Fishing in Moominland

Dan Richards

In late 2019, I was sent to Finland by The Economist to write about the Baltic archipelago of Pellinge, a place synonymous with writer and artist Tove Jansson. A starkly beautiful, uncanny landscape of forested islands ceding to sea-glass smooth skerries, this was the inspiration for Moomin Valley. Away on the shimmering horizon lie Bredskär and Klovharun, the latter home to Tove’s sea-shaken studio, the former familiar to millions of readers as the isle of The Summer Book. I met and spoke to some amazing Finns. I learned a lot about Tove and the Moomins. I wrote and filed my story.

Soon after my return to Edinburgh, the world went into lockdown. During the months that followed, the years, when travel wasn’t possible and memories of past adventures were the best I could do, I thought of Pellinge a lot and sought to keep in touch with the people I’d met there through social media: How’s Kim getting on with his new play? Was Erika’s store ticking over? Everyone safe and well?

Instagram allowed me a window into the world of Marie Kellgren, a professional fisher, as she worked with her father on the Finnish coast. ‘How’s the fishing?’ I’d inquire from pandemic Edinburgh, torpor city, the hush having now reached the point where a passing bus was a major event. ‘Has the sea frozen?’ In my mind Marie skated on the Baltic ice to a soundtrack of Nico at her most imperious and frosty.

That was the winter of 2020, when everyone in Scotland was stuck fast. Then one day she messaged to say they’d run the fan-sled out the shed. There followed several hours of happy updates and pictures. Several times a week we’d message about the day’s catch, and markets in Helsinki, the mix of slog and delight. And then, six months later, we began to chat about the possibility of my returning to write about her work.

In August 2021, she wrote to me about the hope of having ‘a real winter with ice on the sea’, how it always used to freeze over in January and melt in March but two years ago, for the first time on record, they fished by boat all winter long. She’d love to take me out on the frozen water and show me the ropes (nets) but we’d have to wait and see. Her message ended, ‘If we get ice, this might be possible.’

Flash forward to December: ‘Temperature has been subzero for a couple of days now. If the wind stops blowing, the Baltic will freeze soon. We haven't got much snow yet, so here is very dark at the moment.’ I tried to visualise how dark that might be.

In late Autumn 2019, when Pellinge was warm and the dusk glowed pink, I’d asked about the winter – which had then felt like a distant spectre – and had been told that the internet had really improved the lot of Finns in the sticks: ‘These days, during the dark months, a lot of Finns drink red wine and argue on the internet; before the internet, we just drank.’

‘Kalsarikännit’ or ‘päntsdrunk’, a tongue-in-cheek expression describing an apparently common Finnish feeling – to call it a national inclination feels too strong – which roughly translates as ‘deciding to get drunk at home, alone, in your underwear, with no intention of going out.’

One can quite easily picture Moominpappa slipping into a morose week of kalsarikännit, pre-hibernation, scribbling contradictory annotations in the margins of his memoirs as the nights draw in and the last leaves of autumn drift across his beloved garden furniture, but Marie didn’t strike me as somebody prone to ennui. Perhaps, as with fun, one has to make one’s own light in dark times, but she and Erika Englund, who runs a shop in Pellinge, were balls of energy in the planning of my trip once dates were settled. Post-Christmas, the visit began to take a more definite shape.

On January 10th I received this email: ‘Hi Dan! You will need warm clothes and waterproof shoes or boots, there might be water on the ice. We have one pair of waterproof trousers that you can borrow. They are needed only if/when you sit on the ice, hauling the nets.

‘If it goes as planned, we will go ice-fishing on Thursday. We are fishing a bit north from Pellinki and we will go there by car. I can pick you up on Thursday morning. Some kind of outdoor lunch might be good to have, we have sandwiches and tea around noon.

‘So that’s the plan :) Looking forward to meeting you! Marie’

*

On 12th January, 2022, I flew to Finland with friend and fellow writer, Jon Grimwood. When we landed in Helsinki it was snowing hard. The walk from plane to runway bus was enough to raise gooseflesh. After a shuttle train ride, we rumbled east to Porvoo by woozy bus – the sort of old hulk that reminded me of teenage Saturday trips to lose at rugby or run cross-country round other, fitter schools. The snow on the motorway was horizontal and thick. Every few minutes fellow passengers pressed the bell to alight at small concrete shelters in lay-bys surrounded by snow-mallowed trees. As we pulled away, I’d watch them walk into the woods or tromp the ridged hard shoulder to homes unseen.

At Porvoo we got a taxi south with a driver named Gerd. As she drove, the snow becomes thicker, the highways smaller, the world around us now deep blue.

A yellow chainlink ferry. Another half hour, then, suddenly: Pellinge. Welcomes, warm, the shy shaking of hands. Over a dinner of macaroni pie, Maria explained the practical details of ice fishing whilst I nodded, bleary but happy.

‘We start early’, she told me.

‘Of course’, we agreed.

Six a.m. Pre-dawn on the Baltic. The night sky south of Pellinge is beginning to brighten, the glow of Tallinn above the horizon fading, overtaken by first light. Palest blue. We watch it swell, warm, and rise to chase the darkness back overhead to the north. Shortly after, the sun flares red. Slabs of pack-ice chock and schlup on the shore. The temperature is -2°C. We are going fishing.

The track is slick with verglas but Marie chats easily whilst driving on the ice. As the car’s warm bubble moves through the frozen forest, she talks me through her kit: the fur-lined boots with double rubber soles, padded mittens, woolly hat, waterproofed insulated overalls, a fleece-padded onesie like a quilted flight-suit.

I have none of these things. The Finnish winter bit my face, earlier, as soon as I stepped outside. I imagine the implacable cold of the sea ice waiting to snake up my legs.

The sun is yet to penetrate the woods. We drive into a frosted Polaroid – north along a two lane highway, on and off the ferry – pearly with rime. A minute later Marie turns off the main road and begins to negotiate the bumpy track down to Äggskärsfjärden. At the shore, she helps her father load equipment and insulated boxes into a small boat, which they then hitch behind a beefy quad-bike ATV with pyramidal tracks in place of wheels. Beyond, the shore spreads flat powder. There is no wind and very little noise.

It’s still twilight, the sky flax blue, the air crystal cold. Once the boat is hitched, Jon and I climb in and perch on the boxes. Marie and her father sit side by side on the ATV and we begin to drive – drive and slide – across the frozen bay. The snow atop the ice is brittle and hatched with tracks, most mechanical but some animal. Several people have licences to fish this stretch, we’re later told, some on skis, some with dogs, a few with ATVs. As we increase speed, the quad tracks send up fountains of swarf and cut two grooves in the crystal crust, a wake over which I bounce, holding on for dear life but grinning all the way, because this is fun, a proper adventure.

About a kilometre out from shore, we stop. Engine off, the silence settles. Everything still. The snow stretches in all directions, feathered and jagged, soft and glass-hard, undulating as a memory of the water beneath. We cromp and crack as we walk.

Whilst I’m considering the snow, Marie’s dad cranks up a colossal drill – essentially a chainsaw motor on a massive screw. I note that we’ve stopped near a post in the ice and it’s next to this he’s drilling, boring down to make a hole, and again to make it bigger. Then he drives a hundred yards further on and drills a second hole. A red cord is run between the vents. Marie kneels, reaches down into the slush with a long hook and draws up a net. The net is tied to the red cord making a lengthy loop, her father having done the same at his end. This ingenious and doubtless very old method – a halieutic conveyor belt – means that raising and replacing the nets is done in the same cyclical movement.

As the first length of mesh is hauled up hand-over-hand we set eyes on our first fish, a whitefish twisting about with vigour. It’s untangled and placed in the snow where it continues to flap. As the Kellgrens work methodically through the net, it’s joined by others, mainly perch and bulbous burbot – a kind of freshwater cod. I fetch a box from the sled-boat and Marie gets to work with her measure and knife. She’s very quick and economic with her movements. The lucky fish – too small – are plopped back into the lake; the others are cut between the gills and tossed in the box where they continue to thump for some time, which is disconcerting but the way of things. Later, when larger fish emerge from the ice – big pike with big teeth, specifically – they’re stunned with a blow to the head before getting slit. It’s all rather brutal, and the snow is very bloody by the time the net is empty and reset. The pair work in tandem, reeling in, untangling, cutting and boxing: swift, deft and methodical. This is what they do.

By now the sun has risen slightly above the tree line, raking gold across the snow flats. Our shadows run for 50 metres. The new light accents the snow’s fuzz; the fern-like textures an echo of Moomin’s confession that, until the events of Moominland Midwinter, he’d always ‘thought somehow that the snow grew from the ground up!’ – as iron-filings frizz towards a magnet, and the hattifatteners bolt towards lightning.

As the day brightens, so the weird reality of our situation dawns. I’ve never stood on a frozen lake before. The fact it’s only water beneath our feet strikes me as crazy, the quicksilver magic of the Finnish winter. Three days ago the temperature here was -20°C. Today, it’s 0°C. A good day, Marie tells us, cheerfully, as burbot surface, one by one, to get bopped, and offed, and boxed.

I meet Jon’s eye. He nods.

Then Mr. Kellgren fires up an actual chainsaw and goes to work in a shower of spray, carving foot-square blocks which bob in the dark waters now revealed. Marie fetches ice block tongs and sets about extracting the chunks, I help. Up on the snow, they glow like amber ingots.

Once a rectangular hole about six feet square has been cut, the long hook is deployed and a new type of net arises. This one is a hoop net, an extended mesh funnel formed around big loops of pipe. Fish swim in and get trapped. A day or two later, the Kellgrens arrive. Then things get worse for the fish. The net is teeming with monster pike. I imagine any smaller fish unfortunate enough to get bagged beside them were eaten. A heavy duty dip net is brought from the boat-sled and the pike are hoicked up onto the snow. There follows another bout of butchery, during which Marie keeps up an upbeat commentary and, not for the first time, I think how glad I am that she’s my friend.

The Kellgren family have fished the waters round Pellinge for generations. They know them intimately and work sustainably, aware that they’re part of the wider ecology and, in so doing, respect animals and environment alike. On the ice, when the nets contain fish not favoured by Finns – tiny glass eels, roach and perch – some are left on the snow ‘for the birds’. Which sounds innocuous until you spot the birds in question: enormous white-tailed sea-eagles, ominous even at several hundred yards, at which point leaving fish feels more like a deferential offering than an afterthought.

As the morning goes on, the boxes fill. At lunchtime we stop to drink tea and eat buns. In the lull I think about harsh reality of fishing year-round. The Kellgrens’ knees and backs must hurt like hell. Marie tells me later that her father takes pride in never admitting to tiredness. She, on the other hand, feels bone-deep fatigue. When she studied tourism in Helsinki she had no intention of returning to work at the family business, but found herself drawn back. As much as she’s tried to broaden the company’s reach online, using her marketing knowledge to attract new customers, fundamentally, it’s all about the fish, and they aren’t going to catch, gut, and wash themselves.

The fishing day ends as the sun begins to sink, and the temperature with it. The ATV is backed onto a trailer, the boxes packed into a van. Marie drops us back at our cabin before returning to base where she’ll clean the fish then drive the haul to Helsinki.
That evening, gazing out at the twinkling Baltic, Jon and I consider the parallels between Tove and Marie in terms of their mix of energy and steeliness, the striking lack of sentiment in terms of life and death.

Quite early on in Moominland Midwinter, a feckless squirrel dies. Caught out in the snow, it catches the eye of ‘The Lady of the Cold’, stares bewitched a moment, then freezes to death. It is, I think, the only creature in a Moomin story to actually die on the page. ‘When one’s dead, one’s dead,’ Too-Ticky tells Moomin, consolingly. ‘This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there’ll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that’s so very sad?’

Tove described the early Moomin books, where it’s light and summer, as ‘wishful dreams’. I’d always thought her later works were more akin to nightmares, but time with Marie changed my mind – Tove’s stories were no less hopeful or inspiring because they were dark. Their truths were just stark, like the archipelago where she wrote. She didn’t pull her punches (the fish aren’t going to catch, gut, and wash themselves).

That night, on the cabin steps, as the Northern Lights shivered green beyond the firs, we raised a toast. To life, to death, to ice, to fish. To Finland. Tove and Marie. Kippis!

First published in Issue #32

Dan Richards is the author of five books, most recently Overnight, published by Canongate Books