Mrs Tweedie made observations about Finnish men too. Though overtaken by time, genetics and political correctness, they remain a pleasure to read.
The Finns, though intellectually most interesting, are not as a rule attractive in person. Generally small of stature, thickset, with high cheek-bones, and eyes inherited from their Tartar–Mongolian ancestors, they cannot be considered good-looking; while the peculiar manner in which the blonde male peasants cut their hair is not becoming to their sunburned skins, which are generally a brilliant red, especially about the neck where it appears below the light, fluffy, downy locks. Fat men are not uncommon; and their fatness is too frequently of a kind to make one shudder, for it resembles dropsy, and is, as a rule, the outcome of liqueur drinking, a very pernicious habit, in which many Finlanders indulge to excess.
In 1919 a large section of Finland’s women voters used their ballots to support a prohibition on alcohol which lasted until 1932. One can only sympathise with the prohibitionists. In the long winters it must have been galling indeed to watch a proportion of your household income disappearing into your husband’s liver, inflaming his face and temper. Ironically the percentage of households experiencing this misery was low – Finns consumed an average of half a litre of pure alcohol annually, which made them a relatively dry nation. The problem was that the popularity of home distilling and a culture among those who did drink of hitting it heavily meant a very high rate of alcoholism. A hint of how booze gripped the nation is given by prohibition’s exemption of drinks containing less than 2 per cent alcohol: they were not considered strong enough to count.
Many Finns, Mannerheim among them, were opposed to the law, and many broke it. Mannerheim was law-abiding of course, but he could afford to go abroad, and did so whenever he could during the 1920s. Cafes selling special tea – vodka served from teapots into teacups – became immediately popular. Home brewing ballooned, leading to a hundred thousand annual arrests. National per capita consumption doubled to a litre a year. In 1930 a million illegal litres were seized; at the end of the following year 70 per cent of voters chose a return to the legal bottle.
The culture which brought about prohibition is still alive, according to the World Health Organisation, which reckons up to half of Finnish men participate in ‘heavy episodic drinking’. Katri’s ‘long drinks’ are a curious relic of the end of prohibition. In 1952, anticipating a tide of thirsty foreign visitors for the Olympics, the landlords of Helsinki hit on the idea of mixing flavoured soda with hard liquor, and the long drink was born.
Downstairs in the mess cupboards is an archive of how seriously the comfort of Otso’s officers and crew was taken when she was equipped in 1986. There are ranks of wine glasses, brandy flagons, shot glasses and glasses for aquavit, all polished, housed in special shelves and never to be used again. The only legal bottle we have aboard is the broken neck and cork of the champagne magnum which was smashed over Otso’s bow on the occasion of her launch, displayed in a special case. The curation of memory is important and touching. The lounge, with its comfortable chairs, red upholstery, card tables and soft lighting would be at home on a cruise ship, but is never used now. Ghost stewards serve aquavit to ghost officers, but the room is kept lit and ready, as clean as it was left when the last drink was taken, before the surrender to laptops and tablets and downtime spent alone in cabins.
By Sunday afternoon we are working again, escorting out of Kokkola, escorting back in to Kokkola. Bloody Kokkola, I think, will we never be set free? The ice is moving, squeezing, thickening. At one point the mouth of the fairway wears thick red lipstick where it has chapped the paint off one of our charges. Through staves of blowing snow low clouds magnify the sun, diffusing its rays in penumbras of bronze and silver.
Lasse takes me down to the engine room to watch a work party tackling a broken heat exchanger. Katri is there with another apprentice, both observing studiously as planks of wood are strapped across the grilled sides of the wardrobe-sized steel box in an attempt to stop it leaking. It seems a valiant effort, as though the engineers are splinting the exchanger in a spirit of hope, reminiscent of my own DIY.
‘It is increasing our oil consumption,’ Lasse shouts. ‘But we have fifteen thousand litres aboard. We will be OK.’
‘What does it actually do?’
‘Cools the oil!’ he shouts. ‘If it blows up there’s hot oil everywhere.’
‘And you fix it with wood?’
‘We can get spare parts in two weeks. So we pack it. If it comes apart it will do more damage.’
‘Lucky we have the planks.’
‘Ah, Finns are very expert with wood! I got my first knife when I was five and started cutting my fingers …’
Up on the bridge Tem is thinking about sea-level rise. At present the whole of Finland is lifting, post-glacial rebound raising the level of the country ten millimetres a year, while sea-level rise is about three millimetres globally. This difference is being eroded as glaciers melt and warmer water expands, but the closer you are to glaciers the less you are affected because under the thinning ice, relieved of its weight, the earth’s crust is rising too. In Finland, not far from the Greenland ice sheet, this will mitigate the consequences. Tem’s complaint is that the global average is of no use to mariners or coastal dwellers; wind, tide and air pressure render all but local measurements irrelevant.
‘I think sea level should be absolute,’ he declares. ‘It is impossible to calculate! It is never the same anywhere. But if it was absolute then we can say the land goes up and down.’
‘The land here is going up, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Reidun confirms. ‘It is most extreme in Bothnia – one centimetre a year.’
The Finnish Meteorological Institute predicts a ninety-centimetre sea-level rise in the Gulf of Finland by the end of the century, but a mere thirty centimetres up here in the Bay of Bothnia.
‘Is Bothnia interesting to a geophysicist?’
Reidun gives one of her long looks. ‘It is dominated by older basement rocks, which is interesting for mining on land but not for exploration.’
There are Paleoproterozoic rocks, she says, nearly two thousand million years old, and small-scale tectonics like dolerites and ores.
Her sense of utility is tremendous. She deals in aeons of time like a player shuffling cards; all ‘exploration’ is undertaken in the name of oil; rocks are interesting for what they can yield and the physical challenge they offer. Reidun is a climber. There is a trimness and compactness about her fleeces, jeans and trainers: you can see her on an expedition, first to strike her tent, ready to lead. When she shows Sampo or Ville new tricks in the database operating system she has the manner of a teacher whose attention elevates the pupils’ confidence, gently prompting so they seem to make the discoveries themselves.
‘I love the world!’ she says. She takes a photograph of the ice and the notched line of Kokkola’s chimneys hemming it to the sky.
At seven thirty the Eeva VG, a trim blue cargo carrier, leaves her berth and takes up station behind us. It is minus twelve outside. In the peeling cold constellations glitter. The fires of Orion, the Plough and Cassiopeia are so bright they blue and hollow the darkness between them, as though you can see the depths and deeps of space. Between the ships black water smokes silver.
Half an hour later Ville is on the phone to Tem.
‘Problem!’ he says, and emits a burst of Finnish.
Roars of laughter come from the phone.
‘She has been going full speed ahead and now she has a cooling problem,’ Ville says, ‘so she is broken down in the middle of the fairway, and there’s another ship coming out.’
‘Can we tow her?’
‘No no, not allowed. We can only tow for icebreaking! Not for breakdowns.’
‘She needs a tug?’
‘She needs a tug. Or a good engineer.’
We stand by. From Ville’s disposition it is clear that there is a point when the law of the sea, to give assis
tance to those in distress, will trump Finnish regulations applying to icebreakers and tugs. After a while Eeva begins to move again. We lead her out to the mouth of the channel and turn aside into the ice.
I am beginning to develop a feel for the ice now, as I circle the deck in the freezing dark, listening to it. It is like weather, like rain or mist, in the way it comes upon us according to its own laws. It is like the sea in its tenacity and its restlessness, in the way it moves ship tracks, grapples down buoys, traps stragglers and climbs hulls. It is like rust, like entropy, in the way it sidles aboard, rinds the rails with icicles, patches the decks and stiffens the ropes. But in its reformations and renewals, in its unpredictability and its beauty, ice is all but alive.
‘The frost performs its secret ministry,’ Coleridge begins ‘Frost at Midnight’, an image of holy work in some middle place between life and thought, between the perceptible and the immanent. Fascinated by ice, Coleridge would have seen how quick is the creation of ice ferns on a windowpane. The first crystal puts out arms which grow arms of their own, each sprouting off at sixty degrees to the root. The name for the process, dendritic growth, refers to the tree-like appearance of the structure, the living plant perfectly echoed in the ghostly imprint of the crystals. Nature’s patterning leaps across that boundary we think of as the absolute.
CHAPTER 12
Frozen Monday
BY DAYBREAK THE temperature is minus ten and falling in defiance of the morning; the frigid air seems to slow the rising of the sun. A long dawn flares in spectrums of red and orange across the horizon; the ice in answer lightens from deep green to pale magenta. The defiant flourish of a lone gull beating towards the shore seems to emphasise the desolation of this place. I have woken with a clutch of worries in my gut, a sailor’s condition – fears for your family, worries about children, about education and money and chances and what will happen to them if something happens to you? I scold myself and assume my working face.
‘The whole Bay of Bothnia is frozen!’ Tem announces, delighted. The captain is transformed, no clowning or self-mocking now, his voice deep and quiet as he briefs Arvo and Ville. The first business is lifeboat drill. We assemble in minus eleven, bulked up and waddling on the open deck. Ville calls the roll. We answer our names and don life jackets, their straps tangling gloved fingers. For a moment we are all fiddling helpfully with someone else’s jacket, a conga of fumbling. Doing this in the dark with the ship heeling would be chaotic but at least we can say we have practised it. The faces of the crew are set against the cold and the routine.
‘Move to the sunny side,’ Ville orders, and we troop over to the starboard lifeboat. We gather around a life raft.
‘Attach the line to the ship before you throw it over the side!’ he says. ‘You pull this here and tie this on.’
‘Not practising getting into the lifeboats, today, Ville?’ I ask.
‘More people are killed and injured doing lifeboat practice than are saved by it,’ he says. ‘If we start going down get into an immersion suit. That will give you six hours. Otherwise you lose consciousness in about five minutes.’
We stow the life jackets and disperse. Ville allows himself a rare cigarette. His plan, he says, is a captaincy. He is a master mariner; the next level is just a matter of sea time and vacancies.
‘Icebreaker is a great job,’ he says, ‘but it is hard with my wife. Otherwise I am thinking maybe a harbour pilot.’
‘Wouldn’t that be a bit boring in comparison?’
‘Jumping on ships in the ice is not boring! And you are based in one port, so you have regular hours and you can go home at the end of the day.’
‘But you get more people on icebreakers,’ I say, thinking of the cramped capsules of the pilot boats, tiny from our height.
‘Ha! I am not really a people person.’
Some mood of contemplation seems to have come aboard this morning, perhaps owing to the lifeboat drill. In the Bay of Bothnia the distance between ship and shore is wider in the mind than on the map. Our futures are held at bay by the duration of the voyage. Sampo is thinking about ice and its bearing on his career. The freeze has set us free of Kokkola; under bright sun we lead a ship north to Oulu as young ice crinkles along the hull. We plan to exchange charges with Frej, which is bringing a ship south.
‘It’s really thin stuff,’ Sampo tells Reidun. ‘The first hard winds will shuffle it up. It’s a bit too spindly for me.’
‘Silverado man worries about climate change?’ I put in.
He laughs, then his face stills, his expression taking on a look part hopeful, part doubtful.
‘We had a briefing from the Finnish Meteorological Institute. They said by 2050 …’ Reidun and I look at him. ‘There won’t be a need for such a big fleet,’ he says diplomatically. ‘There will still be winters and some cold ones, but infrequent. But until 2030 they said it will be much as it is now.’
Something of this does not sit well with the realist in Sampo. He shrugs. ‘Ships are going to be required to keep emissions down, which means less engine power, which means crappier ships which will need more help, so that balances it a bit,’ he says.
‘Have you seen a change in the winters?’
‘Oh yes. When I started it was the norm for the Bay of Bothnia to freeze every winter – proper ice. Since 2012 it has almost frozen like that, sometimes, but not enough. We get much warmer winters and a lot more wind. It’s really noticeable. With the new weather systems what used to be minus three is now plus one. When we were in Greenland it was really warm.’
‘The multi-year ice is unlocked,’ Reidun says. ‘Older ice was coming out. Big icebergs melting off little ones, like pigs around the tank.’
‘Before the end of my career I’ll have to start selling kebabs,’ Sampo says. ‘I’ll be the captain of a fleet of kebab trucks in Tampere!’
Reidun laughs. ‘You know in Norway now they are growing a lot more vegetables and fruit? The forests and the rocks are moving because the permafrost melts.’
‘We’re getting new species,’ Sampo rejoins. ‘Wild boar. And Siberian ticks coming over the border. We get heatwaves! Whole months of thirty degrees.’
At supper I ask Ville about the Winter War.
‘Does it matter to you, Ville? What does it mean now?’
‘It means a lot to Finland! Tiny Finland! The numbers are crazy. There are still a lot of Russians buried under the country. And it means sisu of course. Everyone needs sisu now. They’re making a film of it – another film. There are so many and they are making a big one now.’
We head for Rahja through proper ice, white and bright as a moon, with Ville hopeful. ‘The ships will get stuck tonight,’ he says. The radios chatter. ‘Good late afternoon,’ says a ship to a port. (It is half past nine and pitch black.) Otso shudders and shakes, cracks leaping three hundred feet ahead of us. Now news comes that a vessel is stuck out in the bay, and we set course for her, wind driving the snow hard across us from the south-east.
In our searchlights Ostbense is marooned in obscurity, as if stranded on the salt bed of an evaporated sea. The Russian captain sounds flustered on the radio. It has taken us a while to get to him, and he is late. The pressure on masters to make port on time is constant. All delays are costly, and captains are answerable to machines which monitor their fuel consumption and running times. Ostbense is owned by a German chartering firm and flagged in Antigua and Barbuda, naturally. (Flags of convenience save ship owners a great deal of money, owing to less rigorous inspection and investigation procedures in certain territories: Liberia, Panama, Monrovia and Antigua are favourites.) We charge towards her, our engines delivering fifteen thousand horsepower, our searchlights illuminating the wind turbine strapped in sections across her deck.
Arvo will perform this fly-by, his fingertips light on the dial of the rudder control. We stand well behind him. Arvo’s view is perfect, Ostbense lying trapped below him, snow blowing across her, her wheelhouse dim. It is a vicious night now, t
he windchill dragging the temperature you experience outside below minus fifteen.
‘Ostbense, Otso. Full ahead and follow our track when you are free,’ Ville says over the radio.
‘Otso, Ostbense. Thank you. I go full ahead.’
In we go, fast, passing no more than twenty metres away, the shock and speed of our passage smashing the ice and setting it rocking between the hulls. Arvo slews us around Ostbense’s stern and loops back neatly, coming out in front of her.
Ville picks up the radio again. ‘Ostbense, Otso. You can use your searchlight to find our track,’ he prompts.
‘Yes, I use searchlight,’ Ostbense returns sheepishly, and a cone of light springs from her bow.
‘Come on, Russian!’ someone comments.
Ville pops his gum.
We feel mighty; we are mighty. In the long relationship between the two nations it is rare that the Finns are the more powerful partner.
Now Atle, the Swedish icebreaker, calls up asking for work.
‘But Tem is not going to let him because Kontio is going to do it, so Atle can’t come down here. We are not friends any more,’ Ville says.
Our poor Russian is struggling. ‘His speed is dropping,’ Arvo says.
Ville goes for the radio again. ‘Ostbense, Otso. Are you going full ahead?’
‘Otso. Yes. Nyet. No, sorry. Yes, we go full ahead.’
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