Into the woods...Mekrijärvi

There’s a beautiful and magical place near Ilomantsi, Finland – about 20 miles from the Russian border – called Mekrijärvi Tutkimusasema, or ‘research station’.  Mekrijärvi is the lake on whose shore it is located. It belongs to the University of Eastern Finland, and you have to be affiliated with the university to book a stay there. We took the first-year English majors there for a trip that was partly “compulsory fun”, partly an advising retreat.

Not all of our majors came on the trip, but I’m guessing around 38 of them did. There were five of us faculty members along and seven or eight tutors – older students who do peer advising. This kind of teacher/student ratio is typical for teaching as well. The plan was for equal parts work and play, including the feared sauna visit mentioned in a previous post. My job was to put together a song booklet and to lead a sing-along. I was told I had no other duties for the trip. I kept offering more help, but I really was allowed to simply have fun, eat, walk, chat with colleagues and sleep.

We left campus at noon on Friday by bus. The road took us through – you’ve guessed it – miles and miles of forest with the occasional lake. I love this scenery and don’t think I will ever tire of it. Though I’ve heard more than one story of non-Finnish visitors coming who after an hour of forest driving say “OK, I’ve seen enough trees.” It’s a six-hour tree-lined drive from Helsinki to Joensuu. Imagine what it’s like going into Northern Finland. This trip, however, only took about an hour.

Pulling into the Mekrijärvi research station was surreal. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I wasn’t anticipating the otherworldly lake views, the historic buildings, the exquisite light or the peace – things which you don’t normally associate with a ‘research station’. There was no traffic noise, no airplanes, nothing but birds and voices and the wind in the trees. We lined up to get our rooms and then unpacked before coffee was served.

After coffee, a few of us took a walk around. The light shifted as clouds rolled in, then brightened as they moved on. The sun glittering on the lake and the rowboats lined up on the shore almost tempted me to get in and row out to a tiny island in the middle of the lake -- after all, singing wouldn’t begin until late – but I stayed on dry land, besides a stroll down the pier. At five we had dinner, and then “compulsory fun” began at six thirty.

Compulsory fun began as a quiz. Students were read a list of events from the tutors’ and teachers’ lives and asked to guess who belonged to what. My secret was the time I had breakfast with Princess Christina of Sweden. I didn’t know if it was a good or bad thing that one group of students thought I was the one who had slept in a burning tent. After this quiz there was an activity to teach each other everyone’s names. To reinforce this activity, the group was divided into four teams. Two teams sat on either side of a sheet, designated one person to sit at the front of the group, and then the sheet would be pulled away. The person who said the name of the other person last had to go join the victorious team. After this game, it was time for sauna. As it turns out, none of the teachers went to the sauna – instead we went back to our suite of rooms and sat in the kitchen drinking. The saunas looked wonderful, but hopefully I’ll get to go back to Mekrijärvi another time when I’m braver.

We then had “iltapala”, or ‘little night food’, and then it was my turn to ‘work’. I passed out songbooks to the students, who sat dutifully in a circle. I asked them to look through the songs and pick one they wanted to sing. One brave soul wanted to start with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, which I imagined we would have to warm up to. Some sang in Finnish, but by the end of the song, everyone’s voices seemed to be swelling in strong unison in English. We progressed through some Beatles, Gordon Lightfoot, some Australian songs, ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’, ‘Freight Train’ and many others. And then, someone asked if we could sing ‘Hallelujah’ again.

I know it’s a small statistical sample, but it really seems like Finnish students love to sing. After my unpracticed fingers couldn’t deal with the steel strings any longer, they continued to sing other songs they knew. I tried to lead them in ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and they quickly took over on their own. Adele, Karelian folk songs, musicals, Michael Jackson followed. One young man even got up and sang a solo. Finally our department chair Greg had to close down the operation at midnight. It’s possible the students went elsewhere and continued singing, or drinking, or both.

In the morning, the fog changed the lighting once again. It felt more unreal than before, and I was fully prepared to see an elf or fairy wandering along. It’s no wonder that this part of Finland is famous for its runesingers – there is plenty of inspiration here. After breakfast, we walked to a farm that had belonged to the most famous of them, Simana Sissonen. As seems to be the custom here, the farm wasn’t just one building, but two farm houses, a granary (aitta) which doubled as a summer sleeping building (its lack of windows would have made it particularly dark for the nights when there was no sunset), a sauna, and a few other buildings.

 

If you haven’t read the Kalevala, Finland’s national folk epic, this area probably won’t make much sense to you, nor will the reverence people have for their runesingers. Karelia is well known for these artists, and a statue of Larin Paraske, one of the most renowned, sits in a prominent position on a stairway landing in the UEF library. It's tempting to make a connection between the runesingers of Karelia and the eager-to-sing Finnish students.

As we returned to Joensuu, the weather got grayer and wetter. I got on my bike, smashed my belongings in my basket and covered them with the flimsy plastic poncho I got last summer on my bus tour of Budapest, and pedaled home in the rain.

I’m going to put Mekrijärvi on my list of places to revisit for a longer stay.

Loss

It's been one month since I moved to Finland. There could certainly be a more cheery way to celebrate that fact than to write a post called "Loss", but it's the place I'm in just now for several reasons.
For one thing, it's September 11. No American who sat glued to the television trying to wrap his or her mind around an airplane boring straight into a skyscraper will ever be able to forget what happened that day. I can't imagine how it was for those who were actually there, or who lost loved ones.
The other thing, which is more immediate, is that a former colleague from the University of Oregon was just brutally murdered, along with her partner. Ann Dhu McLucas was formerly a dean of the School of Music and a central figure in Eugene's very fine music scene. Through Facebook and e-mails I can feel the grief and pain and disbelief.
Before I go any further, I want to bring up the issue of "comparative loss". There are great and small losses, but I don't want to compare them, nor to compare mine with those of any other person. I'm thinking of two statements made by wise people: You cannot compare two subjective experiences in any meaningful way, and experiencing a loss brings up all the losses you've ever had. So I'll simply continue, bearing this in mind.
I've mostly focused on the wonderful opportunity of coming to a foreign country, to a tenured position at a university no less, and to having a decent living wage for once. I've focused on the healthiness of my lifestyle here (biking, for example) and the delightful experiences I've had so far. And let's not forget the wonderful, warm and welcoming people I've encountered.
That being said, this has been a huge ball of loss.
First of all, I moved to Eugene in 1992. So it was my home for 20 years. I've never lived anywhere else for  that long. The web of my acquaintances, some of whom are close friends and adopted family, is thick and tight. That loss right there is profound and, if I allow myself to think about it, paralyzing.
(I need to go fetch a handkerchief. Right back.)
Let me talk about pets for a moment. My first reaction to hearing about job possibilities in Finland was, I kid you not, "Oh, I can't do that. I have a house and elderly pets." I miss my pets every day. I never thought I would be a pet person, but the dog and cat that my children convinced me to let them adopt sneaked into my heart without my noticing. It's so odd to not have a graying muzzle push in under my arm, so unthinkable to not have a big bundle of burry orangish fur curled up next to me as I work. So quiet when I get home. I am somewhat comforted by knowing that they are with a friend who loves them as much as I do. But I still miss them.
And my house. I don't mind living in a smaller space. My home was too big once my children moved away. But I miss things about it: the views out the windows. My sleigh bed. My large bathroom where I could spread things out on a big counter. My love seat, where I had a view of the suet feeder with its cluster of pine siskins. The deck! From my deck I could see my garden, the forest, my little apple trees, bats and larks and the occasional eagle. And let's not forget the ability to find what I need -- not "Oh. I guess I need to buy one of those, too." I may have an apartment and some furniture, but I'm still camping.
I can't even talk about the loss of my church family, my colleagues and students at the high school where I worked. The committees I belonged to and the important work we were doing. Swedish class. The ability to get in my car and drive to see my family. No, I can't touch those losses yet because it hurts too much.
So there it is: a litany of losses.
In the US, we like happy endings. Our films tend to end that way. We're always wanting to fix people's problems for them, tell folks to "cheer up". I could try to list what I'm grateful for here and to think about how I will get to see my children at Christmastime, my friends in Eugene in June. But today I'll just let these losses resonate. It's OK to be sad sometimes. Another wise person once told me, "Emotions are like clouds. They can look very stormy and ugly, but they are clouds, and they eventually move on." I guess I'll just watch the rain for now.

Finnish is funnish?

This post could end up being rather long, so I don't mind (and won't even know) if you take a break. But my relationship to Finnish began before I could speak any language whatsoever, so it's been a long one. And although several years ago I made my peace with never getting any better at it, life has a way of shaking up your suppositions about "the rest of my life", so the story is nowhere near over.

You should know that it's pretty much impossible to learn Finnish. I could talk about it in technical terms like agglutinative and highly inflected languages, but basically, it's not Indo-European (which means you can't get very far based on languages you already know, unless they happen to be Estonian and, well, Estonian), it has 14 cases, and it doesn't distinguish between "he" and "she". The word "mother" is pretty similar in Indo-European languages: Mutter, mere, mama -- but in Finnish it's äiti. That will give you some sense of its weirdness. And I'm not saying this so you will be impressed with the fact that I know any Finnish at all, but to give you some idea of the effort it takes to learn it.

My mother made an effort, and it was quickly quashed. She was the first non-Finn to marry into my father's family, and she wanted to make a good impression on his grandmother (whom we always called Mumma). So she asked him to teach her how to say, "Grandmother, may I pour you more coffee?" He trained with her for several weeks until the big day came. After my mother said her sentence, coffee pot in hand, in the presence of not only Mumma but also the aunts and uncles, there was a shocked silence; Mumma, no dummy, looked at my father with a stern gaze and scolded him by his Finnish name, Rolanti. Meanwhile, Rolanti was laughing so hard he could barely catch his breath. My mother had said the equivalent of "The n**ger is standing behind the tree." Although her foray into learning the Finnish language was brief and traumatic, my father's treachery probably did more to endear her to her new family than the most perfect Finnish phrase could have done.

Had I known that story when I was ten years old, I might not have tried to get my father to teach me Finnish. We went to Fairport Harbor almost every weekend when we lived in Ohio, and I always heard the relatives talking about us kids. I wanted to know what they were saying, and I wanted to be able to talk to Mumma, who would bake nisua for us and serve us milk in clear glasses with thin rings of color running horizontally around them. I can still see them, still smell the nisua, and still hear her say the only English words she knew: "milk" and "I love you". You can get pretty far with those words, but I wanted more. I wanted in.

I had a brand-new Barbie diary, bound in shiny red plastic, that I got as a birthday present, and I figured it was a perfect place to record one word a day. If I could get a new Finnish word each day, I would eventually know the Finnish language. But my father always found reasons not to give me a word. He was either too tired, couldn't think of one, made a silly one up, or, on one occasion, gave me one so hard that I nearly cried from frustration at not being able to pronounce it to his standards. I soon gave up the project. But a few years later, I bought a "Teach yourself Finnish" book at Topanga Plaza, our local mall, and I took it with me whenever I babysat, writing out complex flash cards with nouns and cases and English translations. I even did the end-of-the-chapter exercises. I'm not sure how far it took me, but it was a better tool than asking my father to help me.

Finally, when I started college at UCLA, I was able to take a real Finnish class, and at the end of the year I got to go to Lappeenranta for a Finnish-government sponsored month-long language class. My father, to his credit, paid my airfare, which I'm certain was a financial strain. I went on to take Finnish in Sweden as a graduate student and to go to Lappeenranta for another month-long jaunt. But that was the end of my formal Finnish-language career. By then my focus had turned to Sweden and the Swedish language, which was far easier to pick up than Finnish. Though I kept it up enough to talk to relatives when I would visit and to write a little paragraph to my grandmother now and again, it never got to the point of pure fluency.

How I got to where I am now would take another long post. But I shake my head now at how improbable this is, this return to my benevolent nemesis. I haven't tried to do anything with Finnish for decades. I can stumble by in Finnish. I can tell my relatives things about my life, and I probably sound like I'm about seven years old. I can take care of simple errands in a shop, and, if I focus intently, I can get the gist of about 70 percent of what I hear. But seeing a long text in Finnish makes me feel like I'm on the high dive. In the past I've simply turned back and said, "I'll be braver next time." This is "next time". Now. I have to deal with e-mails at the university, official documents, faculty meetings and newspapers. And I am determined to do this thing, this long slow upward slope of language acquisition, one more time.

It's not all hard work, though. The old joy of learning a new language is there. I may not be as thrilled to write vocabulary cards or to try out new sounds, but the excitement of discovery can still kick in. Yesterday, while driving around northern Joensuu with Sisko and Juhani, I kept noticing place names that ended with -kangas (=cloth). I've mixed that word up with other -as words like "rengas" (=tire), but this time I was proud that I had remembered it. I wanted to try to ask if there had been textile industries in the area, but it was a bit beyond what I could do, so I pointed to Sisko's jacket and asked, "Kangas?" She turned the jacket so I could see the inside and said the equivalent of "Yes, this is a nice, warm jacket because of the layers." (I should point out that Sisko and Juhani, who have infinite patience for this sort of thing, have never learned a foreign language, going to school in rural, impoverished Finland during World War II.) I tried again: "Raatekangas? Käpykangas?" Juhani caught on and said the equivalent of "Oh, that's a different kind of 'kangas'". He pointed to the woods and said, "That's kangas -- forest with moss and berries and such." I looked in my dictionary and I will copy here what it said:
KANGAS  1. cloth, material   2. canvas 3. a dry peaty forest with heavy moss and lichen cover
I was first of all incredibly amused that Finnish has a specific word for this kind of forest, and tickled that it would be equated with material, because it does look like a soft blanket lying under the trees. And now I'll know what that word means in place names. You need these small moments of delight in the desert slog edged with grammar mistakes and fatigue.

There's much more to say, but you're probably fatigued as well. I'll save it for another day.