Icebreaker

by Horatio Clare

  The Dutchman makes port, and we turn north again as the wind rises under a sky threatening deep cold. Heading between two patches of thicker ice we cross nilas, the transparent crystal skin of the new freeze, shining liquorice black. As our wake carves through the nilas ripples of our passage swell under the surface, lifting the crystal sheet into flashing zigzags as the flat solid meets the rounding liquid. Crossing the pack we cut through fault lines, ridges of broken and frozen slabs, lucent green dusted with snow. By the time we make Oulu roads the conditions are extraordinary, a slit of pale light to the south, a dark bar across the northern sky, and between them a rainbow vault of cloud shading from blue through greys to black.

  A cement carrier is jammed in shuga which has filled the fairway. As we lumber up to her, stern to her bow, there is no water visible; she looks like a toy left lying in a white sandpit.

  ‘We will tow her,’ Tem says. ‘It can take time if they are not very used to it, but we have had this one before. Maybe twenty minutes to get the lines on.’

  Down on the main deck the bows of the cement carrier overhang us, her lines and chains hackled with icicles as though the ice is climbing her. Three figures in luminous jackets move slowly on her forepeak; below, two of our crew toddle ponderously in the bulk of their jackets, cold and caution making them seem hesitant and robotic. The windchill is minus nineteen, numbing your face in four minutes. The gap between my leggings and socks is a frigid slash. The cold makes you move slowly, think slowly. In the lee of a stanchion I shiver, watching a dance in which only two out of five figures can move at a time. Our crew throw up heaving lines, which are attached to monkey’s fists, heavy knots like cricket balls, the most complicated in a sailor’s repertoire. Above on the cement carrier the heaving lines are drawn in, taking heavier lines and then steel hawsers with them. The hawsers are attached in a Y-shape, with the tail our main towline, a reassuringly brutal cable of corded steel. It takes a slow while before they are satisfied, then all crew withdraw, ours stringing a chain across the deck behind us beyond which none may pass. We return to the shelter of the bridge and watch as Ville puts the tension on – one pull, two pulls, testing.

  ‘She’s not right there,’ Ville says, and the starboard side of the harness is askew. ‘She’ll hold.’ He inches the power on, the lines straighten, a shiver of locking tension running through them, and, first by inches, then by feet, we move.

  At five minutes to midnight the snow comes, blowing from the south-east, port to starboard across our searchlight beams in a pouring silver current. Above the beams the snow is invisible; below the bridge windows it is a flying carpet. Reidun is a good photographer, but even her camera cannot catch the whorl and witchery of the blizzard. The comfort of the bridge is an extreme counterpoint: dressed for Sunday breakfast, it seems, we eat cake, make tea and survey screens. Our range of vision stretches to twenty miles on the AIS, the automatic identification system, but we have another machine aboard, the J-Map, of which Sampo is particularly proud.

  ‘A real-time system linking Finnish and Swedish coastal radar,’ Sampo says, zooming out until we can see the Gulf of Bothnia and the Gulf of Finland, the coasts and main seaways hedged with a forest of tiny boxes, each with a vector line indicating vessels and their courses. ‘It’s a naval system. We don’t have access to their information obviously – we can just see course and speed – but you can see men of war on it; you can’t on the AIS because they have their transponders switched off. But when we move out of the range of Finnish coastal radar the navy can see what we can see.’

  ‘So we become a listening post?’

  ‘More like watching, another radar …’

  Feeling that we are not quite like other ships is an obvious source of pride. The icebreakers are owned by Arctia, a corporation belonging to the Finnish state, and the sense of being a strategic asset matters. The J-Map is not linked to other systems on the ship in the hope that it will not be hacked. The Finnish position of ‘active neutrality’ during the Cold War was layered with ironies which extend to the present. It was clear that in the event of war Finland would be a battlefield: the Russians would come over the border, and the Americans would attack them with tactical nuclear weapons. The obliteration of Finland was incidental.

  Norwegian and Swedish soldiers and American spies made tours of Lapland, identifying junctions, bridges and radar stations which would make nuclear targets, according to the Finnish former soldier and intelligence specialist Jukka Rislakki. He tells the story of an American attaché at the Helsinki embassy whose 1962 tour of Lapland, measuring roads, bridges and borders, was so brazen that his hosts asked him to leave. A decade later the American naval attaché announced that he planned a similar tour of the harbours of Raahe, Oulu and Kokkola. Finnish security service officers were astounded by the sight of a spy openly photographing their harbours from a boat but took no action. Washington and Moscow both made it clear to Helsinki that they were not interested in the south of the country, only in the shortest routes across it – to the Bay of Bothnia in the middle, and to Norway via northern Lapland, Sweden being neutral. This cannot have been much comfort to the Finns. Their response was practical.

  ‘Every building bigger than thirty thousand cubic metres has to have a bomb shelter,’ Sampo mentions as we discuss the Finnish position.

  ‘Still today?’

  ‘Oh yes. Mostly they are the parking garages. You can store bikes and things there, but you have to be ready to have them cleared in seventy-two hours.’

  ‘Where’s your nearest?’

  ‘My daughter’s school. It’s two hundred metres up the hill.’

  I knew it. They are future-proofed.

  We watch the tracks and courses of freighters, Sampo clicking in and out, half the Finnish coast under his fingertips one second, the next a small knoll under shallow water on our landward side.

  ‘Ah, this is Sisu’s knoll,’ he says. ‘They were following their own track back this way, but the ice had moved north, so they went over it. The depth there is eight metres!’ Sisu draws 7.7 metres.

  The movement of huge sheets of ice defeats perception and intuition. Fast ice forms a rime around the bay, locked in place by attachment to the sea bottom or the shore; seaward the pack becomes a broken tortoise-shell of shifting plates. In March 1809 an entire Russian army left Vaasa, a hundred miles south of us at the bay’s narrowest point, crossed the ice and attacked Umea in Sweden. Travel on ice roads around the bay and out into the southern gulf was common, and an arresting experience for visitors. In February 1779 William Coxe, historian, priest and traveller, set out into the Gulf of Bothnia. He spent the night on an island: ‘In the evening a violent hurricane came on; we heard on all sides the cracking of the ice sounding like explosions of thunder.’ In sunlight the next morning, the storm having produced ‘several apertures’ and the ice melting, Coxe made for the Åland Islands on a perilous thirty-five-mile sleigh ride. His guide ‘carried a hatchet and plumbing iron’. Coxe describes this unnamed man cutting ice and measuring thickness, making ‘considerable circuits’ and constantly shouting and warning the sleigh drivers. ‘He often called out to the drivers to keep at some distance from each other; and repeatedly warned them to follow the precise track which he pursued. In this manner he conducted us without the least accident, to the Isle of Aland.’ Coxe’s tone is in marvellous contrast with the presumed feelings of that guide, who appears to have duelled physics for eight hours with such skill that his charges felt only serenity.

  CHAPTER 9

  Frankfurters, Death Traps, Droids

  IN A BLIZZARD of small flakes we run through ice, cracks jumping a hundred metres ahead of us as we head for the middle of nowhere, as Ville puts it, to retrieve a seventeen-thousand-tonne Swedish tanker carrying chemicals to Oulu. The noise at the bow is thunderous, and the ice is various today. Its mottled archipelagos are made of black curving runes, blown clear, and ridges of glowing green slabs. Behind us sea smoke forms in our wake as the water
is exposed to the frigid air. We lead a second tanker to the oil terminal at Oulu, the wind whistling and weeping around the bridge. Sampo was on tankers.

  ‘Those guys die at fifty from a multitude of cancers,’ he says, shaking his head at the ship behind us. ‘That chemical stuff, it’s on everything – your clothes, your skin, your boots. You can change and wash and maybe you still bring it into your home. At least they are stable – good ships in the North Atlantic. We had seas breaking over the whole deck. All you could see was the foremast. The only ones to really stay away from are the ore carriers, two to three hundred metres long. Because of the shear forces they break and go down in a few seconds.’

  He tells the story of the Finn-Baltic pusher and barge. On Christmas Day 1990 she left Raahe heading south with a cargo of iron ore which according to the dock workers was already wet and shifting. The captain nursed her south on one engine, keeping her speed low to prevent spray breaking over the forecastle and further soaking the ore. As the weather worsened they needed more power and manoeuvrability. The second engine engaged, more water came aboard and the ore began to liquefy. Around twelve thirty on Boxing Day afternoon, rolling in heavy seas, Finn-Baltic took on a two-degree list. As she was turned into the wind the sludge of ore shifted in a mass.

  ‘She capsized,’ Sampo says. ‘Everyone but two guys died. The engineer had stored a torch and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the propeller shaft tunnel. When it went over they climbed up there. They banged, and the rescuers heard them and started cutting the plate. Pressure blew the plate fifty feet into the air and the two guys got out.’

  Only later, researching the accident, do I make the connection. Finn, the pusher part of the combination, and the barge, Baltic, were raised, rebuilt and sent back to sea, renamed Steel and Botnia. I know Steel. We all know her – the sinister black ship with her brute bows and winged bridge like a submarine’s which has been taking coal into Raahe. You do not introduce a ship by her accidents, but the fact that Steel has capsized and lost all but two of her crew – I am certain it was in Ville’s mind as he introduced ‘the ugliest ship in the Bay of Bothnia’.

  Reports of the disaster are grim reading: the bodies of drowned men retrieved from the office, from the staircase, the shower; the remains of the pilot and captain found in the drift path of the wreckage; the deckhand’s body never recovered. The details and inferences are almost worse. The crew spending Christmas at sea in vile weather, leaving Raahe with a wet cargo, driven by the pressure to deliver. The cautious push down the coast, the captain discussing with the pilot whether or not to wait for better weather. The wind slackening, inviting them on, then strengthening again. The captain staring always out of the bridge screens, dreading every wave which dumps seawater into the hold, and making his turn for safety too late. The chief engineer told the investigation that he had long planned to head for the propeller shaft casing in the event of a capsize because he knew that with the cargo gone the single-hulled vessel would float. Clearly he also considered the ship vulnerable to capsizing. It is easy to forget, unless you work on them, that two ships sink every week.

  I look at my shipmates with new eyes. Ville, son of the chief engineer who went all over the world and who tried to take his boy whenever he could, bringing Ville aboard at three years old. When he has the controls his gaze is never still; he sweeps the horizon, the instruments, the screens constantly. (‘I’ve spent much time in the UK,’ he comments. ‘Hull, Grimsby, Immingham. I only saw the sun twice.’) Sampo reels off the years and certificates it takes to become a master mariner: ‘So by the time you get to an icebreaker you have done five years on the kinds of ships we work with. You know what it is like to follow. To steer a big ship you have to feel it in your arse – if you can’t feel her movement in your arse you will never be good at manoeuvring! You feel it long before any instrument will tell you.’

  Tem recalls some of his time on cargo vessels. ‘Raahe is the toughest place. The worst weather. And shuga! I had two days stuck in Kemi roads on a shit ship with no food. The crew were the strangest people. They were all total misfits.’

  ‘People go crazy,’ Sampo says. ‘One Finnish captain invented his own words. Leads he called something like ri-leads for some reason. He used it stubbornly all winter on the radio until it started to catch on! People talking about ri-leads …’

  Tem identifies with this. ‘I had to do a daily weather bulletin in English, so I used to look up the most archaic words I could find. I knew I had won when they had to ask me what I was talking about.’

  We cackle. All Tem’s stories conclude with a self-deprecating coda.

  ‘But I am very silly. Off Greenland I got pneumonia from swimming in the Arctic,’ he confides. ‘I had a temperature of thirty-nine degrees. I couldn’t leave my cabin.’

  ‘We didn’t notice,’ Sampo says. He produces a picture of the crew swimming in the Arctic as a man stands on the ship with a rifle, on the lookout for polar bears.

  ‘Working up there – blue ice everywhere and a big ship behind – it’s a death trap.’

  At lunch we face the national dish, if you believe Tem, which I am unsure I do, a pile of split frankfurters filled with cheese. Queasy, I have another go at the fruit bowl, a pyramid of desiccated satsumas. Lasse offers a tour of his engine room. Lasse is the watchkeeping engineer. He has a gentleness and a sadness about him traced in webs of wrinkles. I see a gnomish quality in his grin, but that idea may just have been planted by the deck officers.

  ‘You know it’s spring when you start to see the gnomes on deck,’ they say, referring to the engineers.

  ‘They call the engine room Nut Valley,’ says Lasse, issuing fat ear defenders. He leads down stairs, through heavy doors, towards the noise and heat. The engine room is a series of low steel compartments confining a battering roar, a frenzied shaking force which seems desperate to escape the tangle of machinery. To communicate we lift one of our earpieces and yell, or signal like divers.

  ‘We carry fifty thousand spare parts,’ Lasse shouts, opening a store in which crates of bolts shine like treasure. There are silvers and coppers, steels and brasses, angular turnings, rounded stalks, objects pressed, plated and cast. Behind another door the noise is suddenly a yammering assault.

  ‘What do you actually do down here?’ I scream near Lasse’s ear.

  ‘The motorman patrols, looking for leaks, checking, monitoring. We work twelve on, twelve off.’

  ‘Are you busy?’

  ‘Sometimes! We have fuel leaks, water leaks.’

  There are racks of tools from a steampunk fantasy, a xylophone of copper hammers and giant wrenches stolen from trolls. As we squeeze along the green steel walkways Lasse gestures and shouts as if he is introducing members of a venerable and subterranean crew who are not allowed out any more.

  ‘Four generators – six thousand volts. Rudder hydraulics … Main engine cooling … Fuel purification – we use low-sulphur marine diesel … Desalination … Converters … Heat exchanger …’

  Here are pop-eyed gauges, domed centrifuges like droids, vines of copper piping and sprouting thermometers; the fuel pumps are entire oil refineries in miniature, budded with bolts and flowering stopcocks. A serpentine hissing comes from the fuel uptakes as Otso drinks her endless fill. At the sewage filtration system Lasse pauses by an encrusted window in a settling tank, peers in at what looks like the liquefied and sulphurous innards of a cadaver. He produces a jug and draws off a familiar-looking fluid which he sniffs.

  ‘This is urine,’ he says, satisfied, and dashes it into the bilges. He invites me to inspect workshops and edge across a gantry above the twin propeller shafts. The main bulkhead doors are hydraulic, hand-pumped open and shut, a reminder that we are below the waterline, and any ingress of the Baltic here would take us to the bottom. As we move forward the engine noise dips, overlaid now with the grinding cacophony of the ice. As we circle back, the engine tattoos the beat of its pistons into my chest, my feet and my inner ear.

 
‘Yes, it is a very dangerous place to work,’ Lasse says. ‘We have very good medical care, the best you can buy.’

  ‘The best you can buy’ also defines Finland’s approach to public health, where standards of care lead the world. The key is the country’s system of all-inclusive health centres, dreamed up by radical doctors in the 1960s and launched in 1972. The health centres provide the entire population with all the basics: ‘all-inclusive’ covers dentistry to ambulances, from GP-run hospital services, rehabilitation, environmental health and home nursing to student healthcare. Some centres are now merged with specialist hospitals and integrated with social welfare services. In 2002 a law was passed insisting that all patients, urgent or not, should be assessed within three working days.

  At first Lasse made me think of a doleful clown from an antique time, but now I think he is a more like a monk, the guest master of the monastery, the one whose duties permit and compel him to talk to strangers, to the world of people unfit and unformed to understand the fundamentals, let alone take the vows. To me the wonder of the engine room is barely removed from the mysteries of faith. Ville touches a button eight decks above us, and a thousand things react, the shining axles spin and the propellers turn.

  ‘On one ship heavy fuel oil exploded in my face. It was a hundred and twenty degrees. I had second-degree burns. Without the medical care I wouldn’t be here. I am sixty next year!’

  We withdraw to the engineers’ control room, a large cabin on the main deck which everyone passes on their way to eat. The watch spend a great deal of their time in front of the screens in here, eyeing systems schematics, monitoring points and following the rest of the world through social media. There is a particularly large television hanging over us, showing the Nordic World Ski Championship, which has been casting a growing spell over the crew and the ship. Finland is hosting, and Otso is supporting the national effort, silent crew assembling to watch whenever they are off duty. Cross-country skiers power through a pine forest above his head as Lasse reclines in his chair.