Sweet, Sweet Irony

These days I spend a lot more time thinking or reading about politics in the US than I probably should, and certainly more than I used to. It’s become an obsession (benign, I hope) that was born when Barack Obama was elected president. No doubt, a few million Americans on either side of the political divide could say the same, so groundbreaking was Obama's election.

A Birther trying to make a point.
Photo: Bonzo McGrue

The obsession isn’t only due to my hopes and excitement over a Democrat and African-American winning the White House. It’s was intensified, in large part, by the ferocious backlash by many conservative Americans to Obama. If Republicans in the heartland had grudgingly accepted President Obama’s legitimacy, reined in their more obstructionist instincts, and allowed Washington to get down to business as usual, I suspect I would have become bored with politics as a spectator sport by now.

That didn’t happen, though. The total and strident opposition from the right, in the form of the Tea Party, turned the political scene into a slow-motion train wreck that I couldn’t turn away from.

I see the Tea Party as mostly older, mostly white, sometimes illogical folks lashing out over the fact that things aren’t what they used to be, that the US got hit with a gigantic financial crisis, and that – Heaven Forbid! – the Democrats won an election. (It has to be said that for some, though I hope not most, it is also all about the color of Barack Obama’s skin.)

As fanatical (or fanciful) as the Tea Party sometimes can be, there’s a subset that’s even fringier – the Birthers. These are the folks who believe (or pretend to believe) that Barack Obama is not eligible to be president because, as they claim, he was born in Kenya and therefore is not a “natural born” US citizen, as required by the Constitution.

I personally know many people back in Georgia who could be characterized as Tea Party supporters. I hope none of them is also a serious Birther.

For Birthers, it’s not enough that Obama is an American by right of being born to at least one American parent (in his case, his mother). In the astute legal opinion of your average Birther, laboring away over a keyboard in a doublewide somewhere in the wilds of West Virginia, Obama would also have to be born on US soil to be “natural born”. American soil!

Despite the fact that all evidence points to Obama being born in Hawaii barely three years after that state joined the Union, hard-core Birthers refuse to believe it.

For this reason, most Birthers seem delusional (meaning there really is something wrong with them), or else they are cynical pranksters trying to egg on those others who are delusion.

The worst offender, in my mind, is Donald Trump, who made the Birther issue the linchpin of his so-called presidential campaign. He supposedly went so far as to send a crack team of special investigators to Honolulu on a loudly publicized, but insubstantial, wild goose chase to uncover the “truth” behind Obama’s origins.

I’m sure Trump never really believed the Birther nonsense (he’s not that stupid), but he was happy to stoke the conspiracy flames for his own self-promotional, giving the movement a sheen (very oily sheen?) of respectability. Because of this, my opinion of the man went from him being mildly ridiculous and obnoxious to being outright despicable.

(Ask my wife how I feel about Trump. She has seen me practically leap over the sofa trying to find the off switch on the remote whenever his face appears on TV. Following the Birther business, I cannot stand the sight of the man.)

Most Birthers, however, are true believers convinced that Americans born on foreign soil (and, for them, that means Obama) cannot rightfully be president. So, imagine my glee when, a few weeks ago, there was an unexpected turn of events in the Birther saga. And it came from deep in the heart of Tea Party country.

A rising star in the Republican Party is Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas and a conservative with impeccable Tea Party credentials. 

Cruz is smart. He graduated Harvard Law School – just like Barack Obama. And he’s ambitious. There’s already talk of him running for president in 2016, even though he’s only a one-term Senator – just like Barack Obama. He has an American mother and non-US father – just like Barack Obama. And he was born on foreign soil – just like Barack, wait, no, not like Barack Obama.

Unlike Obama, Cruz is the real deal. He actually was born abroad, in Canada, a fact that people only seemed to realize recently, after months of him generating White House buzz among the Tea Party faithful. Mon Dieu! To quote an old Cheech and Chong routine: “You are Canadien, not you are?”

I love this. A charismatic conservative firebrand, the answer to the presidential dreams of Tea Partiers (and presumably Birthers), has the exact background that Birthers claim disqualifies the current, much despised Commander in Chief.

The good news (for Cruz) is that it seems most experts who don’t live in the fantasy world of Birtherism agree that being born in Calgary doesn’t make Cruz any less presidential material.

That would also be good news for my children, born American on the foreign soil of Finland, if they ever aspired to run for the highest office in the land, as long as they fulfill another constitutional requirement of living in the States for at least 14 years. In any case, becoming POTUS is nothing I would wish on any of my loved ones.

The bad news (for Birthers) is that the eligibility of foreign-born Cruz leaves them with a dilemma.

They have to either drop him faster than a disgraced Rick Perry or Herman Cain, or be forced to admit that they were wrong. They would have to face the fact that the singular "issue" that has outraged them over the past five years, the issue that they have worked themselves into a tizzy over, harped on, protested against, flooded the Internet with ALL CAP diatribes about, and even took Donald Trump seriously over, was, in fact, from the very beginning simply bogus.

Or they could bend logic and decide, as a supporter quoted on TV did, that “Canada’s not really foreign soil”. Either way, I am enjoying the irony of it all. ¶

Road Trips

I’ve been back in Finland from our holiday in America for well over a month already and am only now getting around to posting anything about it.

At some point on the trip, along Colorado Highway 13, I think, among the empty (and I do mean empty) red-and-green landscape of Rio Blanco County, I had a pang of homesickness for Helsinki.

What I was feeling had more to do with family than any real longing for the cool, leafy corner of the Finnish capital that I call home. My wife, daughter and I were rolling at 65 miles an hour toward a rare family reunion later that day, and the only thing missing were my two sons back in Finland.

Still, we had been away from home for a while. It was Day Nine of our trip to America, and it was starting to feel like a long one. Maybe it’s a sign of aging that my desire for traveling begins to have a shelf life. (Who knew?)

It wasn’t always so. When I was about to set out on my first "buddy" road trip out west back in 1980, I recall my father advising me that I would find out that a week or so of that kind of traveling is more than enough. Beyond that, it’s no fun to be so far from home.

He might have been drawing on his experience from a hunting trip he made in 1963. For my father, this was no ordinary hunting trip. He and a few friends had driven along two-lane highways across the Great Plains to hunt elk in the Rocky Mountains of southern Colorado. I was too young to remember the details, but it feels like he was away a couple of weeks, though it might have been only one.

The most lasting impressions of my father’s trip came from the elk-head trophy that later towered over our living room and the grainy 8-milimeter home-movie footage he brought home from the trip. I even recall the night that the film was shown at the little community center near our home. It felt like a big deal, and for the time, it was.

I’m sure that the trip to Pagosa Springs had been a worthwhile adventure for my father and a great success, though tinged with some sadness (on the trip, a companion was stricken with the first signs of an illness that would come to kill him). With three young children back in Georgia, though, my father probably felt more than enough homesickness to put him off straying so far from home again without us. He didn’t go out West again until the road trip the whole family took to Wyoming thirteen years later.

In 1980, I was 23 and single with really nothing, or nobody, to miss back in Georgia. At least, not for a couple of weeks. So, I didn’t heed my father’s warning about over-extending my first own cross-country road trip, and in fact, homesickness wasn’t a problem.

My friend and I drove some 1600 miles (2500 km) to visit our college roommate in Grants, New Mexico, and then continued on to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and finally Las Vegas before turning back toward Georgia. I don’t recall feeling homesick even once.

It was the same, two years later, when I made a similar trip, this time for three weeks, though by then there would have been some cause for homesickness, or at least bittersweetness, if I had thought about it.

I called this my “Goodbye America” trip, because I was soon moving to Helsinki and was unsure how long it would be before I returned. I also wanted to show my Finnish girlfriend something of the American West. My battered Toyota station wagon carried us from Georgia across the southern tier of the US to Los Angeles and San Diego (and, for a couple of ill-considered and nerve-racking hours, even Tijuana).

We followed the coast up to San Francisco before hitting a series of national parks (Yosemite, Death Valley, Zion, Grand Canyon) on our way back East. We slept in the car in the hills above LA, took refuge in a Las Vegas casino after crossing Death Valley without air conditioning, and stopped to check out Aspen (where my future wife bought a Moomintroll book for me, as a kind of early introduction to Finnish culture).

In some ways, the trip we made this summer relived some moments from those epic road trips of my youth. We drove to the South Rim for the first time since 1980. On our first visit to LA since the “Goodbye America” trip, we toured some of the most memorable spots from before and tried to recognize others we only half-remember. We stayed at the same ski resort in Utah (and hiked to the same 11,068-foot peak) as we did on another epic road trip we took with the family almost a decade ago. And we met relatives and friends we haven't seen in far too long. There were certainly some nostalgic moments. 

We also broke some new ground and stumbled upon some unexpected finds, like dinosaur bones exposed in a wall of a naked stone, a street-side painting in a Utah ski town left by guerrilla artist Banksy, and an archeological dig, once frequented by the legendary Louis Leakey, now almost forgotten. 

Even the routes and spots we did retrace and revisit all look new again after so many years, so it didn't feel as if we were simply rehashing the past. Not the whole time, anyway.

I hope to eventually post more about parts of the trip. But if my writing output since returning to Helsinki is any indication, it might have to wait until the next big Southwest road trip, hopefully this time in something less than 30 years. ¶

Photo: Taiga Korpelainen

The World We Live In

In the early 90s, I was likely one of the few Americans working for a certain big Finnish IT company. In my case, it was part of a team in Helsinki writing user manuals for server and system software (very little of which I actually understood, it has to be said).

At some point, another American I’ll call James joined the company as a project manager. Apparently, he had been an exchange student here in his youth, and memories of those days had prompted him to make the unlikely move to relocate to a place where he had practically no connections.

He was, in some ways, the odd man out. He was older, unattached, and more buttoned-down than my other colleagues. And unlike the other expats I knew, he hadn’t moved to Finland because of romance, which was a bit rare in those days. This was long before the golden age of Finnish high-tech, when the chance of working at dynamic, cutting-edge firms (at least one in particular) was enough to draw smart, geeky foreigners, like James, to the cold, dark north.

Among ourselves, we joked that James must have been a spy. Remember, this wasn’t that long after the Cold War, when the working assumption among many was that Helsinki was a natural fault line for East-West espionage. (I still recall how the downtown office of the Teboil service-station chain was widely seen as a front for the KGB.)

I’m sure James was no spy, but with his deep roots in the IT world, he did know things. One conversation I remember from those days was when he explained the function of the super-secret National Security Agency, an outfit I’d probably never heard of before.

James described the giant dish antennas on the East Coast used by the big US telecommunications companies for the downlink of all trans-Atlantic phone traffic. He went on to tell about a second set of dishes directly behind the first, perfectly positioned to scoop up the very same overseas phone traffic and feed it to the NSA supercomputers that then searched this torrent of data for words of particular interest to the American government. Perhaps even back then, this was no real secret, but rather public knowledge to anyone interested enough to find out. I don’t know for sure.

Anyway, maybe that’s why, when calling my parents from Helsinki, I used to half-seriously envision that someone in the depths of the US intelligence apparatus might be listening as we chatted about the most mundane things imaginable. After all, mine was part of the “foreign” communication that the NSA was tasked with intercepting.

Things have changed since then, and in some ways, they haven’t. Washington is now in an uproar of the first magnitude over the revelations by a former CIA/NSA tech support guy, Edward Snowden, about the extent of the data harvested nowadays by the NSA from domestic phone and Internet traffic. It’s huge, and it’s not just foreign traffic.

Some Americans suddenly feel their liberty has been violated by the fact that information (metadata, mind you, not content) of every phone call they make is being routinely collected by the NSA, and not because any of these people are suspected of any crime. Not yet, anyway.

It’s a fascinating case. For one, the shock and outrage of some people is curious, considering that the broad outline of NSA’s expanded activity has been public for years. It was a key part of a new reality that Americans seem ready to accept after the horror of 9/11. (The Patriot Act, which expanded the NSA’s surveillance powers, sailed through Congress barely six weeks after the Twin Towers fell.)

And it reflects the new reality of an online world. In the Internet age of Google data mining and voluntary exhibitionism on Facebook, it seems almost quaint to find people suddenly so concerned about privacy.

It seems I’m not one of them. I belong to the majority of Americans (56% according to a recent poll) who tend not to be too bothered by this new reality.  Maybe I should be. At least, some people tell us we should all be.

It’s not as if my entire life is an open book, but generally speaking, I have nothing to hide. (And I do recognize how boring that sounds.) Well, I do have some secrets, but there is nothing I wouldn’t want surfacing in an NSA intercept. Nothing that I might talk about on the phone or do online is going to get me indicted, unless it’s a crime to spend too much time surfing the net. I’m not the kind of person the NSA is interested in.

That’s not to say that people who are skittish about the invasion of privacy are guilty of any kind of wrongdoing. It’s just that they have a more finely tuned sense of mistrust and personal liberty than I do. They are, in a sense, more principled. They will argue that the Fourth Amendment constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches (without probable cause) applies just as much to law-abiding citizens as it does to people who do have something to hide, maybe even more so. They will argue that giving up even a small measure of this privacy for the sake of more security is unacceptable. Until now, however, they seem to be a minority in the US.

Still, there is a certain segment of the population, for which privacy is an overwhelming fixation. I know people who are a bit freaked out that their house is visible on Google Maps Street View, as if that is significantly different from someone being able to see it in person from a public road.

There are people who chafe at the sight of security cameras at every street corner. (Once, I saw spray-painted in large letters on a wall on a London street the text “One Nation Under CCTV” – a terse commentary on the huge concentration of video surveillance in that city). Personally, I don’t mind being watched all that much. Apparently, others do. 

An especially telling example of this at the moment are the people in my home county in Georgia who are fretting that unmanned drones will soon be flying overhead, spying not only on moonshiners, but also on the ordinary citizenry.

This fear seems to stem from certain technology and business interests in Georgia trying to establish a center for drone research in the state. Why my hometown should feel especially threatened by this isn’t exactly clear to me, unless it’s a case of local officials trying to drum up business by offering the county as a potential site for the drone facility. To me, it sounds like a paranoid response.

It’s not as if concerns over privacy are always based on reality. Once, back when everyone in Helsinki still had a landline phone, I was complaining to a co-worker about how phone bills in Finland are not itemized (by number called, duration, etc.). I was surprised by her reaction.

In the days before cell phones, a common experience for American college students was the settling of the monthly phone bill. Going down the list of long-distance calls made with the phone you shared with your room- or house-mates, you would tally up who owed what for which calls. We’d also often discover calls charged to our phone by mistake (or “by mistake”, if you didn't necessarily think the phone company was trustworthy). Itemized bills helped keep both roommates and the phone company honest.

This is what I was complaining to my co-worker, about how you can’t do this in Finland because all charges, both local and long-distance, were presented together in one lump sum. I told her how I’d prefer to see all long-distance calls I’d made itemized in the bill.

Out of defensiveness, I think, over a foreigner like myself daring to criticize how things are done in Finland, my co-worker instantly exclaimed, “Well, I wouldn’t like that at all. I wouldn’t want anyone to know who I had been calling.”

I didn’t say it, but of course this is a ludicrous way to think. If there is anyone who knows precisely which numbers you have called, it would surely be the company routing those calls (and charging you for them). If you object to the phone company having this information, you might want to rethink whether you should be using a phone at all.

Of course, that was an extreme (and to be frank, stupid) example of an exaggerated sense of privacy. Now, with all the news about the NSA leaks, such concern over privacy is the one thing that some people will no doubt be all too willing to share with others.  ¶

A Slow Slog through a Book

In my long slow struggle with the Finnish language, I sometimes run across little examples of what makes it so difficult, for me anyway.

In the past, I’ve looked for books in Finnish that are at the right reading level, yet interesting enough for me to actually make the effort to slog through pages of sometimes baffling text. After some false starts with children’s books (sigh) and detective novels, I’m now trying a little book I found in the library a couple of months ago, “Pitkä kävely Meksikonlahdelle”.

It’s a Finnish translation of “A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf”, an account of legendary naturalist John Muir’s 1867 journey on foot from Indiana to Cedar Key, Florida, on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

I was aware of this book earlier, but have never got around to reading it. This feels like a perfect story to hold my interest, even if I have to keep referring constantly to my Finnish dictionary (okay, okay, actually to Google Translate – there, I said it, I am lazy). This classic chronicle by Muir, who went on to found the Sierra Club and was a driving force in the creation of Yosemite National Park,  combines three pet interests of mine: natural history, long treks, and the Southeastern US.

Anyway, on page 34 of the book, as Muir is progressing on his journey from Kentucky into Tennessee, I encountered a couple of examples of what makes Finnish so frustrating.

One was the simple word tennesseeläismaanviljelijältä. That is one word, 29 letters long. Geez. It doesn’t quite trip off the tongue like hölkyn kölkyn (Finnish for “bottoms up”).

As I’ve said before, Finnish often offers up its words in big meaty hard-to-chew chunks. To be fair, the word ”Tennessee” contributes nine of those letters, but the other 20 are down to the way Finnish grammar sometimes packs as much meaning as possible into single bloated monoliths of language.

The word means “from a Tennessee farmer” (20 letters total), which, for me as an English speaker, is much easier to get my head around. If you look carefully enough you can make out the word for farmer (maanviljelijä) in there somewhere. The suffix “-lta” gives the meaning of “from”, and tennesseelais- tells us that the farmer is a Tennessean. (Curiously, while in English we would say “American” farmer, we would never say “Tennessean” farmer. At least, I wouldn’t.)

The other two words that struck me as prime examples of the maddening complexity of Finnish were contained (in bold) in the following passage from Muir’s book: 

“Suurenmoisimpia Kentuckyn kasveista ovat sen ylväät tammet. Ne ovat sen rehevien metsien mahtavimmat asukkaat.”

(The most magnificent of Kentucky’s plants are the noble oaks. They are the most spectacular residents of the lush forest.)

In English, if you want to say that oaks are more magnificent than the other plants of any particular state, you just put “most” in front of “magnificent”. Easy. It’s only slightly more complicated if you wanted to heap the same amount of praise on oaks by using a simpler word like “noble”; you would say “noblest”.  

That’s English superlatives in a nutshell. Either add “most” or “‑est”. Again, simple.

Superlatives in Finnish are also simple in theory. All you do is add “–in” to an adverb or adjective as in suurenmoisin (“most magnificent”) and mahtavin (“most spectacular”) and you’ve got the superlative – in the basic form, that is.

In practice, it’s another story, since in Finnish almost no word is spared being from transmuted almost beyond recognition into one of some 20 variations. The original suffix “-in” is used only in one of those variations, and is replaced by “-imm-” or “-imp-” in all the rest.

Still, once you know this, it’s not hard to recognize that words like suurenmoisimpia and mahtavimmat are superlatives. Even I can manage the passive act of reading and understanding those words.

What is still beyond me is actively using such forms properly in written language, and I’m light years from being able to pull a word like suurenmoisimpia out of my brain when speaking. I’ll probably never utter “Suomalaiset saunat ovat maailman suurenmoisimpia.” “(Finnish saunas are the world’s most magnificent.)”.

I doubt I can perform the mental gymnastics needed to figure out on the fly which form of suurenmoinen is required for that particular example, which in this case would be the partitive plural of the superlative. It even sounds like rocket science.

If you are strictly process oriented, you can work your way from the basic form to derive the correct form in four "easy" steps (making the changes in bold):

suurenmoinen (basic form) ⇒ 1. suurenmoisen (genitive) ⇒ 2. suurenmoisin (superlative nominative singular) ⇒ 3. suurenmoisimpaa (superlative partitive singular)  ⇒ 4.  suurenmoisimpia (superlative partitive plural)

Of course, you could also simply memorize suurenmoisimpia, accepting it as it is, a perfectly formed word emerging from the dark mystery of Finnish grammar, without trying to understand the convoluted path that brings it into existence.

Or, you could do what I’ll probably do – avoid ever speaking in Finnish about anything that could be even remotely considered to be the most magnificent. At least, that should be easy. ¶

Some Gneiss Granite You Got There

I have an unfortunate weakness for really lame inside-family jokes, something my wife and kids will certainly vouch for.

There is one such joke that I unfailingly trot out whenever we travel somewhere where the landscape is especially rocky, for example, the Canary Islands or Utah. I look to my wife and say, “There’s a lot of geology around here.” She cringes.

This is, of course, not a “joke” in any sense other than it exasperates my wife to hear this again, as she has pointed out long ago and repeatedly that there is the same amount of geology everywhere, in the same way there is the same amount of weather everywhere.

That is true, of course. Geology is everywhere; it’s just that it's more noticeable and interesting in some places than others, Finland being one of those.

Devil's Churn at Pihlajamäki.

Here in Helsinki, we live atop the Baltic Shield, a remnant of the Earth’s crust that has been around some for 500 million years since the Precambrian period (that is, before life really got going).

Coincidentally, I stood last summer on the edge of the Canadian Shield, another giant layer of Precambrian rock that, in the vicinity of Ottawa, ends in an impressive 270-meter (almost 900-foot) high escarpment overlooking a flat plain along the St. Lawrence River. See, geology is everywhere.

And in Finland, the Baltic Shield is everywhere, not that most Finns would think of it that way. For most people here, the visible parts of the shield is just the ordinary bedrock (kallioperä) that you find practically everywhere, if not fully exposed as naked stone, then just barely out of sight beneath the ground. (When we built an extension to our house, we were dismayed to find just how near the surface the granite bedrock in our backyard was. It eventually took three attempts to blast out a pit big enough for a small basement.)

The kallioperä is often covered only by a thin layer of soil, which has consequences beyond basement excavation. Trees here can be toppled in winds far below hurricane strength because their grip on the Earth is especially tenuous when their roots can’t penetrate much below the surface.

Tree toppled by winds last autumn.

Often the bedrock is the surface, with exposed granite taking the form of dramatic shorelines, barren islets and the countless rocky outcrops (kalliot in Finnish) that punctuate the generally flat landscape all over Southern Finland. These hills of solid rock often have to be cut in half to make way for highways, leaving some impressive road cuts that in winter are plastered with impressive columns of ice. It also means that Finns have a special expertise in carving out portions of the Baltic Shield to suit their needs.

In the lush, forested landscapes of my native Georgia, exposed rocky surfaces are rare, except for most notably places like Stone Mountain, a giant dome of granite near Atlanta – and a place I have still never visited. Typical, isn’t it?

Any lushness in the forests of Finland has been hard won in the last 10,000 years or so since living things started to reclaim this part of Earth bulldozed, sandpapered, scraped to the bare stone by a layer of ice three-and-half kilometers (over two-miles) thick. Signs of the so-called Weichsel glaciation, which covered most of Northern Europe, can be seen everywhere here.

One such sign was uncovered, and almost destroyed, a few kilometers from my home, when some roadwork was undertaken twenty years ago on the side of a kallio in Pihlajamäki. A portion of bedrock was being prepared to be blasted when a passerby noticed the outlines of two large “giant’s kettles” (called hiidenkirnut in Finnish, or “Devil’s Churns”).

Baltic Shield bedrock is never far from the surface.

These “kettles” are potholes formed when fast-flowing water carves out a round cavity in bedrock through the twirling, grinding action of stones that become trapped in the hole. I recall seeing miniature versions of these in the mountain creeks I fished with my father back in Georgia.

The giant’s kettles in Pihlajamäki are much bigger than those, the larger one being almost 7 meters (23 feet) across and eight and half deep (28 feet). They were formed over 50,000 years ago as the retreating Weichsel icecap unleashed torrents of meltwater lasting hundreds of years, eventually digging a hole spacious enough to dump ten VW Beetles.

This massive pit wasn’t the only geological fingerprint left by the retreating ice sheet, not by a long shot. Besides the gouge marks left on exposed rock by glacial scraping and scouring, evidence of the Ice Age is easy to spot in the innumerable glacial erratics (siirtolohkareet), eskers (harjut), and kettle holes (supat).

Erratic and uprooted trees in Helsinki's Central Park near Paloheinä.

 Erratics are isolated boulders, large and small, torn from their original location and carried off by glaciers before being dropped in a new neighborhood as the ice sheet vanished. Eskers are long narrow ridges of sand and looser glacial debris that can wind for miles, sometimes with lakes on either side, as with the scenic Punkaharju in eastern Finland. They are sometimes mined for building material, creating large sand pits that have also been used (at least once) as locations for Finland’s own low-low-budget versions of spaghetti Westerns.

Kettle holes (not to be confused with giant’s kettles) are large cauldron-like dents in the ground where giant blocks of long-gone ice left deep impressions in the sandy deposits around them.

Still, the most impressive holdover from the icy Weichsel episode is the one that is the most subtle, in fact, practically impossible for mere mortals to see except near the coast.

With the Baltic Sea on two sides, Finland has a long coastline that is rustic, rocky and, well...rising. In many spots you can find the rocky beds of ancient beaches well inland from the modern shoreline, signs that the waterline was once much higher than now.

Erratic near the seashore at Sipoo.

The reason is that frozen water doesn’t weigh nothing, and terra firma isn’t always as firma as it seems. An ice sheet two-miles thick exerts punishing pressure on the earth’s crust, which it turns out is a bit spongier than you might think. During the last Ice Age, parts of the Baltic Shield were pushed down by this tremendous weight. After the icecap disappeared 100 centuries ago, the Earth's crust started to bounce back – slowly.

It’s still rebounding today, at a rate in some places of a meter (three feet) every hundred years, most notably at the, ah, poetically named Merenkurkku (Throat of the Sea), the 25-kilometer-wide chokepoint in the Gulf of Bothnia between Finland and Sweden. (By the way, Merenkurkku should not be confused with merikurkku, “sea cucumber”, a distinct possibility thanks to Finnish’s odd use of kurkku to mean both “throat” and “cucumber”. Why not, it’s their language?)

Most likely, even in my lifetime some rocks that were once merely hidden boating hazards in the waters of Merenkurkku have now emerged to be visible boating hazards. Because Merenkurkku is only 25-meters (75-feet) deep, it’s possible that, if the rate of rebounding remains the same, you (okay, let’s be honest, someone who is not you) will be able to drive across dry land straight from Vaasa to Umeå, by the year 4513. Give or take a lifetime or two.

Typical rocky Finnish seascape.