Icebreaker

by Horatio Clare

  The ice is in various moods today: crystal slush on the fringes of hard pack, the fairway into Raahe a thick rubble of shuga.

  ‘Arne. Full ahead, please, full ahead,’ Ville urges. She is already close behind us but he wants her closer. ‘The nightmare is if she sticks now. It’s so shallow here, five metres beneath the keel; it’s shuga from top to bottom.’

  Raahe looks extraordinary, a low line of miniature wind turbines and smelting works steaming under a magnified sun. Arne makes port under a penumbra and a swirl of cloud which shades the light from solar orange to black above the conifers.

  As we return to the bay, Sampo hands over the controls. Reidun has a go. There is much laughter and much swerving.

  ‘No! Too hard!’ she cries as we snake through the white.

  My turn. ‘Here you are,’ Sampo says, ‘Steer course 221.’

  I have been longing to have a go. I have driven lifeboats, river cruisers, narrowboats and once, making a radio programme about the Parisian river police, a huge crane barge. Otso cannot be so hard, and there are no bridges to avoid.

  ‘That dial is your rate of turn. There’s your course. All you need is the rudder control.’

  The course climbs, 221 becoming 230, 235. We are swinging to starboard. Bring her back and counteract. The rudder control is a small wheel like an ice-hockey puck; tiny touches of fingers and thumb are all it takes. Now she starts to come back to port, the course falling rapidly through the degrees. Too much! Counteract. Look ahead. There is nothing, no mark or distinction, from which to take a bearing; only ice and mist. Anything! Give me anything! A lump in the snow, a ridge, a horizon point to align the bow with. Forget it. Feel her through your feet then. But my feet are not telling me anything. There are no waves, there is no sensation of wind or pressure on the hull. And the tiller is backwards, of course.

  ‘Look at your rate of turn. She’s skidding. Midships. Rudder midships. There’s your rudder indicator. Course?’

  ‘Two eighty. Hopeless! I’ll bring her back.’

  ‘Move her by increments, counter each move.’

  ‘Easier said … The autopilot is laughing.’

  ‘Ah, the autopilot is not much use. The ice can drive the gyros crazy, which makes her start to oscillate. We steer all the time.’

  ‘Look, 221!’ I hold her for a little while. ‘I don’t understand how you do it. There’s nothing to see and nothing to feel.’

  ‘Ah, but there is. You have to feel it through your arse.’

  ‘I’ll have to eat more, then.’

  Tem appears and raises his eyebrows at our track.

  I apologise. ‘The VTS will think you have been hijacked by drunks. Do you even remember your first time?’

  ‘My first voyage was six months on a large crude carrier, a hundred thousand tonnes,’ Tem says. ‘Between Shetland and Europe. The smell wasn’t oil but this inert gas produced by the engine and pumped on top of the oil so that there is never any oxygen in the tanks. It doesn’t smell good. Then a cargo ferry between Teesport in Middlesbrough, Hull and Zeebrugge. On the European side communication was no problem. We were all Finnish; they were all Dutch; we all spoke English. But when you get to the UK they can’t understand anything we are saying and they are using all these strange words.’

  A quiet afternoon in the ice of Raahe roads turns into an eerie night. Something between low cloud and ice mist surrounds us; above our dimmed lights the vapour hangs like a cave roof. The atmosphere on the bridge is studious, Ville working on a computer, Arvo at the chart table looking like an architect, neat columns of figures in a ledger and his gaze fixed on a screen. In fact they are both shopping. Ville is looking for a new boiler and browsing quad bikes; Arvo is in the market for a house. He surveys prefabricated chalet-palaces with huge balconies, glass walls and windows giving on to rafts of wooden decking.

  ‘Where are you going to put that?’

  ‘It might not be that one – it’s up to my wife. At home! On the Åland Islands. Look, I’ll show you.’

  He brings up a map, and down we go into the archipelago, until we have a satellite picture of a cluster of roofs on the edge of a long creek, pines around them, a neighbour to the north, a little dock, a boat. The pictures were taken in summer. It looks like a dream of serenity in the long green-gold light.

  ‘It’s beautiful! Which one’s yours?’

  ‘That one. And that one, and that one, the sauna. The new house is going to go here,’ he says, and hovers the cursor. Arvo is most of the way to building a hamlet.

  ‘My children come to stay, and there are many grandchildren so it is always busy. We sauna, we go fishing and have barbecues. Spring is fishing and relaxing. We catch pike and perch.’

  Arvo’s dark eyes are made small by his spectacles, but through the glass they gleam. Pride and pleasure radiate from him. A life at sea, and what a lot to show for it. My grandfather was a sailor, his descendants will say to their children. Your great-grandfather was a sailor – he built these houses. From out here in the realm of silence, of introversion, Arvo has made a converse life on land. You can easily imagine his rolling walk down to the dock, children skittling around the lawn, towels hanging over balconies, life, food and chatter. He talks about meeting his wife on the islands, marrying in his thirties and always going away, one of the seafarers of the Ålands who sustain and are sustained by the mirror community of their wives. If you only have half a life on land then what a rich and providing half-life this is. In Arvo’s comfortable bulk is the ease of a man who has earned his fortune. I have seen the lightness of a grandfather’s smile in my own father, in my partner’s father, and now I see it in his. A seafarer like this strikes a bargain with life. You will risk the seas, and yours will be a special loneliness, measured on calendars. The land, which will so rarely be yours, will be yours to give, and if you live, to enjoy when you are done.

  ‘I had a captain once,’ he says. ‘He came on board and he called a meeting. On his desk he had put a sign. He said, read it. I read it. He said, read it out. I read it out. The captain is always right. Then he said, that is rule number one, the captain is always right. What is rule number two? I said, I don’t know. He said, for rule number two see rule number one. This arsehole. Then when he gets into trouble he asks us what to do. We said we don’t know, what is rule number one?’

  I make sympathetic noises.

  ‘I had a British captain and a second mate, they liked to drink before lunch. And after lunch. Then before dinner, then after dinner until four in the morning! We did everything. It was better they did not touch the ship. They were fine until they ran out of alcohol.’

  Ville fires a burst of Finnish at Arvo. They nod agreement and now they are all bustle.

  ‘We’ve been watching this ship,’ Ville says, indicating an icon on the screen. ‘She’s been struggling. We’re watching to see if we need to help her. She’s going to Kemi, but … look.’

  The AIS shows her track. She has been drifting and fighting the ice in comical loops off Kokkola. She is currently making less than a knot and going sideways.

  ‘You’ve just been sitting here, watching!’

  ‘Yes! Ha ha! No, we have to go. You can see there’s a big ship’s track here. If she could have got there we hoped she could have followed it.’

  Arvo presses pairs of buttons, watching the monitors as the engines fire. A deep beat comes up through the deck, and a distinctive high beeping comes from a box beside him.

  ‘Distress signal,’ he says. ‘A long way away. I was on a Chiquita boat, out from Bishop Rock to Costa Rica. We were across the Atlantic when the US Coastguard called us. They said there is a ship in distress two days north of you and you are the closest vessel, you have to go. We went north for thirty hours before they cancelled the call. They’d got another ship there. So then we turn back. The emails! Days and days of emails.’ He shakes his head and rolls his eyes.

  He takes the helm and brings us out of our foxhole, hauling Otso round in a hee
ling turn.

  Tem has appeared. He laughs. ‘Arvo really knows how to take these turns.’

  ‘Remind people we’re on a ship,’ Arvo responds.

  We cross wide leads and patches of ice until we find our struggler locked in a raft of thick ice. The visibility is terrible. Twenty-knot winds blow mist from the south-east. Approaching head-on, Ville can see only blurred lights until we are very close. Ville pulls us in an ankh-shaped loop around the ship.

  ‘Textbook,’ Sampo pronounces. ‘Straight from the textbook of icebreaking, which we do not have.’

  Minutes later we are guiding the Dutch ship through the floes.

  ‘She’s a regular customer,’ Sampo says of her. ‘She’s been with us many years. She’s an old ship – carries scrap metal and rolls of steel, and random cargo – wood, sawdust. Paper only comes down in big ships. There was one going to Philadelphia today. It has to be really dry so you need some serious air conditioning. They’re buying a lot of high-quality timber in Iran at the moment.’

  ‘She’s very small.’

  ‘Yeah. Think about it. There’s a captain, a chief engineer, a couple of deckhands. They don’t sleep at all in twelve weeks. When you meet them they’re like the living dead.’

  A study by the International Transport Federation found the majority of seafarers work more than eighty-five hours a week, with a quarter saying they had fallen asleep on watch.

  The ship of the living dead follows us through the floes as mist scuds across the ice. Now I think of ice as a being – its movements, its agency, the way it determines, yields, thickens, prevents, makes wonderful. I think of ice as Gaia, as world spirit given form and colour. Sea ice can be infinitely studied, tracked and measured, hymned and wondered at; sea ice can be hacked and broken, but sea ice cannot be made by us and cannot be controlled.

  CHAPTER 15

  Darkness

  ENGINES START AT seven, the cabins rattling, the ship shuddering and grinding. I wake thinking of Arvo’s photographs of barbecues, fishing, boats and the long low sun. I think of a generation retiring under that westering light. Arvo is back on shift, complaining that he has not slept well, looking forward to trying again this afternoon. It is a lissom morning, the light silver-grey, the sea black, the ice a mosaic of green and white.

  ‘Where are we going, Arvo?’

  ‘The same ship as yesterday. Now she is stuck a little bit north.’

  The horizons close and retreat with the mist, flat horizontals, as though we are sailing through a two-dimensional world. It is warmer today, the decks sloppy with snow-melt. There is a tickle in the air like a portent of rain. Liquefying snow runs down the screens; beyond them the boundaries dissolve, patches of snow and mist becoming one.

  ‘Good morning!’

  ‘Good morning, Tem. You are in an excellent mood!’

  ‘Oh I am, fine, fine! I am going home. I have a good sleep behind me, and it’s good to break ice in the morning, not at 4 a.m. I have sent pictures of us to the VTS. Normally they only see us on the screen, but now they can see us pushing, cutting, pulling.’

  ‘It’s a disorienting day, isn’t it? We could be upside down.’

  Ville grins. ‘I had one ship, I said follow my track. Silence. Then he comes on the radio – “I only see white. I only see white!” He was from Costa Rica. He had never seen solid water before.’

  ‘Sometimes they lose concentration when they are following you,’ Tem says. ‘They stop navigating. I had one, I said I am turning away. They were entering the fairway by the buoys and he says, “I can see a flashing light! What do I do?” They had no idea where they were. Sometimes they try to sneak through, they think if they follow clear leads they will find a way. But the lead goes nowhere, they hit the ice like a shotgun and stick.’

  The morning’s messages bring news of Otso’s next guest in the form of a scan of her passport.

  ‘She is an admiral’s daughter,’ Ville says.

  ‘A Canadian admiral. We were getting very excited,’ Tem puts in.

  ‘But then we got her passport – born in fifty-seven!’

  ‘We should email back, “Why are you travelling on your mother’s passport?”’

  Skagenbank appears like a black cut-out on a white set. Tem reads the swinging loop of her track. ‘They have been following the track we made last night. They have missed it here, tried to get back and … no hope.’

  Ville sweeps us around her. ‘Perfect!’ Tem exults. ‘Ah it is so nice for me.’

  Two seals pop out of gaps in the ice ahead. Life at last! They look like fat ladies in black bathing suits, staring as if collywobbled at the appearance of a ship in the middle of their morning swim.

  ‘I think they are making baby seals,’ Tem observes.

  Arvo shakes his head: ‘They have already made them. In spring we see four hundred, five hundred basking on the ice. And then the pups, and then the sea eagles, and then the blood. It’s like a slaughterhouse.’

  ‘The small ones, we try to avoid them,’ Tem says, ‘because they cannot swim yet. The babies look up at us, these crazy people doing icebreaking.’

  We keep up our chatter as we cross a black waveless sea, in and out of its shifting cloud which seems to promise hope one moment, despair the next, in a series of slow variations, the moods of dim mulling afternoons and grey mornings alternating. Then the wind comes up and by mid-morning there are waves. Snow, rain and lines of ragged ice fragments like bubbles stream out of the mist. Now the wind keens and whistles as we cross open water. Ville says we are ‘scouting the fairway’ but it is the equivalent of pacing up and down.

  ‘Too much too warm,’ says Arvo. He grabs the pair of hand-strengtheners which sit on a sill by the binoculars and clicks them rapidly. You can feel impatience aboard with us. This is dead time, stretching every minute. It is almost as though we are veering close to another darkness in this sub-polar sea, some ancient dread, like an apprehension of the world’s end.

  By AD 98 the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus had heard tell of this place, or read about it in texts now lost. In The Germania, his account of the northern tribes, he wrote, ‘Beyond the country of the Swedes there is another sea, sluggish and almost motionless, which is believed to be the boundary and limit of the world, because here the last glow of the setting sun shines on into the following dawn, dimming the brightness of the stars.’ Tacitus reported that the rising sun might be heard here, and that ‘his attendant deities are seen and his crown of rays. Thus far, and no further, does nature go.’ The waters of the Gulf of Bothnia and the penumbras of its sun are exactly as Tacitus described them, though his source must have been here in summer as there is no mention of ice.

  Pigrum ac prope immotum – sluggish and almost motionless. Yes, this is that sea. I pound around the deck, keeping moving, keeping the cold and rain on my face. On this shadowed day I feel like a sailor’s Jonah, as if an approaching depression is coming for me and reaching out past me to the crew.

  The psychological responsibility of a seafarer is clear – you must be strong with yourself and wear your bravest face, because ships magnify and transmit moods and there is no way off them. This is why you make Tem the captain, for his miraculous ability to synthesise and broadcast well-being. My task, then, is a trick of language and a question of resolve. On this ship I can admit fear of depression, in the sense of confessing it to myself, but I absolutely will not admit it in the sense of allowing it to come aboard through me. It must not be shown, shared or given a moment of succour. The trick is to see it not as incipient isolation but as a confirmation of solidarity: everyone feels blues and apprehensions; everyone is vulnerable to a tightening of the spirit, whether caused by thought, memory or passing shade. That is what this shall be. The talking-to I give myself before returning to the bridge is the equivalent of Ville’s insistence that we are not prowling up and down though stippled black water, dissatisfied and redundant. As I return he parks us in a foxhole. Our patrol is now reduced to drifting with
the ice.

  ‘Low-energy scouting?’

  He grins. ‘We are checking where the floes will go and how the wind is moving them – if it will be safe for ships. In two hours this floe will be out of the fairway.’ Then he adds, ‘In my dream I was going on board another vessel to start work. You should get overtime for working in your sleep.’

  We watch the electronic chart, the radar and the J-Map. Tem pulls up a section of the coast. ‘This is the Sisu buoy. They went the wrong side of it and found a sandbank.’

  I trace the outlines of outcrops and islets. ‘What do these names mean?’

  ‘One Stone … Bird Grave … Up here near Kemi, Murder Island.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘A lot is related to the civil war. Kemi is still a Red city, and Tampere.’

  It was a particular feature of the 1918 civil war that reprisals were often worse than the battles themselves. Prisoners and combatants attempting to surrender were routinely shot. The Whites implemented a version of ethnic cleansing against Russians – revolutionaries and neutral residents alike – killing them out of hand. The White victory at Varkaus, which gave them the north of the country, saw twenty fatalities during the fight and a hundred and eighty Red prisoners killed after surrendering. When the Finnish state broadcaster Yle asked for memories of the civil war in 2016 it addressed the greatest Finnish silence of them all. A quarter of those responding said the topic was still a sensitive issue in their family. Stories of ruthlessness, guilt and silence were among the respondents’ themes, along with pride in combatant grandparents and continued loyalty to their cause.