by Tim Moore
‘Sorry, this Howling Wolf place is a bit further down here than we all thought.’
‘A bit?’
‘Quite a lot. Also the road is unbelievable, way worse than that other one. We lost a hubcap.’
I could hear my wife saying something in an urgent tone.
‘Oh yeah, the woman here told us to watch out for bears. Literally, she wasn’t joking. “Bad bears,” she said. And there’s a couple of … cccccgggghhhh … mmk.’
A terminatory beep was followed by silence. I checked the screen: for the first and only time in Finland I had strayed beyond signal coverage.
It wasn’t my first warning. The reindeer farmers said they’d seen two bears the previous summer, and the fisherman who put me up in the bank had a sideline organising bear-spotting tours: ‘We have very many brown bears in the forest, 300kg adults and babies.’ He told me they wandered over from Russia ‘because there is nothing there to eat, not for animal, not for people’.
In case you hadn’t noticed I’m a frightful weed, but somehow these worrisome revelations hadn’t troubled me – not even when the fisherman added that a jogger had come to a very messy end in the woods a few years before. I have a feeling I was just too scared too care, my fear gland already saturated with hypothermia and starvation and incapable of soaking up any more perceived danger. But my family’s uplifting presence had squeezed out this mental sponge, allowing it to absorb the impressive metaphorical bulk of a 300kg omnivore emerging from hibernation with an empty stomach and a bad temper.
Thickly spread with muddy slush and hemmed in by deep snow and dark trees, the desolate 5223 made an extremely convincing backdrop for murderous predators and doomed bids to escape them. The road was unrideable; the forest impassable. I began to feel like a Red Army conscript in 1939, a hobbling, shivery sitting duck tracked by unseen enemies entirely at home in these conditions, biding their time for the perfect moment to strike. I checked my phone and again stared wanly at that zero-bar void. Had my son been trying to communicate some additional warning at the end of our truncated call? A couple of what? Apart from bears, was there anything else – anything at all – that a vulnerable pedestrian might possibly expect to be threatened by on the lonely approach to the Howling Wolf Inn?
The night before, Jarkko had outlined the definitively Finnish concept of sisu, raising it in relation to his country’s extraordinary wartime conduct. ‘It isn’t easy to find a word in English,’ he’d said. ‘Sisu is courage, determination … maybe like your stiff upper lip, but with fighting spirit.’ The way he told it, sisu seemed another product of Darwinian selection – survival of the hardest. Anyone who lacked this quality up here either buggered off after one winter, died of whimpering haplessness or went the full Captain Oates. Sisu was the Winter War sergeant who’d been shot through the chest, telling his commanding officer he was ready to get back to the front as it was ‘so much easier to breathe with two holes in my lungs’. Sisu was also, it seemed, a fifty-year-old man trying to ride a shopping bike for 10,000km down the Iron Curtain. ‘Of course! You made a decision and you stick with it, even though it was a bad decision and everything is going wrong. This is absolute sisu!’
I decided this was a compliment, and had fancied myself tapping deep into rich and syrupy reserves of neat sisu during the kelirikko ordeal. Yes, I would struggle on, through thick and thicker, cold and colder, defy the odds until they defied me, and still be found with a grim smile on my frozen face. Is that a stiff upper lip, Mr Moore, or have you been dead for three days?
That was then. Now I felt the last watery dregs of Sisu Zero drain from my core, dribbling it into the slush behind me like the pathetic slug I was. After all those weeks of deep-frozen silence the woods around were fitfully alive with percussive, deep-bass thwomps – the sound of some thaw-loosened wodge of snow falling heavily to earth from a lofty branch. So at least I told myself, in between a roster of high-pitched internal reassurances. What if I didn’t meet ‘bad bears’? Perhaps a good one might help with directions and offer to share his kill with the weary traveller. Surely wolves didn’t eat people outside folk literature, and even then they only ate really small people. And come on, not even the most ravenous bear would trouble himself with emaciated human flesh wrapped in hi-visibility nylon. God, no. No no no. No. Chocolate and wounded animals – that was the preferred ursine menu related to me by a Yellowstone Park ranger some years before. Chocolate: you know, the sweet brown stuff, as for instance found in the three Snickers bars currently packed about my person. My person: you know, that hunched stumbler currently perfecting his impression of a wounded animal.
The light began to die; the wind picked up. Tall trunks swayed, and so creaked. I felt entirely estranged from the world of men. FLUMP! Another arboreal avalanche sent my right hand diving into the anorak pocket, primed to hurl out Snickers like a Chinook helicopter distracting an incoming attack with a cloud of chaff. My features slowly solidified into Ron Weasley’s idiot gurn of terror. Around this time I realised that every craven, squelchy lurch was taking me closer to the already very close Russian border, start line for the annual post-winter Hungry Bear Dash and notional barrier to the world’s largest population of wolves. Something I hoped was kelirikko began to pool inside my boots.
After an hour I began to fear that I may have somehow missed the Howling Wolf; after another I knew I had, and was numbly resigned to posthumous identification by dental records. In between I remembered the anti-bear pepper sprays on sale in every Yellowstone Park gift shop, and then the bottle of Tabasco recently purchased to extend the pre-packaged supermarket burger’s palling appeal. I was still toting it pathetically at the forest when a loud but not entirely convincing wolf howled out from the distant gloom.
‘You took your time,’ said my son when I dropped the MIFA at his feet. ‘Mum’s in the sauna with a couple of gold miners.’
‘When I hear what you try to do I laugh until the tears are coming down my face. But later you send me the picture of your bike.’
‘And then it stopped being funny?’
‘No, then I thought I would really die from laughing!’
Not the fate of many a Finn, I fancied, but then Raija Ruusunen was a very singular woman. Having gone the extra mile for me on so many figurative occasions – most recently by sourcing the lakeside cabin whose fire we were all now sitting around – she had this time done so literally. It had taken Raija two hours to drive here, simply in order to deliver the bicycle – her own pride and joy – that would allow my son to ride along with me for a few days. A life-threatening guffaw at my expense seemed a small price to pay, though our books were almost balanced by the snorts of disparagement emitted as she flicked through my Garmin screens. ‘Your average speed is 11.5 kilometres per hour! It’s unbelievable! On my tours I make 25, and with many bags of camping equipment!’ Having as yet never even momentarily attained that speed, I thought this rather harsh. Was it my fault that I didn’t have a proper bike, and was a few years older than Raija, and had chosen not to emulate her daily habit of going to the gym at 5 a.m. to perform 250 squat thrusts? (Yes; no; yes.)
Raija listened to my travails on the road to the Howling Wolf Inn with polite interest. She had lived for many years in a farmhouse deep in the predator-rich woods, her sole neighbour an unimprovably Finnish character with whom she exchanged words about four times a year. ‘Once I met him outside and he asked who was my new friend. I didn’t understand, and he says, “Last month I look from my window and you are walking to your door, and directly behind you there is walking a bear.”’
Round here, she said, I was more likely to meet a wolf: ‘They have 40,000 in Russia.’ As a lecturer in tourism, Raija nurtured a keen interest in the rouble-spilling oligarchs who crossed the border; as a Finn, she felt very uneasy about accepting their custom. The Winter War had traumatised two generations of her countrymen – Raija seemed certain that her elders’ cold detachment was a consequence of formative exposure to carnage and de
privation. Indeed, she sometimes wondered if the Russian invasion and its aftermath had permanently rewired the national DNA, shaping that clichéd character of insularity and hard drinking. ‘I don’t like that we must now rely on people who made this happen.’
The recent collapse of its currency might have put a brake on the trade, but Russia’s influence was still pronounced in these parts: the mugs we drank from were decorated with crude cartoons captioned in Cyrillic, and Raija seemed embarrassed to confess that the cabin was owned by a Russian, and largely rented to his countrymen. ‘We maybe get the bad type here, the ones who go to our supermarkets and think the queue is just for little people, who put money in your face and expect you do everything for them.’
Jarkko had said much the same: he didn’t like Russians, and the Winter War artillery piece at the end of his drive was hardly a welcome mat. ‘We don’t offer what they want,’ he said, and what they wanted was high-end shopping. Perhaps by force of rural austerity, the reindeer farmers enjoyed a more symbiotic and less hostile cross-border relationship: they nipped over a few times a year for cheap booze and petrol, and to recruit a very different sort of Russian to help out with their summer berry harvest. But the 6,000 Russian troops recently transferred to the Finnish borderlands had gone down like a very leaden balloon. ‘Putin bad man,’ the farmers told me.
When the wartime tide turned against Hitler, Finland was hardly alone in backing the wrongest of wrong horses. Yet of all the Russia-hating regional nations who pinned their colours to the swastika – Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and by default the Nazi-occupied Baltic states – only Finland emerged from the post-war shakedown as a free country. They lost a fat slice of territory to the east of the border I was riding down, and a big lump near Leningrad, but stayed on the right side of the curtain – largely because Stalin was still spooked by their sisu. ‘Everybody respects a nation with a good army,’ he said in 1948. ‘I raise a toast to the Finns.’
That respect knew few bounds and crossed many borders. By way of illustration let us consider the remarkable story of Lauri Törni, who joined the Finnish army at the age of nineteen, just before the Soviet invasion. In a campaign crowded with heroes, Törni displayed such exemplary valour and imagination fighting behind enemy lines that his eight battlefield decorations included the nation’s highest military honour, the Mannerheim Cross. After Russia finally brought his country to heel in 1944, Törni was swiftly recruited by a German-backed resistance movement, which saw him taking Soviets on in an SS uniform. This earned him first an Iron Cross, and then, with the war over, a six-year sentence for treason. After the Finnish president pardoned Törni in 1949, he fled to America; as soon as its government awarded him citizenship, he enrolled in the US army. A nation who had put an ex-Nazi in charge of its space programme was predictably relaxed about certain blots on the CV of such a rare military talent. The man who now called himself Larry Thorne was quickly transferred to the Special Forces, with a combat-proven speciality in survival techniques and guerrilla tactics. In his mid forties, Captain Thorne returned from a first tour of Vietnam with two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star medal, but he didn’t return from his second until 2003, after a Finnish–US team found his remains in the remote wreckage of a helicopter. Whatever else we can take away from Lauri Törni’s fabled exploits in the armies of three nations, it is clear that here was an extremely brave man who really didn’t like Communists.
Few Finns did by 1945, but in the interests of preserving their national independence they buried their inner Törni: sharing a 1,700km border with a stroppy nuclear behemoth meant playing an extremely careful hand. Throughout the Soviet era Finland maintained a precarious neutrality, staying out of NATO and dutifully participating in every rubbish Eastern Bloc knock-off, from the Friendship Games to the Intervision Song Contest. Finnish film censors banned The Manchurian Candidate and several others for their anti-Soviet sentiments. Critical books were removed from public libraries, and the mass media never had a bad word to say about its looming neighbour. The nadir of ‘Finlandisation’ – coined as shorthand for any painfully lopsided relationship between adjacent nations – came in 1961, when the Finnish government was dissolved and reformed in a coalition of Khrushchev’s choosing. The Finns even bought Trabants, and more Ladas per capita than anywhere else in the West.
‘The Russian state always has its nose in our business, in its own people’s business,’ said Raija as I walked her out to her car. ‘It is like this in Russia for many centuries. So Russian people don’t like to get involved in problems of other people, because they are scared that the state will make it their problem also.’
She plipped the car open and turned to me. ‘In Russia, you knock on a door but nobody will open it. You fall down and nobody will help you to get up.’
I was beginning to understand why she was telling me this, and wished I didn’t.
‘I have worries for you in Russia, if you will have problems like you have had here.’
With that I watched my guardian angel fly away through the black-skied, white-floored woods.
Side by side on the cabin decking, Raija’s bike and my little MIFA made a much more obvious father and son than the bona fide duo walking out towards them. Other than the mountain bike I’d seen being ridden to school a week before – by a heavily insulated child who weaved away as I manically dinged my bell in fraternal welcome – Raija’s was the first rival machine I’d seen since setting off. How vast it looked, yet how svelte. It was only a matter of time before my short, fat MIFA found itself mercilessly Finlandised. All those gears, all that alloy …
‘Don’t even think about it,’ said my son, hoisting a ski-trousered leg over Raija’s crossbar and scooting exuberantly off into the morning sleet.
My plan for the days ahead was straightforward and ever so slightly reprehensible: I would tootle behind in my son’s twenty-one-yeared, twenty-four-geared slipstream, towed along as he punched a father-shaped hole through the cold air. To facilitate Project Bastard, I had outlined a system of communication: one ding of my bell meant slow down, two was an order to raise the pace. It was a single-ding morning. Again and again I had to tinkle him back to heel as he slid impetuously ahead through a punishing stretch of kelirikko, then powered on when the road flattened and cleared. Only now were the entry-level physics of small-wheeled inefficiency laid out before my stupid eyes: to keep pace with my son meant turning the little MIFA’s pedals three times to his two.
We were hugging the Russian border’s treeless death-strip when the first scabs of sleet flicked us, and more especially him, in the face. The scenery was soon swallowed by a thin, wet blizzard, smearing out what would have been my first sight of a watchtower. I only noticed I’d reeled my son in when my front spikes bit harshly against the lip of his rear mudguard. Ding-ding! He jerked to attention then instantly sagged, like one of Pavlov’s dogs who’d wised up. His head dropped further and his speed fell away. His front wheel began to wobble through the slush; when the wind eased I heard low, despondent moans. It was like following myself on day one. I didn’t trouble my bell again.
‘Burgers, just the way you like them,’ he muttered an hour later, tossing me a pair of plastic pouches. ‘Cold and raw.’
We were squeezed together in an enclosed wooden bus shelter the size of an outhouse, with a heart-shaped window in the door.
‘They’re not raw,’ I said, unsheathing one defensively. To be honest they might easily have been, but by now I’d eaten far too many to care.
Since his arrival my son had expressed amazement and no little revulsion at the stuff I shoved in every pocket before riding off each morning, nurturing a genuine belief that diet was the most awful aspect of my ordeal. He’d now found out the hard way that it wasn’t, but with Project Bastard shelved this was no time for schadenfreude. Before we left the cabin I had lovingly bagged my boy up, pulling supermarket carriers over his undersocks in a tender rite of Arctic passage. I had lent him my mittens – a Kevlar-coated
ex-German army pair – plus a hat and a pair of long johns to supplement all the turquoise skiwear he’d borrowed off our neighbours. He was well layered, young and fit. But wet snow had blotted its way in through his hiking boots and the tops of his carrier bags, and his knees, unaccustomed to this surfeit of rotation, were aflame.
I broke my son four hours later. The sleet had cleared but a heartless cold wind screamed in our faces, frost-welding wet wool around my fingers and his toes and pushing us almost to a standstill. Labouring past the sign that welcomed us to Tohmajärvi, our destination, I looked back and saw a small turquoise figure in the very far distance, off his bike and pushing. I waited and we walked together in silence through the decrepit hinterland of a dying lumber town, all empty marshalling yards and boarded-up hard-man bars. After all those drably functional settlements, this was my first Finnish craphole.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
What kind of world is it when a young man sucks his father’s wheel all day?
The support crew was reunited at a creepy and peculiar motel built for Russians who’d stopped coming. ‘Check out the clocks,’ whispered my wife when we shuffled rigidly into its reception to meet her. There were two on the wall behind; both told the wrong time, but the wronger was labelled MocKBa. The desk beneath them was manned by a pair of laconic young wasters with bleached hair.
‘This town is finished, my friends,’ said one by way of introduction. ‘Last year they close even the police station.’
‘Maybe police decide we’re so good we don’t need them no more,’ added his colleague with a mirthless smile.
‘Yeah, maybe. But they make sure to close the Alko store before they go.’
The motel only had apartments: ours was huge, new and shambolically austere, like a looted show-home. The curtain rails were all falling down and the kitchenette drawer was home to one bent fork and a meat thermometer. Marooned in a corner of the cavernous living area stood a sort of glass-fronted pine Tardis. I peered into this curiosity and read aloud from a label stuck above its integrated bench: ‘Infrared sauna. Do not use with alcohol. Please no animals.’ My son, who had yet to speak and was still very fully dressed, pushed me aside, opened the door and cranked all the dials up. Then he shut the door and sat down, blank faced in the deep red glow, until his boots began to steam.