finally confident. I was finally in mountains. I was finally someplace I could love – Lapland. I was finally sincerely happy and, maybe for the first time in my life, I took pleasure in absolutely every moment of the day.

I saw fewer pines each day and the birch were shorter and all yellow and orange. The swamps were rusty with wide swaths of water that reminded me of quicksilver. Ground shrubs were scarlet or crimson and the mornings very foggy. The nights were cold but the days were warm. There were reindeer everywhere.

I left Inari and covered the 30km to Kaamanen in one day. I passed Saturday night there and all of Sunday, waiting for my passport to come in the Monday morning mail. But I hadn’t planned my food correctly and Sunday I had to buy some food from the little store in the cafe. The prices were unreal, so I settled for a small bag of macaroni, costing me 2.10 euros. I complained about the price to the sour-faced woman staring me down from across the counter, but in the end, I had no choice. I needed the food. Monday morning I returned to the café for a coffee as I headed out of town. The same bag of macaroni now cost 0.40 euros. I held it up to her. “Don’t shop on Sundays.” she said to me with a frown.

At Kielatupa I met Klaus. He coughed like a smoker. He had large tanned hands and piercing blue eyes that squinted when he listened. His English was ungainly. His Finnish non-existent. He moved with an ease that didn’t match his bulk and everything about him was fatherly. He smiled easily.

In his room there were maps and rocks. 1:24 000 topos he studied with a magnifying glass, noting things that confused him (lakes on small, flat bumps of 5-10 meters, a river that ran uphill and large rocks situated on the tops of high, narrow points) and larger, 1:50 000 geologic maps of Lapland that hung on the walls. The rocks were samples and he had them catalogued and numbered, their point of origin marked on the appropriate map. He also had a shovel, several compasses, a fedora and piece of bread and a tomato. On his bed lay a long rod attached to red box with a switch. It said: ‘Goldspear’. Klaus was looking for gold.

Klaus was from Berlin. He was born in 1943. He had a wife who was Turkish. In 1998, she left him; went to Turkey and disappeared. He wrote to her at her mother’s home, but he had received not a word. His daughter studied at a University in Austria. He said she was too pretty for her own good.

I said that Lapland reminded me of New Mexico. “There’s something of the desert in the Arctic.” I said. He was incredulous. The wide open fells blanketed in low shrubs could easily pass for Otero Mesa or the grasslands of the Sky Islands. The canyons were shockingly similar to the Rio Grande Valley or the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado. “The only real difference,” I said. “is in the amount of water.”

Klaus had been coming to Finland for Gold every summer since 1962. At that time he prowled the rivers near Säriselkä and the fells that are now inside Urho Kekonen National Park. “It was better then. No restrictions. No Wilderness areas. No National Parks. I hate National Parks. Now there’s tourists and hikers and skiers. Before, it was just the gold miners and the reindeer herders. Now, they wont let me prospect for gold. Environmental rules screw up everything.”

I pointed out that, if it was just a few guys like him, out half-assed, prospecting with a boat, shovel and pan, that would be one thing. But the giant sluice-boxes, steam shovels and high-pressure hoses the Lemmenjoki miners use are tearing down entire hillsides, destroying rivers and poisoning the water. “Parts of my home state are totally poisoned by large scale mining. Most of the world is open to mining, we gotta save something. And, what do you want,” I asked. “a Lapland that looks like a gravel pit?” He knew what I was talking about and deep down, he could easily agree. He nodded his head. “Ja, ja. But…what is the great American battle cry?”

“Give me liberty or…”

“No, no…’the government stole my land!” He thought this incredibly funny.

I was going to the canyons and wide fells of the Kevo Strict Nature Reserve and did not want to walk in the road. I wanted to go back into the hills. Klaus knew a shortcut, but he wasn’t going to walk. “Then, can we go by boat?” I asked. He laughed. “Get in the car.” He said. I did and we drove about 5km down the asphalt to a barely noticeable break in the birch. “Here.” We climbed out and walked together up a small hill. There, we looked at the rocks – they were almost 3 billion years old. I took a compass bearings on several hills to the NE and NW. “Take a new compass bearing on that hill when you come to the place where they gather the reindeer.”

“What will you do?”

“I’m going to Kargasniemi to buy a salmon. A big one. Then I’ll boil it lightly. No salt. No spices. Just the taste of the fish.” He looked happy but I was sad to part from him. I wanted to look for gold with him, and push a boat up a shallow, gravely stream into the Wilderness. I think sometimes that I’m getting tired of meeting people I love and then watching them fade away out into the world.

Days later, I was at the border. I walked along the wide, gravely Tenojoki for two days. Norway was just across the river. I couldn’t convince myself that I had actually walked across Finland.

On the last night I slept in a cabin by the river. It was a very cold night. The river valley was completely black. Around 1 a.m. I went outside for a piss and saw the Northern Lights. They were light greenish, nearly white. They shot across the sky like rockets and then disappeared. Then a curtain appeared in the north and waved as if in a breeze. Another appeared looking like a broken egg and then, more rockets. Several stars fell through the show and, I swear to God, I could hear them. It was a high-pitched moan and its intensity came and went with the strength of the light show. I stood, naked and cold, in a wonderland of dark and light. It felt like a ‘congratulations’ from God. I had never felt more humble in all my life.

I came to Nuorgam late in the afternoon of September 14th. The streets were nearly deserted, the stores empty and a brisk breeze blew up the valley. The border was a dilapidated fence with a speed bump. There was a sign and a concrete pile marking the point as the “northernmost point in the European Union”. I stepped into Norway and thought: “Is that it?”

END

In Nunnanen I stayed with a family of Sami reindeer herders. Dinner was beef-steak and canned peas. The coffee was acidic and burned my stomach.

“Finns aren’t in touch with their environment anymore. And neither are we.” The matriarch was a small, bitter woman who taught grade-school in Peltovuoma. Her mouth was dry and snapped as she talked. “…and anyway, Finns, Samis, Swedes, French…what does that mean anymore? What does it mean to be a Finn when you can buy Mexican food in the stores, your clothes were made in China and your vegetables come from Spain? No, don’t ask me about being Finnish or Sami – those lables don’t mean anything now.”

Two days later, I slipped and fell straight out of the door of the Kalamakaltion wilderness hut. I hit my head on a rock and felt dizzy. I fell again 5 minutes later and cut open my finger on a rock. The rain had turned the ATV trail to a glistening mud, slick as ice. The rain fell in a steady drizzle.

I passed through stands or dwarf birch, partly colored for autumn. I passed several small lakes and the ATV trail ploughed through swamps and streams, as if nothing could get in its way. The trail was used by the reindeer herders. Thier camp was beyond Peltotunturi and the trail stretched all the way to the edge of the National Park. I slipped and fell several more times, once into a shallow brook. I was not pleased.

At Peltotunturi I climbed up out of the trees and on to a wide, flat fell that extended all the way to Norway, only 5-6km distant. The wind was fierce, I got caught in a squall of rain and snow and the visibility dropped to just a few feet. The rain actually hurt when it hit my face. I saw a mountain plover and was sure it was shivering. Fearing I might lose the trail, I pulled out my maps and compass to take a bearing on the hut where I hoped to spend the night. That was dumb. The wind tore my 1:50 000 topo from my hand, launching it into Norway. It also took my general 1:100 000 area map, but that, I at least recovered, torn, wet and shreaded from a reindeer fence a kilometer across the rocks. I stuffed it in my pocket and made for the treeline. I was soaking wet when I arrived at the reindeer camp.

It was abandoned. Dozens of kota skeletons mixed easily with the birch. The kota is the Sami tee-pee. It looks exactly the same. There was a long fence surrounding the encampment, which covered several acres. It looked like a motocross rally arena. It had been terribly overgrazed and the ground pounded to dust by ATVs and motorcycles. The trails left off like a cobweb. Plastic sheeting blew in the wind, shopping sacks caught up in the birch, beer and cola bottles rolled in the wind. There were plastic buckets, gas and engine oil jugs and several batteries. The detritus of modern transhumance. I ate lunch, huddled in a kota with a plastic sheet wrapped around my body.

Reindeer came and stood and watched me, then moved on, bored. I packed and moved on behind them.

From there, the trail was not as well used, but it was clear. My thinking was this: the Forest Service must resupply and repair these huts on occasion, even if they are very remote. They must do it on ATV. The trail I was on went to within 5km of the hut on the map (the one that blew away), so, I figured, they must use the same trail to get to the hut, right? Wrong. The ATV trail continued to the north when I thought it would turn east. It never did go east. I fixed my position, took a bearing on the hut (with the 1:100 000 map) and left the trail toward the east. Down a hill I ran into a swamp. It was only a few hundred meters wide but deep and wet. I had to detour 2km south to get around it. But I misjudged my pace. I misjudged the landscape. I ran into several more swamps. I got confused in a grove of willows. I got tired. I got lost. The rain continued to fall and I begin to think: ‘I have a wife at home. A child on the way…what in God’s name am I doing out here?’ I climbed up over a hill and came face to face with a large moose. Literally face to face. We scared the hell out of each other. I went right, she went left. That’s when it struck me how very far from home I was. I was surrounded by hills with names like: Kotaojanniemi and VaskonkelkŠ. By rivers with names like: Repojoki and Positjoki. Reindeer ran in front of me, a moose just tried to eat me, there were swamps all around, the rain hadn’t stopped falling for over 24 hours. I recalled what the professor said: “homesickness is the tool that tells man to go home. Go to what you know. It’s a preservation mechanism.” I felt homesick.

I sat down in the rain and ate some food, drank some water and took a deep breath. When I had calmed down, I walked back south and climbed a hill. I found an opening in the very thick foliage and the clouds cleared just long enough to reveal a couple of peaks. I used the tops of Tupalaki and Repovaara to triangulate my position. Then I took a new bearing on the hut and went straight along the bearing for an hour. The forest was thick. I scared up capercailliea and pyy. Night was coming (I had been lost for 4 hours) and I stumbled often. I fell twice (that made more falls in one day than in the rest of my life combined!). At the end of the hour I came out of the forest at the shore of a small lake. I turned and walked due east for 100m. There was the hut. I hadn’t seen another human being for two days (and I wouldn’t for 2 more days), but the hut was warm. There were still red embers in the stove. The rain fell all night.

I woke in the pitch black. I knew I was in a hut, but I didn’t know which one, so I fell asleep again. In the early morning I woke from the cold. It was still raining. I got up, lit a fire and went back to sleep.

I dreamed of New Mexico and the Sandia Mountains. Nina and I were home and my mom and dad were there with us. With a large, steel blade, I cut open my lower left arm to the bone. There was no blood, just damp sawdust and bits of wood and worms. My dad held back the skin while my mom plucked the worms with tweezers. Then, Nina sewed my arm tightly closed with strands of long-stem Roughbent, my favorite grass. A puffy white cloud floated across Sandia Peak. I woke.

Two days later, the sun shone and I could see the broad, flat top of Morganmaras. By 4pm I was with the goldminers and autumnal tourists in Morganmoja. I’d never felt better in all my life.

I rented a small, warm room with stale air and rested my legs for a day. My neighbor was a middle-aged man in a track-suit. He had a long nose and glasses. He never walked, but went everywhere on his white and blue mountain bike – even to the WC, only 20 meters away. He hummed J. Karjilinen in the morning and Lizst in the afternoon and when I spoke with him, he made vague gestures as if a small bird were flapping in front of his face. He came and went all day, collecting willow twigs, pine needles, chunks of pine and birch bark, dried reindeer scat as well as the remaining heads of horsetail cotton-grass. He sat up late at night, assembling them into small baskets and ornaments.

Njurgalahti was nothing more than a few dozen undersized huts and several larger houses painted red and topped with varying shades of green tile. There were yellow and red Shell oil drums scattered about, several random piles of gravel and a place to practice gold-panning; replete with a large poster demonstrating the proper swirling techniques. Tall, dry grass surrounded a majestic, gray snag and many dozens of cars and two buses sat outside the extremely overpriced café. It was the only place to eat. Behind the bar were several Brughelian landscapes of the Lemmenjoki Valley. There was also a blond woman who growled at the customers and her husband, who acted much like a puppy-dog. I paid 4 euros for a dry sandwich of stale tomatoes and wilted lettuce and sat down.

At the table next to me sat Voltaire’s ‘perfect Englishman’. “I travel, but completely without motive.” He said. His fingers were greasy with butter and he invited me to join him. He was a solicitor from Dover. His specialty was divorce. “Its sad, really.” He said, and he was sincere. He wore a green tribly over his balding head. He was plagued by both a lisp and a stutter. When he walked, he both limped and shuffled, having been born with two broken hips. “It limits me to not more than 20km rambling, daily.”

“My hips are intact, but I cant do much more than that.”

He smiled. He was friendly, the way the English always are. I liked him immensely.

He loved Finland. But he couldn’t say why he loved Finland. “I’ve been here 13 times.” He came every summer for four weeks and he studied Finnish with a book and cassette tapes at home. he could list all the Finnish presidents and considered Mannerheim more of a Churchill and Ryti somewhat of a Chamberlain. He said that the fascists had once threatened to kidnap Ståhlberg and send him to the USSR if he continued his policies of land reform. He had once been in the same room with Tarja Halonen.

He was also an expert on timetables. “The Inari bus leaves at 7:45 sharp. From there, I’ll have just enough time to purchase a few souvenirs and lunch at the hotel. You know, the hotel. Remember when Michael Palin lunched there?” Oddly, I knew what he was talking about. He continued, “The Goldline, that is, the postal bus, leaves at 1:40pm sharp, putting me into Kargasniemi at 3:45. I can cross the border, shower up and be ready for dinner at precisely 6. Will you be leaving on the 7:45 bus?”

“Thank you, but I’m walking.”

“Splendid.” He talked incessantly, but not about himself. Breakfast passed with a recitation of all the bus and train timetables going to and from Rovaniemi to all points north. It concluded with a review of the timetables for the coastal steamer in Norway. I could never get him to talk about Wilderness, but I was sad to see him go.

I took my things and passed back into the hills. I saw a fox and an eagle. I crossed a frigid trout stream and slept under a pine. Then I was in Inari.

Dan rejoined me in Muonio. He carried with him a fork, 2 broken ribs, a lime green backpack with purple ribs and a nearly empty plastic bottle that had been filled with a litre of red wine. “It helps the ribs.” It was great to see him.

We set off the next morning to Pallas-Ounas National Park. I carried a kilo of raw beef (plus food for 12 days) and Dan a litre of cheap Italian red. The sky was dark and grey; a wind blew from the northeast and the ground was wet. I may never have left Muonio without Dan’s encouragement. It was August 22.

We followed a wide gravel road past a mix of clearcuts and second growth. The mountains of the National Park were obscured by clouds; but I was thrilled just knowing they were there. We came to Toras-Sieppi, one of the only villages to escape the retreating Germans in 1945. There, we met two French girls looking for a place to stay. All the campgrounds were closed and a chilling wind blew from the lake. They drove away and we made for a Forest Service hut. We continued into the forest along a huge, freshly bulldozed path that cut a painful scar through swamp, forest and field. An ATV trail criss-crossed the cut but the forest around was wide and open with an incredible range of age and species diversity.

Somewhere along the line we came to an agreement that if the hut was crowded with drunks we were getting into a fight. I had had it up to my neck with the extreme drinking and associated rudeness, and Dan felt the same. We were tired and not excited by the prospect of a night with smashed, loud, rude Finns. Luckily for someone we only found two Germans, a sweet couple from Swabia, trying to light a fire (how appropriate….). Together we sipped the wine, roasted the meat and snacked on German chocolate until we fell peacefully asleep around midnight. I like Germans, even if they like to burn stuff. We met them again at the Pallas Hotel, a large, empety wooden building dominating a low saddle between some of the highest fells in Finland. I had a beer for lunch and we didnt leave the hotel until the next morning.

I woke up sore and unhappy. My stomach hurt. My feet hurt. My head was stuffed. My hands ached. This lifestyle was wearing on me. I growled at Dan all morning and the top of Taivaskero was shrouded in a freezing mist. How was I to know that would be Day 1 of the best 10 days of the entire trip?

Depending on the map you choose, Taivaskero’s elevation is either 805, 806, or 807 meters. I suspect that is was measured by the same team who measured distances in the park. A sign at the hotel announced “Nammalakuru, 15km”. We walked 50m to the next sign. “Nammalakuru 13km”. I dont know why those little things irritate me so much.

We climbed to a small pile of wood and concrete, the remains of the origional art-deco hotel the Germans blew up in 1945. A group of riekko (lagopus lagopus) crossed the trail in front of us. Visibility dropped to 20m and we spent the morning climbing in and out of wonderful, bare, rocky, Arctic valleys. We came to the Nammalakuru hut at 1pm. A Finnish couple joined us from the north and Dan chatted with them while I made tea. I stepped outside to an accussing finger.

“And where are you from?”

“America.”

“I figured as much.” The Finn growled, disgusted. As if only an American would do such a thing. From that moment on he completely ignored me. He turned his attention to Dan. I felt a little hard done by. After all, didn’t the Mungo Parks, RF Burtons, PL Feremors and Nick Cranes of the world all hail from Britain?

In the evening we came to a low, wet grove of yellowing birch. We climbed up a hill to a pond. A squat log sauna graced its shore. Up a flight of 50 wooden stairs sat a hut. It held a heavy wooden table, 2 rows of elevated slats with enough spave to sleep 10 and a square Swedish stove that we stuffed with logs. In the night we sauna-ed and slept out of the rain and cold. We slept until the rain ended then eased the ache in our bones with a morning sauna. We only made it 10 km that day.

For me, it was simply good to be in the mountains. The Pallas-Ounas range isnt actually that high but its latitude gives the impression of being at 12,000-13,000 in the Southern Rockies. The lowland cloud sitting on my mind the last two years lifted, I felt high and elated. The birch yellowed by the hour and crowberry, riekonmarja and suopursu took on shades of coral. At Pahakuru we crossed the tree-line and the land fell away in all directions. The clouds teased us with wide expanses of blue lakes below.

At Taipuri there were skeletons of Sami kotas and the land had been grazed down by the reindeer. Dawn was clear but by 8am is was +6C and cloudy. We split there. Dan went on to Hetta and I to Ketomella. It felt big somehow, like a momentous split. I felt as if I should say “next year in Jerusalem” not, “a couple of weeks in Helsinki”.

Fall mornings in the high country are my favorite.

GOOD NEWS! One of my stories has been accepted for publication in a compilation. The publisher is Travelers Tales (www.travelerstales.com), the book name is something like: “The Hayenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why” and the story is “Egypt, Day One“. Look for it in early 2004.

———-

It’s now become clear that I won’t be able to make the end in 16 weeks. I need an extra 10 days to two weeks to finish this off. So, the end date will now be sometime around September 15. 

———-

August 13
“”There is nothing of Acerbi that remains, and, anyway, Lapland is more modern than New York City.” It was a warning. 

In Oulu came word that an Italian writer was travelling ahead of me, tracing the same route I intended to follow to Muonio. I sent a note ahead, requesting a meeting and an exchange of perceptions. He refused, with an oblique, Calvino-ish reply (do all Italian writers actually intend to be coquetish?) and left me with the warning.

In 1799, Giuseppi Acerbi departed Oulu in the company of the Swedish colonel, Adolf Skjödebrand. Acerbi was a handsome, young Italian with wild, curly hair and a wry grin. He spoke 6 languages, including Latin, and had been educated in both the sciences and the arts. Thier goal was Nordcapp, the northernmost point in Europe. They travelled to Tornio by sledge and boat. There, Acerbi found a German clergyman with whom he could speak Latin and who was familiar with local botany. They spent the summer climbing the Tornio and Muonio rivers to arrive at Nordcapp in early autumn.

Skjöldebrand sketched dramatic landscapes and ethnographic details. He also compiled a report to the government about the region (later, considered a regional expert, he participated in the border negotiations after the disasterous 1808-09 war with Russia). Acerbi recorded the geology, botany, natural history, geography (in his book, he seemed to question the calculations of the Maupertuis expedition), culture, food, dress and music of the Finns and Samis. He deplored the sauna (and the Sami) but was enchanted by the Finnish women (rightly so!) and never passed up the opportunity to enter the woman’s sauna – fully clothed – to record temperature extremes in the name of science.

In Helsinki, at the National Library, I found an origional, 1802 copy of his book. His style was at once lucid and severe. He was witty, cocky and above all, observant. And he was funny. Charming even.

Acerbi’s descriptions of the wild, wide, Tornio river valley (along with Skjöldebrand’s prints, which I also found) were the reason I chose to cross Finland at the center and follow the western route northward.

But the Italian writer was correct. Nothing remains of Acerbi’s river. Imaginations rarely match up with the real thing. Fifteen years ago, in Morocco, an Australian, horribly disappointed to find Arabs in jeans and polo shirts, said “whatever you imagine of a place – you’re wrong.” How true.

———-

In Kemi, my Swiss benefactors joined me for a week. Leaving Kemi was a problem: there was no where to walk. For over an hour we endured the nerve-wracking roar of tractor trailers, logging trucks, motorcycles, cars and RVs. We walked single file as fast as we could. It wasn’t pleasant but they had been forwarned. We came to a bridge that was under construction. The asfault was fresh and hot, a steam roller moved back and forth with a bleary-eyed teenager at the healm and the cars fell into a single line. 

We joined the fray; there was no other option.

Safe on the other side, we trudged through a shopping center parking lot, cars sales, a plumbing store, RV sales, a wood lot – and finally onto a bike path leading to Tornio. It didn’t get better until five days later, north of Avasaksa. The highway nearly domintates the river and the growling, polluting, obnoxious traffic never ends. The campgrounds were louder than a street-side cafe in Helsinki and there was no where to walk but on the road. It was comparable to Interstate 25 (in Colorado) between Colorado Springs and Denver.

And, why not? It’s not my river valley and my disappointment was caused by myexpectation of something different. Still, be in Colorado, New Mexico or Finland, I consistently fail to understand why people accept – and even encourage – the destruction of beauty and peace in favour of ugly, violent highways. They are so prevelant in our lives now, that we don’t even remark on how horrible and damaging they actually are. It’s like contracting a slow-growing cancer, then ignoring it. Sometimes I feel like a terrible anachronism.

———-

In Tornio, we ate breakfast in a clean, well-lighted place, but the city itself was dirty. The river was wide and the land flat. In the blue of the haze and the clouds, it was difficult to distinguish between the sea, the river and the land. 

The land slowly rose as we went north and, little by little, the river narrowed. At Kukkola rapids the river dropped 13.8m in 3,500m and men with long nets stood out on planks of wood that hovered over the whitewater. They took trout, salmon, char and whitefish. We could wave to the tourists on the Swedish side.

I was wrong about having more light. The nights are becoming longer and on August 6 I could see Venus from the Erkheikki sauna about midnight. In Kemi the temperature had been +30C. By Karunki it was +15 and at night it dropped to +5C. A heavy dew formed on my tent, my shoes and my pack.

By Yli-Tornio there were hills. The valley was lush. The hay had been cut and bundled into massive, white plastic rolls. There were houses all along the Swedish side and cell phone towers on nearly every hill. The clouds were low, puffy and white against a purple storm; sunlight touched the green hill tops.

On August 9, we walked east along the highway from Avasaksa to climb a large hill. There were no walking trails until nearly the top. The hill is well-known for its fabulous views – and they are fantastic – so it’s been designated as a “Nature Protection Area”. But, protected from what, I wonder: there is a wide paved road to the top, a huge vacation village, a ski-slope, a cafe, a theater, two parking lots, observation tower, museum and cell phone tower. What, I wondered, is there left to protect?

Barbara and Regula left from Avasaksa. A woman told me that an elderly man was about a week ahead of me, walking to Nordcapp with a pushcart for his things. By the Arctic Circle it had warmed again to +24C. The Finns were sweltering in the heat, the Germans wore shorts and t-shirts and the Italians thought it a bit chilly. I was sweating and sunburned and swam in the river. Yes, the Arctic Circle.

I’ve about a month left and thank God there will be hills. I’ve had it with flat. Physically I am fine, but my mind is growing weary. I’m looking forward to the Finnish Line.

On the last night in Suomussalmi the mosquitoes were relentless. They came in waves and crashed themselves into my body. Their bite was like the prick of a needle. I grabbed an empty plastic bottle and dove into my tent, kicking my boots off just outside the door.

The bottle was for urine. I dreaded the thought of exposing myself to the mosquitoes for a midnight pee. Having the bottle solved it all. Once full, I unzipped just enough of the tent flap to stick my arm out and empty the bottle on the grass. I slept well.

When I left my tent in the morning I found that my left boot was full of urine.

The thought of crossing the country from East to West was far from appealing. In fact, it was incomprehensibly threatening and depressing. So, I started at a run, covering nearly 80km in 2 days. The temperature was a constant 28C with 500,000% humidity. Puolanka found me exhausted.

The local campground appeared to serve as the regional cultural center. A series of xeroxed posters announced the coming attractions: Eeva Mäkeläinen and Orchestra, Jari Kulja and Orchestra, Marta y Dos Huevos, Duo Armando, and the Karsikas Quintet. It was iskelmä, a particular style of Finnish music nearly impossible to describe.

If you can possibly imagine a cross between the worst of Celine Dion and A Flock of Seagulls with a drunken accordion player and a pound of cheese thrown in for good measure, you might be at the cusp of comprehending iskelmä. Add too much make-up, hair full of black shoe polish, an extra 20lbs ‘hidden’ under too tight pants and lots of gold jewellery…well, its fascinating to say the least. It reminds me of Pueblo.

The campground owner was a mellow, confident father who drank too much. He sat outside the square box that served as a reception desk and sipped beer with a bearded man whose voice was soft like cotton. His daughter worked behind the desk. She was a thin, lovely girl with dark eyes and a large hickey on her neck, which she turned toward the customers with pride.

The windows were covered in postcards; there were no curtains.

There were tables and chairs under an awning. A middle-aged woman with permed hair and a small golden tennis racket dangling from her neck sat next to me. She said bad things about foreigners to two men who nodded and grunted in agreement. “And now, they’re having babies here! They should just go home.” She asked me what I thought.

“I like foreigners.” I said and they fell silent. “But I’ll volunteer to be the first to go – if you buy me a beer.”

A man next to me began to giggle. “Hyvä. Hyvä.” He said. “Good. Good.” The others remained silent. She bought the beer.

“I wasn’t talking about English or French or Germans or….where are you from?”

“America.”

“Or Americans. My God no. I mean, Americans work hard.”

“You haven’t seen me work.”

“Hyvä. Hyvä.”

“I lived in Sweden once.” One of them men said. “There they had separate tables for the Turks…” Then everyone fell into an uncomfortable silence. My phone rang. It was Nina. She said I was going to be a father.

———-

I didn’t sleep well. The night was cold and something was on my mind. I drifted in and out, peed 50 times and woke up shivering at 7am. But the morning was hot and the sky blue. 

In town there was free coffee at a bank. A line of old women in headscarves and flower-print dresses hid from the sun outside of Spar-market with their wicker shopping baskets.

Thunderstorms grew over the forest, but it never rained. The land fell flat and dry; the soil sandy. The trees were shorter and thinner. Along the roadside, diminutive alder and willow fought for space with red clover, buttercup, timothy, daisy and a variety of tall, yellowing grasses. The forest floor was covered in heather, bilberry, cowberry and crowberry. Horsma filled the clear cuts and juniper bushes took hold along their edges. The birds were nearly silent. Eventually, I came to Yli-Vuotto.

Anja Henttunen was the daughter of a man who had come back from America.

At the end of the 19th Century there wasn’t enough to eat in Ostrobothnia. Her grandparents kept the farm but went to Minnesota for work. They found it, and five children were born to them there.

The oldest son went to work in a mine at the age of 10. “Working underground is no place for a Finn.” His father growled and they chose straws to decide which child would return to the farm in Finland. The vote was rigged and the oldest came up out of the mine and they gathered the money to send him home.

The first winter he slept on straw above the oven. In the spring he began to clear the land. By hand, he dug the drainage ditches and cleared the trees. He worked 15-18 hour days. Eventually he cleared 10 hectares and bought a horse. But he was never able to get ahead.

When The Church had the police come and confiscate his horse for unpaid taxes, he renounced God and joined the Socialists. He was arrested during The Uprising, escaped the firing squads and spent a year starving in a prison camp run by the large landowners. When he came home, he was too weak to work.

“People say Communism and Socialism was the Soviet Union.” Anja said. “But not for us. It wasn’t ever that. It was about human right and equal opportunity. Thousands of people were killed for the 8-hour work day.”

Anja and her husaband, Olavi, run an outdoor nature-tourism center. Olavi is a carpenter who looks like Jesus (but talks MUCH less). Anja is somewhat like a saint. They have beds for 30, 2 saunas, a cafe and canoes for hire. Mostly they give advice, have fun and work hard. Anja wants to create an environmental tourism that is not only environmentaly friendly, but honest about nature.

She said that Finnish nature tourism caters too much to the customer. They create the nature experience that the tourists want (i.e. comfortable) instead of letting nature be nature and allowing the tourists to see it as it really is. As a result, nature in Finland tends to be roads, hotels, cottages, simplified rivers, catered expeditions, etc. I told her that I had visited Hossa Hiking Area.

“And?”

“Its like a nature amusement park. Disneyland for hikers.”

“True. It’s wrong for people to think they are in nature at places like that. It’s the same with the summer cottage. It’s not nature, it’s an extension of home. Anja had another vision. “There must be room for both.” She also had a vision of my walk.

“Its a pilgrimige.” She said that people don’t make ethnographic trips for thier own education anymore. That now, all is tourism and people think that 2-3 days in the tourist areas is enough to know a place. “But there is a difference between what you believe and what you want to believe.” I wasn’t sure what they meant, but it certainly sounded good.

She took seeds from red clover and phragmites australis and rubbed them into the bare spots on the ground with her heel.

“It means something that you become a father on this walking trip. In the middle. You’ll have to bring your child to these places.”

It made me feel heady to think that other people find thier own meaning in my walk.

On July 29, I arrived in Oulu.

It was south-east of Lentiira where I saw the first wild wolf of my life.

I started from camp at midnight and walked next to a large open fen where the sedges undulated green and yellow in the light breeze. The short sedges became tall and then broke into scattered pine and hair’s-tail cotton grass. There, the breeze stopped and by sunrise a low, white fog filled the space between the pines, turning the forest pink.

The wolf sat at the edge of a fresh clear-cut. The fog was thickest there and the black soil shown clear and moist where it had been ripped apart by the harrowing machine.

There were no birch; the seed trees were all pine.

The animal was clear and unmistakable. It was grey. Its ears were up. It stood like a statue. I slowed, then stopped; not quite believing what I saw. Then I was afraid.

I scanned the forest, wondering if the pack might be hunting me. I took up my walking stick and held it across my chest. I considered running. I thought I should make a fire. I did nothing.

The wolf sat still, considering me. Then, it stood, turned and trotted into the clearcut. It was something I had wanted to see my whole life and then it was over and I was alone. I’d never felt more alone in all my life.

———-

I’m not sure what to say about Suomussalmi yet. Too much good in too short a time. It was one of my favorite places. For now, suffice it to say that Renne Karppinen and his wife Merja (and a number of other people I met there) have restored my faith in humanity.

“That wolf…” She insitsed on speaking English, but the words came only after a painful struggle. “That wolf…..ate my husband…”

I balked. Wolves don’t eat people. They don’t even attack people. But there was emotion in her voice. “That wolf…”

I reached Saramo on July 9. The village had shrunk since the war. The store and restaurant now belonged to a family whose farm had collapsed with the advent of EU regulations. There was a bridge, a shuttered bakery, a broken gas-pump and the Fishing House, a fresh wooden building with oversized windows, a grey schist door step and fishnets on the wall.

The owner was a plump, unquestioning mother who passed the day curling pastries with her long, laquered fingernails and dusting her collection of Mannerheim statues. She was very kind. Dinner was bits of moose piled thickly on creamy mashed potatoes with a side of lingonberry jam that smelled of pine needles.

The other two customers were Russians and sat by the window watching the rain. One was a seductive young beauty with a soft mouth and wandering eyes. Her pants were skin tight. Her partner was an older, thin man with the eyes of a killer. He stared me down furiously; making sure I understood what belonged to him.

But I was interested in the wolf on the wall. It was small for a wolf, its fur snow white and its eyes light grey. Dark weasle pelts, tacked to the wall, framed the stuffed animal. “That wolf ate my husband….mikä on koira?”

“Dog?”

“That wolf ate my husband dog. This dog.” And she produced a portrait of a sad, fat rat-dog sitting, wide-eyed, on a leatherette couch. I nearly said “Good ridance.” but ordered a beer instead. It rained all night and all the next day.

At the Peurajärvi Fishing Area I laid my tent in a monoculture of even-aged, evenly thinned pines. Blueberries, pink heather and light blue jäkälä carpeted the forest floor. Yellowing reeds lined the lake. A silent, solitary RV was parked nearby. Five boats, all painted yellow and powered by oars circled the lake as if a carousel. No one was catching fish. Silence reigned. It was perfect.

I met Justani while floating in the lake. “Too cold for me!” He said from the shore in nearly perfect English. He was a fit boy of fourteen and he came from a farm near Isalmi. He said that he speaks English so well because all his friends moved away when farming got too tough and that, now, he has nothing to do but study and watch American TV shows. He said that he likes to fish but never caught anything in all his life. “Dad says thats not the point.”

Justani wanted to know about the Southwest and he sat outside my tent asking questions: “Have you been to Lake Michigan? Is the Grand Canyon in Colorado? Is there water in the desert? Can the birds fly over the mountains? Have you ever seen an elk? What does bear taste like? What does beer taste like? Can you kill a bear with a bow and arrow? How big is a mountain lion? Have you ever seen a wolf?”

“There are no wolves.”

“Why not?”

“They were all killed off about 80 years ago.”

“All?”

“All.”

“Why?”

“People were afraid of them and they sometimes killed cows and sheep. So they shot them all.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Have you ever seen a wolf?”

“Of course. They kill our sheep every once and awhile. I even saw one eat our dog last winter.”

“Really?”

“Yah. She was so fat and old. We let her out to pee and he suddenly appeared and picked her off the step and took her into the forest. It was probobly the biggest thrill of her life.”

“Didn’t you want to kill it?”

“Why?”

Through the evening three cars pulled into the camp area. One was a crunched Toyota and it held four retirees. The other two held two, twenty-something couples. They all crowded around the fire pit and began to drink. Off in the forest a man and a woman began to scream at each other. A car drove into the camping area and spun a half dozen donuts leaving the dust to float into my dinner. Around 11pm Justani’s father hooked the RV to the car and started the engine. “Where are you going?” I asked him.

“Home. In Finland, on the weekends, the forest belongs to the animals.” I had forgotten it was Friday. Then they were gone.

By midnight the drunks at the campfire had pulled the car next to my tent and turned on the dance music (I wasn’t sleeping near the firepit). It echoed across the lake. I could hear a woman crying hysterically in the forest.

I asked them to turn down the radio, that I needed to sleep. But they were too drunk to comprehend. When I asked again, an old man threw a log at me and growled. Then, he tried to shit on my tent. I swung my walking stick at his scrawny, white butt and he ran off laughing, his pants around his ankles. The woman in the forest was still crying.

I lay in my tent, sweating and waiting for them to go to sleep. But they never did. One of the boys sat down just outside my tent and called a friend. When I crawled out of the tent to protest, he nodded and said “terve” as if we were passing on the street. I packed my things. Just before I left I went to the toilet to get some TP. The old man sat in his own shit on the steps of the toilet, his pants still around his ankles. “Hei. Tule tanne.” He said. “Come here.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

The boy talked on the phone, two old ladies piled wood on the fire, the car stereo boomed, a pretty blond girl with long braids lay sprawled in the blueberries, shirtless and snoring. The woman in the forest continued to cry and howl.

It was 3am and a thick fog formed over the lake and moved among the trees. Everything was pink. For a moment, I couldn’t help but recall what an Englishwoman had said after living 20 years in Finland: “Well, I didn’t move here for the people!”

I traced a path along Pine Lake and swam from its beach. A Canadian beaver circled in the middle, slapping its tail. The sun rose, dull, behind a veil of clouds. At 6am I crossed a road. A man sat alone in a van, smoking and looking at the sky. “Wonderful forest.” He said. I crossed and climbed into the Hiddenportii plateau. The air was clear and bright and the lakes too cold to swim. By 11:30am I set my tent on a cliff where the wind would keep the mosquitos away. I wasn’t mad anymore. Then I slept.

The mosquitos suddenly showed up en masse just outside of Juuka. Thier companions were large horse-flies with orange eyes (parma), and they bite through clothing. At one point I had to put on all my rain gear and a mosquito hat just to be able to concentrate on walking and not on wacking bugs. By the time I made camp and got a smokey fire going, I was soaked from sweat as if it had been raining.

July 6
I met a Finnish farmer who had lived for 13 years in the Seattle region. He had been an engineer for Microsoft. He said “In America, nature is a place set aside. Someplace you go, but generally not where you live. The cities are, for the most part, ‘de-natured’. Nature has been removed. In Finland, the cities are not de-natured. Nature is just outside your door and all around you. Finns live in nature. Naturally, the consequences are different.

“Americans live in de-natured cities and homes and try to preserve nature “out there” because they dont have it at home. While Finns are much less apt to see the need for nature protection because they think its everywhere.

“In Finland, the environment suffers from this world view. In America, your spirit and humanity suffers.”

July 8
I’m nearly a week behind schedule. My first thought is that this whole thing may last longer than 16 weeks. But I still want to beat winter to the top of the country. I stayed in Nurmes for 3 days to shop, repair equipment and dry out. It has been raining for days and nearly everything is soaked through. Today the sun is out, but the wind is blowing and the air is cold. Tomorrow I go on to Saramo on the route to Kuhmo.

Sleepy and The Strangler tried not to stare. They crowded the campfire, cooking thier sausages slowly and sipping beer. A small radio sat on top of thier six-pack but the volume was too low to really hear anything. Sleepy wore fresh green hiking pants, a camaflouge t-shirt and a green flight jacket. A scarf sporting the skull and crossbones covered his head and a long puuko hung from his belt. The Strangler was dressed identically but his wife wore pants that were much too tight and she pushed at her glasses as if they irritated her.

She gathered the empty beer bottles and drove away, leaving the men with thier backpacks.

From Joensuu I walked with Nina, Anna Sinkkonen and an Englishman called Dan. We began from a gas station where truckers and tourists ate stale pastries and drank coffee that tasted of burnt meat. The trail paralleled the highway, then dipped back along rough forest roads. After an hour, I leaned my pack against a tree and walked a kilometer in each cardinal direction, crossing a road every 30 to 50 feet and returning to find my pack covered in fat red and black ants.

Dan said not to worry, he was porting a bottle of Chilean red and would share it out at dinner to numb any welts left by the ants.

For hours the trail was the same. It switched from one road to another and every kilometer brought a new landscape. We climbed a low hill along an electricity line. We passed through thick stands of spruce and pine, fields of potatoes and rye and clearcut upon clearcut where moose left droppings in thick piles amongst the grass and flowers.

In the evening we bedded on a narrow peninsula where a sandpiper was raising her young and a man and a boy fished from a boat with a golden retriever named Jasmine.

We laughed until we fell asleep. The sun never set and a pink fog formed on the lake. The second day we walked through a swamp. When we came to Burial Lake we stripped to pale skin, loaded our bellies with the whiskey Dan carried and swam in the fridgid water.

Sleep and The Strangler tried not to Stare.

They were border guards from Lappeenranta. They were on vacation and would hike to Koli to see the “National Landscape”. They were calm and quiet. So much so, that they made me feel both relaxed and nervous all at once and Anna said that the government must choose them that way, after all, “who else could deal with a job like that?”

Sleepy cut a small block of birch, pulled his puuko from its sheath and gathered a red coal from the fire, demonstrating to us how to make a traditional cup or spoon.

The Strangler said the Russians lied even when they didn’t have to. Even when all thier papers were in order and thier cargo correct, they lied. They told so many lies that the border guards had to review thier papers until they’d worn thin. It stopped up the cross-border traffic half way to St. Petersburg and drove the customs officials to drink.

“Communism didn’t ruin Russia,” he said, “the Russians did. How could such a rich country with so many brilliant people stumble through history as if a trash can were wrapped around it’s ankles?”

The old Finns thought that spirits lived on Koli. They called it Musta Rintanen. They avoided settling the area until the 1700s. Koli is a pile of granite and gniess rising to 347m above the sea, its flanks are shrouded in old-growth forests and lush fens and swidden fields of lupin, dandelion, bluebell and prickly rose.

Elves and goblins lived there until the Christians came and wizards and witches hid there from the cross; a servant girl called Annikki was asked to give her virginity to a gnome king and when she refused he broke her legs and she spent the rest of her life paying for her pride by filling the bottlemless pit of Uhrihalkeama with sand and gravel.

“In the 1890’s Finnish nationalists chose Koli as a representation of Finnish cultural identity. The landscape and Finnish nationalism were fused. Painters and writers came to Koli for inspriation. Sibelius is said to have hauled a grand piano to the summit to play for his Aino on thier wedding day and Järnefelt scribbled a poem on the wall of the Devil’s Church.

Through the third day I climbed hills for the first time in two years.

We found a sauna at Kiviniemi. We sweated and swam until the sun came up at 3am. We slept all the next day. Dan went into the forest and returned with beer and eggs and smoked ham and when he ate, he ate from a plate with a knife and a fork; Anna, Nina and I ate with spoons from a bowl.

There was a cafe with a map on the wall. It said “The Modern Wilderness”. It was lined with grey roads. Trekking trails were dotted blue and red and cafes, bars, parking lots, lodgings, campgrounds, stores and gas stations were marked with stars.

I asked the Wilderness Guide serving coffee what erämaa meant to him and he said “we don’t have it, at least not in Finland. It’s in America and Canada and Russia but… it’s someplace man’s hand has not touched and there is no place like that in Finland.”

I asked Anna the same question. “Erämaa is someplace with no houses and no roads. I don’t know if there is any in Finland. We have so few people, we have this idea that you can take as much as you want and that nature’s fruits are endless and we have trees to cover the damage… maybe we’re destroying it without knowing it.”

When the other’s had gone out, I pulled out my map and marked down the location of all the sauna’s, cafe’s and stores in the modern wilderness, and then went outside into a rainstorm.

“It rained all the last day. The wind blew hard from the north. By noon we could see Koli. We walked on a sharp ridge paralleling the Koli ridge to the west, a wide valley full of lakes lay between, and in the east Lake Pielinen ran North-South as far as the eye could see. Mist crowded its shores, and I thought I could see a long wooden rowboat approaching an island.

“We were relieved to sleep at Paimentupa, a converted farmhouse with a sauna, a drying closet and soft beds; Dan somehow procured a bottle of merlot for our plain pasta dinner, we all ate with forks and we laughed until we fell asleep.

“We didn’t climb Koli until late in the morning. We walked lazily and listed to to Nina and Anna sing. It was a Karelian song about a lonely juniper. Then they sang of a man who loved his sweetheart even though her bones were bowed, her eyes crossed, her hair nappy and the market horses laughed at her.

The view from the top is one of the most beautiful in the world.

On June 30th I awoke perfectly alone for the first time in a week. My belly ached from being hollow. The sun was shining but the air was cold like October. There were no cars on the road and I saw no people. The only sounds were the wind and the birds. Although we’d passed the summer solstice, I was walking north. For me the daylight would continue to grow. The warmest month was yet to come. The lupins were just beginning to bloom in purples and pinks along the roadside. It was the middle of summer. But I felt as if I was walking into winter.