Week 16: Lemmenjoki National Park, Inari

August 30, 2003

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.

Posted in Travelogue