Trip 42 — Fasta Åland Walk

Prologue
Tuesday, 18 June 2024

"That must be a good book," she said as I walked by.

Had she noticed the cover?

I've been going about town for a few weeks with a teal-covered paperback bearing a windblown-haired blonde in an off-the-shoulder dress heading out along a lonely pier. The title is in a quasi-cursive, with loopy F's and sloppy A's.

"Ooh, 'The Island Affair,'" a friend joked when he saw the book in my apartment. It's not like me to read a romance novel, particularly one whose artwork so obviously marks it in that category. (Alan Titchmarsh's "Rosie," 13 Abecedarian Walks ago, was more subtly suggestive, with a cartoonish picture of a woman trying to control her leashed dog.) Only the cover's melancholy hue and the reeds in the water hint that the archipelago of Helena Halme's novel is up near Scandinavia rather than in the Caribbean.

I've been doing a lot of flirting with the 60th parallel north lately. Yell and Eysturoy lie just above it, Hiiumaa just below. Åland (pronounced "oh-land"), the 6,757 bits of earth poking out of the Baltic Sea between Stockholm and the old Finnish capital of Turku, straddles the 60th-degree ring. Its main island, Fasta Åland, stretches a toe out immediately north of it, as if grasping for a finish line.

Åland has been an autonomous region of Finland for just over a century but its population and main language are Swedish. Ninety percent of Åland's 30,000 people live on Fasta Åland, more than a third of them in the capital of Mariehamn.

Fasta Åland is easily the most irregularly shaped landmass to figure in the Abecedarian Walks. Its extremities are only about 40 kilometers apart, but the place has so many interior lakes and peninsulas that completing a perimeter excursion on foot will take ten walking days, with a few out-and-back segments.

Set in modern times, "The Island Affair" was a good guide to where Åland residents meet up for a meal with a view, lose themselves in Mariehamn, or have their favorite Åland pancakes. As with Hiiumaa, I managed to unwittingly time my arrival with the midsummer holiday. Held on a Friday around the solstice, midsummer is a big deal on Åland; it's when an elite outdoor party provokes the affair's commencement, and it's when, absent such an invitation, I should see the annual street festival with music, dancing, and the raising of a maypole.

When the woman made her comment, I was reading the book while walking along a quiet street in Jersey City. I was six pages from the end and about six minutes away from the bar mitzvah service I was headed to play. I thought I might finish just as I arrived, but the final page remained unread until after the service.

That was all right; I didn't need the resolution yet. It's a temporary one anyway: The book is the first in a series. But unless the characters are met with a Canadian yen and head off to Prince Edward Island — as I shall do for walk #23 next month — I'll be content to leave them after following their summer footsteps.

Go on to day 1