Plains of Alajoki

We had watched the dark sky and listened to the distant thunder for hours, but when we saw this roll-cloud rising, we jumped on our bikes and stormed off. We had six kilometers to go for safety, and we made it only barely.

Sun finally set behind the barn. In these latitudes the sun mainly moves sideways, so it took quite some time to go .

Night falls and slight mist rises from the yet warm fields.

Story goes that a father planted this pine-tree for his new-born child so that, in due course, it would provide planks for his/her coffin. The story does not tell why the tree was never cut down; most likely the baby died young. Infant mortality was very high in the area in those times, because the whole families, including mothers and older kids worked in the fields all day long, and infants were left home alone with their rudimentary "automated" feeding devices - that is, milk-filled cattle horns that were left hanging upside down at their reach. Those "baby bottles" were astute sources of infections. The habit of leaving children by themselves may not have been the best nourishment for their emotional developement either, and might well have contributed to the social troubles in the area those days, most notably the rise of the so called Bads , who caused havoc in the area for hundred years. The advent of the Bads is usually explained by socioeconomic reasons, like by the local inheritance rule, where one descendant got it all and forced other siblings to buy their share of the patrimony from the heir and fund the purchase by selling lumber or distilling pine tar for shipbuilding. This worked fine as long as lumber for those pursuits existed; when the forests dwindled down, non-heirs were left on empty, got frustrated – and turned into Bads. That ended when the "excess" population prone to bad habits emigrated to America – which, in turn, may explain why the US... oh well, let's not get into that! From America as well as from Russia we got this new, weird idea , which led us to our one and only civil war. The idea was called socialism . It took us 80 000 White soldiers to put an end to it, while Americans got away with one McCarthy. (Americans called it communism, but it was only because to them all Europeans are socialists, and you have to tell those two apart somehow, don't you?) In Russia the funny idea that all men are – were – equal lasted longer and provided them enough time to round it out more elegantly, without war. But let's not get into that either! Today, all that is just annoying, distant history, and all men are happily unequal again, more and more so every day – some, like immigrants, even more unequal than others. And no, we won't get into that either, because there is nothing left there to get into: our present state of affairs is the final Arcadia, Lintukoto, Paradise, Narnia, Summerland, Xanadu, Heaven, you name it – or the Tree of Life if you will; end of all roads, singularity without alternatives. . . . Sorry about all that; it must have been the limbs of the tree that carried me away – too far away someone might say – and out on a limb at that. Someone else might call it irony. Anyway, the tree in the picture goes by the name Coffin Tree in the local map, so the story might as well be true. The first story, that is.

As photogenic as haypoles were, they are history. This I took in the end of the 70's; we had spent the night in the tent nearby but had gotten so cold before the dawn that we'd had to take a hike. Here the sun had just risen and can be vaguely seen behind the closest stack. In a thick fog in a place like this it can get so amazingly quiet at night before birds wake up that an urban dweller may go nuts out there! The fog sucks all reverberations and echos whatsoever from the ether and you can only hear your own breathing, blood circulating and brain buzzing – and the worst of all, your thoughts, if any. :-)

Only 30 years ago the plains were full of barns. Not so anymore.