MOVING

Today I moved from Välivainio, a prefab suburb that looked a little bit like the pastel neighborhood in Edward Scissorhands, to Toppila, the Harbor District. The first house was fairly OK but kind of expensive, about $550/month, with no dishes and a rudimentary couch-bed. The new place is only $240/month, has 2 beds and a couch, a little mini-kitchen in one corner, and a television set. I want to start watching children’s programming so I can beef up my comprehension, because nobody around here is willing to speak in simple sentences to me. I just got 2 awesome new books so I will be unstoppable.
Anyway, it took two bike trips to move my stuff to the new place. Today was very windy and sunny, and everyone seemed to be out and about. My Russian landlady, soon to be ex-landlady, was burning garbage in a samovar with a big snorkel-top. I thought about asking her for an explanation, then decided there was no way I could understand it, so I just smiled and nodded.
New house is actually a historical building that belongs to the City of Oulu, so I am now officially a guest of the City. It’s called Merikilta, “Sea-Guild,” and it’s run by a gruff tugboat captain named Captain Jarkko. He has an enormous handyman named Markus who looks dangerous, but he speaks perfect English and is friendly. I told Captain Jarkko that I was in Finland to study birds, but planned to look for dragons while I was here. (I meant to say dragonflies, but tangled the words.) He merely grunted, and continued to give me the tour. The house is over 100 years old and it sits near an inlet of the harbor, where ships used to pick up barrels of tar (Oulu’s former specialty) for export. These days there’s a bunch of shabby buildings, wrecked Volvos, disused train tracks, and forest. It’s also conveniently close to a giant steam-tower, one of the few landmarks in Oulu visible from more than 500 meters. This is the Finland of Kaurismäki, the Finland of The Match Factory Girl and Man Without a Past – post-industrial, grubby, gray, stark. And yet there is a forest right outside my window and the Baltic Sea in the backyard. Apparently seamen rent the place out on weekends and drink Ukko Vodka (I found the empty bottles in the hallway – Ukko is the God of the Sky from Kalevala). The only drawback so far is that there’s no bathroom upstairs where I live – no running water at all, in fact, so I need to run downstairs to wash dishes and eliminate waste.

I inherited this room from Henrik the Swede, who just left for 2 months of DNA extraction in Britain. When he gave me the keys, he said he’d left a few items in the refrigerator, and I could either eat them or toss them. So when I moved in I had a look: milk, local rye bread, a red onion, cream cheese, and a toothpaste-like tube with a lot of unfamiliar writing on it. I squeezed a little bit out and tasted it: fishy, unusual, but not bad, per se… so I looked up the words on the tube, and it was smoked cod eggs. Well. I decided I had better have a sandwich right there and then, so I chopped a slice of onion, spread some cream cheese on the rye bread, and squirted out some of the goo. Evidently it is supposed to be used in much smaller quantities, because the taste was overpowering and I have been suffering from cod egg burps all evening.

OULU WILDLIFE

Piptophorus betulinus - "Razor Strop"

Training

I’ve just spent two days training to be a member of the research team. The first day I spent with Rikku, a dark young man in horn-rimmed glasses. He didn’t speak much English, which meant we didn’t talk much. He would say full sentences to me in Finnish, enunciating each word, but I simply don’t have the vocabulary to decode it yet. I could feel waves of mild contempt coming off him: I was contemptible on many levels. I was not a birder, I was not a local, I could not communicate intelligibly. Every time we saw an insect he asked me which species it was. Every time we saw a bird he would tell me which species it was. He had 100% more species ID’s than me. It was disheartening. When we stopped for lunch I asked him where I could go around campus to meet people and make friends. He told me it would be very difficult, because Finnish people already had all the friends they needed.
That night I needed to do laundry. Actually, I had many domestic needs. I needed a knife, a fork, a spoon, and a bowl, so I could chop vegetables and eat my ramen. It’s surprisingly hard to find these things in a new town. I tried to pinch them from the school cafeteria but they closed five minutes after we got back from the field, and I was hustled out like a bum when I went in to get a bowl of coffee to cut and stab before I spooned it into my mouth. Ever try to eat yogurt with no spoon? I was so hungry by the time I got home that I simply chewed a spoon-shaped depression into a cucumber and used that. I was getting sick of the rye bread and Grade D sausage sandwiches I had been eating for lunch and dinner, I desperately wanted a bowl of ramen with onions, carrots, broccoli, and garlic. But more pressing was my pile of dirty clothes. I could not continue to show up at the respectable University Zoological Museum (home base for the field work and location of my office) in my filthy outfits.
Where do you do laundry in a new town? I had seen no Laundromat and had gotten vague answers about the machine at the Zoo from Henrik and Pettere. The Zoo closed at 4, there was no way I could get back at 3:30 and run wash. So I purchased a small box of detergent, and filled a bucket with warm water, and scrubbed the clothes in the shower. Then I hosed them off and hung them in the setting sun on the clothesline.
The next morning I woke up at 5 and it was raining heavily. I ran out and pulled my clothes off the line, then festooned them around my apartment. I was excited by the prospect of not going out in the field, which was rumored to happen in the case of rain. But by 8, meeting time in the museum, it had cleared up. I put on dry pajama bottoms under my wet pants and hoped for the best. Today they sent me out with the other lad, a long-hair named Petri. He had not changed clothes in the three days since I met him, I noted with gratification. He had dirty blond hair, very high cheekbones, and odd eyes. At first I thought they were squinty, but I got a better look at him, and 60 degrees of arc in his left iris was brown while the rest of both eyes was blue. He had a disarmingly deep voice and a somewhat gruff manner. But once out in the field, he had me navigate from nest to nest with the GPS so I could get used to what we were trying to do. Like Rikku, he was polite without being friendly. Once we stumbled onto a big ant nest, and he asked me the species, but this time I at least knew the genus: Formica (not a very hard ID.) We also found a frog and a butterfly. He called the butterfly a suruvaippa, or Sorrow Diaper, and said it was the first of the season. I was able to display some bug-magic by sneaking up on the butterfly to photograph it. He watched curiously, then offered the theory that it must have been the wind that kept the butterfly from flying away. Sure buddy, that’s right: the wind.

No shamanic forces were invoked in the filming of this insect.
I just realized as of this moment that I have no way to recharge my camera battery. No way to plug it in. Damn.

Willow tits

Today I got my keys and an office, which honor surprised me, considering the shabby treatment with regards to office space that I had received via my old lab at OSU. Then Pettere and I went to have a talk with my landlady, to tell her I was only interested in staying 10 days because I’d heard of more affordable housing elsewhere. This went surprisingly well. The landlady, whom I had not met, turned out to be Russian, proud of posture and beautiful in a grand way. Pettere was there to translate into Finnish, but I happily switched into Russian and was able to make some of the arrangements myself. She was very polite, not in the least cranky about a ten-day lease, though she overcharged me by twenty euros. I didn’t say anything because it could have been so much worse. I noticed her bookshelf was stocked with Russian, Finnish and Swedish titles about Arctic mythology, and desperately craved to look through them, but there was the matter of the hide-a-bed to attend to. I had not been able to find the bed hiding in the sofa in the kitchen. We all went out to my little outbuilding, and the landlady did some mechanical jiu-jitsu and voila! there was a bed. It even had a sheet: stained, scaly and grotesque. She explained a young man had been sleeping on it before me, and suggested I get my own sheet (as if there was any question.) We parted on good terms, then Pettere and I headed out to the field.
It was very cold and still, with a steel sky in which the sun burned like a little round furnace. Unlike Henrik, Pettere was there strictly to observe. The strangeness I noticed about him at first meeting was still there, though it was gentle and thoughtful. In profile he looked like a Native American, with raven hair, high cheekbones and a high-bridged nose, but his eyes were a pale blue-green and seemed to see everything at once. He seemed somewhat hesitant in his motions while we were in cars or buildings, but now that we were outside, squishing through muskeg, he moved with the assurance of a wild animal or a ghost, drifting across uneven terrain with his eyes in his binoculars. We both wore thick knee-high boots lined with wool, very common in this part of the country. Pettere also had a grayish-green outfit made of some tough but light canvas-like material that must have had phenomenal insulating properties for its size and heft. He looked like a primeval forest-man, some kind of guardian of the wood, and if he carried a bow instead of binoculars it wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Our task for today was to find the punky stumps of birches that willow tits love to bore holes in for their nests. The stumps achieve the exact correct punkiness through the digestive efforts of a polypore mushroom, which grows out of the stumps sideways like a shelf. Pettere was hacking holes into every dead tree we saw, pulling some of the wood out and rolling it in his fingers. On acceptable stumps, he would bore a little cave with his knife, to invite young couples to make nests at eye level.
He had an identical miniature tape-player to Henrik’s, and it played the exact same file of a territorial male. Toward the west side of the lake we found a pair of birds, and used the binoculars to identify the colors of bands on their legs. This was extremely difficult. We followed the birds as they fluttered from tree to tree, to try to find their nesting site. After an hour, Pettere decided it was too cold, and we went home.

Oulu Woods

The Woods

Sunday morning I was supposed to meet Henrik the Swede to do some fieldwork at 9 am. I waited patiently for a bus, but the bus doesn’t run on Sunday mornings, so I hobbled the four kilometers to campus on my blistered feet and got there by 9:10. Fortunately Henrik was still there, and helped me get outfitted with heavy, wool-lined wading boots. We got into his 30-year-old LandRover and rumbled out into the boreal forest. Development was rampant, and swathes of forest were being cleared for private use, but we drove several miles north of town until we found a likely spot. Henrik was looking at how memory formation affected the physical properties of bird brains. He owned two dogs, some kind of fancy breed of pointer. One was old and disciplined, the other young and excitable. He kept them locked in a small cage in the back of the vehicle. Evidently they were too rambunctious to come birding with us. Henrik explained that he was a hunter during the season, and employed the dogs thusly.
We wandered through the dense birch and pine forest. The landscape undulated a few feet up and down, otherwise it was totally flat. There were no landmarks and no way to estimate direction, except by orientation with the sun. The day was surprisingly bright and clear, scented with pine and the smell of spring. Great puffy tufts of lichen sprouted out of the ground, and ice hummocks crunched under our boots. We played a male willow tit call from a tiny tape recorder. After forty minutes or so of following what seemed to be a path, someone answered from above us. Henrik found a shady area and we unrolled a mist net a few feet off the ground. He pulled out a box with a pair of fake tits in it, and withdrew a battered and frayed male. He attached it to a branch and hung the recorder from the same branch. We sat back as the infuriated male tit above us circled around and around, looking for the intruder in his territory. He soon discovered the decoy and arrowed down toward it. Just like that, he was snared, dangling upside-down. The female followed him, more cautious, but still curious to see who was emitting this amplified territorial call. Soon enough she too was caught, and we examined our captives. The male was fully adult, as evidenced by rounded feathertips. The female was still young, and therefore no use for Henrik’s project. He incarcerated the male in a cloth bag, and set the female free. Then we rolled up the net and headed back to the car.
The dogs were allowed out for a few short minutes while Henrik produced a thermos of coffee and some sweet rolls. He commented that Finnish coffee was like American coffee, weak bitter swill, so I should prepare myself for the proper Swedish stuff. I didn’t bother to explain to him that gas station and airplane coffee were not what we drank at home. The buns were fresh from a local bakery, and delicious. After this brief break, Henrik set up his mobile lab. He had built a folding table in the back of the car, with room for one to squat behind it. He withdrew a variety of instruments, vials, philters and potions, part alchemist and part chirurgeon. I sat in the front seat, wanting to observe. The dogs started making a ruckus, so he ordered them back in the cage, where they whined and agitated. Henrik took a ceramic box and tossed in a chunk of dry ice, which he crushed with a screwdriver. He poured high-proof alcohol over it, making a supercooled slush.
The car was stifling, sweltering in the full sunlight. Henrik at last had all elements arrayed, and withdrew the hapless male from the bag. He used a pair of brightly-colored plastic-handled scissors to decapitate it, and stuck the quivering body upside-down in a funnel where the blood dripped into a vial. He peeled feathers and skin back from the head, and cut through the papery skull to reveal a surprisingly large brain. The dogs whimpered and flared their nostrils, but kept perfectly still. The smell of blood and guano filled the car. Henrik worked quickly, chopping the brain in two and depositing half in a tiny metal box filled with gel, which then went into the dry ice slush with a bacon-grease-like hiss. The other half went into a tiny bottle of formaldehyde. Next he dissected out the syrinx, which I understood to be like a larynx, and the two yellow egglike testes. He took a generous fecal sample from the intestine and from the bottom of the cloth bag. The headless body was stored in a Ziploc bag against the shady side of the car, and it was time to go find another bird.
This time we headed the opposite direction, toward the sun. We crossed several manmade ditches: apparently this area had been a bog fifty or sixty years ago, and had been drained to create forest. I was glad of it but curious what the bog might have contained. The ditches were filled with inch-thick ice over scummy brown water, and we had to leap over them. My blisters were in agony but I said nothing. This time it took us over an hour to find another pair of willow tits, hömötiäsiä in the local parlance. When the net was up, a third bird was drawn by the territory call and a struggle ensued, with both real males duking it out and nobody paying any attention to the decoy. At last one male drove the other one away, and returned his focus to the noise. He was soon snared. The female wisely avoided us and could not be enticed to join the circus. We also netted a green finch that blundered through. Henrik tried to teach me how to hold a live bird, but the finch buckled out of my grip and flew away. We took down the equipment and then tried to find our way back to the car. With no landmarks except the ditches, going was slow. At one point, a large bird erupted from the shrubbery and took off. I didn’t even get a glimpse of it, but Henrik informed me it was a capercaillie, whose name I recognized from the Kalevala.
We returned to the car and Henrik repeated the procedure as before, while I played outside with the dogs. He emerged, somewhat pale, and washed his hands carefully. Then he squinted at his watch. “Two forty,” he said. “Home, or barbecue?”
“Barbecue,” I said without hesitation. We gathered dead twigs off the pine trees and soon had a healthy little fire roaring in the sand next to a shallow lake. Henrik had some grillimakkarat, Finnish camping sausages, and a tube of spicy mustard. He also had a handy little metal sausage-griller which folded like a lanky garlic-press. We discussed the humble sausage: its many different names in the Germanic languages, its merits as a way of turning dislikable meat into delicious homogenate, its infinite international variety. Henrik said when he hunted he liked to use the entire animal, and sausages were instrumental. “I have a great recipe for moose nose soup,” he added, “but my hunting partners turn their noses up at it. You just throw it into the boiling water for about ten minutes, hair and all. If you’re delicate you can change the water at that point, but there’s no need. Then you just simmer it on very low heat for about an hour, and it makes a delicious stock that you can strain the hair and bugs out of. Then you peel the nose and inside is a perfect blend of meat and fat, like many traditional Christmas dishes.” Our sausages were starting to plump over the coals. We ate them on hard local rye bread with a bit of cheese and slathered with mustard. It was delicious.
We reclined in the sun and chatted for a long while. Henrik told me about the blurry linguistic border between Finland and Sweden, and the varieties of Finnish spoken in Sweden. He said Finns are required to take six years of Swedish in public school but rarely speak it, out of resentment. There were ethnic Swedes in Finland who were fiercely proud of their Finnishness but never bothered to learn the local language. Then the topics drifted around, from the arbitrary nature of the p-value to the destruction of the environment. Both of us agreed we were about to witness staggering changes in the next fifty years.
At last we’d had enough sun, and the work day was officially over, so we gathered up the dogs and headed back to Oulu.

Helsinki-Oulu

My last day in Helsinki, I went with my friends Hanna and Tytteli to the Kiasma Museum of Modern Art. There we met up with a struggling television personality named Ira. I never quite understood what her story was, but she had attained a press pass to shoot video inside the museum. She wanted to do some improv work with a foreigner to showcase her English abilities. Needless to say, I played the part of the foreigner. The less said about that whole thing, the better. It was nicely accented by the utterly weird and disturbing art that filled every chamber. Some of it got under my skin in a bad way, which I guess is what art is supposed to do, sometimes. The freakiest stuff was by a Thai woman who made wall-sized videos of herself reciting poetry while collecting dog shit in a Ziploc bag, or herself chanting in a morgue, or herself changing the clothes on her dead daughter, outfit after outfit.
Afterwards Hanna and I raced back to her apartment to get my stuff, and then we met Tytteli and some of her friends at a Chinese restaurant. I had seventy minutes before my train left for Oulu, and was feeling the time-pinch. I came into the restaurant with my giant backpack on and was immediately confronted by the proprietress, a flat-faced, wiry-haired Chinese woman who jabbered at me in Finnish. This mix of shape and sound confounded my language circuits, and it was as if her mouth were moving but her voice was saying something totally different. When we established Mandarin as a common language, she ordered me in barky tones to deposit my bag behind the counter. I did so, then sat down. Tytteli’s friends were all gaping at me.
“You came in with a bag too big for the restaurant, then you used Chinese to make it fit,” said a tall man with a broad face who introduced himself as Hakkis. He was a musician who was working on a William Blake musical that was to debut in Paris in August. His friend was the son of a famous Finnish rock musician, and both of them were very friendly. They offered advice about travel in Finland, and told me the most dangerous place in the whole country was the line for the sausage kiosk half an hour after the bars closed. “There’s always some guy, dead drunk, whose girlfriend just left him, looking for a fight, and any excuse will do. Otherwise it’s a very safe place.”
The food was expensive, greasy and bland, and when it was time to pay, Hanna got in a fight with the proprietress about having to pay a euro each for the water that had been provided in pitchers on the table. I recall getting in a similar fight with some Thai Chinese hosteliers in Phuket over an identical issue. I knew my train was leaving soon, but this was too good to miss – both Hanna and the proprietress wanted that euro as if it were death’s antidote, and I thought they were going to come to blows. Finally Hanna won, and rightfully so, in my opinion: it’s not as if tap water cost the restaurant anything to provide, so they didn’t lose anything in the deal, and anyhow it’s shabby to charge for free things.
I got to the train in plenty of time. Hanna had packed a little snack for me of leftover pie, cheese, and chocolate soy milk, which she handed me as I boarded. Hanna and Tytteli waved as the train departed, and I was on my way to Oulu.
The sun was down by the time we left, and I tried to sleep. The voice announcing stops kept waking me up, and the seat wasn’t shaped to hold a sleeping human form. Finally, somewhere after Tampere, I dropped off.
When I woke, dawn was just arriving. There was about four inches of snow on the ground, and the predawn light was a peculiar blue. Blue and white, the Finnish national colors. We passed farms and cabins, cozily-lit villages, tilled fields, and mile after mile of dense forest: slim trees packed together like hairs on an otter. I recalled Tytteli telling me that the Swedes, when trying to Christianize Finland, found the holy trees the shamans used to worship, cut them down, and built churches on the same spot. I tried to imagine what these ancient giant trees looked like in the cool morning light.
We pulled into Oulu at 8am. Thin snow fell and a chill wind scoured the streets. The scenery was flat and cheerless: concrete and brick buildings, frozen slush on the streets, people hurrying around huddled against the cold. According to my map it was about five kilometers to the University, where I was supposed to meet Markku, my new supervisor. I tried to walk it, but my feet began to suffer before I was halfway there, and I gratefully shelled out the four dollars for a bus ticket. Once there, a Persian graduate student of telecommunications showed me the way to the Zoology building, and I met Markku Orell.
He was a rangy, bearded man with intense blue eyes and a springy gait. He seemed unsuited to living in civilization, somehow, as if his every instinct were screaming for him to flee into the wilderness. His assistant, Pettere, was tall and wore a mullet in his thick black hair, and seemed somehow spectral. Both men gave the impression of being only visitors or temporary residents of this world, as if at any moment they could relax their grip and slide sideways into a wild, untamed alternate reality. Markku showed me his lab and his maps, and explained a bit of the research he was doing. He had a curious way of raising his eyebrows and opening his mouth before he started speaking, as if his brain or voice were revving up. After I had a brief look at the Zoology labs, they introduced me to Henrik, a Swedish post-doc with two noisy dogs in his office. Henrik was a few years older than me and was more firmly native to the world I knew. Markku arranged for me to go out with him into the field the next day, to get some experience working with birds (of which I had none.)
Then we went to my new quarters, a small outbuilding apartment in a new neighborhood between the university and downtown. It looked fine, but seemed a trifle modest for $600/month. The bed was a sofa in the kitchen that allegedly contained a hide-a-bed, and the bathroom was cramped up in such a way that to sit on the toilet I needed to put my left arm in the sink.
Markku and Pettere then drove me to a mall so I could get a new power supply for my computer, as my expensive adapter had burnt out in Helsinki. The only one available was very expensive, but I decided I needed my computer to work while I was in Finland so I bought it. Then they dropped me off and left.
I looked at the power source on my computer and saw it was a step-down converter that could handle inputs of up to 240V, and recalled a cable at the mall that was only fifteen dollars that would do the job. So I decided to walk back to the mall and exchange the newfangled one. Unfortunately the name of the mall was not on the bag or the receipt, only the name of the electronics store: “Musta Pörssi,” or “Black Market.” Nobody knew where it was, least of all me. I trudged around Oulu for hours, asking everyone, before I finally found the mall in an industrial area on the other side of a bridge. The bridge went over the rail depot, where trains loaded with birch logs headed to the paper mills of the south. By the time I exchanged the wires and got home, I had two large blisters on the balls of my feet, the kind of deep subdermal blisters that cannot be drained.
I was feeling low, here in this cold, bleak industrial northern town: no instant friends here, not like Helsinki. So I decided to treat myself to a sit-down meal, at the Ravintola Vanha Artturi, the King Arthur Restaurant, near my new home. It had a reassuring logo of a big snarling bear, and seemed to promise hearty cuisine that would bolster my spirits. When I limped in and asked to see the menu, they apologized and said they only served drinks. Some Ravintola! The Lebanese pizza place next door was already closed, so I had to content myself with rye bread and sausage which I had intended for lunch the next day. I wanted to walk around some more, as it was still light out, but my feet were in agony so I returned to my new “home” and tried to fold the bed out. It collapsed into pieces: it was only a couch, not intended to be folded out unless I was trying to burn it in a small fireplace. I decided then and there I wasn’t going to sleep on a couch for ten weeks and resolved to explore other options as soon as possible.

HELSINKI

I’m staying in Helsinki with my friend Hanna, with whom I first made contact on MySpace. Given the potential creepiness of this arrangement, I was prepared to flee the nine blocks to the nearest youth hostel if anything seemed sketchy. But so far everything has been on the level. Hanna lives in a downtown Helsinki communal apartment with four other people. None of them are particular friends with each other, but they all seem to get along. One of them, a German graduate student named Johannes, is in Lappland conducting biological surveys, and graciously let me stay in his room.
My first taste of Finnish food when I arrived was thin slices of heavy bread with mustard, smoked salmon, and arrugula, chased with strong hot coffee – absolutely delicious. I was keen to get synchronized with the local schedule, but despite the coffee I could not avoid crashing for two hours after I ate. When I woke, I had hundreds of questions about Finnish grammar, which Hanna helped me with as best she could. There is of course a gulf between speaking a language and explaining its components – just try to describe a dangling participle or the future perfect tense – so not all my questions made sense, and I certainly didn’t assimilate all the answers in an afternoon. Just to give a little example of how it works, here’s the word for book, “kirja,” pronounced keer-yah, declined into the most basic cases:
Kirja/Kirjat the book/books
Kirjan of the book
Kirjaa book (the idea of a book)
Kirjaan as a book
Kirjassa in a book
Kirjasta out of a book
Kirjalla around a book
Kirjalta up off a book
Kirjaksi into a book (changing state)
Kirjalle to a book

Sadly each noun does not conform to this pattern – sometimes they inexplicably add or drop letters when the endings are attached. There are several “noun types” that conform to specific patterns, and it is only a question of learning them by heart.
We went for a walk around one of Helsinki’s innumerable sea inlets at sunset, then picked up bread, cheese, sausage and vegetables at the supermarket. Dining out in Helsinki is desperately expensive, and neither of us was anxious to overspend. I bought the groceries because I was getting free lodging, and it struck me how much everything cost here. The items I described, plus some chocolate, fruit, yogurt and two beers, cost over thirty dollars. I was looking forward to living in a university town and finding the cheapest of everything.
We went back to the apartment and watched some television – I was interested in the children’s channel because it seemed like I might be able to follow it more easily, but we found a hilarious comedy show that was partly in English, and Hanna translated the other jokes for me. Then the fatigue overtook me, and I had my first full night of sleep in days.
Thursday was beautiful, crisp, blue-sky spring in Helsinki. Hanna had a work meeting in the morning so I walked down to the nearest waterfront. There were large, shiny metal spheres at irregular intervals on a plaza made of rough-hewn granite rectangles the size of bricks. I have been very impressed so far with the public art and the heavy employment of granite as a building material. In particular I have seen many bears made of stone; this is evidently a totemic animal for the Finns. Their word for bear, karhu, sounds appropriately bearlike.
I sat on a bench at the waterfront and brushed the braids out of my hair. While I was doing so, an old man came and sat next to me, and started telling me a story. I nodded and grunted at the appropriate intervals, but soon he realized I didn’t understand a word he was saying, and we both had a good laugh. He patted me on the shoulder and walked away smiling.
Hanna came home and we ate sausage-and-cucumber sandwiches with slices of cheese that smelled like athletic socks. Hanna eats lots of other food besides sausage, and is a complex individual whose many wonderful personality traits could never be fully captured in a mere blog. Then we made our way to the ferry terminal to see Suomenlinna, a castle complex on a nearby island. Hanna is something of a scamp, which I use in a complimentary sense, and has evolved ways of not paying for things like public transport, so we were able to use the bus and ferry system free of financial burden. I spotted two hoboes in torn jackets who were obviously playing the same game. As a visitor to the country I was fully prepared to pay all necessary fees and charges, but this sneakiness appealed to my inner rascal, and I was also fully prepared to play the befuddled foreigner if confronted by the authorities. But the only authority we saw grinned and waved at us with his cigarette as we got off the ferry.

HANNA AT SUOMENLINNA


The castles at Suomenlinna were more of squat stone fortresses, designed for defense and fortitude. The walls were riddled with loopholes and alcoves that overlooked the Baltic Sea. A few cannons still graced the ramparts, but most of them had been converted to pillars holding nautical chains in a circle around a white church. Each pillar was topped by the sword-wielding Finnish monkey-lion, another national symbol.


Hanna, not being from Helsinki, didn’t know the history, and the museum was closed, so we wandered from building to building with no real clue. A stout wind was blowing, and an icy rain began to pelt us. I insisted on dipping my lucky rock in the Baltic. By this time we were both wet, and Hanna wanted to catch the ferry back to the city and dry clothes. She was hurrying along a bit faster than I would have liked, as many details caught my eye, but I noticed she was heading in the wrong direction. I didn’t say anything, calculating that this would mean more time spent exploring. We came to a granite-and-copper sarcophagus of a Swedish sea-lord, surmounted by an ancient-looking helm and inscribed in gold-chased Swedish writing, but by this point I was also so cold and wet that I suffered an attack of No Curiosity before I could make out the meaning of the writing.

We just missed the ferry, and suddenly had an hour on our hands. We went into a café and asked after brandied coffee, but it was about twelve dollars a cup, so we opted for the plain coffee at a mere two dollars, and took a seat with three vaguely barbaric folks at a round table. They were two men and a woman, heavyset with lined faces. One of the men had gray eyes and gray hair, and his head seemed to dangle from his neck toward his beer. The other man had long dark hair and a big beard, and the woman seemed like she might make a good prison guard. They didn’t pay us any mind at first. I started asking Hanna about the month names in Finnish, because they all end in –kuu, the word for moon. None of this silly septem, octo, novem, decem business – these words meant something. Our tablemates became suddenly animated as they discussed the old Finnish language, and just like that our grim, slightly scary table was all laughs and big gestures and debate. They were delighted that I actually wanted to learn Finnish, and each of them had suggestions of places I should visit while I was there. They were a bit confused that an entomologist should want to come to Finland instead of, say, Africa, but I assured them their dragonflies were the stuff of legend, and they seemed satisfied.
After our coffee, we saw an art gallery hosting a show by a pair of local painters, and strode in like we belonged, accepting glasses of wine. The art was the kind of modern non-representational stuff that looked to be borne of artistic fervor more than artistic vision, but I certainly wasn’t going to say anything. I spotted the two hoboes from the ferry, wine glasses in hand, as they studied and critiqued each piece in turn.
We found a pamphlet describing the art, which included the phrase “olemassaolon merkityksettömyydestä,” a jaw-cracker which means “out of the meaninglessness of existence.” Remember that in Finnish the emphasis goes on the first syllable, so after the “mer-“ in “merkityksettömyydestä,” you still have a long way to go. The rest of the crowd in the gallery might have been lifted from any art show in any city: horn-rimmed glasses, wild hair and eyes, black turtlenecks, unwell-looking poets in scarves. We stood with our backs to a radiator and tried to warm up until the ferry came.
Back in city proper, we visited a large bookstore in search of the English version of the Kalevala, the national epic. They had German, Spanish, and Japanese Kalevalas, but no English. I coveted the Tintin books, Tintti in Finland, but decided I could find those at the Oulu Library when I got there. Then we picked up a small bottle of mint schnapps at the liquor store, and headed to a pub to meet with some other MySpace friends, Larzeus and Tytteli, who were from Hanna’s hometown Porvoo.
Tytteli was there when we arrived, six feet tall, willowy and all smiles. She was a cheerful soul who worked at a social programs office. Her English was not as good as Hanna’s and she confessed to celebrating her bad memory because it meant there were new things to learn all the time. We ordered hot chocolate, which we promptly adulterated with the schnapps bottle hidden in my sleeve, and we had just started drawing in my notebook when a booming deep voice hailed us from the door.

Larzeus, or Lasse officially, was a giant bald man with flowing blond beard. He played bass for a Lappish folk-rock band and toured all over Finland for gigs. His day-job was with the labor union, ensuring fairness to workers. He had a heavy stone around his neck and pouches of stones on his belt. He brought his boy, a nine-year-old named Ruben, who looked somewhat bored until he was presented with a basket of fries. Larzeus and I have been communicating extensively through MySpace, on such topics as traditional Finnish shamanism, folk music, and interesting rock formations, and so our first face-to-face meeting was an instant success. I found out from the women that he had been the librarian in Porvoo years ago, and he’d read books to children with his big bear voice and play accompaniment on bass. I found myself wishing my town had had such a librarian. He told me he used to play rugby (or a rugby-like game) for a team called the Porvoo Butchers, until around age fourteen when he noticed the girls liked musicians better than jocks, and he started concentrating on the bass more seriously. He had used his time as a librarian to educate himself in a broad range of subjects, and he had obvious mental agility. We had a good discussion about linguistic introgression and the geographical gradations of morphemes across Northern Europe. Young Ruben finished his fries and started to look sleepy, so we said our goodbyes and promised to meet again.

Hanna, Tytteli and I went back home and made more hot chocolate and a fire in the fireplace, and were joined by roommate Sofia. The wind and rain howled outside, and the three women started telling ghost stories and working themselves up into a state of mild fright. They were courteously using English, and it was interesting to observe how the emotional substance of the conversation was affecting them just as strongly in a foreign language. Sofia kept begging the other two not to tell such scary stories, but then she would listen raptly to each one. We leavened the mood by eating apple pie and watching an absurdly catchy tune on YouTube called Ieva’s Polka. Finally it was time for bed, even though we were all having such fun and didn’t want it to end.

Pictures, Properly

Corvallis-Helsinki

I left Corvallis with my Subaru packed to its greatest extent yet. Even when we went to Burning Man with three people and all their attendant food, water and supplies, there was still more open space. I think the alternator is dying – the poor car can’t bear to idle, it just shuts itself down at stop signs or when in neutral. But it was able to get me to the Portland Airport for my flight to Chicago. As I was locking my car up, leaving it for pickup by my friend Luke, I discovered two tapes from a book-on-tape series I checked out from the library for the last road trip. This is terrible! I thought I checked that before I turned it it, but evidently no. I seemed to have plenty of time before my flight left, so maybe I could post it back to Corvallis from the airport.
United Airlines was having a terrible no-good day, and the check-in crew was showing signs of disinterest in passenger problems. They wanted me to check in with a robot console, who refused to issue me a boarding pass and insisted I check in with a Scandinavian carrier who had no ticket-counter in Portland. It took three employees passing the buck to each other for half an hour before someone finally consented to check me in old-school style, but by that point I had missed a crucial 45-minute pre-flight deadline for check-in, even though I had myself been there in plenty of time. They referred me to yet another disinterested, tired-looking agent, who had to make a phone call before giving me my boarding pass and making an elaborate show of weighing my backpack. Needless to say there was no time for tape-posting.
I sat next to a deaf woman, who was also a teacher. She insistently said she taught deaf students when I asked her what subjects she taught. OK, you’re instructing people in the same sensory environment as yourself, but that doesn’t really address what information you are disseminating. I reflected for a moment on lip-reading, in English and in other languages, and found myself committing the linguistic hubris of a native speaker who thinks his language is more so than another language… in this case thinking English lends itself more readily to lip-reading than, say, Finnish, with its heavy use of vowels and its peculiar long and short consonants. Come to think of it, I haven’t really heard anything, ever, about deafness in other languages.
United grudgingly issued a small cup of water and some biscuits to the passengers. I was dying of thirst, having quaffed extremely strong coffee all night the night before, and having had it burn through my kidneys at an accelerated rate. The biscuit mollified me, because it was imprinted with an ancient-looking abhorrent sigil straight out of Lovecraft. A Cthulhu Cookie could only help me at this point.

I arrived in Chicago with an hour and a half before my flight to Stockholm. I was determined to unload these tapes before I went to another continent, but having never been to Chicago O’Hare I was ignorant of the vastness of that airport. What seemed like a simple walk to the US Post Office in Terminal 2 was in fact a blistering trek along endless corridors. My flight was leaving from an entirely different building, so I sprinted back through to catch a tram, and boarded the plane with a clear conscience.
This time I sat next to a thickset young man with outrageous hair. It was teased and moussed into a thicket of multicolored spikes and beaks, like a hedgehog wearing a ducktail. He spoke in a comically thick Chicago accent. He was a hairdresser on the way to an important conference in Sweden, which was apparently a kind of hairdressers’ Mecca. He criticized the stewardess’ burnt, stripped, bleached locks, but said nothing about my samurai-do. I had my hair up in a sort of bun-of-braids, which were fraying loose, making me look like Toshiro Mifune after a swordfight. I thought about the stereotype of male hairdressers, which hitherto had not included jowly growly Chicago types.
A meal came early in the flight. When purchasing my ticket, I saw there was a “Hindu Non Vegetarian” option so I selected that (months ago) and forgot about it until the stewardess brought me a box marked “special.” Inside was tender Tandoori chicken, curried chickpeas, bhasmati rice, and fresh fruit. I got my meal before anybody else, and let the smells waft through the cabin.
The sun went down as we were crossing over Canada toward Greenland. It was a curious sensation to look out the window and see stars coming up, seemingly below the level of the plane. Jupiter rose out of Africa, far to the southeast, and hung bright and unblinking over the Atlantic. Reykjavik passed under us, a cluster of Earth-fired lights, and then total darkness for hours. The sun came up just as we came to Norway, where wormy clouds that looked like uncooked baguettes writhed between jagged snowcap peaks.
We descended into Stockholm, an airport surrounded by forest and granite, and all too soon I was on a smaller plane bound for Helsinki. The tired Swedish businessman next to me told me that Finnish people all sounded angry because the stress fell on the first syllable. He then told me Finnish was closely related to Russian, and I saw two Finnish women behind us glaring at him. In fact, Finnish is not related to Russian at all; instead, it belongs to a family of languages that originally came from Asia and includes Estonian (its nearest neighbor), Hungarian, Samoyed, and lesser-known branches like Udmurt, Komi, and Mordvin.
I had barely been able to sleep on the Chicago-Stockholm leg, because the seat was uncomfortable and the coffee was so good, but now my days of exhausted packing and preparation caught up with me and I fell senseless until we were on the ground debarking into Helsinki-Vantaa airport. There was no passport control or immigration office, and I walked off the plane, through the airport, and onto the street. I thought something must be wrong, so I found an information kiosk and expressed my concerns. They said I could stay as long as I wanted. I shrugged, returned outside, and boarded a bus into the city.

Pix Pox!

OK I just noticed that blogspot is trimming my pictures down - arrgh! I will try to remedy it.

A long story short

Vancouver - Seattle - saw friends Sam, Michael and Mia in Seattle, then rushed down to Portland for eye exam. Cornea expert just as baffled as previous practitioner - no explanation of condition. Stellate pigment depositions in right eye - recommended treatment: steroid titration.


And now: Off to Helsinki!

Camp Elphinstone

We arrived at YMCA Camp Elphinstone long after dark for the 2007 Burning Man Recompression - a regional Burner Event. I had never been to a regional, though I had heard about them happening all over the world. We were one night early when we got there, so the camp was still relatively deserted - there were about 25 people total, scattered throughout the complex. When we signed up we chose one of the Theme Cabins, and somehow we had ended up in the rabbit-themed Fur and Loafing. There were only two other people already there, one of them asleep, the other a brash, corrosive troublemaker named Robin. She was kind and friendly at her core, but had no reservations whatsoever about riling people up or abrading their eardrums with a voice like a bucina.
The camp was very poorly lit, and we huddled along through the darkness as Robin led us from cabin to cabin. Most of the people were in front of Camp Clown, and many were wearing elaborate costumes. I suddenly felt plain and drab in my unwashed camping clothes. The first person I talked to looked like the ghost of a Dr Seuss character, with flabby cheeks, a little round mouth, a thin blunt nose, and two very large blue eyes with bags of wrinkly dark flesh underneath them. The eyes were habitually half-open and the little mouth drooped, making him look perpetually disdainful. He smoked and complained. After a few minutes I excused myself and moved toward another lit area of the camp.
As I drew near I saw it was not only lit, but lit with uncomfortable amounts of light. Some gentlemen on the porch of an uphill cabin had an enormous spotlight aimed down at me. I clenched my eyes and walked up the hill, and heard them catcalling and jeering. I turned and saw they were focused on the porch three cabins down, where the center of the light was trained. A young woman in her underwear was pinning decorations to the outside of the house, and she shielded her eyes every time she had to turn uphill.
Once I got behind the light, I saw a group of people dangling their legs over the porch. Their leader was a tall man with glasses, a mustache, and a constant smile. He introduced himself as Hannibal, and excitedly told me the specs of his spotlight. It radiated heat and electric burr. "We use it to pee on things with light," he explained. Nearby was what looked like a black iron funnel of a size for emptying kegs into hogsheads. It was hanging from a square steel frame, and had its mouth open to the north. "That's Little Dragon," he said. "We'll be firing him up tonight."
One wall of their cabin was covered with Mylar™, and in the glow of the spotlight it drew night insects. I scanned over them: some moths (arctiids and noctuids) and a short-tailed ichneumon. A short woman in a police uniform, complete with dark glasses, introduced herself as Puss in Boots and asked about the ichneumon. I told her how it might sting a spider or caterpillar in the head, not enough poison to kill it but just to permanently stun it, and then lay a few eggs in its abdomen. They would hatch and eat the victim alive from the inseide out, and then hatch into more wasps. A goat-faced man with long hair and a vandyke leaned forward and said "That's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard. I hate that bug. I'm going to kill it." And he did. He used a wine bottle to crush the ichneumon against the wall. I gave him a stinkeye. I experienced a moment of cosmic failure. My intention to educate by telling an entertaining story, and thereby increase the general awareness of my insect brethren, had backfired completely. Goatboy would never have even noticed the ichneumon without my meddling. I would have to be more cautious around these foreigners.
A raucous blare came from downhill. Robin had just stepped out from between two cabins and was struggling upward against the light. "Turn it off!" she shouted, and repeated the request with color. Hannibal laughed and taunted her. Robin spun around, dropped her pants and mooned the spotlight. She stood, regained her poise, and yelled "Anybody want to go to Christmas Camp?"
Down the hill to Christmas Camp, which had strange glowing decorations that may or may not have had anything to do with Christmas.

At this point the notes fall off and have yet to be updated. I include here a few pictures of the event, but time dictates that I speed through the story.

Wenatchee and the Entiat

I had never been to my friend Ryan's new house in Wenatchee, but we blundered onto it by chance and met him there just as he was getting ready to go to work. We were going to stay with him one night and then camp with him the next. His house was full to bursting with computer parts, toys, mechanical bits and pieces, and disassembled who-knows-what. It was like someone had gotten into a full moving truck and taken everything inside apart. Ryan was full of excitement to see us, and leapt nimbly around the house showing us every detail. He had a handsome orchard of small trees in the back, and a basement-room converted into a music recording chamber. There was about eight inches of water in one corner of the basement, which was a surprise to Ryan, and he disappeared upstairs to return almost immediately with an industrial wet-vacuum cleaner. We helped him carry the water up the stairs and dump it off the deck, and then he had to go to work.
I went to visit my old boss John Dunley at the Washington State University Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center. Dr Dunley had been instrumental in convincing me to go to graduate school for entomology. We chatted for a while, and he assured me a place there if I ever wanted to come back. Then duty called him somehow or another, and I rejoined Kim and Luke for a trip to Starbucks Coffee. We wanted to sit outside, it being such a nice sunny day, but none of the tables or chairs were in the sun yet. So we dragged a table and three chairs into the nearest patch of sun, which happened to be directly in front of the door for SuperCuts, a barber franchise. The patrons of SuperCuts, shaggy on the way in and dapper on the way out, had to negotiate around us, but there were no tonsorial complaints from within so we stayed there. I started reading aloud from my Kalevala, the epic of the Finnish people, which is divided into poems called Runos. The translation I have is exceptional, as the translator is a native Finn who spent much of his life in America and has a deep appreciation for the rhythmic cadences of both languages. Although the English version does not rhyme like the Finnish version, some of the poetry of the original is preserved. As I was reading, a man walked by and dropped a quarter into my coin-purse, which was sitting open on the table.
Later we went for a walk around the Western edge of Wenatchee. We passed a large soccer field where young Mexican men were warming up for a match. At the far end of the parking lot, we saw two men struggling but smiling on the other side of a car. As we walked around, we saw that one was helping the other lace up a corset. He was red-faced and puffing, but he gave us a friendly grin.
Ryan came home with his son Logan in tow. Logan was twenty-six months old and the spitting image of his father, both in appearance and manner. He was a cheerful, energetic child who loved mechanical things and had a short attention span.

Then our old friend Jason Underwood showed up, and we had a grand old time comparing stories and laughing while we barbecued portobello mushrooms, drank beer, and helped Ryan pump water out of the basement. After much tinkering, Ryan found the culprit: a badly-repaired pipe in the wall that had burst its seams like a boiled sausage. He simply turned the water off to that whole part of the house, and deferred repairs until after camping. He told a story of plumbing woes: a guest had somehow lost his cell phone into the toilet a few months ago, and it had lodged in the toilet's gullet somewhere out of sight. The guest had only known he'd lost the phone but couldn't remember where. Ryan, who works for Wenatchee Public Parks, knew something was plugging the toilet and assumed it was a bolus of feces and paper, and had acquired a heavy-duty toilet-unplugger from work. He had jammed it down the toilet's throat and twisted, as he had done hundreds of times at park restrooms. "Porcelain is fragile," he said gravely. Apparently the toilet was unable to withstand the pressure and had cracked open, revealing the missing cellphone. At that precise instant while Ryan was telling the story, the phone rang, and it was the same guy whose phone had fallen in the toilet months ago. We all doffed our hats to the Forces of Incredible Coincidence.

The next morning we headed north, up the Entiat River and into the Wenatchee National Forest. We were joined by Reid, another Wenatcheeite, and we found a perfectly charming campsite right next to the river just before the Fee Area began. We explored up and down the river, trying to find a place to cross, but it was too deep and fast-moving. I climbed up the opposite hillside quite a ways, but it got too steep to go any further without extreme risk. Ryan cooked us hobo stew in balls of aluminum foil, and I fried up a pan of mushrooms and onions, which we ate with some mysterious local sausages cooked on sticks. We told ghost stories and read some more Kalevala, and Ryan practiced his kiung-fu holds on Luke. It was a chill starry night, and the waning moon illuminated the snowcaps on the Cascades. We had a big campfire and I retired my blue camping shirt by stuffing it with pine pitch and tossing it in the fire. That shirt had served me on dozens if not hundreds of camping expeditions, and had survived the efforts of mother and girlfriends who wanted to chop it up for rags. It was badly frayed, but kept me warm. This trip it got a big gash in it which was too severe to repair, so I liberated it with fond farewells.


In the morning we said our goodbyes to the Wenatchee boys and headed north on 97 to Tonasket, the site of the first Terry Mang story. I got some good details to help Dr Mang find an appropriate place to live and exist around Tonasket, then we crawled further north to Oroville, where we crossed the Canadian border into Osoyoos. The border guards were very friendly but conducted some kind of deep research on an unseen computer while we waited, then welcomed us to their country. We exchanged money at what seemed to be a very poor rate (1US: 1.13C) We continued north to Penticton, to get a look at the mythical Lake Okanagan and to visit the exciting Tim Horton's donut franchise. Then we headed west, over Manning Provincial Park and some stunning views of the North Cascades. We dropped down the other side, through agricultural land, and passed through Vancouver with very little trouble. By that point we were listening to the Avalanche-Canucks game on the radio, in which our beloved Avs performed with great gusto. We ended up in a long line for a ferry over to Sunshine Coast, our destination, and Kim and I left Luke in the car while we sought out fish and chips. We finally found them in a little Chinese place near the ferry terminal, and raced back to the car. But the ferry was 30 minutes late, so we had plenty of time to eat and listen to the Avs mopping up the Canucks. The ferry ride was brisk and bracing, and we rolled off onto the Sunshine Coast, north of Vancouver on the other side of the Squamish River delta, at around 11pm.

Colorado to Washington

We made excellent time across the Rockies and up through Utah. The sun set over Twin Falls, ID, and we stopped for colossal hamburgers. We drove a couple more hours and then tried to make for a patch of national forest outside of Boise, near a town called Mountain Home. I don't know if we ever actually found the national forest, but we did find a powerline maintenance access road that wound up through osome hills, and eventually discovered a semi-flat spot that wasn't directly under the powerlines. We set up our tents and then walked around the hills a bit, overlooking Mountain Home. The town was longer than it was wide, and was the only light-source on the horizon. It made me think of a giant fleet of glowing ships, hanging in the depths of space. Wind and rain drove us back to our tents and we called it a night.
The nezt morning we woke to find piles of snow on the tents and the car. We shook them out as best we could, and then drove down to Mountain Home for some coffee. It looked remarkably like our hometown of Evergreen, Colorado, and the absence of big chain stores and megamarts was refreshing. The town suffered from curious potholes: they were all square or rectangular, obviously not formed by normal pothole action, but just as annoying and hard on the tires.
We continued across Idaho, under a sky that looked like crinkled aluminum and a sun like a shiny nickel. As we approached lunchtime and the state border, I saw a billboard for a Chinese buffet in the town of Caldwell. Signs helpfully assisted me to the proper exit, but once we were off the freeway, we were on our own. We meandered through Caldwell, looking for a commercial district, and found ourselves looking at a gigantic inflatable onion-domed structure with a battery of air-compressors along the east side. As we came around it we saw the words "Caldwell Sheriff's Department" printed on the side. It looked much better suited to Black Rock City than a small Idaho border town. The Sheriff's influence didn't stop at extravagant architecture: across from the onion-pavilion was a chain-linked and razor-wired auto maintenance yard with every variety of vehicle, from meter-reader to large flatbed, all painted white and emblazoned with the Sheriff's sigil. The most surprising item there was a small white tank, parked askance on a pile of metal rubble, and also bearing the Sheriff's sign.
Still no sign of the Chinese buffet! So we turned around, passed all the Sheriff's stuff again, and found ourselves driving under a gate that said "Welcome to Farm City." Indeed, everything on the other side of the gate was simultaneously urban and rural, from the tractor stopped at a red light to the rodeo grounds across from the elementary school. We finally found the Chinese buffet, and as we approached the door, a little man whose legs didn't work correctly scuttled in front of us and held the door open. We were followed by his companions, one of whom was sitting at an odd angle in a wheelchair. We let them go in front of us, and stood in the vestibule inhaling the glorious scent of Chinese buffet. Unfortunately it was pay-before-you-eat, and the party preceding us had endless complications and sons-of-complications, while we stood salivating into our beards. Finally it was our turn to pay the counter-woman, who looked like an iron sculpture. She was at least six feet tall, and the severe permanent wave of her hair added a few inches. I paid out of my Change Purse, which was an upside-down plastic CD-spindle cover, basically a wide plastic cylinder open on one end, into which I had been tossing coins for the last seven or eight months. It was a bit awkward to carry around, but there is a certain pleasure in paying in exact change for your transaction. If I used paper money it would just calve more change for my coin-purse, and it was heavy enough already. At long last we were unleashed on the food, whose few flavors were enhanced by our hunger. The General Tso's Chicken was especially unusual for the glassy texture of the meat, and the hot and sour soup was made revolting by the addition of corn syrup. There was also ham, sausages, and waxy frozen pizza for the Farm Citians who eschewed foreign fare. The other patrons seemed largely to consist of men dining alone. They all wore heavy mustaches, square haircuts, and cellphones in holsters on their belts.
I ran into an Oriental person coming out of the kitchen with a large tub of hot food, and asked in Chinese whether there were chopsticks. She eyed me with cold disdain and didn't reply, so I asked again in English. "You can ask your waitress about that," she informed me. Another time an Anglo girl came out of the kitchen to collect empty tubs. She was quite obese but had bewitchingly attractive eyes and smile. She gave me a look that said she might very well like to cook me, if I would just step across the threshold into the steamy, noisy kitchen. I was drowsy with too much food and couldn't look away from those molten-dark-chocolate eyes, but then the kitchen doors swung shut and the spell was broken. We quickly left after that.
That night's destination was Pendleton, Oregon, where we took on another passenger: Kim, the mapmaking entomologist. We stayed with her and her boyfriend Keegan, and dined on homemade pizza, yucca root and burdock. We took a sunset walk around the well-ordered town, admired the prim lawns and borders between houses, the well-groomed population and smiling children who waved at us, the shiny cars and straight edges. We came to the end of town, after which was an explanse of rolling, sere hills, but access to the hills had been prevented by a padlocked gate. Evidently there was chaos and unpredictability beyond that boundary, and some wiser person in Pendleton was helping to keep us from going astray. We thanked our unseen benefactor and avoided the natural world beyond the border, and returned to the house for some good clean cribbage and bible verses (actually we drank rum and read pagan epic poetry.) We woke the next morning and assimilated Kim's gear into the car, then went down to a bakery to get breakfast and use their free internet. The bakery smelled peculiar: a mix of mildew and air-freshener. Luke compared it to the scent of a grandmother's basement. Yet the food was good and the coffee strong, and helped us on our way.
We crossed into Washington around the Tri-Cities, and drove north along the border through the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. We didn't spot any mutants or piles of tozic waste, only a giant mushroom of steam rising from some facility on the eastern horizon. After that we were into apple and pear country, and rode through endless riverside orchards. The pears were just starting to bud and had been treated with kaolin clay, which warded off hungry pests. It gave the pear orchards a ghostly appearance, as if the trees were made of white ash. After a morning's drive, we rolled into Wenatchee, the erstwhile apple-capital of the Northwest.