Sanna goes on to Tornio to pick up the video camera and the car, while I hang out at the Kemi library and read magazines. we did not have a good night. I never sleep well on the train, though I prefer to take the night train to or from the north — the day train is paralyzingly boring and tedious. I end up in the bar on the train writing manically through much of the night, and finally crawling back into bed, exhausted.
I recall Riikka’s dream from Grenada. How the aliens abducted her and flew her out to a place in the desert (recalling the outlines of the mountains). And then began to tell/show her about the rods embedded in the earth there. Sticking a meters out of the ground, they were semi-metallic – (semi-conductors) – that went several kilometers deep into the earth. Through the natural high-intensity of the earth’s magnetic fields there … and so on … Electromagnetism.
While I lie here almost naked in a small moving room on a train, the Santa Claus Express. I should be screaming with laughter. Train #69, The Santa Claus Express. Heading north. A woman-girl fast asleep in the other narrow bunk. She sleeps, and my hair still falls out along with the dandruff.
Gotta piss. Maybe head for the bar. Do so.
Here, I’m from a different planet. Fuckin’ heading north to the fuckin’ unknown. Coasting into the fuckin’ winter of my life on the Santa Claus Express. Sober (a shot of Tequila?). Hardly moving. Hanging at the bar. The train has stopped, but nobody has noticed. (Has somebody pulled the brakes?) No fuckin’ way. So it goes. The Others sharing the space here continue to paw their way through life. Unable to sleep, I come here. Just to write as I have so many times before. These thin contrasty lines that keep only part of the self alive.
Approaching a station. Jarkkala or so, couldn’t understand the announcement, an automated woman in Finnish, Swedish, and English. She tells us where we are. The train moving slow. The moving only a shaking back and forth. Nothing else. Blackness outside. Black clothes on. Suddenly I think we have changed direction. While the drunken Finnish fellows sing English (Amurikan) songs. (We have come to Parkano, or somewhere). Another place name. In between coming and going. (I am lost again!) The fellows get louder and louder. And it all goes on (hyvää, hyvää, one says, trying to break in and tell something. joka paiva ja joka ikinen yo.) Military guys, well, still wearing fatigues. hair stringy and dirty. sticking straight out around the neck like the bearers slept with head dropped straight back, slack-jawed, mouth wide-open gulping air like a gaffed cod. eyes glazed under crusted lids. (Can I remember another life, other from this one, here, now?) doubtful. Buried in the detritus of present saturated busy-ness. The boys singing “rollin’ on the river.” And counter voices lifting up — so all conversation eventually stops, is subsumed: they either sing or sit in drunken silence.
I wobble back to that small moving room and squeeze into her bunk. There’s no room. She sleeps. and I think about sleep and movement, and what comes at the last stop. Kemi finds me still awake and wired at high latitudes.
she picks me up from the library and we head to the harbor at Aljo, where we meet Eero, the ship captain and park ranger who will take us to the islands for the night. the boat is a ten-ton speed-boat used for patrolling the area of the national park and conducting research. I study the charts and instruments carefully. We visit two islands first, Sanna making several shots. The main reason she wanted to come and shoot was to capture some scenes of bad weather for her video, which was shot so far under mostly ideal weather circumstances. This is the last weekend Eero will have the boat in the water until next year. The sea here, not being very saline, with the temperatures in winter well below zero degrees Centigrade, freezes with up to a meter of ice. The islands are accessible by ski and snow-mobile by Christmas, although people seldom visit them. As we sprawl intertwined in the sauna, we are talking about how the entire scene is a perfect script. Our long running conversation of the day which has traversed so many levels of emotion and situation; the abrupt shifts of sensuality and language whenever Eero enters the scene; the powerful physical setting; the drama of the weather which eventually threatens to strand us on the island for an indefinite period, the traditional wood-fired sauna — something which is always special to me, as well as to every Finn, and so on. bodies steaming in the night airs.