Day 42 – to Ekkerøy

The Varanger National Park was established in 2006 as an almost untouched natural wilderness practically free of technical intervention. It’s a wild place, and one can only imagine being here as a winter storm comes through.

During the night the wind had shifted round to the south, and it was noticeably warmer, perhaps double the temperature of yesterday, at 9C.

It was one of my pensive mornings, which the dog is used to now. I have the best ideas when I’m walking, and I like to mentally review my books when out. This means occasional stops to note them into the phone, as an email to myself..

But today the mind wandered, I looked back at the people I’d met in the last few days in Finnish Lapland, and it struck me that they shared a condition, that I will call the ‘Year Of The Hare’ Effect; the CSI fisherman, the Remote First Aid lecturer and his wife, and the Political Scientist, to mention a few.

Year of the Hare is a book by the Finnish Lapland writer, Arto Paasilinna. It is about a journalist on the last day of his holiday in Lapland with a friend when in his car he runs over a hare. The hare has a broken leg, and the journalist cares for it, contacting his office back in the south to say he won’t be back at work, for a year.

When, on occasions, I took the train to London in my last years of working, from the Lake District, I found the contrast between our daily peace and quiet and the madness of the Euston departures and arrivals really difficult to handle, but I think the effect of the tranquility and wildness of the Arctic, somewhere like Lemmenjoki, must be even more so. The effect on busy office workers being that they rebel against returning.

Who lives in a house like this?

The outward leg of the walk took me past one of the dwellings that are scattered around, and I chatted briefly to the two guys working outside. These guys are Sámi reindeer herders, brothers, both in their 80s, for whom life has hardly changed over their years.

A note that Lapland is how this areas of Finland, Norway and Sweden was formerly known, it is now called Sápmi.

Other than that we met no one.

Blueberries or rabbit shit? Not easy to tell apart. Either way, they go well with granola at breakfast.

Back at the van, I drove on twenty minutes to the coast, and the island of Ekkerøy, connected to the mainland by a causeway.

With the backdrop of Arctic Russia, just a few kilometres across the estuary, I settled in for the afternoon.