Growth

Is there room on the island, land on the main part of the island
for me to sing my songs, intone my long lays?
Words melt in my mouth, sprout on my gums.
. . .
Then reckless Lemminkäinen now began to sing.
He sang up rowans in farmyards, oaks in the middle of farmyards,
sturdy boughs on the oaks, an acorn on a branch.
The Kalevala

Ruotsalainen is an island of oaks.

Not a big island, like nearby Ruissalo, which has a larger oakwood, but with ancient oaks, mostly overlooked by timber hunters.
They were owned by the King of Sweden. The people of the island once came to hate the oaks as symbols of an unloved monarchy. The oaks are still there; the king long gone and his fleets with him.

Sadly, few islanders are left in the twenty-first century. The Turku archipelago and its sometimes difficult winter climate has shared a rural decline with much of the rest of Finland.

My hosts at Saari have arranged a special trip for me to see the oaks. There's a regular ferry for the islanders, but there's no facilities on the island for anyone else. Twenty-one folk live here.

The ferry-crossing is bitterly cold this October day; all my layers are cut right through by the wind. Sisko Ilmalahti, our guide for the day (our wee group is Anna from Saari, Morven, Niran and myself), greets us at the ferry landing and accompanies us directly to her house for coffee and an early lunch. Islanders eat early and heartily. Her house is off by a small bay, surrounded by piles of anchors.

The heavy horse left the island two days before we arrived, but evidence of its work is everywhere. They've felled some trees in the woods: not oaks - pines mostly, and big ones at that. Any fool can fell a tree. What happens then is a large tractor entering the woodland, compacting earth, destroying flora, including saplings, breaking overhead branches, to drag or worse, load out the stems on a heavy trailer.
The best woodland management is the oldest. Here, they've felled the trees not for the timber, though of course, nothing will be unused from trunks to lesser branches, but for the light their absence brings to the woodland. The horse has trodden carefully round all saplings, its heavy weight nothing compared to the tons of a forestry tractor. Its chains and harness, its strength and intelligence alongside its handler’s mean each tree is hauled out, slowly and with care, bringing trunk after trunk with no more damage than the walk through the woods we’re taking now.

Oak trees seem now to need a great deal of light if they are to grow from acorns which fall from trees onto the woodland floor. Regeneration needs a little help. Sometime around 1900 there was the accidental introduction into Europe of American oak mildew, which spread to every deciduous oak in Europe. While not deadly in itself, its effect is to add to the burden of oak saplings attempting to grow under a heavy canopy; the combination of mildew and absence of light does mean death to the saplings, however. Acorns carried by jays or squirrels outside the woodland, buried and forgotten grow perfectly well. Oaklings now grow happily anywhere except in oakwoods.

Here on Ruotsalainen, they want to rejuvenate this precious woodland - there's nowhere for acorns to germinate on an island except inward to the oakwood - hence the felling for light and the great care taken by that horse avoiding oak roots and already struggling oak saplings.

There's snow flurries, with fat flakes landing on the floor as I stand at the foot of an ancient, broken-limbed oak with Sisko's husband. Morven's stravaigin somewhere, doing her thing with the old slide camera and Anna has wandered off with Sisko looking for mushrooms. There can be no better companions to a forest than the quiet hunters of mushrooms and photographs and this island-forester weighing each word with myself and Niran an environmental artist, who's thoughtfully translating.

We estimate the tree to be older than five hundred, but there's no way of knowing for sure without a core sample, which would be foolish with such a precious tree. We talk of ancient island grazing regimes; of how islands are washed over not just by heavy seas, but by history. Forgotten woodlands the man's saying, which allowed them to survive. We talk a long time, round the tree, looking up, with snow falling on our faces, knowing that all is being done to help the woods live on into a time we'll never see. We stroll across a small clearing to another ancient and continue the discussion at its foot. I do my nose to outstretched arm's fingertip circling - an infallible yard-length each time - and the old tree gives me five and a half yards of circumference. The conversation is perfect and slow as growth; but Anna calls across the woods asking if we're waiting for winter. And we realise we're cold and hungry. Anna has found fat perfect ceps and shows us her haul as we straggle back the long way to the anchored yard.

On the way, we pass the manor house and its outbuildings - wood of course, with a windvane carrying the date 1677. The timber ends of old log-built barns have been used to help date woodlands elsewhere in Finland, but these are too weathered. The date though and the size of the great foundation timbers, old when felled, points to an ancient woodland of oak on the island in the middle ages - the time of Taivassalo kirk with its peopled and demoned landscape frescoes.

The islanders have ever lived in the present though and have tried everything to put food on the table. We pass a low deserted part brick buiding with a date of 1928: there was a brief attempt then to establish a brick manufactory with local clays, but it never amounted to anything in Depression times; islanders staying with the fishing and farming.

Along the way too, we clamber up the weathered outcrop at the centre of the island. It's no longer snowing, the skies are blue and we're treated to a 360 degree view of small islands, skerries and trees wherever they can crimp their roots. To each horizon: islands and trees.

Back at her house, Sisko busies herself with cooking another meal on her old steel log-range; Anna cooks up the mushrooms and we talk with Sisko and her husband about island life. The TV is on in the corner, sound down: an incongruous documentary about logging truck drivers in Alaska. In gaps in the slow moving conversation, we all stare out the windows - each one with a different view of up-close pines and birches, with flittering tits; between the trunks the glimmer of cold Baltic water.
A helicopter can be heard away to the south, then seen: it's the mainland hospital helicopter. Sisko tells us they don't turn out if the patient is very old. I don't know if this is twenty-first century health economics or that the helicopter ride would prove too much for a frail old person.

Sisko was born on Rekisaari, King's island, which she says should be pronounced Reksaari. It's called that because the king (him of the oaks) visited once. Her great-great-grandfather was a Pilot in these waters which are deep, mostly narrow and very difficult unless one knows the reefs and rips. Her great-grandfather and his son were Pilots too. Children are baptised here in sea water - that way they'll not drown at sea.

Sisko and her husband came to Ruotsalainen to build this house as a summer house sixteen years ago. No-one now lives on Rekisaari. Sisko shows us a photograph of herself and her father and brothers all smiling back in the seventies, leaning on the farmgate outside the Rekisaari house; without nostalgia.

The rain all falls on the mainland she says and it was hard to find water for the garden - by which she means what I say too: a vegetable garden for feeding a family. It proved impossible in the end to stay summers in Ruotsalainen and visit the Rekisaari garden to water, daily across the sea to the northwest and still have time for fishing and the other things that make up island life. The Ilmalahtis live in this house all year now.

Until two years ago there was a fishing co-operative on this island; we see the smoke house for catches of Baltic herring just outside. The co-op is no more. When we can't understand his name for the herring traps, Sisko's husband draws us a picture with his biro of the box nets that are used to catch the herring - the anchors sit outside. The herring have their own traditions and have always run the same places when they arrive. The Ruotsalainen folk know their routes and it allows them to funnel the fish into an anchored box-frame lined with net, which is lifted when the shoal is inside.

Fish were smoked or salted and taken to the annual fish fairs lasting a week in Helsinki and Turku for sale.

With a decline in fish numbers, aggravated by State protection of seals here - a tourist attraction - Sisko estimates there are ten thousand seals in the archipelago, all of whom eat fish and raid and damage the box-traps, fishing is no longer a way to earn a living.

There's also the question of cormorants - we discover their name after a long description and a mime of a bird with wings outspread on a rock, drying for lack of sebaceous glands - the dinosaur looking bird. No-one knows the Englishing until after the mime: merimetsu in Finnish. They migrate in their thousands and eat the pike-perch. Wherever I go in the archipelago I'm given this name, but I'm none the wiser as to what species a pike-perch is.

It was seasonal work; the Baltic, being barely salty because of the influx of so much mainland river water and its lack of noticeable tides to flush it, freezes hard each winter.

As if a final nail were needed in island fishing economy, the small scale salmon farming proved susceptible to nitrates in the water from mainland crop growing practices. All the salmon now comes from Norway.

It's with a little regret, but a lot of pragmatism our conversation moves through all this. Ruotsalainen islanders are resourceful folk and maybe can see the days ahead through their oakwoods.

A faint sound of oak-song today, here in the island of trees and people growing together and growing old together, a backwash of events allowing enough time for the changes of that growth.