The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold

by Tim Moore

  Stalin’s two-week war was soon a bloody two-monther, with ten Red Army troops dying for every Finn. Near Suomussalmi, ski troopers surrounded an entire Soviet division as it plodded up the road: the ensuing siege reduced the Russians to eating their horses, and would cost them 40,000 lives to the Finns 1,000. The mercury dropped below minus 40°C, adding new chapters of frosted woe to an already weighty catalogue of incompetence. Russian guns seized up in the cold; the Finns freed theirs with alcohol and glycerine. Russian medications froze; the Finns taped ampoules of morphine to their armpits. A trainload of skis belatedly arrived but the Russians didn’t know how to use them; a troupe of volunteers went off to practise in the woods and never returned. Spooked and confused by invisible snipers and silent ambushes, neighbouring Russian divisions would regularly engage each other, sometimes exchanging fire for hours at a time. When the Red Army took to crawling forward across the ice behind armour-plated shields, the Finns simply crept around to the side and shot them all in the bottoms. It was now so cold that fallen comrades froze to brick in an hour, providing useful but rather demoralising cover.

  Yet all the while, both sides understood that despite their derring-do and murderous ingenuity, the Finns were merely delaying an inevitable. By the third month they were down to Dad’s Army reservists fighting with captured weapons, and Stalin ordered a regroup that naturally began with many generals being lined up against the wall (one was executed for ‘allowing fifty-five field kitchens to fall into enemy hands’). Duly inspired, the Red Army finally broke the Finns with a concentrated assault of unparalleled ferocity, hitting their southern borderlands with 600,000 troops, the heaviest artillery bombardment since Verdun, and history’s first carpet-bombing. ‘May the hand wither that is forced to sign such a document as this,’ said Finland’s president, before applying his pen to the surrender treaty. A stroke three months later obliged.

  The Russians’ scarring Winter War humiliations would stand them in good stead fifteen months later. By the time the Panzers rolled in, the Red Army had already learned every painful lesson. Their abysmal performance against a rag-tag force of caped skiers also encouraged Hitler to overplay his hand, assured that the Nazi war machine would crush them in short order. One may reasonably posit that the plucky Finns thus indirectly defeated the Nazis – especially if one overlooks the awkward regional endgame, which from 1944 onwards saw Finland fighting alongside Hitler’s troops as full allies.

  But the grim bottom line underscoring the Red Army’s Finnish campaign and all their subsequent costly, blood-soaked victories was this: kill me, kill him, kill every soldier you see and keep killing, but understand that you will never kill us all. Short on acts of individual bravery, the Russian invasion of Finland was unsettlingly characterised by dead-eyed, almost apathetic mass sacrifice, the plodding, dutiful acceptance of casualties on a horrendous scale. This was Soviet collectivism reduced to its grisly essence: sheer weight of expendable human numbers was the ugly, blunt weapon that eventually undid the Finns and would also see off the Nazis at Stalingrad. The Finnish commander in chief, General Mannerheim, referred to ‘a fatalism incomprehensible to Europeans’.

  Perhaps the general was familiar with what must rank as one of the most appalling spectacles in the history of human conflict, described here by William R. Trotter in his definitive work, The Winter War: ‘In one sector of the Summa battlefield, repeated attacks were delivered straight across a massive Finnish minefield by men who used their own bodies to clear the mines: they linked arms, formed close-order rows, and marched stoically into the mines, singing party war songs and continuing to advance with the same steady, suicidal rhythm even as the mines began to explode, ripping holes in their ranks and showering the marchers with feet, legs, and intestines.’

  I’d brought Trotter’s book along for the ride, but for days had been too exhausted to open it. With Russians now so near at hand, I wish I’d kept it closed. They really didn’t sound like people a cyclist ought to be sharing a busy road with.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Went past the Winter War Museum this morning. It’s only open in summer.

  4. NORTHERN OSTROBOTHNIA

  ‘You probably won’t die,’ said my wife the night before I left, ‘but I do worry that you might go mad.’

  This gladsome valediction recurred as the deserted infinity rolled on, and hypothermia’s cold, dead hand on my shoulder evolved from stimulating novelty to ever-present bore. The ruminative pace of my progress would have been acceptable if there’d been something to ruminate about, something that wasn’t trees, snow or silence. Maybe once every other hour I’d see a fox or a farm or a red squirrel or a road sign. With so little data coming in from my eyes and ears, my emptied head would slowly fill with a dribbled slurry of gloom and delusion. Home seemed a year and a million miles away. I tried and failed to imagine the kinder months of my journey ahead, a future in which nature enhanced life, instead of making it a total misery, then doing its level best to bring it to a tragic, lonely end.

  Things that weren’t there began to loom up in the snowy distance: a wolf on its hind legs, a burning police car. I took to narrating voiceovers from some tarmac-based sequel to Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys: ‘Finnish National Route 4 has been called Europe’s loneliest road, threading its way through an Arctic wilderness of wood and water. As I travel along it I’ll be meeting some of the extraordinary characters who call this bleak but fascinating place home, and hoping to somehow once more avoid the violent public shoeing I so richly deserve.’

  After that, traditional Lapp aphorisms:

  ‘If weight of snow bends trees down flat, leave the bike at home, you twat.’

  ‘The remedy when frostbite’s looming: petrol, matches and a Moomin.’

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  ‘When weight of snow bends trees down flat, leave the bike at home you twat.’ (trad. Finnish)

  ‘Frisbee, ear wax, Richard Gere – a wandering mind means death is near.’

  With the roads enduringly flat I could at least handle the physical challenge, no worse at this stage than riding all day on an exercise bike, in a meat fridge. And I was getting to grips with the conditions, learning that the road’s iced peripheries offered superior traction for spiked tyres, and sticking my leg out speedway-style on the sharper corners. How glad I was for those tiny wheels, which seemed the perfect fit for my handling skills, and meant I didn’t have far to fall when they let me down.

  Indeed, the little MIFA seemed to be coping commendably in general. Yes, the back wheel had developed a fairly major wobble, but as it only kicked in above 15kmh this was rarely a problem. The chain guard and rear mudguard bracket kept rattling loose until I remembered Pub Quiz Peter’s going-away gift, a zip-lock bag of locking nuts. The saddle slipped a bit, the original rubber luggage straps were starting to split, and as my German friends had promised, I was finding disappointment with the brake. But despite all this, and the MIFA’s inherent long-distance, foul-weather impracticality, I could think of no other bike I’d rather have been riding.

  Such at least was my heartfelt belief at the time. Writing those words now in all their deluded wrongness, I fear I may have succumbed to what psychiatrists call Helsinki Syndrome, so named after a bank siege where the captors shot themselves and everyone else froze to death.

  The man in the Cossack hat flagged me down as I floundered towards him, jumping out of a VW Golf to wave through the flake-flecked twilight. I could only guess how many hours had passed since I’d last seen a car, though I vividly recalled the circumstances: with her approach silenced by the heaviest snowfall yet, I shrieked and flailed and fell in response to the elderly driver’s close-quarters horn toot. Indeed, I had spent much of the day kissing snow or the iced gravel that underpinned it, on a circuitous trail that wound through my journey’s first sustained undulations. Crossing a frozen lake the track had completely disappeared, leaving me to pick a line throu
gh uprooted orange marker poles scattered distantly across the ice.

  To minimise my falls and their severity I eventually hit upon the canny ruse of going even more slowly than usual. Even so my shins and ankles burned from regular violent introductions to pedal edges on their way to ground. Keeping an overladen shopping bike upright in pannier-deep snow had if anything been even tougher on my arms, now palsied and useless from shoulder to wrist with the effort of bullying the bars straight whenever the front wheel started to go. On the helpless, slithery descents, the back one kept coming round to meet me. ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger,’ said a small voice in my head. ‘Though as a rule it also scares the piss out of us and really hurts,’ replied a bigger one.

  I had little useful idea of my whereabouts, except that I was now in Northern Ostrobothnia, which had an even colder and lonelier ring to it than Lapland, and sounded very much like somewhere you would be banished to with no hope of return. At some point I grasped that my idea of where I might overnight in this frigid outback was even less useful. Jabbing at my phone with clumsy, numb digits, I made the first of what would be many emergency calls to Raija Ruusunen.

  ‘I’m going to put you in touch with our contact in Finland,’ the European Cycling Federation’s Ed Lancaster had written many months before, in an email littered with polite suggestions that I consider setting off at a less ridiculous time of year. Thus was I introduced to Raija, whose stoic and noble reply accepted my schedule, and its implicit consequences for both of us: I had made my stupid mind up, and she would therefore be getting me out of a succession of fine messes. ‘Cycling in Finland in March is winter cycling, it’s still snow almost all over the country here near the eastern border. There will be no people or traffic, the lack of places to eat and sleep is a huge challenge. This is really a wilderness biking tour. I give my personal phone number (open 24/7) and help you, if you are in trouble or need something.’ (Perhaps sensing the need for a positive spin, her PS threw me a feel-good lifeline: ‘There is research on well-being and forests, it says that even fifteen minutes in a forest gives you positive effects. In this case after 1,700km in Finland you will be very well.’)

  I would never understand Raija’s miraculous modus operandi, nor in all honesty did I ever try to. It seemed appropriate simply to accept that a guardian angel should work in mysterious ways. Feeding into a frost-withered grapevine, this cyclo-evangelical university lecturer from Joensuu – a city I never went near and which at this stage lay 400km to the south – was somehow able at the shortest notice to persuade far-flung strangers to set off into the Arctic emptiness and drag an unknown English shopping cyclist from death’s frozen door.

  My Cossack-hatted saviour rather uneasily absorbed my snood-filtered babble of gratitude, then beckoned me to follow him to a clapboard cottage set back from the road through a rank of conifers. As a rustic Finn he proved a man of few words, none of them English. I will leave you to imagine his attempt to imitate the act of ice swimming, and my own response when I realised this was a serious invitation relating to a shore-side hole in the small lake just below us. The only time his features broke into life – I’m fairly sure this applies to every Finn of middle years and above – was when he threw open a door in the cottage basement, and an almost visible wall of heat fell out on top of us.

  The sauna is an invention cobbled together from Finland’s most abundant natural resources: wood, water and vowels. To call it a popular national tradition would be like calling respiration a hobby. There are more saunas than cars in Finland, three million for a populace less than twice that. Sitting in a stupidly hot cupboard really is way up the hierarchy of Finnish needs – above sexual reproduction to judge from the sleeping layout in the off-season holiday cabins I’d been routinely staying in, which typically featured four single beds per room. In one of them, a two-storey building that slept ten, the only internal door was the one that kept heat in the sauna.

  On the sweaty red face of it, Finland’s enduring sauna obsession seems an embarrassing indictment of a failure to follow their fellow north Europeans up the Goldilocks learning curve: outdoors in the snow – too cold; indoors in a pine-lined crematorium – too hot; stretched out on a sofa in a centrally heated home – just right. But rather admirably, they don’t even bother trying to justify or articulate their addiction to broiled claustrophobia. To a Finn there is simply no problem that cannot be solved by another sauna, especially if that problem is wondering what to build next to your sauna. When the winebox-draining, woolly-jumpered snowmobiler told me that his new summerhouse was home to no fewer than three saunas, and I asked why, he shot me a look of puzzled affront: it just is.

  I fired up saunas in Finland every day bar two, but it took a while to appreciate them as more than handy defrosting suites for clothing, feet and toiletries. After a week or two I learned to savour the sauna as a sort of blazing-hot chill-out zone: a wooden womb in which to gestate the day’s events, and with more fondness than their deep-frozen horror generally deserved. But the sauna that Cossack Hat had now left me alone in was off the scale, an overdose of mind-messing centigrade so fiercely volcanic that within a minute my hair – ow! – was too hot to touch. Reflexively, I scooped up a ladle of water from the usual wooden pail and tipped it onto the magma briquettes. In the super-heated circumstances this was in itself an indicator of irrational thought; when the cartoon hiss of igneous steam thus explosively released hit my head I very nearly keeled face first into the furnace. Instead of spooling through them at my mental leisure, the day’s events now rushed unbidden through my broiled mind with nauseous, blurry haste, beginning with the porridge and herring breakfast buffet. That ruined farmhouse with the stoved-in, snowed-up roof, a line of dinosaur-sized elk prints tramping into the woods, the old man fishing through a hole in the ice who got up and walked away when he saw the camera … everything seemed foggy and unreal, like a fast-forward, soft-focus episode from someone else’s previous life. I rose too fast to my feet and almost swooned, then swayed drunkenly to the door, escaping just before rivulets of molten memory dribbled out of my nose.

  This mildly hallucinogenic experience was to prove a handy primer for the hours ahead, and the days that followed them. Events and encounters seemed tinged with surreal improbability even as they unfolded, and I can only now be sure they occurred in real life courtesy of hard photographic evidence. Tip another ladle on the sauna, pour yourself a Dirty Rudolf and kick back as I leaf through this compelling album.

  DSC02967. Cossack Hat has picked me up from my cottage, and deposited me at a lonely wooden farmhouse. I am pictured inside, where the unseen residents – a mother and her adult son – have recently watched their surprise guest consume five bowls of salmon soup. Snow has drifted halfway up the window behind me. On the wall is a photograph of the son’s paternal grandfather as a pre-teenage Winter War reservist. Inveigling themselves into frame atop the big brick hearth to my left are a group of memorable photo-bombers: two stuffed birds, a rather lugubrious wolverine, and a very pointy-mouthed skull with a Post-it note stuck to its jaw, reading: WOLF. The mother has just explained, largely through the medium of splendid mime, that her husband shot this animal and she skinned it: like the wolverine, it had been caught with its teeth in their antlered business assets. In a while, I shall be impelled to watch the English version of an educational DVD on a TV just out of sight, which will begin thus: ‘The reindeer is an animal with long legs and four toes.’ And after that, I will go out to feed bell-necked, stick-headed jostlers with the son, who will be wearing a jerkin his mother fashioned from the wolf’s pelt. And I will still be wearing the very particular outfit that envelops me in this scene: a red-felt, four-horned Lapp hat, and the capacious hide of a pale-coated reindeer.

  DSC02973. This less immediately captivating image shows a crudely skinned side of smoked trout on a background of melamine-faced chipboard. It is the following afternoon and I am in the staff kitchen of a recently decommissioned bank at Juntusrant
a, 38 very snowy kilometres from the Hossan reindeer farm. The trout looked a lot better when a fisherman handed it over after letting me into the bank. Since then I have hacked the oily pink flesh off with a bread knife and eaten it all. I have also been into the bank’s basement and enjoyed the wood-fired staff sauna. In a while I shall make my bed in the manager’s strip-lit office, before a night’s sleep interrupted by a bleary trip to the loo, which will almost end with me locking myself in the facility featured in DSC02975: a James Bond-grade security vault.

  DSC02991. Continuing a clearly fixated theme, this still life depicts the interior of a well-provisioned refrigerator. Its door and shelves are crowded with toothsome calories and refreshments: meatballs, sardines, a variety of yoghurts, tomatoes, cheese, ham, fruit juices, chocolate milk and two large bottles of beer with snarling bears on their labels. A pair of companion images portrays a groaning fruit basket garnished with Snickers bars, and a kitchen work surface piled with the full spectrum of bakery products and a range of preserves. I have progressed a day and 57km south through a filthy and frictionless world of slush, a world that has left its cold, brown mark on man and machine. The house I am in stands marooned between Suomussalmi, scene of Finland’s greatest military triumph, and the Winter War museum, which of course is only open in summer. And I have this house – kitchen, sauna and all – entirely to myself, having let myself in with a key left in the mailbox. The landlady lives 25km away but has at some earlier point driven over to deposit this key, make up a bed, crank on the heating and assemble the three-scene cornucopia just described. I have not met her and never will, but know all this through a telephone conversation conducted in the bank that morning. ‘I cannot take any payment because I am sponsoring you,’ she told me then. ‘We are all sponsoring you, because you are on a bicycle, and because it is winter, and because you are mad.’