The Magical Elixir of Vappu

Last week my wife started making sima, in preparation for the May Day holiday (or Vappu, in Finnish). Sima is a light, citrusy, slightly alcoholic (0.8%) drink that is considered to be a Finnish variant of mead. It’s a traditional drink for Vappu and is stocked by all groceries this time of the year.

New home-made sima in an old bottle, with tippaleipä 
(funnel cake), another Vappu tradition. 

Still, my wife often likes to make up a batch of homemade. She dissolves brown sugar in a big pot of water, adds slices of lemon and brings it to a boil. After it cools, she adds a tiny amount of yeast and lets it set a day or so before bottling it to ferment for a week. It’s a mild potion that even kids can drink.

It’s strange to associate mead with the modern day sima that is consumed during Vappu (to be sure, along with much, much stronger stuff). For me, “mead” evokes instead the dimly remembered past, a legendary age chronicled by Beowulf, the epic poem of the Anglo-Saxons.

It conjures up images of stout Viking types in King Hrothgar’ mead hall downing tankards of the drink just before all hell breaks loose and the monster Grendel lays waste to them all, triggering chaos and confusion and heroic acts (and some not so heroic), all immortalized in tall tales that live on long after the dust has settled.

"Ancient Finnish Hero" from the 1888
English translation of Kalevala.

On second thoughts, maybe the legacy of mead does have a lot in common with your typical night of Vappu partying.

Of course, mead also makes an appearance in the Finns’ own epic poem, Kalevala. A part of Kalevala devoted to preparations for the wedding of Ilmarinen, a godlike blacksmith, also includes the story of how mead was first brewed.

It was a complicated process. Osmotar, creator of beer (mead), knew how to mix barley, hops, and water, but couldn’t get the concoction to ferment. She wondered aloud:

“What will bring the effervescence,

Who will add the needed factor,

That the beer may foam and sparkle,

May ferment and be delightful?” *

Who indeed? That would be Kalevatar, a “magic maiden” who gave a splinter of wood to “the magic virgin” Kapo, who rubbed her hands and knees together to transform the splinter into a snow-white squirrel. Kalevatar sent the squirrel forth to retrieve the cones of a faraway fir tree, which she then dropped into the vat of beer to ferment it. It didn’t work.

But it brought no effervescence,
And the beer was cold and lifeless.

Next, Kalevatar gave a chip of birch wood to Kapo, who once again worked her magic, this time to produce a magic marten. Kalevatar sent this weasel-like creature deep into the mountains, where bears fight, in order to collect some, well, some bear spit.

From their lips the foam was dripping

From their tongues the froth of anger;

This the marten deftly gathered,

Sadly, bear spit didn’t do the trick either, and the beer didn’t ferment. Maybe beer drinkers today – and bears – should be thankful of this fact.

Kalevatar wasn’t about to give up so easily, however. She gave Kapo a pea pod, from which the magic virgin caused a honeybee to emerge. Kalevatar directed the bee to visit a meadow on a distant ocean island, where a young woman slept...

Girdled with a belt of copper

By her side are honey-grasses,

By her lips are fragrant flowers,

Herbs and flowers honey-laden;

Gather there the sweetened juices,

Gather honey on thy winglets,

Honey was the missing ingredient. When it was added, the beer fermented so fast it overflowed the cauldron and soaked into the sand and gravel underneath. It made a powerful brew.

Great indeed the reputation

Of the ancient beer of Kalew,

Said to make the feeble hardy,

Famed to dry the tears of women,

Famed to cheer the broken-hearted,

Make the aged young and supple,

Make the timid brave and mighty,

Make the brave men ever braver,

Fill the heart with joy and gladness,

Fill the mind with wisdom-sayings,

Fill the tongue with ancient legends,

Only makes the fool more foolish.

Our homemade sima, though refreshing and tasty enough, doesn’t pack that kind of punch. Maybe instead of brown sugar from S-Market, next year we should try honey from a faraway island meadow carried on the wings of a magic bee. I’m sure it shouldn’t be too hard to arrange.

* The quotes from Kalevala are from the John Martin Crawford translation of 1888. 

Headlands around Hemp

A couple of days ago, on Easter Monday, as my wife and I took a two-hour walk around the woods near our home, she taught me an extremely precise Finnish word, pälvi.  (She claims that she has mentioned this word before, but of course these things we easily forget.)

Pälvet are the patches of ground, usually at the base of a tree, where the snow first starts to melt in spring.  They are the scattered spots on the forest floor where green makes its earliest reappearance, and for many people they are surely a welcome sight after a long winter. 

Finnish is maybe unique in bestowing this hopeful sign of spring its own name – apparently even Swedes, fellow Nordics with their own generous expanses of snowy woods, don't have a word for it. As you can imagine, we don't have a comparable word in English either, though when you type pälvi into Google Translate, you will get an English "equivalent".  

According to Google, these patches of barely thawed forest translate, surprisingly, into "headlands around hemp." Really? I can easily believe that, in order to come up with a translation like that, hemp had to be involved somewhere.      

Pälvet

The challenges of late-season skiing.

Man of War Romney

I’m struck by the kind of small coincidences (and by “small” I mean trivial) that you run across every once and a while. This past week, while two US states and the District of Columbia were holding Republican primaries on Tuesday, I was making slow progress reading Chapter Eight of “The Glorious Cause”, a classic tome on the American Revolution by Robert Middlekauff. (“Tome” is exactly the right word – you could stop a freight train with this massive book.) 

As voters in Wisconsin, Maryland and DC were giving Mitt Romney a clean sweep in the polls, essentially guaranteeing him the Republican nomination and proving that in the end the GOP would not be jumping down the rabbit hole dug for them by the Tea Party, I was reading about the events in Boston in May 1768.

At that time, almost 250 springs ago, the British subjects in North America were in an uproar over taxation (sound familiar?), in particular the recent attempts by Parliament to make them pay duties on some items they had to import from Britain, such as paper, paint, glass and, not least of all, tea. To help enforce these extremely unpopular measures, the Royal Navy sent to Massachusetts a 50-gun man-of-war, HMS Romney. Her presence in Boston Harbor was not appreciated, and soon after arriving, the Romney sparked further outrage by commandeering a ship belonging to the richest man in America.

John Hancock, best known to modern Americans because his name is synonymous with a person's signature, was an extremely wealthy businessman, not unlike future Bostonian Mitt Romney (the man, not the man-of-war). Hancock also may, or may not, have engaged in a practice used by many of his fellow merchants to avoid paying duties, namely smuggling. 

A month before the Romney (the ship) dropped anchor in Boston Harbor, one of John Hancock’s sloops arrived from across the Atlantic with a cargo of Madeira wine. Royal customs officials suspected that Hancock had slipped most of the cargo off the boat without declaring it and paying the required duty. With the arrival of the Romney, they now had the muscle to act on their suspicions. The officials ordered the man-of-war to seize Hancock’s sloop – which was fittingly named Liberty. A riot, as they say, ensued, with the tax officials beaten bloody, but escaping with their lives. One more step on the path to revolution. 

If you are a Tea Party supporter (circa 2012) who, after this week’s primaries, is feeling some resentment over your movement being hijacked by an establish Republican like Mitt Romney, you might see a cruel metaphor in the fact that, back in the original Tea Party era, a ship called Liberty was confiscated by one named Romney. Me, I just find it all an ironic coincidence.  

"The Lost of the Romney", depicting the ship's demise after running aground in 1804. 

Affordable Care

Yesterday, I got up at 4:30 to take my youngest son to the airport for a trip to Spain. While he was stuffing the last of his gear into his backpack, I switched on the TV and happened to see a bit of CBS Evening News.

Here in Finland, we naturally don’t see a lot of American broadcast news. At our house, our satellite service provides international cable news channels like the UK’s Sky News and BBC, but only CNN from the States and nothing from old-school American TV networks, like NBC or CBS. 

Except, as it turns out, at 4:30 in the morning. Apparently, Sky News rebroadcasts some programming from American news shows, but only in the dead of night. So, by chance I caught the tail end of a CBS News story about health care in America – which has been a huge story this week anyway as the Supreme Court begins deliberations to decide the fate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. 

The CBS story told about a health-care provider in Texas, a nurse practitioner named Melissa Herpel, who has set up her own “walk-in” clinic to offer quick medical aid without the need of an appointment. (A nurse practitioner doesn’t have a medical doctor’s degree, but is qualified to do many of the same tasks, including prescribing medicine.) Herpel’s clinic doesn’t charge as much as a doctor would and is more convenient than a visit to a hospital emergency room, making it ideal for the nearly one out of four Texans who don’t have health insurance.

What got my attention, even as I was half-wake and in bad need of coffee, were the figures being quoted in the story. Herpel was shown treating a little girl who had a large wooden splinter in her foot, for which Herpel changed her standard fee of $50 (€38), plus $15 for an injection of antibiotics. This, according to the CBS report, compares to the $900 (€680) that the same treatment might cost in an emergency room. For removing a splinter?

The $15 ($11) that Herpel charged for the shot of antibiotics might seem pricey considering that the medicine itself reportedly cost only two dollars a vial, which must be enough for several doses. (There’s, of course, also the cost of the syringe, etc.) But, that’s a bargain compared to the $100 (€75) that Herpel says the same injection would cost in an emergency room. 

If that’s the case, then having a splinter treated for under a hundred bucks probably seems like a good deal to the girl’s mother, who has to pay for it out of her own pocket because she says she can’t afford the $400 (€300) monthly cost of health insurance.

I find these figures somewhat mind-blowing, which I’m sure shows that I haven’t had any direct experience of American health care for a very long time.

I can’t say how typical $400 a month for insurance might be, though I have seen a figure of $5500 ($4100) a year for a family policy bought on the individual market, so it seems to be in the right ballpark. Nor can I say how these figures compare to Finland, where health care is based on the single-payer model. I’ve never bought health insurance here, and the only charge for visiting a doctor is a nominal office fee. Last November, when I saw a doctor about a bad cough, the office fee was €13.70 ($18). (For people under 18, it’s completely free.)

Of course, the girl in the CBS report could have had her foot treated without her mother having to pay a dime, if she had visited the local emergency room, which is required by law to treat uninsured people. And it can be argued that it's this requirement to occasionally provide free health care for 25% of the population that forces Texas hospitals to recover their costs by charging everyone else $900 for splinter removal. If it sounds like an odd system, it is.

Living here in Finland, it’s easy to forget how American medical care, which is mostly based on private health insurance, works for most people. Those who have insurance get their care from their regular physicians; those without it, go to the emergency room. And, as we all know from TV, emergency rooms aren’t the nicest of place to spend much time.

Like I say, I can’t vouch from personal experience whether the high costs reported by CBS of having a splinter removed is representative of medical care in the States. But, something tells me I’d rather not ever have to find out for myself.  

Family Vacation

This is the time of the year when I start thinking seriously about summer vacation.  It’s also the time of the year when I realize it’s almost too late to think about summer vacation.  Back when we used to go to the States almost every year, March was about the last chance to find five decently priced seats on flights across the Atlantic. 

Delicate Arch.  Courtesy: National Park Service.

Maybe that’s still true, though I wouldn't know as we’re no longer often in the market for such trips.  Our summer travels to Georgia – trips to give my kids and parents a chance to spend some time together – are now a thing of the past.  My parents have passed on, and my kids are no longer kids.  The last trip we made to the States together (and maybe the last ever) was eight years ago, which somehow doesn’t seem possible.  It’s a shame it’s already been so long, but at least it was a great vacation. 

On that holiday, we combined, as we often did when the kids were small, a visit to Georgia with a trip to a meeting that my wife was attending.  As a university researcher, she is expected to attend once a year an international scientific meeting in her field, most of which are held in the summer, and often in North America at various locations.  Each summer there were several meetings to choose from, almost all equally relevant and useful for her work, so she has often been able to pick the one with the most promising vacation possibilities.  Over the years, we’ve used this model to weave our holiday plans into my wife’s conferences at such places as Maine, Maryland, Montreal and Oregon. 

Usually, I’d fly over with the kids to spend a week or two in Georgia, before meeting up my wife for the second phase of the holiday.  That’s what we did in 2004.  After, a week in Georgia with the kids, the four of us flew to Denver to meet my wife, who was flying in for a meeting in Utah.  We, however, took our sweet time (and the scenic route) getting to Salt Lake City. 

The boys on a beach in Maine, 1994.

It had long been my dream to take the kids to Yellowstone National Park, one of the true wonders of nature and a place I had not visited myself since a trip there with my parents 25 years earlier. 

It was one of the best road trips ever.  We crossed Wyoming in a day and a half.  We stopped at the grave of Sacagawea (the Lemhi Shoshone woman who as a teenager helped guide the Lewis and Clark expedition across the Rockies).  We made a side trip, at my insistence, to South Pass (exactly the kind of natural gateway for wagon traffic across the Continental Divide that Lewis and Clark were hoping to discover, but didn’t). 

In the Grand Tetons, we saw grizzlies and bison, drove through deserted sagebrush on torturously slow roads, and walked a trail freshly littered with bear scat.  (Also, in a grocery store in Jackson, we happened to meet a Finnish man who apparently has lived there for decades – lucky guy.)  In Yellowstone, we saw all the world-famous geysers, hot springs, mudpots, fumaroles and waterfalls.  We took a rafting trip on the Yellowstone River just north of the park and saw more bears and bison, plus some wapiti. 

It was completely satisfying, and hopefully something the kids will remember fondly.  Leaving Yellowstone, we drove south to Utah and the site of my wife’s meeting at Snowbird, a ski resort situated at almost 8000 feet (2400 meters) at the head of a steep canyon in the Wasatch Range east of the city.  

While my wife attended talks and panel discussions, me and the kids hiked along nearby ridges and visited the Timpanogos caves south of Snowbird.  In the evenings, we hung out in the resort’s heated outdoor swimming pool while the air temperature hovered in the 40s.  Jesus, that was a great place! 

The kids in the Wasatch Range, 2004.

On the return trip, we stopped at Moab, Utah, home to Arches National Park, a kind of Mecca for me since it was here that one of my favorite writers, Edward Abbey, worked as a park ranger, a period of his life he immortalized in his classic book of nature writing, Desert Solitaire.  

We also visited nearby Canyonlands National Park, with its immense views of stark canyon landscape surrounding the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers.  At Canyonlands, we navigated our rented Dodge Durango down the scariest stretch of jeep road I have ever been on, down into a world of naked sandstone carved by the course of the Colorado River.  After reaching the bottom of the escarpment, we didn’t see another human being until we finally emerged once again on paved road near Moab four or five hours later. 

Before finally returning to Denver to catch the plane back to Europe, we made a quick trip to the prehistoric cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado, a spot my wife and I had visited in the early 80s.  We also saw a bear there. 

It was an epic trip, a trip of a lifetime, really.  I’m hoping to do something similar again.  Maybe a road trip from Los Angeles to Colorado via the Grand Canyon.  It won’t happen this year.  The only meeting my wife is thinking of attending this summer is in Ottawa, which means that perhaps a road trip around the Great Lakes is in order (I’ve never been to Michigan!). 

Even if we do have a chance to make that California trip someday, I have to face the fact that it won’t be with the whole family.  They have already mostly left the nest, flown the coop.  And maybe it wouldn’t be that easy to talk them into it anyway, even if they were all still living at home.  As much as I loved the trip to Yellowstone, I’m sure not all the passengers enjoyed every minute of sitting in the car on a 3000-mile (4800-kilometer) drive, no matter how spectacular or historic the scenery passing by might be.  

Delicate Arch, and the raven who 

kept a close eye on us.

View from Green River Overlook

Canyonlands National Park

Driving on the Shafer Trail jeep road

Canyonlands National Park 

The Goose Neck bend of the Colorado River