The year was 1982. It was summer and I was in Finland — “Suomi” to the Finns. (Why don’t we call all countries what their respective natives call them?)
Nine other educators, a university professor and a small assortment of spouses and teenagers were along for the ride. Our purpose was a six-week tour of the country. The tour was put together by a Finnish geographer who traveled with us the entire time, as did Ekki, our bus driver. We were joined by several other Finns throughout the trip. Here’s a story about our journey into Finnish Lapland, aka Lappi, above the Arctic Circle.
We were housed in a government school empty for the summer. It was a place where the Finnish Laplanders, or “Sami,” sent their children to board during the long, cold winters because of the impossibility of traveling the roads. We grouped ourselves as appropriate in vacant rooms and slept on mattresses on the floor with provided bedding. A cook had been hired to feed us. We ate cafeteria style. We settled in and then we were off to study the area.
Reindeer were wandering all over. I dug a reindeer skull out of the permafrost; it now hangs on my wall at home. I ate a little raw reindeer meat. We went for long walks in the twilight. In Lappi, a single summer day lasts for more than two months.
Because Suomi is mostly low elevation with many pockets of still water, the Finns have three names for the mosquito. My favorite is sääski. We battled sääskis incessantly.
We picked rare cloudberries that are native to alpine and Arctic tundra. They are used for jams and tarts and a liqueur rarely seen outside the country. We scavenged for small blueberries from stunted shrubs covering the forest floor. We visited a man who made handmade knives and another man who made canoes.
We learned of the problems of a people with nomadic reindeer herds constrained by the borders of three countries. It was quickly evident that poor dental care was the norm for these natives. Whatever the diet or circumstance that caused it, all native teeth I saw were in horrible. rotting condition.
One day. word went around that for dinner that evening, we were to all wear something we had not yet worn on the trip. I didn’t have much in that category but put on what I could dredge up and then, using safety pins, completed my outfit using my bed blanket. We all met down in the cafeteria and discovered we were a creative bunch.
Throughout our stay at the school, we’d had some rather silent Sami visitors — mostly men — who would periodically peek in at us. We were probably the most excitement they’d had up north for the entire summer. That night was no exception. We all wondered what they thought of us and our get-ups.
We were soon to find out: Toward the end of dinner, several of them suddenly ran into the middle of the room and struck a ta-da! pose in their native costumes, which they’d gone home to put on and which we were delighted to see because, until then, we’d only seen them in modern clothes.
Word had also gotten out that we were having a dance that evening. The Finns love to dance. There is a dance hall in almost every small town in Finland. (In Clark County, we have Finn Hall in Brush Prairie, the site of many a dance during World War II.) Our group had often gone out dancing when we were done with our day. I’d especially had a great time with bus driver, Ekki, an award-winning tango dancer. Circumventing the language barrier, I’d point to him and myself and make circles in the air, and we’d be off to tango.
But this night, I was tired and went to bed. Not for long! The women came in to get me up, as there was a need for more dancing partners. You see, the male Sami had come to dance. They came by foot, by bicycles and on tractors.
I was asked to dance by a Sami man who hardly reached my shoulder. (They are a shorter people.) We barely got it together on the dance floor but he took great delight in “dipping” me backwards almost to the floorboards. In one dip, I could see the geographer dancing backwards right toward me. I thought for sure at least four of us were going to end up in one big, painful heap, but my worthy partner pulled out the stops and we averted disaster. At the end of the dance, he stepped back, clicked his heels together and saluted me with a great big grin.
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