Bog Myrtle & Peat

Photographs of Joensuu in the old days make it look like the Wild West. There are steam engines, water towers and a sawmill which is bound together with strengthened canvas straps. The river is a mess of limbless timber, and horses haul beams of wood back and forth along it.

A few people show up in those old pictures, but they’re a stern and heavy-handed bunch. Their houses stand in a single line which leads up to a wooden church on the over-exposed horizon. And the backdrop to all these images is a dark streak of forest which runs from one side of every photograph to the other. It feels like a frontier town on the edge of civilisation; the precise location on the matchstick where the splinter burns from white to black.

Joensuu is still a timber town now, and heavy conveyor belts thump across the river from the automated mill to remind offices and shops that their wealth is trivial against the heft and bellow of the forest. Modern Finland is nothing like the primordial wilderness imagined by British travellers. There are some tracts of ancient woodland, but the overwhelming majority of Finnish forests are nowadays managed for commercial timber production, and that’s mind-boggling because the scale of this man-managed landscape is extraordinary. I took a window seat on the top deck of the train which runs for four and a half hours between Joensuu and Helsinki, bending a steady curve around the Russian border. Aside from a few fields and the gasping relief of lakes glimpsed through a barcode of trees, the view from the window is an endless, unremitting wall of forest. 

After an hour on that train, the trees began to blur into a single upright texture. It became hard to think of individual scots pines or aspens – they were too close and we moved so quickly that I began to feel like I was watching an old cinefilm projected on a sheet or a whitewashed wall. It was easier to watch droplets of rain running sideways along the outside of the glass, and the forest became a flickering, nonspecific backdrop to more immediate concerns of luggage and instant coffee. But I couldn’t ignore the abstract rush of forest at my elbow, because often there were black grouse which stood in the sidings like poultry, and once towards the Russian border, I saw ten cocks standing on the roof of a signal box. I would have been sorry to miss that, and a few miles south of the station at Tolosenmäki, an elk ran madly back from the tracks with all the crashing enormity of a transit van. A small, brick-red calf ran behind her, with legs so thick and heavy-ended that I laughed aloud and the woman sitting opposite me looked up from her book. I tried to explain, but the animals were already miles behind us – and when I pointed out to the forest, it was shockingly blank, like a child who’s pulled a face behind your back and then smiles sweetly when you turn to confront them. The joke was on me.

Helsinki slipped around the train like a sleeve, but even the city is meshed in trees and when announcements were made over the train’s loudspeaker that we were soon to arrive in the capital, it was hard to believe it. Stepping out onto the platform, the scale of that journey collapsed onto me as if I’d been travelling for many decades. It’s a baffling, distended sense of time and distance without any markers or shift in terrain to differentiate one hundred miles from another – we might have travelled across the entirety of Europe, just as it was possible that we’d simply gone round and round a ten mile loop for four hours. Joensuu felt like it belonged to another mindset, like when you sleep for an hour at lunchtime and wake with a sense that your morning was yesterday. And now I note that my memories of the town revolve more clearly around those old photographs than any real recollection of the place today.