Week 1: Hangö, to Nuuksio National Park
May 1, 2003
Into my backpack I have placed the following: binoculars, a birding book, a book of Finnish folk tales, Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia, fishing lures and a fishing pole; a tent, sleeping bag, compass, first aid kit, a water filter, 2 canteens, toilet paper, a rain coat, rain pants, a lighter, a knife, a wool pullover, an extra pair of socks and underwear, a camping stove and fuel, extra pens, a Finnish dictionary and my running shoes. I will buy my food, as needed, along the route. My pack wieghs about 15kg.
May 1, 2003
We arrived in Hangö in a pouring rain, but we had been drinking champagne from Helsinki, and none of us cared about the weather. There was no wind, just fat, cold drops of water plumetting from above. A thick fog obscured everything but the train and the streets were deserted. The sea was rough and grey and full of white foam.
I hadn’t expected a send off. I had thought I would begin the trip alone, instead, it was a party. There was myself, Nina, Rane, Outi, Siri, Frank, Tess, Ellen, Eeva, Razzie and Ivar. Outi forced us for a swim in the sea and the cold made my shins ache. After that the rain didnt seem so cold. We drank more champagne and invaded a bed-and-breakfast called Villa Doris.
The building, a slate-blue 19th Century Russian villa, was under renovation and it smelled of paint. The wires were exposed along the walls and there was plastic taped to the floor. Our bedroom smelled of old woman and the beds were perfectly soft. The owner gave us a doubtful look, but she was polite and didnt complain when we pulled all the desks and chairs into the hall to commence our party. We drank and ate into the night.
In the morning the storm cleared and it was warm. I was tired and didn’t want Nina to leave. I walked to the southern-most tip of the mainland, considered, then went back north. I was in a daze, just begining to comprehend what I had committed myself to do, but I was joyous to be out of Helsinki; releaved to leave its pollution and noise and the rudeness of its people. The silence of Hanko was its greatest gift to me.
I walked through the town to a monument marking the spot where the Germans had landed troops in April 1918 to help end the Finnish Civil War. Then, I walked along a white, sandy beach, lined with giant pines and Russian villas. The sky was blue and the sea calm. I began to sweat and an old woman threw a ball into the sea for her dog to chase.
I passed into the forest and followed a line of melting trenches, rounded and overgrown with moss and blueberry and pine, for several kilometers up the coast. There were bloody battles here as the Finns, backed by Swedish volunteers, fought through the Summer and Fall of 1941, slowly expelling the Soviets from the peninsula.
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I spent the first night at the Tvärminne Biological Reserach Station and awoke the second morning into a cloud of Starlings and Fieldfares. A group of Whooper Swans passed low overhead followed by several Eider pairs and Woodlark sang like a flute. A Yellowhammer stared at me from a branch and I thought I might be in heaven.
I followed a highway for most of the morning because there was no other place to walk. But a highway in Finland, at least outside of Helsinki, is like a small country road in the States. Cars passed at the rate of 3-4 an hour (cyclists were just as frequent) and when I arrived in Lappohja a pair of grey-haired women in a rusty Lada gave me a wave. Then I left the highway and went back into the forest.
I found myself trying to find something that tied the landscape together; that linked one place to another. The forest seemed unwhole, carved as it was by roads and clearcuts. The highway and the railroad tracks cut everyting and divided the world into ”us” and ”them”. I guess I seek these links because I am a child of the arid Western United States. At home, water binds the landscape, its tied by rivers and I always follow the rivers. But here there are no rivers.
Oddly, the war was the link. It bound the peninsula thought experience. In the summer of 1941 the Finns went to war to expell some 30,000 Soviet troops from the Hangö Peninsula. Remnants were everywhere. The trenches stretched for miles and rusted pillboxes, shrouded in grass, frowned from low hills. I came upon a line of massive gray granite boulders, each stone was about three feet tall and they were arranged three deep so to form a wall across the entire peninsula. A tank barrier. I followed it to the coast.
In Skogby the line ran through the village and ended at the sea. Life had grown around the boulders as if they were a monument to some great project long fogotten. Children played on them and a group of men and women raked leaves into piles and set them to fire. The air was sweet with the smell. A man asked if I was going a long way.
”To Nuorgam.” I said.
”That’s along way.” Then he told me he had once ridden his bike from Nuorgam to Helsinki. It took eleven weeks.
”Why did you do it?”
”To see my country.”
In the evening I came to Ekenäs and slept at the Steiner School. They let me shower and cook and it rained hard through the night and I was glad to be sleeping inside.
In the morning, the sun was shining and the air was cold. A teacher asked if I have any memory, in my soul, of Europe. I couldn’t decide if I had. “All my fairy tales are European, but the land is foreign.”
I walked west to Snappertuna. The land was flat and freshly ploughed. The fields steamed in the new sunlight and small groups of gulls milled about. The houses were like specks on the land and the farmers seemed to be very well off.
The castle is one of the oldest in Finland. It sits on a massive chunk of grey granite streaked in white. It is surrounded by high yellow grass, birches and two black spruces that frown on a rust colored café. The owner was a short round woman with back hair. She had lived in New York City as a teen and knew everything and anything and made sure you knew that she knew. She told me that the castle once sat on the coast, guarding Swedish trade routes against the Hanseatic League. Then the land rose, the sea fell away and the castle lost its importance. Now it was a tourist attraction and a picturesque locale for summer theater.
I skipped Ingå for a small forest road and in the evening I made for a cabin owned by a club obsessed with Lapland. Rane, my friend, was waiting there with food and a warm sauna.
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There was water everywhere on the land but it was all polluted with agricultural run off. I was thirsty and asked for water. A farming family took me in, fed me on moose, warmed the sauna and made a soft bed for the night. There were four of them. The father was thoughtful and deliberate and wondered about long trips and “things that take time.” The daughter spoke perfect English and was very smart: “I don’t want to be a farmer.” She wanted to be a plastic surgeon and live in NYC. They lived in a 1902 manor house, owned forest and field and spoke Swedish. On the book shelf was a bust of Mannerheim, their guns were in a locked glass display cabinet and the house was dotted with landscape paintings. They said their well was running dry from the drought and that modern farming methods were endangering many of the birds that depended on pastoral landscapes for survival.
When I left them I saw that it had rained but that the morning sky was clear. The air held the smell of freshly cut wood and crushed pine needles. The few clouds in the sky were puffy and white. A wren hovered over the field singing and an old lady pushed her bike down the lane.
Posted in Travelogue
