Of Beauty,
Briefly
Four landscapes of the north,
four days taken at random from a year.
A record of what was here.
After the dark months.
The sun comes back in February.
For seven weeks it has not been above the horizon. Now, around noon, it lifts itself over the spruces, sits there for an hour, and goes down again. You can watch the whole arc in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee on the step.
Minus twenty-two. The first breath is a clean small shock. After a minute the cold becomes a kind of presence in the room of the body; you notice your boots, your own breathing, a stiffening at the rim of your cap where sweat has begun to freeze.
A snowdrift in flat light is the bluest thing you will ever see.
Not powder blue, not periwinkle, not any of the soft words for it. The shadows on the snow are an exact tender cobalt, and they last all afternoon. The pines, heavy with frost, are pale and slightly blue too. Some of them settle every so often under the weight; it is not a creak, not a whisper, some small adjustment of mass. There isn't really a word for the sound.
Twenty kilometres north of here the river is open where the current is strong, and the water there is black against the snow. People go through it. Not often. Every few winters. You learn which channels are safe and which aren't around the same age you learn not to touch the stove.
A raven crosses the sky, alone, three hundred metres up. Its shadow on the snow is several times the length of the bird. It does not seem to be going anywhere in particular. The light catches the underside of its wing, briefly, and then it is past.
The sun clears the trees. You stand in it.
You forget to be cold.
Two hours of light, then the sun goes again. The snow turns from blue to grey to blue with the moon.
Tomorrow there will be six more minutes.
The first warm day.
The frost lifted in the night. By morning the field is dark and soaked and steaming a little.
Yesterday the ground was iron. This morning, without anything having visibly happened, it is soft again. The crocuses came up two weeks ago; the first of them came up through the last snow. Some years they freeze and don't recover. This year they will. They are purple in a field that is otherwise still mostly brown.
A crane is calling somewhere out toward the lake. The birches haven't leafed yet, but the buds are swollen and red-brown at the tip of every branch. In a week, maybe ten days, they'll go.
In the ditch by the cow shed there is a small skeleton. A vole, possibly. The bones have been picked very clean. I leave them where they are.
By noon it is fourteen degrees, which up here counts as a heatwave. People come out into their yards in shirts they have not worn since September. A neighbour's child stands barefoot on the grass. She is gasping a little. She has not stood on warm earth in seven months. Last spring she was someone smaller and might not have noticed, so for her, in some functional way, this is the first time.
The cat sits in the doorway with its eyes shut, doing nothing and approving of nothing being done.
Nothing about this
was guaranteed.
The cranes could have failed to come back. The April that nearly killed everything could have killed everything. It is possible to imagine a year in which the field stays frozen through May. It has happened. It will happen again.
Not this year.
1:47 a.m.
No one tells you the night doesn't come. Or rather: they tell you, but they cannot quite tell you in a way that prepares you.
At 1:47 a.m. on the dock at the south end of the island, you look up and the sky is the colour of the inside of a peach. Not dusk. Not dawn. It is the hour at which, in any normal latitude, you would have been asleep for three hours.
The sun isn't down. It went around the back of the world without leaving the sky.
The water is so still that a perch breaking the surface counts as news. You can hear it from the cabin. The island is small enough to walk around in twenty minutes. It has a forest, two small hills, three kinds of moss, and an animal in the rafters who watches you sleep and does not introduce itself.
Saimaa itself is not, exactly, a lake. It is fifteen thousand kilometres of shoreline folded into a region you could drive across in a day. Every bay is somewhere different from every other bay. You can boat for a week and never see the same channel twice.
Fewer than four hundred ringed seals are left in Saimaa. They are the only freshwater seal of their kind. The females dig dens in snow on the lake ice and raise their pups inside them. Mild winters do not give them enough snow. There has been a series of mild winters.
Almost all of this is something we are doing, or failing to do. The seals do not know this.
On the night of midsummer, by tradition, you build a fire. The kokko is a pyre as tall as a house. On the islands, people have been building these for a long time. The fire is lit at the moment the sun would set, if the sun were going to set. It isn't. So the fire burns into a sky that is still light.
We light it anyway. We have always lit fires at midsummer. It feels important. I am not sure I could justify why.
as the water.
There is no line between them.
1:47 a.m.
Light enough to read by,
if you wanted.
Ruska.
The Finnish word is ruska.
It refers to the few weeks in early autumn when the leaves of the north turn colour, all at once. What turns, mostly, is the dwarf birch: vaivaiskoivu, a small tough plant that grows ankle-high across miles of tundra. In September it goes the colour of arterial blood. Around it the bilberry goes wine purple. The aspens, where they are, go a sharp impatient yellow.
Walk up onto a fell. Three hundred metres above the rest of the country, which is enough, this far north. Sixty kilometres of country visible in every direction. Most of it in colour. The colour is so saturated and so distributed that for the first minute you have trouble registering what you are looking at as land.
All this colour is the leaves doing the work of dying.
Chlorophyll is being withdrawn into the roots. The leaves are being abandoned because winter is coming and the trees cannot keep them fed. The reds and the yellows are byproducts of the abandonment, pigments the chlorophyll had been hiding all year.
The leaf gives up so the tree can keep going. Every September, in this country, several hundred kilometres of land become the most beautiful place on earth by means of a slow, biologically practical surrender.
A reindeer crosses the path twenty metres ahead. It looks at you, decides you are not a concern, and keeps going. There is the smell of wet bog and lichen and something slightly metallic, the cold getting into the air. The light, low, gilds everything that wasn't already burning.
In a few weeks the snow will come. The colour will be gone. You will not remember accurately how red the dwarf birch was. Photographs will not help; the camera cannot get the saturation right. You will misremember it and it will gnaw at you slightly, each winter, until the next September.
Walk through it.
Walk through it twice
if you can.
Four days. None of them was guaranteed.
The light comes back to Lapland in February because of axial tilt. The fields thaw in May because of how an atmosphere holds heat. The night fails to come in June because we are on a tilted sphere going around a star. The leaves turn red in September because chlorophyll is metabolically expensive in low light.
All of it is mechanical. None of it is for us; it would happen if we weren't here, and it will happen after we aren't. Beauty is incidental to the geometry.
Still, we are here, and we see some of it.
The world is in worse shape than it has been, and in better shape than it could be. We can keep it more or less like this if we are careful and unsentimental and a little luckier than we have any particular right to be.
If we manage, there will be more Februaries. More Mays, Junes, Septembers. We will not be there for most of them.
Some of them, though.