I wandered around, noting buildings by Alvar Aalto, and among the quirky neighborhoods, the art nouveau apartments and the quickly changing marine skyscape, I attempted to detect the spirit of Sibelius. A Finnish gentleman of a certain age took me aside and made it clear that Suomenlinna, Lorkeasaari, Seurasaari, and the great beach at Phlajasaari should not be missed. I assured him I would follow his advice. When I travel, there is usually one rhapsodic instance of telling myself, “I must learn the language!” It is an innocent impulse, resulting in no action, that I felt not once in Finland where even a sprinkling of words sound monstrously impenetrable. But pictures were another thing. I looked at rooms full of them in the Atheneum. Some of the sculpture was so conservative I thought it was Roman, but the painting was another matter, the best possessing a sequestered domesticity, a pleasing lack of European references.
There are beautiful public gardens behind one of the inlets, slightly unkempt, but every bit as handsome as English gardens sometimes are and as most French gardens are not. These were dominated by vast winter greenhouses that faced modest ponds and beds of replacement plantings. A very old woman, surely more than ninety, had been wheeled up to one of the ponds by her nurse. The nurse, you could see, hoped the old woman would take an interest in a family of mallards feeding on the pond. I noticed one of the woman’s legs had been amputated and it was clear she didn’t see the ducks. She seemed beyond indifference. Despite the nurse’s good intentions, this business with the ducks was insufferable. To grin at such a sight would spell defeat. I admired her refusal and watched this little drama by standing next to a wall of viburnum, pretending to be interested in the ducks myself, and stealing glances at the old woman.
She caught me. I averted my eyes. When I looked again in her direction, she was smiling at me in a sly way. The length of shore along the pond dividing us seemed a tremendous distance. When she gestured for me to come over, I affected a saunter but my guilt betrayed me. Once I reached her side, I saw that her silver hair was in thick, complicated braids. She reached out her hand and I took it. She was from another century and her hand was cool and full of strength. The nurse shrank to the size of a pinhead and the wheelchair seemed poised for flight. We watched the ducks. Our eyes shone. We were flying.
Back to my hotel for a snack of perch soup, reindeer, and cloudberries in the dining room, then dreams of Atlantic salmon in Russia.
THE TARMAC AT MURMANSK was under repair and so our small group of Americans and Brits were diverted into a military airport. We stood near a plywood shanty, awaiting transport to the Soviet helicopter, its red star painted over. It would carry us to sixty-seven degrees north latitude, above the Arctic Circle, to our camp on the Ponoi River, three hundred fifty miles of wild Atlantic salmon water springing from a tundra swamp and flowing to the Barents Sea.
We took the time to inspect the pale blue fighter planes parked in front of bulldozed gravel ledges. They looked like state-of-the-art military equipment, but canvas had been thrown over the canopies, there was at least one flat tire, and they now belonged to a discarded chapter of world politics and other cerebral fevers. The hearty, cheerful Russian woman who was our translator for the moment gestured to the airplanes and said, “You like some military secrets?”
We boarded the enormous helicopter and put in our earplugs, sitting on benches amid duffel bags and rod cases. The Russian crew nodded in that enthusiastic, mute way that says, We don’t know your language. The helicopter lifted off to an altitude of about two feet. I looked out the window at the hurricanes of dust stirred by the rotors and then the helicopter roared down the runway like a fixed-wing aircraft and we were on our way.
In very short order, the view from the window was of natural desolation, rolling tundra, wisps of fog, and alarming low-level whiteouts. Even through my earplugs came a vast drumming of power from the helicopter’s engine. As I often do when confronted with a barrage of new impressions, I fell asleep, chin on chest, arms dangling between my knees, looking like a chimp defeated by shoelaces.
After an hour and a half, we stopped at a rural airfield and got out to stretch while the crew refueled, a task they performed with cigarettes hanging from their lips. Parked on this airfield were enormous Antonov biplanes built in the 1940s. A Russian mechanic told us that some of them had American engines. These were great cargo-hauling workhorses in Siberia, and from time to time we would see them flying over the tundra at a snail’s pace.
We reboarded, joined by a very pretty Russian girl carrying an armload of flowers. She smiled at everyone with the by now familiar mute enthusiasm while the helicopter once again roared into flight. We all mused on this radiant flower of the Russian north, working up theories about her life and dreams. Everything was so wonderfully foreign that later we were slow to acknowledge that she and her husband were our talented cooks from Minnesota.
Landing on a bluff above the Ponoi River, we could see both the camp and the river. The camp was a perfectly organized congeries of white tents of varying sizes, and once I was installed in mine, I briefly stretched out on my bunk to take in that bright sense of nomadic domesticity that a well-appointed tent radiates. In this far north latitude, I knew that the sun would be beaming through my canvas day and night. In one corner was a small Finnish woodstove that in our sustained spell of warmth would never be used.
We were instructed about the angling at the first dinner. An amusing and slightly imperious Englishman named Nicholas Hood picked the first pause between syllables during the official briefing to forgo dessert and descend to the river with his sixteen-foot Spey rod. I was impressed by his deftness in effecting a warp-speed fisherman’s exit without getting caught at it. I had just given an old household toast of ours, “Over the lips, over the gums, look out stomach, here it comes.” To which Hood responded, “Cerebral lot, your family,” and was out of there. One of my companions, Doug Larsen, a superb outdoorsman, remarked that Hood slept with one leg in his waders. I do like to hit the ground running in these situations, but by the time I could disentangle myself Hood was stationed midway down the Home Pool cracking out long casts and covering water like one who’d bent to this work before. “Any sense of the protocol on fishing through here?” I asked.
“Go anywhere you like,” he said, far too busy to get into this with me. So I went, I thought, a polite distance below him and began measuring several long casts onto the tea-colored water. English salmon anglers think that our single-handed rods are either ridiculous or inadequate or simply bespeak, especially when combined with baseball hats, the hyperkinetic nature of the people who use them. One Englishman fishing here earlier in the season had stated plainly that he didn’t think Americans should be allowed to fish for salmon at all.
At the end of one quiet drift, a salmon took, ran off with the fly line and, well into the backing, cartwheeled into the air. He put up a strong, fast fight and I had to follow him down the beach to a small cover, where I tailed him. I looked down at the salmon, at eight pounds not large, but a wonderful, speckled creature, a pure and ancient product of the Russian arctic. I slipped the barbless hook from the corner of his mouth and this brilliantly precise fish, briefly in my hand, faded like an image on film, into the traveling depths of the Ponoi.
When I returned to my spot on the pool, there was Nicholas Hood, beaming and fishing at once. “Well done!” said Hood, showing surprising pleasure at my catch. As we would see, Hood was much too able a fisherman to be insecure about anyone else’s success.