Odd Jobs Read Free Page B

and outbuildings bore matching red sides and minty-green roofs—Christmas colors—made me realize how few of these habitations could be called pretty. Like the Finns themselves, they seemed more sturdy than ornamental.
    The landscape, with its rubbed-looking pines and low granite outcroppings, didn’t much vary. Monotonous landscapes, perhaps, are the most penetrating, and inspire the most intense nostalgia: we love countries that dare to bore us. As the train looped north, it passed, I could see by the map, very close to the Russian border, but I failed to spot, above the bristling tree-line, the watchtowers I was told were there. Lakes opened up the vista on one side of the tracks or the other and then on both sides as we rolled along the famous, photogenic Punkaharju ridge—Finland’s postcard icon, its Mount Rushmore, its Eiffel Tower. The morning’s windy bits of blue sky had disappeared and it was raining again, and the lake water looked black and bitter, slapping the embankment with little dirty waves. I still had no umbrella.
    Savonlinna itself, where I found my hotel by crossing a narrow bridge in a drenching rain, had the wistful melancholy of a summer place out of season—empty balconies and outdoor tables, deserted docks and diving boards, boats moored in waterlogged rows. European vacation places always seem a bit slick and tinny to me, perhaps because they awaken no memories of my own childhood holidays. Yet, after eliciting tea from a waitress in the bar and letting my raincoat dry for an hour, I borrowed an umbrella at the hotel desk and set out to see what wet sights there were. It reminded me of, years ago, my venturing up Wilshire Boulevard, in another Sunday twilight, to fulfill a lifelong ambition to view the La Brea Tar Pits. On the old Jack Benny program, they used to crack jokes about the tar pits, and though I was in Los Angeles for only a night, and had a worrisome toothache, I had waited much of my life for this opportunity. Oddly, though I could only peek through a fence, and a tar pit in the darkis not much to see, I was not disappointed. A sight is composed, in large part, of our desire to see it. And, as we say on a golf course when it rains, “At least it’s kept the crowds away.” Savolinna was not crowded.
    Cozy and dizzy with jet lag beneath my borrowed umbrella, I walked along the lakeside, under dripping linden trees, past pastel holiday homes and shop windows hopefully displaying images of bronzed beauties. A beach that had, in the tourist brochure I had studied, extensively brimmed with basking flesh seemed in reality no bigger than a hall rug, set out to soak. Olavinlinna Castle, approached across a little bridge where my umbrella nearly blew inside out, was closed. The floating walk to it was rather gleefully tied up on the other side of a kind of moat, and a trio of German hikers clowned away their disappointment in the small green park here, like sparrows frisking in a birdbath. But the civic museum nearby, quite surprisingly, was open. Just as a toothache almost justifies itself in the relief of its ceasing, our trips to Europe pay off with these unexpected admissions.
    Inside, it was dry, and dim, and almost deserted. On the first floor, primitive Finland explained itself in terms of geological maps, Neolithic artifacts, rock paintings executed at heights that indicated shifting lake levels, agricultural tools of a touching cleverness and gawky beauty, a reconstructed peasant’s house with one dummy in a rocking chair and another tucked asleep up in a high nook against the whitewashed fireplace chimney. Finland’s land, I read, had emerged from the sea less than twenty thousand years ago, and was still rising, a centimeter a year. On the museum’s second floor, a new exhibit revelled in the ingenuity with which the nation’s proud and perennial harvest of trees was conducted: logs used to herd logs, logs lashed into chutes and bumpers and, when wide lakes were reached