Koivupolku

Ruska, a week late

Ruska is the Finnish word for the autumn colours, and every year there is a small national conversation about whether it is early or late, good or disappointing. This year it was late by about a week, and then it arrived all at once: the birches went yellow over three cold nights, the aspens turned a strange coral pink, and the blueberry bushes on the forest floor became a deep wine red that looks almost artificial in low sun.

We walked the ridge path above the lake on Saturday, about eleven kilometres with a long stop at the lean-to shelter on the top. The shelter had a fresh pile of split wood, left by whoever maintains it, and a notebook in a plastic box where walkers write the date and a line or two. Most entries this month were about the colours. One just said "cold hands, good coffee", which seemed to cover it.

The wind came up in the afternoon and by Sunday half of the birch leaves were on the ground. That is the thing about ruska: it is short, and you have to go when it happens rather than when it suits you.

The last swim

The water was 7 degrees when I measured it on Thursday morning. That is not cold by the standards of people who swim through the winter in a hole cut in the ice, but it is cold enough that the first ten seconds are mostly about breathing on purpose.

The routine at the cabin is the same as always: sauna first, until the skin is properly hot, then down the wooden steps into the lake, a few strokes out and back, and up again to sit on the bench and steam quietly. Three rounds is enough. After the third the body feels oddly light and the head very clear, and the evening coffee tastes better than coffee has any right to taste.

The neighbours across the bay have already pulled their boat out and turned it over for the winter. Ours will stay in the water another week or two, until the mornings start with a thin crust of ice along the reeds.

Lingonberries and a long afternoon

Lingonberry season follows the blueberries by a few weeks, and the berries grow in drier places: on pine heaths, on mossy rock, along old logging roads where the light reaches the ground. We picked for about three hours with a berry rake and came home with a little over eight litres, which is more than we need and not quite enough to give any away.

Most of them were cleaned on the table in the yard, a slow job of rolling the berries down a tilted towel so that the leaves and needles stay behind. Half went into the freezer as they were. The rest became a simple stirred jam with very little sugar, which keeps surprisingly well because the berries contain their own preservative.

Everyman's right, in practice

Visitors often ask about jokamiehenoikeus, the everyman's right, which allows anyone to walk, ski, cycle and camp for a short time on most land, and to pick berries and mushrooms without asking the owner. It is generous, and it works because most people treat it carefully.

• Walk anywhere except yards, gardens and fields with crops.
• Camp a night or two at a reasonable distance from houses.
• Pick berries, mushrooms and flowers that are not protected.
• No open fires without the landowner's permission, and never when the forest fire warning is on.
• No cutting trees or branches, no disturbing nesting birds.

In practice the most important rule is the unwritten one: leave the place as if you had never been there.

Mushroom basket

A wet August meant a very good mushroom autumn. Within an hour in the spruce forest behind the village we had a basket of funnel chanterelles, a few ceps, and a handful of hedgehog mushrooms that someone else had missed under a fallen branch.

I only pick what I know with complete certainty, which is a short list: chanterelles, funnel chanterelles, ceps, hedgehogs, and the milk caps that need to be boiled before they are salted. Everything else stays where it is, however tempting. The local library has an excellent field guide with large photographs, and the mushroom advisers at the market square on Saturdays are happy to look into anyone's basket.

Dinner was the simplest possible: mushrooms fried slowly in butter with onion, a little cream at the end, and rye bread.

Notes on a small cabin

The cabin was built in the late 1960s by my partner's grandfather, mostly on weekends, and it shows the habits of a careful man with little money: every board was used twice, the window frames came from a demolished school, and the woodshed is bigger than the bedroom.

There is electricity now, from a small solar panel and a battery, but no running water. Drinking water comes from a well in the village, in two blue canisters, and washing water comes from the lake. The toilet is a dry outhouse with a view of the birches and a stack of old crossword magazines.

It is the kind of place where a week passes very slowly in the best sense. The day is organised around wood, water, food and weather, and after the third day you notice that you have stopped checking the time.

Midsummer without the mosquitoes

Juhannus, the midsummer weekend, empties the cities. Everyone who can goes to a cabin, lights a bonfire by the water, and stays up for the night that never quite gets dark. This year the weather was cool and windy, which spoiled the swimming but kept the mosquitoes away, and most people seemed to think that was a fair trade.

The bonfire on the point across the lake was lit at ten in the evening and was still glowing at three, when the sun came back up over the trees after a short pale twilight. Somebody in the next bay played the accordion, not very well, for several hours.

Bog walk on duckboards

Most national parks in southern Finland have at least one bog trail on duckboards, two planks wide, laid over the wet moss. They are among the best walks in the country: flat, quiet, open to the sky, and full of small things to look at.

On this one we saw sundew plants catching small insects, cotton grass waving in the wind, a pair of cranes far out on the open bog, and a common lizard warming itself on a plank. The boards are slippery when wet, and some of the older sections tilt alarmingly, so it is worth walking slowly. That is the point anyway.

The loop is a little under seven kilometres. There is a lookout tower halfway, a fire place with a shelter, and a dry toilet that is cleaner than many in cities.

First ice

The bays freeze first, from the shore outward, usually in November after a few clear and still nights. The first ice is black and transparent, and on a calm morning you can see the stones and weeds through it as if through glass. It also sings: long, low, electronic sounds that travel across the lake as the ice cracks and settles with changes in temperature.

Nobody walks on it yet. The rule we follow is at least five centimetres of clear ice for a person on foot, and more near inlets, under bridges and around reeds, where the ice is always weaker. Later in the winter there will be ski tracks and fishing holes across the whole lake, but for now it is only for looking.

Cross-country ski trails after dark

In the darkest weeks there are only a few hours of daylight, and most people ski in the evening on lit trails. Nearly every town has them: loops of three, five and ten kilometres through the forest, lit by lamps on wooden poles and groomed several times a week for both classic and skating styles.

There is something peculiarly calm about it. The snow absorbs sound, the light makes small yellow rooms along the track, and between the lamps the forest is completely black. You hear your own breathing and the rhythm of the poles, and occasionally someone much faster passing with a polite "hei".

Sauna, briefly explained

There are said to be more saunas in Finland than cars. Whether or not that is true, almost every house, summer cabin and apartment block has one, and the rules are simpler than visitors fear.

• Shower or wash before going in.
• Sit on a small towel or a seat cover on the bench.
• Throwing water on the stones is called löyly; ask before adding more.
• Cool down outside, in the shower or in the lake, then go back in. Repeat as you like.
• Drink water. Nobody is counting how long you stay.

A wood-heated sauna takes about an hour to warm properly. A smoke sauna, which has no chimney and is aired out before use, takes most of a day and is worth every minute.

Waxwings in the rowan

Flocks of waxwings arrive in early winter and strip the rowan trees in town of their berries in a day or two. They are absurdly elegant birds, pinkish brown with a crest and small red and yellow marks on the wings, and they travel in noisy groups of thirty or forty.

This morning a flock settled in the rowan outside the kitchen window and worked through it with great efficiency, dropping half the berries in the snow below. By noon they had moved on to the next street, and the blackbirds were left to clean up the rest.

A slow train north

The train from Helsinki to Kajaani takes about six hours. It is not fast, but it is warm and quiet, there is a restaurant car with decent soup, and the view changes slowly from suburbs to farmland to an almost unbroken forest that goes on for hours.

In March the light is coming back. The snow is still deep, but it is brighter and harder, and the low sun on the lakes is almost too strong to look at. I spent most of the trip reading and the rest looking out of the window, which is the correct way to use a long train journey.

What to pack for a day in the forest

A headlamp is worth carrying from August onwards; the evenings shorten faster than you expect. A thermos of something hot is worth carrying always.

Spring floods on the river path

When the snow melts in April the rivers rise quickly, and the low path along the riverbank disappears under brown, fast water for two or three weeks. The town puts up a small sign at each end saying the path is closed, and everyone ignores it as far as the first puddle, then turns back with wet boots.

The flood brings its own visitors. Whooper swans rest on the flooded meadows on their way north, sometimes a hundred or more at once, and their calls carry for kilometres on still evenings. Goldeneyes display in the open channels, throwing their heads back in a way that looks uncomfortable, and the first wagtails appear on the edges of the ice that is left.

By the beginning of May the water is back in the riverbed, the path is covered in a thin layer of grey silt, and the willows along the bank have catkins full of bees.

Rye bread, the slow way

Finnish rye bread is sour, dense and dark, and it is made from a starter that many families have kept going for decades. Ours came from a neighbour in a small jar, with instructions written on the lid: feed it, keep it cool, and never wash the bowl completely clean.

The dough is mixed the evening before, left overnight in a warm corner, and shaped in the morning into flat round loaves with a hole in the middle. The hole is traditional; the bread used to be hung on poles under the ceiling to dry and keep through the winter. Ours does not last that long. Warm from the oven with salted butter, a loaf disappears in a day.

The recipe is mostly a matter of feel: rye flour, water, salt, starter, and time. The first few attempts were bricks. The fifth one was very good, and since then it has been a weekly habit.

Listening for capercaillie

In early spring the male capercaillie gather at traditional display grounds in old forest and perform before dawn: a strange sequence of clicks, a pop like a cork from a bottle, and a soft grinding sound. The leks are sensitive, and nobody who knows where they are will tell you, which is as it should be.

We did not go looking for one. Instead we stood at the edge of a clearing on a forest road at four in the morning, by chance, and heard the clicking somewhere far inside the trees. It went on for perhaps ten minutes, then stopped, and a woodpecker started drumming in its place. We walked back to the car very quietly, feeling we had been allowed to overhear something private.

Ice road across the lake

In cold winters the authorities open official ice roads across some parts of the lake, ploughed and marked with small spruce trees on both sides, with speed limits and weight limits and a notice at each end giving the current ice thickness. It feels strange to drive a car across water that you swam in a few months earlier.

The ice road near us is about four kilometres long and saves almost an hour of driving around the bay. This winter it opened in late January and closed again in the third week of March, when the sun began to soften the surface and the snow along the edges turned grey and wet.

On weekends the road is busy with skaters as well. Long-distance tour skating on natural ice has become very popular, with groups travelling twenty or thirty kilometres in an afternoon, always with ice picks around the neck and a throw rope in the backpack.

Rowing to the island

There is a small rocky island about two kilometres from the cabin, with three pines, a smooth granite slope facing west and a fireplace ring that somebody built long ago. We row there on calm evenings in an old wooden boat that leaks a little, so one person rows and the other bails with a cut plastic bottle.

The ringed seals of Saimaa live in this part of the lake, one of the rarest seals in the world, and in summer you sometimes see a round grey head watching you from a distance before it slides under without a ripple. We have seen one three times in ten years. Each time the conversation in the boat stopped completely.

We eat sausages from the fire, watch the sun go down behind the far shore at about half past ten, and row back in the long blue dusk, when the lake is so still that the oars leave little whirlpools that last for a minute behind the boat.

Firewood for next winter

Firewood should dry for at least one summer before it is burned, so the wood for next winter is cut and split in spring. This year it was birch from a few trees that the storm brought down in November: about six cubic metres, which took two long weekends with a chainsaw, a splitting axe and a borrowed hydraulic splitter for the knotty pieces.

Stacking is an art of its own. Bark up, a little gap between the rows for air, a roof over the top and the sides open to the wind. A good stack is quietly satisfying to look at, and the smell of fresh birch in the woodshed is one of the best smells of early summer.

About this site

Koivupolku is a small notebook, kept mostly for friends and family who ask what we have been doing. It is updated irregularly, usually after a weekend at the cabin or a longer walk. If something here was useful to you, that is a nice bonus.

The place names are real, the weather is as it was, and the berry quantities are, if anything, slightly modest. Photographs are not included on purpose: the page should load quickly on a weak connection at the end of a forest road, which is where most of it was written.

Corrections about birds, mushrooms or grammar are always welcome by post card.