‘Beautiful house, Tem!’
‘It’s a great area for children,’ Reidun says.
‘Yes. These houses were built for the veterans of the war.’
‘Does the war still matter to people here?’
‘I would say it is not forgotten,’ Tem says. ‘You know Finns used to shake boxes of matches at the Germans? Rovaniemi! They burned the town when they left, but this is only history now.’
He shakes his right fist as he drives, rattling invisible matches, an unexpected burst of not-altogether-staged feeling from this most pacific of men. Tem is a slightly different person on land, already in paternal mode, answering questions like a father, eyes on the traffic, an ear on the conversation, thoughts stretching ahead to the reunion with his children.
At the airport Tem embraces Reidun and shakes my hand. Reidun is in low spirits, the backlog of messages on her phone nagging her and nothing else to do at the airport but begin to answer them.
‘You can always come back!’ Tem tells her, and she says he must come to Norway, and we all make sure we have each other’s emails. Reidun and I thank our captain.
‘It is my pleasure,’ he says. ‘If you ever want to come back, Otso will be waiting.’
Reidun takes the Oslo flight, and I prepare for a marathon to Helsinki, London, Manchester and on into the Pennines, where I will arrive at 4 a.m. Finnish time. The departure area offers daybeds, wooden armchairs and an atmosphere more like a communal drawing room than an airport. Commuters queue for beer as a text comes from Katri: ‘I am drunk already and going dancing!’ The spirit of old-fashioned seafaring is most alive in the youngest of the crew.
I watch the other passengers: two American men joking about the banking business, a professorial Finn on his phone, an elderly man thinking about his family, by his contemplative half-smile, a smart woman my age who swigs down Prosecco like water; all of us suspended in the in-between time that travel simultaneously grants and steals.
My notebook lists the cargoes we escorted. There was zinc concentrate from Sweden and coal from Poland, calcium chloride for Sweden and iron ore for Bremen, zinc for Rostock, fertiliser for Lübeck and pyritic ashes for Rotterdam. There were the wind turbines for Rahja and Raahe; there were containers from Hamburg and containers to Hamburg. There was caustic soda for Kotka. From these cargoes will come food, cars, buildings, paper, light, heat and power, the fundamentals of civilisation. But the view from Otso does not extend to abstract horizons. The crew’s care over their work is professional, and as Sampo and Ville expressed it, also a matter of national pride. To the ships of the world coming up into the ice of Bothnia, Otso is the first manifestation of Finland after the voices on the radio. While most civilian vessels fly flags of convenience, Otso’s blue and white livery is a projection of Finnish expertise, Finnish robustness and Finnish prowess. For observers of geopolitics icebreakers are an emblem of not entirely soft power. China’s Snow Dragon is used to demonstrate a national interest in the north polar region (in 1999 she turned up unannounced in the Canadian Arctic, panicking the authorities, who had not seen her coming), as are Russia’s expanding fleet and the icebreakers of Canada and Sweden. Finland’s shipyards are busy with Russian orders for the next generation of vessels. Designed with asymmetric hulls, they will skid sideways into the pack, opening channels wide enough for tankers. To the local travellers filing into the plane now, boarding a Finnair jet (majority-owned by the state) at a Finavia airport (wholly owned by the state), the voyages of Otso are another beat in the rhythm of Finland’s daily tune, a flap of the flag, ‘Some little bit,’ as Jouni the engineer described his morning’s work, some little, vital bit.
Last night I dreamed of the ice; there were narwhals in it, basking sharks and seals, all frozen into a kind of porcelain. The voyage of Otso broke a heaven and a horror out from my internal sea. The horror was a glimpse of a world in which humans are almost the only creatures, our machines the only life. A seal and eagle on the first day, three crows, two gulls, a raven, another two seals – in ten days! It is the longest I have ever been anywhere with so little sight of birds or animals. The mid-Pacific and the Karakum Desert are teeming places compared to this frozen sea. The absence of life seemed a foreboding. Our lot in a world denuded of other creatures would be a deep and dreadful existential loneliness. Imagine having no other companionship than humans and whatever we tame or breed: no wild thing, no bird to make the sky surround it, no flourish of being in landscape, no iteration of spirit in form.
Though this was only a reflection of the season – in the spring there will be seals and sea eagles; the Bay of Bothnia still sustains salmon, pike, perch, sea-spawning grayling and sea trout – there was a shuddering emptiness in a world which seemed only elemental.
That emptiness, for all its magnificence, peopled itself with ghosts, some enchanting, some eerie. In Charles Bonnet syndrome an active brain, underserved by a decaying optic nerve, fills the mind with apparently visual phantasmagoria. There were moments when something similar seemed to happen to me. Faced with the ice and sky, the circling and the waiting, tightness in my stomach became a parade of fears, strange doubts and premonitions – phenomena hitherto always banished by travelling and writing. It felt and still feels frightening, but there must be a healthy scourging in it, a kind of sauna of confinement and intensity, wringing toxins out of the mind’s pores.
The sauna, even the ship’s stripped-back version, without whipping birch twigs or snow rolling, made sense of the proverbial Finnish injunction to behave there as you would in church. You settle into yourself as the heat rises until you pass a point of thinking and begin to leave yourself behind. As in a meditation, the last directed thoughts are of your breath and body, each tippling bead of sweat a wriggly kind of pleasure as you imagine and feel it bearing afflictions away. In a steaming cupboard in the bowels of a ship in the middle of an ice floe somewhere in the darkness between Finland and Sweden a naked man saw himself for a second as if from far above, a comically tiny fleck communing with the universe from this position of pure eccentricity. I put down my notebook and laughed. Sacrilege to have brought it here, though I think my friend Thomas would have approved. The voyage came about partly through his legacy, which connected Pekka at the embassy and me. He was an iconoclast and a wonderful, comical scourge, whose help and advice often came wrapped in mockery. The idea of a fool like me seeking self-improvement by sitting in a hot box off Ostrobothnia with a notebook would have made him laugh.
Travelling with Finnish seafarers was a lesson in considered and gentle self-possession. Often, watching from the bridge as we voyaged through darkness and snow, my thoughts quietened to a kind of listening silence, a wordless companionship with the navigators. Working and watching through the small hours out in that obscure gulf was like being admitted to an almost secret society, unseen and benevolent, which stands guard over every night.
From Oulu to Helsinki, to the late pulsing streets of London, to the last train and finally home, I brought a souvenir of the voyage in a double feeling which has been settling and crystallising as I have written its story.
There is Otso’s mighty bow, thrusting forward over the ice, which is snowed and jumbled on the surface, consolidated pack stretching away beyond the searchlights. And there is a sickle of a crack running forward, curving away from the ship, shooting out more shatter lines, every splinter evidence of our power and efficacy. How mighty is our roaring attack! The decks shudder, the impacts grate and crash, and the pack splits, barely hindering our charge. The confrontation is never an equal contest.
Our purpose was destruction, but there was no benefit to us in final victory. All the while we wished the weather colder; we wished that more ice would form. Though the crew relished rest and the abeyance of that juddering contact, something in us – which was explicit in Sampo and Ville – also longed for our opponent to offer more defiance. This double impulse seemed a portrait in miniature of a particular relationship with nature and the eart
h. The more deeply buried its treasures, the vaster its oceans and the more mighty its resistance, the greater the invention and the resolution earth has drawn from us. From the Pliocene until now, until this fractional instant of geological time, earth has been matchless. But now, suddenly, its opposition is wilting.
The planet threatens to become soggy, tempestuous and backward as the ghost-climates of older worlds are disinterred and loosed again. Perhaps this partly explains our ongoing rapacity, our ever more frenzied extraction and the feebleness of our plans for change. It is as if we are disappointed in the earth, like adolescents struggling to accept a parent’s vulnerability. Can it really be so sensitive? Is the ice so thin? It seems to be harder for humankind to nurse a wounded opponent than to battle one still vigorous. But it is touching and revealing that even icebreakers practise conservation. According to Tem’s report on the Kemi-Tornio fairway, pristine ice is husbanded there, an unbroken lane which can be used at the season’s end, so that ships are not trapped in shuga of their own making.
And then there was the heaven, the brightest spell I will remember from the Bay of Bothnia, the privilege and amazement of standing on the sea. A spiral of scribbles on the page of the bay, the plot of Otso’s voyage could have belonged to salvagers or treasure hunters searching for the Sampo of the Kalevala, that miraculous world-making mill. We seemed to find it that sparkling day when we stepped from the ship onto the ice in a storm of light.
The discovery that the sea really was made solid gave me a fizzing exhilaration. I jumped on the ice as if to test it, trying to land lightly, laughing with delight. If it was familiar to the crew it was a miracle to me that all the air was scintillant, that the horizon was a weld-flash of ice and sky, that distance could only be measured in colour until colour dissolved into glare. Our little bright-suited figures were slow blobs, laughable and laughing. Light poured down and up at once. In the silent vortex of the albedo I felt a mingling of calm and wonder, as if all superfluity had been whipped away. While standing on a mountain top grants you the vista of a scoop of space, from valley bottom to cloud level and beyond, standing on the sea under clear air erases depth and height. The sky begins in the snow under your boots. You are simultaneously huge and as tiny as a fleck.
The stillness of the air held a charge in it, for nothing around us was stable – between the sun and the frigid air creation and destruction were in whirling play. On the underside of the ice below us congelation growth thickened the crystal layers, while in the ridges of our footprints radiation tickled them minutely away. Although you could not hear it or see it, you could not help but sense it, a molecular dance, a duel, an effervescence at the edge of perception: the making and melting of ice.
Acknowledgements
HUGE THANKS, PEKKA Isosomppi, for your inspiration and your efforts, which sent me on this voyage. Thank you, Minttu Taajamo and Eero Hokkanen, for all the time and trouble you took in arranging my travels so beautifully.
Great thanks to the crew of Otso, superbly led by Teemu Alstela, for your wonderful welcome and endless patience. Thank you especially, Sampo Viherialehto, Ville Suni, Arvo Kovanen, Lasse Matilainen and Reidun Myklebust for your excellent company and kind instruction.
Thank you, the best of the best, Zoe Waldie and Rosie Price at RCW, for your ceaseless encouragement, care and insight, and for finding the book a perfect home with the great ship Chatto and its magnificent captain, Clara Farmer.
Thank you especially Becky Hardie, superb editor, for your marvellous work on the manuscript. (Any infelicities which still afflict it are my doing; all those that do not were exorcised by Becky with unfailing good humour and efficiency.)
I am hugely grateful to Charlotte Humphery for seeing the book through to publication, to Hugh Davis and Anthony Hippisley for their scrutiny of copy and proofs, to designer Julia Connolly and illustrator Eoin Ryan for making this a beautiful object, and to Anna Redman for taking it to the world.
Researching Finland and the Finns sent me on an idiosyncratic journey through libraries and texts. I am particularly indebted to the writings of Jonathan Clements, whose works on Mannerheim and Finnish history and culture make delightful and entertaining points of departure for anyone interested in Suomi.
This book was written through a hard time. My love and deepest thanks to Rebecca Shooter, Aubrey Shooter Clare, Jennifer – on behalf of all of us, Jenny! – Gerald, Emma and Chris Shooter, and to Sally, Alexander and John Clare for your love and support. For unfaltering friendship and kindness, thank you Roger Couhig, Merlin Hughes, Richard Coles, Anna Gavalda, Jay Griffiths, Niall Griffiths, Debs Jones, Douglas Field, Ellie Hunt, Phil O’Farrell, Emma Back, Mike Fuller, Rupert Crisswell, Kartika Panwar, Laura Barton, Dan Richards, Robert Macfarlane, Jeff Young, Andrew MacMillan, Robert Graham, Sarah Maclennan, Helen Tookey, Marge Mather, Alison Finch, Sîan Walker and Henny Schoonderwoerd.
Special thanks to Robin Tetlow-Shooter. Much love xx
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Icebreaker Page 13
