Caption: “In memory of all the Åland Islanders who found their graves in the ocean.”
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I have a habit of beginning my journal entries – the stories
I write when I’m actively out traveling or sailing or actually doing something
– with reminding myself of where I was when I wrote it. Setting the scene for
my own memories sake I think (incidentally, that’s the main reason I write, or
at least started writing – it’s pretty selfish. I enjoy the act of it. Turning
on some music – this time, Smashing Pumpkin’s ‘Adore’ album – using the
blackout feature in Word that makes my computer desktop black save for the
white screen on which these letters appear, and sinking right into it. And the
subsequent re-reading of what I’d written. I have journals like this that go
back to my first experience abroad, in Costa Rica in 2004, that one written by
hand, the title and a little palm tree sketch scratched into the leather
surface of that particular journal’s cover with my Swiss Army knife. It’s all
great stuff).
So I’m writing from the ‘sommar stuga’ in Bergö, in the
northern part of mainland (sort of) Åland. This is Johanna Mattsson’s parent’s
summer cottage (there’s a mouthful), Mia’s maid of honor in our wedding and
whom I met in New Zealand at the same time I met Mia. Unfortunately, she can’t
be here (she works in Sweden as a dentist), but her parents have been giving us
a wonderful stay.
The property was handed down (as is much of the property on
Åland, for it’s nearly impossible for foreigners to buy real estate here,
keeping the country in the hands of the locals. And more importantly, keeping
this beautiful place reasonably priced for those who grew up here) from
Johanna’s grandmother on her mom’s side. It’s a small peninsula overlooking a
little cove inside a larger bay. The waterside is interspersed with the typical
red granite cliffs of Åland, and reedy, swampy areas where the water is
shallower. They have a very small dock built into the red granite in front of
the cottage, where Tryggve, Johanna’s dad, keeps his old wooden runabout
moored. Just up from the waterfront is the ‘bastu’ (sauna), which has an attached
shower and a set of bunk beds for guests (where Mia and I slept last night to
get off the boat). Behind the cottage is another tiny little ‘stuga’, which
houses the washing machine (no dryer), larger refrigerator and the oven (the
cottage itself is not much bigger than a typical college dorm room, so there is
room for only a tiny fridge and simple two-burner stove next to the single
sink). Next to it is the outhouse (yep). Inside, the cottage has a small dining
table for two, a sitting room with a couple bookshelves and a wood stove as the
centerpiece, and two very small attached bedrooms (by which I mean, literally,
rooms big enough only for the beds that occupy them. No walk-in closets here).
All the buildings on this little piece of land (it’s
probably an acre, if that, but a gorgeous acre it is) are painted dark green,
so they blend right into the surrounding forest. The deck out front of the
cottage is painted dark brown, and probably has a larger footprint than the
cottage itself, with a big dining table for 6 or 8, and a handful of sitting
chairs and coffee tables. It overlooks the dock just down the sloping front
yard, which is mostly grass with a few big natural granite slabs poking up here
and there. This is a summer place, and most of the time is spent here outside.
Arcturus is
anchored in the tiny cove just off the dock, and it became apparent last night
that a large sailboat is indeed an odd sight around these parts. Granted, we
were able to get here reasonably easy enough from the open sea and the outer
archipelago, winding our way through a couple of cliff-lined narrow channels
(Mia and I tacked through one particularly small part, with 100’ red cliffs on
each side, that dropped another 160’ sheer into the sea, the wind funneling
directly into this little canyon. We only had a couple hundred yards room, just
enough to get up some headway to enable us to tack over again. Arcturus is not the most weatherly boat
– a modern J boat could probably have made it in two tacks – but we made it
through nonetheless, dropping the sails only when the channel became too
rock-strewn and narrow to even make one tack). But the thing is, it feels
inland here. It is only 5 feet deep where we’re anchored, and small fishing boats
passed us as we made our way in, and the reedy, forested shorelines were a
decided change from the rocky outcroppings of the archipelago.
The boat drew attention from the neighbors apparently, too.
We sat down for dinner last night on the deck (I was the grillmaster for the
pork loin and zucchini – only after, of course, Mia and I had a naked swim in
the cove and a fantastic sauna and shower afterwards. It feels so luxurious to
me, but not having a sauna in Finland is like not having a shower in America –
it’s just how it works here), and shortly thereafter two of the neighbors
wandered down to inquire about the sailboat in the harbor. Tryggve offered them
cold beers as a good host, and they sat down for a chat. Tryggve is very
impressed that we sailed all the way here from America, and is constantly
asking me what this and that is like back home. He rowed out the boat with me
yesterday to help retrofit the propane system from American to European. He
enthusiastically told his neighbors about us and the boat, much to his delight.
Turns out that one of them (I forget their names – these
Finnish ones are hard for me to understand, and harder for me to remember) was
a seaman on a ship in Gustav Erikson’s fleet back in the day, and had been
across the Atlantic himself several times as a merchant mariner. Gustav Erikson
is rather famous around these parts, for he owned 17 of the last merchant
sailing ships to sail the grain route from Australia to England, and many Ålander’s
were captains and crew, far more than the countries tiny population of 28,000
would think to have provided.
Later that evening another neighbor turned up, this time in
an old wooden motor launch. We watched him approach the dock from the deck,
Tryggve already bragging for the man about the boat, making sure I noted how
smoothly it parted the water, ‘like a swan,’ he’d said. Claes (his name I
remembered) shouted for Tryggve to come down to the dock. He grabbed a cold
beer first, and I followed him down, intrigued to see this neat old wooden
boat. As they chatted, I asked in Swedish if I could climb onboard and poke
around. ‘Absolutely!’ Claes replied.
‘Start her up!’ he said in Swedish. No, no, I can’t do that,
I said. The engine was ancient, a small green two-cylinder gasoline motor built
in the 1940s. The boat itself was older, build of fir on the neighboring island of
Föglö in 1938, with tarred frames inside and a varnished hull outside, built in the clinker style.
Claes finally convinced me to turn the key and bring the
thing to life, which I did with delight, and he eventually convinced me to take
the boat out for a spin in the bay. By now Mia had come down to see what all
the commotion was, with her camera in tow as usual, and the two of us took the
little Adele out for a ride in the
bay. The controls were directly on the engine itself, a lever (cleverly homemade by Claes from an old piston) attached to the
gearbox for forward and reverse, the throttle adjacent. You had to keep the
cover off the engine box to drive the thing, and you steered with a tiller. I’d
never driven a proper wooden boat before, so it was a thrill. It was an open
launch, about 25’ long perhaps, a beautiful canoe stern and graceful sheer. A
real boat, which I made sure Claes knew I understood upon our return. He seemed
proud to have shared it with us.
Later on, after the sun had set and we’d retired into the
stuga, Claes came up from the dock to politely interrupt Mia and I from
checking email and Facebook. I gladly closed the computer for him, and we
chatted for another 30 minutes. He seemed as excited to meet us as I was to
meet him, and was thrilled that we’d sailed Arcturus
here all the way from America, and all the more impressed with my Swedish (as a
quick aside, it’s incredibly nice to be able to speak the local language here.
It’s opened up another side of life that I had not experienced for the first 4
years that I knew Mia. I was always on the outside, only getting the small
translated parts of conversations and not able to really participate in life
here. Now that I’m more or less fluent, at least conversationally, it’s like
I’ve opened up another world).
Claes was yet another merchant seaman in his day, and told
us of his trips round the world carrying cargo, ‘more than I can count,’ he
said with a smile and that little ‘spark’ in his eye, as Mia likes to say. He talked about how he
nearly relocated to New Zealand, after working for a while on the New Zealand
Line between there and Australia, but came home for the sake of his three kids.
‘I’d thought about writing my memoirs one day,’ he told us in Swedish, ‘but I’d
only publish them if I could guarantee that my kids wouldn’t read them!’
Claes and I spoke in Swedish, though he acknowledged that he
speaks English. In his 40 years of travel on the sea, he would have had to, he explained.
Claes is not unlike many Ålanders in that he’s followed a life at sea. We
talked about how interesting it must have been to come from such a small island
in the middle of the Baltic, which today has only 28,000 people, and to go out
and see the world, to bring back those stories. Even today this continues.
Åland has a top notch maritime academy in Mariehamn that caters to islanders
and Finns and Swedes alike. Nowadays the seaman work on merchant ships and
Norwegian ships searching for oil in the North Sea.
I’m saving the details of this for a magazine story, but
it’s the reason that Åland controlled the very last of the merchant sailing
ship trade, the reason the main flag outside the maritime museum is not that of
the country, but of the International Cape Horners Association, of which Åland
has an active branch (and in fact only last week hosted the International
Congress, with the few remaining Cape Horners in the world coming to Mariehamn
and having dinner aboard the Pommern,
the only Cape Horn tall ship in the world to be preserved in it’s original
state. It sailed the route up until the late 1930s). And it’s the reason we got
to meet Ålands last living Cape Horner, the 95-year-old Frank Karlsson, who
worked as first mate on the Viking,
another of Gustav Erikson’s ships, and rounded the Horn in 1938. We found him
at the old folks home in the village of Degerby, stopping there on a whim on a
windy day last week, solely because I’d seen a newspaper article in the museum
that mentioned he lived there. But again, I’m saving that for another story.
So until tomorrow, when we’ll sail back across the open
stretch of ‘Åland’s Hav’, we’ll be enjoying the stuga, the sauna and our little
swimming dock. Mia and I are planning a 13-mile run this afternoon through the
countryside (the gravel roads here are paved with crushed red granite), whereby
we’ll return, have a swim and a sauna, and, hopefully, another delightful
dinner with Johanna’s parents. Who knows who might drop by tonight and what
more stories I’ll discover.
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Onboard the ‘Pommern’ near the helm at the stern.
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Photos from belowdecks on the ‘Pommern’ depicting life at sea.
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The Åland sector of the A.IC.H., International Cape Horner’s Association
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“Frank, the Last Cape Horner”
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‘Pommern’s’ impressive four-masted rig.
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Shackles on the ‘Pommern’ bigger than Mia’s head!
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Albatross statue commerorating Åland’s Cape Horn Association
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Memorial to all the Åland Islanders who died at sea, outside the Maritime Museum
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‘Pommern’, with her foresails hoisted…I didn’t know this, but at the time this photo was taken, the last of the living Cape Horners were actually aboard for a dinner.
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View from the ‘stuga’.
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Claes’ ‘snipa’, his 1938 wooden launch built on nearby Föglö
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‘Adele’s’ 1940s era gasoline two-cylinder.
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At the helm!
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Åland’s pretty red, blue and yellow flag.