Time for a Miller Run

On Sunday I went downhill skiing, the first time – I’m embarrassed to say – this winter, even though we’re already into March.  It’s been a busier, stranger winter this year, which has prevented me from doing as much as I would like to outside. 

For this short ski trip, I drove to Peuramaa (“Deer Land”), a nice, typically small ski hill about 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of my home in Helsinki.  One thing to know about skiing in Finland is that the really good downhill spots are in the north, mostly in Lapland, where Finland’s only actual mountains are located.  I say “mountains”, but sadly the topography in Lapland is nothing like the Alps or the Rockies, or even my native Appalachians. 

View from the top of Peuramaa.

Finland has been ground down too much by ancient ice to boast anything other than tunturit (or “fells”), massive, solitary, rounded mountains that don’t rise much above tree line – which in Lapland isn’t hard to do.  That far north you run out of trees at around 600 meters (2000 feet).  That’s not very high even by Georgia standards (the small part of Georgia that has mountains, that is). 

Still, you don’t have to be towering to be wild and barren.  The word tunturi has the same root in the Sami language that gives us “tundra”, which tells you something about the environment on the flat summits of Lapland's highest peaks in winter. 

That’s Lapland.  The rest of the Finnish landscape rises and falls in a mosaic of hills and ridges, but mostly nothing approaching mountains.  In the part of southern Finland where I live, the highest patch of ground is some place I’ve never heard of that’s only about 160 meters (500 feet) above sea level.  (Well, that’s still higher than half of Georgia, but it ain’t that high.)

Peuramaa, where I went skiing last weekend, is lower than that.  It stands only about 50 m (160 feet) above the flat farmland to the west (if my Suunto altimeter can be believed), but it does rise abruptly, making the lower slopes quite steep.  That seems normal for ski hills in extremely southern Finland.  Most are situated atop kalliot, which are giant humps of rock that sometimes rise vertically from their immediate surroundings. 

Sunset on Sunday.

The weather on Sunday was awesome.  Blue sky, temperatures just below freezing, no wind at all, and a bright sun that didn’t set until just before the place closed at six.  The fact that it’s not already pitch dark by that time is another plus for springtime skiing. 

It was a perfect day, and as I stood on top of the hill watching the setting sun, I was put in mind of the place where I first “learned” to ski long ago.  (I have to confess, I’ve never taken lessons, as my deeply flawed technique shows all too well, but I still manage.) 

As unlikely as it might sound, Georgia used to have a ski resort.  Sky Valley wasn’t big, though it did have a vertical drop bigger than Peuramaa’s.  And it is barely even in Georgia.  To get there, you had to drive over the state line into North Carolina, and then reenter Georgia on a small dead-end road to reach a small basin under Georgia’s second highest peak (Rabun Bald, 4696 ft, 1431 m). 

When it opened in 1969, Sky Valley held the distinction of being America’s southernmost ski hill this side of the Rockies.  That is, until Cloudmont, an even more unlikely ski area, cropped up in Alabama a year later.  Building a ski resort so far south requires a level of optimism I can scarcely imagine, especially the one in Alabama, which isn’t even as high as the hill behind our family home in Georgia – a hill no one would rightly consider ski-resort material.   

Yet, Cloudmont remains in operation, while Sky Valley closed to skiing in 2004, after the resort changed hands.  It now seems to be mostly a secluded golf resort and vacation community.  But, back in the 70s, when I was in college, it was a bustling little resort where I learned with my brother and buddies how to make it down the hill on skis.   

Just under two hours from Athens, Sky Valley was great for a quick day out on the slopes, such as they were.  My roommates and I would sometimes skip classes to enjoy some less-crowded weekday skiing.  One of my best memories from those trips was inspired, as so many other things in college life are, by a beer commercial. 

Miller Beer used to run TV ads with the tagline “It’s Miller Time”.  Maybe they still do.  The storyline went like this:  in the evening, after a day well spent doing something satisfying, and manly, like building barns or racing dirt bikes, blue-collar, outdoorsy dudes would get together and throw back a few, well-deserved cold ones because, well, “It’s Miller Time.” 

When we skied at Sky Valley, we had a habit of trying to get as much skiing in as we could, especially as closing time approached.  We’d try to squeeze a few more runs in before the chair lift shut down, sometimes racing to the bottom of the hill just before they stopped letting people on.  If, on the way back up the hill, we saw that the chairs behind us were empty, we knew that was going to be the last run of the day. 

Once at the top of the hill, we’d wait while the other skiers headed back down.  We’d stand there, savoring the scenery, the camaraderie, all the fun we’d had that day.  Finally, when everyone else had cleared off the hill, we’d head down one last time ourselves, making the most of that one last run, the run we naturally dubbed “The Miller Run”.  

On the slopes at Peuramaa.

Easter in Finland

The great thing about Easter in Finland is that it’s always a four-day weekend, thanks to the fact that, as the most important holy day in the Christian calendar, it’s also an official public holiday.  And it’s not just one holiday.  Besides Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Finland also celebrates Easter Monday, something unheard of in the Baptist church I was raised in. 

Practically everything shuts down here on those days (the Saturday in between being a normal day), especially all the stores – meaning you need to do some strategic grocery shopping if you want to make it from Thursday to the following Tuesday without resorting to an emergency run to the local gas station for milk or ketchup.  Or mämmi. 

Mämmi served with milk.

Mämmi is a dessert eaten only at Easter and most likely only in Finland and Sweden, and it has a distinctly ugly appearance that makes it the butt of quite a few jokes.  A thick, dark, pudding-like concoction made of malt, rye flour and molasses, mämmi is not the most appealing dessert you’ll ever see, but it is fact quite tasty.  Personally, though, I prefer the other Easter dessert, paskha, a white frothy custard introduced to Finland by the Russian Orthodox Church.  Still, the most popular Easter sweet has to be chocolate.  My favorite is the Mignon chocolate egg, produced only at Easter and as far as I know nowhere else than Finland.  The unique thing about this treat is that it’s a real, intact eggshell – filled with chocolate – that you peel as you would any hard-boiled egg. 

Being such a long holiday, Easter is a popular time for Finns to make a quick trip somewhere with the family.  We’ve occasionally used the four-day weekend for trips to Lapland, where there’s often still plenty of snow for some late-season skiing.  I have friends who are doing that right now, though as late (and warm) as Easter is this year, I have to think the skiing might be a little dodgy right now, even that far north. 

The presence of snow on the ground is just another difference between the holiday here the Easters of my youth in Georgia.  When our children were young, they did their Easter egg hunting inside the house for the simple reason that searching for chocolate eggs in the snow outside just isn’t all that fun, or challenging.  They tend to stand out against all that white snow.  Another difference is the trick-or-treating that takes place on Palm Sunday, when children – mostly girls – dress as witches to go door-to-door exchanging decorated pussy-willow switches for candy.  The connection between this and the crucifixion of Jesus still escapes me.  But, then again, you can say the same about the Easter Bunny and dyed hard-boiled eggs. 

Mignon chocolate egg starting to hatch.
Photo by Tiia Monto.

Even in secular Finland, Easter does also have a religious side.  It might be one of the few times during the year that many people actually step into a church, though based on the televised service I saw on Friday, it’s not anything like at capacity crowds.  The Orthodox church – which, to be honest, tends to exhibit a bit more flair than the Lutherans do – makes the celebration more participatory.  Part of the Orthodox Easter ritual is for the entire congregation to chant and bear lit candles as they follow their priest in a procession circling the church several times.  It can be quite a spectacle, though I have to confess I’ve only seen it on TV occasionally.  In my family, we have concentrated only on the cocoa- and sugar-based rituals of what is a thankfully long holiday. 

Happy Easter, everyone!

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.