It's a Pieni Maailma After All

One day this week I was at the summer cabin we’ve been building about an hour east of Helsinki, trying to apply another coat of paint to the log walls before the last of the precious warm, summery weather completely evaporates.

It’s usually very quiet there on the shore of our sheltered bay, far from a paved road, surrounded by forest, with just the sound of birds, or an occasional boat or airplane passing by, or children playing on the opposite shore.

At one point, as I swiped the paintbrush back and forth over the wood, I noticed a faint, percussion-like sound in the distance behind me. At first, I took it for the sound of blasting, like someone dynamiting granite bedrock at some construction site. But this sound was sharper than that type of rumbling explosion. And it continued for a while, rhythmically, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

I had a fleeting thought that it could have been a Finnish navy ship somewhere in the open Baltic to the south, firing its guns in some sort of war exercise. That would be extraordinary, to say the least. I have no idea if those kinds of exercises ever take place.

Then I realized it probably could have been Santahamina, the sprawling military base occupying an island just offshore from Helsinki.

A few years ago, during my son's compulsory army service, I undertook an almost weekly ritual of driving over a small drawbridge to the gates of Santahamina on Friday evenings to pick him up for his weekend leaves. It’s surely a place well known to many young men (and a few young women) in this part of Finland. As Santahamina is practically just another suburb, Helsinki residents can sometimes easily hear the boom of artillery practice on the island. And since it’s just a little under 25 kilometers (15 miles) from our cabin, as a seagull flies, I decided that this must be the origin of the dull, thumping sound I was hearing.

And with that thought, an old memory stirred, a reminder of how small the world can sometimes be.

In the early 1980s, I lived a couple of years in a basement apartment in an antebellum house in Athens, Georgia. “Antebellum” in this case meaning a house predating the American Civil War of the 1860s. In fact, it was a registered national landmark of some kind, although unlike the finer southern mansions elsewhere in Athens, this house was badly rundown, almost decrepit, in a relatively seedy part of town, behind the bus station. It was musty and infested with cockroaches, but was cheap – the monthly rent was a mere $75 – and it suited a certain bohemian lifestyle I envisioned for myself at the time.

As it happened, the person living in the (hopefully less decrepit) apartment above me was someone I was acquainted with from Young Harris, the junior college in north Georgia I had attended a few years earlier. That’s not so surprising, since many of my classmates from Young Harris had gravitated to the University of Georgia upon graduating, and Athens wasn’t such a big town. Still, it was a coincidence. 

Charles was older than me, and actually maybe more of an artist than a student. At Young Harris, he had been a director of one of the men’s dorms, more mature than us 18-year-old freshmen.  

When later, as fellow tenants in a crumbling Athens landmark, I introduced Charles to my future wife, he was intrigued to hear she was from Finland, and happy to share an unexpected memory with us.

It seems that as a young child, Charles had lived in Helsinki. What are the odds of that? It is a small world, after all.

This would have been in the late 50s, early 60s, a time when Finland was even further off the beaten path than when I arrived some twenty years later and was an even more unlikely a place for someone from Georgia to end up.

The explanation was that Charles’ father, an officer in the US military, had been stationed to Finland in some capacity, perhaps in connection with the American Embassy, no doubt a plum assignment at the time, as Helsinki lay only some 40 miles from the Soviet Union.

Whether or not Charles had any other early memories from Helsinki, the one thing he did mention was hearing the booms of artillery from his home there. 

My future wife knew immediately where that had come from, the only place it could have come from:  Santahamina, which even today occasionally emits – from the edge of a peaceful, even sleepy, capital city – war-like sounds that can be heard miles away by random, misplaced Georgians. 

Foraging

Once, when I was a kid, we had a visit from the family of my mother’s uncle, a preacher who at the time was living in Macon, Georgia. For some reason, we decided to take them, including his mostly grown sons (my first cousins once removed) on a little excursion to one of our favorite spots in the foothills of the Cohutta Mountains, a place called Bear Creek, a place I’ve taken my own children many times for picnicking during summer visits back to the States. 

I only remember this little outing because, as we walked along the graveled Forest Service road deep in the woods, my brother, sister and I spotted some ripe blackberries growing on the sunny slope of the road bank. We immediately started helping ourselves to the berries, while our city cousins looked on, almost regarding us as feral children, wild people of the mountains. At least they declined to join in the berry picking themselves.

I thought of this earlier this summer when my wife and I were walking along a similarly graveled road near the little sauna-cabin we’ve been building not far from Helsinki. We spotted some ripe wild strawberries (metsämansikoita, or “forest strawberries”) on the side of the road and started sampling them. No one passing by would have batted an eye at this. 

Foraging for wild food like this is extremely typical in Finland, and one of the local customs that unexpectedly echoes a familiar way of life in faraway North Georgia. 

In the past few weeks, all along the road to our cabin we have been seeing cars parked in every little pullout or side road, a sign that the blueberry- and mushroom-picking season is well underway. With the summer so cool and rainy this year, everyone is expecting the season will be exceptionally good, and in fact we’ve already found keltavahvero (chanterelle, Cantharellus cibarius) in places where you don’t normally see them. I didn't grow up foraging for fungi in Georgia, and I'm far from being an expert. Even now, chanterelles, along with suppilovahvero (winter mushroom, Cantharellus tubaeformis), are the only ones I can safely identify by myself.

My first haul of suppilovahvero, winter mushrooms.

Growing up in Georgia, we didn’t really do much foraging for blueberries, either. What we did go after was blackberries. I remember our whole family, donning boots and long-sleeve shirts in the middle of the sultry Georgia summer heat to wade chest-deep into a thicket of blackberry vines (as we called them), an almost impenetrable tangle of thorns. It was worth it. My mother would turn our haul of fruit into jellies and jams and usually more than a few blackberry cobblers that I can still almost taste.

Blackberries (called karhunvatukka, “bear raspberry”) don’t grow wild in Finland, but their cousin, the raspberries, do. The converse is true in North Georgia – raspberries are the less common of the two, as I recall.

The woods where I grew up didn’t off much in the way of blueberries. There was something we called “huckleberries”, growing low to the ground and bearing tiny, round fruit full of gritty seeds. They were probably poor specimens of what the British call “bilberries” (Vaccinium myrtillus) and basically the same thing as Finnish blueberries, only apparently not as well suited to the habitats of Georgia.

The “huckleberries” we knew as kids weren’t very good or abundant, and reaching down to pick them at ground level seemed a risky proposition in the snaky country I grew up in. It was therefore a revelation when we discovered a higher alternative.

It was on a short hike with our parents one summer day to the summit of Springer Mountain (3780 ft., 1150m), the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, literally at the very edge of my home county. On the approach trail, we noticed blueberry bushes, not at ankle level, but five feet or more in height. And they were full of large, tasty berries.

Although spending a lifetime in the woods, we’d never run across these “high-bush” blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum) before, and maybe they’re not all that common in Georgia anyway. We only ever encountered them in the cooler, open forests of the state’s higher ridge tops, a fairly limited environment after all.

The much more mountainous landscape of western North Carolina is another matter, however. I used to go hiking regularly in a slice of that landscape called Shining Rock, a federally protected wilderness area of stark, 6000-foot peaks that are mostly bare of the dense forests more typical of the Appalachians. The scenery there is much more “western”, completely out of place in the Southeast.

Often on the way to Shining Rock, I would stop at a spot along the Blue Ridge Parkway where a slope of brush and grass, interspersed here and there with clumps of trees, rises gradually from a high-country stream. This place, Graveyard Fields, already a bit magical and mysterious, was also rampant with high-bush blueberries.

When the berries were ripe, the “fields” would be filled with Cherokees, from the small reservation nestled next to the Smokies, foraging no doubt in the manner of their ancestors.

You might think the berries there would also be a big draw for foraging bears. I never saw one in Graveyard Fields itself, though I know of at least one instance in which a bear got a taste of its berries.

This was on a camping trip with my parents along the Parkway one summer. We had picked some berries at Graveyard Fields that day, and my mother had used them to whip up a pie back at our campsite. Since we weren’t able to finish the pie before bedtime, we put the rest in an ice chest, which we (unwisely) left sitting on the tailgate of our truck. It didn’t sit there unnoticed for long. We awoke in the night to the sound of the ice chest crashing to the ground and a bear devouring what was left of the berry pie.

I haven’t heard of any encounters between people and bears in Finland over blueberries, but the competition between human foragers can sometimes get tense, as well, despite the fact that Finland's "everyman's rights" allow anyone to pick berries anywhere they please, including private land.

Last month, a popular tabloid asked its readers to share stories of the altercations they have experienced with other berry pickers. The resulting examples of marjaraivo ("berry rage") included tales of pickers being threatened by dogs, tractors, and a red-faced old lady, and in one instance the air being let out of a berry picker’s tires.

Normally, foraging competition is limited to keeping your favorite mushroom-picking spots a closely held secret, especially when it comes to the highly prized keltavahvero. 

Chanterelles from the Finnish forest.

(My parents exercised the same kind of secrecy when it came to the locations of ginseng, a slightly different kind of wild forest product that they loved to search for in the mountains of Georgia.)

Showing off the harvest from your undisclosed mushroom location on social media, is of course extremely typical. In summer, photos by Finnish friends of basketfuls of chanterelles or buckets of blueberries appear on my Facebook feed with the kind of regularity that American friends post memes praising Jesus. Foraging is that central to the Finnish way of life.

I once took an advanced Finnish-language course designed for immigrants to the country. In addition to grammar lessons, there were outings arranged with the purpose of introducing us foreigners to various aspects of Finnish life and culture. These included a visit to a Baltic herring festival, tours of a couple of national museums and, of course, a mushroom picking expedition.

Our little class assembled one autumn morning in Paloheinä, part of Helsinki’s Keskuspuisto (“Central Park”). Before we got started, our teacher briefly instructed us on which mushrooms were easily identifiable as safe, and which were obviously ones to avoid. She stressed that if there was any doubt, we should first check with her before picking something. Most of the class, those students from Algeria, Vietnam, Bangladesh and other such exotic places, stuck pretty close to the teacher as we combed the forest floor for edible fungi. I did likewise, since, even after over two decades of living here, mushroom picking is one aspect of Finnish culture this American has not yet managed to pick up.

One group of students, however, immediately disappeared, spreading out into the forest mostly on their own. The Russians. Well, the Russian-speakers, that is, which included Russians, Ukrainians, and one Azerbaijani. If there was one thing they required absolutely no help in, it was mushroom picking.

If anything, our boreal neighbors in Russia are even more dye-in-the-wool mushroom pickers than Finns are. I guess it’s one of those cultural things that transcends borders and languages when there are tasty things growing in the forest well worth foraging for. 

Forsyth County

Finland has seen some unusually prominent political demonstrations recently over the question of immigration, including a massive peaceful pro-multiculturalism rally in Helsinki’s Senate Square and a neo-Nazi gathering in Jyväskylä that resulted in some violence.

I’m hoping to write more about those events soon, but since I had almost finished this post on a conveniently related topic, perhaps I’ll get this one out of the way first.

Almost thirty years ago, I marched in what amounted to the only political demonstration I’ve ever taken part in. I even hesitate to use the word “march”, since to my ear that sounds far too self-important. Let’s just say I showed up.

I wasn’t an especially political person in my youth. The part of rural north Georgia I was from was not exactly a hotbed of political activism in those days. I think the status quo was just fine for most folks in my solidly conservative and God-fearing county. There wasn’t lot of diversity of opinion there when it came to the biggest political issues of the day, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. I think it’s safe to say that most residents supported the former and were at best uneasy about the latter.

In high school, the only overtly political act I engaged in was at a public hearing held in my hometown to gather “public comment” about a new four-lane highway to be built between Atlanta and North Carolina. As I recall, there were five proposed routes the highway could have taken through the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I felt that at least one or two of them would devastate some beautiful, mostly secluded mountain landscape.

At the well-attended hearing in our old county courthouse one evening, I took my turn to stand before a microphone and briefly, and no-doubt awkwardly, expressed my opinion about which of those alternative routes should be rejected outright, mainly the one through Neels Gap, a high saddle along the Appalachian Trail. I thank God, or whomever, that there is no recording of my statement.

For what it’s worth, that four-lane highway was eventually routed through my own hometown, the least disruptive option really, so in a sense, my side won.

Also while at college in Athens, I don't recall there being any major student protests on the University of Georgia campus, where a diversity of opinions certainly could be found, as well as the kind of young, energetic, sometimes idealistic, student body that is tailor-made for political activism. If there had been some massive exercise of the right of assembly while I was there, other than for a football game, of course, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.

Much later, after living abroad in Finland for a few years, I was again a resident of Athens, this time studying journalism, when an unexpected event occurred that harkened back to the civil rights movement of two decades earlier. That event occurred in Forsyth County.

Forsyth is a little county occupying some rolling countryside about halfway between Atlanta and the mountains of North Georgia, a county with a tainted history I had never heard about, despite growing up only two counties away.  

In truth, I didn’t know much about Forsyth at all. We never had much reason to go there. Cumming, the county seat, was not on the way to anywhere we ever went, though I have driven Highway 53 across the northeast corner of the county on innumerable trips back and forth between home and Athens – genteel enough wooded countryside that in a sense camouflages some truly horrible violence from over a hundred years ago.

In 1912, Forsyth County was the scene of some of the most explosive racial trouble to take place in the Jim Crow South. Within a week of each other, two women, both white, were assaulted by black men. Now, whether they were actually assaulted – and one certainly was – is almost beside the point, given the racial tilt of the criminal justice system in the South at the time (and arguably even today). The perception of assault was proof enough for the local white population.

In the first incident, it might have actually been only a case of attempted rape. Race relations being what they were, however, this was sufficient to stoke tensions to the point where white vigilantes patrolled the streets of Cumming, a local black preacher was nearly beaten to death for making disparaging comments about the white victim, and the National Guard was called out to maintain the peace.

The incident that quickly followed the first one was much more serious, resulting in the murder and alleged rape of a second young white woman. Two days later, a mob of townspeople dragged one of the suspects (just an accomplice, not even the alleged murderer) from the county jail, shot and then hung him from a telephone pole in the middle of town, no doubt to the great satisfaction of many of the white citizens.

The other suspects escaped mob “justice” only by being shuttled off to more secure jails in Atlanta.

The white mobs of Forsyth were not done, however. In the months that followed, practically every one of the thousand or so black people living in the county (about 10% of the population) were driven away, often forced to sell or even outright abandon their lands and homes. It was probably the biggest single example of ethnic cleansing to take place in Georgia since the Removal of the Cherokees.

By the 1980s, there were still practically no blacks living in the county, despite the fact that the urban spread of metro Atlanta had almost reached the southern borders of rural Forsyth. The county’s reputation as an unfriendly place for African-Americans had not been diminished in the least.

Presumably, to highlight this lack of racial progress in a county holding such a fateful place in Georgia black history and to commemorate the original violent banishment of the black population, Georgia civil rights leaders decided in 1987 to hold a demonstration in Cumming.

The rally on January 17 was not a huge affair. Fewer than a hundred marchers gathered there. I can’t recall much prior publicity surrounding it, if any. I suspect that, like many others, I hadn’t noticed anything in the news about such a demonstration about to take place. By 1987, that sort of thing seemed mostly out of date, Page Two sort of stuff, you could say.

That changed quickly. The small group of marchers, led by Hosea Williams, was met by a counterdemonstration that included elements of the Klu Klux Klan. Rocks and bottles were thrown, and some of the marchers sustained small injuries. Eight counterdemonstrators were arrested.

The specter of peaceful civil rights protesters being pelted by bottles, almost a quarter of century after Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, captured the attention of folks well beyond a core of civil rights activists. It sparked outrage with the wider public, and rightly so.

A week later, a second march took place in Cumming, following a mounting wave of publicity. I felt I had to be part of it.

I confess that part of me felt this was a chance to get a taste of the civil protesting of the Sixties that I had been too young to appreciate at the time. But mainly I felt ashamed of what had just taken place in Cumming, where thickheaded throwbacks to Georgia’s segregationist past had tried to revive their bigoted ideology in the crudest fashion. I wanted to help show the rest of the world that Georgia wasn’t like that anymore. Looking back, maybe I was too quick to be so optimistic.

On that chilly, sunny Saturday morning, my housemates and I gathered with other Athenians in front of the El Dorado vegetarian restaurant on Washington Street. Whether by design or coincidence, this was also the location of the Morton Building, which was built in 1910 as home to one of America’s first black vaudeville theaters.

Someone laid some old bed sheets on the sidewalk and painted some slogans on them as makeshift banners. We then drove to Cumming, joining the other demonstrators at a little shopping center on the edge of town, to wait our turn to begin a slow mile-and-a-quarter walk to the Forsyth County courthouse. There were some 20,000 of us.

I can’t say I remember many details from the march itself, but a couple of things do still stand out in my mind. One was the wall of National Guardsmen in riot gear lining both sides of the road along the entire route. They were part of the reported 1,700 troops sent, along with some 500 police of different sorts, to prevent violence.

I recall that they were arrayed with their backs toward us marchers. It wasn’t us they were keeping their eyes on, it was the counter-protesters. And there were some of those to be sure. Here and there, on the other side of the phalanx of National Guardsmen, were pockets of outwardly hostile people, shouting at us, though they were no doubt a bit subdued by the overwhelming presence of the police and troops. At least, there was nothing thrown.

There were, of course, some people just watching. I remember one young man standing alone on the road bank, watching the flood of outsiders filing into his hometown. He was wearing a watch cap and sunglasses. He had a big piece of duct tape prominently covering his mouth, and he held a handwritten sign that said, “I have to live here”. The message was clear.

Some of the other onlookers, standing on their front lawns or porches, reminded me of people I knew from my own home county of Gilmer, which was also an all-white county (if that status has been due to a Forsyth-like banishment of blacks, I’ve never heard about it, but I can’t be sure).

Many of these locals seemed to be basic country folks, people that I saw as ordinary, mostly decent people. I felt they weren’t bad people, but just out of step with the times. Watching them watching us, I couldn’t help thinking that they were in shock over the immense public display taking place in what they probably considered to be a town just fine the way it was.

And the public display was immense, with the thousands of marchers and police, helicopters flying overhead, Oprah Winfrey supposedly broadcasting from a restaurant somewhere in town, leading national figures like Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, and presidential candidate Gary Hart giving speeches from the courthouse. The march certainly overwhelmed the sleepy little town, and I’m sure it blindsided the people living there. I felt they couldn’t comprehend why such a thing would happen. They just didn’t get it.

I didn’t necessarily see those individuals, watching from their lawns in stunned silence, as racists. And I had no reason, just by virtual of the fact that they lived there, to think they were. At least, not overtly so.

Nor did I necessarily see them as supporters of the hateful white-supremacists counter-demonstrators – many of whom, after all, had come from elsewhere, just we marchers had.

I had a bit of sympathy for them. Cumming, partly due to its history and partly due to its present, had suddenly become a focal point, a magnet of sorts, for the changing racial currents of America circa 1987, changes that were unstoppable and needed to happen. These folks, ensconced in a parochial, small-town bubble, were simply in no way prepared for those changes, as I saw it, though you could argue they should have been.

They were caught off guard, a bit like a deer in the headlights, at the magnitude of the change that was about to overtake them as. Despite their stubborn wishes for it not to be so, the world was continuing to turn and society was continuing to progress. I thought that for many of them, their biggest fault was only an inability to accept change.

Now, thirty years later, after seeing the recent furious uproar in support of the Confederate Battle Flag, which in my mind can only be seen as a symbol of racial hate, it’s obvious that resistance to change in the South is more entrenched than I would have ever imagined, at least when it comes to race. Not that much has changed. Even now, only about 3% of Forsyth County is black, compared to 26% in adjacent Gwinnett County. Race relations seem as fraught as ever, not only in the South, but all over the country, as witnessed by the Black Lives Matter movement, born almost exactly a year ago.

If I thought in 1987 that Forsyth County was an aberration in an increasingly progressive, modern Georgia, I’m thinking now I was wrong. 

Hey, Hei, Heinä!

Near my home in North Helsinki is what I usually refer to as “the horse farm”. That’s not a completely correct description of Tuomarinkylän kartano, but it will do. They do have horses.

Tuomarinkylä (“the judge’s village”) is, in fact, a former kartano (“estate”) that was founded almost 300 years ago on the broad, rich bottomlands of the Vantaa River. It was a Finnish equivalent to the Georgia plantation or Russian usadboy, though of course with the arduous farm work being done by sharecroppers, not slaves or serfs.

The manor house at Tuomrinkylä.

Today, Tuomarinkylä is owned and run by the city. Its well-preserved manor buildings  contain a cafe and an interior decorating shop (and formerly a couple of museums, now closed due to austerity cuts). Its barns and stables are home to dozens of horses belonging to a couple of riding schools operating there. Its fields are sown in grain and hay. It’s a nice place to visit to be sure.

Driving past there recently, I noticed a sign saying something about an upcoming heinä-something-or-other. I should have taken a closer look. Seems that for quite some time I’ve been missing an unexpected side of the farm.

The past couple of summers or so, I have noticed a field along the road running past Tuomarinkylä has been filled with rows and rows of haystacks, the old-fashioned kind formed around a wooden pole.

As a child, I remember seeing these kinds of traditional haystacks near my hometown in Georgia, presumably because that’s how one local farmer still did it in the 1960s, though by then the de rigueur method of gathering and storing hay had long been mechanized bailing.

I have also seen such hay stacks here and there in the Finnish countryside, though it’s not clear whether they were erected simply for decoration or out of nostalgia. Come to think of it, the place where I have regularly seen them was the small corner of a field cut off from the rest of the farm by a highway. Maybe the farmer figured it wasn’t worth getting a machine in there, and just did it by hand. Respect for that.

In any case, the time when hay was stacked by hand in Finland probably isn’t that far removed from today. Hiking in the woods with my wife a couple weeks ago, we happened to pass a farm where we saw leaning against a barn wall a dozen or so wooden poles, each sharpened to a point at the ends and with holes drilled through them at regular intervals. It was obvious what they were for.

Riding training at Tuomarinkylä.

For the record, nowadays hay in Finland is packed into in the huge, round bales also common in the States. The ones completely covered in white plastic and often left in the fields are whimsically called dinosauruksen munat ("dinosaur eggs").

It may not be going too far to say that haymaking is one those mundane things that underpin civilization – at least any civilization with livestock. And it’s been romanticized in plenty of artwork over the centuries, as well as lives on in such English expressions as, “needle in a haystack”, “hit the hay”, “make hay while the sun shines”, and the ever-popular “roll in the hay (!)”.

All through my childhood, my family always owned some cattle, though my parents were mainly running a small business in town. When I was in high school, we had maybe twenty head or so, which we kept on some pastureland we rented along with one of my uncles. Each summer, we’d close off one part of the pasture from grazing, allowing the grass to grow freely to its full height without fear of being munched by some ambling bovine. When the grass was high enough (and a long-enough stretch of hot, dry weather was forecast to allow harvesting), we’d hire someone to cut and bale the hay.

When the hay was dry enough for bailing, my brother and I were recruited to help load the bales onto the back of our pick-up truck, often driven by my mother, as we followed behind the hay bailer. The machine, pulled by a tractor, spat out the rectangular blocks of hay remarkably fast. We had to work quickly, slinging the 50-pound bales up onto the truck and stacking them five or six layers high, before hauling them to a barn to be unloaded and stacked there for the winter.

We once had to cut short a hiking trip in the Smokies because a window of hot, dry weather had opened up, and we were needed back home to bring in the hay. It was hot work, and I remember we couldn’t wait to finish so we could jump in the cold creek flowing past the field to cool off.

Crossroads at the farm.

As I recall, we cut hay in June back then in Georgia, in fact in early June. In Finland, it seems it’s traditionally done a month later in July, based on, if nothing else, the Finnish word for “July”.

In Finnish, the month of July is called heinäkuu, literally “hay month”, so that must be the month when you do something with hay. Obviously. I guess that goes to show the role that hay has played in ancient Finnish life, as opposed to, say, the corrupting influence of the Romans. (The English “July” is named after Julius Caesar, who without a doubt never spent a single day cutting hay.)

It’s almost surprising that the word for “hay” in Finnish (heinä, pronounced “hay-nah”) is so close to the English, given how weirdly different most Finnish words are. Obviously, it’s been borrowed from one of English’s Germanic-language cousins. I’m guessing Swedish, in which the word is “hö” (pronounced something like “heww”).

(Also a bit surprisingly, an informal Finnish word for “hello”, “hei” is identical in sound to the “hey” used in America. In this case, it definitely comes from the Swedish “hej”.)

Another way of translating heinäkuu (and my preferred way), is “hay moon”, since kuu means both “month” and “moon”. The connection there is, well, obvious. It reminds me of the names that Native Americans gave to their “moons”. For example, the Cherokee called July “Ripe Corn Moon”.

The fact that Finnish often has such descriptive names for different “moons” of the year adds to the sense I often have of the aboriginal character of the nature-loving Finns, though sometimes those descriptive names miss the mark. The Finnish word for June is kesäkuu, which can be read as “summer moon”, a twisted joke this year when June was the least summer-like it has been for years, depressingly cool, cloudy and rainy.

Haystacks under cloudy skies.

July hasn’t been much better, though the weather improved enough to put up hay at Tuomarinkylä, with a little help from the villagers. The sign I had seen by the road was for an upcoming heinätalkoot, which was held on July 2nd. Apparently, these events have been held for years, maybe even decades, but I’d never noticed. My only plausible excuse is that in the past I often spent that part of July out of the country. The more realistic excuse is that I just wasn’t paying attention. In any case, the heinätalkoot seems like a great idea.

Talkoot are probably best described as “communal work”, where a group of people pitches in to get some chore done. In the past, this included putting up buildings, in the same vein as the legendary "barn raisings" of the Amish. The most common form nowadays is when all the residents of a housing co-op periodically get together to fix/clean up the premises, mow the grass, trim bushes, clean gutters, that sort of stuff. Strangely enough, these kinds of group work could be called "bees" in America.

The heinätalkoot at Tuomarinkylä, one of those creative public happenings arranged regularly around Helsinki, gives city folks a chance to tap their country roots by pitching hay for a few hours like their ancestors used to do. From the photos, it looks like it would have been a fun outing. At least fun to watch. Hopefully, I’ll remember it next year, and try my hand at tapping my own haymaking roots, such as they are. 

Pekka Halonen's "The Hay Cutters".

Stillbirth of a Nation

Years ago, sometime after I had moved to Finland, I ran across a small pamphlet that Finnair had produced for their customers traveling to the United States.

The booklet offered practical guidance on such matters as how much to tip in restaurants or how the hell to identify a dime as a ten-cent piece, despite the fact that “10” or “ten” are nowhere to be seen anywhere on the coin. Another one of those little American oddities to perplex foreign visitors.

Among other useful information was a page dealing with US public holidays, listing about half a dozen of the most significant ones, including the quintessential American holidays of Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Labor Day. What struck me as odd, in fact extremely odd, was the inclusion of a day I did not recognize as any holiday – Jefferson Davis’ birthday. 

Though I was born and raised in the South, I can’t recall anyone ever talking about the birthday of the Confederacy’s one-and-only president, let alone celebrating it. As far as I was concerned Jefferson Davis had long been thankfully forgotten, certainly not a figure to be commemorated.

I’ve since learned that his birthdate is indeed an official holiday in Florida and Alabama. Of course. No doubt, it’s also celebrated unofficially by certain segments of the population in other southern states, and by that I mean folks who, 150 years after the fact, can’t come to grips with the thought that the South waged a misguided and treasonous war against the United States, and lost. Lost badly.

Obviously, the creators of the Finnair booklet must have sourced some bad information if they thought that Davis’ birthday merited a mention as any kind of national holiday. To me, it would be as absurd as celebrating Benedict Arnold Day. I trust no one does that.

When I was growing up in the South in the 60s, the Civil War was a very faint backdrop to the modern world, but not much more than that. No one took it too seriously where I lived, though we definitely identified ourselves as Southerners.

We jokingly called a neighboring family who lived along our dirt road “Yankees” because they had moved there from Ohio. That’s about the extent of the Civil War intruding on my childhood as I can recall. I remember hearing only one Civil War-era story handed down from the older generation of my family. 

Years later, when a co-worker from Boston asked me to demonstrate a “rebel yell”, I had to disappoint him. It was not something we ever did growing up in my part of Georgia. I’d be able to do an authentic rebel yell as likely as an authentic Swiss yodel.

Back then, if we were preoccupied with any events outside our own daily lives, it was with a different and still-on-going civil war, one in Indo-China, and a lower grade of political unrest in the US, the overall turbulence of the 1960s. The Civil War wasn’t much of a topic of conversation. No one felt strongly about what had happened 100 years in the past. No one harbored simmering resentments over it.

I should perhaps pause to explain that mine was not the South of “Gone with the Wind”, by any means. The Georgia haunted by the ghost of Scarlet O’Harra was actually a bit foreign to me, so my experience may not have been typical for what used to be called the Cracker State. ("Cracker" is a slang term for poor, white Southerners.) 

I grew up in the mountains of North Georgia, in a country of small upland farms and forested wilderness. This mountainous area was surely not as dependent as the rest of the state on the slave-based economy that sustained the genteel cotton-growing elites, the aristocratic plantation owners. In 1860, only about 150 slaves lived in Gilmer County, where I was born, according to one source I have found. Gilmer was mostly a county of “small-fisted” farmers.

The two delegates sent from Gilmer to the Georgia Secession Convention in the spring of 1861 voted against leaving the Union. When the war came, a decent number of local boys fought on the side of the North, including at least one of my ancestors. There were no battles fought near the county and no Civil War memorials erected there. Reminders of the war did not really exist there.

That's why it shouldn’t be too surprising that I don’t recall as a child hearing anyone expressing the view that the Confederate States should have won the war. In my predominately Republican county, probably no one strongly felt that that President Abraham Lincoln, the icon of the GOP, was wrong to fight in order to keep the Union together. (Obviously, this was long before Fox News arrived on the scene.)

As I write this now, it seems the Civil War should be even less of an issue than fifty years ago. It should all be ancient, and settled, history, with no real relevance to today.

Oh, how I wish that were true.

In recent years, I’ve spent enough time browsing the history sections of American bookstores to know there is a lucrative enough market for revisionist history books recasting the past from a right-wing worldview.

My impression is that the drive to rewrite (or to be more charitable, to “reinterpret”) history got a boost after the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, when the country took a noticeable turn to the right. And now, with the murkiness of the internet, where everything and nothing is true, rewriting history has never been easier.

I shouldn’t have been too surprised, therefore, to hear Andrew Napolitano, some kind of Fox News “personality”, railing on-air last year against Abraham Lincoln – Abraham Lincoln! – for his unnecessarily launching a “murderous war” against the South. What the hell?

I don’t greatly admire that many American presidents, but the more I read about Lincoln, the better I understand what an extraordinary politician and leader he was. I found it shocking that someone on “mainstream” TV would lambaste the president for struggling to hold the United States together. I might as well have been watching Russia Today.

I know that some contemporaries of Lincoln similarly railed again him as a “tyrant”, but those folks were on the side of the Confederates, dead set against any restrictions on the rights of the good people of the South to own other human beings. That was presumably a more acceptable form of tyranny, one based on race.

Following the terrorist killing of nine African Americans in Charleston last month, the issue of the Civil War is rising again, with a twist.

The white-supremacist murderer posted photos on social media of himself with the Confederate Battle Flag, provoking a groundswell of anti-rebel-flag sentiment that was inspired in part by Ta-Nehisi Coates in an article in the Atlantic Monthly. In reaction to the shooting, Coates set his sights on the rebel flag still flying on the grounds of the South Carolina capitol in Columbia, insisting that it was time to “take it down”.

Let’s be honest, compared to the bigger problems of racism and political violence, the matter of one flag is small beer. Still, for a native southerner, like myself, who has come to see that flag as a disgraceful throwback to disgraceful times, it was a welcome development.

Perhaps because the Charleston shooter also posted photos of himself burning an American flag even some conservatives in the South have felt justified, or chastened enough by the public outcry, to come out in favor of taking the flag in South Carolina down. But, it also seems they’ve often missed the point.

The rationale I’ve seen repeated here and there is thus:  although the flag is in reality nothing more than a benevolent symbol of Southern heritage, it had sadly been appropriated as a symbol of white supremacy by hate groups, such as the Klu Klux Klan. (“Appropriation” is a particularly popular buzzword nowadays.)

Using this argument, it has finally become socially acceptable now in 2015 for even true sons and daughters of Dixie to support taking the flag in Columbia down. Progress, of a sort.

This conservative argument seems reasonable, up to a point, so perhaps it’s best not to quibble. It is true the flag has for years been used as a banner by reactionary groups opposed to civil rights. But what the new-found opponents to the flag conveniently ignore (assuming they even know) is that this “appropriation” is nothing new and the reactionary groups using the flag this way have also included state governments.

The familiar Confederate symbol of rebellion was incorporated into the state flag of Georgia, but not until 1956, at the dawn of the civil rights movement. It’s doubtful that pride in Southern heritage, on an official state level, had been dormant all the years prior to that.

Of course, it was clear to everyone at the time that the change was made as an act of defiance against a tide of racial integration. Georgia was thumbing its nose at folks, especially in the federal government, who thought that the “separate but equal” principle of segregation was a cruel joke.

Georgia removed the rebel symbol from its flag only in 2001, and only after an acrimonious debate. Mississippi, whose flag also features the old battle flag, is now discussing doing the same in the wake of the Charleston shooting.

Not everyone, though, is jumping on board the anti-flag bandwagon. Not far from my home county, a parade of pickup trucks and jeeps flying the battle flag whizzed through the streets of Fort Oglethorpe, protesting the removal of the flag from a gift shop at the nearby national military park. A couple of the trucks in the speeding procession rear-ended each other, showing that enthusiasm for a white-supremacist Lost Cause doesn’t necessarily breed safe-driving habits!

And while moderate southern conservatives are now seemingly willing to concede that the “optics” of the battle flag are a liability in today’s world (due to hateful appropriation!), I have come to understand that many of them are still in deep denial over the fundamental truths of the war that spawned the flag. Even today.

I recently had an internet debate (always a bad idea) about the Civil War with some folks from Georgia and elsewhere, some of whom I would have thought were thoroughly modern and well-educated people. While they seemed to agree the time had come to abandon the battle flag, they dug in their heels at any suggestion that the Civil War itself was fought for anything as unrighteous as slavery.

It was dismaying to see people of my general age and background, four or five generations removed from Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, insisting that a war that resulted in some 750,000 deaths on both sides was fought over "tariffs". Or the "banking system". Or the always-useful excuse of “states’ rights”. Anything, anything but slavery. At first, I thought they were joking or being ironic. They weren’t.

I thought such willful twisting of historical reality was only found on the fridges of society, bringing to mind marginalized loners hunkered down in some tumbledown house trolling the darker reaches of the internet, not people who function in the open sunshine of the modern life.

This kind of slavery-denial is difficult to understand, especially since all it takes to dispel such illusions is to read the Georgia Declaration of Secession*, basically the equivalent of the US Declaration of Independence.

A long-winded document by any definition – three times the length of the American Declaration (and even longer than this post!) – it leaves no doubt about what moved the pompous blowhards who wrote it to take the drastic action of revolution.

By my rough analysis, some 78% of the text is devoted to slavery. Only 15% deals with other grievances southerners had with the North, namely tariffs and “internal improvements” (infrastructure spending), where they felt they were being victimized by the Yankees. The Declaration reeks of victimhood.

Yet, despite the Declaration being readily available on-line and crystal clear in its meaning, some people contrive to find that slavery wasn’t the South’s motivation for secession, and therefore, racism wasn’t behind it. That, after all, wouldn’t be “honorable”.

Seriously, I can’t understand the point of trying to whitewash the past by denying that Southerners, even if they might have been our own ancestors, went to war over slavery. Why do folks today feel the need to make excuses for people long dead and gone? And why do I now seem to be encountering more of this denial than years ago?

I suspect that some of the people I was arguing with recently grew up in middle or south Georgia, or some other part of the state seeped in Civil War lore, dotted with war memorials and statues of Confederate generals. (Don't get me started on Stone Mountain, the "Mount Rushmore" of the Confederacy.) Perhaps most other Georgians learned such archaic attitudes at their mama’s knee. At least, I didn't.

Or perhaps the traditional, pro-American, narrative of the Civil War has now been successfully hijacked by neo-Confederate apologists, like Andrew Napolitano and other right-wing revisionists. I would see that as brainwashing. 

Anyway, I would hope the stark contrast of the Charleston shooter burning the American flag, while flaunting the rebel one, brings home to modern-day fans of the Confederacy a contradiction that has always seemed obvious to me: how can you claim to be a loyal patriot of the United States – as southern conservatives certainly do – and also feel pride at the sight of a symbol of an enemy “nation”?

In any case, on the Fourth of July this past weekend I was happy to commemorate the founding of the United States – and not the stillbirth of a different nation, one that did not deserve to be born despite what some folks in the South might still prefer to believe, even today. 

Words of President Barack Obama, in his eulogy for the nine slain parishioners of
the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

* Correction: This should perhaps be referred to as the "Declaration of Causes of Secession". While the "Ordinance of Secession", adopted Jan. 22, 1861, was more properly Georgia's "declaration of independence",  it was followed a week later by the Declaration of Causes.