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.