Helsinki Tainted

When it was announced that Joe Biden would be meeting with Vladimir Putin during Biden's June trip to Europe, there was some speculation that the meeting would take place in Helsinki. Hearing this, my wife and I looked at each other and after a moment said, “No way. That won't happen.”

Since 2018, Helsinki has been forever tainted as a meeting place between American and Russian leaders. No American president in their right mind would want any reminder of that disastrous meeting here three years ago to cloud their own. That’s Trump’s legacy. He ruined Helsinki for US-Russian summits. It’s like the disgrace associated with Munich after Neville Chamberlain’s trip there in 1938. At least, Trump didn’t promise Sudetenland to Putin. Or did he?

A week ago Trump issued this ridiculous "statement", doubling down on his taking Putin’s side over the US government’s. He’s even proud of it. So refreshing to think that it's Biden meeting with Putin in Geneva today, and not that embarrassing game show host who shamelessly kow-towed to the Russian leader just a few miles from where I live.

Tainted Landmarks

I was recently reminded of a part of Helsinki with a very colorful name. It's one very small part of South Harbor, where the big ferries from Sweden dock, a mostly enclosed "basin" not much bigger than an Olympic swimming pool, with only a narrow passage out. Next to the busy Kauppatori open-air market square, and the site of the yearly Baltic Herring Market, it is at the epicenter of Helsinki tourism, despite a very un-touristy name -- the Cholera Basin. 

For these 30-odd years I have vaguely known the place's name without really knowing the genesis of that name. Wikipedia to the rescue! As the story goes, a ship master from Nauvo in the Turku archipelago died from cholera while in Helsinki for the Baltic Herring Market of 1893. Rather unadvisedly, his bodily fluids (use your imagination) were dumped overboard into the basin. Obviously, this was quickly recognized as not a good thing to do. As a precaution, all the herring boats were towed out of the harbor and guards were posted on the quayside to prevent anyone from helping themselves to the basin's disease-ridden water. 

As far as I'm aware, it worked and no one contracted cholera from the cholera basin. At least, I hope so. Yet the basin was forever tainted with the name, which might say something about the dark humor of the Finnish people and their willingness to embrace an unpleasant episode from the past. Or, at least not gloss over it. 

It's impossible to think about the Cholera Basin incident now without being reminded of current events, the spread of the new coronavirus (seven confirmed case in Finland at the moment) and the actions different nations are taking to control it. From police on the quayside to self-quarantines and entire cities locked down in China, people's lives will always be disrupted now and then by tiny life forms (or in the case of viruses, barely life forms), even if only mercifully few people suffer from the horrible illness those pathogens cause. 

Let's hope the final impact of the COVID-19 disease on life in Finland -- and the world --  is minimal and not long-lasting. Somehow I don't see anyone commemorating it by naming some place in Helsinki "COVID-19 Square" or "Coronavirus Corner". But there is this bar...

The Cholera Basin in a serene mood.
Photo by Matti Paavonen

Northern Nights, Northern Lights

This past week we in Helsinki have apparently been treated to a display of Northern Lights, or aurora borealis for the scientifically inclined.  I say “apparently”, since I haven’t been lucky enough to see anything through the cover of low clouds that’s been hanging over Helsinki every time I’ve remembered to look up at the sky. 

As with any event that requires peering up at the night sky, Helsinki has the huge disadvantage of almost never having an actual view of the night sky.  Compared, that is, with other parts of the world.  Check out the night sky in the arid American West sometime and you realize just how much of the heavens (the Milky Way!) folks back in Helsinki have never even seen. 

Aurora over Malmesjaur Lake, Swedish Lapland.  Photo:  Jerry Magnum Porsbjer

But when it comes to the Northern Lights, Helsinki is doubly cursed, because here in Finland the ghostly lights synonymous with the Far North are rarely visible this far south.  While I have seen nice displays of revontulet (the Finnish name, which literally means “foxfires”) a few times in Lapland, I’ve seen them in Helsinki only once or twice in all the time I’ve lived here, and even then they were hardly visible. 

That might be surprising for a city sitting at a latitude of 60 degrees, closer to the North Pole than well over 99.7% of everyone else on Earth.  The thing is, the Northern Lights don’t have anything to do with the pole at the top of the world.  The aurora, which is created when the solar wind streaming from the sun collides with Earth’s atmosphere, is spread out in a ring around the magnetic North Pole, which – not tethered to the actual North Pole – has a tendency to wander around.  For the last century or so, it’s been located somewhere in the Arctic wastes of Canada, moving toward Russia.  That’s why those of us who occasionally carry compasses to different parts of the world have to adjust them from time to time. 

It’s also why the Northern Lights are more visible in North America than in Finland.  They even sometimes make an appearance in my home state of Georgia, like this past week when a powerful solar storm pushed them as far south as both Atlanta and Helsinki.  Only, ironically enough, the folks in Georgia had a better chance of actually seeing them. 

Northern Lights with a rare blue streak.  Photo: Varjisakka

Sharecropping and vice versa

I live on the northern edge of Helsinki in a suburb called Torpparinmäki, a community clustered around a hill that barely rises above the flat bottomland of the slow-moving Vantaa River.  The name Torpparinmäki translates in English to “Sharecropper’s Hill”, which gives a clue to the earlier tenants of this quiet neighborhood. 

View toward Torpparinmäki at harvest time.

While on the subject of Finnish place names, many of them, when translated, would fit perfectly with some countrified spots back in the States.  I used to live near a part of Helsinki called “Buckwheat Ridge”, which evokes a certain nostalgia for bygone Americana.  No doubt, there are scores of prim, upscale, gated communities across the US called “Buckwheat Ridge”. 

The Tuomarinkylä Manor house, built in 1790.

The name “Sharecropper’s Hill” perhaps doesn’t carry the same kind of cachet, but it’s still a nice place.  This used to be part of Tuomarinkylä Manor, a large farming estate, something close to what back in Georgia we would call a plantation.  This stretch of rich agricultural land at the confluence of the Vantaa and Kerava rivers was already a prominent estate by the mid-1700s.  The sharecroppers who used to work this land are long gone, but the “big house”, built in 1790, still stands today, restored as a museum.  And the land, or at least part of it, is still being cultivated. 

Checking out the livestock at Haltiala.

The Haltiala Farm, which butts up against the backyards of Torpparinmäki’s row houses and single-family homes, is apparently the last working farm within Helsinki city limits.  It’s owned and operated by the city and is a popular spot for families who want to briefly treat the kids to the sight (and smell) of farm animals.  At Easter, the public is even allowed into the stables where the newborn lambs are kept. 

Bikers welcome.

Haltiala also operates a small café that has been doing extremely good business all during this summer, especially – for some reason – with motorcyclists.  The farm is a big attraction as well for the flocks of geese that have been flying over our house lately to feed among the stubble of wheat and rye. 

Associating with the locals.

Some crops have been sown especially to be reaped by a different type of two-legged visitor.  Along the road leading to the farm are fields of peas, sunflowers and assorted other flowers that members of the public can help themselves to at harvest time.  In the past, I would get at least a bag or two of peas this way, but sadly I haven’t been paying enough attention in recent years and have noticed the fields are open for harvesting only after they’ve been trampled down and mostly picked clean. 

Searching for that last pea in the field.

Still, it’s a nice touch, I think, that in Helsinki even city slickers have the opportunity to share a slice of Torpparinmäki’s history and be a pea-picker for a day. 

Reds

The first time I saw Helsinki, the city I've ended up spending half my life in, wasn’t from a plane overhead or from one of the ferries from Sweden that dock at South Harbor.  Instead, my first glimpse of the Finnish capital was inside a movie theater in Athens, Georgia.  On the big screen, as it were.  It was at a showing of the newly released movie Reds, which my Finnish girlfriend had been especially eager to see. 

This epic film from 1981 chronicles the career of journalist and devoted communist, John Reed, apparently the only American to be entombed in the Kremlin in Moscow.  Directed by and starring Warren Beatty, along with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, Reds is based on the book “Ten Days that Shook the World”, Reed’s firsthand account of the Russian Revolution of 1917. 

"V.I. Lenin lived in this house in 1917", plaque in Hakaniemi.

To report on the happenings in Russia, Reed traveled through Finland, which was still part of the Russian Empire, on his way to Petrograd, the former St. Petersburg, arriving just in time to witness the tumultuous events that led to the takeover by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party.  The title of the book Reed wrote about his time in Petrograd is no exaggeration.  The course of history was indeed radically changed in those few weeks, though in this post-Soviet era it all begins to feel like ancient history. 

(By the way, it’s funny how in the States the color red – the “brand” of socialists and communists throughout the world – has recently come to symbolize the conservative Republican Party.  A small example of American exceptionalism, if you will.  If you think about it, it gives a whole new meaning to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s and Republican Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts.) 

At the time Reds was made, almost a decade before the collapse of the Soviet Union, filming behind the Iron Curtain was apparently no easy matter to arrange.  Beatty’s film was just one of several Hollywood productions over the years that used Helsinki as a more accessible stand-in for St. Petersburg, Moscow or some other place in the USSR. 

Helsinki doesn’t make its appearance until about halfway through the three-hour movie, as Beatty and Keaton, in the roles of Reed and his companion Louise Bryant, finally make it to Petrograd and are driven through its magnificent Palace Square (played here by Helsinki’s Senate Square).  With an Empire Style architecture that mimics the look of its Russian counterpart, Senate Square does a well enough as a cinematic substitute for St. Petersburg. 

On his way to the real Petrograd, Reed followed in the footsteps of Lenin who had passed through Helsinki a few months earlier on his return from exile in Switzerland.  When the revolutionary government in Russia cracked down on the Bolsheviks, Lenin retreated to Helsinki to lay low for a few months.  There is a plaque on the corner of Hakaniemi Square marking the building where he stayed as a covert guest of the Helsinki chief of police, a fellow Bolshevik. 

The "capping" of Havis Amanda, May Day Eve.

Hakaniemi has long enjoyed a reputation as a leftist stronghold.  It has been the traditional home of Finland’s Social Democratic and Communist parties, as well as all the major trade unions.  I recall when I first came here, even the large advertisements on the buildings overlooking the square added to the leftist atmosphere.  There were the corporate logos of Interflug (the state airline of a former country called East Germany), Intourist (a travel agency founded by Joseph Stalin), and Pepsi (the cola of choice in the Warsaw pact, not that there was really any choice about it.).  Of these, only the Pepsi logo remains high above the cobblestones of Hakaniemi.    

Despite those changes, Hakaniemi Square is still the traditional site for leftist rallies and gatherings, especially at May Day, the international workers’ day.  (In the US, May Day is ignored entirely, in favor of the all-American non-socialistic Labor Day in September – another bit of expectionalism.)  Hakaniemi serves as the starting point for the May Day Parade, where supporters of labor unions, leftist organizations, and assorted socialist and communists parties march a couple of kilometers to Senate Square to listen to speeches made from the steps of the Cathedral.  Nowadays, the number of marchers has been greatly diminished from the early 80s when almost a quarter of the Finnish electorate voted communist. 

Today, the worker-related celebration of May Day is more like a minor sideshow to the real focus of the holiday, namely huge crowds of students – past, present and future – having a good time.  May Day Eve is the closest thing to Carnival in Finland.  While you won’t see as much samba dancing as in Rio (in fact, none), the sea of revelers in their white student hats, still generate plenty of gaiety with the help of lots balloon, streamers, noisemakers and, of course, alcohol.  For first-time visitors, it can be alarming to see such crowds of normally reserved and restrained Finns filling the streets and publicly losing all their inhibitions.  The evening’s main event takes place at the Havis Amanda Fountain near South Harbor.  To roaring encouragement from the crowd, university students – often suspended from a construction crane – place a large white student’s hat on the bronze statue of a nude mermaid at the center of the fountain. 

In recent years, we’ve chosen to skip the chaos at Havis Amanda and instead celebrate May Day at home.  And we seldom ever watched the May Day Parade, most recently in 1989 when my very pregnant wife and I decided to follow along as the ranks of leftists decked out in red and carrying red flags and banners marched earnestly to Senate Square.  Though the route of the march isn’t strenuous by any means, the act of walking that far was for my wife physical enough to kick off a labor movement of an entirely different type.  The next morning our first child was born.  Six months later the Berlin Wall came down.  As far as I’m concerned, they were both equally world-changing events.  

A curious American at the May Day rally, Senate Square 1983.

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.