/travel/finland/Profound Thoughts from a Weekend in Kuusamo
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.
Last weekend I went to Kuusamo. Coincidentally, so did Paul, but we didn't bump into each other.
I left in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The town was quiet, and I got a few shots of empty Oulu. On the bus out of town, there was a little garden of tulips, nearing full bloom. The busride was uneventful and sleepy.
Kuusamo is a reasonably large town. Nearby is Ruka, a major skiing center in Finland. We were outside a town outside of Ruka, in a rented cabin. The cabin itself was simple, and its surroundings were fairly bland.
The highlight was two light hikes through the Finnish forest. It doesn't take too long to get deep enough in the hills ("mountains", they say) that you can't hear anything that doesn't belong. I wish I had taken more time to just stop and listen, since somtimes the sounds of cities drives me to distraction. We all stopped on one of the little walkways at one point. You could hear exactly three things, and nothing more -- running water from nearby rapids, a few birds chirping, and our own little rustles as we stood in silence.
The Finnish forest is an interesting place. Because of the climate and lighting, the trees are generally narrow and spindly. The evergreens have long bare trunks and fairly sparse needles, and the leaves on the deciduous trees are small, but plentiful.
The trails we were on took us over bogs, up and down hills, and through flat fields with trees. We saw only a few signs of fauna, though these included the largest ant hill I've ever seen. The trail was often rocky, but the forest around us wasn't. It's obvious when you say it that way that the forest is rocky too, but it's not obvious when you're walking along. The rocks are lying under the forest, almost never visible.
The bogs are fascinating. They seemed stagnant, but if you looked carefully you could see clearly that the water was in fact flowing through them, reasonably quickly. There are only a few inches of water above the soft, moss-like growth that runs deep beneath them. All of the lakes and ponds tucked in the mountains were clear and lifeless. The usual sets of circles rippling outward from fish or frogs were absent, as were the little trails from an insect's wake. We saw one water bug the whole time. There's little algae and few lily pads. Things seem to decay slowly -- some ponds had an unnatural number of trees at the bottom.
When I was walking, I was trying to figure out how I would explain the beauty of those forests. They aren't more untouched than National Parks in Canada, and by most characteristics they aren't the beautiful. But they are. And then I figured it out: The whole forest puts the cycles of death and life and the perpetuity of those cycles directly, unavoidably in front of you. The forest felt ageless, markless, unsusceptible to forest fires or other traumas; Finland is relatively immune to severe weather and natural disasters like earthquakes. One thousand years ago, and one thousand years from now, these forest are the same. You could see trees in every state of life, from pinecone to sappling to fullgrown to fresh-fallen to covered in moss to being just a long narrow imperfection in the ground, completely buried in other life, more often than not with sapplings growing on it. Trees that had fallen still clinging to the earth around their shallow root structure seemed to make good starting points for ant-hills. Other than the trodden path that we walked along, everything was soft and moist, layer upon layer of life, death, death, and decay.
The forest was constantly in all states of life and death. It was impossible to separate the obvious cycle in any reasonable way if you looked at the forest instead of the trees.
