Week 3: Hämenlinna to Heinola
May 23, 2003
May 18
Tiitu, my good friend, said that if I could count on one thing during my walk, it would be the kindness of the Finnish people. “If they are anything,” she said, “they are kind.” I hate to make generalisations. I want my words to speak for themselves. But, I must say, that thus far, I have met with incredible kindness and generosity on my trip:
- a farm woman came from her house with a bag of fresh sämpylä (baked bread), a man came with his 6-year old daughter to ask me to afternoon coffee and pulla, I asked a family for water and got a moose dinner, sauna, great conversation and a soft bed, I asked to put my tent on a rainy golf course and instead got a hot shower and soft bed in the club house. People on the road have patiently endured my struggling Finnish when I ask my questions or seek directions. Put another way….18 days on the road, 9 saunas, 4 hot showers…thus far, Tiitu should be proud to know that she is correct.
May 23
I walked from Valkea Mustajärvi without breakfast. I felt empty somehow and the thought of porridge turned my stomach. The way was mostly along timber roads and there were stacks of pine and birch piled by the road. I could hear children’s voices in the forest but I didnt see a soul. After an hour I turned onto a small forest path that climbed through a thick stand of young aspen and onto a granite hilltop sheltered in spruce and carpeted in blueberry, lingonberry and moss. A great lake spread out before me to the northeast and the wind blew soft upon its surface. I thought of home. I was homesick.
When I was a child there was a cuckoo in our neighborhood. We never saw it and my grandpa said it hid in the blue spruce. On hot summer days, just after the peak of the heat, it would call softly. On those days, clouds gathered over the Sangre de Cristos, then swept down to the plains, cooling us with a shower.
I could hear a cuckoo. It was somewhere off in the pines on the other side of the lake. But I couldn’t see it. It reminded me of home and I thought of being in my mom’s back yard, or of sitting on my dad’s deck sipping a beer and staring at Pike’s Peak. I wished the silver birch were quaking aspen and the Scots pine, Ponderosas and I felt sad.
On the other side of the lake I met two women. They were from Hämenlinna and came to Evo to walk for the day. I asked: “Do you come here often?” They didn’t take it as a pick up line and answered: “Sometimes.”
“Where else do you go to be in nature?”
“What do you mean go? We don’t really have to go anywhere. It’s all around us. Hämenlinna has lots of great wilderness. Aulanko and….well, its everywhere!”
“That’s just an urban park. Even this isn’t any wilderness.” I said, throwing my hands out. “It’s full of roads! They harvest trees here. They mine gravel. That’s not…” But they strongly disagreed. I realized that maybe we North Americans have a fundamentally different concept of WILDERNESS than do most Finns. They couldn’t stay to chat. “I have to drive down to see a house. I want to move.” Said one. “I want to live in the countryside.”
I left them and moved into old growth spruce. The forest was dark and humid and a solitary, giant black woodpecker flew in front of me, crying a song that was lonely and sad. Then the trail rejoined the timber roads and I was in an industrial forest. There were clear cuts on all sides but the trail borders and the shores of a lake were buffered from the cuts with 10 meters of forest. A honey buzzard sat for a moment on a snag then disappeared over a hill. I slept in a hut near a river and a saw a beaver. I kept a fire burning all night against the mosquitos but there were none. In the morning I stayed in my sleeping bag and watched the sun glint amber on the spider webs strung between the trees.
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Pyy is the Finnish name for the Hazel Grouse. A small, shy woodland gamebird with a short bill and stunted wings. Sami says that name Pyy gave rise to the verb Pyytäwhich means both “to ask; request” and “to hunt”.
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