Travel to Finland to wake yourself up | Health

The world becomes very small when your body is in crisis. The second we jumped into the Baltic Sea, everything stopped. I gasped for air and started hyperventilating. I waited to catch my breath, but it didn’t happen.

I had no choice but to swim like that. Calm body, panicked breath. It was more of a doggy paddle than a swim, any motion to propel me forward.

The waves were high and wide apart. I would ride the crest of one and then slide into the valley of the next, feeling myself get smaller and smaller and my place in the world becoming nothing more than another bubble in the sea.

The sea affected my traveling companion, Earl Bridges, differently. As I hyperventilated, his breath calmed. He started swimming backward and watching me closely.

“I’ve got you,” he said. A wave lifted him high above me and then he slid below as a wave lifted me. “I’ve got you,” he said again.

It made me feel safe and it made me furious. This was my idea after all, to jump into the icy Helsinki water in October and swim from one yellow ladder to another like the locals do. Why was this so easy for him and so jarring for me?

Another wave lifted us. At that moment, the erasure of the world was complete and we were the only people in existence, suspended in a cold womb.

I felt strong and weak. The blood was rushing to the core of my body to keep me alive, leaving empty arms and legs to propel me forward. I could feel the joints of my elbows and the space between the bones in my fingers. I could feel every decision I had ever made and how it had built me into who I was, cell by cell.

The yellow exit ladder came into view with the crest of the next wave. I kicked my legs and pulled myself forward with my brittle arms.

And then it was over. My hand grabbed the cold metal of the ladder wrung and I held on as the sea tried to hold on to me, pulling at my legs while I searched for a foothold.

There were two women on the dock, drying themselves off and changing back into work clothes. We made eye contact as I pulled myself up the ladder and back to solid ground. We all laughed a little bonding laugh but didn’t say a word.

Earl and I walked back to the place where we left our towels and clothes.

And that’s when I felt it, the reason people jump into the Baltic Sea, day after day.

The blood that had been protecting my core from death in the unforgiving cold water rushed back through my body like a wave onto shore. It was an incredible feeling, like I was being washed from the inside out. I felt every cell resetting. My mind was clear and giddy. The regret and brittleness I felt moments before in the water were replaced by a feeling of fullness. I was fresh and freed. I left something in the water — a shed skin — and I was ready for whatever happened next.

That’s why you go to Finland, to wake yourself up. You come to this stoic corner of the earth to feel something.

***

Finland is about being in your body. It’s about extreme cold and heat. It’s about eating food that you spent the day gathering — feasts of mushrooms and berries. Freezers full of fish and meat, caught and hunted.

As I lifted a spoon of cloudberries to my mouth, a Finnish friend said, “My mother gathered those this week. Think about how you have to bend down to pick each individual cloudberry. It takes a lot of work.” Be grateful. Be mindful. The orange cloudberry burst in my mouth with a citric shock of Vitamin C. I tasted it. I noticed it, that one bite.

When people talk about Finns, they always talk about “sisu” — that Finnish word that describes a stiff upper lip, a toughness in the face of adversity, a quality that people in this Arctic part of the world have that gives them the ability to face anything. It’s not happiness. It’s not resilience. It’s sisu.

But that idea of the quiet, stoic, unaffected Finn is just one aspect. The Finns we met added something else — the pleasure found in discomfort. The taste of the cloudberry after hours of picking. The rush of blood after a swim in the sea. The sweat of the sauna after another ladle of water lands on hot rocks.

I read a book this year called “The Comfort Crisis.” It’s about the importance of discomfort. Comfort is killing us. It dulls our minds and softens our bodies. To bring himself back to life, the author took a 30-day hike into the wilds of Alaska. He spent 30 days outside, without the sound of traffic, without one email or text message, without a pillow or hot shower or heated car seat.

He wrote that it takes three days for the world to really fall away, but by that third day, nature is all that’s left. Your senses are heightened. Everything is magnified. The author calls the experience “misogi” — a Japanese word for a ritual cleansing. Misogi, in this author’s context, is the act of creating discomfort, of doing something really hard, in order to wash away the crust of our life of convenience.

On the other side of the difficulty is something next to pleasure. If not happiness, then something very close to it. The feeling of being alive.

***

My attempt at misogi was to add a few days on the Karhunkierros (Bears Ring) Trail to our trip.

The funny thing about adding a backpacking trip — days and nights in the woods with only what you carry — is that you obsess about what you will carry.

In the days before our flight to Finland, I packed and unpacked, and on the day before we set out for the trail, we made one last stop at an outdoor store in Rovaniemi.

What you bring shapes the experience. And it unfolded in a series of good and bad decisions.

For food, I packed oatmeal, energy bars, instant coffee, packets of hot chocolate, ramen and canned fish. All great choices.

I bought a brand-new Thermos that was the best thing I brought. I filled it with hot chocolate each morning and we would stop every couple of miles for something warm to drink.

I bought a water filter, since there are rivers and lakes all through the forest. I bought a pocket knife in Finland. They are known for their knife making.

And we bought two kuksas — handmade cups carved out of a block of birch wood, designed to perfectly fit in your hand. A leather strap is tied around the handle for attaching it to your backpack. Little pieces of art — simple, useful and beautiful, the Finnish way.

I packed my Jetboil camp stove.

I did not pack a tent because I had been told that Finland has cabins all through the woods where you can stay for free. But even that knowledge did not prepare me for what I would find on that hike. Finland has some of the most incredible infrastructure for enjoying the outdoors I have ever experienced.

If I had understood that before I got on the trail, my pack would have been much lighter. I would not have packed snow pants in preparation for cold nights around a fire, because we slept in a cabin with a wood-burning stove and lots of firewood, already chopped. There are wooden bunks for sleeping and a table where you sit for breakfast and watch the reindeer wander through the forest outside the window.

The trail is only 10 miles from the Russian border. As we walked, so many Russian novels and movies came into sharp relief. I could understand the Dostoevsky and Tarkovsky forests now. Birch trees as far as you can see feel like closed curtains, and I understood how a little isolation and imagination turns them quickly into a canvas of spirituality, exile or paranoia, depending on the mind of the artist.

This kind of nature, it’s not like mountains or oceans where you are reminded with each vista that the world is a vast place. Here, you keep your head down. You notice each step because the trail is full of tree roots. Here, the forest is engulfing. It dampens sound and limits what you can see.

It smells like the must of rotting wet leaves.

I had circled the stops we would make on a map. Ten or 11 miles didn’t seem that far to walk to get to a place to sleep when I traced my finger over the line on the map while sitting on a hotel bed. And it didn’t feel far for those first few miles.

Every so often, the forest opened up into a marsh or a river or along the shore of a pond. There are boards to get you across the marshes. There are suspension bridges to get you across the raging rivers. Next to the ponds and lakes, there are tracks for sliding your portaged canoe into the water.

There are metal markers every kilometer, letting you know how far you’ve come and how far you have left to go.

The Finns thought of everything, and it is all meticulously maintained and beautifully designed.

This place is remote. We took a 12-hour, overnight train from Helsinki into Rovaniemi, then rented a car and drove for a day to the edge of the country. It was truly and deeply far away in every sense of the word, but the message on this trail was clear. Being in nature is a gift. It’s a right, the Finns say. You belong here. Stay here. Disappear into the forest.

I could hear my wooden cup, hanging from its leather strap, moving from side to side against my backpack as I walked.

Hiking is the perfect environment for deep conversation, mostly because you don’t have to talk at all. You can walk for miles in silence and let your mind wander. Then, when one of life’s questions arise, you throw it out for discussion. And, because you’re walking for miles and hours, there’s no rush to solve it. The ideas get as much room as the forest will allow, broken up by pauses when the trail runs into an outcropping and silence is needed to climb over wet, muddy rocks.

It’s one thing to want to experience misogi — created suffering in order to make yourself feel alive. And it’s another thing to be pulling yourself up an embankment, feet slipping on roots, the pack pulling at your spine, the sun setting and miles to go before you can stop.

I always think I want to do something hard, but when I’m in the middle of doing it, I feel something very far from alive. I feel embarrassed to be weak in front of another person. I feel mad at myself for not being stronger or more fit. I wish for the comfort in “comfort crisis.”

The sunset at that latitude adds to the tension.

The sun seems that it can’t wait to get to the horizon in the early afternoon, but once it does, it sits there and the golden hour lasts and lasts — casting long, sundial shadows. Then suddenly, even though it’s not quite 5 p.m., all light disappears.

We walked in the dark, hoping the cabin I marked on the map was right around the corner. It wasn’t. Down a hill, up a hill. Maybe it will be at the crest of the next rise. It wasn’t.

I started to imagine what it would feel like to tell Earl that I had heard there were cabins where you could sleep in the forest of Finland, that I had talked him into coming with me on this long march without a tent, and that I had been wrong. I was practicing my apology around 7 p.m. when I saw a shape in the darkness that looked like a rooftop.

The cabin was feet from a rushing river, with a porch perfect for watching the water. Inside, the wood-burning stove was already hot and a couple was reading by the light of their headlamps. They greeted us and hoped we didn’t mind their Australian Shepherd curled up in the corner. The dog lifted its head to be petted, but was exhausted from a long day of hiking. And so were we.

We cooked ramen and canned white fish and I fell asleep instantly as soon as my head touched the pillowless wooden bench that was my bed for the night.

The next morning, we decided to hike another 9 miles and then exit the trail at a spot on the map that said “visitor center” in Finnish.

We stopped a few times to drink hot chocolate from our wooden cups. The sun was out and made the lichen a bright green and the berries that were still growing in the low bushes stand out in stark red and blue relief. The trail seemed easier on the second day, a mental trick from knowing we would be done soon. We walked and talked about the arc of this journey and all journeys.

And we were lost in conversation when the trail opened up into an empty parking lot and a locked-up, winterized visitor center. We were greeted by a few rutting reindeer.

Because it said visitor center on the map, we didn’t imagine that we would find ourselves in the middle of nowhere — meaning 60 miles from the nearest town without another person to hear our voice. We hadn’t planned how we would get back to our rented car, because a visitor center is where you walk to a window and ask for advice.

We sat on the steps of the center, itself a mile from the highway, and I started poking through my cellphone for a solution. In case you find yourself in need of a ride in the middle of the forest in Finland, I’ll save you the time it took to figure it out. The app Taksi located a driver in a town an hour away and called him. I don’t speak Finnish, so I couldn’t tell which of the signs was the name of a place. I spelled every sign I could see. The taxi driver patiently listened as I spelled out the Finnish words for reception desk and bathrooms. And then, somehow, I read something that gave him a clue of where we were. He told us to walk to the road and he would find us.

The ride cost $117 but got us back to our car.

That night, we ordered wine and a feast of reindeer and bear meat with potatoes and lingonberries, and a small bowl of salted fish.

Earl asked, “What do you want to do now?” We had agreed at the beginning of the trip, not to plan too much but to follow our whims and let the journey unfold.

***

We headed north for the town of Inari, population 581.

At that time of year, there was one place open in Inari. PaPaNa was a bar and restaurant. It had an upstairs room for darts, couches for watching TV, a stage for live music. There was a big porch for sitting outside on a warm day, but on this bitterly cold night, it was the place everyone gathered to smoke.

Two men came in from the cold and held on to the edge of a table to get back to their seat, too drunk to walk without help, but not drunk enough to stop for the night.

It felt like the kind of place that had been built over time by the people who drank there — like an old iconic ski town bar, with art hung and drawn on every wall, and jokes behind the bar about where rude customers can go. Everyone sat at long wooden tables and benches — a group of Spanish tourists on a package trip to see the northern lights, a group of locals still dressed from a day of working outside, now drinking White Russians, and two teenage boys — who stood at the bar flirting with the tattooed bartender.

I ordered the Inari Special, a large pizza with smoked reindeer meat, blue cheese and pineapple.

We ordered White Russians in an attempt to fit in.

We sipped our tall glasses of milk and vodka and hoped the locals would invite us over if we looked interesting enough. We moved a few times — from table to table and to a perch at the bar — hoping each move would be the portal to get us absorbed into the social life of Inari.

But we didn’t speak Finnish or Sami — the local language — except to say “moi” or hello. We were chirping birds with our one word greetings and no one was fooled that we were one of them.

We wanted to have one of those adventurous nights, carried on the shoulders of newfound friends. But you can’t create those with willpower and meek smiles from the corner of the room.

Still, when we walked back into the beautiful, heavy-logged lodge where we were staying, we were energized and ready to try again. We ordered White Russians — that came in rocks glasses this time with cream and Kahlúa. And we approached a group of English-speaking women, sitting by the fire with chocolate martinis. They were from Indiana and were all there to fulfill one woman’s bucket-list wish to see the northern lights, but it was cloudy and instead they were scrolling on their phones. They had the air of masked disappointment that comes when you travel across the world hoping for one thing and you haven’t figured out yet how to see what else is there.

***

Just like so many people, we were also in Finnish Lapland to see the northern lights. We watched the Arctic Circle descend below us on the map as we continued to travel north.

I downloaded one of the apps that tracks sun storms and tells you where in the world you need to be that night to see the lights. I signed up for notifications on my phone to tell us when we should run outside and look up.

I read all the listicles of best places to stay to see the northern lights from your window — written mostly by people who looked them up on travel review sites, having never been themselves. We stayed at one of “the best places on earth,” according to those articles — a hotel called Arctic Treehouse. And it is a beautiful hotel with an entire wall of window looking out into the forest, with shots of beet juice and cloudberry juice greeting you in the morning, with reindeer skins on the ground among the light birch Scandinavian-design furniture. Hiking trails wind through the woods, leading to overlooks — and that’s where you should watch the lights, not from the coziness of your room.

Every night in Lapland, we went outside looking for the lights and that was the one place we saw them. We strained through cloud cover on some nights and low solar activity on others.

Instagram is the worst thing to happen to the northern lights. I can tell you now that people take photos through filters and long exposures that amplify what they are seeing, and so when you see them for yourself, you’re almost underwhelmed. You realize immediately how much people exaggerate in this era of performative experiences.

But you can’t let what you were told to expect ruin what actually happens.

We walked out to the edge of a road to an overlook that let us see all the way to the horizon.

The lights started faintly at first, a line across the sky — white then green. The painted line started to grow and spill across the sky, moving in waves. We were under the sea, looking up. As it rolled over us, bright green now, I knew exactly where I was — not just on the Earth, but in the solar system.

I had been watching the solar activity all day and seen pictures posted from telescopes in Russia and Norway and Alaska of bursts on the sun’s surface. Those bursts were reaching us now, writing a message across the sky, tracing the outline of the top of the world. I got smaller and smaller. I mattered less and less as my consciousness of my place in the universe grew. The sky filled with moving green light. I forgot how cold it was. I stood perfectly still as one of the few people on earth to be experiencing this display.

And then it was over.

The light retreated and only stars were left. The sky remained the window into space that it always is, but I was more aware of it now. I could see the stars as light reaching us from far away through years of darkness. I could feel myself standing on tiny, cold planet Earth trying to understand it all or at least this corner of it.

***

We tried to see the northern lights one last time by heading as far north as the map would take us.

We drove through an underwater tunnel to the island of Vardo, Norway, and the edge of this part of the world. We stood on a spit on the end of the island, looking out on the Arctic Ocean. There are a few places that make you see the planet as a whole and this was one of them.

The air blew from the sea against my cheeks and it felt like glaciers. It felt like the dry crunch of snow. It felt like it had traveled across the curve of the earth.

There weren’t any northern lights, but there was a clear night sky.

A lighthouse was blinking — once every two seconds.

Two crab fishing boats headed out to sea in the dark and wouldn’t return for weeks.

We stood in the cold as long as our willpower let us and then walked into a bar for some food and a drink. A man walked in — blond and boyish — and said in practiced English, “I would like to have one beer.”

The pint was poured and he took his seat and before long was doing the thing he came to do. He told the men around him that he didn’t have any experience fishing but he had worked in a cannery.

The bartender wiped the counter and gave a nod to a man sitting against the wall. The man reached into his chest pocket, pulled out a pack of Kent cigarettes and offered one to the boy. They walked outside and stood in the cold, smoking, not saying a word.

When they returned, speaking in Russian, the boy had a place on the next boat out.

***

Life is all about who you meet. It’s interpreted through the voices of the people you talk to and through the sound of your own voice. And that’s doubly true when you’re traveling, trying to figure out the puzzle of another country.

One of the reasons Earl came along, or I came along with Earl, depending on who’s telling the story, was to scout for a PBS travel show that he hosts.

Before we came, he heard about salmiakki, the favorite candy of Finland, and reached out to the head of the salmiakki association with a request to tour a factory. And that’s how we ended up in Ilmajoki, a small town four hours north of Helsinki, staying with a family that owns the Namitupa Candy Factory.

To call it candy is to create immediate cognitive dissonance, because it has a strong taste of black licorice and salt. The salty taste comes from a powder coating of ammonium chloride, which, to the unaccustomed, tastes a little like licking a battery. And the shock hits you especially hard when you bite into a piece of salmiakki candy that’s pink and heart shaped — a slap when you expect a kiss.

But maybe that’s why it’s a Finnish obsession.

By comparison, regular sugar candy is bland. It’s predictable. You can eat it without thinking. You can be comfortable.

But salmiakki makes you feel something, said Lotta Laine of Namitupa. You can’t ignore it. You must stop and taste it.

It’s an experience that demands to be lived — just like so many Finnish things.

To get there, we drove 14 hours from the top of Norway to Ilmajoki.

We arrived just in time for dinner. First came glasses of milk. Then came the pastries and homemade preserves and black sausage from Tampere.

Then the conversation. We talked about the candy business, but then we slipped easily into the larger questions.

Finland is listed year after year as one of the happiest countries on earth on the World Happiness Report. The ranking describes happiness as feeling a sense of control over your own decisions, trusting your government, and relative economic well-being.

So, this question of happiness was an easy conversation starter. Are you happy? And what does that mean anyway?

Does a free college education and free health care lift enough of the financial weight of life that you can feel happy? They felt that it did.

The only impediment to happiness these days, in the broader sense, was the darkening shadow of Russia, pressed for 833 miles against their shared border.

There’s a saying about the historic relationship between Finland and Russia that I heard a few times, loosely translated, “A Russian is a Russian no matter how much butter you fry him in.”

Our hosts confirmed, yes, that’s something people say.

Helsinki is full of Ukrainian flags, shouting support. And with that war raging not so far away, someone at the table wondered aloud, what would happen if they had to leave Finland. Where would they go?

“There’s nowhere I would love as much as Finland,” she said.

And what about the idea that happiness is feeling that you have control of your own life? We heard in response the story of the Namitupa factory — a midlife career pivot for Reijo Laine. The factory is steps away from their house and employs their daughter and son-in-law and sits at the center of their small town. It creates a livelihood, but also speaks of attachment to family and community and culture.

Our dinner plates were cleared and we were each given a small spoon. Reijo opened a small jar full of gray powder and as he did, he talked about being a young boy and walking to the counter at the pharmacy with his friend to buy a couple grams of salmiakki powder. He said they would put a little bit of the powder on the back of their hand and lick it. And that taste was intertwined for him with the memory of childhood friendships and bike-riding freedom.

We passed the jar and used our spoons to do just as he described, a little on the back of our hands and then licking it. The taste was a shock but the powder melted on our tongues and became intertwined with the warm feeling in the room of good food and winding conversation and full glasses of milk.

I reached down and picked up a cloudberry from a small bowl in the middle of the table. I put it in my mouth and thought about how someone bent down and collected it. I noticed the effort of the person who picked it and the burst of vitamin C as I savored the flavor. And I noticed the way it layered over the strong taste of the salty licorice salmiakki still on my tongue.