Week 2: Nuuksio, Nurmijärvi, Hyvinkää
May 8, 2003
May 8
There were cars everywhere. Even on the back roads. They drove fast and rude and dangerous and I couldn’t get remote enough to ever avoid them. Southern Finland suffers from roads. They are everywhere, criss-crossing the landscape in complete disorder like some kind of disease. There is no place to avoid them and even when they are out of sight, the sickly dull roar of the road is never far.
I made for Nuuxio National Park to find some peace and walk on forest trails instead of roads. I crossed a bridge to an island in a lake and camped for the night. But the noise penetrates even there. One can always hear the cars.
I decided to rest and slept on and off throughout the morning. The day was warm and clear but for a few cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere. The water was deep blue and the forest alive with birds. Nuuxio is like an island in a sea of cars and roads. It is a moist upland of lakes and mossy forests thirty kilometers west of Helsinki. I watched ducks and eiders and even tried to swim, but the water was too cold. In the afternoon, four young men came to the island and lit a fire. They opened beers and cooked sausages. Then, ten teenage boys came and they all set tents. Three of the boys sat on their packs looking at me while the others threw rocks and bottles at the ducks. I packed my things and hiked 3 kilometers to another camp site. Nina joined me there and we ate chicken and sipped whiskey and I was very happy to be with her.
We walked to Nurmijärvi together. We crossed the whole national park in a couple of hours and camped by a lake called Kaitalampi. There were no sounds but the birds and the highway. At one in the morning a drunk couple came into camp and set their tent. They made a fire, broke beer bottles, talked loud and fought until the sun came up at four-thirty. So much for solitude in national parks, I thought. We packed our things and went back out on the roads.
May 15
There were a group of middle-aged men watching the trains coming and going from Hyvinkää. They had ridden thier bikes to meet amongst the pines and the wild roses. They stroked thier beards. They drank beer for breakfast and one of them growled at me: “pitka matka?”
“Ya. A long way. To Nuorgam.”
“Oh, ho! What country are you from?”
“America.”
“Have breakfast with us!” And he pulled a Karjala beer from a plastic bag.
“Ok.” The others said nothing but they grunted thier approval and gathered around me. One man told me he had been a goldminer in Lemmenjoki. He had made it rich in a year when the lemmings ran amok in Rovaniemi. But he wasted it all on Swedish women. He drank too much kossu. In a snowstorm he shot a moose, gutted it and spent the night hidden in the warmth of the steaming carcas. But it sounded like his grandfather’s story and I turned to the man who had offered the beer.
“The only thing he ever mined was Lapin Kulta. But I like to walk in the forest.”
“Why?”
“I just do. Can I come with you?” The others hooted and laughed and garbled and made fun of him when I said “no.” He promised not to drink. But I refused to take him along and left them.
I liked Riihimäki before I arrived. The traffic was sparse and a long, sinuous asphalt bike trail laced the highway like a seam for several kilometers south of town. At the edge of town, thousands of trees were stacked in a fenced yard and a Volvo L1506 tractor handled them roughly. The machines seemed soft and distant, drowned in the vast forest. Thier growling was somehow soothing and the air was filled with the scent of sweet pine and birch, cut, stripped and bare in the sun. For a moment I distained any work that took place in front of a computer and wanted a job stripping logs.
In the center, McDonald’s was selling “El Maco” and there was a line at the walk-up window. The girls were pretty and the boys rode bicycles, wore empty backpacks and covered thier heads with baseball caps. The day was hot and clear. Outside of the library I met a guy who said he wanted to be Superman.
“Why?”
“I dont know, dude. Why the fuck d’you wanna walk across Finland?” He wasn’t over seventeen and spoke English like a punk from suburban Denver. His hair was blue, he carried a vinyl Superman bag and wore a Superman t-shirt. He knew American pop-culture better than I and sang to me the themes to “All in the Family”, “One Day at a Time”, and “Alice”. Then, he asked me to leave him alone. I did.
In the afternoon I passed a camping area whose mascot was two bunnies doing the dirty. A small pond was crowded with 5th-wheels and campervans. The guy at the reception cum bar was incredibly cool. I liked him immediately. I decided there was nothing to do but spend the 12€ to put up my tent. Then, I looked for someone who wanted to talk about nature. But everyone was inside, watching TV. I went back to the bar, listened to a Ricky Martin CD and drank away my whole day’s food allowance. I couldn’t stop smiling.
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