Sixty Degrees North

by Malachy Tallack

  Saunas mimic the Nordic climate – the heat of summer contrasted with the cold of winter – and when enjoyed at this time of year they hint at a kind of defiance or protest. To step into a little wooden room at eighty degrees celsius is to declare that even now, in darkest winter, we can be not just warm but roasting hot. We can make the sweat drip from our brows, then leap like maniacs into icy water. It is both an embrace of the season and a fist shaken in its face. It is a celebration of the north and an escape from its realities. The actress and writer Lady Constance Malleson went further. For her the sauna was ‘an apotheosis of all experience: Purgatory and paradise; earth and fire; fire and water; sin and forgiveness.’ It is also a great leveller, and appeals therefore to the spirit of Nordic egalitarianism. ‘All men are created equal,’ goes an old saying. ‘But nowhere more so than in the sauna.’

  After repeating this dash from cold shower to hot room twice more, I decided that I’d had enough. It was strangely exhausting, and I felt the need, then, to lie down. As I stood drying and dressing in the changing room, two men came in. They were in their sixties – one perhaps a little older. Both stripped down to trunks quickly, opened the door without a hesitation and went outside. I heard them splash into the sea, and a moment later they returned, dripping but not shivering, took their trunks off and went past me into the steam and heat next door. For a moment I considered turning round and joining them, as though I could shed my awkwardness by sharing others’ ease. But I decided not to intrude on the silence of friends, and so I headed back out into the cold.

  From the centre of town I trudged ankle-deep down the tree-lined streets until, at the end of Östra Strandgatan, the trees took over. A woman and her little dog went ahead of me into the forest and I followed, treading carefully down the path. When she stopped to allow a procession of school-children to pet the dog I overtook and continued beneath the branches, their giggles and chatter rippling into silence behind me. This was the first of the town’s nature parks – Hagen – with the islands of Ramsholmen and Högholmen, accessible by footbridge, lying beyond. The forest was mostly deciduous, so bare of leaves, but a map in my pocket identified some of the species: oak, wych elm, common hazel, horse chestnut, small-leaved lime, black alder, common ash, rowan, bird cherry. Away from the old town, with its colourful buildings, this place seemed altogether monochrome. Dark trunks against the white ground, beneath a bruised, grey sky. Even the birds – magpies, hooded crows and a flock of noisy jackdaws – added no colour.

  I walked along the trail, through Hagen, then Ramsholmen, without purpose or hurry. The path was well maintained and trodden, though I could neither see nor hear anyone else around me. As I moved further from the town, the only sounds remaining were the patter and thud of snow clumps falling from branches to the ground, and the occasional bluster of birds somewhere above. Despite the absence of leaves, the canopy was dense enough to make it hard to see much at all, just now and then a flash of frozen sea emerging to my right. When I crossed the second footbridge, to Högholmen, the path faded, but still the snow was compacted by the footprints of previous walkers, and I continued to the island’s end, where I could look out across the grey ice to the archipelago beyond.

  In Finland, familiarity with nature is not just approved of, it is positively encouraged, and the state itself takes an active role in this encouragement. The path on which I had walked was well tended, despite the season, and street-lights had continued for much of the way, so even darkness couldn’t interfere with a stroll in the forest. There were bird boxes everywhere, and benches, too, where one could stop and think and rest. The right to roam is enshrined in law in this country, as it is in the other Nordic nations. It is called, here, ‘Everyman’s right’, and gives permission for any person to walk, ski, cycle, swim or camp on private land, no matter who owns it. Food such as berries and mushrooms can be gathered on that land, and boating and fishing are also allowed. The restriction of these rights by landowners is strictly prohibited. Indeed, the legal emphasis is not on the public to respect the sanctity of ownership, but on those with land to respect other people’s right to use it. This means that, while land can still be bought and sold, it is a limited and non-exclusive kind of possession. The public, always, maintains a sense of ownership and of connection to places around them.

  The emphasis on access and on the importance of the countryside in Finnish culture harks back to the rural nationalism of the nineteenth century. But it has become, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a deep attachment to nature that finds its most notable expression in the profusion of summer-houses dotted around this country. Around a quarter of Finnish families own a second home or a cottage outside the town, and most have regular access to one. Often these are located on an island or beside a lake, and while many have no electricity or running water, nearly all are equipped with a sauna. This region alone has about five thousand of these cottages.

  There is an old stereotype that says Finnish people, given the choice, will live as far apart from one another as possible, and perhaps there is a grain of truth in that. Perhaps the desire to remain close to nature necessitates a certain geographical distance from one’s neighbours. But there seems to me something extraordinarily healthy in the attachment to place that is so prevalent here. There seems, moreover, something quite remarkable in this longing not for what is elsewhere but for what is nearby. It is an uncommon kind of placefulness that is surely the opposite of isolation.

  On my way back towards town I stopped on the bridge between Högholmen and Ramsholmen. I took ham and rolls out of my bag and put together some crude sandwiches. I stamped my feet on the wooden planks to try and compensate for my gloveless state. As I stood eating, an old man in a bright green coat appeared from behind me. He must have been close by during my walk around Högholmen, though I never saw nor heard him once.

  The man stopped beside me and gazed out over the frozen water. His face was soft and wrinkled, and a little sad, topped by grey, sagging eyebrows. His dark-rimmed spectacles seemed to hang precariously at the end of his nose, and yet, at the same time, they pinched his nostrils so tightly that his breathing must have been restricted.

  ‘I’ve been looking for an eagle,’ he said.

  ‘A sea eagle?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, a big one.’ He extended his arms and flapped slowly, in demonstration of what a big sea eagle might look like in flight.

  ‘I didn’t see it today,’ he explained, solemnly. ‘But some days it is here.’

  We stood together in silence for a moment, both looking in the same direction.

  ‘Well,’ he said, glancing up at the sky, ‘it is fine now. But for how long?’

  I smiled and nodded, recognising both subject and sentiment.

  ‘What is coming tomorrow?’ he added, turning away to go, then paused a second longer and shook his head, sadly. ‘I don’t know.’

  Returning to Shetland from Prague in my mid-twenties was not the joyous homecoming I might quietly have hoped that it would be. It was difficult and tentative, and for a short time I questioned whether my decision had been sound at all. By then, my mother had moved away from Lerwick and away from the house in which I’d spent my teenage years, the house overlooking the harbour. Much had changed since then, and much was new to me. I had returned to Shetland because, finally, it had come to feel like home, but in those first few months a great deal again was unfamiliar.

  Not long after coming back I got a job as a reporter for The Shetland Times, and a little flat in Lerwick, a few lanes away from where I’d been brought up. I settled in to a life that I felt I had chosen, and, as I walked through the town again, those buildings and those streets, those lines and those spaces, seemed as though they were etched inside of me.

  In the months that followed I began to write every day, more than I had ever written before. I started work on what I thought was a novel: the story of a man’s return to the islands after many years away. In that story, the man – I never chos
e a name for the character, he was simply ‘the man’ – reconnected himself with his home by walking, obsessively, the places he once knew. The steps he took not only rejoined him to the place, physically, they also drew him back, through his own history and into the history of the islands themselves. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, through his physical connection, he drew the past upwards into the present. To fuel this work, I read books about Shetland history. I read novels and poetry. I visited the archives and the museum, and I learned much that I had never before been interested in learning. Through that anonymous character, I strove to relate myself to a place from which, previously, I had always maintained a distance.

  It was then, in that time of research and writing, that I realised something which now seems obvious: that this history in which I was immersing myself was not separate from me. These islands’ history could be my own. Though I had no connection by blood to Shetland, though my ancestors so far as I know had nothing whatsoever to do with the place, none of that truly mattered. The ancestors of whom I am aware lived in Norfolk and Cornwall and Ireland, places I know hardly at all. My connection to those places, carried in fragments of DNA, has little real meaning. Certainly it means nothing when compared to the connections I have made in my own lifetime. For culture and history are not carried in the blood. Nor is identity. These things are not inherited, they exist only through acquaintance and familiarity. They exist in attachment.

  As I came to understand that fact, a sense of relief washed over me like a slow sigh, and I began to imagine that a matter had been settled and that something broken was on its way towards repair. By day, as a reporter, I wrote about Shetland’s present; by night I read and wrote about its past. As familiarity and acquaintance grew, attachment brimmed within me.

  In Turku, the country’s second city, I boarded one of the enormous ferries that ply back and forth between Finland, Sweden and the Åland Islands. In the terminal, crowds had gathered in advance of departure time, laughing, talking cheerfully to each other, and once on board they filed into cafés, restaurants and – most popular of all – the duty-free shop. Soon, the ship was full of people, most of them weighed down by bags of alcohol and cigarettes.

  Åland is separated from mainland Finland by a stretch of the Baltic that never fully unleashes itself from the land. From Turku we passed densely forested islands with bright summer houses at the shore. And though, as the morning progressed, the islands thinned out and decreased in size until an almost open sea stretched out around us, here still were holms and islets, some as smooth and subtle as whales’ backs, just breaking the surface. From the boat, these islands looked as though they had just risen up from beneath the water – which in fact many have. The land here is rising at fifty centimetres per century, so new islands are emerging all the time. And when they do so, it doesn’t take long before they are occupied by trees. Even the smallest of skerries, it seemed, had at least one rising from it. Coming from a place where such extravagant vegetation needs to be coaxed and coddled from the ground, it was amazing to see this profusion. In the Baltic, trees won’t take no for an answer.

  The sixtieth parallel runs through the south of the Åland archipelago, not far from the capital, Mariehamn, where we docked around lunchtime. Disembarking, with rucksack slung over my shoulder, I was surprised to see most of my fellow passengers walk out from the ferry and then straight back on to another one heading in the opposite direction. For the majority, it turns out, the journey is simply the first half of a full day’s cruise to Åland and back, with good food and tax-free shopping more important than the destination. I stepped out into the town’s grey winter light and headed for my hotel.

  If there is ambiguity in the relationship between Swedish Finns and the state in which they live, in Åland the situation is rather different. Here, there is less ambiguity and more complexity. These islands belong, officially, to Finland, but they are culturally Swedish and politically autonomous. The residents are highly independent-minded. The archipelago has its own parliament, its own bank, its own flag and its own unique system of government. Despite a population of fewer than 30,000, spread over 65 inhabited islands, Åland has the power to legislate on areas such as education, health care, the environment, policing, transport and communications. It is, to all extents and purposes, a tiny state operating within a larger one, and its separation from that larger state is fiercely maintained. Finnish is not an official language in these islands, and the army of Finland is not welcome on its shores.

  This strange situation did not come about because of a long-held sense of nationhood here (unlike, say, in the Faroe Islands). Instead, it was the result of a peculiar and, in hindsight, rather enlightened decision by the League of Nations. For centuries these islands had been a de facto part of Sweden, but in 1809 they were annexed together with Finland. Åland became, then, part of the grand duchy that survived until the revolution of 1917. At that time, as Finland prepared to announce its own independence, Ålanders demanded that the islands should be returned to Sweden, both for reasons of cultural continuity and to be brought under the protection of an established and stable state. But given the history of this region, the request was not a simple one to grant, and when the three sides failed to agree, the matter was referred instead to the League of Nations. In attempting to come up with a solution that would please everyone, the League settled on a compromise. Rather than staying with one state or joining another, Åland would instead become autonomous and demilitarised. It would function within the state of Finland, but its Swedishness would be enshrined in law. It would be, in other words, neither one thing nor the other. Such a precarious compromise could easily have been a disaster, but in this case it was not. In fact, it turned out remarkably well. Today islanders are proud of their autonomy and what they have done with it. They maintain strong links with both neighbours, but have fostered and cultivated a sense of distinctiveness and independence that is now, almost a century later, firmly embedded.

  Mariehamn sits on a long peninsula, with a deep harbour on one side where the ferries come in and a shallow one on the other, for pleasure craft. In the smaller harbour, expensive boats were hidden beneath plastic wrappers, while the wharf was chock-a-block with empty spaces, to be filled by summer visitors.

  I strolled across the bridge to Lilla Holmen, a snowy, wooded park that was more or less empty of people. An aviary stood among the trees there, teeming with zebra finches, budgerigars, parrots and love birds, and there was even a tortoise, lying still in the corner. Outside in the park were giant rabbits in hutches, and three peacocks that approached me, then raised and shook their fans as though in protest.

  There is an unmistakable air of self-confidence to Mariehamn. The town feels like what it almost is: the capital of a tiny Nordic nation. The wide linden-lined boulevards; the grand clapboard villas; the lively, pedestrianised streets: Mariehamn pulses with a kind of energy that belies its scale. Just 11,000 people live in this town, and yet it seems many times bigger. It feels creative and vibrant and prosperous. In the summer this place would be full of visitors – Finns and Scandinavians, mostly – but in January there were few of us around. Yet unlike in Ekenäs, that didn’t feel like a loss. There was no sense of limbo, or of absence. Tourists bring money to the islands, but they don’t bring purpose. Åland’s focus is upon itself and its own concerns. After all, how many other communities of 28,000 can boast two daily newspapers, two commercial radio stations and one public service broadcaster?

  I couldn’t help comparing this place with home, and with Shetland’s own capital, Lerwick. As I wandered Mariehamn’s rather grand streets I thought of the streets in which I grew up. In the time I’ve known it, my home town has changed significantly, and despite the islands’ wealth it has begun to look a little run down. An enormous supermarket on the edge of town has sucked much of the life from its centre. Once home to a host of independent businesses, the town’s main shopping street is now a place of hairdressers and c
harity shops, and Lerwick’s museum and its recently-built arts centre are outstanding in part because of what they are set against.

  I wondered then, as I have often wondered, whether more autonomy could have brought some of the benefits to Shetland that Åland has seen, and I think perhaps it could. But Åland’s success has been bolstered by two factors that are not on Shetland’s side: geography and climate. These islands are not just beautiful, they are also sunny and warm in summer, and therefore very popular with tourists. Åland is also fortunate to lie halfway between two wealthy countries, and a tax agreement means that Finns and Swedes can take day cruises here and come home with bags full of cheap booze. Åland is politically autonomous, but it is still financially reliant on its neighbours. In the 1930s, the largest fleet of sailing ships in the world was owned by the Åland businessman Gustaf Erikson, and the economy is still very much dependent on the sea. The ferries which today carry around a million passengers each year back and forth across the Gulf of Bothnia are, by a considerable margin, these islands’ biggest industry.

  Wandering on a half-faded afternoon, I stepped on impulse in to the Åland Emigrants Institute, which occupies an unassuming building set back from Norre Esplanadgaten, one of the main streets in the centre of town. I’d read somewhere that there was an exhibition inside, but the institute is not a promising looking place and it wasn’t clear if visitors were actually welcome. Inside there was little to indicate whether I was in the right place at all, just a narrow hallway and corridor with an office at the far end, its door open. I turned to go again, disappointed, but was stopped as I did so by a woman beckoning me back. ‘It’s not really an exhibition,’ she said, in answer to my question. ‘It’s just a few things. But do come in anyway.’