Week 12: Suomussalmi to Oulu

July 30, 2003

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.

Posted in Travelogue