It’s easier to be smitten with anything cast in its best light. When all you’ve ever really known of a place is seen through rose-colored glasses, it gets the best consideration. As our family’s annual summer destination, Finland has given us it’s best, summer in and summer out. Living here through the winter could be a country of a different color, or at least shade.
My first impression of Finland was a single late-summer day in 1997. I had bussed and boated my way to Helsinki from where I was living and training in Torsby, Sweden, for a four-rest-day mini-trip to the country of my ancestors. I spent a day in Stockholm beforehand. The AF Chapman—a ship that worked as a very cool hostel---seemed an idyllic place from which to operate on a budget. That was until I laid awake all night in the top bunk fearing for my safety as a fellow lodger in the bunk below went through fits of grunting and swearing, all night long. I realize with distance and hindsight today, that the poor guy was probably struggling with a pathos not dangerous to me at all, and I kind of feel for him as I recall the experience. Still, it was one of those things where I laid awake for 7 hours wondering what I could do to get out of it and if I’d emerge unscathed as daylight returned. Luckily, night wasn’t long. I survived.
I packed up my things, walked around Stockholm, then in the early evening, went on my merry way to Helsinki, expecting to use my bunk on the Silja Line ship to catch up on sleep lost on the Chapman. As I entered my compartment in steerage on the cheapest ticket I could get, I first realized that if the ship sprung a leak in the hull, my compartment comrades and I would be the first to suck down the cold salt water of the Baltic Sea. The second thing I noticed was that the three other college-aged dudes in my sleeping arrangement weren’t likely to help me catch up on my sleep lost on the Chapman, which was confirmed and then some as the trip wore on. By the time we landed in Helsinki, I was sleep deprived and staring 14 hours down before I could re-board and maybe rest on the return trip to Stockholm. I was not exactly in a great frame of mind when I first set foot on Finnish soil.
I was supposed to have competed years prior, way up north of the arctic circle in February, 1991, at the Biathlon Junior World Championships in Sodankylä, but a combination of Desert Storm breaking out, and probably an unexpected number of juniors meeting the qualification criteria (I think it was something like 6 or 7 athletes met the standard which was probably 5-6 beyond what any budget the USBA had anticipated for the event) kept me and all those other US juniors home for safety reasons. I was instead, after spinning my competitive wheels for the next month and a half, rewarded by the USBA with one of two spots on a trip to the Miyasama Ski Games in Sapporo, Japan—a long standing invitational skiing event in Japan’s snow-buried northern island of Hokkaido. It was cool and all, especially as my first overseas competition trip, but it was not the country of my family as I’d been anticipating.
So, back to Helsinki 1997, massively sleep deprived, I walked off the ship into Finland for the first time, early on a beautiful August morning, just haggard, trying to stay awake, with no agenda, no plan, and no research. Classic 25 year-old Chad. I was also quite poor, spending the little money I’d accrued as a National Guard soldier/athlete to train in Sweden in preparation for an Olympics I ultimately never competed in. So, trained not to spend ANYTHING on ANYTHING, I neglected to utilize the affordable street cars. Instead, I walked all over the city in an exhausted state, took a nap or two on park benches, found the Sibelius monument, and still left Finland with a good impression, to zonk out on my return ship to Stockholm. I don’t know if it was lightheadedness or not, but Helsinki on a nice summer day, felt so light and airy, very approachable and not too stuffy or taking itself too seriously while being very chicly dressed—an impression that has since been confirmed in a state of woke, several times over, along with other, numerous, since-revealed nuances of character.
As luck would have it, I would never actually set foot in Finland to compete. Ten years after that stint in Helsinki, I returned there a second time, directly from the US with my fiancé at Christmas time, to meet her friends and family ahead of our hastily-planned nuptials the coming February. What I experienced this time around was a very different Finland indeed—one we are slowly heading into right now.
Mimmu’s family and friends were great. I felt welcomed. The holiday spirit warmed everything. I met the real Santa Claus up in Rovaniemi, ate reindeer meat gravy over mashed potatoes and had riisipuuru after Joulu sauna by candlelight. We walked with candles in the Jyväskylä cemetery, placing them at Mimmu’s relatives’ grave sites. The candle light of us and all the others doing the same was touching and beautiful. The depth and duration of darkness surprised me on that second trip to Finland, but how it was embraced in holiday traditions did too. I think I knew it would be dark that time of year, but it left an impression deeper than I’d expected going into it.
When we arrived in Helsinki this summer on July 20th, the sun rose that day at 4:22 a.m., though we were on approach for landing in Amsterdam at that moment. We arrived at Helsinki airport at 6:30 p.m. and the sun felt like late afternoon. We spent the first night in a hotel by the port I floated into on the Silja Line back in 1997, and walked into the Tori to enjoy a dusk, grilli-stand dinner, with almost nobody else around. By the time we got back to the hotel to rest our weary travelling heads, it was after 11:00 p.m. The official sunset that day was 10:22 p.m., but the way the sun actually descends into darkness in the summer here, even after actual sunset, the “midnight sun” hangs around for hours. As our heads hit pillows, it was approaching midnight, and it was still too light out to fall asleep without the heavy shades drawn to block out the outside radiance.
Today, September 25th, the sun rose in Jyväskylä at 7:09 a.m. and will set at 7:06 p.m. In the two months since the day we arrived in Helsinki, the day is 6 hours and 3 minutes shorter if measured by sunrise and sunset. That’s one-quarter of a day’s sunlight that has been lost due to our latitude and tilt of the earth. So, a sizable chunk.
Jyväskylä is probably further north than you think. I really hadn’t given our northerliness such thorough consideration either. I started considering it in recent weeks as I’ve seen the days shorten fairly drastically. Finland seems and feels “civilized.” It doesn’t feel like a northern outpost. In fact, as I studied this psychological misconception in myself, I discovered many North Americans misperceive how far north all of Europe is.
For example, did you realize both Moscow and St. Petersburg are south of Finland? The whole country. Did you know London is a bit north of Calgary, Minneapolis would be in Northern Italy or that Chicago is south of Rome? New York is south of Istanbul. But the best one is, that great bastion of the north, Quebec City, is south of…you guessed it, Paris. You don’t often hear much about Paris being a northern city.
The whole of Europe is way north of both the Asian and North American continental locales with similar climates. The surrounding oceans and seas create a much more temperate climate than the massive landmasses that interact with the cold air and weather patterns at the northern reaches of the earth. And it really makes living this far north seem less, well, northern. But the sun doesn’t lie either.
In rank order of population heading south in any direction from the North Pole, Jyväskylä is the 5th largest city you’d come across. That’s right. There are only 4 bigger cities north of Jyväskylä in the entire world—Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, and Norilsk, Russia; and Oulu, Finland. That’s it. Of the 20 largest cities north of the 60th parallel, only one (Anchorage, 5th) is outside Russia or Scandinavia. Even outposts that conjure up really way-the-heck-up-there images in our minds, like Whitehorse, Yukon, or Anchorage, Alaska, are both south of Jyväskylä. We are smack dab at the same latitude as Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and just a touch south of Fairbanks and Nome.
What this northernness does is create a huge dichotomy of daylight between summer and winter. Anyone reading this from Alaska or Finland itself might find this blog relatively ho-hum, because you’ve lived this seasonal daylight yo-yo plenty. NBD. But for us, this is probably going to be an adjustment. I think back to the dark December Christmas of 2007, and perhaps I was under more duress as I met person after person in a venerable “This Is Your Life” for Mimmu, speaking none of the language while being the focus of everyone’s intense quizzical interest. Maybe I was just more sensitive to the dark because of other factors affecting me? I spent two Olympic Trials in 1993 and 1994 at Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage, so I’d been nearly this north before. I was there for two stretches of a couple weeks that winter, and I don’t remember it being particularly hard as much as feeling kind of like you are constantly waking up or getting ready for bed.
The first I actually thought about it for us this winter was at the end of August. We were still having nice days, but temps started to dip more regularly, and we were consistently twenty degrees cooler than Duluth. Duluth has since started to catch up, but I realized the time frame between the solstice and the equinox are exactly the same everywhere. Up here, the change is more drastic though. Not so drastic that you wake up one day and say, ”Hey, what gives on this fall-back crap?!” The change here is hard enough that they don’t need a day each year to mess with a savings of or returning of daylight. It happens quickly enough on its own. Just since September 1 the day has 2 hours and twenty minutes less daylight, and that’s just a running start to what October and November are going to bring us—longer and longer stretches of unescapable darkness.
It’s easiest to fall for something in its best light. The rates of divorce these days are a testament to that notion. For the most part, Finland for me and my kids has been from its best side—the side that says, “I think I want to marry this.” It’s easy to be happy and love anything when it’s easy and lovely. Not that late fall and winter will be horrible here, but we’re going to get very familiar with it without its makeup on, when it needs to bathe, do its laundry, brush its teeth, comb its hair, and perhaps not be quite as jolly as when times are the best. We’re going to get “more intimate” with Finland than we’ve ever been. Mimmu hasn’t lived this far north through a winter since 1999. The kids and I never have. Most humans on earth have never done it. It’s probably not that scary, but it is an unknown, and it’s not Finland’s best side. I think addressing that up front is a wise strategy.
Here’s hoping the joy and anticipation of the holidays is enough to cover up that pimple we don’t usually see, or those mornings she wakes up on the wrong side of the bed. A good snowfall would certainly help me. Great skiing would present another good side of Finland when we might otherwise have discovered its closet drinking.