Väinämöinen's oak

In order to reach the small island community of Iniö, maybe twelve miles from here down the bay and out into the Gulf of Bothnia, if you don't have a boat (and I don't) it's necessary to travel by bus maybe forty five north and then turning south west to negotiate the bays, inlets and islands scattered along the coastline. Then the two ferries, first to the island of Jumo, then another to Iniö.

While I'm here to look at the oakwoods - unusual for Finland, the country of pine and birch, I need to get an idea of the bigger landscape in which they formed. Waterscape would be as correct as landscape with twenty thousand islands in the archipelago.

The road north starts with surprises for me - among the spruce and pine , fir and birch in large tracts, broken only by farmland - crops of sunflowers and of raspberries. After the raised eyebrows, I realise the length of summer days and relative mildness (it's comparative) are responsible. As must surely be the case with the long growing oak.

We move on edging south west into a place full of lakes and rivers, each with tiny mooring places and boathouses, inlets bounded by rock outcrops with the trees in feathery mossed bedrock cracks. Causeways and bridges lead the way, which becomes almost more water than land, more rock than farm, more woodland than all those. In this landscape, in this place it's easy to believe in the presence of not just the bears and wolves still here in forest and told of in the Kalevala, but the legends around them, of Väinämöinen's sowing of the ancient wilderness itself:

He sowed the hills with pine groves, sowed the knolls with stands of fir
He sowed birches in swales, alders on light-soiled lands
rowans in holy places, willows on flooded lands
junipers on barren lands, oaks by the side of a stream.

The names of the places we pass or are signed are the melody of epic: Lautenpää, Rautila, Taivassalo, Pukholma, Lehtinen, Aasmaa, Hakkenpää, Parattula and Laupustentie.

The first ferry is Aurora. The chart on the cabin wall shows me absolutely that there is as much land - island - as water. I find it hard to get a bearing on where we might be, with islands to each horizon, with hard by, tree'd island on isle on islet, skerry on reef; up close, and we are, these are upthrusts of weathered granite with the trees clawing into fissures. And we're floating not only on the water the ferry sails, but on the reflected mass of piled cumulus.

Iniö kirk is a beautiful spare Gustavian building. Indeed it was Gustav IV who had it built in 1798, perhaps fearful of the Revolution in France, building churches for merit in the next kingdom. The white interior is loved by the priest who tells us not only of the strong grace of the kirk architecture, but of the people who live on the island. There's a small community of 250, with two schools, a shop, a post office, a nurse, a library visiting twice a week and a doctor visiting once or twice a week. And the ferry is free.

Inside the doorway of the kirk proper, beyond the entrance leading to the belltower hangs a small model three-masted schooner. In august and spare Gustavian surroundings I find it heartening to find this ex voto. With prayer, it brings sailor and fisherman safely home.

I climb, with the priest to the very top of the bell tower - she's a little nervous of the open sided stairway at the very top, but we make it just fine, among a couple of fossil like bird skeletons and a fluttering finch. The finch has come in through a gap in the wooden shutters and disturbs the priest greatly - she'll return later to make sure it's away.

At the top, above the two bells, the vast oak beams are scrawled with the names of the old carpenters and repairers. Some have taken a chisel and carved, most a stub of pencil and written names and dates in copperplate handwriting as fine as the beams themselves. The priest speaks with fondness of the descendants of some of those who have written their names.

The easy-going island ways mean that a mention of the bells demands that the bell ringer be phoned to ring them, though it might mean the islanders wonder who they are tolling for.
And he duly arrives, a farmer in boiler suit and cap, speaking an elegant island Swedish, as though Gustav was still around. The bells - after introductions - are rung. I'm in the tower with ear protection and watch as the bell-ringer muscles the bells into heavy chimes - no ropes, but short cords (looking like baling twine) to each bellhead which is swung to rebound the clapper. One bell, one ring, the other bell, another ring, repeated and repeated. I feel all this as much as hear it.
The bells are cradled and swung in massive oak squared beams.

The ferry, the Skagen had brought us to the north settlement here, Norrby, so I head south to the other end's village, Söderby. It's an island of boats, though we pass the mandatory island rusting cars at farmroad end - old Volkswagens, each costing more to move to scrap than it ever cost to buy. It's a living island, full of apple trees and caravans, with those boats at Söderby tucked into fine boathouses and mostly out of the water. A couple of steel working boats pull against the ropes; a classic wooden island two master rides beautifully each small swell in the wee harbour.

A living island anywhere has its problems, too, with folk far away inheriting country cottages here - there's more than half a million in the old wooden-hut tradition of city escape now in Finland; with these driving the price of houses, it's hard for the youngsters to find somewhere to live.
The old island troubles and concerns remain of course. The priest tells of the old lore of winds - which not to set out in; which will bring rain. And above all which quarter's wind bring the fish which mean winter food.

The midsummer tower is still here at Söderby, with four ships at the top spinning in the wind, the rowan leaves twined through it now brown. Soon it will come down until summer rises again in Iniö and the archipelago.

The little oakwood at Saari is inseperable, not just from the land that allowed them to grow - or maybe Väinämöinen had a hand - but from the people and their lives, who still cherish trees and the use of timber in church and boat.

Back on Skagen and midway between Iniö and Kustavi there is a little transforming magic: the spirit of place, oak and pine and sky and rock takes over, somehow an inversion of island and sky - the skerries, reefs and whitecaps rising into the blue overhead and the same number of small drifting cumulus clouds buoying Skagen from below.

The ferry drifts this way, between clouds, with tree'd islets above until two shadows arrive moving somewhere between: a pair of white-tailed sea eagles out-skerry size pass languidly, making small the laboured distance of Skagen's engines.

Louhi, mistress of north farm, takes her broken boat and fashions it again:

. . . the planking she knocked into wings,
the steering oar into a tail for herself . . .
She spreads her wings to fly, raises herself aloft like an eagle
She flies swiftly along, seeking out Väinämöinen;
one wing brushed the clouds, the other grazed the water