The Chinese Wildfire Hoax

Friends and family back in Georgia have been dealing lately with something out of the ordinary and outside my own experience -- a series of big wildfires scattered all across the Southern Appalachian mountains. One of the fires, the Rough Ridge fire in the Cohutta Mountains, is said to be perhaps the largest in North Georgia's history. I've seen satellite images of smoke covering the northernmost third of the state, reaching down to Atlanta and Athens. It seems a bit unreal.

If it's the same Rough Ridge area that I once went camping with my father and brother, then it is some very rugged terrain firefighters have having to contend with.

Of course, in the heavily wooded mountains of Georgia and North Carolina, there have always been the occasional forest fire, though none from the past that really stand out in my mind.

Back in the days when my father was young, there was the habit of burning off the underbrush in the mountains in springtime, all the better for the grazing cattle that farmers let range freely during the summer. But that practice ended long before I was born.

As a kid, I can recall seeing just one wildfire, from a distance at night. It formed a crooked orange line in the dark as it burned on the side of Talona Mountain (which we called Reed Mountain, for some reason), an isolated "monadnock" that rose within easy viewing distance of my family's home.

And when I was in college at Young Harris, essentially at the base of Brasstown Bald, Georgia's highest peak, there was once a fire somewhere in the area. It was serious enough that the Forest Service asked for students to volunteer to help with the fire fighting. My classes wouldn't allow me to join, but some of my friends did and came back to school at the end of the day sooty and looking a bit exhilarated. I did envy them for the experience.

In any case, never when I was living in Georgia would there be so many fires burning at the same time, especially in November. Typically, autumns were coolish, and a bit wet, not what I would think of as fire season. 

The photos and reports that I'm seeing now seems like a smaller-scale version of something out of the American West, where fire is often enough an inescapable part of life. I know a family in Colorado who had to evacuate their house a few years ago due to an approaching fire and can still point to the spot just across the road where the flames thankfully came to a halt. And this is not not far from Storm King Mountain, where 14 firefighters lost their lives in 1994, a grim reminder of the deadly and destructive power of uncontrolled fire. 

A couple of years ago, we were driving across northern Arizona when the news came over the radio that 19 "hot shot" firefighters had similarly died at Yarnell Hill some 60 miles to the south of us. Later that night, we could see a small fire burning on Dean Peak in the Hualapai Mountains near Kingman, the faint smell of smoke noticeable in the car as as we sped down Interstate 40. 

Of course, fire is also a huge concern in Finland, a country made up almost entirely of forests. Fire prevention is taken very seriously here, and a typical feature of the evening news in summer is the latest update on which parts of the country are under metsäspalovaroitus ("forest fire warning"), when open fires in woodlands is strictly forbidden. Sometimes the entire country is under such a warning. That was surely the case in the summer of 2006, which was incredibly dry. Finland avoided major fires then, but even in Helsinki you could sometimes not avoid the smell of smoke reaching all the way from across the border in Russia, where numerous fires burned out of control for days, due to the lack of resources or motivation to extinguish them. 

Luckily, no lives or structures have been lost to the North Georgia blazes, and at the moment smoke is the biggest threat to people. But the smoke, if nothing else, is unpleasant and potentially unhealthy. The Atlanta area was placed under a Code Red air quality alert, indicating the smoke can be harmful for everyone, not only children and those with respiratory ailments. 

And conditions don't seem likely to improve. Apparently, there's a chance of rain this weekend for the area, but before that temperatures are still expected to reach 24 C (75 F), which to me seems unnaturally high for a week before Thanksgiving.

Nowadays, when every little thing gets politicized, I'm amazed I haven't yet seen anyone trying to score political points over these unprecedented wildfires, and I hesitate to do it myself (a bit).

I've always been extremely annoyed by conservative pundits or talk show hosts who poke fun at the notion of global warning wherever there is an usually big winter storm somewhere. Erick Erickson comes to mind, declaring something like, "Well, with all the snow covering Buffalo right now, it sure looks like 'Global Warming' to me. Ha, ha, ha!" Or something like that. Appealing to the common sense of the common man.

Hearing this kind of nonsense always makes me want to pull my hair out, thinking "No you idiot, you have to look at the trend, the overall trend. You can't look at just one isolated event and declare that climate change is bogus." Especially, when the event goes against the prevailing trend.

By the same token, you should also guard against making too much of an unusual weather pattern when it seems to confirm the reality of climate change. You never hear folks like Erick Erickson doing that.

That said, rare drought conditions and historically bad wildfires certainly seem to fit predictions of a rapidly warming planet. You would think the warm, tinder-dry conditions in the Southern Appalachians in late autumn would make local people, many of whom voted for Donald Trump, stop and consider that maybe this is a sign of global warming. Maybe it's not a Chinese hoax after all, despite what Trump has claimed over and over again.

You would think they might finally take the issue seriously and be alarmed that the next head of the Environmental Protection Agency might well be a climate change denier.

Or, maybe not. Maybe they'll just breathe in the pungent smell of burning timber and, with a sense of self-satisfaction, think to themselves, "Ah, nothing to worry about. That smells like Trump's America to me!"

Wildfire in California, 2008. 
Photo: Bureau of Land Management.

A Sentimental Journey

A couple of weeks ago, I made a slightly weird trip to America, to my home state of Georgia. It wasn’t exactly an impromptu trip, but it was unexpected in some ways, even extraordinary.

In the past, I usually traveled to my native land with my family during the summer, when the kids were out of school, back before they were all grown up. This time I went alone, and this time it was in autumn, a season in which I have found myself in America only once in the past quarter-century.

As odd as the timing was, the route I took was also unusual. It was convoluted, you might even say highly impractical and in some small way adventurous. I hope to share some impressions from that trip in later posts, hopefully before they fade. We’ll see.

Ever since my father died in 2006, I have had some unfinished family business back in Georgia that I’ve kept putting off, especially as my visits back there became less frequent. I am even now a bit shocked to realize I have been to Georgia only twice in the past ten years, and the last time was over five years ago. I guess that’s how things go.

Anyway, feeling that I finally couldn’t put off making a short trip to Georgia any longer, I jumped at the chance when I saw that SAS was offering super cheap flights to the States this autumn. Only, none of these flights was to Atlanta. The closest destination was, in fact, Washington, D.C.

Still, I convinced myself that Washington, on the edge of Dixie, is not that far from North Georgia. And, I’m always certainly up for doing a little road trip, although doing one solo was a completely new experience for me.

Anyway, that’s how I found myself in the States, road tripping on my own some 500 miles (800 km) to Georgia, not exactly on holiday, but driven by a need – a need tinged with profoundly bittersweet expectations – to wrap up some personal affairs.

One item on that agenda was the bringing back to Finland of an heirloom, my father’s guitar. That was a small challenge in itself, considering how we are long past the golden age of passenger-friendly air travel when you could bring all manner of luggage onto planes without incurring extra charges.

I was also acutely aware that wrapping up things, finally, at the old homestead meant I might not be coming back again for some time. Or maybe I will. Who knows? In any event, when you leave any place there is never a guarantee that you will ever return. 

So, my quick trip Stateside had all the makings for a very sentimental journey, and it was. 

I was able to re-connect with some places from my previous life. I was able to spend time with close relatives I don’t often see, though sadly only a few, so short was the time. And I was able to get some superficial feeling for what’s going on now in that part of America – on the ground, as they say.

It seems I should be able, after such a trip, to sit down and reflect on all the places I went and all the things I did, process it all and then discover one or two gems of understanding, of revelation, of self-awareness that sums up the whole experience. If there are such "gems" to discover, that is.

The best I can come up with is this:  We should try as hard as we can to hang onto family, no matter how distant and different we might be. The passage of time is relentless. It can be a brutal reality to face. The past really is past – sometimes a hard, but necessary, truth to grapple with. And the landscape of my own past life, still familiar from so many memories, is moving on without me, making me feel less and less a part of it. 

With each long-delayed visit back there, America seems increasingly to me to be a weird place in some ways. More than ever, the country I grew up (especially the South) and I seem to be diverging, moving further apart. Traveling to my hometown, I felt more than ever like a mere visitor there, a foreigner. I guess that's natural after so long. 

To quote the writer Thomas Wolfe, whose own hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, I paid a quick visit to during this trip: “You can’t go home again.”

Tell me about it. 

Selfie somewhere deep in the woods of North Georgia. 
I do miss the sunshine.

Voting Here and There

I just cast my vote in the US presidential election. For the past two and a half decades, I’ve been voting by absentee ballot from my home here in Helsinki. In the past, I have done this by marking an overlarge stiff paper ballot sent from my birthplace in Georgia.

This election cycle, I decided instead to use the “electronic” option, which is available for UOCAVA voters. (For the record, UOCAVA - a term that could not be more unlovely if it came from the forges of Hell itself - stands for Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.)

“Electronic” in this case means that, as an UOCAVA voter, I can now download my ballot from a website, print it out, mark it, and enclose it in a blank envelope (provided by myself). I then enclose that, with a signed oath, in a second envelope (again, provided by myself – I’m saving the State of Georgia some money here), before mailing the whole thing to my hometown back in Georgia.

Sadly, while I’m doing all this I’m fully aware that my vote will not matter anyway. Not one bit. Zilch. It will be essentially ignored. Still, I’m glad to do it out of principle and a sense of duty. I feel better knowing at least I tried to have my voice heard.

Non-Americans probably don’t realize how voting works in the U.S. Of course, like in most other countries, Finland included, voting takes place locally. I vote in my home county in North Georgia, where I am still a registered voter though I haven’t lived there since I was 18. In theory, I could vote for local offices like the county sheriff or school superintendent. In practice, I only cast votes for national offices (presidency and congress), because I don’t think it’s fair to influence (as if) local issues I really don’t follow. (As a UOCAVA voter, I’m allowed to vote only for national offices, which is fine by me.)

While county-based voting makes supreme sense when you live in the county where you vote, it’s a bit odd for long-term expats who, like me, have only the flimsiest connection with their “voting homes”. I’ll never live in Gilmer County again, but as a voter, I’m stuck there for the rest of my life. That is why my vote will never count.

Finns also vote locally, but those living overseas are not tied to their home piiri. In late 1981, when Finland was preparing to elect its first new president in 25 years, my future wife and I were traveling in Mexico. To ensure she wouldn’t miss her chance to do her civic duty, we stopped by the Finnish embassy in Mexico City so she could vote. She simply showed up there, out of the blue, presented her Finnish passport and voted. It’s not an option enjoyed by us Americans overseas.

The consequence of being forced to vote in Georgia is, I’ll say it again, my vote won’t count. This form of, what you might call, personal voter “nullification” may be unique to America and can be traced directly back to the Founding Fathers.

Since the US Constitution was adopted in 1789, the US has elected presidents through an “Electoral College”, 538 men and women who do the actual voting for president. It is these electors that we mere citizens will technically be voting for this November 6^th.

The whole idea is an obsolete holdover from the 18^th century. Inserting 538 “middlemen” into the process is unnecessary enough, but it also dilutes democracy. Condensing the preferences of some 130 million voters into only 538 votes that really count doesn’t exactly meet the standard of one-person-one-vote.

What makes the system truly undemocratic, though, is the way the individual states choose those 538 electors. All but two states use the self-described “winner takes all” approach. Georgia has 16 votes in the Electoral College, all of which will go to one candidate. Georgia voters will effectively select 16 Republican electors or 16 Democratic electors, nothing in between. It’s an either/or proposition. No shades of grey here.

Of course, that’s only hypothetical. In reality, Georgia being Georgia, there is only one possible outcome – sixteen Georgians will officially cast votes for Mitt Romney and no one will vote for Barack Obama.

This is because Georgia in political terms is a solidly red state. That doesn’t mean that, as it would in the rest of the world, Georgia stands in proletariat solidity with the likes of Hugo Chávez. In exceptional America, “red” means politically conservative and “blue” means liberal, in other words, Republican and Democratic. The distinction has not always been so stark as it is now.

When I was growing up, Georgia was practically a one-party state, and that party was Democratic. This was a legacy of the Civil War, already a century in the past. The Republican Party had been the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Reconstruction, so the old Confederacy naturally gravitated toward the Democratic Party, and stayed with it.

One thing that seems safe to say about Southerners is that many of them know how to hold a grudge, especially when it comes to things like defeat on the battlefield and the emancipation of human property. At least that would explain how, in the 25 elections held between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Georgia consistently thumbed its nose at Lincoln's Grand Old Party and gave its electoral votes to Democrats, every single time.

(The exception to this anti-Republican reaction was the half dozen counties in the mountains, including my home county, which didn’t much support secession and after the war voted Republican long before the rest of Georgia did.)

That unwaveringly conservative Georgia could vote unwaveringly for the party that eventually gave us Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been due to the schizophrenic nature of the Democratic Party, which in the past has been happy to accommodate both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives and segregationists. That changed as Democrats started enacting Civil Rights laws and the right wing of the party began defecting to the GOP. Finally, the Republican Party had a chance to take over Georgia, and it did big time.

John Kennedy was the last Democrat Georgia voted for who wasn’t a Southerner (namely native-son Jimmy Carter, both times, and Bill Clinton, but only for his first term). Otherwise, it’s been only Republicans since 1964, except when the Peach State did itself proud by voting for raging, hard-core segregationist Independent George Wallace. Jesus Christ!

This is why, it’s dead certain that Georgia will go Republican again, and why my vote for Barack Obama will count for nothing in the Electoral College.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain, though. Due to the way the Electoral College distorts elections, a lot of Republican votes will also be nullified. For example, Republican voters in Democratic bastions California and New York (together, 84 electoral votes), might as well stay home. The way it adds up in the current election, the quirky math of the Electoral College gives Mitt Romney fewer chances of winning the majority of those 538 votes. I guess we can thank the Constitution for that.

Finland used to have its own Electoral College, which was abandoned in 1994. Elections here are now based purely on the popular vote, which is the most straightforward way to measure the will of the people. That is kind of obvious.

Despite the overall advantage that the Electoral College gives Barack Obama this time around, I would love to see it abolished. If the US had relied on a simple tally of votes back in 2000, George W. Bush would never have been president, and things, well, things might have turned out very differently. 

Super Tuesday

The Republican presidential race took a great leap on Tuesday when my home state of Georgia, along with nine others, all held primaries or caucuses on the same day.  Against my better judgment, I stayed up to around 3:30 to watch the returns come in.  Georgia was declared a win for Newt Gingrich within minutes of the polls closing at 2:00 a.m. Helsinki time.  No surprise there.  Not even Newt could manage to lose in his home state. 

Gingrich got 47% of the vote in Georgia, to Romney’s 26%.  What surprises me is that Santorum, favorite of hard-core evangelical Christians was only able to reach 20%.  Ron Paul got a pitiful 6%, which I guess shows there really isn’t much of a libertarian streak in the Peach State after all.  Republicans in my home county in North Georgia went for the native son in an even bigger way.  They cast 51% of their votes for Gingrich, giving him a whopping 28 points lead over Romney.  And this despite support for Romney from some of the county’s more prominent citizens that was enthusiastic enough to draw attention from national TV, though not exactly in a good way. 

While Gingrich took Georgia by storm, you have to wonder whether the hurricane force of his personality (read, “blow-hard”) is strong enough to carry him much beyond his home state.  It begins to look like he doesn’t have much of a natural base outside his native south, if even there.  In northern and western Super Tuesday states, like Massachusetts and Idaho, Gingrich didn’t make it higher than 8%.  In Ohio, he did better (15%), but still came in third. 

Even in the South, Gingrich wasn’t a shoo-in.  Neighboring Tennessee, just up I-75 from Atlanta, went overwhelmingly for Santorum, leaving Gingrich in distant third place.  With a less-than-stellar showing like that, it’s no wonder there’s lots of talk that Gingrich should do everyone a favor and quit.  Of course, he won’t.  Not yet.  He’s betting that Georgia and South Carolina weren’t just flukes and is putting all his chips on Alabama and Mississippi, two other Deep South states that vote next Tuesday. 

I have a feeling that the baffling allure of Newt Gingrich does not extend much beyond the Georgia state line, and he’ll lose next week, especially when God-fearing voters in Alabama and Mississippi have the option of Rick Santorum. 

If you ask me, Santorum’s allure is just as baffling as Gingrich’s.  He is not only conservative, but also a true believer.  He’s a deeply religious Catholic with an antiquated worldview that has apparently prompted him reopen a debate that many of us thought was settled over 50 years ago. 

Everyone recognizes that abortion is an incredibly emotional and tangled issue, and one that is still controversial for many Americans.  I don’t doubt for a moment that Santorum, like many conservatives, would like to see abortion disappear.  But what is surprising is that he also seems to feel the same way about birth control, decades after the Pill made planned pregnancies easier and a way of life for most Americans. 

Maybe that’s what bothers Santorum.  He is currently riding the wave of controversy over birth control that would have been hard to predict a year ago.  He has talked about “the dangers of contraception” in America, which he sees as not only unleashing sexual freedom outside of marriage, but also igniting too much sexual pleasure within it.  In Santorum’s mind, sex between a husband and wife is sullied by contraception.  Without the possibility of creating a baby each and every time, matrimonial sex is diminished, reduced to just an act of pleasure stripped of its true purpose, procreation. 

I’ll hazard a guess that most married couples in America kind of like it like that.  In ordinary times, I would say that Santorum is way out of step with his fellow citizens.  But these may not be ordinary times.  Just witness the uproar surrounding Sandra Fluke. 

Fluke, a 30-year-old law student, tried to testify before Congress in favor of forcing church-supported universities, such as Fluke’s Georgetown, to pay for birth control as part of their health-care insurance coverage.  (It was a White House proposal along these lines that first awoke the apparently long-simmering animosity of conservative Republicans to birth control.) 

Fluke told an informal panel of Democratic lawmakers that the lack of insurance coverage for birth control pills could cause hardship for low-income students at Georgetown.  She explained how a fellow student with an ovary condition treatable with birth control pills eventually lost an ovary after she was unable to get the medication through Georgetown University’s insurance. 

Now, some conservatives might simply argue against the policy Fluke was advocating.  (By the way, the public health system in Finland pays when women visit a clinic for birth control prescriptions, but not for the medication itself.  Women here have to cover the cost of the pills, unless they need them for a medical condition.)  Or conservative critics might question Fluke’s objectivity or accuse her of exaggerating the severity of the issue.  Fair points.  But that wouldn’t have been vicious enough for conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, a gasbag of historic proportions. 

On his nationally broadcast show, Rush launched into a personal attack against Fluke where he called her a “slut” and “prostitute” for expecting taxpayers to pay her to have sex.  Rush’s twisted (in every sense) logic was that Fluke was having so much sex that she could no longer afford to pay for birth control herself.  He continued his on-air attacks for four days in a row, at one point suggesting that if taxpayers had to pay for Fluke to have consequence-free sex, then she should provide video tapes of the encounters so everyone could enjoy. 

Even by Rush Limbaugh standards, this is simply unbelievable.  Not to mention totally inaccurate.  Besides being incredibly insulting and juvenile, his rant bore no relation to what Fluke’s actually said, to the issue at large, or the reality of birth control itself.  For example, it would be private insurance paying for the pills, not taxpayers.  Limbaugh also seems to think a woman needs to take a birth control pill each time she has sex.  Chances are he’s confusing birth control medication with Viagra, something he apparently does know quite a bit about. 

Limbaugh finally issued a lukewarm apology when sponsors started leaving his show, but hasn’t faced much real criticism from the right over his comments, least of all from the GOP presidential candidates, who all seem afraid of him.  I would love to think that something like this would force him off the air for good, but the way things are these days, I wouldn’t get too hopeful. 

Happy International Women’s Day?

Moon-eyed Finns

Situated to the west of my hometown in Georgia is a mountaintop called Fort Mountain.  It’s a spot that always figured prominently in our summertime visits to the States because of the 3712-acre (1500-hectare) state park that occupies the top of the mountain.  When the kids were small, we never failed to make at least one trip to the park each summer so they could enjoy a round of mini-golf and cool off in the park’s lake, one of the highest in the state. 

At 2848 feet (868 meters), Fort Mountain is not an extremely high peak, even by Georgia standards.  But from the west, where the mountain plunges over 2000 feet to a flat, broad valley, it appears like a towering rampart. 

You might be mistaken in thinking that the striking view from the valley of this natural barricade was the inspiration for the mountain’s name.  It’s more complicated, and strange, than that. 

Near one of the mountain’s summits, a short distance from rocky cliffs that overlook the valley far below, is the mountain’s real namesake, a primitive “fort” of low zigzagging walls made up of loose rock.  The builders of this rudimentary structure are a mystery, and archeologists doubt that defense was even its intended purpose.  Still, popular speculation is that Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto’s men might have constructed the walls as improvised fortifications when passing through the area almost 500 years ago. 

Conquistador Hernando de Soto, probably never 
mistaken for a Moon-eyed Person himself.

The native Cherokees had a different explanation.  According to a legend of theirs, the rubble walls were built by a race of “Moon-eyed People” who lived in the area before them.  Adding to the mystery, the Cherokee said this tribe of fort-builders were blond, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and able to see in the dark. 

Some people have seen these stories as enticing evidence for the hoary legend that a Welsh explorer, Prince Madoc, sailed twice to America three hundred years before Columbus and settled among the Indians. 

I used to joke with my kids on our visits to Fort Mountain that they, in fact, are the Moon-eyed People, because of their blue eyes and blond hair.  And because they, like all Finns, can see in the dark.  Or so it seems to someone like me who needs all the bright light he can get. 

I’m reminded of this now that we’re at the end of November, it’s dark by four o’clock, and the very gloomiest time of the year is still three weeks away.  Already for several weeks now, I’ve been going around the house in the evening turning on lights for members of my Finnish family who somehow haven’t noticed that they’ve been sitting there for an hour reading in the dark.  Being a Moon-eyed Person certainly has its advantages during these dark Finnish nights – at least you can save a bundle on electricity bills.  

Famous Georgians

Often when I tell someone in Finland that I’m from the American state of Georgia, I get a blank look in return.  If “Georgia” seems to mean nothing to them, I offer the explanation of “Floridan lähellä” (near Florida).  Everyone knows Florida. 

In the past I’ve tried to correct this lack of Finnish awareness of Georgia by listing (or boasting, as the case may be) some of the famous people who have come from the Peach State.  I even gained a bit of a reputation among my colleges for doing this to a highly annoying degree. 

Foremost is Martin Luther King, who is without question the best-known Georgian anywhere in the world.  And, of course, there’s Jimmy Carter, whom Finns of a certain age are definitely familiar with, though they might not necessarily associate him with Georgia. 

Beyond these two famous men, Finns (and, for that matter, anyone else outside of Georgia) are much less aware of the other prominent folks from the state. 

This is where I come in, happy to enlighten the uninformed that renowned Georgians also include Mr. Ray Charles and Mr. James Brown.  Okay, it’s true the Godfather of Soul was born across the river in South Carolina, but he lived most of his life in Georgia.  And Ray Charles, the man who made “Georgia on My Mind” such a classic, would deserve to be an honorary Georgian, even if he hadn’t been born there. 

But, the list goes on, especially in the musical realm:  Little Richard, Otis Redding, Gladys Knight, all R&B and Soul legends, all from my home state.  Closer to my own time, the alternate musical scene in the college town of Athens -- a liberal oasis in a sea of diehard conservatives -- spawned acts such as The B-52s and, of course, R.E.M., the best band ever, period.  Sorry, Tenacious D. 

And then there’s the Georgians who left home to make it big in Hollywood, starting with Oliver Hardy, the larger half of the Laurel and Hardy comedy duo.  Hardy briefly attended boarding school in Young Harris, the tiny mountain town where I went to college almost 70 years later.  Other, somewhat more modern entertainers from Georgia are Julia Roberts, Burt Reynolds (how could Burt not be from Georgia), and the delectable Kim Basinger.  I once worked with someone in Athens who had gone to school with Kim.  She once showed her high school yearbook, where the teenage Basinger certainly looked pretty in her school photo, but not so different at the time from many of the other girls in her class. 

I realize I’m dating myself badly with all these references to figures who are already starting to fade from the scene.  Or maybe it shows I haven’t lived in the state for a long time.  Anyway, the best-known native sons of Georgia nowadays are two that sadly I’m not proud of at all.  And both are running for president. 

One of them, Newt Gingrich, is in fact the current Republican frontrunner, which means he is the “anti-Romney” of the moment.  (Republicans seem desperate to find some marginally acceptable candidate who is not Mitt Romney so that this person [fill in the blank] will appeal to Republicans apparently desperate to vote for anybody – except maybe Mitt Romney – who is not Barack Obama.) 

Finns might be puzzled by the name “Newt”, especially if they realize that it’s English for vesilisko.  Of course, Newt’s simply a nickname for Gingrich’s actual first name “Newton”, but it’s hard to imagine a name more fitting to his personality.  (And for this I mean no disrespect to actual newts, God bless ‘em.)

As Speaker of the House in the 90s, Gingrich led rebellious Republicans in a failed and ill-advised attempt to shut down the federal government.  A bit later, he was more successful in clamoring for the impeachment of Bill Clinton over his lying about sexual misconduct – while Gingrich himself (who was 55 at the time and married) was dappling in a little sexual misconduct of his own with a 32-year-old congressional employee.  She became his third and – at least for now – current wife.  Gingrich has since blamed his forays into adultery on his overriding passion for America.  Seriously. 

Despite all this, Newt has somehow gained the reputation of being an intellectual, the gray eminence of the Republican Party, which does nothing to mask the belligerent, mean-spirited nature that makes him a uniquely unlikable person. 

On the other hand, the other Georgian running for president appears to be extremely likeable.  Too bad he also appears completely incompetent for the job of highest office in the land.  Herman Cain is, by all accounts, a likeable guy, a powerful motivational speaker, and – as the former CEO of the Godfather’s Pizza chain – probably a fairly successful businessman.  That doesn’t, however, make him presidential material, as recent events have shown.  His only shtick is a simplistic flat tax plan, branded “9-9-9”, that most economists agree would hurt poor people the most.  Beyond that – and a fine singing voice – he’s got nothing. 

But Cain is good at promoting himself and was briefly the frontrunner in the quest for the “Anti-Romney-Obama”.  That was until his star began to fade a few weeks ago after stories of past sexual misconduct started to emerge and his campaign started to stumble. 

The sex allegations now seemed to have fizzled, with no new developments lately, and I think that’s fine.  I would hate to see Cain drop out of the race due to unproven claims of hanky panky with any woman he happens to run across who isn’t his wife.  Instead, it is much more fitting that his campaign self-destructs because voters finally can’t ignore the fact that, behind his upbeat nature and his gimmicky 9-9-9 plan, he hasn’t got a clue what he would do as president.  His recent flubs at answering straightforward foreign policy questions on Libya have proven just how out of his depth he is. 

I think that even more than Gingrich, who probably seriously thinks he could be president and actually has some chance of winning, Cain is only in the race for free publicity to sell his books and boost his personal brand.  Both men, in their own ways, are embarrassments and not the kind of Georgians I would want to brag about – or be president.   

Summer break

I’ve been taking a long break from blogging, mostly due to some holiday travels with the family and a home renovation project that’s keeping us busier than usual for this time of the year.  Our family vacation this summer was a walking holiday in the Italian Alps and a very abbreviated Midsummer celebration in Finland, which I hope to write about in future posts.  But for now, I’m just happy to be enjoying a glorious Finnish summer. 

I never really knew how to appreciate summer until I moved here.  In fact, the last few years I lived in Georgia I had grown to hate summer – it was way too hot and way too long – and I couldn’t wait for the first crisp mornings of autumn. 

Here in Finland, I can’t get enough of the season.  By definition, it can’t get too hot here for my taste.  I say that, though to be honest we were sweltering a bit last week when temperatures soared to nearly 30 degrees (about 85 F).  We don’t have air conditioning in our house and only one tiny table fan, so on those few really hot days (by Finnish standards, that is), we have to rely on cross ventilation.  That’s usually enough, though it was so hot last week that, even with all the doors and windows open wide, it started to get sweaty inside.  The only thing that helped were occasional trips to the basement to cool off. 

But those days are rare here, and this year we were also lucky enough to avoid the other, darker, side of Finnish summers – the nonstop rainsqualls that can last for days.  Fortunately, we were in Italy the week in June that the Finnish summer decided to take a nasty and wet detour.  Other than that, Helsinki has been experiencing an exceptionally fine summer.  In fact, while rain showers and even thunderstorms have hit other parts of the country, Helsinki has been by-passed completely, and it’s actually become a bit too dry here. 

As someone who grew up in the southern US, I find it quaint how much attention gets paid to the few thunderstorms that do occur in Finland.  Unlike Georgia, where there can be almost daily storms in summer, Helsinki gets maybe only half a dozen thunderstorms in the whole season.  (My daughter and I were caught out in one of those while kayaking last summer.) 

It’s true that, lying on the coast as it does, Helsinki has more moderate weather than the Finnish interior.  Still, nowhere in the country do you experience anything like the kind of violent weather that often rakes across parts of the US, especially in spring.  And Finns should be thankful for that.  So far this year, at least 15 Georgian have died in severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.  A relative living in my home town recently found a piece of paper from the town of Piedmont – 135 kilometers away in neighboring Alabama – that was carried and deposited by the storms that swept through southern states on April 27th killing over 300 people.  Nothing like that happens here in the calm climate of Finland. 

Even when a Finnish thunderstorm does form, it’s a much more sedate affair.  Back in Georgia, a typical day in high summer often starts out clear, hot and humid, with the heat building up until by afternoon towering thunderheads loom above.  Then a storm lets loose with some serious thunder and lighting, and everything cools down until the next day. 

In Finland, this same cycle can also take place during the hottest part of summer, but in slow motion.  Here we’ll sometimes have three or four days of non-stop hot and sunny weather that eventually results in a whole day of more-or-less stormy, at least rainy, weather followed by a few cooler, cloudy days before clear skies return.  Compared to Georgia storms, it’s plain boring. 

Still, as much as I enjoy watching the spectacular displays of lighting that we often have back in Georgia, when you consider the tragedy that sometimes comes along with it, I guess I can’t complain about boring, and never-too-hot, summers in Finland – as long as there’s plenty of sunshine.  

Golf in April is the cruelest sport

I’m not a golfer, and in fact I have a certain prejudice against the sport.  But even here in Finland I can’t help being keenly aware when the Masters Tournament in my home state of Georgia rolls around every April.  It’s not that I care who wins, because I don’t, not even slightly – though I used to think Tiger Woods was cool. 

Grounds of the Augusta National Golf Club.
Photo by pocketwiley

I wouldn’t even remember that the Masters takes place this time of the year if not for the fact that I sometimes happen to see brief reports about it on CNN.  Despite myself, I can’t ignore those TV reports from Augusta, with their footage of the world’s top golfers in shirtsleeves – shirtsleeves for Christ’s sake – strolling over perfectly manicured green grass, often with flowering dogwoods or azaleas in the background.  And all that sunshine.  It just doesn’t seem fair. 

Springtime in the South is amazing, an unfolding display of flowers and scrubs blossoming everywhere you look, woods turning green almost before your eyes, and nights filled with the pulsating sound of invisible tree frogs.  At least that’s how I remember it.  Spring is what I miss the most about Georgia and is something best not brought to mind when in Finland we still have thick snow on the ground in April and where any semblance of spring – or what passes for spring here – is still a good month away. 

That’s why those springtime images from the Masters being broadcast into my living room every April always remind me of how nice this season really can be when it’s done right.  When I look out the window on a typically gray April day here in Helsinki, such reminders just seem a bit cruel.  

April in Helsinki.

Cold

For much of this month, Helsinki has been sitting at the bottom of a high-pressure cell of air so cold that it had begun to feel oppressive.  We enjoyed two weeks of temperatures around -25 centigrade (-13F) and below, with highs on most days not much above -18C (0F).  Further inland and to the north – far from the moderating effects of the sea (even if it is frozen) the chill has been much deeper.  A seasonal low of almost -42C (-43F) was measured in Lapland on February 18^th, right on the eve of the annual “ski holidays”.  This is when schools in Helsinki close for a week and the city empties out as many families head either south to warm spots not known for their skiing, like the Canary Islands or Thailand, or – against all human reason – northward into the heart of coldness to ski in Lapland. 

The upside of the frigid weather we’ve been experiencing is that for a couple of weeks we've had clear, blue skies.  This, along with days that are getting noticeable longer, gives us an abundance of sunshine that many parts of the world take for granted, but that Finns can usually enjoy only in the dead of winter when it’s “too cold to snow”. 

Local ice-climbing spot in Helsinki.

Of course, strictly speaking, it can never be too cold to snow.  But for practical purposes, once the air here gets much below -20, it usually can’t hold enough moisture to form snow or even clouds, allowing us – for a few weeks at least – to live under a dome of blue winter sky, instead of a low ceiling of monotonous gray vapor.  The aridity of the cold air also has a downside for someone like me.  Such extreme lack of humidity turns me into a walking static-electricity generator.  I electrify everything and everyone I touch.  Also, the cold air quickly dries out skin left exposed too long, resulting in me going around most winters with my hands bleeding from countless small cracks.   I managed to avoid that this year -- that is, until a week ago when I shed my gloves for twenty minutes to help someone jump his car off.  

When I first contemplated moving to Finland, I dug out a world map to check the location of my future home.  Upon seeing how far north Finland really lies, my first thought was:  “How in the world does anyone live up there?”  It was a perfectly logical reaction for someone who grew up in the temperate climate of Georgia. 

While my home state does share the same latitude with such scorching places as Morocco, it doesn’t mean we’re unfamiliar with cold weather.  The “Siberian Express” cold fronts that barrel down through the US from Canada almost always reach the northern part of Georgia, giving us a short-lived taste of real winter.  My family’s fishpond would freeze over most winters for a few days, though with ice strong enough to bear the weight of nothing heavier than a cat – a fact that inquisitive minds couldn’t help verifying by luring an unsuspecting pet out onto the ice to test it. 

Very occasionally, temperatures even dipped briefly to zero Fahrenheit, which always was a big deal and could have been a real hardship for us in Georgia if it had ever lasted more than a day or so.  I recall my father getting frostbite once from trying to loosen the frozen water pipes at his dry-cleaning store to keep them from bursting.  In ordinary winters, we managed well enough though, even if our house, like most in the South, was admittedly not built for prolonged cold spells.  We made up for the lack of effective heating (or even any real insulation) by sleeping under thick quilts and electric blankets. 

Still, we could take comfort during the coldest part of winter by looking at the weather map and thinking it could be worse.  We could be those poor bastards in Fargo, North Dakota, which was point-blank in the path of the Arctic blasts coming down from Canada.  There, they had to contend with mind-blending temperatures like 40 below. 

With temperatures like that (and Canada to the north only a mysterious terra incognita on the weather map), it was easy to think that Fargo was at the very northern edge of human habitation.  And, the fact is that when you look at a map of population density in North American, it seems most Canadians live in a band of territory just north of the US border, almost as if huddling next to the US for warmth.  I doubt the Canadians would see it that way, however.

With such preconceptions, we were naturally skeptical of the possibility of life anywhere more than a day’s drive north of the desolate Dakota plains.  By comparison, Helsinki is practically the North Pole.  It’s almost as far north as Whitehorse or Yellowknife or some other forgotten (but apparently colorful) outpost of civilization, where I imagined the few people who somehow ended up there must have struggled to cling to life. 

View from Helsinki's frozen Töölö Bay.

But, that’s continental North America.  Europe is different, thanks to the redistribution of warmth by the Gulf Stream, which begins in the sun-baked straits between Florida and Cuba.  By transporting warm Caribbean water to the far northern Atlantic, the Gulf Stream helps moderate winter weather that would otherwise be as bitter as Saskatoon’s.  This is partly why Portugal, at about the same latitude as Boston, has a pretty enviable climate in January instead of one that gives New England its well-deserved reputation for winter sports.

It’s always been nice to think that warmth from the part of the world where I grew up was helping to make my new home livable.  There have been some worries of late, however, that this flow of heat to Europe might not be as unrelenting as it seems.  Some studies have suggested that the Gulf Stream has slowed in the last couple of years by as much as half.  In October, a meteorologist in Poland predicted that this slowdown would trigger the coldest winter in Europe for a thousand years.  That is truly a frightening thought, raising the specter of a second “Little Ice Age” like the one that disrupted life in Europe beginning in the 1300s. 

The last couple of days have now been near freezing and, despite the two feet of snow still on the ground and the serious deep-freeze we had the last two weeks, there’s a real sense that winter is about to break and the slow change toward spring has started.  Unless things get very ugly very quickly, we can safely say that – at least for this year – the threat of being hit by a frost not seen in a millennium was just very, very bad weather forecasting.  

Snow -- The Dark Side

A couple of weeks ago, Helsinki was hit by probably the worst possible weather phenomenon you can experience this time of the year -- it turned warm.  Above freezing, in fact.  We knew it was coming.  It had been predicted days in advance.  But that still doesn’t mean we were mentally prepared for it.  So I was a little surprised, and hugely disappointed, when I woke one morning to the light tapping of rain on our bedroom skylight. 

A typical Helsinki mid-winter street scene.

Now, for many folks in the US, especially in the south where I’m from, the idea of a downside to above-freezing temperatures will sound, well, nutty.  Especially after the southern US recently got walloped with a blast of proper winter weather that caused all kinds of havoc in Georgia and other subtropical states.  Atlanta-based Delta Airlines was apparently forced by the snow and ice to cancel some 3500 flights over a two-day period.  And schools were closed for a full week, as highway departments were unable to keep roads passable.  At least three other southern states besides Georgia declared states of emergency.  A sudden winter storm in Dixie, though small by Helsinki standards, shows how little climate change it actually takes to upend modern life. 

But trust me, a sudden thaw in Finland, though not as disruptive as a little snow in Georgia, is no fun either.  As long as the mercury stays below freezing here in Helsinki, all that snow burying the yard, piled beside the road, and covering the rooftops remains more or less pristine – in fact, lovely, white, and deep.  And dry.  Nice and dry.  That all changes once warm air blows into town.  Sidewalks turn into wet stretches of slush, and deep puddles of dirty, brown meltwater appear in the streets.  It’s sloppy wet conditions like this that make it oh so understandable that Nokia, Finland’s best-known technological powerhouse, first got its start making knee-high rubber boots. 

Our own private hanging glacier.

Of course, all that slush under your feet is just an inconvenience.  What is seriously something to worry about is the danger from above.  As long as temps remain below freezing, the snowpack on the roofs will, in most cases, stay put, like hanging glaciers clinging to a mountainside. 

Many Finnish houses are fitted with “snow rails”, small guardrails along the bottom edge of the roof, to keep those micro-glaciers from sliding off.  But, even snow rails can’t hold back 20 inches of accumulated snow when warmer weather greases the skids, as it were, and gravity does what gravity does best. 

During these annoying warm spells, an entire roof-full of snow can plummet, and I mean plummet – without warning -- to the ground with a fearsome thump.  After one such “avalanche” last week, we checked that both our cats were accounted for, since the falling mass of snow completely obliterated a path (more like a snowy trench) that the cats often use when they’re outside. 

While such a sudden dumping of snow would certainly entomb a cat, it wouldn’t do a human any good either.  It’s common to see sections of sidewalks below the typical Helsinki eight-story apartment building cordoned off by caution tape if there’s a danger of snow falling, especially when the roof is being cleared.  It’s deadly serious business.  An 81-year-old Helsinki man who strayed into such a taped-off area was recently killed by falling snow and ice. 

And it can be dangerous as well for the guys who clamber around on the roofs to clear the snow.  At least three snow cleaners (should they be “snow sweeps”?) have fallen from high rooftops this year, saved only by their tethers.  Still, the job is well-paid and pretty good seasonal work for folks who are not afraid of heights, and are fit.  

A local snow dump.

It is definitely physical work, as my wife and I found out last weekend when we agreed to help clear snow from the three-acre roof of a warehouse near Helsinki, as part of a money-making scheme for our daughter’s soccer club.  Working in shifts over an eight-hour period, about a dozen of us soccer parents pushed large scoop-fulls of snow to the edge of the roof and dumped them to the parking lot three stories below.  At the end of the day, though we were able to clear only part of the roof, we had left several piles of snow in the parking lot, each large enough to cover a VW minibus. 

Fortunately for us, removing the snow once it was on the ground was someone else’s problem.  And that is the ultimate problem with snow when you can’t simply wait for it to melt – where the hell do you put it all?  By mid-winter, every parking lot and sidewalk in Helsinki is crowded with piled up snow that eventually needs to be dealt with.  (It’s great fun, however, for neighborhood kids who love climbing around on these temporary, slippery mountains.) 

Of course, unlike many cities in the US – and not only the south, mind you, but also New York a couple of weeks ago and Washington this week – Helsinki is pretty well geared up for all this.  To keep the city functioning, an army of front loaders and dump trucks work all winter long, hauling the snow to its final resting place.  Scattered around Helsinki are a dozen or so “snow dumps”, where truckload after truckload of snow (200,000 loads last winter) is deposited in monster piles, some reaching at least 30 feet in height.  (One or two are located offshore on the sea ice so that they'll melt directly into the Baltic.)  In these dumps, the remains of winter slowly melt away before completely disappearing sometime in summer.  If you've come to decide -- as some of my friends have -- that you've had about enough of snow for this winter, thank you very much, it might just give you a chill to think that somewhere nearby the white stuff can linger until June.