Spo's photos with the keyword: landscape

... People living on the coast of Gulf of Bothnia has this speciality that us southeners at the Gulf of Finland don't: the sun that sets into the sea. Shooting against the setting sun was especially challenging this time because of the huge contrast between the glittering sea and the gloomy skies. Luckily I always shoot raw, I wouldn't have succeeded at all without it, not even close. Funny that there was this constant flux of people to the tip of the sand bank even though everyone could clearly see there was absolutely nothing out there. Perhaps the adults hoped they'd hear Sirens singing there, and the kids would get a glimpse of the mighty Kraken.

And they went, and they melted.

Only 30 years ago the plains were full of barns. Not so anymore.

Just a snapshot of another boring landscape again. Incidentally downtown Helsinki is seven kilometers in the direction of the tracks. Yes, Helsinki, the capital of Finland, the most urban hipsterious city in the world!

Story goes that a father planted this pine-tree for his new-born child so that, in due course, it would provide planks for his/her coffin. The story does not tell why the tree was never cut down; most likely the baby died young. Infant mortality was very high in the area in those times, because the whole families, including mothers and older kids worked in the fields all day long, and infants were left home alone with their rudimentary "automated" feeding devices - that is, milk-filled cattle horns that were left hanging upside down at their reach. Those "baby bottles" were astute sources of infections. The habit of leaving children by themselves may not have been the best nourishment for their emotional developement either, and might well have contributed to the social troubles in the area those days, most notably the rise of the so called Bads , who caused havoc in the area for hundred years. The advent of the Bads is usually explained by socioeconomic reasons, like by the local inheritance rule, where one descendant got it all and forced other siblings to buy their share of the patrimony from the heir and fund the purchase by selling lumber or distilling pine tar for shipbuilding. This worked fine as long as lumber for those pursuits existed; when the forests dwindled down, non-heirs were left on empty, got frustrated – and turned into Bads. That ended when the "excess" population prone to bad habits emigrated to America – which, in turn, may explain why the US... oh well, let's not get into that! From America as well as from Russia we got this new, weird idea , which led us to our one and only civil war. The idea was called socialism . It took us 80 000 White soldiers to put an end to it, while Americans got away with one McCarthy. (Americans called it communism, but it was only because to them all Europeans are socialists, and you have to tell those two apart somehow, don't you?) In Russia the funny idea that all men are – were – equal lasted longer and provided them enough time to round it out more elegantly, without war. But let's not get into that either! Today, all that is just annoying, distant history, and all men are happily unequal again, more and more so every day – some, like immigrants, even more unequal than others. And no, we won't get into that either, because there is nothing left there to get into: our present state of affairs is the final Arcadia, Lintukoto, Paradise, Narnia, Summerland, Xanadu, Heaven, you name it – or the Tree of Life if you will; end of all roads, singularity without alternatives. . . . Sorry about all that; it must have been the limbs of the tree that carried me away – too far away someone might say – and out on a limb at that. Someone else might call it irony. Anyway, the tree in the picture goes by the name Coffin Tree in the local map, so the story might as well be true. The first story, that is.

Together they are strong; they guide us, they protect us and they give shelter to our ways.

If there is fate predefined, it lies ahead behind that ridge, unseen. Does it turn to the left, does it turn to the right; does it thin out and vanish, does it build up to a highway? Or does it always take form only to the next ridge and according to the rules we've already set – by ourselves? Which one would you prefer?

As much as I've always enjoyed calendar autumns - the disappearing of excessive light and the dissipation of the numbing heat, the amazement of wearing clothes again - just as much I have always hated the mental autumn , the idea that slowly but inevitably, everything around us starts to wither and die, and that there is nothing I can do about it. The magnitude of this annihilation falls heavy on me, every year. In this annulment, progress gets too deeply buried – but not quite. That year, the fall fell to a full halt in one long and incessant, unscrupulous slide, starting right here, with the taking of this picture. The smell of the void is already there, you can almost feel the land standing still inside of it in the thin and limpid air, timidly waiting for the permafrost. Golden birds have flown home, the only movement left is the darting of the clouds – the passage of days, swift as arrows. So, you may imagine my astonishment when I found the tree – in Google Maps. Without the tree I would have never, ever been able to place the picture on the map, not even close – I would have put it much further south, away from Ylläs. But then again, this is wide angle. This is with many calendar autumns passed. View to the west towards Ylläs from Lainiotie 301.