Week 8: Joensuu to Koli
July 1, 2003
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.
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