Juhannus at a borrowed mökki
A week ago today I was in the back seat of a car on the motorway to Helsinki, with a bag of damp towels on my knees and two rolls of film in my jacket pocket. I meant to write this on Monday and did not.
Juhannus is Midsummer. For most people here it means leaving the city for a mökki, a summer cottage, usually on a lake and always with a sauna. I do not have one, so I am grateful for invitations. This year Antti, a friend from university, asked me to his family's place in Päijät-Häme, north of Lahti.
The cottage is red with white window frames, and the sauna is a small log building down by the water. Antti's father built it himself in the eighties. On Friday at six o'clock exactly he raised the flag. At Midsummer it stays up through the night, the one night of the year it is supposed to.
We went to the sauna three times that evening. Someone had made a vihta, a bundle of fresh birch twigs that you beat yourself with. Afterwards the whole sauna smelled of wet birch leaves. Between rounds we climbed down the jetty ladder into the lake. The water is brown like weak tea and much colder than anyone admitted, so nobody stayed in long.
The bonfire was on a flat rock by the shore, mostly branches and some boards from an old fence. Across the lake we could see other fires, small orange points with the smoke going straight up. The mosquitoes kept away from the smoke and found us the moment we stepped out of it. On Saturday morning I had eleven bites on my left ankle.
Later, close to midnight, Antti and I took out the rowing boat. It leaks a little and I row badly, so we went mostly in circles. The sun had set at about eleven and would be back before four, and in between it never became properly dark. There was only a long blue-grey dusk, with the brightest part of the sky moving slowly round to the north. His father says the darkest moment comes a little after one, not at midnight, because of summer time. I stayed up to check and could not tell. Somewhere out on the lake a kuikka kept calling. I had to look up the English name afterwards: black-throated diver.
I finished the Fomapan 100 in the afternoon, mostly the jetty and people's feet, and put HP5 in the Bessa for the evening. Around midnight I tried to photograph the far shore, a black line of spruce and above it a pale grey sky with no detail in it. The meter wanted 1/30 at f/2.5 for the sky and a quarter of a second for the trees. I do not own a tripod. I tried from the boat first, which was stupid, then from the jetty with the camera pressed against a post, bracketing a stop each way. I will find out from the scans whether any of it is sharp. I have my doubts about the frames from the boat.
Saturday was slow. On Midsummer Day somebody always points out that the days are getting shorter again, and this year it was Antti's father, with some satisfaction. Nobody argued.
On Sunday we ate the leftover sausages cold for lunch, with mustard and the end of the rye bread, and set off for Helsinki in the middle of the afternoon. Half of southern Finland had the same idea. The motorway was slow all the way from Lahti.