is not unlike my daughter’s old Waldorf preschool in Boulder,
complete with paganistic rites, woodcrafts and Middle-earth
symbology (in fact, J. R. R. Tolkein was reportedly influenced by the
Kalevala, a Finnish creation epic in which the world is born from the
cracked egg of a diving duck). The group I was hiking with even
broke for a snack circle. They didn’t start singing or making
headpieces out of twigs, but I could see it coming.
To the Finnish, being outdoors in nature isn’t about paying
homage to nature or to ourselves, the way it tends to be for
Americans. We fetishize our life lists, catalog peaks bagged and
capture the pristine scenes of grand wilderness. It is largely an
individual experience. For the Finnish, though, nature is about
expressing a close-knit collective identity. Nature is where they can
exult in their nationalistic obsessions of berry-picking, mushrooming,
fishing, lake swimming and Nordic skiing. They don’t watch moose;
they eat them the way their ancestors did. And they do these things
often.
According to large surveys, the average Finn engages in nature-
based recreation two to three times per week. Fifty-eight percent of
Finns go berry-picking, 35 percent cross-country ski, often in Arctic
darkness, under lights in large city parks. Seventy percent hike
regularly, compared to the European and American average of about
30 percent. Fifty percent of Finns ride bikes, 20 percent jog and 30
percent walk a dog, and I particularly like this one: 5 percent of the
population, or 250,000 people, partake in long-distance ice-skating.
All told, over 95 percent of Finns regularly spend time recreating in
the outdoors.
It could be that the Finnish exist in something of an arrested state
of development, or perhaps the rest of us somehow got
overdeveloped. We put down our floral wreaths earlier, acting, for
better or worse, like civilized grown-ups. Finland is highly unique
among Western countries for urbanizing very late in the game.