The weather is a bit chilly in Åland these days.
Since the heavy snow we got at the end of November and the subsequent stormy melt, the temperature has hovered around zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Days are shorter too. In the morn, the sky is pitch black until about eight, and by dinner time, around five in the afternoon, the sun has clocked out of his shift for the day. Still, it beats living above the Arctic circle, like we did for almost 15 years. At least we do get a few hours of sunshine, even in the darkest days of the winter, and snowstorms are not nearly as vile down here as they were up there.
The combined dark and cold make it so that going outside is kept to a minimum. Even my four year-old daughter prefers being cozy inside or roaming the halls of the local library rather than playing (European) football outside. Fair enough; I am cold and tired too, and we have a gym right by our house, so, no need for us to go on a daily rampage in the frosty landscape to keep the body in working order.
All that being said, I do miss going out exploring. In the weeks and months following our move from Arctic Norway to Åland, some 1000 kilometers (c. 620 miles) south, I did after all manage, in between paperwork and practical chores, to travel quite a bit around, often by bike, and came to really appreciate the place. Although my initial focus was on museums, old church buildings, kingly estates, and other historical areas, as time went by, I started investigating even older material, particularly Bronze Age sites. As it happens, Åland is especially rich in this regard, as I discovered the first time I visited the islands, three years ago.
Back then, while driving from museum to museum (there are over 30 in the archipelago), we passed by a sign emblazoned with the ever-tantalizing Heritage symbol. Ignoring the complaints of my toddler and wife, I pressed on into the woods, lifting the former over my shoulder. Five minutes later, we were met with –
A big pile of rocks.
Literally just that.
A big pile of rocks. Maybe 10 meters (30 feet) in diameter and a meter (3 feet) high.
A stone mound in Saltvik. Photo by Lyonel Perabo.
It goes without a saying that my ladies were far from impressed. Neither was I, if I have to be honest. Pacing around the… thing, I noticed a signpost, and, upon reading it, everything started making sense. What we were seeing was actually a Bronze Age burial, probably that of a king or magnate of sorts. All of a sudden, that pile of rock took on a new meaning; it became, in a way, a gate to a distant past that I knew little to nothing about.
Maybe because Arctic Norway comparatively has much fewer grand Bronze Age sites than south Scandinavia, I never thought much about that period. Åland, on the other hand, is quite frankly teeming with those prehistorical landmarks. Soon after moving here, I discovered a wealth of archival material, both online and in print: map after map, spreadsheets after spreadsheets of archeological data, many of which about the eons when the descendants of the Battle-Axe culture were ruling the North. Encountering such a wealth of archeological sites and resources made me want to experience it all first hand, and not sorely through drab academic papers and publications.
As fall came and went, I managed to talk my wife and child to join me on near-weekly expeditions into the countryside in search for some of the most impressive sights I had just recently become aware of. We tramped on the side of impressive hillforts, spotted mounds so massive locals likened them to churches or the dwellings of giants of old, and more. Nevertheless, the most successful of those trips was one where I almost failed at spotting anything at all.
Sometimes in October, as the weather was getting steadily colder and the Baltic storms began to rage, we went on a short trip to Hammarland, in the west of Åland. In my sights: a cluster of graves to the southeast of local lake. Once we got the car parked and started trodding towards the forest, the winds began to pick up, and it started dripping. After making our way to the edge of the woods, past an old half-collapsed dry toilet and beyond a spot of logged wasteland, I had the distinct feeling that we might not stay up here very long. A bummer, I thought.
At that point, we had come to the edge of the forest. I had my map and my compass, but my wife was not all that thrilled coming to see yet another old mound, so she took our daughter for a stroll to keep her occupied. Leaving my ladies behind, I got on with the search, trying to find my footing in the part wet, part gnarly forested ground, something I was not used to anymore. After fifteen years in the Arctic, walking in the forest was something I had to relearn.
The woods around my erstwhile home in Arctic Norway were indeed few and far between, and mostly consisted of small birches barely taller than your average adult. Here in Åland, I met with real woods: tall boney-white birches, even higher spruce, thick pines, bushy walnut grooves aplenty, not to mention all the willows, aspens, and ashes. All this vibrant life was everywhere I could look, and all the while I was searching for graves.
After a while, it all became somewhat hypnotic: the green, grey and brown vertical landscape, the sound of tall bushes rasping against me, the dead branches breaking under my boots, the smell of the grass and reindeer-moss. It felt almost like a meditation, and I truly did not care anymore if I even found the tombs I was looking for. I was communing with the nature of my new home, and that surely was worth some archeological disappointment, right?
Then all, of a sudden, I heard a loud shout:
“Dear!” quoth my wife.
“Yeah? What’s that?” I answered.
“Can you come here a minute?”
Taken out of the forest-spell, I motioned towards the commotion without answering, hoping that everything was all right with the little one, but as I came in view of the ladies, the excited grin they shared dispelled any doubt of a problem being afoot.
“We found mushrooms! Tons of mushrooms!” blurted my wife, as she and our daughter alike giddily heaved handfuls and handfuls of winter chanterelles from the ground. This made me smile. In our years up north, my lovely wife never did have much luck finding mushrooms, something she grew up doing and thoroughly enjoyed. But here we were: just a month in into our new home, and she already found a mane unlike anything she had found for the past decade and a half.
After folding one shirt into a basket of sorts, we started gathering the little saffron-colored fungi, which soon filled our makeshift container. All happy and contended, we decided we all had had a good enough excursion, despite the lack of graves, and started heading back out of the woods.
Then, just as we passed by the big boulder marking the edge of the forest, my daughter started yelling: “Looooook papa: big rocks !” Dumbfounded, I knelt down to her level only for her to repeat: “Big rocks! There! Big rocks! You see?!”
The stone mound in Hammarland. Photo by Lyonel Perabo.
I turned my head and there it was: a massive stenröse (stone-mound), more than two meters (c. 7 feet) in height, concave in the center, where a huge rowan tree was proudly standing. It truly was a sight to behold, and a much more massive structure than anything we had seen up to that point. Coming closer, I uttered a silent thank you, and then, to my daughter, an audible one. Although I already had gotten much from this short trip, I would have been a little bit disappointed had I not found the tomb.
While my wife stayed back, guarding the precious cargo of mushrooms, my daughter and I came closer, staring at the massive rock pile, the tall and proud rowan, its branches still heavy with crimson-red berries, both equally in awe. We did not stay long, just the time to turn around the mound once or twice and on our way we went, although my little one sure would have wanted to stay longer to climb all over it.
The mound and the rowan tree. Photo by Lyonel Perabo.
On our way back home in the car, I reflected on how invigorated interacting even just for such a short time with this little bit with of nature, this little bit of history, made us all feel. All of us got something from the forest, both food for thought, for the soul, and for the stomach. Somehow, I cannot shake off the feeling that this was all but a message of sorts, that we made the good decision, that the land here will provide, given that we keep reaching out to it and treating it with the respect it is due. Judging by the experiences, the discoveries, and the harmony we have encountered here on the islands in the weeks and months since that escapade, I think I might just have been right.
What blessings might hide all around us? For the first time in a long time, I am both delighted not to know and excited to find out. I guess this must be a good sign.
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