My walking today on the way to Tammimäki is through a blue sea-sky continuum along the newly raked gravel paths that remind me of that luxurious austerity of some Japanese gardens; but these are for walking on, not just the eyes. The blue is brilliant and though it's full morning, the sun low. Only the belt of trees, their green, breaks up this shining blue.
Overhead fly Canada geese in dozens, their shadows across the gravel and shadows passing quickly up the lit birches. They fly lower and heavier than greylags, their carolling lighter. Memory of place is strong in us all, even when we're passing through, like the geese and me. My walking today is through the places of revealed dreamscape: the small and intimate map made step by step, reading land. I name the places and they exist for my next walk. The place of adders; the bay of the boat-house; the inlet of the blue wooden boat; the apple tree of wasps. Though here all are wasp-ridden, the insects drunk on fermenting juice; but it's at this tree I was stung - picking windfall apples with wasps inside. Our storytelling moves across the land and is a record.
Winter is the stalker in the woods. It's behind the intoxicated wasps, the chittering squirrels laying up stores and the yodels of Canada geese, but summer will not yet yield: its last movement still to be played. A single cormorant flies into the bay from the expanse of the Baltic sea. Jays work the acorns before they tumble to the woodland floor.
This place is called Saari - the Finnish word for island. As well as saari, there are placenames for skerries, rocks, points and sounds all now inland along the Gulf of Bothnia. Oulunsalo (island of Oulujoki) is a peninsula. Turning north and facing the maples on the rise I see quite clearly where the island would have been a thousand years ago, before post-glacial rebound forced the sea to walk from here. I'm strolling on old seabed. Fertile farmland supporting many head of cattle and growing silage and sugar beet.
That long view, were we able to take it, would be the proving of the fact that these oak trees of Tammimäki also walk. Generation on generation, moving out from the parent tree; that oldster dying, leaving this new generation to march outward, until checked, when the trees move back inwards, rippling the years, walking always: slowly walking. A walk of centuries in one place.
On my own daylong flickering ephemeral walk I fill a pocket with rosehips like nipples; I fill my red-spotted handkerchief with puffballs; I carry some stems of yarrow and their pure white flowerheads. These things flame into life and burn out in their walk of shorter days than mine.
The rose hips are for their redness, the puffballs for the skillet, the yarrow for a posy in the jamjar on my desk. I invent these things afresh as stories in my walking, in my memory of place.
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
Monday, 27 September 2010
Low moon
I seek for charms that autumn best can yield
In mellowing wood & time bleaching field
John Clare
The sky is purpling as the light fades. There's a snell wind, but the days are still full of sunlight - dawn to dusk.
It's that sunlight that these trees have been storing, summer following spring, year on year, decades at a time. From the size I'd say fifty years of stored energy giving bursts to growth of limb and leaf, holding back some for those bitter winters that are written through their trunks in concentric circles.
Just now, birch and pine, they're felled, split and stacked in the sauna woodshed. Twelve feet long of a stack, six feet up and six feet across.
There's a melancholy in the air today. Folk are silent, a little withdrawn. There's sunlight in plenty, but there's also that wind, blowing from the east and hopping straight over autumn to speak of winter.
I've missed the sauna time and it's late but I mooch dragging my toes over there anyway and at midnight find it still hot. I have it all to myself. There's a greeting from the pine logs and the birch logs throwing their lives of digested sunlight outwards from the stove. I sit on the pine bench and breathe. Simply breathe. My gratitude is to the split logs and Simo the log splitter and to the trees that gave up their stores of energy for this moment.
The axe sits behind the splitting block just outside where I'm suspiring now, rather than breathing. It's a fine tool, with a curve to it that brings to mind those axes carved onto Pictish stones in Scotland; a collar grips the shaft which curves as gracefully as a young birch.
I throw a ladle of water onto the hot stones and a wave of scorched air, seconds in coming, hits the throat and nose first making breathing a searing awareness. I taste the salt of my own lips and at the same time the resinous smell of pine burning is brought to my nostrils straight after the heat.
I'd twisted a calf muscle, but it's uncramping; even my hard-working liver, often a weight on me, seems to relax.
The heat becomes too much, but on my way out I throw on a couple more splits of pine which crackle into flame at once. I cool off in the open porch. I'll not use the dipping pond, it's rank green with duckweed. Just steam in the midnight black.
Distant planets are caught up in the branches of the pines. There's a lowing from the cattle in the one cleared field among the trees down by the bay.
I steam-roast and cool off a few more times, the time in the heat shorter and the cooling longer, until finally the high moon beckons. A dark shadow, stepping delicately through crisp undergrowth, slips among the larch trees over by. The pine and spruce cones are hard underfoot, but the grass is cool and sweeping heels and toes as I walk towel-wrapped, barefoot home.
The living trees softly rolling in the wind, might with me, be recollecting their dead.
In mellowing wood & time bleaching field
John Clare
The sky is purpling as the light fades. There's a snell wind, but the days are still full of sunlight - dawn to dusk.
It's that sunlight that these trees have been storing, summer following spring, year on year, decades at a time. From the size I'd say fifty years of stored energy giving bursts to growth of limb and leaf, holding back some for those bitter winters that are written through their trunks in concentric circles.
Just now, birch and pine, they're felled, split and stacked in the sauna woodshed. Twelve feet long of a stack, six feet up and six feet across.
There's a melancholy in the air today. Folk are silent, a little withdrawn. There's sunlight in plenty, but there's also that wind, blowing from the east and hopping straight over autumn to speak of winter.
I've missed the sauna time and it's late but I mooch dragging my toes over there anyway and at midnight find it still hot. I have it all to myself. There's a greeting from the pine logs and the birch logs throwing their lives of digested sunlight outwards from the stove. I sit on the pine bench and breathe. Simply breathe. My gratitude is to the split logs and Simo the log splitter and to the trees that gave up their stores of energy for this moment.
The axe sits behind the splitting block just outside where I'm suspiring now, rather than breathing. It's a fine tool, with a curve to it that brings to mind those axes carved onto Pictish stones in Scotland; a collar grips the shaft which curves as gracefully as a young birch.
I throw a ladle of water onto the hot stones and a wave of scorched air, seconds in coming, hits the throat and nose first making breathing a searing awareness. I taste the salt of my own lips and at the same time the resinous smell of pine burning is brought to my nostrils straight after the heat.
I'd twisted a calf muscle, but it's uncramping; even my hard-working liver, often a weight on me, seems to relax.
The heat becomes too much, but on my way out I throw on a couple more splits of pine which crackle into flame at once. I cool off in the open porch. I'll not use the dipping pond, it's rank green with duckweed. Just steam in the midnight black.
Distant planets are caught up in the branches of the pines. There's a lowing from the cattle in the one cleared field among the trees down by the bay.
I steam-roast and cool off a few more times, the time in the heat shorter and the cooling longer, until finally the high moon beckons. A dark shadow, stepping delicately through crisp undergrowth, slips among the larch trees over by. The pine and spruce cones are hard underfoot, but the grass is cool and sweeping heels and toes as I walk towel-wrapped, barefoot home.
The living trees softly rolling in the wind, might with me, be recollecting their dead.
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Screwcap Letter
Nevertheless, his soul is about to slip through their fingers. As his life ebbs away he wavers, appalled by the thought of an eternity without alcohol, and calls for aquavit.
Peter Høeg: The History of Danish Dreams
Pentti Saarikoski passes this way every day at about 4pm. His beard grows ever longer. He's muttering his latest poem: we adore other gods here now your feathers are on special offer in the supermarkets. Today I’m outside, hanging the washing with good wooden clothes pegs on the green plastic line under the Scots pines.
I wave as Pentti cycles past and he wavers on the bike, slows a little, but continues. I yell and run up the cottage steps and fetch the bottle of Finnish vodka – Leijona Original Viina Brännvin, new, pristine, unopened, the last bottle having sort of disappeared – and hand at the neck of the bottle, wave it, shouting Hey hey!
But he’s out of earshot, slipped by, cycling down the hill into what a thousand years ago was the Baltic sea. I’m islanded; but I save that cracking of the vodka bottle screwcap for when he passes tomorrow.
Peter Høeg: The History of Danish Dreams
Pentti Saarikoski passes this way every day at about 4pm. His beard grows ever longer. He's muttering his latest poem: we adore other gods here now your feathers are on special offer in the supermarkets. Today I’m outside, hanging the washing with good wooden clothes pegs on the green plastic line under the Scots pines.
I wave as Pentti cycles past and he wavers on the bike, slows a little, but continues. I yell and run up the cottage steps and fetch the bottle of Finnish vodka – Leijona Original Viina Brännvin, new, pristine, unopened, the last bottle having sort of disappeared – and hand at the neck of the bottle, wave it, shouting Hey hey!
But he’s out of earshot, slipped by, cycling down the hill into what a thousand years ago was the Baltic sea. I’m islanded; but I save that cracking of the vodka bottle screwcap for when he passes tomorrow.
Meandering
Following your nose is a fairly common phrase – if not thought about a lot. I’m not sure if it is the foremost part of my body, but I guess I follow it more than most.
It’s good to walk into unknown parts of woodland, checking out which jays are feeding off which oak’s acorns in their strange jubilant frenzy, not even bothering to scold me. The red of autumn creeps upward in these places with no path; seedling rowans flaming on the floor, maple saplings glowing like any peat fire late at night.
Oaks overhead still green.
Here’s a fine birch – a downy birch, much given to those adventitious clumps of twisted warty growths in its branches – recurving its way up to light – bent at a steep angle by some unknown force before returning to the upright trunk our eyes demand of a forest tree.
There’s broken charcoal burners (the mushroom of that name) along this way; I’m following the path of deer who’ll not bother nibbling the brittle dryness of these – nor will I.
I can hear the geese in the bay – I think (certainly deluding myself) that I can tell from their gabble that they are Canada geese, not the few greylags left. A woodpecker taps an oak in the afternoon filtered light. I wander on, but alerted by something I can’t pin down to move a little to my right. I have no idea where I am in the woods; lost again, my usual state. The canopy is high and blocking any glimpse I might have of the sun. There’s no shadows so I can’t even tell whether I’m going north or east.
But, and here’s the point: here’s a wee clearing. On an old stump I smell, then see: chicken of the woods. Laetiporus sulphureus, a strong smelling, sulphur-coloured polypore that puts many folk – mushroom folk, I mean – off. It is of course just delicious. The smell is purest autumn woods and lingers on the fingers and the carefully wielded knife I use to gently slice it from the stump. No druid was ever more careful with a (almost certainly apocryphal) golden sickle. It goes into the yellow cloth bag that travels in my back pocket for just such an occasion.
With a bouncing step, and with the notion that I’m now travelling (no longer following my nose) east; I walk straight to the wood’s edge and find the dirt road home. Occasionally I stop and put my nose to the bag, like an eager glue-sniffing lad.
Fried in butter, with garlic, lemon flavoured; both supper and breakfast assured.
It’s good to walk into unknown parts of woodland, checking out which jays are feeding off which oak’s acorns in their strange jubilant frenzy, not even bothering to scold me. The red of autumn creeps upward in these places with no path; seedling rowans flaming on the floor, maple saplings glowing like any peat fire late at night.
Oaks overhead still green.
Here’s a fine birch – a downy birch, much given to those adventitious clumps of twisted warty growths in its branches – recurving its way up to light – bent at a steep angle by some unknown force before returning to the upright trunk our eyes demand of a forest tree.
There’s broken charcoal burners (the mushroom of that name) along this way; I’m following the path of deer who’ll not bother nibbling the brittle dryness of these – nor will I.
I can hear the geese in the bay – I think (certainly deluding myself) that I can tell from their gabble that they are Canada geese, not the few greylags left. A woodpecker taps an oak in the afternoon filtered light. I wander on, but alerted by something I can’t pin down to move a little to my right. I have no idea where I am in the woods; lost again, my usual state. The canopy is high and blocking any glimpse I might have of the sun. There’s no shadows so I can’t even tell whether I’m going north or east.
But, and here’s the point: here’s a wee clearing. On an old stump I smell, then see: chicken of the woods. Laetiporus sulphureus, a strong smelling, sulphur-coloured polypore that puts many folk – mushroom folk, I mean – off. It is of course just delicious. The smell is purest autumn woods and lingers on the fingers and the carefully wielded knife I use to gently slice it from the stump. No druid was ever more careful with a (almost certainly apocryphal) golden sickle. It goes into the yellow cloth bag that travels in my back pocket for just such an occasion.
With a bouncing step, and with the notion that I’m now travelling (no longer following my nose) east; I walk straight to the wood’s edge and find the dirt road home. Occasionally I stop and put my nose to the bag, like an eager glue-sniffing lad.
Fried in butter, with garlic, lemon flavoured; both supper and breakfast assured.
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
Sentences from Finland
Acorns crackle underfoot.
Woodstacks grow higher.
Hands clasped behind her back, an old woman in a headscarf watches
an old man stooping, lifting some potatoes from the row.
Hidden under his mattress a revolver and a bar of gold.
Woodstacks grow higher.
Hands clasped behind her back, an old woman in a headscarf watches
an old man stooping, lifting some potatoes from the row.
Hidden under his mattress a revolver and a bar of gold.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
Autumn folded
"When the need for food comes, when you desire to eat,
eat forest mushrooms, . . ."
Charms against bears; the Kalevala
The day opens with a red squirrel undulating along the road in front of me. I'm off to the woods again still checking mushroom spots as I pass by, and after that to sit awhile in the bird hide, Vasikkahaan. As this is a wetland reserve, as everywhere, the needs of humans are the first to be taken into account, by making a building; though the hide - a tower really to reach above the reedbeds - has me admiring its solid no-nonsense construction.
The bone-headed yaffles - green woodpeckers - seem intent on bashing their brains out on not just the trees, but on the telephone poles leading to the couple of houses at the bay. They pay no attention to me. Like any of the bird-hide's visitors, I hope to see the altogether more shy black woodpecker which is also common here.
A jay scolds me as I pass under her: autumn's folded in her wings and she wants no intruders now.
What the woods reclaim the seasons reveal. I've walked extensively through these woods now for 20 days. How could I have failed to notice the skeleton of a small shed in the centre, collapsed on itself and being taken by mosses and lichens, sagging low, so that only the leaf fall of the covering maple is slowly lifting the woodland curtain on this wee puzzling view.
There's none of that damp moss and musty scent in the air that alerts to the presence of ceps. Though there's more fly agaric than I've ever seen anywhere, spilling over themselves at the feet of the old birches - the largest the size of dinner plates and together with the smaller making up a whole set, side plates, inverted teacups and saucers as well; ranging in colour from deep red to faded yellow that ceramicists would enjoy. But they are not edible. I'm wary of the word poisonous. So often it simply means that the old lore of how to use them has been lost. These were once ingested in animistic religion in these parts. While they do poison - extreme vomiting and diarrhea - they are seldom killers and (so it's said) grant visions of the seat of illness in a sick person and to locate lost cattle, lost people. There's more to it of course; I simply admire them. The world is odd enough for me anyway without inducing hallucinations.
Reaching, eventually, the bird tower, even though I'm pretty quiet in the woods, I disturb a napping buzzard who has time to cast me a look before silently moving off along the wood's edge. I can't restrain myself from laughing at a bird hiding from bird watchers in a bird hide. Though I'm sorry for waking the buzzard.
On my stroll back I'm accompanied by ever increasing numbers of cumulus clouds; east and west and north, wherever I look they're massing, pile on pile. They open the sky: maybe it's the rare glimpses of blue among them. A late cricket hops out of my way on the sandy path. There's the hot resinous smell of pine in the air and through that the breath of birches. There's flame now in the maples.
Another half crushed viper at the road's edge. I collect the emptied skin of another.
That the fox is there outside my quarters in the old farmhand's cottage is a fine red bracketing, together with the squirrel, of morning and evening in which nothing happens; literally.
eat forest mushrooms, . . ."
Charms against bears; the Kalevala
The day opens with a red squirrel undulating along the road in front of me. I'm off to the woods again still checking mushroom spots as I pass by, and after that to sit awhile in the bird hide, Vasikkahaan. As this is a wetland reserve, as everywhere, the needs of humans are the first to be taken into account, by making a building; though the hide - a tower really to reach above the reedbeds - has me admiring its solid no-nonsense construction.
The bone-headed yaffles - green woodpeckers - seem intent on bashing their brains out on not just the trees, but on the telephone poles leading to the couple of houses at the bay. They pay no attention to me. Like any of the bird-hide's visitors, I hope to see the altogether more shy black woodpecker which is also common here.
A jay scolds me as I pass under her: autumn's folded in her wings and she wants no intruders now.
What the woods reclaim the seasons reveal. I've walked extensively through these woods now for 20 days. How could I have failed to notice the skeleton of a small shed in the centre, collapsed on itself and being taken by mosses and lichens, sagging low, so that only the leaf fall of the covering maple is slowly lifting the woodland curtain on this wee puzzling view.
There's none of that damp moss and musty scent in the air that alerts to the presence of ceps. Though there's more fly agaric than I've ever seen anywhere, spilling over themselves at the feet of the old birches - the largest the size of dinner plates and together with the smaller making up a whole set, side plates, inverted teacups and saucers as well; ranging in colour from deep red to faded yellow that ceramicists would enjoy. But they are not edible. I'm wary of the word poisonous. So often it simply means that the old lore of how to use them has been lost. These were once ingested in animistic religion in these parts. While they do poison - extreme vomiting and diarrhea - they are seldom killers and (so it's said) grant visions of the seat of illness in a sick person and to locate lost cattle, lost people. There's more to it of course; I simply admire them. The world is odd enough for me anyway without inducing hallucinations.
Reaching, eventually, the bird tower, even though I'm pretty quiet in the woods, I disturb a napping buzzard who has time to cast me a look before silently moving off along the wood's edge. I can't restrain myself from laughing at a bird hiding from bird watchers in a bird hide. Though I'm sorry for waking the buzzard.
On my stroll back I'm accompanied by ever increasing numbers of cumulus clouds; east and west and north, wherever I look they're massing, pile on pile. They open the sky: maybe it's the rare glimpses of blue among them. A late cricket hops out of my way on the sandy path. There's the hot resinous smell of pine in the air and through that the breath of birches. There's flame now in the maples.
Another half crushed viper at the road's edge. I collect the emptied skin of another.
That the fox is there outside my quarters in the old farmhand's cottage is a fine red bracketing, together with the squirrel, of morning and evening in which nothing happens; literally.
Sunday, 19 September 2010
Entering
What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realise I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts that have entered my head.
So 800 years ago the monk Yoshida Kenko noted in his book Essays in Idleness.
Falling short of demented, I nevertheless share Kenko's feelings. While I've been trying for years to do less and to be more - there's something very odd in the recording of states of being. Or if you like states and places of non-doing.
Although everything else is foraging for a living in the wood, including the trees in the last days of a prolonged summer almost putting on a little extra weight for winter, I'm just sitting here with my back to an old oak.
I'm looking out over flat farmland, due east at the edge of the woods. Here and there an isolated red painted wooden barn settled in a clump of sheltering trees and a big sky above all this flatness.
It's been raining off and on, drizzle mostly, not too wetting, so I'm sitting on my inside-out hat to keep arsebones dry. The great comfort of the woods eases itself into my shoulders. Muscles and bones relax. Behind me are small rustlings and silences. In the silences every now and then I can hear a leaf fall with a papery rustle catching on twigs in its slow descent. The arc of a rainbow appears in the grey sky slightly south of east, its outer edges of red and violet shimmering a little - a result either of the smirr of rain, or my own vision - I can't tell.
I stare so long at the rainbow which shifts only slightly that my eyes dance with entering colour; the woods have folded me in and I drift off into the shortest of dozes, a step beyond reverie.
With solstice right here, right now, earth turning and sun standing, nights already as long as days, this is not idleness. I'm storing up light and colour, a gathering-in of some of the energy of the sun that I'll need to last through the darker days of winter.
So 800 years ago the monk Yoshida Kenko noted in his book Essays in Idleness.
Falling short of demented, I nevertheless share Kenko's feelings. While I've been trying for years to do less and to be more - there's something very odd in the recording of states of being. Or if you like states and places of non-doing.
Although everything else is foraging for a living in the wood, including the trees in the last days of a prolonged summer almost putting on a little extra weight for winter, I'm just sitting here with my back to an old oak.
I'm looking out over flat farmland, due east at the edge of the woods. Here and there an isolated red painted wooden barn settled in a clump of sheltering trees and a big sky above all this flatness.
It's been raining off and on, drizzle mostly, not too wetting, so I'm sitting on my inside-out hat to keep arsebones dry. The great comfort of the woods eases itself into my shoulders. Muscles and bones relax. Behind me are small rustlings and silences. In the silences every now and then I can hear a leaf fall with a papery rustle catching on twigs in its slow descent. The arc of a rainbow appears in the grey sky slightly south of east, its outer edges of red and violet shimmering a little - a result either of the smirr of rain, or my own vision - I can't tell.
I stare so long at the rainbow which shifts only slightly that my eyes dance with entering colour; the woods have folded me in and I drift off into the shortest of dozes, a step beyond reverie.
With solstice right here, right now, earth turning and sun standing, nights already as long as days, this is not idleness. I'm storing up light and colour, a gathering-in of some of the energy of the sun that I'll need to last through the darker days of winter.
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Directions
On my flaneur way this morning, I was stopped and asked for directions by two men in a car who wanted to find the water – the sea - and the woods: “the real Finland” as one put it. They spoke in English, I guess having no Finnish, but the irony of asking a man just twelve days in the country for the real Finland amused me. I told them they could not drive there.
I have the sort of face that wherever I go, I’m taken for a local. I’ve been saluted in Stornoway and hailed in the forest of Fontainebleau; people ask my advice about the destinations of buses.
Truth is, I’m just wandering around and frequently lost. Though I feel at home wherever I go, I don’t always know how to get from here to there. If I can’t read the language of a country I happily rely on the kindness of strangers.
Once, in a place where I was effectively illiterate, my direction-giver (a laughter-wrinkled old woman with a roadside stall) took my hand and led me to my destination - a ten minute walk. Deliciously, I was a child again.
Here, since for example I can’t understand even the nearby signpost that seems to my ignorant eye to point to Yggdrasil, the world tree, I get by orienting with various landmarks: the clump of old birches, the glade of the mushrooms.
The equinoctial storms are fast stripping not just the leaves from trees, but me of my natural signposts. The old birches no longer look the same; the mushrooms deliquesce in the sudden rains.
The geese, an aural marker for me these past days are leaving.
They have circled lazily all my short days here, settling in the bay to my east, muttering into their breasts until night blankets them.
With the storms, however, all is activity. I thought them completely flown yesterday, until my ears led me to them in the opposite direction, to the west. Standing in hundreds in a cutover wheat field, up close, their raging discussions in greylag tongue was as loud as it was incomprehensible.
Except; I knew instinctively their talk was of migration and the way south.
Theirs is a language rich in tonality: the honks and whiffles, the clacks and hoots rising and falling along the scale. The language of the body is easy to understand, though; when they as one spread their wings and made a small run to get airborne, it was clear a decision had been made.
They lifted then, into the wind, the massed lines of their flight-path writing their decision across the grey of the sky in bold quill work: hieroglyphs, ideographs, fine scripts.
Ignorant as I am of even their smallest phonemes, I have enough of their flowing calligraphy to know that it all spells one word: south.
Their landmarks remain constant: the waters and the hills; all pointing their direction with the clarity of territory, not the symbols of a map.
The oldest lead the youngest: south.
I have the sort of face that wherever I go, I’m taken for a local. I’ve been saluted in Stornoway and hailed in the forest of Fontainebleau; people ask my advice about the destinations of buses.
Truth is, I’m just wandering around and frequently lost. Though I feel at home wherever I go, I don’t always know how to get from here to there. If I can’t read the language of a country I happily rely on the kindness of strangers.
Once, in a place where I was effectively illiterate, my direction-giver (a laughter-wrinkled old woman with a roadside stall) took my hand and led me to my destination - a ten minute walk. Deliciously, I was a child again.
Here, since for example I can’t understand even the nearby signpost that seems to my ignorant eye to point to Yggdrasil, the world tree, I get by orienting with various landmarks: the clump of old birches, the glade of the mushrooms.
The equinoctial storms are fast stripping not just the leaves from trees, but me of my natural signposts. The old birches no longer look the same; the mushrooms deliquesce in the sudden rains.
The geese, an aural marker for me these past days are leaving.
They have circled lazily all my short days here, settling in the bay to my east, muttering into their breasts until night blankets them.
With the storms, however, all is activity. I thought them completely flown yesterday, until my ears led me to them in the opposite direction, to the west. Standing in hundreds in a cutover wheat field, up close, their raging discussions in greylag tongue was as loud as it was incomprehensible.
Except; I knew instinctively their talk was of migration and the way south.
Theirs is a language rich in tonality: the honks and whiffles, the clacks and hoots rising and falling along the scale. The language of the body is easy to understand, though; when they as one spread their wings and made a small run to get airborne, it was clear a decision had been made.
They lifted then, into the wind, the massed lines of their flight-path writing their decision across the grey of the sky in bold quill work: hieroglyphs, ideographs, fine scripts.
Ignorant as I am of even their smallest phonemes, I have enough of their flowing calligraphy to know that it all spells one word: south.
Their landmarks remain constant: the waters and the hills; all pointing their direction with the clarity of territory, not the symbols of a map.
The oldest lead the youngest: south.
Brecht
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
Brecht wrote that in 1939, while Nazis were burning books and more. Finland was fighting the Winter War with Stalin's Soviet Union and Europe was at war again.
Wars in the twenty-first century are physically removed from Europe, but still often of our making or connivance.
But to speak of trees is not to ignore injustice, and Brecht has that qualifying "almost".
Finland's forested terrain also helped in keeping Finland from Soviet subjugation.
It becomes a necessity to speak of trees more and more as injustices increase. War, even when dressed up in polluting 'ideology' as with the Nazis, is about resources, including land. We are fighting in the middle east for the control of oil and increasingly, of water. That trees and plants, past and present have a role in this is obvious: no laying down in the Carboniferous era of plants, no oil. Without the current stabilising effect of trees, no topsoil, no water retention. When lemon groves and olive orchards are cut down as an act of military aggression in Palestine, it does more than ruin the farmers - it leads to eventual desertification.
To be silent about injustice is not an option. But to speak of trees is not to be silent. It is not only a tacit oppositional stance to that of warmongers, but is also an engagement with some of the underlying causes of war.
Poor people do not own resources. In Europe, aristocrats once owned vast tracts of forest; some still do. Multinational companies now control the world's resources where once aristocrats did; the effect is the same, often the owners and controllers are the same too. A discussion of trees is not complete without a discussion of land and land ownership and hence the control of resources.
It's also part of a larger discussion of the way the world is regarded by the ever greedy Homo sapiens (though we should now find a new word to replace sapiens). The most fleeting look at ecology reveals that we depend on other species more than they on us. Our relationship is at best symbiotic, but we act parasitically. The climax of parasitism - say mistletoe in an oak - is the stifling of the host, to the detriment of both.
Brecht was right, we have a duty to act in the prevention of daily - and often terrible - human injustice (there is no other kind). No-one discusses trees to prevent a firing squad or a suicide bomber. But to speak of trees and importantly for trees becomes an imperative as well. It's to ask questions; the who, the why.
If a primarily aesthetic (or proper economic) appreciation of trees, of woodlands, leads to an understanding of the political aspects of land ownership and its control and misappropriation; so much the better.
To wander in the woods - where we're not needed - is to realise this. It's also to realise that we're often not wanted by a landowner.
Brecht also wrote: You can't write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen.
Fences are absentee policemen.
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
Brecht wrote that in 1939, while Nazis were burning books and more. Finland was fighting the Winter War with Stalin's Soviet Union and Europe was at war again.
Wars in the twenty-first century are physically removed from Europe, but still often of our making or connivance.
But to speak of trees is not to ignore injustice, and Brecht has that qualifying "almost".
Finland's forested terrain also helped in keeping Finland from Soviet subjugation.
It becomes a necessity to speak of trees more and more as injustices increase. War, even when dressed up in polluting 'ideology' as with the Nazis, is about resources, including land. We are fighting in the middle east for the control of oil and increasingly, of water. That trees and plants, past and present have a role in this is obvious: no laying down in the Carboniferous era of plants, no oil. Without the current stabilising effect of trees, no topsoil, no water retention. When lemon groves and olive orchards are cut down as an act of military aggression in Palestine, it does more than ruin the farmers - it leads to eventual desertification.
To be silent about injustice is not an option. But to speak of trees is not to be silent. It is not only a tacit oppositional stance to that of warmongers, but is also an engagement with some of the underlying causes of war.
Poor people do not own resources. In Europe, aristocrats once owned vast tracts of forest; some still do. Multinational companies now control the world's resources where once aristocrats did; the effect is the same, often the owners and controllers are the same too. A discussion of trees is not complete without a discussion of land and land ownership and hence the control of resources.
It's also part of a larger discussion of the way the world is regarded by the ever greedy Homo sapiens (though we should now find a new word to replace sapiens). The most fleeting look at ecology reveals that we depend on other species more than they on us. Our relationship is at best symbiotic, but we act parasitically. The climax of parasitism - say mistletoe in an oak - is the stifling of the host, to the detriment of both.
Brecht was right, we have a duty to act in the prevention of daily - and often terrible - human injustice (there is no other kind). No-one discusses trees to prevent a firing squad or a suicide bomber. But to speak of trees and importantly for trees becomes an imperative as well. It's to ask questions; the who, the why.
If a primarily aesthetic (or proper economic) appreciation of trees, of woodlands, leads to an understanding of the political aspects of land ownership and its control and misappropriation; so much the better.
To wander in the woods - where we're not needed - is to realise this. It's also to realise that we're often not wanted by a landowner.
Brecht also wrote: You can't write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen.
Fences are absentee policemen.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Shiva
Today is yellow where yesterday was green. The butter yellow of the aspen catches my eye. The trees are still vital, but here and there the green is stripped away, revealing the yellow underneath. There is no appreciable difference between the length of light yesterday and today. No difference in temperature that I can feel. Yet all the trees are showing a little yellow; some a lot. Maybe tomorrow the maples will be red.
The aspen leaf between my fingers trembles just as it did on the tree. The aspens, still in full leaf, though yellow, are seething in the wind, each leaf rattling on its stem, making a noise like the gentle soughing of waves onto a strand. The tall birches all droop away from the wind. Maples shed their leaves in their own yellow shadow - falling to windward in a grounded double-image of their upward limbs. Leaves drift down in parabolas to land against the paths, yellow on yellow.
The oaks stand against all this, neither much yellowing, swaying nor dropping leaves.
There's a hierarchy of trees which we have imposed. In a woodland there's none of that. I've written before of Shiva (I don't mean the Shiva the god, the destroyer, the bringer of change; though who knows? but Vandana Shiva the Indian physicist and environmental activist) going to the woods to learn of democracy.
What a weasel word democracy has become, though I malign weasels. Self government is what Shiva is really learning from the woods, not a hierarchical trickle down materialism delivered by self-seeking manipulators purporting to represent something they call the people.
In a wood, there's balance in the active presence of large numbers of interdependent species; none with greater significance than any other. Aspen leaves and oak leaves alike fall to the forest floor and are pulled down (even in this thin soil) by tribes of earthworms. The woodpecker holes shelter other, smaller birds too. The fungal infestation Ascocalyx abietina has no favourites among the pines it attacks.
Here at Saari, the tree surgeons are in.
Years ago I climbed trees with all the shackles, ropes and harnesses I could muster to give first aid to living broken boughs. It's not a foolproof method of getting up and especially down a tall tree. If you'd ever seen a twelve stone apprentice stuck dangling because of a faulty running knot - and with him two heavy rescuers also stuck for the same reason, and a ground crew in helpless laughter, you'd know the same.
But tree surgery has moved on. Here, there's a woman, a men and a cherry picker. And they are pruning the oaks. Only the oaks; of dead limbs.
The value we place on trees, the ranking, that imposed hierarchy, is nearly always financial. The timber will be valuable. So birch is worth less than oak because it's not much use except for firewood; oak is sought after by boat builders and cabinet makers. There's a small island of oaks south of here that was owned by a former Swedish king for building his naval fleets. People, commoners, were kept away from valuable assets (except to cut and haul the trees; ever met a king who did his own work?)
So on the cherry picker basket, thirty feet up, the surgeon is delicately cutting wood with a small chainsaw, as delicate as if with a scalpel. It's not only the oaks that have dead limbs, but the maples too. In a parkland situation like this (built landscape: to resemble savannah with browsing deer where sheep may safely graze for the extremely wealthy)these trees will never be felled for money. They are planting the next controlled and managed generation underneath them; these oaks have become valuable aesthetically (as a former display of wealth, but primarily now for the eye to gaze upon).
It's the aesthetics of the situation that demand the oaks be trimmed, more than the dangers of falling limbs. Maples pose no such threat and are left untrimmed. The tidy civic mind is at work: partial death is unsightly. And let us put the next generation of oaks where it'll be most appealing.
Gardening with trees has long been practiced; no different from where the roses go.
The woods, however provide something else. Vanadana Shiva may have held philosophical-political conversations with herself in woods. I go to the woods to experience that pleasure of controlled anarchy a woodland brings. Where the fox depends on the mouse, the mouse on the seed, the seed on the pollinating bee and wasp. Where the dead birch leans into the living pine and the bracket fungus slowly reverts to the horizontal as the tree slowly leans in death.
The delight of living, as the other Shiva knew full well, is the awareness of death.
There's no implication of disorder in anarchy; the order of woodlands is neither random nor chaotic, and never destructive. The order of woodlands is self-generative.
I go to the woods because they do not need me.
The aspen leaf between my fingers trembles just as it did on the tree. The aspens, still in full leaf, though yellow, are seething in the wind, each leaf rattling on its stem, making a noise like the gentle soughing of waves onto a strand. The tall birches all droop away from the wind. Maples shed their leaves in their own yellow shadow - falling to windward in a grounded double-image of their upward limbs. Leaves drift down in parabolas to land against the paths, yellow on yellow.
The oaks stand against all this, neither much yellowing, swaying nor dropping leaves.
There's a hierarchy of trees which we have imposed. In a woodland there's none of that. I've written before of Shiva (I don't mean the Shiva the god, the destroyer, the bringer of change; though who knows? but Vandana Shiva the Indian physicist and environmental activist) going to the woods to learn of democracy.
What a weasel word democracy has become, though I malign weasels. Self government is what Shiva is really learning from the woods, not a hierarchical trickle down materialism delivered by self-seeking manipulators purporting to represent something they call the people.
In a wood, there's balance in the active presence of large numbers of interdependent species; none with greater significance than any other. Aspen leaves and oak leaves alike fall to the forest floor and are pulled down (even in this thin soil) by tribes of earthworms. The woodpecker holes shelter other, smaller birds too. The fungal infestation Ascocalyx abietina has no favourites among the pines it attacks.
Here at Saari, the tree surgeons are in.
Years ago I climbed trees with all the shackles, ropes and harnesses I could muster to give first aid to living broken boughs. It's not a foolproof method of getting up and especially down a tall tree. If you'd ever seen a twelve stone apprentice stuck dangling because of a faulty running knot - and with him two heavy rescuers also stuck for the same reason, and a ground crew in helpless laughter, you'd know the same.
But tree surgery has moved on. Here, there's a woman, a men and a cherry picker. And they are pruning the oaks. Only the oaks; of dead limbs.
The value we place on trees, the ranking, that imposed hierarchy, is nearly always financial. The timber will be valuable. So birch is worth less than oak because it's not much use except for firewood; oak is sought after by boat builders and cabinet makers. There's a small island of oaks south of here that was owned by a former Swedish king for building his naval fleets. People, commoners, were kept away from valuable assets (except to cut and haul the trees; ever met a king who did his own work?)
So on the cherry picker basket, thirty feet up, the surgeon is delicately cutting wood with a small chainsaw, as delicate as if with a scalpel. It's not only the oaks that have dead limbs, but the maples too. In a parkland situation like this (built landscape: to resemble savannah with browsing deer where sheep may safely graze for the extremely wealthy)these trees will never be felled for money. They are planting the next controlled and managed generation underneath them; these oaks have become valuable aesthetically (as a former display of wealth, but primarily now for the eye to gaze upon).
It's the aesthetics of the situation that demand the oaks be trimmed, more than the dangers of falling limbs. Maples pose no such threat and are left untrimmed. The tidy civic mind is at work: partial death is unsightly. And let us put the next generation of oaks where it'll be most appealing.
Gardening with trees has long been practiced; no different from where the roses go.
The woods, however provide something else. Vanadana Shiva may have held philosophical-political conversations with herself in woods. I go to the woods to experience that pleasure of controlled anarchy a woodland brings. Where the fox depends on the mouse, the mouse on the seed, the seed on the pollinating bee and wasp. Where the dead birch leans into the living pine and the bracket fungus slowly reverts to the horizontal as the tree slowly leans in death.
The delight of living, as the other Shiva knew full well, is the awareness of death.
There's no implication of disorder in anarchy; the order of woodlands is neither random nor chaotic, and never destructive. The order of woodlands is self-generative.
I go to the woods because they do not need me.
Friday, 10 September 2010
Conversation
I'm standing with my hands in my pockets by the side of the road. I'm contemplating the stones beneath the oaks. They are not small, but each maybe the size of a kitchen chair and have been dropped off here from the front loader of a tractor at some time I'm guessing. There's an odd thing here with age. These oaks have been here a long time - from the girth of the largest I've seen, 250 years at a guess. Who knows what generations preceded them. I'll try to find out the history of this little wood as I can, but for now, I'm thinking at least 250 years.
They're growing on thin sandy soil; bedrock emerges here and there, each covered with a plumage of lichen and short mosses. The oaks have an intimate relation with the rock and the soil. The new kitchen chair rocks are just as old as the bedrock - they were perhaps left behind in Mynämäki by a retreating glacier; rubble, but the stuff of geology.
I'm wondering how long it'll take the oakwood to assimilate these stones, for them to weather and leach and to grow into one another in that intricate way minerals and trees have with each other.
It's not Pentti Saarikoski, long dead, but he certainly looks like a photograph I've seen of him with full beard and long flying 1970s hair. He cycles a little past - I think his brakes need attention - then halts and turns his bike and himself round and comes to stand beside me, facing the same direction. He speaks: in Finnish, but when I apologise in English for not understanding the language, he attempts English.
I'm guessing he's about my age. His bike is old, his clothes denim and well worn; world-wide America sits on his head in the shape of a baseball hat. His clear eyes regard me with some curiosity and he makes his thoughts plain in one word and a grand gesture in the direction of where I had been looking: What?
I shrug - how to tell him I'm thinking of the interdependence of mineral and plant? I say one of my three Finnish words: Oak. His eyes wrinkle around the edges Ah! he says, sighing and I warm to a man who can take that as a full explanation.
He speaks again in Finnish and indicates the cloth bag on his handlebars. For a moment I think he might bring out anything: mushrooms, glittering mica, an ammonite, a seahorse.
It's vodka - the cheapest available from Alko, the State monopoly drink shop in town. Leijona brand at 13 euros 25 cents a bottle. I know this because not two hours ago I bought a bottle.
Twisting the screwtop with a crack he offers me the bottle and it's then I say my second Finnish word: Cheers! His blue eyes wrinkle again, he smiles as I swig and hand it back. He swigs and we together contemplate oak. Another swig each and the bottle goes back into the bag.
He's cycled a round trip of 24 kilometres for that bottle. He remounts his bike and points it towards the west again, and my third Finnish word comes out as he cycles off: Thanks!
His smile again and I have no need to understand the words of his reply as he waves his arm up and back. It's a gesture that takes in oak, minerals, age, kitchen chairs, and humanity.
***
Life is given to man
to make him consider carefully
the position he'd like to be dead in
Pentti Saarikoski
They're growing on thin sandy soil; bedrock emerges here and there, each covered with a plumage of lichen and short mosses. The oaks have an intimate relation with the rock and the soil. The new kitchen chair rocks are just as old as the bedrock - they were perhaps left behind in Mynämäki by a retreating glacier; rubble, but the stuff of geology.
I'm wondering how long it'll take the oakwood to assimilate these stones, for them to weather and leach and to grow into one another in that intricate way minerals and trees have with each other.
It's not Pentti Saarikoski, long dead, but he certainly looks like a photograph I've seen of him with full beard and long flying 1970s hair. He cycles a little past - I think his brakes need attention - then halts and turns his bike and himself round and comes to stand beside me, facing the same direction. He speaks: in Finnish, but when I apologise in English for not understanding the language, he attempts English.
I'm guessing he's about my age. His bike is old, his clothes denim and well worn; world-wide America sits on his head in the shape of a baseball hat. His clear eyes regard me with some curiosity and he makes his thoughts plain in one word and a grand gesture in the direction of where I had been looking: What?
I shrug - how to tell him I'm thinking of the interdependence of mineral and plant? I say one of my three Finnish words: Oak. His eyes wrinkle around the edges Ah! he says, sighing and I warm to a man who can take that as a full explanation.
He speaks again in Finnish and indicates the cloth bag on his handlebars. For a moment I think he might bring out anything: mushrooms, glittering mica, an ammonite, a seahorse.
It's vodka - the cheapest available from Alko, the State monopoly drink shop in town. Leijona brand at 13 euros 25 cents a bottle. I know this because not two hours ago I bought a bottle.
Twisting the screwtop with a crack he offers me the bottle and it's then I say my second Finnish word: Cheers! His blue eyes wrinkle again, he smiles as I swig and hand it back. He swigs and we together contemplate oak. Another swig each and the bottle goes back into the bag.
He's cycled a round trip of 24 kilometres for that bottle. He remounts his bike and points it towards the west again, and my third Finnish word comes out as he cycles off: Thanks!
His smile again and I have no need to understand the words of his reply as he waves his arm up and back. It's a gesture that takes in oak, minerals, age, kitchen chairs, and humanity.
***
Life is given to man
to make him consider carefully
the position he'd like to be dead in
Pentti Saarikoski
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Greylags
I spend my days mostly in silence, around the little oakwood or at the shoreline. It's been years since I smoked a cigarette, but I can still feel that intake of smoke past the lips and down. A dram would be good, though maybe at midday, whisky - even a good Islay - would prevent much fruitful thinking - since that's what I'm attempting. But looking out over the bay, these stimulants might just be a substitute for speech. Or thought.
The greylag geese resolutely refuse to answer me, so I simply listen to their conversations. I can't understand the fine points of their humour, though they do laugh a lot, but the gist of the grammar seems clear enough - it's based on volume. The louder the language (or maybe it's a dialect; is greylag a variation on beangoose or Canada goose?) the more they are likely to take flight. Softer whiffles and gurgles denote contentment. So much is universal. The orthography of their language is beyond me mostly though. There are vocables that have no exact equivalent in English. Finnish might come closer, with its vowel and consonant clusters. But the most tricky would be that click which humans can only make at the back of the throat - and then not all of us.
Individual greylags make words: eu ö; k'-eu k'o; and phrases: eu ö k'eu eu eu; wy,eu ö-ö-ö on a rising inflection. And then with that near back of throat click: wee - 'k' ö wa'k' yeu yeu yeu.
What I do understand is when they rise up in cackles and hoots and barks, wheeling higher and round again, their cries collectively mingle: they become one organism with one voice: a distant gale howling when the cabin door is shut and the fire's lit.
The greylag geese resolutely refuse to answer me, so I simply listen to their conversations. I can't understand the fine points of their humour, though they do laugh a lot, but the gist of the grammar seems clear enough - it's based on volume. The louder the language (or maybe it's a dialect; is greylag a variation on beangoose or Canada goose?) the more they are likely to take flight. Softer whiffles and gurgles denote contentment. So much is universal. The orthography of their language is beyond me mostly though. There are vocables that have no exact equivalent in English. Finnish might come closer, with its vowel and consonant clusters. But the most tricky would be that click which humans can only make at the back of the throat - and then not all of us.
Individual greylags make words: eu ö; k'-eu k'o; and phrases: eu ö k'eu eu eu; wy,eu ö-ö-ö on a rising inflection. And then with that near back of throat click: wee - 'k' ö wa'k' yeu yeu yeu.
What I do understand is when they rise up in cackles and hoots and barks, wheeling higher and round again, their cries collectively mingle: they become one organism with one voice: a distant gale howling when the cabin door is shut and the fire's lit.
Oak and maple
Trees are being planted at Saari Manor. Oaks and maples, puddled in well to this sandy soil. There's been no rain for days. The green rain gauge by the barn is empty; dry on its iron cradle. The young trees are well tended, broken roots trimmed back along with damaged branches, but nothing else - the curve of young limbs as they've formed where they first were grown are left to find their own way to the light in this new home.
There's harmony in the planting of trees. A music of hole digging and root pruning, of puddling and planting; of hands on the roots to spread and gently bury them; the tamping and raking and setting aside of stones.
And there's songs in the tools used and laid by in casual lunchtime arrangements: the blue-back handle of the bow saw with its black blade lever and the two orange-handled loppers, one short and the other long against an ash stem; the blue-shafted spade with its yellow handle (a more spoonlike spade than mine at home) together with the orange-toothed soft rake and the black steel rake against an old oak. And over there, stabbed in the turf, an isolated spade.
There's harmony in the planting of trees. A music of hole digging and root pruning, of puddling and planting; of hands on the roots to spread and gently bury them; the tamping and raking and setting aside of stones.
And there's songs in the tools used and laid by in casual lunchtime arrangements: the blue-back handle of the bow saw with its black blade lever and the two orange-handled loppers, one short and the other long against an ash stem; the blue-shafted spade with its yellow handle (a more spoonlike spade than mine at home) together with the orange-toothed soft rake and the black steel rake against an old oak. And over there, stabbed in the turf, an isolated spade.
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
St Patrick
At the very same spot that a couple of days ago I persuaded the grass snake to quit the unmetalled sandy road, this morning on my way down to the shoreline, there's a dead adder. It's at a point near a barn on a slight rise where the sun strikes hot - or as hot as it gets in September in Finland, which this year is fairly hot: 19 degrees today. On the sand, an obvious place for reptiles to bask. When I pick it up, it reaches from the ground almost to my waist. It's roadkill, though nothing will eat it but scavenging beetles and other insects. The poor beast's intestines are coiled out; blackened blood coating them with around that, a grime of sandy soil. I examine the head and teeth with care, noting the grin of death, and then stretch the dead snake out to rest in the cool grass. It was a big male, as thick as a child's wrist, with a zig of black lightning all along its spine.
Having tired of the conversation of geese - it's all one sided - they never listen - I head for home and here at this same wee rise in the road is an adder. A strong male again, guts erupting. Thinking it's the one of the morning, I check anyway; but there's that one I laid in the grass still unmoving, dead. I retrace my few steps, noticing blood staining the dirt and examine the second one. He has a yellow underpart to his tail. As I lift him to measure and heft, he writhes gently and I realise he's still alive. It's hard to know what to do - I don't kill things. Is the viper suffering? I lay him in the grass like the first and at this point I notice the small nick on my pinky - bleeding gently. My brain tells me that a dead adder and a half dead one don't bite and I'm sure I was careful to keep my fingers away from fangs, but I suck the knuckle and spit anyway, an atavistic but maybe prudent reaction.
Having finished work for the day, and since it's still early - light and warm, I ramble down to visit the geese again. I'm ever hopeful of engaging them in a short discourse. My two adders are still there, the second cold now; basking between the two corpses, on the dirt road in the last of the day's heat is a female adder. I have no truck with anthropomorphism but nevertheless it's hard not to wonder: why a female? Why now and why between two dead males. I know the logical explanations.
I pluck a long stem of rosebay willow herb with its seeds still adhering, to persuade her to leave the road. This is all getting a little biblical. I'm feeling like some latter day saint (not a Mormon, that would be odd) but a sort of Patrick, banishing snakes from a dirt track in Mynämäki. The snake bares her fangs and raises her head to strike as I gently brush. A long moment passes then we both retire: she to the long grass gracefully, me a step backwards with none of the grace of a saint.
Having tired of the conversation of geese - it's all one sided - they never listen - I head for home and here at this same wee rise in the road is an adder. A strong male again, guts erupting. Thinking it's the one of the morning, I check anyway; but there's that one I laid in the grass still unmoving, dead. I retrace my few steps, noticing blood staining the dirt and examine the second one. He has a yellow underpart to his tail. As I lift him to measure and heft, he writhes gently and I realise he's still alive. It's hard to know what to do - I don't kill things. Is the viper suffering? I lay him in the grass like the first and at this point I notice the small nick on my pinky - bleeding gently. My brain tells me that a dead adder and a half dead one don't bite and I'm sure I was careful to keep my fingers away from fangs, but I suck the knuckle and spit anyway, an atavistic but maybe prudent reaction.
Having finished work for the day, and since it's still early - light and warm, I ramble down to visit the geese again. I'm ever hopeful of engaging them in a short discourse. My two adders are still there, the second cold now; basking between the two corpses, on the dirt road in the last of the day's heat is a female adder. I have no truck with anthropomorphism but nevertheless it's hard not to wonder: why a female? Why now and why between two dead males. I know the logical explanations.
I pluck a long stem of rosebay willow herb with its seeds still adhering, to persuade her to leave the road. This is all getting a little biblical. I'm feeling like some latter day saint (not a Mormon, that would be odd) but a sort of Patrick, banishing snakes from a dirt track in Mynämäki. The snake bares her fangs and raises her head to strike as I gently brush. A long moment passes then we both retire: she to the long grass gracefully, me a step backwards with none of the grace of a saint.
Monday, 6 September 2010
Scaup and smew
There's a gentle rasping of oak limbs one against another in the north wind. It stopped me where I was carefully walking, thinking I'd heard a very dainty woodpecker.
On the fringes of the little oakwood Tammimäki are birches and some poplar, but here at the centre is very little but oak, just a small number of rowans. Oak of all ages, from the oldest, which I measure tip of nose to outstretched left fingertips as one yard, to be five yards in circumference to the smallest underfoot saplings, a single stem and inches high. There's little or no grazing here so the regeneration is thick, healthy and vibrant.
Among the freestanding large boulders the woodland floor is carpeted with berries. Down low, the lily of the valley berries glow orange, poisonous miniature persimmons. Herb Paris too, its single fruited stem offering what appears to be a cultivated blueberry. It's a narcotic. Mrs Grieve tells me it's only used in homeopathy these days, and considered poisonous. There's a red berry borne by a plant with leaves like a raspberry but growing low. The only edible berry here is the wild redcurrant, growing higher, but just about tasteless.
It's a small woodland, cared for by the government: conserved with minimal management. I see dead trees left to stand or fall as they will. There's also some that have been deliberately ring-barked: a double cut deep into the wood that killed these trees which were certainly alien species. But in decay and death they have provided homes for more invertebrates than they did alive.
They are still standing and I'm thinking of the old gamekeepers' gibbets on which were hung "vermin": unwanted species around a pheasant run - crows, foxes, buzzards and the like. Our manipulation of other species is unbounded.
I don't think anyone walks here any more, but there's the remains of a stone dyke, more of a boundary marker made from large boulders removed from the adjacent field, than anything to keep stock in or out. It's hard to get to grips with the origins of this woodland. Most Finnish woods are of mixed trees - predominantly birch and pine. A complete stand of oaks, extending to a woodland is rare.
A brown dragonfly moves along the path ahead of me as I leave Tammimäki and head west for the wetlands which are a staging post for birds on their migrations. The beautifully named garganey and gadwall; the scaup and smew all rest here. As do some thousand of greylag geese who are here at the moment, until their long flight south and west to Spain
And dancing, circling cranes.
The geese ululate and warble above; resting in a form is a hare in the middle of the big cutover wheatfield next to the bay.
As I move south, inland a little through a deep fringe of woods, aspens are rattling in the wind and a little below that red squirrels are dancing, making curious soft clicking noises. Now and then a leaf falls from their gymnastic browsing and flutters slowly to the floor of the wood. There's a drone of winged insects. The wood is an orchestra this evening - from the aoelian harp top notes, to the cello continuo of mosquitoes.
I've done a kind of spontaneously choreographed walk here, led by sightings - now under this tree, now against that bank - of mushrooms; led as much by my appetite as any squirrel.
I head for home with the sun beginning to sink, a bagful of what Finns call butter ceps - sticky and brown on top, butter yellow underneath.
On the fringes of the little oakwood Tammimäki are birches and some poplar, but here at the centre is very little but oak, just a small number of rowans. Oak of all ages, from the oldest, which I measure tip of nose to outstretched left fingertips as one yard, to be five yards in circumference to the smallest underfoot saplings, a single stem and inches high. There's little or no grazing here so the regeneration is thick, healthy and vibrant.
Among the freestanding large boulders the woodland floor is carpeted with berries. Down low, the lily of the valley berries glow orange, poisonous miniature persimmons. Herb Paris too, its single fruited stem offering what appears to be a cultivated blueberry. It's a narcotic. Mrs Grieve tells me it's only used in homeopathy these days, and considered poisonous. There's a red berry borne by a plant with leaves like a raspberry but growing low. The only edible berry here is the wild redcurrant, growing higher, but just about tasteless.
It's a small woodland, cared for by the government: conserved with minimal management. I see dead trees left to stand or fall as they will. There's also some that have been deliberately ring-barked: a double cut deep into the wood that killed these trees which were certainly alien species. But in decay and death they have provided homes for more invertebrates than they did alive.
They are still standing and I'm thinking of the old gamekeepers' gibbets on which were hung "vermin": unwanted species around a pheasant run - crows, foxes, buzzards and the like. Our manipulation of other species is unbounded.
I don't think anyone walks here any more, but there's the remains of a stone dyke, more of a boundary marker made from large boulders removed from the adjacent field, than anything to keep stock in or out. It's hard to get to grips with the origins of this woodland. Most Finnish woods are of mixed trees - predominantly birch and pine. A complete stand of oaks, extending to a woodland is rare.
A brown dragonfly moves along the path ahead of me as I leave Tammimäki and head west for the wetlands which are a staging post for birds on their migrations. The beautifully named garganey and gadwall; the scaup and smew all rest here. As do some thousand of greylag geese who are here at the moment, until their long flight south and west to Spain
And dancing, circling cranes.
The geese ululate and warble above; resting in a form is a hare in the middle of the big cutover wheatfield next to the bay.
As I move south, inland a little through a deep fringe of woods, aspens are rattling in the wind and a little below that red squirrels are dancing, making curious soft clicking noises. Now and then a leaf falls from their gymnastic browsing and flutters slowly to the floor of the wood. There's a drone of winged insects. The wood is an orchestra this evening - from the aoelian harp top notes, to the cello continuo of mosquitoes.
I've done a kind of spontaneously choreographed walk here, led by sightings - now under this tree, now against that bank - of mushrooms; led as much by my appetite as any squirrel.
I head for home with the sun beginning to sink, a bagful of what Finns call butter ceps - sticky and brown on top, butter yellow underneath.
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