I've been here four weeks now! Like asking someone to draw a map of their route to work or school, this blog has a lot of detail near the beginning.
I've been ice fishing on frozen lakes twice, been invited to dinner twice and of course I have been in the kindergarten every day.
If success were measured in numbers of fish, the fishing trips were a disaster. But fish are not always the point; Chris, Tiina's partner-cum-husband (this partner thing started while I was in Japan and I still feel weird about it) took me out into the forests to a beautiful spot.
We started to hike across this flat expanse of snow with ice underfoot. "How far are we going?" With my head bowed to protect myself from the driving snow, I had to shout to be heard against the wind. "Over there, near that little cottage." It was at least a kilometre and a half away. We had bumped into Tiina's father in the supermarket car park on our way and Tinna told us later over dinner that he had said only mad foreigners would go fishing in conditions like this. We got to our spot and Chris started to drill a hole in the ice with the massive ice drill he had carried with him. The tip had been replaced by a friend since the last time he had been out and it hadn't been sharpened. It didn't work. Chris had a metal file and started to file the edge of the drill, cutting himself in the process. He was bleeding all over the snow and by the time he gave up, the place looked as though he had butchered a dog. He wasn't making any sort of impression on the ice with the blunt drill and normally he would have cut through it in seconds so I walked off to the coast in search of some assistance. I walked through the forest until I found what I was looking for and came back with a long tree trunk. We found an old hole in the ice previously cut by chainsaw but which had frozen over solid again. After a few attempts at battering it with the tree trunk, brown muddy water spouted up. We scooped the ice out and set our lines, had a coffee and waited. It wasn't long until we started to pack up and make our way back to the car. We had been out on the lake in an ambient temperature of about minus 15 with the chill factor taking this down to at least minus 20. The whole time, through the drilling, the sharpening, scooping the ice out of the hole, Chris's hands had been bare. He said he was all right but they looked nasty red to me.
We got back to the car, packed our stuff into the boot and started the return drive along the forest path. When we got to the edge of the forest where we had to turn to cross a field, we were faced by a barrier of snow that had drifted across the track. Chris straightened up the car and made a rush at it. We were stuck. An old local boy walking his dog assisted us as I went in pursuit of another log to wedge under the spinning wheels. It was getting dark and Chris was starting to panic but I felt no sense of urgency; I knew we would get out. This was, however, before I had read the story on the BBC website about the Swedish man just across the other side of the Gulf of Bothnia near Umea, who, trapped in his car for two months, had survived because his body had gone into a sort of hibernation.
We did get out and we did survive to tell the story over dinner in a warm cosy house set in a most beautiful landscape of evergreens and silver birch.
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