Thinking Like a River: An Anthropology of Water and Its Uses Along the Kemi River, Northern Finland 9783839467374

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Franz Krause Thinking Like a River

EnvironmentalAnthropology Volume 7

Editorial The series EnvironmentalAnthropology publishes studies that are based on ethnographic methods, reflect emic perspectives and contribute to environmental theory building. The series is based on a broad concept of the environment, which includes both the social, human-made and the “natural” environment. With this broad thematic scope, the series maps the diversity of culturally specific lifeworlds and practices worldwide. The series also aims at bringing together ethnological studies with an environmental focus and to promoting dialogue within interdisciplinary and international debates. In this way, the writings published in EnvironmentalAnthropology make unique contributions to pressing environmental issues of the present day. The series is edited by Eveline Dürr, Frank Heidemann, Oliver D. Liebig and Martin Sökefeld.

Franz Krause, born in 1979, works at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Cologne, Germany. His previous postdoctoral projects were at the Countryside and Community Research Institute and Tallinn University. His research focuses on the role of water in culture and society. He works with approaches from environmental anthropology, political ecology and environmental history.

Franz Krause

Thinking Like a River An Anthropology of Water and Its Uses Along the Kemi River, Northern Finland

The production of this book has been funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG, project number 276392588 The research, on which this book is based, has been generously supported by: University of Aberdeen College of Arts and Social Sciences Research Bursary | University of Aberdeen Small Grants Fund | Angus Pelham Burn grant, Aberdeen | Finnish Cultural Foundation Lapland Fund | Finnish Cultural Foundation Paavo Koskinen Fund

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-n b.de

© 2023 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Matti Merivirta, or Meri-Matti (1937-2016), navigating his boat on the upper Kemi River during a multi-day boating event in opposition to renewed plans for constructing a large reservoir in the region, July 2008. Photo by Franz Krause. Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839467374 Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-6737-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-6737-4 ISSN of series: 2629-415X eISSN of series: 2747-3597 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Kemijokilaisille. To the people of the Kemi River.

Contents

Figures........................................................................................ 11 Foreword Oliver D. Liebig, Editor of EnvironmentalAnthropology ........................................... 13 Preface ....................................................................................... 15 1. Introduction .............................................................................. 19 Research objectives............................................................................ 21 The Kemi River ............................................................................... 22 The meaning of water ......................................................................... 23 Towards a concept of flow .................................................................... 25 A genealogy of “thinking like a river” .......................................................... 29 Methods ....................................................................................... 31 Overview...................................................................................... 34 2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life” ........................................ Introduction .................................................................................. Ethnic labels and cultural mixing along the river ............................................... River dwellers................................................................................. Alienation, idealisation, transfiguration – and continuation ..................................... Conclusion ....................................................................................

37 37 38 43 56 64

3. A fluvial topology: The river as space-maker ........................................... 65 Introduction .................................................................................. 65 Naming a river ................................................................................ 66 Up and down, north and south, as suggested by the river’s flow ................................. 71 The river as separator or integrator ........................................................... 80 Conclusion .................................................................................... 82 4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history ................... 83

Introduction .................................................................................. 83 The progressive genesis of a river............................................................. 84 The dominance of salmon weir fishing......................................................... 88 The establishment of timber floating ........................................................... 91 The river as a means of timber transportation ................................................. 93 The spread of hydroelectricity and the displacement of floating................................ 96 Hegemonic hydroelectricity ...................................................................100 Conservation, tourism, and present struggles for hegemony....................................104 The continuing genesis of a river..............................................................109 Conclusion ....................................................................................109 5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow ......................... 113 Introduction .................................................................................. 113 Fishing for fish and good times ............................................................... 114 Fishing techniques: Inversions of the fish’s life story .......................................... 116 Fish as river indicators........................................................................123 Seasonalities of fishing ....................................................................... 131 Fishing as attention to the river .............................................................. 133 Conclusion ....................................................................................136 6. Boating along the Kemi River: Claiming and understanding water through navigation .................................137 Introduction ..................................................................................137 Boaters, boats and a flowing river .............................................................138 Boating as relating with the river ..............................................................144 Moving along the river.........................................................................148 Boating in a world of roads....................................................................152 Conclusion ....................................................................................154 7. Timber floating down the river: Managing flow and friction of people, wood and water .................................155 Introduction ..................................................................................155 River dwellers as rafters ......................................................................156 Practicalities of timber floating ...............................................................158 Dangers and skills ............................................................................164 Managing the rhythms of timber transport ..................................................... 167 From livelihood to folklore..................................................................... 170 Conclusion .................................................................................... 171 8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world...................................173 Introduction ..................................................................................173 Modes of movement .......................................................................... 174 Permanent roads and their predecessors ...................................................... 176 Roads and river courses ......................................................................185

Driving across the river: seasonal and permanent bridges ..................................... 187 Roads and rhythms ...........................................................................189 Keli – movement in the world.................................................................. 191 Conclusion ....................................................................................193 9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement .................................195 Introduction ..................................................................................195 In the hydropower hub ........................................................................196 Producing, selling and supplying electricity ....................................................199 River dwellers and river-robbers.............................................................. 207 Managing hydropower and social relations ..................................................... 211 Observing the river............................................................................ 215 Hydropower developments as displacement ...................................................218 Conclusion ................................................................................... 224 10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river ................... 225 Seasons and seasonality ..................................................................... 226 Seasons as rhythms.......................................................................... 235 Regularities and regulation on the river....................................................... 240 Conclusion: Rhythms of transformation ....................................................... 253 11. Conclusion .............................................................................. 257 Dwelling along a river: Rhythmic flows and mutual construction ............................... 257 What is a river? .............................................................................. 263 Thinking like a river .......................................................................... 268 References................................................................................... 271

Figures

Figure 3.1

The Kemi River catchment with different extents of “Kemi Branch”

67

Figure 3.2

The island of Saarenkylä

75

Figure 3.3

Rivers, catchments and borders

81

Figure 4.1

The Kemi River as hydroelectric catchment and chain of power stations.

85

Figure 4.2

The present Kemi River projected on different stages of the isostatic uplift after the last Ice Age

86

Figure 4.3

Map of a stretch of the lower Kemi River, depicting in detail the positioning and characteristics of the respective long salmon weirs

89

Figure 4.4

Timber floating channels in the Kemi River Basin in 1983.

94

Figure 4.5

A map and an aerial photograph of the river as floating channel

96

Figure 4.6

Detail of a map of timber-confining constructions, upstream from Ossauskoski power station, late 1980s

99

Figure 4.7

The “energy-economic plan for the largest rivers of the Kemi River catchment” published by the National Board of Waters (Vesihallitus) in 1980., published by the National Board of Waters (Vesihallitus) in 1980

102

Figure 4.8

Two popular representations of the Kemi River main channel

103

Figure 4.9

Detail of a canoeing map of an upper Kemi River section

106

Figure 6.1

Journey undertaken by inhabitants of Kittilä to attend mass in Sodankylä

147

Figure 6.2

Portages on the headwaters of the Kemi and Luiro Rivers, from Meri-Matti’s account

150

Figure 6.3

Two generations of homes on the Kemi River

153

Figure 7.1

Two types of timber floating barriers in the river

161

Figure 8.1

Main roads around the village centre of Autti

181

Figure 8.2

Major rivers and major roads in the Kemi River catchment

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Figure 8.3

Three parallel generations of permanent roads on the lower Kemi River

186

Figure 8.4

Ferry crossing the Kemi River in Oikarainen, as an extension of the road

188

Figure 9.1

Electricity consumption, production and import in Finland

201

12

Thinking Like a River Figure 9.2

Electricity prices measured in Euros, on the Nordpool market during week 30 in 2009

202

Figure 9.3

Combined electricity production at all Kemi River power stations during week 39 in 2008

203

Figure 9.4

Submerged islands, channels and river banks, widened watercourse and subsidiary constructions

221

Figure 9.5

Adaptation of timber floating work districts (uittopiirit) on the upper Kitinen

222

Figure 10.1

Water level between two dams

247

Figure 10.2

Hydropower monument on Seitakorva dam

249

Figure 10.3

Measured and projected discharge at Savukoski

252

Figure 10.4

“Old River” and new Vuontis River

255

Figure 11.1

A river profile

267

Foreword Oliver D. Liebig, Editor of EnvironmentalAnthropology

Living by and with the river shapes the people as well as their practices. The river – its currents, form, or use – is being rearranged by the people settling at its banks, engaging in a reticulation both ongoing and mutual. In environmental anthropology, there has always been a particular interest in the exchange processes people maintain with the waters nearby. However, although many studies focus on this topic, it is hard to find valuable descriptions of how the relations to this specific environment actually look. While claiming that they analyse such relations, they tend to speak of political or cultural processes instead. As a result, one learns very little about the environment and its relation to the people inhabiting it. In contrast to such studies, Franz Krause’s book aims for a different approach. This seventh contribution to the book series EnvironmentalAnthropology focuses on life at the Kemi River. Franz Krause gained his insights during a year of fieldwork in the Finnish province of Lapland. Starting in the provincial capital of Rovaniemi, he examines the narratives and practices of living with and being part of the river’s currents. He highlights continuities and changes in river transportation, plant growth, and timber production, but also in hydroelectricity generation and fishing, which the latter continues to be a crucial way of relating to the river. Through fishing, the river dwellers not only experience an immersive engagement (Gísli Pálsson 1994 “Enskilment at Sea.” Man 29, No. 4 (Dec): 901–27), but they express their belonging to the river and, not least, are marking their territory. Franz Krause thinks their environmental relations not as separate entities, but describes them as enmeshed in weather conditions and seasonal temporalities (ice, floods, droughts) which are particularly impactful with regards to the living with and managing of the Kemi River. Moreover, in characterising the river dwellers as embedded in certain local-specific narratives, he depicts them in a profound interchange with the landscape they inhabit. In this context, he finds analogies in behaviour, practices, and appearances between the river and its inhabitants. Continuity and change always play major roles when dealing with environmental processes. At the riverside, this becomes visible through the history of extensive lakedrainage (“järvenlasku”) projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here,

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Thinking Like a River

Franz Krause highlights the potential frictions in everyday encounters and the (political) struggles that nowadays come with negotiations around electricity production and consumption. Again, these aspects are portrayed as an inherent part of environmental relations, emphasising that the spheres of the political are not detached from making a living and dwelling on site. Regarding the concept of thinking – as referenced in the book’s title – the question is not so much whether or not people really think like a river or what the thinking of a river might truly consist of. It is more about enhancing the concept of thinking, conceived as an environmental meshwork reaching from practices over environmental continuities and changes to infrastructures. Franz Krause frames this approach as an anthropology of rhythms that mark the water flows of the river, the electricity markets, and the river dweller’s sensibilities all at once. In his study, Franz Krause takes the environment and the environmental relations of the river dwellers at the Kemi River seriously. He describes the richness and the range of environmental engagement with the river in great detail by focusing closely on the specific exchange relations and how they affect both people and the environmental coherences that surround them. This makes this study an important contribution to the field of environmental anthropology, proving that the particular relations themselves deserve the main focus of attention. Oliver D. Liebig, May 2023

Preface

Welcome to this book! It contains the doctoral dissertation that I defended at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland in 2010. Following some minor corrections, the dissertation was digitally archived on the university’s server and has been available online since. Over the past 12 years, however, I have repeatedly been asked where my book was and why I had not published my doctoral research. My original plan had been to have the dissertation translated into Finnish and to publish it in Finland in order to make it available more easily to the people who had contributed to the research and for whom the Kemi River is a more relevant concern than for most other potential readers; this idea did not receive funding, though. Regarding the English-language version, I considered it published as it was, freely available for download around the world. Unfortunately, this is not the way academic merit works, especially in Germany, where I now live and work. A book, defined as a document with an ISBN and preferably sold by a large publisher, is what counts. So – here comes the book. I sincerely hope that this format is more than a fetish of university vanity and does help this research to reach more readers, because both research and readers would deserve this. In writing the dissertation that became this book, I have been supported, in various ways, by many people and institutions. The present text is indebted to their ideas, suggestions, and trust and they deserve my heartfelt vielen Dank, kiitoksia paljon and many thanks. So many, in fact, have helped me along the way that it would be impossible to list all their names here. A few of them must be mentioned nonetheless. My supervisors at the Department of Anthropology in Aberdeen, Tim Ingold and Andrew Whitehouse, have continually fostered my anthropological enthusiasm, patiently read and commented on notoriously oversized drafts, and time and again pointed my work in fascinating directions. While doing fieldwork, I benefited from an affiliation to the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland, Finland; in particular, I want to thank Anna and Florian Stammler. My encounter with the Kemi River was greatly facilitated by Hannu Korva, Tapani Niemi, Juho Päiväniemi and Helena Tiihonen, who began sharing their experiences of the river and suggested further respondents during that critical first stage of fieldwork, where ‘the field’ appeared like a closed book to the newcomer. Pirkko Gröötilä and Sinikka

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Thinking Like a River

Vuonokari-Kämäräinen have provided invaluable help with the Finnish language, the former by interpreting many of my first interviews, the latter by seeing me through a number of language courses at the University of Lapland. During the analysis of my findings and writing of the dissertation, I enjoyed affiliations to the Thule Institute and Department of Art Studies and Anthropology at the University of Oulu, Finland, and to the Canadian Circumpolar Institute, University of Alberta, Canada. Special thanks are due to Teija and Hannu Heikkinen in Oulu/Kiiminki, and Anita Dey Nuttall and Mark Nuttall in Edmonton. This research project was financially supported by the College of Arts and Social Sciences (Research Bursary) and the Small Grants Fund, both of the University of Aberdeen; by Angus Pelham Burn and his generous help to anthropology research students; and twice by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, from their Lapland Fund and their Paavo Koskinen Fund, respectively. Most of all, I want to thank my parents, Barbara and Georg Krause, for their ongoing inspiration and help, and Hannah Strauß-Mazzullo and Jonas Strauß, for making sure I lead a life beyond the research, too. The majority of fieldwork, on which this book is based, was carried out in 2007 and 2008. What is often called the “ethnographic present” therefore refers to this period: the “now” in the book does not refer to the moment of reading it, but to the time of research and writing. Similarly, the book’s “anthropological present”, if it were, is situated in this period: the literature and debates that it builds on are those of the time of writing, where “recent” means the 2000s and today means around 2010. Much has changed along the Kemi River since then, some people have passed on, ever fewer river dwellers remember the Kemi River without dams or even the timber floating days. But from what I understand from the distance, the general dynamics and tensions of living along this river have remained, including the repeated revival of debates about further dam building. While the anthropology of water was in its infancy at the time of writing, the field has burgeoned in the past decade and this book now contributes to a much wider set of debates than it would have ten years ago. If I wrote this book today, I would be able to relate my findings to a much more developed set of literatures in water-related research; but this would change neither the main arguments nor the findings themselves. I would probably not use the term “stream” to refer to a river in the sense of a watercourse with a strong current, which I do in this book inspired by the Finnish word “virta”, often used synonymously with “river”. Some of the ways in which I would link the material and arguments from this book to more recent academic debates can be found in the articles and chapters that I have published in the meantime and that draw, often verbatim, on sections from the dissertation. Parts of chapter three have been developed into the chapter “Rivers, borders, and the flows of the landscape” in A. Kannike & M. Tasa (eds) The Dynamics of Cultural Borders. Approaches to Culture Theory 6. Tartu: Tartu University Press, pp. 24–45 (2016) and the article “Making space along the Kemi River: a fluvial geography in Finnish Lapland.” Cultural Geographies 24(2): 279–294 (2017); a summary of chapter four can be found in “Shaping and reshaping the Kemi River: notes on the perpetual genesis of the major catchment basin in Finnish Lapland” in: M. Nuttall, H. Strauss, and K. Tervo-Kankare (eds.) Society, Environment and Place in Northern Regions. Oulu: Thule Institute, pp. 27–45 (2011); an argument from chap-

Preface

ter five has been published as “Fishing with empathy: knowing fish and catching them on the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland.” Polar Record 50(4): 354–363 (2014); some material from chapter seven has found its ways into “Is a River ‘Infrastructure’? Thinking About Timber Transport on the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland.” Voices from around the world 2017(3); I have written about the idea of keli from chapter eight as “Conditions. ” In Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, edited by Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, 82–86. Earth, Milky Way: Punctum (2020); the main thrust of chapter ten is developed further in “Seasons as rhythms on the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland.” Ethnos 78(1): 23–46 (2013); and the observations on water movement from chapter eleven are published in “Rapids on the ‘Stream of Life’: The significance of water movement on the Kemi River.” Worldviews 17(2): 174 – 185 (2013). The respective publishing companies have kindly given their permission to reproduce these texts here.

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1. Introduction

Kemijoki

Kemi River

Lapsena tunturilähteen ja tuulen syntynyt on Kemin mahtava vuo. Senhän jo koskien kuohuista kuulen, vapauden viestiä kertovat nuo. Kertovat kurkien huudoista suolla, soittavat välkkeestä yöttömän yön. Haastavat, kuinka nuo ihmiset tuolla laulavat laulua taiston ja työn.

As the child of mountain spring and wind born is the mighty stream of the Kemi. I’m hearing the roaring of its rapids, they narrate the message of freedom. Telling of the heron calls in the mires ringing out the shimmer of the nightless night. Chatting, how those people there sing songs of combat and work.

Lähteelläs tunturivihurit soittaa, välillä jänkien lohduton vyö. Rannalla ihminen kärsii ja voittaa, siellä on ainainen, ankara työ. Kuuluu jo kauaksi ympäri Suomen, kirveen kun iskee Pohjolan mies. Eilen on alkanut Pohjolan huomen, tänään sen koko maailma ties.

At your spring the mountain winds sound, between hills the bleak boggy belt. Man on the bank suffers and wins, his work is ceaseless, arduous too. Far across Finland, one can hear the sound of Nordic man striking his axe. Yesterday began the Nordic tomorrow, today the whole world knows it.

Kaunis on syntymälähteesi syli. Uljas on uomasi, voittamaton. Vaarojen halki ja jänkien yli, helmassa merten sun määräsi on. Laulusi lauluina näin ovat meillä, Pohjolan lapsille soittosi soi. Kaikuvi aavoilla, tunturiteillä: Päivälle Luojamme Pohjolan loi.

Beautiful is the bosom of your birth-source. Bold is your course, invincible. Across hills and over bogs, your way will take to the bosom of the seas. Your songs we sing as our songs, your sound sounds for the children of the North. It echoes in the waves, in the mountain-roads: The North was created to be the land of the light.

The lyrics1 of this song by Veikko Lehti (1952) were published as one of the first items in the first issue in the journal of the local history association (kotiseutuyhdistys) Totto in 1

My thanks are due to Pirkko Gröötilä, Eeva Heinonen and Inka Wahlstén for help with translating these lyrics from the Finnish original. The original actually rhymes, is set in a consistent dactylic

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Thinking Like a River

Rovaniemi, on the banks of the Kemi River (Kemijoki in Finnish2 ). The song speaks of a “mighty stream” integrating mountains and sea, birds and mires, past and future, winds and the midnight sun, along which people work, suffer, fight and win a “Nordic tomorrow”. It sings of roaring rapids, echoing messages of freedom and invincibility to river dwellers and beyond, and the equally powerful sound of human labour along the stream, together realising the dream of a “land of light” in Finnish Lapland. It praises, in short, the Kemi River and its significance for human life along its banks. What it does not tell, is that the combination of the roaring rapids and “Nordic man striking his axe” had recently brought about severe social and ecological repercussions. Two hydropower dams had been constructed in the catchment, and many more would follow over the coming decade; industrial forestry led to ever more logs floating on the summertime river, polluting its clear waters and jeopardising fish and fishing; and the hope to boost forest productivity by draining forested land literally drowned many tributaries in an increased load of sediment. This book, very much like the song, is about the Kemi River and the people living along its banks. Instead of lyrical poetry, however, an anthropological approach is attempted, investigating the relations of river and river dwellers through the medium of water and the practicalities and meanings of water use. The significance of water for human life is undoubted and has received considerable study and attention in the recent past (e.g., Palmer 1994, Ward 1997, Shiva 2002, Barlow and Clarke 2003, Young 2005, Gleick 2009, World Water Assessment Programme 2009). Anthropologists, too, have recently begun to focus on water, which is evident, for instance, in that the January and February 2010 issues (vol. 51: 1, 2) of Anthropology News, the monthly paper of the American Anthropological Association, have been devoted to “Water governance and management” and “The meaning of water” respectively. This introductory chapter lays out the specific approach to the relations of humans and waters that I will take throughout the book. After stating my research objectives, I briefly review existing literature on the Kemi River and its inhabitants. This feeds into a discussion of literature on water and water use from anthropology and related disciplines, and an outline of a concept of flow that is to guide the coming analysis of river dwellers and stream. Then, I present what I mean by the phrase “thinking like a river”, explain my research methods, and finally, I give an overview of the structure and chapters of the coming book.

2

metre and boasts many other stylistic embellishments, such as alliterations that are highly esteemed in Finnish. The English translation, unfortunately, is a mere rendering of the direct meaning. In rendering Finnish place names, I have usually translated the part of the name that indicates whether it is a river or a lake (e.g., joki in Kemijoki translates as River). Where these place names are applied to towns or villages, however, I have left them in the Finnish original. Thus, I render Kemijärvi, for instance, as “Lake Kemi” when I write about the lake itself, but as “Kemijärvi” when I refer to the town located on the lake and sharing a name with the body of water.

1. Introduction

Research objectives The idea of focusing on the relations of a river and the people along its banks had developed out of my earlier study of approaches to the non-human world in ecological economics (e.g., Costanza 1991, Costanza and King 1999) and environmental ethics (e.g., O’Neill, Turner and Bateman 2001, O’Neill 2005, Curry 2006). Although these two approaches explicitly differ in their stances regarding the commensurability of various environmental values, they seemed to fundamentally agree on the idea that these values have an “objective” quality. Both approaches to human valuation of their environments assume that these environments constitute a world of nature separate from that of human society, and that human beings are self-contained entities possessing reason and conscience. Thereby, they reduce the world to a set of objects that can be classified in terms of their intrinsic attributes. Dealing with relatively stable environmental phenomena, such as ore deposits or forests, a claim to their objectiveness is easily taken for granted. When dealing, however, with water, this flowing and ever-transforming element crucial for most biological life, participating in many physical processes, and constituting two-thirds of the human body, both the boundedness and the objectiveness of the environment is more readily called into question. On the most general level, thus, the question guiding this research has been how living, working and identifying with a flowing river is different from living, working and identifying with solid land. More directly than land, I surmised, a river would convey ideas of people’s interrelations and the transformative flow that integrates them and their environments (cf. Strang 2006b). In this context, I mean by ‘land’ a solid substrate upon which life takes place, such as is often implied by notions of “place” or “rootedness” (e.g., Bender 2001). A focus on relations with the river, I imagined, would potentially help to illustrate how places are not fixed entities but constituted by continuous, rhythmic flows of people, waters, and others (cf. Ingold 2009a), and how the ideas of spatial and sociocultural integration resonate with the course and dynamics of rivers (cf. Harris 1998, Oslender 2002). Whereas I suspected that flows and frictions integrate humans with one another and with the places they inhabit more generally, I wanted to investigate these relations along a river, itself a formidable instance of flow and friction. Instead of focussing solely on representational issues, however, I wanted to emphasise practical engagements with the river (cf. Bourdieu 1977) and the specific kinds of perception, relations and skills associated with these activities (cf. Ingold 2000). Therefore, my more specific research questions pertained to the resonances of particular riveractivities with ways of understanding the river and the wider flows of sociocultural and ecological phenomena. I set out to explore how such activities affect both whether the people engaged in them “think like a river”, and if so, how this thinking is done. Concentrating on three activities – fishing, traffic and hydroelectricity generation – I looked into the respective knowledges and skills that river dwellers developed in practising each of these, and which aspects and images of the river related to each of them.

21

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Thinking Like a River

The Kemi River With a length of about six hundred kilometres, the Kemi River in the Finnish province of Lapland is the longest in Finland, and its catchment area of about 51 400 km2 (Korpela 1977: 1) drains over half the province into the Bothnian Bay of the Baltic Sea (see chapters two, three and four for a more detailed introduction to the river and its people). This river captured my research interests in a number of ways. The pronounced seasonalities of temperature, light and discharge, characteristic of this area around the Arctic Circle, offered the possibility of exploring the dynamic transformation of the river along a variety of different dimensions, and of elucidating corresponding variations in human uses and skills. Furthermore, the river and its inhabitants have, during recent history, undergone rapid transformations regarding flow regimes, infrastructure, and livelihoods, which many people remember well and which have received much attention in locally published material. In practical terms, some of these transformations – in particular the development of an intricate and well-maintained road-network – meant that I had access to the river and river dwellers along its length throughout my fieldwork period. And finally, the river flowed through a region well-known to my first supervisor who was able to direct me to relevant issues and to discuss ethnographic and linguistic details with me. It soon became clear that anthropological literature dealing specifically with the river dwellers is scant. There are a number of historical and ethnological accounts of the famous, but extinct salmon fishery (Vilkuna 1975), of the work of timber rafters on the river (Snellman 1996), and of life along the catchment’s upper reaches in the early twentieth century (Paulaharju 1939, 1963 [1923]). Moreover, various anthropological studies analyse farming in the catchment and beyond (Ingold 1988, Abrahams 1991, Ortlieb 2000). Most anthropological research in Lapland, however, concentrates either on forestry issues (e.g., Lehtinen 1991, Berglund 2000), reindeer herding (e.g., Heikkinen 2002, 2006) or environmental conservation (e.g., Mazzullo 2005). The largest share of studies dealing directly with the Kemi River have investigated the social implications of hydropower development (e.g., Havukkala 1964, Tikkanen and Tikkanen 1972, Asp and Järvikoski 1974, Järvikoski 1979, Järvikoski and Kylämäki 1981, Asp, Luostarinen and Mäkinen 1981, Luostarinen 1982, Huttunen, Keränen and Pennanen 1995, Hämeenniemi 1996, Leppänen 2001) and the social movements opposing further damming (e.g., Autti 1996, Peuhkuri 1996, Romppainen 1996, Liljegren 1999, Suopajärvi 2001, Stöckell 2008). These studies are rich in detailed description and often inspiring in political analysis. While they powerfully convey the significance of hydropower developments for the present river and its inhabitants, such studies frequently leave little room for all the other important themes and activities that constitute the relations of river dwellers and the river. For example, much is written about life on the river in literary works (see Kerätär 1996 for a review), personal memoirs (e.g., Alaruikka 1977, Alamaunu 1987, Pokka 1994) and local histories (e.g., Niemelä 1989, Kuusela 1990, Heikkilä 1994, Yliniemi 1995a, Hämäläinen 1997, Itkonen 2001, Kempas and Pränni 2002, Julkunen 2003, Niemi 2004a, Yliniemi 2005). The major hydropower company has commissioned two historical collections about the river, dealing respectively with the “by-gone Kemi River” (Linkola 1967a) and the “present Kemi River” (Seppälä 1976), the latter mostly a celebration of the feats of elec-

1. Introduction

trification and hydropower technology. In sum, existing literature on the people of the Kemi River seems to focus on life in the past, which was closely entwined with the river, and the fundamental shifts induced by hydropower developments that are portrayed as having severed the link between people and river.

The meaning of water Anthropologists have long written about issues of water and humans. Such studies range from the classic accounts of people maintaining sophisticated irrigation systems (e.g., Leach 1961) to recent writings about the sociocultural dynamics of irrigation (e.g., Lansing 1991, Mosse 2003) or issues of dam-building and constructions of water scarcity (e.g., Mehta 2001, 2005). Particularly the latter theme is discussed in a variety of publications with an anthropology-geography-development-studies background (e.g., Potkanski and Adams 1998, Lansing, Lansing and Erazo 1998, Swyngedouw 1999, Kaika 2003, Roth, Boelens and Zwarteveen 2005, McAvoy 2006). These studies tend to take a political ecology approach, focussing on the power relations and discourses that “naturalise” particular images of, uses for and access to water. Another interesting take on the study of humanwater relations has been proposed by geographer Jarmo Kortelainen (1999), who has analysed the utilisation of an eastern Finnish river in terms of an “actor-network”. This allows him to avoid the conceptual shortcomings of juxtaposing a natural river with societal utilisation and cultural meaning-making, and to approach the river instead as a nexus of various actants, both human and non-human, including “glacial processes, gravitation, hydrological circulation, microbes, fish and vegetation” (ibid.: 237). Studies focussing more closely on the meaning of water include a book on the reassessment of wetlands in a post-modern era (Giblett 1996), in which the cultural and ecological significance of such landscapes, dismissed under modernity as useless wastelands, is acknowledged precisely on the grounds of their messiness and ambiguity. Various scholars have delved into the semantic history of water, for instance in Renaissance Europe (Schama 1995) or in Western urban space (Illich 1985, Bergua Amores 2008), usually highlighting the relative novelty of the construction of water as hygienic detergent, as well as the instrumental role of political-economic elites in shaping different meanings and employing them to their advantage. A collection of works on spiritual aspects of water (Shaw and Francis 2008) discusses its fundamental role in religion, cosmology and symbolism. Alley’s (2002) research on the Ganges contrasts the holiness of its waters to its physical pollution, discussing issues of purity between religion and industrial waste. And Orlove (2002) provides a rich ethnographic account of life on and around Lake Titicaca. But none of these publications seems actively to engage in the issue of what are the sociocultural and material implications of living and dealing with water. Probably the most promising body of work in this respect has been carried out by Veronica Strang, who has developed an approach to the anthropological study of water in her studies of the River Stour in southern England (e.g., 2004, 2005b) and of the Mitchell River (e.g., 2001, 2005c) in northern and the Brisbane River (e.g., 2006c) in eastern Australia. She observes, for instance, that different activities performed on or along a river resonate with different images of what the river is and what it is for (2001, 2009), and

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that direct sensory experience of river water engenders meanings that are surprisingly consistent, both cross-culturally and historically (2005a). Another recurrent topic in her work is the relation of water management, material culture and social structure (2004: 129–192, 2005b, 2005c, 2008a), indicating that controlling water always has implications for controlling the users of the water as well. This is based on the finding that water is a most powerful integrator, both physically and metaphorically, of people, linking human beings who live along the same stream or depend on common waterworks. Moreover, Strang writes about the “transformations” that water – as a fundamental ingredient of organic substance – undergoes in the processes of production, acculturation and commodification (2005c, 2006c). Because it forms an essential constituent of products and human producers alike, water assumes a central role in the construction of social identity and spheres of belonging (2006b, 2008b, cf. Malpas 2006). Water issues thus pertain directly to human and economic issues, not just because life and production are impossible without water, but through the acknowledgement of a common substance shared by a particular group, its non-human environment and the objects that come forth from their mutual engagement (Strang 2004, 2006b). Controlling water is thus a way of controlling a sense of self. In a recent publication, Strang summarises what she understands as the culturally and historically universal meaning of water: Water is perceived, broadly, as the lifeblood of every endeavour, as the essence of spiritual and social identity, as the substance most vital to human health and well being, as the wellspring of individual and collective wealth and agency and as the fluid manifestation of literal and metaphorical processes of change and transformation (2009: 3–4). Strang thus significantly advances the anthropology of water, but she seems to be caught up in a tension between understanding water as “substance” (e.g., 2004: 67–79) and as “object” (e.g., 2005a: 97), albeit a most malleable and fleeting one. As substance, it forms part of a host of things and processes, as object it has its very own characteristics and exists outside of humans and other life forms rather than being incorporated into them. But what does it mean to say that water can be seen both as object and as part of everything else? Strang (2006a, 2006b) observes, on the one hand, that water is characterised by its fluidity and, on the other, that it forms part of a “concrete, material” world with “a greater degree of constancy” than the “dynamics of social and cultural life” (2006b: 156). In trying to bridge the opposition between water-as-physical-element and wateras-metaphorical-flow, Strang thus constructs another somewhat arbitrary division, between material-based places and a flow-dominated sociocultural universe. Mark Harris’ work with people living along the Brazilian Amazon (e.g., 1998, 2000, 2005) avoids theorising water altogether. Nevertheless, the dynamics of the river and the resonating processes of life on the riverbank form a core aspect of his anthropology. River dwellers, in Harris’ account, relate to water not only by swimming in, drinking or contemplating it, but above all by experiencing its rhythmic flow and by gearing their attention and activities to this flow. Rather than object or substance, flow emerges as the essence of water. This flow is subject to continual rhythmic dynamics, most vividly evi-

1. Introduction

dent in the annual changes of water level, oscillating between a dry period and an inundation of the entire floodplain. The significance of water in anthropological terms thus goes beyond its integrating role among human beings and among them and the material world, since water essentially represents a material and symbolic flow that continuously forms and transforms the social and ecological universe (cf. Ingold 2007c, 2009b). Rather than suggesting stasis in a world of bound objects, water lends itself to an alternative “imagination of matter”, as philosopher Gaston Bachelard puts it. Because we fail to de-objectify images and deform forms – a process which allows us to see the matter beneath the object – the world is strewn with unrelated things, immobile and inert solids, objects foreign to our nature. […] By grouping images and dissolving substances, water helps the imagination in its task of de-objectifying and assimilating. It also contributes to a type of syntax, a continual linking up and gentle movement of images that frees a reverie bound to objects (1983: 12). In the modern, urban image of water this inherent sense of relation and transformation has been largely eradicated, and water has been reclassified as the abstract, anonymous compound H2 O that actively obliterates its role as “shared substance” (Illich 1985). In other contexts, however, the principal idea of watery flows that make and unmake people and things persists. It thrives, for instance, in the ancient but presently rather popular Tao philosophy, which has been paraphrased as “the watercourse way” (Watts 1975). To sum up, two closely related aspects of water emerge as critical for anthropological study. The first is its property as shared substance, both physically and metaphorically, supporting ideas of identity and integration of human groups internally and with particular environments and artefacts. Moreover, this aspect draws attention to the connectedness of various “objects” and “forms”, as water flows in and out of many “products”, “things” and other entities otherwise regarded as bounded and separate. This links directly with the second aspect, namely its flow. More than many other phenomena in the world, water is characterised by rhythmic movement and transformation, relating to particular affordances both for human activities and for their homologous metaphorical transfers to making sense of life. Does close engagement with water thus instil a particular outlook on the world that perceives it as pulsating movements of substance, flowing in and out of people, places and things, rather than as a set of pre-constituted objects, territories and individuals whose relations are only secondary to their individuality? This is the central question guiding the ethnographic analysis in the coming chapters. Before it can be adequately addressed, however, a few conceptual clarifications are needed.

Towards a concept of flow If an essential part of the meaning of water lies in its flow, movement and transformation, then an anthropological study of a river, following in the footsteps of Strang and Harris, could be fruitful. Rivers are both formidable phenomena of flow and important foci of human dwelling. They are more than carriers of symbolic meaning and sources

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of identity-construction, as Cusack (2007) seems to suggest. Living with a river, as the works of Strang and Harris indicate, means attending to its rhythmic dynamics (Harris 1998) and dwelling in a world permeated by the waters’ sound (cf. Feld 1996, Levin 2006), sight and touch (Strang 2004, 2006a), and the sense of its continuous movement and transformation. Approaching life on the river in this way, two psychological concepts come to mind. The first is William James’ (1892) “stream of consciousness”. He posits that the human mind generally works in terms of rhythmic flows, in which individual thoughts are merely instances, like drops of water in a river, surrounded by and surrounding other drops. Just as the river is not the sum of any number of drops, but characterised by the particular movement and arrangement of its matter, consciousness is not a “train” – made by linking individual cars – but a stream. The other psychological concept is Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s (1990) idea of flow as “optimal experience”. Csíkszentmihályi argues that human experience and actions are in a state of flow when they issue from a rather challenging task met by well-developed skills. Tackling something difficult by putting one’s abilities to full use is said to result in an experience where: Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted. An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for their own sake (ibid.: 71). Because skills develop while practicing an activity, people need to expand their challenges accordingly in order to sustain the experience of flow. If the challenge is too high, people are frustrated, if their skills are too sophisticated for the challenge, they become bored. Flow only occurs when there is a dynamic balance of skills and challenges that may, however, transform the experience of the skilled practitioner so as to “melt” the “objectness” of the things she uses into the very flow (Ingold 2009b: 147), extinguishing the detached reflection of external things. Taken together, these two concepts imply that cognition, experience and meaningful action can themselves be understood in terms of movement. Parallel to the rhythmic flows of river water and resonating sociocultural dynamics, there are rhythmic flows in human mind and experience. Csíkszentmihályi’s ideas about flow, in particular, are related to the – most watery – concept of immersion (e.g., Strang 2004: 54–59, 2005a: 100), which has, however, been criticised for sidelining the spatialities, practicalities and materialities of the medium (or sociocultural context) in which one immerses oneself (Helmreich 2007). If thinking and acting in the world are “streams” and “flows”, then it must be cautioned that such movements do not happen in a vacuum, but through continuous negotiation and tensions with other movements. There is always some friction (Tsing 2005). The idea that sociocultural dynamics, particularly as they pertain to spatial movements and connections, are meaningfully conceptualised as flows has also been voiced by a number of post-modern scholars. Most poignantly, Rob Shields has treated “flow as a new paradigm” (1997) in a programmatic introduction to the first issue of the journal “Space and Culture”. Drawing on such theorists as Deleuze and Lefebvre, Shields devel-

1. Introduction

ops a concept of flow that corresponds closely to the terms suggested by my reading of the anthropology of water. Rather than an empiricism of isolated and static objects, setting flows at the centre of social investigation, forces one to confront a world in motion and to acknowledge oneself, always moving position and perspective (ibid.: 2–3). Unlike “processes” that merely link one otherwise stable disposition with another, “flows signal pure movement, without [...] suggesting a point of origin or a destination” (ibid.: 3). They are characterised, not by their purpose as relation, but by a particular tempo, rhythm and direction; “flows have a Fate but no destiny” (ibid.). Concurrently, in a world emergent from flows, the distinction between fixed and mobile entities is the outcome of a tactical, political endeavour, not an analytic one. These considerations resonate with Tim Ingold’s advances in anthropology that re-conceptualise the relations of human beings and the places they inhabit. Instead of a fixed, bounded locality, a place is rather an open “nexus of ongoing life activity” (2005: 506), with horizons but without boundaries, “constituted in movement, through the comings and goings of people and animals” (ibid.: 507). Although he does not develop an explicit theory of flows, Ingold writes extensively about the trails, lines, threads and fluxes (e.g., 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2008) that constitute human biographies, place-making and a person’s interactions with human and non-human environments. He argues that place, movement and knowledge are most adequately understood as instances of trajectories of movement, becoming and storytelling, rather than as enclosed territory, transportation from origin to destination, and the accumulation of individual facts, respectively (2009a). Ingold avoids the term “flow”, presumably to differentiate his approach from the overly abstract and sweeping statements about, for instance, the “space of flows” (e.g. Castells 1996), grounding it rather in social and material practices such as walking (Ingold 2004, Ingold and Lee Vergunst 2008), wayfinding (Ingold 2000: 219–242), weaving (ibid.: 339–348), and writing (2007b), to name but a few. Nevertheless, his argument is critical to my understanding of flow. Life is not conceived as an interaction of given entities and individuals, but as an ongoing enfolding of movement by and between persons, animals, plants, the weather and a host of other dynamics. Outside academia, in novels, autobiographies and semi-documentary books on rivers, ideas of flow also surface frequently. Might there be a connection between the flowing waters these writers describe and the conceptual language they find appropriate to do so? Best known among these writings is probably Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” (1950 [1874]), which contains an amalgam of river-anecdotes, cultural history and the author’s memories of his work as a steamboat pilot. The book is rich in descriptions of the continuous alterations of water, river bed and course, and the incessant pranks they play on navigation, settlement and other human activities along its stream. Most famous is probably his portrayal of the river’s capricious meandering that “plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions:” [F]or instance, a man is living in the state of Mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side

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of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the state of Louisiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him (ibid.: 3–4). Life on the Mississippi emerges from Twain’s account as continuous transformation, where shifting river courses, rapidly developing transport technology, the rise and demise of riverside towns, and the biographies of people all flow into one another. The only constancy is the river itself, but which is anything but static not only in that it streams, but also in its meandering, sediment load, floods and droughts. Similarly, Scottish novelist Neil Gunn’s “Highland river” (1991 [1937]) portrays a “free rushing world of light and earth and water” (ibid.: 24) in which the protagonist, the waters and salmon of his home river, and other past and present people living along the stream, are intimately joined. The protagonist’s journey to the source of the river simultaneously becomes a journey to his personal origins. In the famous “A river runs through it”, Norman Maclean (1976) writes about his family fly-fishing in western Montana, USA, but does so in a way that merges the family history with the rhythmic flow of the watercourses and the interaction with its fish. He ends his narrative with the (often-quoted) observation that when fishing, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm [of fly-fishing] and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters (ibid.: 104). Besides these “classic” river-narratives, the genre is prospering presently and the metaphor of flow to convey the mutual transformations of people and rivers continues to be central to these accounts. For instance, Richard Flanagan’s “Death of a river guide” (1996) recounts the flowing together of biographies and rivers in the framing narrative of a group of tourist rafters descending a river. Not coincidentally, Flanagan had published an environmental history of a river (1985) before his career as a novelist, and he is known to be a keen canoeist. Generally, both a somewhat historic approach – accommodating developments, changes and continuities – and some kind of direct experience of the river – having swum, boated or fished there – seem to suggest the metaphor of flow to these writers. This is evident, moreover, in Akiko Busch’s “Nine ways to cross a river” (2007) that documents her swimming across nine North American rivers, which she takes as an opportunity to delve into the environmental history of each respective stream, to recount her personal experiences with some of the river dwellers, to reflect on the rhythms of swimming and other sociocultural and ecological phenomena, and to ponder the integration of the world through water. A similar correspondence of embodied experience with a river, the stream’s environmental history and an array of somewhat philosophical questions, all rendered in an idiom of flow, can be discerned in journalist Tom Fort’s (2008) ac-

1. Introduction

count of descending the River Trent mostly by punt, or hydrologist David Archer’s (1992) book on Northumbria as the “land of singing waters”, among many others. My understanding of flow emerging from these observations and grounded in the foregoing discussion of the concept in recent academic writing is that it pertains to a world in motion, epitomised not so much by post-modern slogans of new mobilities, placelessness and globalised streams of capital, labour and information, as by an idiom sensible to the movement, transformation, growth and mutual exchanges that constitute lived life. Flows imply trajectories, which I take to be neither the connections of separate places, things or persons nor the changes from one steady state to another, nor the abstract fluxes that are often held to be characteristic of the “information age”. Rather, my understanding of flow means approaching the world as a “meshwork” (Ingold 2007b) of the various “threads” along which human biographies, knowledge and skills, meteorological phenomena, river discharge, and various other dynamics unfold and mutually influence one another. These “threads” do not develop in thin air, but are based in a material, phenomenal grounding, entangled in power relations, and constituted by their “friction” with other trajectories of different rhythms and directions (Tsing 2005). Thinking in terms of flow, I presume, is “thinking like a river”.

A genealogy of “thinking like a river” In the context of formulating his famous “land ethic”, Aldo Leopold proposed “thinking like a mountain” as a means to appreciate and understand the intricate meshwork of ecological relationships. Taking on the perspective of a mountain, in his understanding, facilitates the adoption of a wider spatial and longer temporal frame for thinking and decision-making. The limited, human horizon has too often resulted in ecologically disastrous consequences. For instance, predatory animals have been culled in order to protect deer and cows that finally, however, degrade their pasture and starve. Beyond the shortterm and spatially limited interests of human beings, Leopold writes, there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. […] The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea (Leopold 1949: 129, 132). While this is clearly related to a “land ethic”, centred on the static mountain and implying a detached, panoramic view of all the processes around, Leopold has also used the metaphor of the “Round River” (1953) to draw attention to the cyclical flows of energy and materials through land, plants, animals and people. It is this trope that Donald Worster (1993) refers to when he posits that, because of the centrality of water for human survival, Leopold’s “land ethic” must be complemented by a “water ethic”. Correspondingly, he proposes “thinking like a river” as a corrective to “thinking like a mountain”. Sound water management, he claims, “requires vision more than technique: a way of perceiving, a set of mental images, an ethic controlling agricultural policy and practice. It demands

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[...] learning to think like a river” (ibid.: 131). For Worster, this seems to imply above all “our trying to become a river-adaptive people” (1985: 331), prioritising ecological dynamics, like the hydrological cycle, over those of the market or of engineering schemes, like the large-scale irrigation systems of the US American West. In fact, the idea of “thinking like a river” surfaces in a host of popular accounts throughout the English-speaking world, North America in particular. Canadian novelist and professor of English, Hugh MacLennan, for instance, uses it as title for the introduction of his “Rivers of Canada” (1974) which portrays a number of Canadian rivers by sketching their cultural histories, industrial transformations and pollution, and significance for Canadian national identity. Although the markedly environmentalist tone of the book has been read as suggesting a link with Leopold’s “thinking like a mountain” (Forkey 2007), MacLennan’s “thinking like a river” emphasises above all the continuity of rivers in contrast to the pronounced social and ecological changes of the 1960s. The phrase “thinking like a river” reappears furthermore in contexts as diverse as boating, counselling, conservation and engineering. It has been applied to the skill of telling the forms of the river bed from the shape of standing waves, to the strategy of pausing and gaining momentum in order to overcome an obstacle, to the converging flow of ideas into plans for action, and to the periodicity of convergent, goal-oriented action and divergent, reflective moments in work processes.3 The concept of “thinking like a river” that I want to propose here embraces some aspects of these ideas, but emerges more directly from the preceding discussion of the anthropology of water. I suggest it means imagining the world in terms not of permanence and solidity, but of movement and flow. People, places and things are not seen from the superior vantage point of a panoramic view, but as integrated along the flows of life, like the integration of the hydrological cycle (cf. Tuan 1968). Such a ‘riverine perspective’ potentially has major implications for the conceptualisation of social relationships and society, for thinking about persons, places and events, understanding land and landscape, and knowing and dealing with the material world. What remains to be seen is to what extent people living with a river also think like a river. To what extent do the river and its flow pervade the imagination of those whose livelihoods are connected to its waters or along its banks? Throughout this book, I will illustrate how thinking in terms of flow and movement is integral to many river-related activities and understandings. Fishing is based on the movements of animals, waters and fishers and on the flow of energy between feeding places to spawning grounds. Boat travel, itself a significant flow on the river, is structured by currents and eddies. Timber floating is premised on the idea that the river embodies a fundamental movement of matter downstream. The force of this movement is the basis of hydropower management, and the visual and tactile appreciation of this flow is an income opportunity for tourism enterprises.

3

“Thinking like a river”, http://www.paddling.net/sameboat/archives/sameboat117.html; “Think like a river”, at http://www.holisticmanagement.org/n9/Education/InPractice_Archives/Think_like _a_river.pdf; “Think like a river”, at http://www.sehn.org/Volume_14-6.html; “Lyle’s law of thinking”, at http://www.tbp.org/pages/publications/Bent/LylesLaws/F03Thinking.pdf, all accessed 2010–02-04.

1. Introduction

It will become clear that this sense of flow is quite unlike the popular assertions about the ever-expanding, boundless flows of the “information age”. Instead, the movements that characterise river-activities and related thinking are characterised by a delicate tension between flow and friction, between a general movement and specific forms and negotiations of this movement (Shields 1997, Tsing 2005, Strang 2006b). Fishing is an interruption of fish movement; navigating a boat only works by moving faster or slower than the currents; timber floating entails guiding and regulating the logs on the river’s flow; hydropower necessitates the strategic retaining and releasing of water; and so forth. Furthermore, the flows of waters and people along the Kemi River are not constant movements, but subject to pronounced seasonal variations (Mauss 1979, Harris 1998, Lefebvre 2004). Fishing, transport modalities, hydroelectricity production, tourism and a great many other processes along the river display remarkably rhythmic patterns of increased and decreased activity over the course of a year, of a week and over a day. These rhythms influence and are influenced by the spatiotemporal rhythms of the river itself (Schwenk 1965, Riegner 1989, Leopold 1994). “Thinking like a river” therefore implies imagining the unfolding of the world as a rhythmic flow, negotiated, regulated and made real through the entanglement of river dwellers’ activities and the dynamics of the stream.

Methods In order to explore what “thinking like a river” means along the Kemi River, I moved to Rovaniemi, the provincial capital of Lapland, located on the river’s middle reaches, wellconnected to most places in the catchment, and home to the University of Lapland, the Provincial Library, the headquarters of the major hydroelectricity company Kemijoki Ltd, and many other institutions. After a brief visit in spring 2007, I lived in Rovaniemi from August 2007 to September 2008. During the first few months, when I was still seriously struggling with the Finnish language, my research activities were also somewhat limited. At first I could only communicate with river dwellers who were comfortable speaking English with me, or if we found a volunteer to interpret. But after I had attended another language course and had come to know ever more people and places, the “field” began to “work” in my project. The main sources on which this study draws are notes that I took after interviews, observations, meetings or tours with river dwellers. I interviewed over fifty river dwellers, some in groups, but mostly individually, and many of them multiple times, usually in their homes, but also in other places including the river bank. My questions usually focused on the respondent’s personal relations with the river, particular river-activities that he or she enjoyed or was proficient in, and the changes that life on the river had undergone during her or his lifetime. Thus, the interviews tended to centre on respondents’ biographies, concurring developments on the river and the various skills that the river dwellers developed for practising particular activities. I drafted interview protocols following these encounters, as well as writing general fieldnotes on a regular basis and recording other river-events in which I participated, such as public hearings concerning damming or fish restocking projects, riverside art shows, or fishing competitions. Among the most rewarding methods for learning about life on the river were “guided

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tours” along the banks, boating, walking or driving accompanied by a river dweller who would point me to some of the places on the river most relevant for her or him (cf. Kusenbach 2003). Other sources include local publications available at the Lapland Provincial Library, such as the numerous local histories and personal memories of river villages and river dwellers mentioned above. I subscribed to the regional paper Lapin Kansa (“People of Lapland”) for just over half a year, preserving the articles pertaining to the Kemi River, which turned out to be numerous. Finally, I obtained relevant Finnish literature at the University Libraries of Lapland and Oulu, and visited the Provincial Archives in Oulu for documentation mostly on timber floating. In trying to make sense of this vast quantity of data, I approached the Kemi River through the combination of two perspectives, phenomenological anthropology (Jackson 1996, Ingold 2000) and environmental history (Cronon 1993). As is well-known in landscape research, landscapes – and, by extension, “waterscapes” (Swyngedouw 1999) or “riverscapes” (Cusack 2007) – can be conceptualised either as “cultural image, a pictoral way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings” (Daniels and Cosgrove 1988: 1) or as “the world as it is known to those who dwell therein, who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them” (Ingold 2000: 193). Even though both definitions potentially yield critical insights, I agree with Bender (1993, 2001) and Tilley (1994) that it is in the combined articulation of phenomenological and structuralist-representational approaches that land- or riverscapes can be grasped most convincingly. As the etymology of the word “-scape” suggests (Olwig 2002, 2004: 56–57), these concepts hinge on the involvement of inhabitants with the area they inhabit, which can apply to land as much as to water. People perceive and shape the world around them through their everyday encounters, but their perception and actions resonate not only with these immediate encounters, but also with larger political-economic dynamics. In the interplay of these moments, landscape is the ephemeral form emerging from the social process of negotiating actualities (lifeworld) and potentialities (representations) (Hirsch 1995). On the one hand, I have thus focused on the embodied practices of dealing with the river in the context of securing a livelihood or simply living and moving along its banks. In this, I have adopted Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” (2000, 2005) that treats being in the world not as inhabiting a place endowed with form and meaning independently of this habitation, but as a process by which forms and meanings unfold in the engagement of a person with her sociocultural and ecological environment. Consequently, people’s physical and mental creations are part and parcel of their activities in the world, and cannot be adequately understood if separated from their practical contexts (cf. White 1996, Harris 2000, Ingold and Kurttila 2000). Therefore, in order to grasp what life on the river is all about, I looked into the practical skills (Ingold 2000: 289–293) entailed in river dwellers’ dealings with its waters. On the other hand, and resonating with this phenomenological, skills-based approach, I have presented the material on the Kemi River from an environmental historical perspective, most explicitly in chapter four, but implicitly throughout the book. In this, I follow Donald Worster (e.g., 1985, 1988, 1990) and Richard White (e.g., 1990, 1996), both established scholars in the environmental histories of water, a phenomenon that lends itself to environmental historical analysis extraordinarily well (cf. Raffles 2002a, Mauch

1. Introduction

and Zeller 2008) and that has always been fundamentally entwined with human lives (Raikes 1967). White, for instance, observes: “The world is in motion. Tectonic plates drift across a spinning planet. Mountains are lifted up and eroded to the sea. Glaciers advance and retreat. All natural features move, but few natural features move so obviously as rivers” (1996: 3). Rivers have been used as a setting for various historical accounts (e.g., Magris 1989 tells the history of central Europe through the lens of the Danube), but the peculiarity of their flowing waters and the degree of their interaction with their human populations have usually been neglected. An explicitly environmental historical approach, however, highlighting the ongoing mutual shaping of river and river dwellers, provides critical insights into the processes of transformation and tradition along the stream. Environmental history, in short, can be regarded as a direct extension of the “dwelling perspective”, enriching it with representational and more explicitly political dimensions. By portraying the river and river dwellers through their biographies, I indicate how historically contingent forces – ranging from infrastructure to maps and state policies – have fostered and precluded particular livelihoods and concomitant ways of relating with the river. Alongside such analytic merits, an environmental historical perspective also does justice to the strongly historical idiom in which most river dwellers phrase their experience with the Kemi River. Not only is the river, with its ubiquitous references to past activities, including place-names, altered shorelines and hydropower constructions, a constant reminder of change and by-gone days, but many river dwellers also regard historical explanations as most persuasive. They are inclined to set their own biographies in wider historical contexts and to spend much of their time reading or writing local histories. These histories are not necessarily constructed as parts of Finnish national history, but often figure as their own specific narratives in time4 (cf. Hastrup 1992b). Writing about the history of the Thames, Peter Ackroyd (2008) suggests that the continuous exposure to the very flow of the river leads river dwellers, in particular, to perceive the world as deeply historic – in terms of the past always pertaining to the present. On the Kemi River, too, my respondents frequently referred to the past – both in their personal biographies and in the wider developments on the river – to clarify the present to me. This is reflected in the many historical accounts presented throughout the book. Most often, I render such historical accounts as river dwellers’ narratives, because it is through their narratives – biographical and otherwise – that they have related to me past developments as a meaningful sequence from their present perspective (cf. Rapport and Overing 2000). Narratives allow river dwellers, and me in this book, to formulate temporal and causal relationships integrating elements from different sources that may seem incommensurable in other accounts. Narratives make sense, they are “a means of linking locales, landscapes, actions, events and experiences together providing a synthesis of heterogeneous phenomena” (Tilley 1994: 32). In telling narratives, river dwellers trace their own flows through particular places, along meaningful developments and in relation to significant people, “weaving” their personal lines into the emergent meshwork of social life (Ingold 2007b). 4

In Finnish, a separate term exists for such “little history”. While general history is referred to as historia, specific historical narratives are often called historiikki.

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Finally, the following text, particularly chapter three, draws on ideas on spatiality that, although following logically from Ingold’s (e.g., 2007b, 2009a) and other anthropologists’ (e.g., Feld and Basso 1996) work on place and place-making, have been more widely discussed in human geography (e.g., Massey 2005, Olwig 2004). In writing about a river as a socio-spatial phenomenon, I try to avoid treating it as a “place” or a “series of places”, and consider it instead as one of many flows that make and unmake places (Raffles 2002a) and that contribute to shaping river dwellers’ sense of space (Oslender 2002, Velásquez Runk 2009). An analysis based on narratives and participatory experience, and focussing on the rhythmic flows of a world in movement, cannot be representative in the statistical sense. The image of life on the Kemi River that I am about to present is necessarily situated contextually, and in particular, historically (cf. Bourdieu 2003). Arguably, however, learning and knowing are only possible from a certain vantage point, and grounded in (inter-)personal experience (Merleau-Ponty 1962, Ho 1991, Jackson 1996, Goulet 1998, Ingold 2000). Taking this point seriously, and not as a mere apology to more quantitatively-minded researchers, this book presents a portrait of Kemi River dwellers that is relative to its context rather than absolute or universalising in its claims, but not, on that account, arbitrary.

Overview The following chapters can be roughly grouped in three sections, introducing the river and its people, discussing various river uses, and addressing the recurrent topic of rhythmic flows, respectively. The first section, chapters two to four, provides a geographical, historical and ethnographic sketch of the Kemi River and its inhabitants. Rather than concisely defining what the river and life on its banks are all about, these chapters approach the ethnographic context from different angles, each shedding light on particular aspects of life on the Kemi River. In the following section, chapters five to nine, three areas of engagement with the river are analysed in detail, namely fishing, various forms of travel and transport, and hydroelectricity generation. These chapters explore the practicalities and narratives of key aspects of actual river use, and portray the river dwellers’ experiences of their transformation. And in the final section, chapters ten and eleven, I draw together some issues of rhythmic flows and seasonal variations that have surfaced in earlier chapters, and formulate what “thinking like a river” may mean on the Kemi River. Chapter two introduces or, in Wagner’s (1981) word “invents”, the river dwellers and discusses some wider themes of their relations to the river that have undergone drastic changes within living memory. After sketching the dynamics of settlement, mixing and learning by which the present population has come about, I present abbreviated biographies of four river dwellers, illustrating their mutualities and commonalities. Then I go on to show how many river-activities that were practiced as “livelihood” a generation or two ago, are today continued under the label of “leisure”. While developments in infrastructure, economic system and market forces removed the economic necessity of these practices, the activities themselves generally changed little.

1. Introduction

Chapter three analyses how the Kemi River structures geographical space in central Lapland. I look into the origins of the name Kemi, and into the progressive application of this term to ever longer sections of the stream. Furthermore, I indicate how the flow of the river has defined what is “higher” and “lower”, a relational distinction visible in place names, family names and directions of movement. I show why the distinction of high and low in terms of the river’s flow is frequently used synonymously with “north” and “south”, even though the run of the river does not follow the directions of the compass. Finally, I suggest that whether the river is perceived as an integrator or approached as a boundary depends on the context of the activity, for which the stream is either a continuous flow or an impediment to movement. In chapter four I outline an environmental history of the river, drawing attention to some of the processes that have shaped and still shape the stream and relations with its inhabitants. These include geological and hydrological dynamics, but also the specific human utilisations of the river. I sketch the historical sequence of three hegemonic forms of river use, namely salmon fishing, timber floating and hydroelectricity generation, and suggest that a new rival, nature-based tourism, is on the rise. Chapter five examines the practices and meaning of fishing on the river. Many river dwellers know the river primarily by fishing on it. In order to comprehend in what ways these people think about – or even like – the river, it is thus most important to understand how they fish. I argue that fish are valued according to the particular waters associated with them, and explicitly river fish are valued especially highly. Furthermore, I suggest that catching fish requires knowledge of fish behaviour, even though the living animals are usually invisible to the fishers. In order to devise a successful catching technique, river dwellers enter into an empathetic relationship with their prey. In chapter six, river boating is presented as a practice that has been necessary to get around in the catchment until a few decades ago and continues to be very popular. I demonstrate how boats and boating are geared towards a medium in flow, and how taking a boat on the water is imbued with powerful meanings of relating to and claiming the river. Furthermore, I trace how boating has historically opened up the catchment to the river dwellers, and how the practice has been altered with the advent and expansion of roads and car traffic. Chapter seven analyses the management and work practices of timber floating that constituted a major ecological, economic and cultural aspect of living with the river until its abrupt end twenty years ago. I describe various tasks in the process of transporting logs from remote forests to pulp mills in the estuary, drawing attention to the different kinds of flow management according to specific characteristics of the river and of work organisation. The skills of timber floating emerge as the careful negotiation of flow and friction, two forces present in all engagement with the river. In chapter eight I portray road traffic as a recent but ubiquitous means of getting around in the catchment. I point to some of the transformations that have occurred in the development of the road network, and illustrate how road traffic represents a very different form of movement from boating or timber floating. I demonstrate that roads follow old-established routes along the rivers, but that drivers encounter the river as an obstacle that has to be bridged rather than as a means of transport. Finally I show how,

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in spite of permanent roads and bridges, movement along the Kemi River remains integrated with the seasonal rhythms of weather and waters. Chapter nine discusses hydropower developments on the river. Although the Kemi River produces only a fraction of the electricity generated by other northern hydroelectric schemes (e.g., the Canadian James Bay Project, McCutcheon 1991) and its dams are mere toys by international standards of comparison (see Qing 1998 on the (in-)famous Three Gorges Dam), this river use has strongly transformed the stream and the lives of river dwellers (see McCully 2001 for a broader discussion of the adverse social and ecological impacts of damming), and threatens to do so even more (Niemi 2007c). I portray hydroelectricity generation along the river chiefly as a management of rhythmic flows and a negotiation of electricity prices, river discharge and public opinion among river dwellers. I also touch on issues of river ownership and show that damming the river has not only displaced people and landscape, but also rhythms and power. In chapter ten I focus on the issues of seasonality and rhythm that structure all of the river-activities presented. I argue that life on the Kemi River is best understood as the interplay of various rhythmic phenomena, such as river discharge, freezing and thawing, plant growth cycles and animal behaviour, darkness and light, and patterned human activities including river regulation. Finally, in the concluding chapter, I address a number of themes running through the book, highlighting the mutual transformations of river flow and sociocultural life, and synthesise what “thinking like a river” implies for Kemi River dwellers.

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

Introduction The human population of southern and central Lapland is concentrated along the banks of watercourses, and has been for a long time. In this region, where lakes occur strikingly sparsely in comparison to other parts of Finland, most water is part of the Kemi River and its tributaries. Humans have benefited from the streams in a number of ways, three of which – fishing, transport and power – will be discussed in detail in coming chapters. But the rivers of the catchment basin have also provided the inhabitants with drinking water for themselves and their livestock, with an appropriate place for washing laundry, and with a space for social events and personal contemplation. Many river dwellers refer to the Kemi as their “stream of life” (elämän virta). The seasonally flooded riverbanks, as well as the numerous river islands and even the shallow parts of the river itself have long provided the most important source of hay to feed cows, sheep and horses during the long winters. Moreover, the river and its banks and islands have provided an exciting playground for generations of children, many of whom learnt to swim in its waters, some of whom drowned in the strong currents. Every river dweller family knows of drowned relatives or neighbours, old and young. Some fall out of or capsize with a boat in summer, others break through the ice in winter. The river both gives and takes, many say. Most homes in the catchment are situated close to the rivers, but the closest ones are often the longest-inhabited places. Living on the stream continues to be popular, and housing developments around town centres have recently been extended to the floodprone, lower riverside areas. The older settlements were usually located on high banks (törmät) towering the river, which allowed both proximity to and safety from its waters. This also means that the river has been – and for many still is – an everyday sight, not only when practising particular river-related activities, but also when preparing food in the kitchen or having a chat in the living room. Equally, the sounds of flowing water used to belong to the aural environment of riverbank dwellings; along many stretches, however, these sounds disappeared with the construction of hydropower dams. Even seeing the river has become more difficult in many places, as bushes and trees have overgrown

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the former hay-meadows that have fallen into disuse with the mechanisation and specialisation of agriculture. This chapter analyses how this close integration of people and river is played out in the lives of river dwellers. A brief historical overview of immigration and cultural change in the watershed will be presented, followed by biographical portraits of four present river dwellers. Subsequently, I will discuss the dynamics of decreasing economic dependence on the river that are paralleled by a continuation of many formerly necessary riveractivities under the label of “leisure”.

Ethnic labels and cultural mixing along the river Who are the people of the Kemi River? Clearly, they have been shaped by extended processes of immigration into the catchment area and concomitant cultural change that gave rise to the sociocultural set-up as it appears today. This account echoes Harris’ (2005) analysis of genealogies of skilled practice among Amazonian river dwellers, which indicates that this group emerged not only from both immigrant and Indigenous ancestors, but also from a “constant reinvention of available techniques and forms of knowledge” (ibid.: 214), improvising traditions of both European and Amerindian origin. Also in the processes of immigration along the Kemi River, skills and practices – coupled with language, religion and taxation – have, until recently, been much more important than ethnic labelling.

Rivers as trajectories of contact The rivers of Lapland have – as transportation routes and settlement corridors – long directed the movements and intersections of various ethnic groups in the region (e.g., Ahvenainen 1967a), some of whom are today considered “Saami”, others labelled “Finns”. The articulation of these movements is often portrayed as an expansion of one group of people at the expense of another, assimilating the Indigenous population and wiping out their traditions, religion and way of life (Lähteenmäki 2006: 202–205). It is true that during a certain period, most pronounced probably between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, agriculture, sedentary settlements and Christianity spread rapidly through the region that had been characterised by hunting and gathering, reindeer herding, seasonal migrations and animism. Furthermore, there are accounts of Christian missionaries robbing Saami communities of their shamanic drums, destroying their shrines and prohibiting their language, or of Finnish settlers taking away the best fishing spots and hunting grounds from the Indigenous fishers and hunters. On the other hand, however, there is an alternative narrative, both in emergent historical literature (e.g. Niemelä 1989, Lähteenmäki 2006, Jokela 2006) and in river dwellers’ accounts, that emphasises the continuous dynamics of adaptation and innovation among both newcomers and established populations. Traders and settlers arriving from the south are likely to have adapted themselves to the new circumstances just as much as they have adapted their new environment to fit their needs. This applied both in an ecological and in a sociocultural sense. The historical pattern seems to have been

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

that with the newcomers from the south, agriculture and permanent settlement spread along the rivers to the point where agricultural production was feasible. In this area, not only new settlers but also established people adopted such a way of life, including the language of farmers, i.e. Finnish. In areas where agriculture was not feasible, incomers also adopted a suitable livelihood, which was in those regions usually based on reindeer herding and the corresponding language, Saami. Today, this is reflected in the concurrence of the northern limit for commercial forestry with the divide between municipalities (and reindeer herding cooperatives) in Finnish Lapland that acknowledge a Saami presence, and those that do not (Ingold 1997: 45).

Dynamics of cultural adaptation and adoption Interactions between longer-established and more recent groups in the Kemi River area did not simply progress upstream from the sea until they reached the agricultural frontier at the fringes of the catchment. Rather, the immediate banks of the lower and middle Kemi River, for instance, were being settled by incomers much earlier than areas further upstream or inland. Furthermore, settlement was clustered around a few centres along particular river stretches, in between which the riverbank remained the realm of Indigenous hunters and fishers much longer (Ahvenainen 1967a). As many people from Lapland are keen genealogists, the stories that are told of some of their ancestors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries vividly illustrate the dynamic back-and-forth movement, concentrated along particular routes and around particular centres, which constituted the expansion of settler populations into Lapland. The following example is purely hypothetical, but based on different stories that I came across (e.g., Niemelä 1989, Erkkilä 2006): A particular man might attempt to avoid taxes and military conscription by setting up a farm in central Lapland. Subsequently he might marry a Saami woman, and one of their children might move to southern Lapland, establishing a farm under more suitable conditions. Another child might go to the Arctic Ocean coast – thus even further north – to earn money in the sea fishery and meet another migrant worker with whom she would set up a family elsewhere in Lapland. A third child might continue or expand the parents’ farm, and a fourth one might decide to live with his mother’s relations to become a hunter and fisher and be exempt from “Finnish” taxes. While the influx of “Finns” into the catchment long proceeded haphazardly, the longer-established population in the Kemi River area did not passively surrender to expulsion or assimilation by dominant incomers. On the contrary, they were probably shaping the process of the newcomers’ integration as actively as these settlers themselves (Lähteenmäki 2006: 309–310). Moreover, trade routes had integrated the area with its neighbouring spheres of influence for millennia (Kotivuori 1996). A group of people from southern Finland, called “birkarls” (pirkkalaiset), is said to have controlled trade – and later Swedish tax-collection – in the area of present Lapland from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, before the actual influx of southern Finns occurred (Hansen 1984). Furthermore, Swedish, Karelian and Finnish people had been living in the port of Tornio and around the salmon market of Kemi since the Middle Ages (Vilkuna 1975: 40–44).

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The Indigenous population of the Kemi River area, classified as “Forest Saami“ (metsäsaamelaiset), in fact led a life quite unlike the pastoralists with their large reindeer herds, generally distinguished as “Mountain Saami” (tunturisaamelaiset) (e.g., Heikkinen 2002, Lähteenmäki 2006). They hunted, fished and kept reindeer, but only rather small numbers that were used primarily as draft animals and as lures for hunting wild reindeer.1 Thus, they were similar in many ways to the Finnish settlers who arrived in increasing numbers from the seventeenth century onward. These settlers also had a few draft and dairy animals – cows in their case – but relied heavily on hunting and fishing. Therefore, these “sedentary” newcomers also led somewhat itinerant lives throughout the course of the year, working at fishing grounds in the spring, around their farms in the summer and on hunting trips in the winter. And while Forest Saami probably were prompted, in part by their contact with Finnish settlers, to adopt agricultural techniques and new species of domesticated animals such as sheep, goats and cows, many settlers in turn adopted reindeer husbandry into their livelihoods (Heikkinen 2006: 187–189). Today, the majority of reindeer herders in Finland are actually classified as “Finns”, and people with a “Saami” identity only comprise about a third of the members in the Association of Reindeer Herders’ Cooperatives (Paliskuntain Yhdistys).

Categories and categorisations That the proportion of people who consider themselves Saami and who are proficient in a Saami language is so low in the province of Lapland – and close to zero in the Kemi River area – is not due to physical displacement of people, but to a development that saw a centuries-long depreciation of “Saaminess” in schools, work and public life. A further factor accounting for the decline of the “Saami” proportion of the Lappish population is that ethnicity had long been subsumed under territorial categories. The Swedish crown drew a certain border across the Kemi River catchment during the eighteenth century, defining areas of sedentary agriculture – i.e. Finnishness – and nomadic hunting and pastoralism – i.e. Saaminess – relevant predominantly for tax classification. This boundary became known as the “Lappi and Lanta Border” (Lapin ja lannan raja), where “Lappi” is commonly understood to stand for the Saami (“Lapp”) area and “Lanta” for an agricultural (“land”)2 region. Shifting this border implied changing people’s “ethnic” affiliation. “Ethnic” identity in central Lapland was thus related to taxation more than it depended on ancestry. Being considered a “Saami” or a “Finn” was a question

1

2

In fact, the reindeer of these two Saami groups are said to have been related to different subspecies. While the nomadic “Mountain Saami” dealt with “mountain reindeer” (tunturipeura) that was smaller and migrated longer distances, the reindeer of the “Forest Saami” supposedly had many characteristics of the “forest reindeer” (metsäpeura), which was taller and followed shorter migration routes. These differences probably continued into the early twentieth century, when reindeer herding in the Kemi River area had already long been practiced mostly by people considered “Finns”. An interesting ambiguity arises from the etymological coincidence that lanta is simultaneously a Finnish word for “manure”. Although river dwellers generally interpret the lanta in Lapin ja lannan raja as referring to the Swedish, and thus bureaucratic, term land, it also lends itself to referring derogatorily to Finns – as opposed to Saami – as lantalaiset, “manure people”.

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

of livelihood (agriculture vs. reindeer herding) and the administrative categorisation of economic activity. Corresponding to what Wikan calls “the ‘preculture’ days” (1992: 475) in northern Norway, when Saami and Norwegians were regarded as different, but not as essentially so, ethnicity along the Kemi River has until recently played a minor role in everyday life. It was an administrative category, but in terms of actual persons, this boundary has been rather permeable (Lähteenmäki 2006: 206–207, 302–303).3 And because the Kemi River Forest Saami found it beneficial to integrate some agriculture into their livelihoods, they have been easily reclassified as belonging to the same group of people as the “Finnish” inhabitants of the area who relied on fishing, hunting and small-scale agriculture as well. At the same time, the “Finns” – besides bringing their own skills and practices with them – also learned many skills and adopted many practices from the established “Saami”. Apart from reindeer herding, these included clothing styles and a special, regionally relevant lexicon. The Kemi River area is thus clearly a region of cultural mixing of Indigenous Forest Saami and different incoming groups, which did not end with the settlement phases of the Swedish empire. The region experienced Saami immigration after the closure of the country’s northern borders in the nineteenth century (Linkola 1967b, Lähteenmäki 2006: 221–274), a large influx of lumbermen during the heyday of the forestry camps in the early twentieth century, of veterans and refugees after the Second World War, and of hydropower construction workers during the 1950s. In this process, further layers have been added to the “Saami” and “pioneer settler” elements of river dwellers’ genealogies. Moreover, during the past few decades it has become increasingly popular for “Finnish” Laplanders to emphasise their “Saami” ancestry alongside their “Finnish” roots (e.g. Jokela 2006: 29). With the mobilisation of Saami groups elsewhere in the country and the wider North Calotte, being “somewhat Saami” has become an asset rather than a stigma. Thus the numbers of Saami speakers in Finland have also increased recently, and are said to have even doubled during the last two decades. At the same time, it has been realised that the various “Finnish” groups entering the catchment from central (Kainuu), southern (Häme), southeastern (Karelia) and eastern (Savo) Finland have been much more diverse than this all-encompassing label suggests. Some people even speculate that the differences between the immigrant groups have been more pronounced than the discontinuities between the Forest Saami and some of the newcomers. It is said, for instance, that while Finns from the southwest of the country, an area tellingly known as “the real Finland” (Varsinais-Suomi), have – through centuries of close contact – developed many similarities with the neighbouring Swedes, Finns from the eastern areas of the country have long led a life not unlike that of the Forest Saami. While I have found it fascinating to witness the negotiation and attribution of such identities – as marked by language, dress, behaviour, or descent – I have come to con-

3

Lähteenmäki emphasises furthermore, that in many ways ethnicity was not a decisive attribute in the lives of nineteenth century people from Lapland, but affluence was. Wealthy reindeer herders and rich farmers thus belonged to the same category, and poor fishers and smallholders to another, regardless of their ethnicity.

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sider approaches somewhat redundant that categorically contrast “Saami” and “Finns” in northern Finland (e.g., Mazzullo and Ingold 2008). Opposing an alleged archetypical Finnishness to a stereotyped Saaminess misses the point that actual people live somewhere in between, in a fashion not reducible to any one label. I am not denying that there may be fundamental differences between “Saami” and “Finns”, but it is clear that, at least in the Kemi River area, people are neither “True Finns” (Varsinaissuomalaiset) nor largescale, nomadic reindeer Saami. Instead, river dwellers are as much “Finns” as they are Kainuu-people, Savo-people or Forest Saami. Whereas there may be striking differences between Finns of south-eastern Finland on the one hand, and Saami of northern Norway on the other, river dwellers of central Lapland, descendants of Forest Saami and “wilderness farmers” (erätalonpojat), display similarities with both groups, but are reducible to neither. Rather than taking ethnic labels – that are certainly significant locally – at face value, researchers might better concentrate on people’s actual practices and discourses (Ingold 1973: 823–825, Ortlieb 2000: 16–17, 284–312); thereby they will be able to appreciate the multifaceted amalgam of traditions and ancestries that make Finnish Lapland such a fascinating place.

An unlabelled identity It is interesting to note that the population converging on the banks of the Kemi River has not developed a specific label for themselves to emphasise their particularities vis-à-vis other groups in Finland. Whereas along the rivers of the Americas, the intermingling of Indigenous and newcomer groups has led to the establishment of explicitly “mixed” identities, such as the Métis on the Red River (Peterson and Brown 1985) or the Caboclo on the Amazon (Nugent 1993, Harris 2004), similar processes in Lapland have not led to comparable labels. This might be explained in part by pointing to the relatively slow pace of settlement progression in Lapland, preceded by long-established trading contacts, and to the many similarities between incoming and established groups, as opposed to the more marked discontinuities between Native Americans and European traders and settlers. Unlike in American colonial contexts, or compared to the situation in Norway, Sweden or Russia, newcomer and Indigenous populations in Finnish Lapland were rather similar. So much is this so that in Norway, Saami have long been called “Finns” (Wikan 1992: 475–476), while some Finns consider Saami as representing their cultural roots, “more Finnish than the Finns themselves” (Ingold n.d.: 4). Nevertheless, people in central Lapland – neither ‘real’ Saami nor ‘ordinary’ Finns – are struggling to formulate their particular identity in a meaningful way. One attempt at this is to refer to people who are from Lapland but not of Saami ethnicity as “lappilainen”, which translates as “Laplander” (Lappi being the Finnish name for the province of Lapland). This term plays on the word “lappalainen”, which is the old Finnish word for “Saami” and usually considered to be just as politically incorrect as the English form “Lapp” (cf. Ortlieb 2000: 284–312). Some Kemi River dwellers, however, are uncomfortable with the term, as it has historically been applied as a tax registry category for people living on the “Lapland” side of the Lappi and Lanta Border. Instead, many river dwellers stress their affiliation to a particular place, such as “Rovaniemi-person” (rovaniemeläinen), or to a particular area, such as “Eastern Laplander” (itälappilainen). These more localised identities

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

conform to the distinction of particular dialects in these different places and areas, which are in turn influenced by the linguistic backgrounds of the respective group of incomers. Today, Kemi River dwellers live in a world that attests to many centuries of cultural mixing between newcomers, established groups and even longer-established populations. One indicator of this is the prevalence of place names made from Finnish words, which are, however, said to be onomatopoetic renderings of originally Forest Saami terms. The town of Sodankylä on the Kitinen River, for instance, bears a name that literally translates from Finnish as “War Village”. Instead of originally signifying “sota” (“war”), however, the current name may be derived from “sova”, a Forest Saami word for a ford in the river across which people are able to wade. Similarly, the Kirkonkuusikko (literally “church spruce forest”) in Kittilä on the Ounas River might not denote the location of a church that was burned down in the early seventeenth century, but derive from a Forest Saami word for “high” that simply sounded a lot like “kirkko” (“church”) to the newcomers. And Lake Särki, just across the watershed in the Tornio River basin, is most probably not named for its stock of roach (Finnish: särki), but because of the area’s abundance in blueberries, the Forest Saami word for which sounds very much like “särki”. This list could easily be expanded to great length by scrutinising the etymologies of place names in the Kemi River area and beyond. The Kemi River has long constituted the principal route along which people, materials, ideas and technologies have made their way into and out of central Lapland. The present riverbank population, their identity and relations to their surroundings, bear witness to these dynamics. Place names tell of the various groups which have met and mixed while moving up and down the stream (cf. Vahtola 1996: 134–147), practices have been mutually adopted and adapted, and a distinct – albeit unarticulated – identity has formed. The river has shaped not only its physical banks, but also the sociocultural dynamics in its catchment.

River dwellers Throughout this text, I use the term “river dwellers” to refer to the people living and working with and along the Kemi River. In what follows, I portray four river dwellers – mainly by sketching their biographies – whom I had the pleasure to meet. I will introduce two ladies and two gentlemen, listed in order of their age, who have been leading very different lives along different parts of the river, but whose lives are all integrally bound up with it. In what they are doing and have done, they have played and are playing their parts in affecting what the Kemi River is today and how it is to develop further; at the same time, all of them had and have to adapt to changes in the river brought about by people and forces other than themselves. In introducing these four people, I have necessarily to introduce, too, the prominent activities associated with the Kemi River, namely fishing, transport, and hydropower, and the river’s ever-present seasonal rhythms. These themes will subsequently be presented and discussed in more detail in further chapters.

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Tapani Tapani was born in June 1932. Salmon were swimming up the Kemi River, and his entire family was fishing with their river dragnet on the bank in front of the farm. Tapani’s mother realised that she was about to give birth while rowing the fishing boat at the far end of the net. A farm hand was sent out on the river by boat to fetch the midwife who lived downstream, and they returned upriver just in time to assist with Tapani’s birth. Tapani proudly concludes, “thus I can tell that I was almost born into a boat” (Niin minä voin kertoa, että minä olen syntynyt lähessä veneeseen.) The first months of Tapani’s young life were busy times on the farm, a few kilometres downstream from Rovaniemi, the present provincial capital. Salmon rose up the river until July, after which came the trout and whitefish runs. And hay had to be prepared for the almost twenty head of dairy cows, plus a number of calves and other animals, to last over the long winter when the landscape was covered in snow and ice, and nothing would grow in the frozen ground. In autumn, Tapani’s father and uncle would go hunting for moose in the surroundings. During the winter, all available hands were needed for forestry work in the wide forests that belonged to the family. And when the river ice broke open in spring with the onset of the annual flood, the salmon fishing season would begin again. After seven such years, Tapani was allowed to join his father in pulling the dragnet through the river. He learned to catch salmon and other fish, how to care for the farm’s livestock and to manage the family’s forests. After school and military service, Tapani enrolled in the forestry institute in Hirvas, a few kilometres downstream and across the river from his family farm. Finishing the forestry course in 1954, he began work for the Finnish Forest Authority (Metsähallitus), initially in a section responsible for forest drainage. The vast forests of Lapland were meant to be taken into productive use, and trees growing on boggy land were considered highly unproductive. Tapani calculates that in the fifteen years he worked in forest draining, he was involved in the excavation of ditches over about two million hectares of boggy forest. Each designated forest patch was carved with parallel ditches fifty metres apart and seventy centimetres deep, draining into the nearest brook. Only later were the detrimental effects of this practice on water quality and the river ecosystem officially acknowledged, and the ditches had to drain into basins without a direct connection to a watercourse. Half a year after meeting Tapani for the first time, I was to participate in an observation flight across the Kemi River catchment during the time of snow melt, when each and every ditch and depression in the landscape was filled with water. Most of the forests indeed looked as though they had been evenly striated with a huge comb; the straight, parallel lines of the flooded drainage ditches, brightly reflecting the springtime sun, ran through large tracts of the forested land. When drainage ditches had been dug through most of the boggy forests of Lapland, Tapani and his work team were allocated to a new task. Now that the forest soils were supposedly suitable for timber production, roads had to be built to extract the timber, in a commercial environment in which year-round road haulage was considered increasingly advantageous. Thus the former drainage planners continued by constructing forestry roads. These roads were routed so as to make felling sites accessible for commuting lumberjacks and to enable the transport of timber on trucks, circumventing the labour-in-

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

tensive floating of timber along brooks and rivers. By means of these roads, the Forest Authority and the pulp and paper industries were able to take control over the forests of Lapland ever more efficiently and pervasively. After working in forest road construction for a number of years, Tapani was put in charge of wildlife management in Lappish state forests. Himself an enthusiastic moose hunter, he consulted with local hunting associations and the Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute (Riista- ja kalatalouden tutkimuslaitos, RKTL), for instance in order to determine how many licences for moose-hunting on state land should be sold in any given year. In this position Tapani worked for about thirty years, until in he retired in 1992. He continued to hunt for a few years, but his hearing deteriorated to the extent that he no longer feels comfortable hunting. He says that hearing is essential to moving about and spotting animals in the forest, where sight is often restricted by trees and undergrowth. Being retired from work and from hunting does not make Tapani an idle man, however. He continues to engage in issues related to forestry policy, and works as the chairman of the Forestry Museum of Lapland in Rovaniemi. He is well aware that many of the things he did during his early career would today be considered destructive rather than productive. Draining boggy forests has not always yielded the desired effects of increased timber growth, but has often caused a deterioration of water quality and severe alterations in the annual spring flood dynamics. Making forests accessible by road has contributed to a further mechanisation of forestry and concurrent displacement of employment, and has also opened up formerly remote areas to tourists and sports fishers, often to the detriment of the fish populations. Today, Tapani tells me, road construction is much more restricted, and also the designation of felling sites is subject to a number of conditions. Forestry roads, for instance, have to keep a certain distance from brooks and other watercourses, and fellings are not allowed close to shores or in places where endangered birds are documented to be nesting. Many drainage ditches are consciously left to fill with debris, and some boggy forests are even being restored. At the same time, Tapani has witnessed other fundamental transformations of his home environment. In November 1957, when he had just completed the first drainage systems of his career, work was begun on a construction site two kilometres downstream from his family farm, which was to profoundly change the river stretch. The rapids of Valajaskoski, along with a number of minor rapids in the vicinity, were to be utilised for hydroelectricity generation by building a dam across the river that would convert the stream into a reservoir all the way to the centre of Rovaniemi, almost twenty river kilometres further upstream. At the position of the dam itself, the water level was to rise a good eleven metres, and even Tapani’s family farm was to be inundated by over two metres. The hydropower dam was finished in 1960, and the family, along with its neighbours, had to sell their homes and parts of their land. Continuing the farm – one of the most prosperous around Rovaniemi – was deemed impossible. Tapani moved to the centre of Rovaniemi, his brothers to villages close by. Tapani says that his mother probably suffered most from the move, because with the farm she had lost the everyday life she had grown into for decades, and her role as the farmwife (emäntä) vanished without proper replacement. A few months after Tapani told me this story for the first time, we visit the place of his childhood home together. After taking a long tour across the dam, to the river is-

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land where his mother came from and to his summer cottage on the riverbank, we finally stop on a road lay-by on the edge of the Valajaskoski hydropower reservoir. He has brought along a picture frame in which three sepia photographs are arranged to form a panorama view of a river landscape. It shows how this stretch looked before the completion of the dam, he explains. The river in the picture is at most two hundred metres wide, and bordered by steep banks. In the foreground, a fishing net hung up to dry on a riverside rack is visible. From the banks, hay meadows extend landwards, and a number of houses are located there, too. One of them, Tapani identifies as his childhood home. Beyond the buildings, wooded hills can be seen. The current shoreline, Tapani says, is close to the former forest fringe. We step out of the car and onto the ice of the reservoir. Because it is covered by a thick layer of snow, we do not get very far. A few dozen metres from the place where the farmstead had been, we stop. The landscape bears little similarity with the photographs that Tapani is carrying along, and that is not because they were taken during the summer and we are here in early spring. Riverbank, meadows and buildings have disappeared, a road has been built and a reservoir impounded that increases the river to about one kilometre in width. A power transmission line crosses the river and leads to the hydropower station, barely visible in the distance. Only when the water table in the reservoir is exceptionally low, Tapani explains, can the foundation of their former cowshed be made out on the current river bed.

Anneli Anneli was born in 1937 on a small farm over a hundred river kilometres upstream from Tapani’s home. The terrain through which the river flows there is much more mountainous than around Rovaniemi, and Anneli’s childhood environment was full of rapids. Just upstream from her home, the Säpsä Rapids foamed in the Kemi River, and about eight kilometres further up, the gigantic rapids of Pirttikoski roared. On her way to school in a hamlet called Juotasniemi, Anneli crossed a bridge over the rapids of Juotaskoski on a small tributary to the Kemi River. The sound of splashing water was omnipresent. Then came hydropower developments. Anneli’s birthplace is situated high on a hill, Säpsänharju, overlooking the Kemi River valley and was therefore not directly affected when the stream was dammed for hydroelectricity generation. Other places, like her mother’s natal home, were too close to the riverbank and were demolished, however. By that time, Anneli had long married into the village of Autti and become the farmwife on a major farm there. This had happened in 1956, when she was nineteen years old. During the same year, construction works on the hydropower station of Pirttikoski began. Hundreds of construction workers from all over Finland swarmed the small village, which soon became a major centre in the area, with schools, shops, a chapel, a police station, a library and a number of societies. Three years later, dam, tunnel and machine hall of the hydropower station were finished, and the constant roar of Pirttikoski rapids vanished all of a sudden from Anneli’s life. Upstream from the village, the river was diverted into a two-and-a-half kilometrelong tunnel that had been blasted into the granite bedrock. By means of this tunnel, hydroelectricity producers were able to concentrate a twenty-six metre drop of the river at

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

one single spot. Also by means of this tunnel, however, a section of the Kemi River bed about five kilometres long was bypassed, which lay dry unless used as a spillway for floodwater. Anneli and many others refer to the tunnel, sixteen metres wide and up to thirty metres high, into which the river disappears at the site of the dam, and out of which it reappears in bubbling eddies downstream of the village, as “Stream of the Netherworld” (tuonelan virta or manalan virta). In 1960, two years after this tunnel had diverted the Kemi River around Anneli’s new home, the rapids of Juotaskoski were silenced by a hydropower dam just upstream from the bridge that she had crossed daily to go to school. And another twelve years later, another hydropower station further downstream dammed the Kemi River along a stretch of twenty-three kilometres, submerging also the Säpsä Rapids. By 1972, the incessant sound of moving water had completely disappeared from Anneli’s world. Instead of roaring and murmuring, the river and its tributaries were now producing hydroelectricity. Today, four decades later, Anneli still vividly remembers the moment when the Pirttikoski power station was taken into operation and the water vanished from the river. No fields were inundated in the village, no buildings had to be demolished or people resettled, as the river course was left largely untouched – only waterless. The absence of water was most widely felt in the lack of the sound of the rapids. Something essential had gone missing from the landscape, and was not restored either when, twenty years later, a weir was built across the dry river stretch to impound some water in the former river bed. A dammed water body is just not the same as a stream with waves and eddies. But Anneli does not appear bitter in the face of this loss. She has lived through so many changes in the area, the village, the economic system, transport and communication infrastructure, and national and international politics, that the disappearance of the river is only one in many radical alterations of her world. As a child, Anneli lived in a largely self-sufficient household that obtained plentiful fish from rivers and lakes, got its meat from hunting, grew potatoes, barley and some vegetables, and had milk, butter and a bit of financial income from their dairy cows. Now she lives on a state pension, and drives her car to the grocery store to buy food. Fish, game and timber used to be plentiful in the province, people few; today it seems the other way around. Cars were a rare sight when Anneli was young, but tractors very fashionable; now, life without one’s own car is unthinkable, but only a few farms remain intact and most tractors have fallen into disuse and rust away. During her childhood, men from the village had twice gone to war with the Soviet Union; these days it is considered impolite to use the derogative ryssät when referring to Russians. When Anneli was seven years old, she and her family were evacuated to Sweden, and when they returned most of the village’s buildings had been burnt to the ground by German troops; currently, both Finland and Germany are members of the European Union and are integrated ever more closely. That her home river has been so fundamentally transformed is thus no insignificant issue. But it is clearly not the only major change that Anneli has witnessed over the last seven decades. And, she cautions, we all need electricity in our everyday lives. It would be naïve to oppose hydropower facilities while living in a home that is heated and lit by electricity, preparing food on an electric stove, using a phone and watching television. The hydropower company’s leaflet about the power station of Pirttikoski states that it produces enough electricity for 27,550 such homes.

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This does not mean, however, that Anneli can be easily swayed. During the 1960s and 1970s, when hydropower expansion in Lapland was utterly unquestionable, she was one of the most outspoken advocates for treating the Kemi River around Pirttikoski not solely as an electricity-producing tool, but also as the living environment of river dwellers that it has been for so long. Among other things, this resulted in the hydropower company’s constructing of the weir that raised the water in the former river bed to a streamlike level. Alongside such directly political action, Anneli has engaged in a number of projects aimed at practising and documenting traditional and place-specific activities, which turn out to have considerable political potential, too. For example, village-based knitting groups, music ensembles or fishing associations implicitly if not directly emphasise the benefits of rural life and counter the seemingly inescapable narrative of urbanisation and mechanisation. Anneli lives in a terraced house in the village centre of Autti, somewhat urban-looking for the size of the village since most of the people who had come for the hydropower construction sites have moved away again. The farmstead where she spent most of her life is now inhabited by the family of her eldest son. He is not a farmer, though, but a technician in the hydropower station. The fields around the farmstead are rented out to one of the remaining five active farmers in the village. When Anneli still ran the farm, they had fourteen dairy cows; today this would hardly be considered economically viable. Anneli’s other two children have moved away from Autti. Her daughter lives and works on a farm about two hundred and fifty kilometres to the south; her other son is employed on the air force base in Rovaniemi during the summer and in the road administration in Vaasa on the Baltic Sea coast during the winter. Coming and going appear to be common around Autti and in Anneli’s family. Her maternal grandfather is from Pudasjärvi in the neighbouring Ii River catchment and did not move to Säpsänharju before 1890; his wife came from Sweden. Anneli’s paternal grandparents lived in Posio, on the watershed between the Kemi River and three other catchments. Anneli was one of thirteen children, three of whom are still alive today. Currently, a daughter of one of her brothers lives in their family home, after returning from Sweden where she had worked for many years. Both of Anneli’s parents-in-law were born in the village of Autti, but her mother-in-law’s mother came from a place on the Ounas River and the family’s last name suggests that an ancestor had come from the village of Misi, a few dozen kilometres to the north.

Helena Helena was born in 1950, but I would never have guessed that when we meet for the first time in Kemijärvi in late September, when she engages right away in a passionate description of the Vapaa Vuotos movement, the reservoir project against which the movement fought, and the social and economic effects of the long-drawn struggle. It was not until our third meeting that I got to ask about her personal biography more directly, and it turned out that many episodes are entangled with the social movement that halted a hydropower development for the first time in the history of the Kemi River. Helena grew up in the village centre of Pelkosenniemi on the upper Kemi River. Her mother belonged to a well-established family in the village; her father had moved there

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

from Saija in eastern Lapland. Her father’s father had in turn moved to Saija from a place called Viitasaari in central Finland, which, for Helena, lies in “the South”. Since the late 1950s, her father – an ardent communist – worked as a taxi driver in the area where cars remained a rare sight until at least a decade later. Helena and her siblings grew up close to the river, boating and swimming in the summer, skiing in the winter, fishing yearround. When Lake Kemi was dammed and turned into a hydropower reservoir in 1965, the effects could be felt all the way up to Pelkosenniemi, over fifty river kilometres upstream from the lake. The summertime water table rose so much that parts of the public riverbank beach disappeared. In spring 1966, the disintegrating ice crust on the affected river stretch formed a large dam just downstream from the village centre, raising the spring flood waters to the foundation of Helena’s family home, washing away their neighbour’s henhouse and causing major damage to other buildings and property. Villagers attributed this unusual event to the excessive manipulation of the downstream reservoir. The following year, when Helena turned seventeen and visited the high-school in the municipal centre of Sodankylä, another large reservoir in the catchment was completed on the tributary Luiro, and in 1970 a third one on the tributary Kitinen. These constructions displaced around six hundred people, some of whom were Helena’s classmates. But these issues were never addressed in school, just as any connection between the reservoir and the ice dam had never been officially acknowledged. When the upstream reservoirs compromised the river water to the extent that the freshwater pearl mussel disappeared from the Kemi River, no consequences followed. Helena was angry and frustrated, and learned to be doubtful of hydropower developments. Helena went to study medicine in southern Finland, at the University of Turku. In 1977, her second job as a medical practitioner brought her to Kittilä on the Ounas River, where many inhabitants were protesting against the plans to construct a series of dams along this largest tributary of the Kemi River. These protests were successful, and in 1983, the Finnish government passed a “Special Protection Law” banning hydropower developments from this tributary. After a short while, Helena moved to Kemijärvi to work in the medical practice that she still runs today. This was much closer to her childhood home, and on the banks of the Kemi River main course. In this area, plans to expand hydropower developments also existed, and people had been organising in opposition. The most imminent project there concerned the construction of a further large reservoir, damming the upper Kemi River in Pelkosenniemi, drowning over forty kilometres of its banks and submerging an area of two hundred and forty square kilometres. This project came to be known as the Vuotos Reservoir, according to a tributary, the Vuotos River, that would also be largely submerged. Helena assumes that this name had been deliberately coined in order to downplay the scale of the reservoir. While earlier versions of the project had called it Kemihaara Reservoir, according to the section of the Kemi River that was to be dammed, the newer reference to a minor tributary was intended to make it sound like a small intervention. Since the mid-1970s, groups of concerned inhabitants – among them Helena’s father – had formed committees in which to organise and voice their interests and concerns regarding the reservoir. In 1982, protests culminated in a demonstration that was held

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over many days on the river itself. Inhabitants and activists embarked upon a boat trip from the headwaters of the Kemi River all the way to Pelkosenniemi, where the dam for the proposed reservoir was to be built. Helena participated too. In the same year, the Finnish government decided that the Vuotos Reservoir project should be abandoned. This did not end the talk about the reservoir, however. Throughout the 1980s, the hydropower company’s public relations department, and a number of people with political and administrative influence, continued to emphasise the alleged benefits of the project. A beautiful lake, rich in fish, would be created, and above all, the high unemployment in the region would be eliminated with the stimulus of construction works and the municipalities’ increased tax income. Many people had already bought into this story and had sold their land in the projected area for one-and-a-half times the going rate, which seemed like a good deal. But as time went by, a lot of people had become suspicious in the face of the not-so-good news from other hydropower reservoirs. Helena found the continued lobbying for the reservoir extremely irritating, and although she had mostly remained in the background of the opposition movement before, she took a more active role during the mid-1980s. She was – and still is – convinced that “a river needs to be a river, a mire needs to be a mire”, and that a reservoir is no good substitute, particularly when used for hydroelectricity production that would entail considerable fluctuations in its size and water table over the course of a year. Rivers have been the “source of life” in the region, and continue to be most significant ecologically and socioculturally. Helena began to write letters to the editors of local and national newspapers. She read up on various technical, ecological and legal aspects of the reservoir project, helped to organise meetings and disseminated information. And before long, she had become the central figure of the movement that was known as Vapaa Vuotos, “Free Vuotos”. Around 1990, the balance of power tipped in favour of the reservoir. The hydropower company acquired large tracts of land in the project area, government support for livelihoods other than hydroelectricity generation in the region was aborted, and the project was officially approved for further development. With the activities in preparation for the reservoir, Helena’s activities in opposition to it also picked up pace. From 1992 onwards, she organised eleven boating demonstrations in the reservoir area, which were joined by people not only from the region, but also by supporters from other areas in Finland and even from abroad. She composed more letters-to-the-editor, produced input for the Water Court survey that preceded the granting of a licence for the reservoir, and wrote numerous legal complaints about irregularities in the process. For example, the hydropower company was cutting down the forests in the project area as if the licence for the reservoir had already been granted, in places where fellings were illegal under current conditions; land transactions to the hydropower company were taxed at lower rates than sales to other parties; the government boosted the company’s purchasing power by increasing their stock by sixty million Finnish Marks from the national tax budget; and rumours were being spread that land in the project area would be expropriated with low compensation to landowners as soon as the hydropower company owned over fifty percent of the terrain. When any law stood in the way of the project, it seemed to be easily amended or ignored.

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

In many legal matters, Helena worked together with a Helsinki-based lawyer who represented the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (Suomen Luonnonsuojeluliitto, SLL); in other issues she consulted with various experts, other activists and concerned inhabitants. But it was in Helena that all the threads ran together. She felt that nobody was asking the right questions to capture the actual and anticipated effects of the reservoir project, so before the official Water Court survey of the project got underway, Helena and a psychologist friend designed, carried out and published a health survey of the affected population. In parallel to a brochure about the project and its impacts, published by the hydropower company and containing mostly numbers and graphs, Helena devised an alternative “information package”, rich in descriptive text and pictures. As a symbolic counterweight to the hydropower company’s growing influence in the project area, she and her fellows founded their own company, evocatively called “Power of Vuotos Ltd” (Vuotoksen Voima Oy), which attracted over five hundred shareholders, both from within the area and from more distant supporters and sympathetic organisations. Owning a plot with a cabin and sauna on the banks of a tributary to the Vuotos River, the company became a statutory party to the court proceedings related to the reservoir project. Furthermore, Helena saw to it that plots of land in the project area, some of which from the property of her father, came to be donated to the SLL or sold to individual reservoir opponents. In this way, over six hundred formerly external people became landowners of small plots and thus parties to the legal negotiations over the reservoir. When the Water Court survey was completed in 1996, an arduous legal process of six years ensued, first at the Water Court in Oulu, then at a Court of Appeals in Vaasa, and finally at the Supreme Administrative Court in Helsinki. Helena grew into something of a legal expert during this period, but it was not an easy time for her at all. Her migraine worsened, and the time she spent in meetings or at the computer, preparing statements and reviewing documents, she was not able to enjoy with her partner and their three children. While the reservoir-lobby had full-time professionals at its disposal, Helena had to take care of her patients at the medical practice during the day and could engage in the legal process only during her “free” time. In 2000, the Water Court gave permission to the reservoir project, but the Court of Appeals revoked this decision a year later, arguing that the reservoir would compromise the “natural values” of the area. Finally, in 2002, the Supreme Administrative Court upheld the mandate against constructing a reservoir. This should have been it, Helena thought; finally there was a clear ruling protecting the area from being submerged, the people from being displaced, and the upper Kemi River from being radically transformed. For over four decades, the insecurity of people in the project area, about whether a forest plot, a hay meadow or a home could be used in a few years’ time, or whether it would by then be covered by a reservoir, had severely crippled the economic prospects of the region. Inhabitants had often been reluctant to invest in their land and buildings, many gave up altogether, sold their land and moved away. Now, it was time to rebuild hope and confidence in the region, and to support development alternatives other than huge hydropower projects. For Helena personally, it was high time to relax a bit after all those years of constant tension, and to spend more time with her family. But this did not quite happen. In spite of the Supreme Court’s mandate banning the reservoir project, politicians and lobbyists have continued to speak about the Vuo-

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tos project as if it were still up for debate. Some high government officials even publicly declared that the Supreme Court judges had been mistaken, and that their decision was “wrong”. Lately, the Regional Council of Lapland (Lapin Liitto), a development and planning authority run by the province’s municipal administrations, has been pushing for the construction of a flood control reservoir on the upper Kemi River. And although the council claims this plan to be fundamentally different from the former hydropower project, the envisioned reservoir is situated at exactly the same spot where the Vuotos Reservoir would have been. For Helena, this means more letters-to-the-editor, participating in meetings and collecting data and documents all over again. It makes her furious that people who cling to the promise of large infrastructure projects are allowed to proceed with their plans even against a Supreme Court ruling. She cannot understand how – after so many studies and a decade-long legal process, all of which have proven the undesirability of a reservoir – it is still possible to publicly debate a similar project. If the decision by the highest legal institution of the country has no binding force, Helena says, “we would be idiots to continue to believe in the constitutional state”. She adds that in the meantime, some of the mires in the project area have been included in the EU-wide Natura 2000 network of conserved areas, so that the reservoir would be violating both national and EU legislation. But in public meetings, interviews and writings she remains composed and voices her concerns in the matter-of-fact way she has cultivated over the many years of struggle. Her strategy, she says, remains the same: be clear and upfront, not get carried away with personal or overly emotional issues, and “always remember to say ‘unconditionally no’” (Aina pitää muistaa sanoa ‘ehdoton ei’.). Fighting against a reservoir is not about bargaining for compensation, but about avoiding the destruction of a very particular, irreplaceable landscape with very particular homes, ecosystems and significant places. Trying to strike a good deal with the developers both ignores this fundamental motivation and diverts energy from the more important, unconditional opposition. It seems that whatever Helena does, she does all the way. This is true not only in her fighting for her home region and the Kemi River. It also surfaces, for instance, in the recent redecoration project of her childhood home that she promoted more than any of her siblings, or in her enthusiasm for her horses that regularly compete in trotting races across Lapland. She will never give up on an alternative future for her home river, one that is not based on hydropower reservoirs or similar large infrastructure projects, like the large-scale, open-pit phosphate and uranium mine close to the Kemi River’s headwaters, another long-debated plan in the area. Together with a number of other activists, Helena is currently involved in an initiative to declare the upper Kemi River area a National Park, to attract visitors and generate income for nascent eco-tourism enterprises. The struggle over the future of the river will probably continue for many years to come, but Helena will no doubt go all the way for her home river.

Erkki Erkki’s colleagues say similar things about him: Once he has set his mind on something, he follows it through, no matter how adverse the conditions. He is said to have recently skied a one hundred kilometre cross-country competition in spite of a bit of pain that was

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

diagnosed afterwards as a broken hip joint. In the summer afterwards, he fixed the oven in the company’s summer cottage with practically no spare parts and only unsuitable tools. One colleague remembers that he finally used an old bicycle spoke to substitute the broken oven door hinge. And at work, as a key decision-maker for the operation of hydropower facilities on the Kemi River, Erkki is no different. When a challenge arises, he does not let go before it is overcome. That is not too surprising, his colleagues tell me, because he grew up in rather simple conditions where he learned to make ends meet during hard times. Erkki was born in 1951 as the third of five children in his family. Three years before, his parents had just built a small house on the banks of the Kalkiais River, tributary to the Kemi River just upstream from Lake Kemi. As a war veteran, his father had received a cheap loan and had been able to buy a bit of state land for a good price, a “cold farm” as they called it. For the government, this was a convenient way of dealing with the soldiers returning from the front in need of work and housing amidst the large numbers of refugees from the ceded territories. For Erkki’s family, it was a chance to set up an existence; and even though they were eking it out in a remote place, it was on their own land. They had five cows, five hectares of fields, five children and one tractor, Erkki remembers. He says that there were quite a few families and holdings of this size along the Kalkiais River when he was young. Every smallholding seemed to need its own tractor, although the size of the farm hardly warranted such a large investment. Erkki’s parents bought a tractor when he was twelve years old, in 1963. They used it to transport timber out from the farm’s forest patch to the Kalkiais River, from where it was floated down the Kemi River to the wood-processing mills; they used it to cut grass on their meadows and transport hay to the cowshed; and they used it to till their fields to grow barley. For other grains, it was too cold in the area. There had been stories that from the 1920s to the 1940s, the climate had been so warm that rye would ripen in the fields, and part of the government’s enthusiasm about founding smallholdings in Lapland might have derived from mistaking this periodic warming for a steady trend. But during Erkki’s childhood, agricultural conditions were never so favourable. On the Kalkiais River lived so many families of former soldiers and other smallholders that a primary school was run on its banks. During the winters, Erkki attended this school, while his mother managed the farm and his father worked in logging camps in even more remote part of Lapland. Depending on where his father was employed, Erkki would sometimes not see him for many weeks on end. Then his mother would have five kids, five cows and all the rest of the household to look after on her own. During spring, the logging camps ended, and his father would work in timber floating until early summer, when work on the farm required all available hands. When he was not at school and could escape the chores on the farm, Erkki went fishing on the Kalkiais River. He says that during his childhood it was an excellent stream for fish, with crystal-clear water rich in oxygen. Not only were there plenty of fish, but they also tasted particularly good. In fact, Erkki tells me, his father had been an enthusiastic fisherman as well, and had chosen the Kalkiais River as a place to found a “cold farm” particularly because of its quality and quantity of fish.

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Today, Erkki has given up fishing in the Kalkiais River. In his eyes, the stream is dead, and it is no longer a suitable habitat for fish. The reason for this radical deterioration of the stream does not lie in hydropower developments, though. True, the lowest section of the river was inundated when Lake Kemi was dammed to create a hydropower reservoir. But that did not spoil the river and its fish. The fatal development for the Kalkiais River, Erkki explains, was the excessive drainage of boggy forests in the vicinity. Large tracts of forest land in the sub-catchment of the river had been regarded too poor in terms of timber output and were “improved” by lining them with a dense network of drainage ditches. What was regarded as excessive moisture was emptied out into the Kalkiais River; and with it was washed large quantities of organic matter that polluted the river water and accumulated on the river bottom. Erkki says that while larger rivers can more easily cope with such increased loads of sediments, smaller streams are simply overburdened by the large amount of materials in the water and on the bed. Such rivers’ self-cleansing capacity is not strong enough to transport the excess material out by means of their currents, for instance during the spring flood. Thus, water quality deteriorates and fish are displaced. Most significantly, more and more sediments settle on the river bed, decreasing the current and causing even more sedimentation. The pools that fish need to survive during cold winters and hot summers are gradually filled with mud, and the gravel beds they need to spawn disappear under a layer of soil that is unsuitable for reproduction. Erkki followed this frustrating development throughout his youth, but realised that there was nothing he could do against it. It seemed comparatively straightforward to protest against certain manipulations of the river, for instance hydropower developments: There was a clear opponent, the hydropower company, and an equally evident set of protesters, the affected riverside community. But to curb the practice of forest drainage appeared much more difficult. Most of the affected riverside population also owned forests in the area and was itself contributing to the deterioration of their river through the “improvement” of their timber production. In the smallholder settlement on the Kalkiais River where Erkki grew up, only one home continues to be inhabited year-round today. All the other families have left the area. The school has long been closed. The decline of the river and its fish is probably not the primary reason for this migration. Throughout Lapland, smallholder communities established after the war have rarely lasted. The mechanisation of agriculture and forestry, as well as the phasing out of government support for farming, has rendered a livelihood based on reliable milk prices and off-farm labour income impossible. But for Erkki, the deterioration of the Kalkiais River also constituted an important motivation for orienting himself elsewhere. Having attended high-school in Kemijärvi, a good twenty kilometres away, Erkki moved to Turku in southern Finland around 1970. His brother lived there, too, and Erkki started to work as an electrician. He burned, however, with a desire to move back to Lapland. And he knew that there was a chance of finding employment in the one sector that was apparently not suffering an economic crisis: hydropower development. Already his father had worked for the hydropower company on the reservoirs of Lake Kemi and Lokka, where he participated in constructing structures to facilitate the floating of timber on the wide and largely stagnant basins. Erkki decided to study engineering in Tampere, and subsequently found a job at a dam construction site on the Kitinen River,

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

that tributary to the Kemi River most recently harnessed for hydroelectricity production. After this had been completed, he worked at another such construction site on the same river. And finally, when the hydropower company centralised the management of its electricity production at a single “control room” in Rovaniemi, Erkki started to work there. Today, he is the senior engineer in the “control room” and, probably more than any other human being, decides on how the Kemi River is to be “driven”. At the hydropower company, Erkki is usually very busy. His phone rings close to all the time; he delegates, gives orders and makes arrangements. He works in an office crammed with documents, and in the “control room” bristling with computers from where every single turbine in the Kemi River hydropower stations can be remote-controlled. But he has also learned that in order to deal with a river, it is not enough to interact with the stream through computer programmes. Erkki considers it part of his job regularly to inspect strategic places along the Kemi River with the naked eye, and so he habitually drives, flies, skis or rides a snowmobile through the catchment to get a better feel for the currents, the snow load, the ice layer and other relevant aspects. Knowing the river both in its digitalised form as a stream of data producing hydroelectricity and in its physical appearance as a flow of water, fish, sediments and ice, Erkki is known as a true river authority among his colleagues. A younger “control room” employee, for instance, reports that Erkki has coined the term “humpautus”,4 which literally means to take the river out for a dance. Erkki has introduced humpautus as a technique to shatter the ice crust on the basin upstream from a hydropower dam. This can prevent the formation of dangerous ice dams during the spring flood. As in a dance, the water table in the river is made to rise and fall at comparatively short intervals by quickly opening and closing turbine inlets and flood gates a number of times. The “dance” continues until the layer of ice bursts and the floes are washed away. And when the spring flood is over, Erkki is likely to take his river on a number of other such “dances”, managing a high enough water table and large enough electricity supply during drier periods, or slowing down discharges so that a reliable ice cover can form on the river in early winter. Erkki and the Kemi River have been as close as dancers for a long time, and probably will be for a while to come; but it is definitely not Erkki who is leading the dance most of the time.

River courses and life histories Tapani, Anneli, Helena and Erkki are evidently living rather different lives. But they are all “river dwellers”, in the sense that the river – and the radical transformations the river has undergone and continues to undergo – plays a central role in their biographies. Furthermore, it is striking how much their different activities are integrated with one another through the river, even though the four have probably never met. Tapani’s work in forest drainage contributed to the decline of Erkki’s home river; Helena’s activities

4

I understand this term derives from the word humppa, which is applied to a type of Finnish popular music that is closely associated with a dance typically performed at social events. The particular movement of this dance is a fast bouncing up and down.

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against the Vuotos Reservoir project were in part informed by accounts of former hydropower projects, such as that of Valajaskoski which drowned Tapani’s home and that of Pirttikoski which diverted the rapids from Anneli’s farm; Erkki today runs some of the machinery that is based on drowning homes and diverting rapids; and Anneli’s engagements in the village-based associations resembles what Helena envisions for an alternative future for the upper Kemi River. Simply by living along the same river, these four persons – and thousands of others along with them – display commonalities in their biographies. In fact, the very biography of the river, its changing uses, shapes and exceptional events, is closely integrated with the biographies of the river dwellers (cf. White 1996). When the river provided a rich fishery, river dwellers were eager fishers; when it was used as a timber transportation channel, river dwellers earned some of their money in floating; and when it was regarded as useless, river dwellers looked for sources of livelihood and personal development elsewhere. Different manifestations of the river resonate with different human activities along its banks, which, in turn, shape the river accordingly. The stories of these four river dwellers also make clear that life on the river is inherently conflictive, concerning envisioned shapes and utilisations of its waters and the consequences these forms and activities may have on other river dwellers. Much of her life, Helena has been working for one such vision and against another one, hydropower, that Erkki’s work includes realising. And Anneli’s and Tapani’s lives had to learn to live with a river strongly altered for this vision, but not without affecting life on the river in other ways. The biographies of people and river evolve – to an important extent – out of their mutual relations.

Alienation, idealisation, transfiguration – and continuation Explorations into the relations of anthropology and history (e.g., Hastrup 1992b) have indicated that narrating the past is always “a selective account of the actual sequence of events, but it is no random selection” (Hastrup 1992a: 9), as it refers both to the significance of the event when they happened and to their implications in making sense of the present and constructing the future. The histories told of the Kemi River bear witness to this dynamic. They are narrated sometimes as a story of alienation from the “stream of life”, sometimes as an ideal, but by-gone past, in which the relations of river and inhabitants appear incredibly harmonious, and sometimes they are told as the logical antecedents of today’s situation that is not considered too novel at all.

The lost significance of the river Today, many river dwellers hold that the significance and meaning of the Kemi River are, for the most part, things of the past (e.g., “Kemijoen merkitys on entinen”). According to a widespread understanding, the river had previously provided an essential source of food and income, a focus of everyday activities, and an exciting phenomenon of the forces of water; whereas today, all of these attributes have been lost. Most of the river’s forces have been captured behind dams, everyday life has shifted from the waterfront to streets and televisions, and – most importantly – there is almost no more work to be done on

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

or at the river. Jobs happen elsewhere, and anything that gets people onto the waters of the river has an air of recreation (virkistys), leisure (vapaa-aika, literally “free-time”) or tourism (turismi, matkailu). One river dweller claims that if there has been one theme that people talked about every single day during his childhood, it was the river. All conversations touched, at one point or another, on the amount of river discharge, on the catch of certain fish species, on the quality of particular navigation channels, on the reliability of the ice crust, or on some other topic to do with the river. People went along the river to transport goods and passengers, they crossed it to attend school, visit the grain mill or work in the family’s forests on the opposite bank. Now, the river dweller asserts, one only uses the name of the river to refer to the hydropower company that has converted most of the stream into a series of reservoirs, so unlike the river on which he grew up. When people speak of the water of the Kemi River at all, this happens in the context of a water shortage for hydroelectricity production, and they are really concerned less about the river water than about rising electricity prices. The reason behind this development, in the eyes of this river dweller, is that the river has become a “trauma” for the inhabitants of its banks. When shrewd industrialists, above all from the wood-processing sector, and willing politicians proceeded to “kill” the river by damming it, the riverside population did little but watch. Most significantly, they stood by as the first dam was constructed, which blocked the salmon runs from entering the estuary, depleting their stocks over the course of a few years. River dwellers have been left with a river that does not look, sound or feel like a stream, and with the uneasy feeling that they have contributed to the murder of a close friend or family member, an issue that most people today try to avoid. The man explains all this while sitting on the porch of his farmstead that is called – like the land around and the road that leads there – according to his family name, one of the very old-established names on the lower Kemi River. There are, he holds, no more people who actively engage with and know the river today. The only people who currently have anything to do with the river are hydropower engineers whose work practice, however, is far removed from the actual, flowing water. Their knowledge of the stream is abstract, based on data that do not spring from their own experiences and acquired bodily skills. They only perceive the river through their computers, but “not all can be seen on the screen”. In fact, according to the old river dweller they know less about the Kemi River than the old farmer-fishers. But also the latter, and even more so their children and grandchildren, have completely turned away from the river. Whereas not all river dwellers formulate their understanding of the recent alienation from the Kemi River as radically as this man, most agree in principle (e.g., Tiuraniemi 1996). Another river dweller explains that since all significant activities – above all earning money and procuring food – have shifted away from the river and its banks to offices and supermarkets, the river necessarily disappears from the experiences and minds of the people living along it. He links this development to the expansion of hydropower dams in the catchment, which modified the river to the extent that it became a sole repository of power and motor for hydroelectricity production, sidelining all other uses of its waters.

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Instead of the majority of river dwellers using the stream, it is now exclusively in the hands of one single company. Some river dwellers explain the general alienation from the Kemi River as part of the wider “modernisation” of work processes, landscapes and people in Lapland. This development swept the catchment very quickly and very radically during a few decades of the mid-twentieth century. One man, who grew up around that time, describes it as a period when everything that was old was declared poor and useless and had to be abandoned to make room for progress and prosperity. This applied to objects, ideas, activities – to anything, including the river (Niemi 2007b). One of his contemporaries says that when Lapland underwent its great crisis of rural restructuring in the 1960s and 1970s, many people were forced to leave the riverside villages for factory jobs in southern Finland, Sweden, or further abroad. Along with this rather new way of making a living, river dwellers adopted new ideas of what it means to be knowledgeable and successful, based on urban or “modern” ideals. According to these standards, people who remained in the villages were no longer defined as successful – after all they had not been forced to move out – but as underdeveloped, backward and antiquated. The activities that such people practised, like boating, fishing, making hay and milking cows, were equally regarded as old-fashioned and retarded. River-activities and -skills were losing the socioeconomic context and thus got redundant (cf. Harris 2005). While in the early twentieth century, handling a boat or a net skilfully still told the real man from the novice, there has been no point in trying to prove oneself on the river since the 1970s. Rather, it was regarded as shameful to be travelling in a boat or to be consuming self-caught fish. And with the devaluation of river-related activities, the skills of punting against the current, reading the water-surface for what is underneath, or setting up a net in the right place at the right time were also no longer practised, developed or learned – and were often lost.

River history as cut-off past, or as inspiration for the future Most stories that are told about the river, and most of the printed material in which the Kemi River features prominently, consequently deal with the past, back in the day, that is, before the end of timber floating in 1991, before the large-scale expansion of hydropower dams and the decline in farming during the 1960s, before the post-war extension of road network and growth of car travel, or before the depletion of the migratory fish stocks around 1950. Back in that day, the river is typically portrayed as having been bristling with life and a focal point of many activities. Village histories, usually compiled by a group of villagers themselves, tend to feature stories about ferries and boats, temporary bridges of wood and ice, floods and droughts, timber floating, grain- and sawmills, fishing, and many more river-related issues (e.g., Alamaunu 1987, Alaruikka 1977, Erkkilä 2006, Heikkilä 1994, Julkunen 2003, Kempas and Pränni 2002, Kuusela 1990, Mustonen 2007, Pihkala, Sippola and Yli-Tepsa 1986, Pokka 1994, Saarenkylän kyläyhdistys 1998). But they are all clearly marked as belonging to a bygone world of battered blackand-white photographs and grandma’s childhood memories. Today, all of this is said to be no longer there.

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

The narrative that “back in the day” the river was significant but more recently has lost its role in people’s everyday lives tends to make the “bygone river” an idealised stream of social and ecological harmony. From memories and stories about plentiful fish arises the idea that all years and seasons yielded rich catches; accounts and reminiscences of timber floating employment downplay the harshness of the work and ignore drowned colleagues; and difficulties with floods or transport conditions are easily reframed as romantic narratives. Almost as if consciously opposing the interpretation prominent during the modernisation decades, the meaning of the river for the people on its banks is strongly emphasised in this romantic re-interpretation. Whereas everything “old” used to be declared as worthless, now everything “old” is stylised as harmonious and adorable (cf. Hastrup 1992b). On the one hand, such a re-evaluation of the “old” is not at all contrary to the modernisation paradigm that idolises both the very recent and the distant past, but condemns things, thoughts and practices that are somewhat old and yet still in use (cf. Macdonald 2002). The long past is regarded as a quaint image and the subject of stories, but not as a model for development. Rather, it is fixed and buried in its “past-ness” and can be clearly distinguished from the present and the future, which are to follow very different ideals. An idealised past, in this respect, serves to mark a clear separation from the present era. On the other hand, however, the emphasis on the positive aspects of previous engagements with the river also provides the basis for formulating a “tradition”, a narrative that constructs the present not exclusively as a break with the past, but as maintaining essential ties with bygone times, thoughts and practices. With this comes the possibility of imagining alternatives to the mainstream development paradigms that see central Lapland as merely a resource periphery and tourist playground (e.g., Niemi 2004a). If past relations of people and river are re-constructed as not quite doomed to extinction, then they provide not only a source of pride for the bearers of this tradition, but also a basis for thinking about the future in terms not dictated by a universalising paradigm (cf. Jokela 2006: 76).

Generations of river dwellers Moreover, a significant change in generations is bringing about different approaches towards the river. The river that older river dwellers grew up with, or at least heard their parents rave about, no longer exists for a number of reasons; and this fills them with bitterness and resignation. In that same generation of river dwellers are also people who seem to have come genuinely to believe in the modern promise that human well-being is enhanced by advancing large-scale technology and industrialised modes of production and consumption. One of the leading proponents of the re-opening of the Vuotos reservoir project, for instance, has himself grown up on the river bank. River dwellers on both extremes of this spectrum, however, are currently ageing, and a new generation of river dwellers has grown up who – born during the 1970s – practically know no other river5 than the existing one. For them, the “modified” river, and not the 5

While this holds true for the Kemi River main course, it cannot be claimed for the tributary Kitinen River, where many hydropower constructions were built during the 1980s and 1990s. Even there

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“free” stream, flows through their lives. I was struck when one young lady praised the beauty of two particular river stretches for their wide and calm waters and the layout of their banks, which were clearly the forebay6 reservoirs of two major hydropower dams. She did not see the smooth water table as a witness to the drowning of the whirling rapids that had flowed there half a century ago, but took pleasure in the reflection of light from the calm basins. Probably she would have even found the rapids a dangerous nuisance, hindering boat travel in the summer, keeping the river from freezing up in the winter and threatening to cause ice dams in spring and log jams during the timber floating season. An older river dweller had told me earlier that younger people do not know what they are missing when they look at, boat on, or fish in the Kemi River. I would agree with this observation, but I also imagine that we would disagree about its implications. The old river dweller probably thought that the “real” river remains obscure to his descendants. But I would suggest that the present river is as real as it was thirty, fifty or a hundred years ago. It holds different affordances; it is associated with different activities; it looks, feels and sounds different; and it is less important for the river dweller’s livelihood in an economic sense. But it is still the Kemi River with a continuing significance for the people on its banks.

Diversified livelihoods and specialised employment The marginalisation of the Kemi River from the economic activities of river dwellers is indeed a dynamic evident in many people’s biographies. It is striking, however, how much time and effort many river dwellers nevertheless continue to spend on the river and in river-related issues. The question thus arises to what extent the categories of “work” and “leisure” have become changed, rather than the centrality of the river in people’s lives. Is it possible that the very category of “leisure” sidelines the ongoing significance of the Kemi River for the inhabitants of its banks? Cato Wadel (1979) has noted that work, although generally regarded as an “objective” category, is really an ambiguous concept. Both the “activities we term work in our own society are continuously changing […] and […] the way in which we characterize work activities and distinguish them from nonwork activities is continuously changing” (ibid.: 365). At the same time, as Wadel argues, many activities that are treated as “nonwork” are nonetheless crucial in making and maintaining persons and society. Such activities include chatting to neighbours, reading the newspaper, being a client and practising hobbies. Thompson (1967) has documented the emergence of the distinction between workand nonwork-activities in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, linking it to the spread of clocks and increasingly “objective” time-reckoning. He maintains, however,

6

however, the river has been significantly modified since the 1960s, and the power stations were probably regarded as little more than additions to an already existing system. I use the term “forebay” to refer to the minor reservoirs at hydropower dams along the river, in order to distinguish them from the large reservoirs geared at annual discharge regulation, which undergo quite different dynamics. While forebays fluctuate in a daily rhythm, large reservoirs do so over the course of a year (chapters nine and ten).

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

that this distinction has been continually resisted – by humans and non-human elements, such as the tides or the weather – so that “the barriers between work and life” (ibid.: 95) have never been completely closed. In similar vein, Carrier (1992) has reminded us that it would amount to a stereotyping “occidentalism” to suppose that there is a unified cultural world called “the West”, in which all economic life conforms to market principles, as opposed to non-Western societies organised in terms of gift exchange. Instead, he shows how many aspects of “Western” society are not governed by a commodity logic but integrated through forms of reciprocity. These include the family, the black economy and even retail trade, relations between large firms and among colleagues within an enterprise. At first glance, a market-oriented work logic might thus seem all-encompassing, but social life is never reducible to it (Ingold 2000: 328–336). Currently, “work” in northern Finland means having a paid job (cf. Ingold n.d.: 16), running a business, operating a farm, or managing a reindeer herd. People who do not engage in this type of activity are considered unemployed and eligible for state support. Those people who do practise an activity that qualifies as “work”, in this sense, often readily identify with it. “I am a reindeer herder” or “I am a teacher” is a common introduction. This implies that all the person does as a reindeer herder or as a teacher is considered work, and that all that she or he does apart from these activities is something else – hobbies, leisure or holidays. That “work” refers to a particular, well-defined set of activities is a peculiar and rather recent phenomenon along the Kemi River, and in the world in general (Wadel 1979, cf. Wagner 1977). For a long time, river dwellers have engaged in multiple activities, all of which contributed to their livelihoods. These activities varied with the seasons and in terms of location, and none of them could sustain a household exclusively. Typical livelihoods included fishing, hunting, picking berries, keeping a few sheep and cows, tending a small reindeer herd, working in one’s own forest, and finding employment in lumber camps and timber floating. As much as river dwellers were “farmers” they were also “fishers”, “reindeer herders”, or “forestry employees”. All such sources of food and income were necessary to make a living, none could be relied on by itself or around the year. Much of this diversity persists, despite only one being presently defined as “work”. I was most struck by this when an old river dweller explained to me that once he went into early retirement he was finally able to spend more time practising his “hobbies”, namely fishing and reindeer herding. This man had earned his money as a construction worker, carpenter, driver, lumberjack and rafter. Alongside these he had managed a reindeer herd and had been fishing with a dragnet and a number of fish traps in Lake Kemi, selling both fish and reindeer meat. But, he told me, nobody can make a living from fishing alone, and not even from fishing and reindeer herding, given the restrictions on reindeer numbers in the herding cooperatives. Therefore he had to find paid jobs, and to practise fishing and herding as “hobbies”. Many river dwellers have had similar experiences. Even though primarily labelled as a “driver”, “nurse” or “farmer”, they tend to make part of their living from fishing, forestry employment or construction work, each of which is often temporarily restricted. Today, a number of river dwellers succeed in maintaining a vital mix of different sources of livelihood. One of them even claims that river people are particularly good at securing different sources of seasonally and locally specific income in order to make a living in a place

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where no single profession generates enough revenue. In his recollection, riverside villages were far less devastated during the economic restructuring of the 1960s and 1970s than other settlements that lay on lakes and in the forest, where entire families left their homes for work in the factories of far-away cities. This difference he attributes to river dwellers’ particular adaptive or opportunistic capacities in adjusting their livelihood to changing economic options and restrictions. In his experience, the current embracing of tourism development throughout central Lapland is just one of the more recent instances of this capacity.

Leisure and livelihood The opposition of leisure and livelihood is frequently based on an assessment of the market value of the different activities (cf. Firth 1979, Wadel 1979: 369): Does someone make more money from fishing than she invests into it in terms of equipment and time? Can someone produce potatoes cheaply enough to sell them economically on the market? Or does the reindeer meat cost less in a store than it costs to produce it oneself? What is “work” and what “hobby” thus usually depends on the market value of the inputs and products of each activity, and says nothing about the amount of time, energy or significance that people invest into it. One river dweller, for instance, worked as a high-school teacher in Kemijärvi for most of his life, but he openly admits that this was merely to make some money. His heart and soul were with the farm on which he grew up in Pelkosenniemi, and especially with the reindeer herd he kept there. Whereas he lived in Kemijärvi with his family, he would visit the farm almost every weekend, during most of his holidays and sometimes even in the evenings during the week. In terms of his job, these were “leisure” activities, and presumably they did not pay very well either. But for him, it was the more significant work. He is rather proud that the farm has continued all these years, even though the family income was derived from his and his wife’s teachers’ wages. The very distinction between “livelihood” and “leisure” is based on the categorisation of activities into “productive” and “reproductive” spheres (Ingold n.d.: 18–19, 2000: 323–338, cf. Wagner 1977, Wadel 1979). Things are created by productive activities, people are (re-)created by reproductive ones. The former is the sphere of work, hardship and money, the latter is characterised by shelter, love and “what-money-cannot-buy”. That this is an arbitrary categorisation can be inferred from taking a closer look, for instance, at fishing. For a number of reasons, such as the availability of cheap fish in supermarkets and the low economic revenue of fishing in the present Kemi River, river fishing is generally conceived as a leisure activity, thus belonging to the “reproductive” sphere. This implies that river dwellers, after their hard and tiring work in professional employment, go fishing to re-create themselves, to restore what they have lost in the process of doing their real work. If the environment of this activity were slightly different – if, for example, the Kemi River were still rich in salmon and the sale of farmed fish were restricted – river fishing would certainly be considered a productive activity rather than “leisure”. Ecological parameters and market prices thus determine which practices are considered “work” and which are “hobbies”.

2. River dwellers: Living along the “stream of life”

In spite of this redefinition, the skills necessary to succeed in each activity have remained the same. To navigate a boat along a river or through powerful rapids, to identify the right technique to catch particular fish in a particular place and time, or to judge which river ice is safe to walk on, remain achievements that are required for and acquired in practising the activity, whether it is done as “work” or as “leisure”. River dwellers can learn to be, and become considered as, good fishers or able pilots independently of their professional status. Two main differences remain, however. First, river dwellers seem less dependent on the result of the activity. Whether they catch a lot of fish or not seems to be secondary to whether or not they succeed in having a good time on the water, ice or river bank (cf. Ingold n.d.: 19). For example, most fishing trips or competitions I participated in ended with making a campfire and frying not the fish that had been caught, but sausages that had been bought beforehand. Again, because of the set-up of market prices and other factors, some activities can be practised as ends in themselves. That brings us to the second difference, which lies in the focus of “work” and “leisure” activities. While the former are directed at the outcome of the process, the latter are focussed on the process itself. The experiences of workers employed in timber floating and tourists on a white-water rafting trip may be largely similar, but as work the experience belongs to a practice of guiding logs somewhere, and as tourism the experience is the very motivation for the endeavour. Some river dwellers emphasise that the very emergence of the word “leisure” has promoted the activities thus designated to a degree of transfiguration. Because “work” is ordinary, “leisure” has to be extraordinary. Whereas fishing used to constitute part of everyday life, integrated with many other everyday activities, many people today feel that it needs an exciting, exotic or exceptional air to be worthwhile. That makes some people want to turn their back on their “ordinary” home rivers to drive or even airlift to especially spectacular, fish-rich or remote lakes and rivers. At the same time, however, the label of “leisure” provides a justification for the continuation of activities in spite of their lack of economic necessity. Activities like boating, fishing or growing one’s own potatoes receive a sort of “honorary status” by being called “leisure”. Even though they do not make money, they are nevertheless sanctioned means of recreation, i.e. important for people’s well-being. Furthermore, particular activities seem to be continued by river dwellers because practising them is felt to be indexical for their sense of who they are. Going fishing, hunting, berry-picking, on boat trips, and on reindeer herding excursions are ways of performing an identity rather than securing carbohydrates or making money. Becoming proficient in these activities is proof – to oneself and to one’s peers – of self-reliance, knowledge of the river and forests, aptness to spend time in the open under all kinds of circumstances, and the possession of the proverbial sisu, the stamina that is supposed to distinguish Finns from the wimps of other nations. In all this, the river plays an important role in central Lapland. One river dweller says that the Kemi River has always been a “source of life” (elämän lähde) for the people on its banks, which continues in spite of its waning role as a workplace and food source. In her opinion, time at the river is generally “fulfilling” (mielekäs), even if it is spent merely watching the stream. No longer is she dependent on milking cows on the riverbank pas-

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ture, selling the milk to rafters at the close-by timber-floating cabin, or catching enough fish to feed her family; but still she feels she just has to go to the river (“se on mentävää”). In fact, “leisure” river use has become the major subject for ordinary river dwellers’ claims to the waters of the river. The end of timber floating, for instance, has been hailed as freeing the river from the logs of pulp and paper companies for the boats of the riverside population. Similarly, many of the mitigation measures that the main hydropower company has implemented along the river, such as landscaping and fish introductions, are intended to improve the river’s leisure appeal. Overpowered by the economic giant of hydroelectricity generation, other river uses have little chances of competing for a say on the river in financial terms. Instead, traditional ways of engaging with the Kemi River are relabelled as “leisure” and “recreation”, something difficult to quantify in economic terms but nevertheless regarded as important. Under this category, river dwellers can continue doing on its waters many of those things that have been done there for ages, like catching fish or embarking on a boat trip, even though in purely economic terms there is no need for such activities.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that the lives of river dwellers and the flows of the Kemi River are closely integrated. The catchment has provided trajectories of contact, conflict and integration of various immigrant groups, the outcomes of which are the present river dweller population and their specific skills, stories and identity. The recent dramatic changes in the river are reflected in the impressive biographies of river dwellers, and their biographies in turn illustrate how much these changes in the river have been actively induced by the people. Nevertheless, many river dwellers feel alienated from its waters today, owing to its extreme decline as a source of livelihood and economically significant activity. At the same time, however, former activities of everyday work are continued and rediscovered under the label of “recreation”, particularly fishing and boating. Whereas presently, only one or two out of the traditionally multiple sources of livelihood are considered as work, many others are still practised, redefined as “leisure”. I have argued that, in spite of the extreme developments that both river and river dwellers have undergone during the life span of older river dwellers, their bond remains strong. Even if direct economic benefits from the Kemi River only pertain to hydropower producers and a few tourism enterprises, ordinary river dwellers continue to use and to appreciate its waters. Despite a frequent idealisation of the river’s past, its inhabitants also highly value its present. In different and variable ways, the river has flowed through the lives of many generations of river dwellers, and the present people living along its shores are no exception.

3. A fluvial topology: The river as space-maker

Introduction How is the flow of the Kemi River reflected in river dwellers’ sense of space? How does the experience of this flow suggest particular spatial relations for river dwellers? And how does living along and engaging with the river resonate with certain ways of perceiving and naming places and social relations? Geographer Doreen Massey (2005) has demonstrated that space is not a pre-given territorial expanse, but a phenomenon constituted by dynamic and evolving relationships. People’s heterogeneous actions create, sustain and transform spatial relations. Rather than being surfaces, upon which social – and one might add, ecological – life happens, particular spaces are brought into being by these very processes (cf. Ingold 2009a, Feld and Basso 1996, Myers 1986). What does this insight mean for life on the river? In an article entitled “The logic of the river”, Ulrich Oslender (2002) argues that people whose lives are closely entwined with the courses and rhythms of rivers are likely to order their world in terms of “aquatic space”. By this, he means “the specific ways in which aquatic elements such as high levels of precipitation, large tidal ranges, intricate river networks, mangrove swamps and frequent inundations have strongly influenced and shaped everyday human life patterns” (ibid.: 92). Specifically, in his study of black communities on the Pacific coast of Colombia during the 1980s and 1990s, Oslender observes that social movements and the forging of community councils have generally coincided with the dimensions of various water courses. The rivers along which most of the settlements were located, traffic proceeded and work took place, provided a central reference for making space in Colombia. This chapter looks at the role that the Kemi River has been playing in river dwellers’ conceptualisations of geographic space. It will become clear that, on the one hand, people have defined the names of streams and the sub-divisions of the catchment, while on the other hand, the river has suggested which places, persons and directions are “higher” or “lower” than others, which areas are integrated and which are divided. Geography, for river dwellers, is not so much a question of the lie of the land as it is a “fluvial” issue, resonating with the run of the river.

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Following Ingold (e.g. 2007b) I treat “aquatic space” not primarily as territory, but as a topography constituted by the “lines” of river dwellers, fish, moving waters, and other flows along the river. Animals, people and waters, in this view, are seen not as separate entities establishing relations with one another, but as ever-developing flows that come into being through their entanglements. Ingold calls this world of entanglements of lifelines a “meshwork” (e.g. 2009b), borrowing the term from Lefebvre and delineating the concept against the idea of a network of pre-existing actors. This meshwork is constantly emerging from the always-growing lines of life; it transforms and flows itself, constituting a “fluid space” (Mol and Law 1994, Ingold 2008). I will demonstrate that space on the Kemi River is fluid in two senses. Not only is it continuously made and remade by the various lines or flows that emerge as the traces of human activity and non-human processes alike. But it also fundamentally resonates with the literal direction of water flow of the river, which indicates what is higher or lower, more remote and more central. After briefly sketching some etymological explanations of the origins of “kemi” and a few other river names, I will argue that the part of the watercourse that is considered the “Kemi River” has grown over the past and with the intensifying integration of the catchment into the realm of Finnish language influence. Then, I will discuss the correspondence of river names and place names, and the dynamics of place naming more generally. It will be shown how places are distinguished into “upper” and “lower” according to the direction of the river’s flow, and how this sense of direction has even absorbed the general directions of the compass. Finally, I will note how the river is sometimes used as a separator, and sometimes as an integrator of institutionalised territories.

Naming a river The word “kemi” is generally understood1 to derive from a southern Finnish dialect and to designate a “field” (kenttä), although it is debated what kind of field this is and how it relates to the river. Most explicitly, Nirvi (1948: 248–250) argues that essentially the word refers to a fishing camp, a “field” on a river or lake shore that a group of fishers regularly visits in order to fish (see also Vilkuna 1975: 42, 403). Originating in southern Finland and applied to places along watercourses throughout the region, this name reflects the practice of early summer fishing trips, many dozens if not hundreds of kilometres away from the fishers’ wintertime homes, as part of a seasonally diversified livelihood including fishing, farming, hunting and forestry. With the spread of a lifestyle originating in southern Finland, the respective language and naming of places also spread along the Kemi River. Originally, however, people speaking a southern Finnish dialect only visited the mouth of the Kemi River seasonally for the main salmon runs, and probably named

1

An alternative explanation relates the word “kemi” to the word “kymi”, which means “great stream” (Nirvi 1948). This would also explain why a number of other rivers in the North Calotte feature similar names, most evidently the Kem River (also Kemijoki in Finnish) that flows through Russian Karelia and into the White Sea. However, this rendering of the word has been criticised as a misnomer, most directly by Nirvi (ibid.).

3. A fluvial topology: The river as space-maker

its estuary, and later more and more of the upstream river, according to this practice, as a “fishing camp”. The naming of the Kemi River and its tributaries thus reflects the historical shift of power relations in the catchment area (cf. Tuan 1991), and the melting together of different cultural and linguistic influences. For instance, Vahtola (1996: 139–140) suggests that the entire river might have been called Kitinen before the Finnish-language term Kemi was applied to the main channel and its eastern tributary (fig. 3.1). Kitinen, according to his sources, derives from a Saami word for “spring” (kita) and is likely to be a somewhat older name in the area than Kemi. This would imply that not only the name of the main channel has been changed over time, but also the understanding of the river’s main course, which was originally traced along the Kitinen, today considered a tributary.

Figure 3.1: The Kemi River catchment with different extents of “Kemi Branch”. Black lines represent major rivers (including the tributary Kitinen), the grey area corresponds to the catchment area. In different (historical) contexts, the section of the river referred to as “Kemi Branch” (indicated by curved brackets) varies from one of three brooks uniting at Kemihaara (1), to the river joined by Luiro and Kitinen at Pelkosenniemi (2), to the entire stream upstream from Rovaniemi (3). Accordingly, the Kemi River proper is an over five hundred kilometres long watercourse (1), the approximately three hundred and fifty kilometres long river downstream from Pelkosenniemi (2), or merely the one hundred and twenty kilometres stretch between Rovaniemi and the Baltic Sea (3).

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Of “rivers” and “branches” Not only do the origins of river names tell about the river dwellers and their spatial organisation of the catchment. Also the application of the term “river” (joki) to a particular stream is significant in this respect. The lower reaches of the Kemi River, between Rovaniemi and the Gulf of Bothnia, have probably been referred to as “river” (Kemijoki) longest. This resonates with the experience that early Finnish-speaking fishers, traders and settlers probably had of the mighty stream that emptied into the sea, unparalleled even by its large neighbouring rivers. Over the next one hundred and twenty kilometres upstream, only minor tributaries join with the Kemi River, the largest one of which is tellingly called Minor River (Vähäjoki). Further upstream, however, the distinction of rivers from minor streams has been more ambivalent (fig. 3.1). At its very headwaters, for instance, there is neither an obvious spring, from which the river emerges, nor is there any watercourse that is labelled as a river. Rather, a number of brooks emerge from the waters of the area’s wide mires and forests, and converge in three watercourses that are called “branches” (haarat): Naltiohaara, Keskihaara and Kemihaara, the Naltio-, Central- and Kemi-branches. Only at their confluence, a place also called Kemihaara, is the Kemi River proper said to begin as a river. While most modern maps designate the watercourse downstream of this confluence as Kemi River (Kemijoki), in many sources, particularly older ones, the approximately two hundred kilometre-long stretch between Kemihaara and the municipal centre of Pelkosenniemi is still called Kemi Branch (Kemihaara) (e.g., Korpela 1977). This is also reflected, among other things, in the appellation of the plans to construct a hydropowerand flood-control reservoir on this stretch (Kemihaaran Allas, Kemi Branch Reservoir) or the term applied to the assembly of wetlands around Pelkosenniemi, Kemihaaran Suot (Kemi Branch Mires). According to this nomenclature, the Kemi River proper does not begin before Pelkosenniemi, where the “Kemi Branch” is joined by the tributaries Kitinen and Luiro. In this context it is significant that while the latter two streams are occasionally called “rivers” (Kitinenjoki, Luirojoki), they are most often referred to by their signifier names only. This also suggests that a real river is formed not at the confluence of the three “branches” at Kemihaara, but at the confluence of the three tributaries in Pelkosenniemi. The river then flows through Lake Kemi and continues to Rovaniemi, where it is joined by its greatest tributary, the Ounas River. This tributary is consistently referred to as a “river”, so much so that it is often considered its own river system altogether, ignoring its integration with the Kemi River catchment. In relation to this massive tributary, the magnitude of the Kemi River upstream from the confluence is somewhat qualified. While this does not jeopardise its status as a “river” in current understanding, it might well have done so a few centuries ago. In maps showing the spatial organisation

3. A fluvial topology: The river as space-maker

of “villages”2 along the river during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the area along the stream between Rovaniemi and Kemijärvi is called “Kemihaara” or “Kemihaaran Kylä” (Kemi Branch [Village]) (e.g. Vilkuna 1975: 76, Väätti 1998: 43). The “village” upstream from Rovaniemi along the Ounas River, in contrast, was not called “Ounas Branch”, but “Ounas River” (Ounasjoki). It can thus be assumed that three hundred years ago, the Kemi River upstream from its confluence with the Ounas River has not been called a “river”, but a “branch”. According to this view, the Kemi River proper begins not before Rovaniemi, at the confluence of the Ounas River and the Kemi Branch. This view is in line with the observation that “Kemi” is a name derived from a language spoken in southern Finland at the time the river gained importance for salmon fishers and traders from that region. If it was them who gave the current name to the river, they applied it to the lower river first, as most of the salmon fishing and trading by southern Finns happened there. This can be inferred, for example, from Vilkuna’s (1975: 22) definition of the “old salmon fishing area of the Kemi River” that extends from the Gulf of Bothnia no further than to the centre of Rovaniemi. The Kemi River of his famous account is consequently limited to these lowest one hundred and twenty kilometres of the stream. It thus seems likely that over the past three hundred years, the point where the watercourse begins to be the Kemi River has been progressively moved upstream.

Place names and river names Further to this historically particular naming of the Kemi River as “river”, it is striking that the names of rivers and the places at their estuary frequently coincide in the catchment and in the wider region. The market, and later town, of Kemi is located at the mouth of the river by the same name. This holds true also for a number of coastal towns in the vicinity: the city of Oulu on the Oulu River estuary, Ii on the Ii River mouth, Simo on the Simo River, and Tornio on the Tornio River. Continuing along the coast into Sweden, the same correspondence is evident in Kalix, Luleå and Piteå, among others.3 Also within the Kemi River catchment, places on the confluence of one tributary with another frequently bear the same name as the respective tributary. On the lower Luiro, for instance, there is a village by the same name, Naruska is the last village on the Naruska River before it joins the Tenniö River, and the Autti River flows into the Kemi River just upstream from the village centre of Autti. This general correspondence of river name and place name at the river’s mouth suggests that land and water are closely associated in the cultural geography of the region.

2

3

These maps are most often based on historic tax register documents, their borders saying little about the tax-payers’ interactions and senses of belonging. The current centre of Rovaniemi, for instance, was divided into three “villages” during this period. Cf. the British naming of places on river mouth as “Mouth-of-(river name)”, such as in Aberdeen (“Mouth of the River Don”) or Aberystwyth (“Mouth of the River Ystwyth”). The Finnish association of river and place seems even closer, however, as place and river names are equal instead of the one being derived of the other.

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River course, catchment and source The preceding account suggests that there is an intimate relationship between the rivers and the land they drain or give access to. In modern geography, this relation is usually invoked by coupling rivers with a corresponding catchment, i.e. the expanse of land from which precipitation drains into the particular watercourse4 (shaded area in fig. 3.1). The relation between a large river and its floodplain can be ecologically more significant than the relations between upstream and downstream reaches of the river (Sedell, Richey and Swanson 1989), and also social relations not only extend up- and downstream, but also orthogonally to the riverbank. But how do river dwellers perceive the correlations of flowing river and solid catchment? In the remainder of this chapter, I will address this issue from a number of vantage points. For the moment, two important distinctions between the river dwellers’ experience of the river and its representation in maps such as figure 3.1 must be made. First, the watershed is much more permeable than the shaded area in the figure suggests. This will become clearer, for instance, in chapters six and seven that describe boating routes and timber floating, respectively. While the former were of course bound to the river courses, they were by no means limited to them, as portaging from one catchment into the next was no different from tracking along impassable rapids on a single river. Similarly, timber floating was generally based on an integration of forest land and floating routes, i.e. watercourses; but as soon as forestry exploitation reached the limits of the watershed, various means of extending the reach of the floating routes were devised, strategically widening the catchment. The second distinction between the map-view and the riverbank-perception of river and catchment is that the former depicts a clear beginning (source) and end (estuary) of the stream, whereas Kemi River dwellers seem to be less interested in such definite points. In the estuary, it was not before the mid-twentieth century that “river” and “coastal zone” were unambiguously distinguished; and that came only as a side-effect of the construction of a hydropower dam across the lower river (chapter nine). On its headwaters, nobody appears to care from where exactly the river springs. Contrary to an old-established Central European obsession with the origins of watercourses (Strang 2005a: 113, Schama 1995, Gunn 1991), no grotto or temple has been constructed around an alleged “source” of the Kemi River. In fact, there is reason to assume that nobody actually knows where that is supposed to be. On an excursion entitled “Where does the Kemi River begin?” (Missä Kemijoki alkaa?) the participants climbed a hill overlooking the wide mires with uncounted brooks and rivulets that unite to form the Kemihaara. No particular place was sought out, suggesting that the river emerges not from a spot, but from a less-defined confluence of waters. Similarly, when river dwellers talk about their familiarity with a particular stream, they often mention how far up they have punted along it and seem to care less about how it runs upstream from that point. The limit of a river’s navigability appears to be more significant than its source.

4

Interestingly, the term is also used in a social context, where it refers to both the geographical area and the particular group of people that are integrated with a certain institution.

3. A fluvial topology: The river as space-maker

In spite of the obvious relations of river course, catchment and source, river dwellers do not necessarily perceive these phenomena as bounded entities. The terms “river” and “bank” are frequently used synonymously, the source is virtually irrelevant, and although catchment boundaries are sometimes meaningful (for instance as municipal borders, see below), they have historically provided no more discontinuities than rapids or shallows along the same river. For river dwellers the Kemi River is a flow with a direction, but not a connection of beginning and end.

Up and down, north and south, as suggested by the river’s flow The Kemi River area comprises, for the most part, rather flat terrain. Only towards the headwaters, particularly in the northwestern corner of the catchment, a number of fells line its banks. The entire height that the stream descends from its sources to the sea amounts to less than three hundred metres, over a distance of about six hundred kilometres. Nevertheless, river dwellers obtain a clear sense of what is “up” and what is “down” from the direction of the river’s flow. This is evident both in terms of the indication of movement, such as “going upwards” (mennä ylöspäin), and in terms of naming places, such as “Lower Village” (Alakylä).

Up and down as directions of movement through the catchment Let us first look at directions of movement, before going into the dynamics of place naming on the river. As will be analysed in more detail in chapters six to eight, travel and transport in the Kemi River area have until recently taken place predominantly along the stream. Boats with people and goods, as well as uncounted logs, have travelled its waters until they were replaced by road transport during the second half of the twentieth century. And going down has always been a very different endeavour from going up. Alongside travel and transport, the host of everyday activities in which people have been engaging along the river banks have also shaped a clear understanding of “up” and “down” according to the river’s flow. When crossing the river, washing laundry, fishing, cutting hay, or simply watching the water’s currents in summer or the passing of ice floes in spring, river dwellers always perceived the dominant direction of movement. Furthermore, they have long known a number of other processes that resonate with the direction of the waters. For instance, during spring the salmon would rise into the river, and most other fish species would also be moving upstream, while in autumn, fish would generally move downstream through the watercourse. Fish baskets thus had to face upstream in autumn and downstream in spring. Living and working on the river, in short, meant dwelling not just in a world of flows, but in a world flowing into a particular direction. Because both travel routes and settlements were concentrated along the rivers, these watercourses served as crucial organisers of the river dwellers’ world. As people and things came and went along the stream, and many activities were tied to its waters, people’s geography must have resembled more a ‘mycelium’ of rivers, tributaries, brooks and creeks than a territory, a plane crisscrossed by rivers and dotted with hills. Of course, people have long known the rivers’ hinterlands, too, for instance through

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tending reindeer and hunting. But such familiarity seems to have been less intense than the intimate acquaintance with the rivers, their banks and the dynamics of the currents. Even accessing hunting grounds or reindeer herding corrals was often realised by boat along rivers and brooks. This is still apparent in the distribution of place names, which are much denser along the rivers than further inland. So close has been the association of river courses and the land drained by them, that still today – in an age of motorised road travel and transport – the direction of the rivers’ flow continues to instil a sense of “up” and “down” into river dwellers’ sense of geography. Most graphically, I was stuck by this when I was driving with an old lady from a riverside village and she told me to “turn upwards” at an intersection. There was no discernible slope on the roads around, nor could we directly see the river from the car. In fact, we had been heading away from the river bank and were now at a crossing with a road that ran roughly parallel to the river. It took me a few seconds to realise that in this case I was supposed to turn right. My passenger and guide found nothing peculiar with her directions, and only upon my direct question confirmed that “upwards” and “downwards” refer to a general movement according to the direction of the stream, not only to immediate travelling on the water or along the river bank.

Riverine place names The organisation of the river dwellers’ world according to the currents also remains intact in a host of place names reflecting the movement of the rivers’ waters. Navigating between such places, even by car, river dwellers are reminded of the direction, and sometimes also the specific characteristics, of the river. Generally, the catchment is very rich in named places, particularly in areas that have long been inhabited and used by human populations, which include, of course, the river and its banks.5 Such place names are most often a combination of a landscape feature – such as niemi (peninsula), vaara (hill), jänkä (bog), kangas (heath) or koski (rapids) – with a defining qualification, for instance according to particular activities associated with the place, a certain person or family, a special characteristic, or the relative position of the location. The last is especially relevant for the organisation of river dwellers’ topologies according to the river’s flow, as the relative position of a place is usually derived from its situation along the river. Not only is the river itself subdivided into an upper and a lower part (Ylikemijoki and Alakemijoki, literally Upper and Lower Kemi River), but many places along the stream are named according to their position in the stream. On Lake Kemi, for instance, there are three old villages that are named Ylikylä (“Upper Village”), Isokylä (“Large Village”) and Alakylä (“Lower Village”), following the main current. Today, Lake Kemi is dammed into a hydropower reservoir, and for most of the year the current that defined the relative position of the three villages is scarcely perceptible. The names, however, persist and tell their story about a bygone landscape, a “memoryscape” so to speak (Nuttall 1992: 38–58). Similarly, the Koskikatu (“Rapids-Street”) in 5

The correlation of human habitation of floodplains and the density of named places along the riverbanks appears to be widespread across Europe, as the work, for instance, of Sweeney and her colleagues (2007) on the Czech Morava River suggests.

3. A fluvial topology: The river as space-maker

central Rovaniemi leads to a dammed section of the river that continues to be called Ounaskoski (Ounas Rapids) even though it lost its rapid water characteristics almost half a century ago, when the hydropower station of Valajaskoski was completed (chapters six and nine). The Valajaisen Uittotie (“Valajainen’s Floating Road”) just upstream from this station continues to be called according to its use to grant timber floaters access to the river, even though no timber has been transported on its waters for almost twenty years.

Place names, house names, family names The river’s flow is also reflected in family names, as family names are often associated with place names. First of all, many family names today refer to a place on the river, possibly through the historical relation between family and place. There are people with the family name of Suvanto (“pool”, “slower-flowing river stretch”), Koskela (“place at the rapids”), Rantala (“place on the shore”) or Jokela (“place by the river”), for instance. One river dweller explained to me that the frequency of using place names as family names is related to the Swedish tax registers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If a family owned land, the name of the property was added to the name of the household head in the tax register and developed into a family name. Or, as another commentator has summarised the matter: in Lapland “farms, not families had ‘last’ names”.6 Ingold (1997: 60–63) points out that among Finnish farmers, the house has traditionally served as a focus of identity and social organisation. The Finnish word talo, conventionally translated as “house”, connotes a “total establishment, an organic unity of place and people, cumulatively built up through the work of generations” (ibid.: 61, cf. Ingold n.d.: 15–16). Rather than being based primarily on kinship, the agrarian order in Finland was of the kind known to anthropology as “house society” (cf. Carsten and HughJones 1995). Along the Kemi River, this is reflected in the association of place-, family- and house-names. On the Kylmäniemi, the “Cold Peninsula” in the upper Lake Suoli, for instance, the farm and the family running it are both called Kylmäniemi as well. Similarly, just downstream from the present hydropower station of Valajaskoski, there is a hamlet by the name of Heikkilänranta, which literally means “the bank of Heikki’s place”. The extended family associated with this hamlet is called Heikkilä, which is also the name of an old farm there. It can be assumed that a person called Heikki set up this farm7 and gave it his name, Heikkilä (“Heikki’s place”). One river dweller told me that in the beginning of the nineteenth century, his greatgreat-grandfather moved to the place he inhabits today, from a hamlet a good fifteen kilometres upstream. This man’s last name had originally been Lakso, but upon moving into a house that carried the name Oinas, he adopted this as his family name, which is still the last name of the present river dweller at this place. There are many similar stories, 6

7

This statement comes from a translator’s note of a text dealing with the Saami and Finnish history of Kittilä (based on excerpts from Niemelä 1989), in the online archives of Árran, a journal of Saami in North America, at http://home.earthlink.net/~arran2/archive/paivio.htm (accessed 2010–0223). An alternative explanation would be that the founder of this farm was already called Heikkilä by last name, but then one of his paternal ancestors would have been the Heikki who had established a place that was called like him and that would, in turn, be reflected in the family’s last name.

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quite often involving a man marrying into a family without male descendants. In spite of the general principle of passing on family name and affiliation in the male line, men moving into a named house have often abandoned their natal family name for the house name of their new residence.

Relational naming of places and people In many cases along the Kemi River, the fission of households, usually through inheritance, led to the establishment of new farm- and family names not according to wholly different place names, but as variations of the original farm- and family name. A peninsula on the Kemi River in Rovaniemi, for example, is called Korvanniemi, “Ear’s Peninsula”.8 This peninsula is home to one of the long-established families in town, the Korva family. A property by the name of Korva (“Ear”) is situated at the high river bank, on a street called Korvanranta (“Ear’s Bank”), and two ladies who have married into the Korva family live in the house named Korva. In the memoirs of one of these ladies’ husbands, a born Korva, there is talk of a number of other families on the Korvanniemi as well, including Ylikorva, Välikorva and Keskikorva families. Along “Ear’s Bank” thus lived the “Upper Ears”, the “In-between Ears”, the “Ears” and the “Central Ears” in the order of the river’s flow starting from upstream. The subdivision of family names thus reflects the direction of the Kemi River’s main current. Because all houses were almost necessarily located on the river bank, the orientation to the stream thus suggested the naming of places and families. A bit further upstream, in Saarenkylä9 (“island village”) at the confluence of Kemi and Ounas Rivers, this phenomenon is most visible as well (fig. 3.2). The very island is subdivided according to the river’s flow, with the point extending upstream into the Kemi River called Ylipää (“Upper Head”) and the flank facing downstream called Alapää (“Lower Head”). The family associated with the “Upper Head” has been called Mommo, or Saarenpää (“Island-head”), ever since around the year 1600 (Väätti 1998, Enbuske 1998). During the mid-nineteenth century, the Mommo farm was divided in two, which have since been called Ylimommo (“Upper Mommo”) and Alamommo (“Lower Mommo”). Until recently, the families occupying these farmsteads had the same last names as the houses. Today, the “Upper Mommo” farmstead is surrounded by a holiday village of thirty-two cottages, and most of the other farms on the island have sold their lands as construction sites for trendy, suburban detached houses that have swarmed the former hay meadows and potato fields during the past ten years.

8 9

“Korva”, apart from meaning “ear”, also refers to the foamy wave that forms on the downstream edge of rapids and is thus present in many place names along the river. Most of my insights into Saarenkylä I owe to the retired school-teacher Erkki Alasuutari, who has not only explained many issues of the island village’s recent developments to me, but also took me on two trips visiting significant places on the island.

3. A fluvial topology: The river as space-maker

Figure 3.2: The island of Saarenkylä (dotted area) – between the Kemi and Ounas Rivers and a narrow river channel along the northeast – with the names of established families and farms.

Many of these new residents probably do not know much about the face of the village a few decades ago, but the place names still tell their story, and the longer established inhabitants remember the village set-up that has given rise to these names. The next farms downstream from the Mommos have been those of Ylikulppi and Alakulppi (“Upper-” and “Lower Kulppi”), and families with respective names continue to live there. Still further downstream are the homesteads of Ylisuutari, Keskisuutari and Alasuutari (“Upper-”, “Central-“ and “Lower Shoemaker”), who trace their ancestry to a person moving into an abandoned farm in the early seventeenth century and who came to be known as the “shoemaker”. The occupants of the “Central Shoemaker” farm have changed their last name a few times during the twentieth century, when a son-in-law of the established farmers took over the farm but not the family name. Nonetheless, the place continues to be called Keskisuutari. This principle of naming places and people according to their relative position on the river seems to have been very widespread in the area. A list of Saarenkylä families receiving land under the Finnish land reform (Isojako) that was realised in Rovaniemi in the late nineteenth century includes, apart from those just mentioned, the following names: Ylioikarainen and Alaoikarainen, Yliraudanjoki and Alaraudanjoki, Ylianttila and Ala-anttila, and Poikela, Keskipoikela and Alapoikela (Hiukka 1998). These names, just as the above, referred to both people and real estate; farm- or house name and family name were identical. Whereas naming families and farms according to the river’s flow appears to have been a rather straightforward pattern, a number of place names on the river-island village of Saarenkylä also suggest that this principle did not work everywhere. Located at the confluence of two rivers, the island actually has not only one “upper head”, but two.

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As I mentioned earlier, the point facing the Kemi River is called “Ylipää”; but the point facing the opposite direction is not “Alapää”, because it faces upstream into the Ounas River. It is called Vitikanpää (“Vitikka’s Head”) instead, according to the family and farm associated with this part of the island. In the late-nineteenth century list (Hiukka 1998), the Vittikka group is subdivided into Isovitikka, Keskivitikka, Uusivitikka and Korkalovitikka (“Large-“, “Central-“, “New-” and “Korkalo-Vitikka”10 ). That there are no “upper” or “lower” groups in this extended family illustrates that the flow of the river was not the only principle by which to create names for family- and farm divisions. In fact, close to the island’s “Lower Head” (Alapää), where the Kemi and Ounas Rivers meet, the Pulkamo extended family and farms do not make any reference to the river at all. Instead of “upper” and “lower”, the two farmsteads are called Vanhapulkamo and Uusipulkamo (“Old-“ and “New Pulkamo”). An indication of the river’s flow can only be meaningfully part of place and family names when it is clearly discernible. At the confluence of the two major rivers, all directions are “upstream”, and the precise course of the currents fluctuates with the relative amounts of discharge from both streams. On some river stretches, “up” and “down” have thus not been viable directions of reference. Similarly, in the area dominated by the large expanse of the Suoli Lake system in the east of the catchment, no long-established families have last names that indicate “up” or “down”. Places around lakes are distinguished according to more evident characteristics – such as particular bays or peninsulas – but not according to the current, which most often is hardly discernible at all. In the Kemi River area, families and their places of residence have thus habitually been named according to salient landscape characteristics. Whereas such characteristics included hills, lakes and peninsulas, along the river the direction of the flow was also frequently adopted to distinguish one farmstead and its inhabitants from another. The resulting place names were clearly relational, in that they indicated the location of one family relative to another. Ylikorva was further upstream than other Korva groups, and Keskisuutari was in between its “upper” and “lower” extended relations. The locations themselves – by taking cues from the river – thus internalise the flow of the waters and the movement of people and goods along the stream. Throughout the Kemi River catchment, the currents suggest where “up” and “down” is and thereby fundamentally shape the river dwellers’ sense of geography. It must be emphasised that place and family naming on the Kemi River have never been entirely simple and uncontested (cf. Bender 2001). Sometimes, a son-in-law taking over his in-laws’ farm would adopt the last name of his wife and that of the farm, at other times the farm and family would take on the name of the son-in-law. Or the place name would remain, but the family name changed. Similarly, which name was chosen for a newly established place – whether a landscape characteristic, the relative position to an existing place, or the name of the founder – was not determined by any single factor. Many places and people were known by two names, of which only one became codified, such as in the case of the Mommo farm that was also known as Saarenpää (“Island’s

10

This last name, Korkalovitikka, is probably a compound with the last name of another influential family in the area, the Korkalos.

3. A fluvial topology: The river as space-maker

Head”). Furthermore, as indicated in the preceding chapter, current place names are often “finnicized” renderings of Saami place names, and a number of present place names have probably replaced former names, while others might be replaced again or discarded and forgotten altogether soon. What is named in the Kemi River area, and who or what the name refers to, reflects both what is important on the river and who has the power to enforce a particular name. Quite a few river dwellers, for instance, warn against the imminent loss of Kemi River place names due to a shift of activities away from the river (e.g., Jokela 2006). While a few decades ago, it would be common knowledge how any particular rock, reef, bend or wave in the vicinity was called, today only the older generations remember these names. With the disappearance of timber floating, the mechanisation of agriculture, the ramification of the roads network and the submerging of some of those very places under hydropower reservoirs, the spectrum of features along the river that needed a name in order to distinguish them and go about one’s everyday activities has greatly diminished. A river that is less utilised by its inhabitants is also named less densely. Place names along the Kemi River thus bear witness to the histories of human settlement and activities and to significant features of the stream or its banks (cf. Henshaw 2006 for place names and environmental change on Baffin Island). In particular, they tell of the integration of humans and river, they reflect past and present dwelling in a world fundamentally influenced by the river’s flow. Place names suggest that the perception of the stream’s directionality has been one of the central aspects of experience (cf. MerleauPonty 1962, Ingold 2007a), structuring the river dwellers’ topology and relations.

Upstream as “north”, downstream as “south” The Kemi River not only suggests the directions of “up” and “down” in the catchment basin, but also – or derived from them – an orientation in terms of north and south. For instance, I have seen the village of Oikarainen referred to as being located “twenty kilometres north of Rovaniemi”. While it is true that the distance from Rovaniemi to Oikarainen is about twenty kilometres, the journey leads south-eastwards along the river – not northwards. On a modern map, the river flows roughly southwestwards, with some stretches more directly southwards and others more clearly westwards, but yet others even eastwards and northwards. Nevertheless, in the minds of many river dwellers, the Kemi River describes a somewhat straight line from its headwaters in the north to the Bothnian Bay in the south. This is further reflected in the denomination of the river banks. Particularly along the lower third of the stream, river dwellers speak of an “eastern bank” and a “western bank”, referring to the orographically left and right banks, respectively. If the orographic left is east, and the right is west, then upstream is logically north and downstream is south. Given that most river dwellers speak Finnish, this is particularly interesting, because linguistically it would be as easy to speak of the river as running generally from northeast to southwest, and to call the banks northwestern and southeastern, as there are primary words for northeast (koillis), southwest (lounas), northwest (luode) and southeast (kaakko) in Finnish. Calling the orographically right river bank “länsi” (west) rather than “luode” (northwest) cannot therefore be explained as a mere simplification of terms.

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This view impacts on river dwellers’ sense of topology in two ways. First, it “straightens out” the river, imagining it as a somewhat straight line rather than the bending and meandering course it actually is. And second, it collapses the geographical directions of the compass northeast and north. While the former is probably a more widespread phenomenon among people who do not primarily experience the river by means of modern maps, but by moving along and interacting with them in various ways during their everyday lives (e.g., Hugh-Jones 1979, Oslender 2002, Keith 2004, Harrison 2004b: 138, Velásquez Runk 2009), the latter is doubtless more specific to the Kemi River, based on the sociocultural setup of northern Finland. In Finland, as well as in other parts of Europe and the northern hemisphere, “the North”11 is commonly associated with a cold, peripheral and underdeveloped place, sparsely populated by somewhat exotic people (Shields 1991). In order to survive, these people have to stick together and help each other out, as only in collaboration can they make ends meet under the tough conditions (Ortlieb 2000: 300–307). This contrasts with the image of “the South” as a warm, industrialised area rich in infrastructure but rather poor in personal relations. In terms of a modern Finnish map, however, the continua from centre to periphery, from milder to colder areas, and from urban to rural lifestyles, are not only ranged along a north-south axis, but also have an east-west dimension. Throughout Finland, western and southern regions share many economic, sociocultural and meteorological characteristics, just as northern and eastern areas are similar in these respects. The Finnish shore of the Baltic Sea extends along the country’s southern and western borders, while its northern and eastern fringes face inland and are comparatively mountainous (see e.g. Ortlieb 2000: 75, fig. 11). This affects, among other things, the country’s climate that gets colder the further one moves northeast, the associated length of the “thermal growing season” (ibid.: 76, fig. 13) that shortens towards the northeast, and the accumulation of snow cover over the winter, which increases also northeastwards. Moreover, in terms of vegetation, the east is very much like the north in Finland. A map of vegetation zones depicts most of central Finland as belonging to the “middle boreal zone”, which extends around the Gulf of Bothnia far into western Lapland. Northern and eastern Lapland, however, as well as most of the eastern parts of central Finland, are classified as “northern boreal zone” (Ratcliffe 2005: 21, fig. 2). The same pattern is discernible in a number of sociocultural and economic indicators. Maps showing the regional distribution of unemployment and areas of state development support (e.g. Massa 1988: 44, 47 figs. 2.9 and 2.11), for instance, have most of the economic weaknesses concentrated in northern and eastern Finland. That northern and eastern areas are also associated with extensive land-use, low population density, high proportion of state-owned land and limited agricultural possibilities is also reflected by the border of the region where reindeer herding is allowed, which extends further south towards the east (see fig. 3.3). Historically, the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia has been integrated with the centres of political and economic power like Turku, Stockholm and Uppsala since the Middle Ages, 11

Many of my thoughts about the North as a relevant category were sparked by a seminar under the title “Why North? Which North?” held in Oulu in February 2008. I owe my thanks to the organisers and other participants.

3. A fluvial topology: The river as space-maker

particularly such places as the port of Tornio and the salmon market of Kemi (Vilkuna 1975: 51–63). Areas further inland, however, have remained peripheral to the Swedish and Finnish states for much longer, where “inland”, as seen from the Finnish coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, means eastwards and northwards. The river valleys draining into the Gulf have gradually provided corridors for the expanding integration of inland areas with the centres. But for a long time, while the lower reaches of these rivers were considered properly civilised lands, the rivers’ headwaters continued to be remote places, known above all as hunting and fishing grounds. For instance, it has been noted that historically there have been many “Laplands” in northern and eastern Finland, each denoting the headwaters of a particular stream that flows westwards or southwestwards into the Gulf of Bothnia. Alongside the Lapland of Kemi, there were the Laplands of Tornio, of Ii, of Oulu and probably even of Pietasaari, a town on the Bothnian coast well into the southern half of Finland (Niemi 2004b: 35, 2007a). The Laplands of the various catchments provided opportunities for the settlers of the lower reaches to hunt and particularly to fish, often alongside the Saami populations of these regions. Going to “Lapland” thus has meant travelling upstream. Finally, the course of the famous Lappi and Lanta Border (Lapin ja Lannan Raja, see chapter two) from the seventeenth century indicates how east and north have been conceptually lumped together (Massa 1988: 28, fig. 2.2, Niemi 2007a, Pihkala, Sippola and Yli-Tepsa 1986: 9). Roughly describing a line parallel to the coastline of the Gulf of Bothnia, the border ran from northwest to southeast in northern Finland, making the northeast into “Lappi”, i.e. hunters’ and reindeer herders’ terrain, and the southwest into “Lanta”, i.e. the region of agricultural settlements. From these various economic, sociocultural and meteorological observations it follows that phenomenally, the “real north” in Finland is the geographical northeast. The more one moves north and east – or northeast – the colder it gets and the more peripheral and sparsely populated it becomes. The “real south”, on the other hand, includes most of the Bothnian coastline, where many larger, industrialised and well-off towns are located. The course of the Kemi River is a microcosm of this relationship, with the industrialised town of Kemi at its mouth and the crisis-stricken municipalities of Pelkosenniemi, Salla and Savukoski on its headwaters.12 Moving up the river is – and has long been – a journey into the cold, sparsely populated periphery; travelling down the river means going towards the mild, urban and industrialised centre. Projecting this relationship onto the North-South imaginary that I sketched above makes it obvious how “upstream” on the Kemi River – although generally referring to the geographical northeast – is equated with “north”. Both “upstream” and “north” imply the direction towards colder, sparsely populated and more peripheral areas.

12

For instance, the Council of Lapland (Lapin Liitto 2009) states that in 2008 the average unemployment in the coastal region of “Kemi-Tornio” has been 11.5 %, while average unemployment in “East Lapland” (including Pelkosenniemi, Salla and Savukoski) amounted to 15.9 %.

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The river as separator or integrator A recurrent issue around rivers and watershed divides is whether either one or the other, or both, are “natural” borders. River courses have probably as much been understood and utilised as integrating arteries as they have served as separating boundaries (e.g. Morgenthaler 2004, Williams 2001, Roth 1997, Burgess 1996, Hyde 1912). In northern Finland, two major rivers – the Tornio/Muonio in the west and the Teno in the far north – were turned into international borders during the early nineteenth century, dividing the Finnish- and Saami-speaking populations living along these streams into groups of Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian nationals. Only through the interests and ideologies of the European superpowers of the time were the Teno, which had been the centre of a Saami community (Burgess 1996), and the Tornio River, which had long provided significant transit and settlement routes through the region (Lähteenmäki 2006: 15–60), used as thresholds to demarcate bounded national territories. Neither the Kemi River nor its watershed divide have been associated with a national boundary. As a transport artery accessible from both the estuary in the southwest and the portages in the east, the river had long played the role of a frontier more than a boundary – claimed by different powers but controlled by none of them. While internationally, the Kemi River is thus neither integrator nor separator, the river and its tributaries divide and unite a number of internal political and institutional entities. The present distribution of municipalities along the river, for example, closely follows the divides of sub-catchments (fig. 3.3). The municipality of Savukoski is located around the headwaters of the river. Almost the entire catchment of the tributary Kitinen River, plus the headwaters of the tributary Luiro River and a small area north of the catchment, falls within the municipality of Sodankylä. The municipality of Pelkosenniemi has emerged around the confluence of the Kitinen, Luiro and upper Kemi Rivers. Lake Kemi and the river above and below it are part of the municipality of Kemijärvi, and the municipality of Rovaniemi again spans the middle reaches of the Kemi River and its tributary Ounas River. Most of the upper Ounas River catchment lies in the municipality of Kittilä. Finally, the municipalities of Tervola and Keminmaa occupy the lowest sections of the catchment, their northwestern borders roughly following the watershed, their southwestern borders equivalent to it. Also the western borders of the municipalities of Rovaniemi and Kittilä roughly follow the watershed divide, separating these political entities from the Tornio River catchment. In terms of organising human communities, the Kemi River is thus clearly an integrator. This relation of municipal and watershed boundaries resonates with the use of the river as an artery of transport, for instance for people to visit each other, attend mass together or celebrate communal festivities. It also corresponds to the historical categorisation of geographical entities in the regions, which used to be divided into a number of “Laplands” according to the major river draining the area. There was Kemi Lapland as well as – towards present-day Sweden – Tornio Lapland, Lule Lapland, Pite Lapland and Ume Lapland (e.g., Schefferus 1971: 10–11). Also within the catchment, a number of “Lapp villages” (Lapinkylät) were associated with different tributaries and sub-catchments (e.g., Ahnlund 1928).

3. A fluvial topology: The river as space-maker

Figure 3.3: Rivers, catchments and borders. Nowhere is the river used as a municipal boundary. In many places such boundaries roughly match the river’s subcatchments. Along most stretches, however, the river functions as a boundary of reindeer herding districts. Also visible in this map is that the Finnish reindeer herding area extends far south of the Province of Lapland in the east, while it excludes the municipalities furthest downstream from the Kemi (and Tornio) River catchments.

Alongside municipalities, reindeer herding districts form highly significant geographical entities in the catchment. Unlike the former, however, these districts do not regularly follow watershed divides (fig. 3.3). On the contrary, along the lower stream, the Kemi River is continuously utilised as a separator of reindeer herding districts. The same is true for the entire tributary Kitinen, long stretches of the Ounas River, and a number of other tributaries, including the Rauta and Jeesiö Rivers. Only the headwaters

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of the Kemi River, upstream from the municipal centre of Savukoski, and the Luiro River are not used as boundaries in reindeer herding. That watercourses should be made into borders for reindeer pastures appears strange given that reindeer are very good swimmers and do not shy away from frozen-over rivers or lakes either. Why, then, would the Kemi River and its major tributaries be utilised as boundaries for reindeer herding? According to some herders, this makes sense, because water courses also form the boundaries of the animals’ “natural” territories. While it can be easier for a reindeer to cross a river than to cross a busy road, water courses nevertheless seem to be perceived as a boundary of some sort by the animals, and are utilised as such in their management by human herders. For land-dwelling reindeer, the flow of the rivers represents a discontinuity and thus a suitable boundary for reindeer-herding districts. For farmer-fishermen working, living and moving primarily along rivers, however, the flowing waters represented continuous routes of integration.

Conclusion From the preceding account, the Kemi River emerges as a fundamental device for conceptualising and ordering locations, trajectories and territories in central Lapland. The chapter has made clear that the river dwellers’ geography is fluvial rather than terrestrial. It is based on moving along or observing the flow of the rivers, and therefore is less cartographic than path- or flow-bound (cf. Ingold 2000: 219–242). Places are constituted not merely by what goes on in them, but as much by how they relate to other localities (cf. Gille 2001). The direction of river flow suggests which direction is “up” and which is “down”, and hence which places or persons are located “higher” or “lower” in the socio-geographic universe. I have shown that even the universal directions of the compass have been integrated into this sense of direction, as “north” has been equated with upstream, and “south” with downstream. In terms of human communities, the rivers are used mostly as integrators, but in terms of reindeer management, they frequently serve as boundaries. These relations of river and river dwellers again suggest that not only do humans construct what the watercourse is, but also the watercourse influences how humans understand themselves. Different groups of river dwellers at different historical periods gave the river its names and defined the extent and course of its main channel. And river dwellers organised social (municipal) and occupational (reindeer-herding) boundaries in the watershed. But it was the actual flow of the waters along which they oriented many of these endeavours. The very forces of the river – in some cases experienced as a boundary, in others as an artery, but usually with a clearly perceivable general direction of current – have played a crucial part in organising the sociocultural geography in the catchment area.

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

Introduction In an article entitled “nature by design”, Eric Higgs observes that ecological restoration always “requires design according to specific goals” (2000: 198) that define what kind of landscape is restored, who does the restoring, and which relationships are to be fostered in the process. This is to make explicit some of the dynamics that characterise environmental transformation of all varieties, including large industrial projects or intensive forestry. Higgs thereby reminds us that particular goals, environmental change and social-ecological relations are closely entwined. Recently, restoration activities have been underway along the Kemi River, motivated by certain goals, envisioning a certain river and implicating certain relations. In this, river restoration follows in the tradition of a series of previous transformations of the stream in order to better serve the prevailing hegemonic utilisation of its waters. Thus, the river has continuously been made and remade to fit the respective dominant image of what a river is supposed to be. Alongside and exceeding human-induced transformations of the Kemi River, the stream also keeps altering according to processes of its own (cf. Raffles 2002a for similar developments in the Amazon). As Richard White puts it in his inspiring historical account of the Columbia River, it is precisely this relationship, between human and riverine dynamics, that makes for critical insights: In aiming for a relationship, I mean to do more than write a human history alongside a natural history. This would be like writing a biography of a wife, placing it alongside a biography of a husband and calling it the history of a marriage. I want the history of the relationship itself (1996: x). This chapter tells an environmental history of the Kemi River in the spirit of White’s book. It focuses on the key socio-political and physical developments and concomitant river uses that have been shaping and reshaping the Kemi. While the theme of historical transformations permeates much of this book, the present chapter is meant as a unifying narrative, indicating how the river uses discussed in coming chapters relate to one another.

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In writing about historical processes and dividing them into meaningful ‘eras’, I have been challenged with the seemingly contradictory ideas of continuity and change (Ingold 1986, Hastrup 1992b, Palang et al. 2004, Hodges 2008). On the one hand, human images and utilisation of the river, as well as the river itself, have transformed considerably throughout the past and are likely to continue transforming in the future. On the other hand, the developments underlying these transformations have been gradual and continuous, and the river and its inhabitants seem to persist. An early twentieth century poem about the English Thames (cited in Ackroyd 2008: 27) puts it thus: Ancient river, changing never, Symbol of eternity, Gliding waters, lapsing ever, Mirror of inconsistency. Marilyn Strathern (1992) notes that continuity and change are relative dimensions, only meaningful in so far as they are emphasised vis-à-vis another. Change is what “‘happens’ to something that otherwise retains its identity” (ibid.: 1). Frequently it is only in hindsight, Strathern observes, that the continuities can be discerned that are created and upheld, often by considerable changes. In what follows, I will refer to such dynamics as ‘transformations’, whereby I hope to highlight that whereas the river’s appearance or its sociocultural significance does not remain constant, the phenomenon that is transforming and transformed – i.e. the Kemi River – remains intact. Thereby, I regard the river as a “fluid space” in the sense of Mol and Law (1994), who observe that a fluid topology “transforms itself from one arrangement into another without discontinuity” (ibid.: 664). Throughout this chapter, I present a number of maps of the Kemi River. Not only do they indicate how the river has been approached in so many different ways, but simultaneously they have provided – and continue to provide – images of what the river is meant to be, and guidance on how to utilise it (Olwig 2004). Because of the inherent conflicts between these various visions, I use the term “rival” to refer to different images and utilisations of the river. Interestingly, the word rival itself derives from the Latin rivalis meaning “one using the same stream as another”1 or “one living on the opposite bank of a stream from another”.2

The progressive genesis of a river A popular present-day map of the Kemi River depicts its course, plus a few more tributaries, as little more than a background for the presentation of the numerous hydroelectric power stations in the catchment (fig. 4.1).

1 2

From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary online, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/riva l, accessed on 2010–01-12. From the Oxford English Dictionary online, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50207408, accessed on 2009–03-18.

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

Figure 4.1: The Kemi River as hydroelectric catchment and chain of power station.s The river is depicted together with a number of tributaries, on a shaded area representing the catchment. An outline of the national borders is present, and so are an indication of the location of Rovaniemi and the position of the Arctic Circle. Furthermore, two reservoirs and three lakes relevant for hydroelectricity production are highlighted. The map is dominated, however by over twenty squares with attached words, standing for the locations and names of the hydroelectric power stations in the catchment. Sixteen of these squares are filled with a light colour and indicate the power stations owned by the major hydroelectricity company, which is also the publisher of the map. Five other squares are black and represent power stations owned by other companies. The final square is green and stands for the site, where the hydroelectricity company is planning to build a further dam and power station; from the major hydroelectricity company’s annual report (Kemijoki Oy 2008a: 51).

The river itself is hardly discernible behind the massive indications of names and locations of the hydropower stations. This representation is clearly in line with the currently dominant image of the Kemi River as first and foremost a hydroelectricity pro-

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ducing watercourse. The huge reservoirs of Lokka and Porttipahta, the present shape of Lake Kemi, and most of the river’s main channel and its tributary Kitinen bear witness to this fact; and so do people, animals and plants along the river’s banks and in its waters, the activities they pursue on the river, and the meaning the river has for them. This river – both image and corresponding geographical shape – is a rather recent one, however. Fifty years ago, the river looked, and was looked at, quite differently, and a hundred years ago even more so. Throughout its history, the river has – and has been – changed so much, that in order to grasp what the Kemi River is, it seems crucial to trace how it became what it is now, and how it is continuously turning into something new. It will be argued that throughout the ongoing struggles over the waters of the Kemi River, there have been various dominant or hegemonic river uses that determined what could and could not be done on the river during different periods of time (cf. Kortelainen 1999 for the eastern Finnish Pielis River). After salmon fishing with long weirs had been the dominant rival since the sixteenth century, it was displaced by timber floating as the hegemonic utilisation of the river in the beginning of the twentieth century. This hegemony faded again during the second half of the century, only to be replaced by hydroelectricity generation, the currently dominant river use. However, just as the river, its shape and meanings have continuously transformed over its history, they continue to do so today. Presently, a rather new rival is gaining influence in the catchment, namely naturebased tourism, for which maps are redrawn and riverbeds rebuilt once more. While tracing the various sociocultural dimensions shaping the Kemi River is of central significance for grasping the complexity of human involvement in the river, it is vital to simultaneously account for non-human dynamics that have shaped, and keep transforming, the river (e.g. Siiriäinen 1967). These include – besides the relatively quick isostatic uplift in the region (Jones 1977) – the forces of the flowing river itself, constantly eroding parts of its bed and building up others.

Figure 4.2: The present Kemi River projected on different stages of the isostatic uplift after the last Ice Age. About 10 000 years ago (a), the ground in the catchment lay around 200 meters lower than today and the various tributaries spilled separately into the lake, which was later to become the Baltic Sea. Within the following 500 years, the ground lifted rapidly, shifting the coastline considerably south-westwards (b); and another 1 500 years later, the coast had advanced to the present confluence of Ounas and Kemi rivers (c); from Mäkinen (1998: 10–11, fig. 1–3).

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

In fact, only ten thousand years ago, after the glaciers of the last Ice Age had retreated from Northern Europe, the Kemi River looked nothing like the stream depicted in figure 4.1, and that was not because of the absence of hydropower plants. The granite shelf, on which Finland is situated, had been pushed down by the ice masses to such an extent that it lay up to 219 m lower than today (Mäkinen 1998).3 The various tributaries that form the Kemi River catchment today spilled into what was to become the Baltic Sea a few millennia later as separate rivers as the shoreline lay considerably further northeast. Martti, for instance, the most upstream village on the Kemi River today, would have been a coastal community (fig. 4.2a). Over the following two thousand years, the ground – freed from the immense weight of the glaciers – lifted rapidly, so that by 9500 years ago the coastline had advanced to the confluence of the Kemi, Luiro and Kitinen rivers (fig. 4.2b), and eight thousand years ago it had reached the location of present-day Rovaniemi (fig. 4.2c). It took another eight thousand years for the final 120 km of the present Kemi River valley to be lifted up from the ground of the Baltic Sea. Many features of the present landscape and river were formed particularly as consequences of this Ice Age, such as the disposal of moraines by the glaciers and the erosion of ground layers and rock surfaces by emptying ice-dammed lakes and the advancing river (Johansson 1998, Johansson 2005a). From the time when the river’s mouth was situated at the present location of Rovaniemi (fig 4.2c), the first archaeological evidence of human settlement in the region exists (Pylkkänen 1974: 19, Kotivuori 1996). Settlements concentrated along the river, and were particularly dense close to the shore. As the shore advanced south-westwards, human habitation followed along. People lived predominantly on gathering, fishing and hunting, especially trapping; important prey included seal, fish, moose, wild reindeer, and beaver (Kotivuori 1996). Even though these early river dwellers maintained relations with people practicing agricultural techniques, the earliest evidence of land cultivation along the Kemi River dates from around a thousand years ago (ibid.: 79, 125). When farming did develop in the region, the river again provided an attractive environment, because of its fertile floodplains that were used particularly as hay meadows, in order to secure enough fodder to feed the livestock over the long winter (Vahtola 1996: 175–180). In 1546, there were 139 farms in the Kemi River valley, most of them around the river mouth, with a secondary centre in the area of Rovaniemi (ibid.: 134). For riverside farmers, who often subsisted as much on fishing as on farming, catching fish in the river and its surrounding lakes provided a substantial share of their livelihood. The river was used as a route for travel and transportation, as a provider of fertilisers with the annual spring flood, and for many other vital uses. Most importantly, however, the Kemi River was used as fishing ground, for pike, grayling, whitefish, trout and – above all – salmon.

3

The number of years presented in this text and figure 4.2 vary slightly from the text and figures in Mäkinen (1998). This is based on email communication with Kalevi Mäkinen in February 2009, in which the author advised the correction of the numbers according to more recent research (e.g. Saarnisto 2005).

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The dominance of salmon weir fishing From the sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century, salmon weir fishing was probably the dominant form of river use, at least in the stretch downstream from Rovaniemi, and is remembered dearly by river dwellers. Eero, for instance, who runs a sheep farm on this river stretch, seems to know every detail of river history of the lower Kemi River, and particularly many stories about the salmon fishery, its abundance, sad disappearance, and the struggle for compensation and reintroduction. Born in 1948, he has no memory of salmon in the river himself, but as a local history specialist, he has collected a large amount of information on the topic, as well as on other river uses. Sitting in the homestead of his farm, which was built in 1907 from logs that had been cut about fifty river kilometres upstream and rafted along the river to the building site, he forcefully embodies a man who has been shaped by the Kemi River, and who readily fights for treating the river and its inhabitants respectably. As Eero puts it, salmon has been the original source of “renewable, domestic, and emission-free energy” harvested on the Kemi River, borrowing the slogan from contemporary public relations media advertising the benefits of the river’s hydroelectricity production (e.g., Kemijoki Oy 2006). Many of the settlers in the one hundred kilometres of the Kemi River closest to the sea had come there partly because of the rich salmon fisheries. With the availability of salt – and much later ice – for salmon conservation, and the development of a particular type of fishing weir during the second half of the sixteenth century, the economic significance of the Kemi River’s salmon fishery increased. These weirs were long, intricate constructions that extended from the river shore far into the river, sometimes even all the way to a river island or reef (fig. 4.3). They were constructed mainly from wooden poles, weighted down by stones and held together by rope or tree fibres. The weirs were coated with twigs, to turn them into effective obstacles for the rising salmon, which were thus made to swim along the weir and eventually into an enclosure. This enclosure was equipped with a net that was lifted up at specific intervals, hauling the trapped salmon into special weir boats (Vilkuna 1975). This fishing technique was practised only during late spring and early summer, because of the seasonalities of both salmon behaviour and the Kemi River’s water (chapter ten). As ice and flood water would inevitably destroy the salmon weirs each year, they were carefully deconstructed during late summer, in order to preserve building material and fishing site. Each spring, after the flood peak had receded, the weirs were constructed anew. Due to the scale of these weirs, they could not be managed by single households, but were instead constructed and operated by particular fishing cooperatives that shared work and material inputs as well as catch.

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

Figure 4.3: Map of a stretch of the lower Kemi River, depicting in detail the positioning and characteristics of the respective long salmon weirs. Other information includes the position and name of houses, the courses of roads, trails and a ferry, and – significantly – the delineation of the King’s Channel at the deepest part of the river; from Vilkuna (1975: 77, fig. 18, based on a map from 1870).

Weir salmon fishing became increasingly regulated by the Crown and – compared to other activities in this then remote area – highly institutionalised. Regulations not only pertained to the composition of the fishing cooperatives and the quarrels between upstream and downstream cooperatives, but also defined the very ownership of the valuable salmon. In Crown documents of the seventeenth century, the long salmon weirs were referred to as “the king’s” weirs, and one third of the section of the river, where the bed was deepest, became known as the “King’s Channel” (ibid.: 87). This channel had to be left open from weirs, building on an older prohibition against blocking the entire river course with a salmon weir. Originally, this had been an agreement between different fishing cooperatives, in order to assure an adequate distribution of the catch along the river, and

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also to ensure the continuation of the salmon population. The understanding that salmon – and particularly the salmon caught with the long weirs – belonged to the Crown, had been continually contested until the eighteenth century, when the Swedish king finally succeeded in declaring it royal property (ibid.: 105–109). Until the mid-nineteenth century, salmon weirs on the lower Kemi River provided not only a major element of the inhabitants’ farmer-fisher economy, but also a considerable tax income for the Swedish Crown, and since 1809 the Finnish Grand Duchy. It can be assumed that both rulers and fisher-farmers were interested in maintaining this status quo. It was agreed that salmon fishing, particularly by means of the very effective long weirs, was a priority mode of utilising the Kemi River, even though only a well-defined group of people, namely the longer-established families of the lower river, benefited from it. For a long time, the salmon fishery remained internally regulated by the fishery cooperatives themselves. This changed in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Finnish state4 became increasingly interested in developing the northern parts of its realm. A number of fishery inspectors visited the river in the 1860s and came to the conclusion that the system of salmon weirs organised by farmer-fishers was highly inefficient and in need of radical, state-led reform. Alongside the inefficiencies in the fishery itself, the development experts considered it problematic that the fishing weirs blocked the river for another, economically more promising use, namely the transport of timber (Vilkuna 1968: 14–15). Subsequently, state regulations of the Kemi River salmon fishery increased significantly, with specifications on the number and extent of permitted weirs. The old claim that the river’s salmon belong essentially to the Crown was re-asserted, and the farmerfishers were once and for all turned into tenants of this royal privilege. In 1888, the “Royal Fishing Association of the Kemi River” (Kemin kruununkalastusarentiyhtiö) was established particularly for the purpose of managing the fishery over the coming thirty years. Before each season, this association auctioned the permitted fishing sites to local fishing cooperatives, which thus obtained the right to build a weir there (ibid.: 16). As can be imagined, the farmer-fishers were not content at all with such a regulation, and a series of episodes of civil disobedience and ensuing court proceedings followed. At first, all the courts involved ruled in favour of the farmer-fishers’ claims to their old-established rights and thus against the new regulation. In 1894, however, the Finnish Senate decreed that the entire fishery in the Kemi River and the coastal area belonged to the Crown, which had the right to rent it to the highest bidder. This, in turn, meant the end for the salmon weir fishery, because the highest bidder in the late nineteenth century was no longer to be found among the established farmer-fishers, but in their new rival, the forestry and wood-processing industries (ibid.: 17–18).

4

From 1809 to 1917, Finland was a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire, the Grand Duke being the Russian Tsar. Internally, the Grand Duchy maintained a rather high degree of autonomy visà-vis the Empire.

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

The establishment of timber floating The assumption that salmon fishing with long weirs was the most significant form of river use began to lose its force with the arrival of steam-powered sawmills and the concomitantly growing wood-processing industry in Lapland, which soon re-defined the river as not primarily a fishery, but first and foremost a means of transportation for timber. The first, water-powered and limited-capacity sawmills in the Kemi River catchment area had been built by the mid nineteenth century. They were, however, located on tributaries, and did not therefore conflict with the salmon weirs in the river’s main channel (Vilkuna 1975: 117). The first steam-powered sawmill was established at the mouth of the Kemi River in 1861 and received its timber from forests in Tervola, only a short distance away. The logs were transported in manned rafts, which occupied the river for a very limited time only, and could furthermore be steered around the salmon weirs once they were built in late spring (ibid.). In 1874, however, an even larger steam-powered sawmill began operations at the river mouth. The timber for this mill was also floated in rafts, but it came from Rovaniemi, Kittilä und Kemijärvi, located considerably longer distances upstream so that floating took much longer (Itkonen 1967: 152). Soon, serious quarrels developed between old-established salmon weir operators and rival rafters, who were backed by a surging new economy; the latter considered the large weirs as obstacles to smooth timber transportation, the former loathed the damages caused every year to their fishing gear by loose logs or ill-controlled rafts. As a result, the first timber floating regulation5 was passed in 1874. Its content shows clearly that the salmon fishery was, at the time, still considered the most important rival. In order not to compromise spawning grounds, fish habitat and water quality in general, the bark had to be removed from the logs before they were allowed to be floated. Furthermore, the times of year when logs were allowed on the river at all were strongly restricted, so as not to intrude into the salmon fishing season. In spring, only twentytwo days were granted to floating that lay between the breaking of the river’s ice crust and the receding of the flood to a level at which the river was fit for building the large weirs. While the entire summer was reserved for catching salmon and whitefish, the floating regulation allowed a second timber floating season in autumn. Also the autumn floating season, however, was intended not to infringe upon fishing activities, and was thus temporally restricted (Vilkuna 1975: 117). Furthermore, chains of wooden booms had to be installed in the river at critical stretches in order to safeguard the shores and constructions from damage caused by loosely floating logs. The fact that this first floating regulation concerned only the lowest section of the Kemi River, between Rovaniemi and

5

According to the regulation, the floating season began on the day the ice broke in Rovaniemi, after which the main channel of the river between Rovaniemi and the rapids of Taivalkoski could be used for timber floating for 18 days; on the roughly twenty-five kilometre stretch between Taivalkoski and the river mouth, another four days of floating were permitted. From then on, the river had to be at the disposal of salmon weir fishers.

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the coast, is an indicator both for the then limited extent of floating operations and for the significance this river section had for catching migratory fish (Itkonen 2001: 43). Throughout the 1870s, the reach of timber floating operations quickly spread from the main courses of Kemi and lower Ounas Rivers to ever more – and more remote – tributaries. The floating regulations of 1874 had to be extended to some of these tributaries already in 1876. With legislation still favouring the fishers’ access to the river, the rules governing floating on these tributaries were even more restricted than on the main course (Itkonen 2001: 43). Consequently, the expanding forestry and wood-processing industries increasingly lobbied for an amendment of the regulation. The sheer amount of timber that they planned to extract from the region’s forests greatly exceeded the volume that could possibly be transported in such restricted intervals. Particularly since fellings had been extended to the north-eastern parts of the catchment area, timber floating to the sawmills took much longer than before, because the large Lake Kemi had to be crossed on the way. Until about 1900, timber had to be tugged across the lake by simple rafts equipped with an anchor and a winch, powered only by horses or even humans. Thus, logs moved much slower there than they did downstream from the lake (ibid.: 44). The timber floating lobby succeeded in gaining the first concessions in the interests of the forestry and wood-processing industries already in 1886. The spring floating interval was prolonged by three days, the beginning of autumn floating was brought forward and allowed to continue longer (Vilkuna 1975: 118, Itkonen 2001: 45–46). To recompense for the damages and disadvantages this extended floating season meant for the fishery, the timber floating enterprises paid compensation to the state (Vilkuna 1975: 118), which was not an issue for the forestry companies, growing richer by the year due to the burgeoning industry (Itkonen 2001: 44). With the tightening grip of the forestry and wood-processing companies on the Kemi River, their financial power also grew. This opened a new strategy for extending the annual floating periods. Already in 1895, forestry enterprises outbid the fishery cooperatives on the auction of all salmon weirs along most critical river stretches. The forestry enterprises did sub-let the fishing weir rights to local fishing cooperatives, but only on condition that the weirs be deconstructed before July 15th to make the river available for an earlier start to the autumn floating season for loose logs; thus, floating could begin one month ahead of the officially regulated interval (Vilkuna 1975: 118, Itkonen 2001: 89). The timber floating lobby, supported by the Finnish Forest Authority eager to develop large-scale operations (Itkonen 2001: 72), finally secured a further amendment to the floating regulation in 1900, legalising an even earlier begin of the autumn floating season. Shortening the fishing period in August was also in line with the state’s concern to limit salmon fishing activities closer to the spawning season (Vilkuna 1975: 118–119). In 1901, a Kemi River Floating Association was founded, in order to coordinate the timber floating activities and to represent the interests of the forestry and wood-processing industries on the Kemi River. During that year’s floating season, all registered salmon weirs between Lake Kemi and Rovaniemi were rented by the Floating Association, sidelining all floating restrictions on this river section. On the next river section downstream, between Rovaniemi and Tervola, the Association simply began floating operations two weeks earlier than permitted, and paid compensation for the losses to the

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

fishery. In both cases, the monetary power of forestry and wood-processing industries was able to buy out the fishers’ access rights to the river (Itkonen 2001: 89). From 1904 to 1909, the Floating Association rented almost eighty percent of the entire salmon fishery of the Kemi River and controlled many important weir sites. Local fishery associations had no means to join the bidding in the annual auctions, and were forced to sub-rent the fishing rights from the Floating Association and to accept the limited conditions warranting unobstructed timber floating operations (Vilkuna 1975: 119–120). Successively, different arrangements were made by the Floating association in order to extend the official floating period. Either the obstructing salmon weirs were rented, or compensation was paid for damages on built weirs – the costs for the association were roughly the same (Itkonen 2001: 90). When in 1918 the thirty-year contract regulating the fishery by the Royal Fishing Association of the Kemi River had expired, the forestry companies were able to effect the adoption of a fundamentally new regulation, which came into force in 1920. This made it easier for the Floating Association to rent the entire fishery together, and furthermore freed floating operations from virtually all time restrictions (Vilkuna 1975: 120–121). Other restrictions were also relaxed during this time. For instance, it was agreed that timber floating could damage the river and its fishery as the need arises, so long as it runs a fish hatchery to restock the river, particularly with salmon and whitefish (Itkonen 2001: 94–95). Therefore, the floating of loose timber was made legally possible all the way from the breaking of the ice in spring to the forming of a new ice crust in late autumn. The Floating Association took to renting all salmon weirs, subletting only very few in uncritical places. By heavily subsidising the association, the Finnish state bore most of the costs for renting the weirs and paying the salmon tithe to the church (ibid.: 92).

The river as a means of timber transportation During the 1920s, the amount of floated timber grew rapidly. Only in geographical and legal niches the rival salmon weir fishing continued. Not only did the Floating Association’s control of river activities tighten, but so also did the extent of their operations widen throughout the catchment, from 408 km in 1912 to 1987 km of floating routes6 in 1959 (Itkonen 2001: 73–75, 106, 134–136). Parallel with the expansion of floating routes, the image of the river as a system of straight lines (streams) and circles (lakes) gained currency in the catchment (fig. 4.4). Equally, the total amount of floated timber increased, from a few thousand cubic metres in the early 1900s to 773000 cubic metres in 1948 to 2 500 000 cubic metres in 1961 (ibid.: 137, 139).

6

To the distance of floating routes managed by the Floating Association must be added roughly another 1500 km of smaller tributaries, on which individual forestry companies floated their timber to get it into the association’s realm (Itkonen 2001: 124).

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Figure 4.4: Timber floating channels in the Kemi River Basin in 1983. This map, created by the Floating Association, depicts the river system as a network of straight lines, divided into sections and regulated by barriers across these lines. Solid lines represent channels floated by the Association, dashed lines stand for smaller tributaries floated by other groups. Lakes, on which timber would have to be towed, are represented as circles or rounded rectangles; hydroelectric reservoirs are depicted in the same way; from Oulu Provincial Archives, Uittoyhdistyksen Kokoelma, 1c:1.

With the growing amount of timber, the river was also increasingly used as a storage facility for logs. At the river mouth, all the timber that had been floated together, but belonged to different forestry companies, had to be sorted and separated again. For this purpose, a one-and-a-half kilometre long structure was built at the river mouth each summer, where workers separated the logs according to the specific marks that the respective forestry companies had attached to their logs. Because this mechanism could only handle a particular amount of timber at a time, however, incoming logs were stored on the river upstream, filling up stretches of many kilometres from bank to bank (ibid.: 126, for a more detailed description of the sorting mechanism, see Itkonen 2006). Until the late 1960s, timber sorting provided around one thousand jobs during each summer from 1946 to 1966. By Lappish standards this was a rather high number, so that

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

employees were even sought from southern Finland. In timber floating itself, from 1200 to almost 2000 workers were employed each year, although these numbers refer to the labour peaks, between mid June and mid July, after which employment decreased considerably. Many rafters first worked on the river and later shifted to the sorting mechanism. Therefore, total employment numbers of the Floating Association ranged from 1300 to almost 2700 per year (Itkonen 2001: 146–147). Because of the seasonal nature of this employment, it fitted well with other types of work along the river, particularly forestry and small-scale agriculture. With increased mechanisation, both in the sorting process and on the river, the amount of rafters employed by the Floating Association declined almost steadily from 1966, when 2251 people worked there, to 1991, the last year of timber floating on the river, when only 365 workers were employed (ibid.: 167). Nevertheless, one of the greatest disadvantages people associate with the ending of timber floating is the seasonal unemployment it bequeathed. The activities of timber floating shaped the Kemi River considerably. From the beginning, wooden and stone dams had been constructed on the headwaters of smaller tributaries in order to regulate the water flow. Both too high and too low water was problematic for timber transportation. Also, along particularly difficult river stretches, chains of wooden booms were fixed between rocks and trees in order to lead the logs along a particular channel. These constructions, however, remained relatively scarce before the establishment of the Floating Association, because most forestry companies were reluctant to make investments into the watercourse that might benefit their competitors. In 1863, the Finnish Senate granted funds and permits to remove a few severe obstacles from the main course of the river. During the following decades, these works – clearing rocks from the river bed to ease timber floating – continued throughout the catchment basin, but mostly on smaller tributaries that were used predominantly by a single forestry company (ibid.: 41–42). More thorough and systematic physical reconstruction of the Kemi River was achieved after the Second World War, when many rivers were canalised and otherwise restructured to ease timber transport (ibid.: 107). During the 1950s, the Finnish Forest Authority started to employ caterpillars and other heavy machinery for clearing floating channels in many rivers, intensifying similar measures undertaken mainly by manual labour and with the help of dynamite (ibid.: 124). Simultaneously, embankments and dams were built along, and extending from, the river banks, in order to channel the current, lead the floating timber past logjam-prone rocks and keep them in that part of the river best suited for floating. Where it was deemed necessary, streams were straightened, narrowed and deepened. Furthermore, thousands of pillars were built on the banks and in the river itself, where the boom chains, leading the timber in a particular way, could be fastened (ibid.: 125). In all this, the Floating Association was strongly supported, both financially and technically, by Finnish state agencies, such as the Forest Authority and the Roads- and Waterways Administration (ibid.: 126). In the process, the Kemi River was increasingly made to look like the lines-and-circle image of timber floating maps (fig. 4.5).

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Figure 4.5: A map and an aerial photograph of the river as floating channel. The left picture shows a detail from the 1983 Floating Association map (fig. 4.4), the right picture indicates what one particular feature on this map, here the barrier of Autioniemi (circled), looks like on the river (the right picture is taken from Linkola 1967a: 153).

Eero, the farmer and local history expert from the lower river, remembers that towards the late 1950s, the rule prescribing the peeling of logs before floating was increasingly ignored, and by the mid 1960s, all timber floated on the Kemi River was unpeeled. During transport, much of the bark separated from the logs, spread in the water, and some of it settled on the river bottom. The resulting disadvantages for the fishery were compensated, both financially and by restocking fish (Itkonen 2001: 198–199). Moreover, the impacts of unpeeled timber on the fishery were presented as partially positive – providing nutrition to the fish (ibid.: 94) – and the labour-intensive bark removal was discontinued. Not only the sophisticated system of long salmon weir fishing, Eero explains, but also a host of other rival activities fell victim to the growing demands of the wood-hungry pulp and paper industries, particularly because timber blocked the stream along some stretches for most of the summer. Even where the river had not been turned into a timber storage facility, drifting logs and snags put swimmers, boaters, fishers and their gear in danger. All this, however, the power wielders accepted, because of the dominance of the wood-processing industry and their central role in the national postwar reconstruction strategy (Massa 1994).

The spread of hydroelectricity and the displacement of floating During the 1950s and 1960s, the management of floating operations became ever more intricate and sophisticated, including increasing mechanisation, reconnaissance aeroplane flights over the catchment area, and collaboration with the Finnish Meteorological Institute. At the same time, however, a new rival was making itself felt on the Kemi River,

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

namely hydroelectricity production.7 The first dams and power station were completed in 1948, three more followed during the 1950s, and another five during the 1960s. Considerably reducing the current in the basins upstream of these power stations, the spread of hydroelectricity production necessitated thorough adjustments in timber floating operations on a constantly growing section of the river. Most significant was the damming of the river on the reservoirs, built during the 1960s, that turned two river sections into huge lakes, and doubled the size of Lake Kemi (Itkonen 2001: 127, Kemijoki Oy 2008a: 50). Nonetheless, there were a number of regulations stating that the new rival was not to obstruct timber floating. Accordingly, special booms had to be installed on the reservoirs to guide the timber along a certain path, and each dam had to be equipped with a floating chute, in order to flush the logs through the dam and past the turbines (Itkonen 2001: 130). From the point of view of hydroelectricity production, the water carrying timber over the chutes through the dams was of course wasted energy, because it did not pass through the turbines. But the dominant form of river use was timber floating at the time, and other river uses had to fit within the existing system. Consequently, the main hydroelectricity producer on the Kemi River, which currently owns sixteen out of eighteen major power stations in the catchment, planned its dam constructions in close collaboration with the Floating Association. For instance, the Association participated in a small-scale model test series that explored and compared the developments of river currents up- and downstream of planned dams, under different arrangements of powerhouse, floodgates, and other constructions (ibid.: 130–131). A renewal of the Finnish Water Act in 1961 legally codified this priority of the rivals: It stated, among other things, that hydropower producers were responsible for the timber floating equipment on the reservoirs and at the dams, so that floating could continue unobstructed (ibid.: 140–141). In spite of all these regulations, however, hydropower developments altered the river in many ways unfavourable for timber floating. Granted, the rising of the water level upstream from power stations drowned many rocky, logjam-prone stretches, so that less attention was required to steer the timber on its way downstream (Seppälä 1976: 255). However, the reduction in current that the hydroelectricity dams engendered jeopardised the very logic of floating: Instead of being washed downstream with the stream, timber was now increasingly pushed around by the wind. Adding to the barriers that held logs back from floating downstream too quickly, new barriers had to be built on the reservoirs, which were to stop logs from floating upstream when pushed by headwind. Also, strong tugboats had to be acquired by the Floating Association, to be employed on the dammed river stretches, particularly across Lake Kemi (Itkonen 2001: 130, 134).

7

Although hydroelectricity did indeed represent a new way of river utilisation, it was not initially a rival to timber floating in an institutional sense: The power company, Pohjolan Voima Oy, that built the first two hydropower stations in the catchment (Isohaara and Jumisko), was established and owned by the very wood-processing companies that controlled timber floating as well. The initial hydropower constructions were thus only a further indication of the hegemony of the forestry industry on the Kemi River.

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For a long time, however, these problems were seen as mere technical challenges that had little effect on the dominance of timber floating over the Kemi River. Not until the 1960s, when amounts and distances of floated timber had reached their peak, the first major drawbacks began to be felt. Some of these stemmed from problems with the rather short-term style of forestry that had been practised in the catchment area. The quality of floated timber decreased as ever younger trees were felled, and thinner and shorter logs were floated. Furthermore, the reluctance to remove the bark before floating reduced the logs’ floating capacities. All this led to an increase in partially and wholly drowned logs, as well as in the amount of timber that was washed past the sorting mechanism into the sea, where it constituted not only lost property to its owners, but also a danger to fishing nets and vessels (ibid.: 139). Other limitations to timber floating arose from parallel developments in road transport. During the 1960s, the road network had been greatly extended throughout Lapland, and the number of available vehicles had increased likewise (ibid.: 124). In 1960, eighty percent of timber from Lapland was transported by floating; road transport accounted for slightly more than ten percent, railroad transport for a little less. By 1980, road haulage had clearly overtaken floating as the primary means of timber transport in Lapland, with fifty percent of the total amount, while floating and railroads transported about forty and ten percent respectively (ibid. : 218). Nonetheless, floating continued to be regarded as the most suitable form of timber transport for longer distances, particularly when timber was close to a large tributary or the main channel of the Kemi (Pertovaara 1963). Thus, despite being considered competitors to some extent, road and river transport went hand in hand for a few decades. The integration of road and river transport even led to an extension of the Kemi River’s catchment area in terms of timber haulage. Logs felled in other areas of Lapland, and even in the Soviet Union, were floated along the river to the sawmills and pulp factories. By the 1970s, most timber transport happened first by roads – over an average distance of forty kilometres, but reaching two hundred kilometres occasionally – dropping the load at particular launches, where it would be inserted into the river when the water conditions were appropriate, and floated to the estuary (Itkonen 2001: 155). In spite of the oil crisis of 1973, road transport became increasingly cheaper and easier than floating, for which not only the expanding road network was responsible, but equally the availability of strong, multiple axle trucks (ibid.: 201). Apart from the relative price advantage of road transport, it had the further benefit of making timber available at the wood-processing factories around the year, that is, also in winter and spring, when the river was frozen or flooded, and floating therefore impossible. By the late 1980s, things had changed not only on the road, but also on the river: Much of the former stream, famous for its suitability for timber floating because of its exceptionally low percentage of lakes (Itkonen 1967: 151), had been turned into a series of reservoirs for hydroelectricity production, with little current to transport the logs (Itkonen 2001: 211). Accordingly, the amount of timber floated on the Kemi River decreased further year by year; in 1990, only twenty-two percent of timber from Lapland was still floated (ibid.: 214). By the late 1980s, the sum of floated timber had fallen below one million cubic metres per year, which many saw as the minimum amount for economic floating. In 1991, even the 0.8 million cubic

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

metres threshold, regarded as the minimum economically viable amount of floated timber by more optimistic calculations, was not reached (ibid.: 213).

Figure 4.6: Detail of a map of timber-confining constructions, upstream from Ossauskoski power station, late 1980s. On the left side, the hydroelectric dam is indicated by the end of the reservoir (shaded), and is marked by the road that leads over it. The booms directly upstream from the dam, forming a funnel towards the timber chute, belong to the hydroelectricity company. The novel construction from the 1980s includes the concrete pillars (squares) and booms (lines) restricting the flow of timber to the centre of the stream, enabling other uses of the water along the shores. In order to allow boats to pass the timber river in the centre of the Kemi River, boat passages were installed on the booms; one is visible on the lower right side of the figure (veneaukko). The figure is a photograph taken from a map belonging to a former employee of the Finnish Forest Authority (Metsähallitus), who worked both in building and dismantling these structures over a short period of time.

The weakening economic performance of timber floating also strengthened the claims of other rivals throughout the 1980s, aiming at further limiting, or even entirely discontinuing floating operations on the Kemi River. One set of claims came from the lower river, where inhabitants were frustrated with the yearly blockage of the river by masses of timber. Calling for more “diverse use of the river” (joen moninaiskäyttö) became an increasingly popular slogan (ibid.: 201). Consequently, a new regulation concerning timber floating on that part of the river was passed in 1982, prescribing, among other things, a reduction in the water area on the river at the disposal of floating operations (fig. 4.6). Although the Finnish state paid for most of the expenses of building the pillarand-booms construction, the tightening regulations impeded the floating operations (ibid.: 207). A second set of challenges came from the hydroelectricity producing rival, who had invested heavily in the river to make it an efficient electricity generator. With growing infrastructure, each cubic metre of water that did not have to be spilled through a timber chute to transport logs, but could instead be used to propel the turbines, gained in eco-

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nomic significance. In the late 1980s the main hydroelectricity company went so far as to offer financial support to two large wood-processing companies: Should they phase out floating from their timber transport systems, the hydroelectricity company would cover some of the expenses incurred in the restructuring (Itkonen 2001: 214). Altogether, timber floating became regarded as problematic for the river, its inhabitants, fisheries, leisure use and hydroelectricity generation, and as an uneconomic form of transport besides (ibid.: 213). Therefore, this rival disappeared from the river by discontinuing its activities after the floating season of 1991 (ibid.: 215).

Hegemonic hydroelectricity One of the consequences of the end of timber floating was the establishment of a new and practically unrivalled river domination by hydroelectricity production. Before, hydroelectricity interests were usually second priority after the longer established use of the river as means of transportation for logs. But, as Eero observes, just as timber floating had displaced salmon weirs on the river almost a hundred years earlier, timber floating was itself displaced by hydroelectricity production in 1991. According to Eero, the parallel goes even further, because not only were the long salmon weirs bought out by the woodprocessing industries, but these same industries were later paid to resign their claims on the river’s waters. There had been plans for converting some of the Kemi River’s energy into electricity already since the early twentieth century, and hydropower companies’ representatives began to buy water power rights shortly after. In Finland, the right to the water power of a certain stretch of river can be bought and sold separately from the ownership of the actual land through which the river flows. This constituted a rather abstract economic good for many river dwellers. Markku, who lives in a village on the tributary Kitinen, which today is intensively used for hydroelectricity production, recalls the stories that were told of weird southern merchants, who had just bought some of the “water” from particular landowners. This was regarded as particularly strange, because it was clear that there is so much water in the river, and ever more coming, that it must be utter folly to buy some of it. The first hydroelectric dam to be built on the Kemi River has also been the most controversial. After the Second World War, Finland had not only ceded roughly twelve percent of its territory to the Soviet Union, but also lost about twenty percent of its industrial capacity with it, including one third of its hydroelectricity production facilities (Myllyntaus 1991: 102). Furthermore, most buildings, bridges and roads were destroyed throughout the province of Lapland. In a combined effort of state and industry, a dam was thus constructed at the mouth of the Kemi River, where the railway and main road connections crossed the river. This dam was intended to simultaneously generate hydroelectricity and provide a bridge to the northern third of the country (Tervonen 1994: 133–138). It raised the water level of the river up to almost twelve metres, and created a reservoir over a kilometre wide and several kilometres long. Its most significant adverse effect, however, was that it blocked the entry of the river for migratory fish, particularly salmon, whitefish, trout and lamprey. No proper fish ladder was constructed past the dam, so that migra-

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

tory fish populations on the river died out. Not until three decades later, and after prolonged legal suits and political campaigns, were lump sum compensations paid to some of the former fisher people or their descendants. Hardly anybody who had known the extent of the rich fisheries in migratory fish regarded this compensation as adequate. Eero, for instance, feels that the disappearance especially of the salmon fishery cannot be compensated by any means, financial or otherwise, such as the restocking of the river with rainbow trout and other fish raised in hatcheries. For him, it constitutes a “historical paradox” that authorities and river dwellers allowed the extinction of the river’s migratory fish, with profound psychological, cultural and economic consequences. This “historical paradox” can probably be partially explained by highlighting the role that timber floating had played in diminishing the claims of the fishers on the river over half a century earlier. Because the river had not been considered primarily a fishing ground since the turn of the century, when the rival wood-processing industries were enabled to buy out the salmon weir fisheries, and floating regulations were formulated so as to allow the river to be covered in timber from snowmelt to freezing, extinguishing the populations of migratory fish was not such a big step any more. While early hydropower constructions had to pay heed to the interests of timber floating – the dominant rival of the time – in executing their plans, the fishery had already been assigned a minor role on the river. Furthermore, since the large salmon weirs were no longer built, the state did not receive any more taxes from their catches. Nonetheless, Eero – and with him many of his contemporaries – sees a tremendous difference in scale between the effects that timber floating had had on the river, and the changes caused by hydropower developments. After the first dam on the river mouth, between the 1950s and 1970s, seven more power stations were constructed along the main course of the Kemi River between Lake Kemi and the sea. Two large reservoirs were constructed on the headwaters of two major tributaries, the Kitinen and Luiro Rivers, inundating 214 km2 and 417 km2 respectively (Kemijoki Oy 1998). Lake Kemi and a few minor lakes throughout the catchment were similarly turned into hydropower reservoirs. Between the 1950s and the beginning of the 2000s, thirteen further hydroelectric dams were constructed on tributaries, seven of which were on the Kitinen River (fig. 4.7). The largest share of these power stations has been built and is managed by a single company that goes by the same name as the river. The current dominance of hydroelectricity production over the Kemi River goes far beyond the usurpation of the name8 by the electricity company. The entire tributary Kitinen and almost the complete main course of the river have been transformed into a “staircase” of hydroelectric reservoirs, so that nearly each meter that the water falls on its way to the sea is “harnessed” by a dam and turned into electric energy (fig. 4.8).

8

In fact, adopting place names for a company name is common practice in Finland, and not limited to hydropower generation. A former pulp mill located in Kemijärvi had been founded by a Kemijärvi Ltd., and the origin of the famous Finnish cell-phone company is a town by the name of Nokia.

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Figure 4.7: The “energy-economic plan for the largest rivers of the Kemi River catchment”, published by the National Board of Waters (Vesihallitus) in 1980. Solid black squares represent built hydropower stations, the black square with a white centre represents a hydropower station under construction, and the white squares with black centre represent planned hydropower stations. The extent of the reservoirs of Lokka and Porttipahta are indicated by vertical lines, the lakes-turned reservoirs such as Lake Kemi are represented by chequered areas. Three further large reservoirs are planned, indicated by diagonal lines. In the meantime, all the dams on Kitinen River have been constructed, but none of the plans for the Ounas River and its tributaries has been realised, due to a special decree from 1987. Also, the Vuotos reservoir project was abandoned after a respective decision by the Supreme Court in 2002. From Enegiateollisuus (2008: 160, for a glimpse of the grand plans of early hydropower developers, see Axelson 1960).

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

The regulative capacities of the headwater reservoirs and dammed lakes considerably alter the flow regime of the river throughout the year. The spring flood is somewhat dampened, while water discharge during late winter and dry periods is increased. Furthermore, all power stations on the river regulate discharge and water level at their particular locations, for their production depends on electricity demand, and concomitant prices. When demand is high and electricity prices increase, more water is let through the turbines, increasing discharge downstream and reducing the water table upstream (chapters nine and ten). Thus, to some degree, the entire river is made to flow according to the electricity market. All other uses of the river today are subordinate to its use as hydropower source. The former coordinator of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (SLL, Suomen Luonnonsuojeluliitto) in Lapland, for instance, has learnt from the frustrating outcomes of countless negotiations about the regulation of the water table in Lake Kemi, that hydroelectricity production9 is presently the unquestionable priorities. All negotiations have to remain within a frame defined by this dominant rival.

Figure 4.8: Two popular representations of the Kemi River main channel, as a chain of power stations, like beaded pearls on a necklace (above); or as a staircase of dams and reservoirs, where the only remaining stretch without a power station appears like an imperfection in the pattern, or like the place where one would trip when walking on the stairs (below); from a leaflet published by the hydropower company (Kemijoki Oy 2008b).

9

To some degree, this is also true of flood control, another rival that makes use of big dams and large reservoirs.

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To an extent, the hydroelectricity company does encourage and support more “diverse uses of the river”, for instance by restocking the Kemi River and some tributaries with popular fish species, or by landscaping river shores and building boat launches. Eero, however, sees such activities as a “bread and circuses” strategy, which is to silence opposition and deflect from more significant issues. Alongside these promotional operations, the company single-handedly defines the river agenda for its own purpose. The river is thus open to all interests, but only so long as they do not jeopardise its main purpose, namely electricity generation.

Conservation, tourism, and present struggles for hegemony During the last few years, hydropower development has somewhat slowed down. Whereas the generators in some of the older power stations have been upgraded recently, no new dams have been constructed since 2001. In fact, the last two projects for further constructions on the river have been stalled. One concerned the Vuotos Reservoir (chapter two), the other one the Sierilä project, the final planned dam on the main course of the river, which would have completed the “chain” (voimalaitosketju) or “staircase” (porrastus) of power stations between Lake Kemi and the Gulf of Bothnia. Today, many people – particularly the generation born since the mid-1970s, when most of the larger hydropower stations on the river had been built – do not take much offence at the existing river landscape, which is so fundamentally shaped by hydropower constructions (chapter two). On the other hand, even those younger river dwellers who appreciate the beauty of a reservoir-river often contend that further dams and reservoirs should not be constructed on the river. Some stretches are meant to be kept “free”, and further electricity production should be obtained from increasing the efficiency of existing power stations instead of building new ones. Large hydropower constructions are considered to be a thing of the past. Nowadays, many river dwellers feel, there are alternative ways of producing energy, and more energy-saving technologies. Is the hegemony of hydroelectricity production on the Kemi River thus weakened? And what form of river utilisation might challenge it? There is indeed a strong new rival in the catchment area, increasingly favoured by both legal and economic forces. The new rival consists of a combination of nature conservation and tourism, based on the assumptions that tourism is a promising economic sector in the region, and that the main tourism potential of Lapland lies in its environmental attractiveness and its image as a place of “unspoilt nature”. The primary reasons for aborting the Vuotos Reservoir project were ecological, reinterpreting an article of the Finnish Water Act that had been in force since 1961, but never before blocked a hydropower project (Koivurova 2004: 49–50). Furthermore, in 2005, the Kemihaara mires, covering a substantial part of the project area, have been included in the EU wide Natura 2000 Network of protected areas under the Birds Directive and the Habitat Directive. And finally, a group of activists and politicians has recently begun to promote the establishment of a National Park in the area of the former reservoir project. This park is intended to preserve and present the ecological uniqueness and distinctive “wilderness culture” (eräkulttuuri) of the region, and simultaneously to provide income

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

opportunities for residents. The link between these two goals is seen in the formula of “nature-based tourism” or “ecotourism” (luontomatkailu). The absence of large infrastructure projects like a large reservoir, it is argued, will benefit the region more than its presence, both in ecological terms and in terms of the local economy. The preservation of a landscape unaltered by a reservoir is said to have the potential to attract tourists, and thereby income. This vision corresponds to recent writings about ecotourism, which David Fennell defines as “a sustainable form of natural resource-based tourism that focuses primarily on experiencing and learning about nature, and which is ethically managed to be lowimpact, non-consumptive, and locally oriented (control, benefits, and scale). It typically occurs in natural areas, and should contribute to the conservation or preservation of such areas” (Fennell 1999: 43, see also definition in Hall and Boyd 2005: 3). Protecting the environment emerges not as an obstacle to economic opportunities, but as a facilitator thereof. This new rival is even more evident in the discussion of the Sierilä project. Located between two river stretches that had been strongly altered for hydroelectricity generation between the 1940s and 1970s, the Sierilä project was regarded as a safe bet for the hydropower company, by proponents and opponents alike. As a representative of the latter, the previous SLL Lapland coordinator explained that it is very difficult to argue for the nature-conservation value of a section of a river which is, as a whole, widely regarded as already lost or destroyed by hydropower constructions. Building one more dam into an existing series of eight seems like not much of a problem. It was thus all the more surprising, when the survey’s results presented the project as non-viable (Savolainen 2008a, 2008b). Even more astonishing was the fact that the argument against the hydroelectricity project was not based on ecological or conservationist logic, but primarily on economic calculations. While the benefits concerning the energy economy of the power station would amount to 112 million Euros, the “damages, disadvantages and losses” (Sierilän voimalaitoksen rakentamisesta aiheuttavia vahinkoja, haittoja ja edunmenetyksiä) caused by the project were calculated to be 114 to 415 million Euros. The largest share of these costs would come from the “potential loss for nature-based tourism” (potentiaalinen luonnonmatkailulle aiheutuva menetys) which is estimated to be 76–376 million Euros over the assessment period of twenty years (Kurkela 2008: 59–60). In the public discussion of the Sierilä power station project, nature-based tourism can thus be seen to be a powerfully emergent rival for hegemony over the Kemi River. The survey argues that the river can be put to better – i.e. economically more rewarding – use than hydroelectricity production, if its landscape is managed in a way that attracts eco-tourists. The slogan of nature-based tourism is gaining momentum on the Kemi River, not only in opposition to hydropower projects. Over the past few years, municipalities and tourism enterprises throughout the catchment have been developing an ever increasing range of tourist “products” that include the river. One of the main challenges for tourism in Lapland is that most income is gained solely during the winter, when tourists come to ski and see Santa Claus. Both because of a growing insecurity about winter snow conditions, and because of the extent of unused facilities during the summer, municipalities and companies have begun to develop summer tourism. Not infrequently, summer

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tourism “products” include the river, such as boot tours, white water rafting trips, and fishing excursions. The four municipalities of “Northeast Lapland” (Koillis-Lappi) publish a “tourism map” (matkailukartta) with predominantly nature-based tourist attractions, particularly fishing and bird-watching. On the website of the municipality of Pelkosenniemi,10 the “tourism” (matkailu) menu includes a “nature destination” page listing a host of attractions, among which the detailed listing and description – including GPS coordinates – of riverine fishing grounds is the most detailed. Likewise, the website of the municipality of Savukoski presents the possibilities of fishing and canoeing as the first two options on its summer tourism menu.11 The same website also provides links where visitors can download detailed canoeing maps of the upper Kemijoki and most of its navigable tributaries (fig. 4.9), and canoeing is quickly gaining popularity in Finland (Pukarinen and Kirjalainen 2006). Furthermore, among the many tourism brochures published in the municipality is an English language leaflet entitled “Fly fishing. The angler’s dream holiday in Lapland”, promising “Hundreds of kilometres of fish-filled wilderness rivers in Savukoski” (Savukoski Development Association 1996).

Figure 4.9: Detail of a canoeing map of an upper Kemi River section. The map depicts only the river, its immediate surroundings as seen from a boat, and access roads. Rapid water sections are marked and, for difficult stretches, brief advice is given how best to pass them. Other relevant information includes the length of river sections, shelters and hotels, and boat access ramps. Map downloaded from the website of the municipality of Savukoski, http://matkailu.savukoski.fi/image s/stories/kartat/kemijoki_4.pdf, last accessed 2010–10-05.

10 11

The website of the municipality of Pelkosenniemi is http://www.pelkosenniemi.fi/; accessed on 2009–03-12. The summer tourism website of the municipality of Savukoski is http://matkailu.savukoski.fi/?de ptid=19970; accessed on 2009–03-12.

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

Of course, the utilisation of the Kemi River as a tourist destination presupposes a somewhat different stream than previous river uses have engendered. Decision-makers throughout Lapland deem canoeing and fishing on hydroelectricity reservoirs or timber floating channels not quite attractive enough both for high-valued fish species and for potential tourists, and have therefore taken to reshaping the Kemi River once more. In summer 2008, the Lapland section of the Finnish Environmental Administration (SYKE, Suomen Ympäristökeskus), for instance, proudly declared that their “restoration works” (kunnostustyöt) on the Kemi River had been successfully finished. Over 6700 km of rivers in the catchment, along with almost 2800 km of other rivers in Lapland, had been manipulated in order to stimulate fish populations and improve leisure industry and tourist fishing potential in the region. Pillars, platforms and other timber floating constructions were dismantled, and rocks and gravel, which had been removed from the river bed for timber floating purposes, were returned to the river. The positioning of matter in the river happened both according to memories and records of the respective reach before timber floating and according to fishery biological assumptions about what makes an appropriate habitat for particular fish species (cf. Higgs 2000). At the same time, such fish species were reintroduced along the restored reaches. A study by the Environmental Administration of the impacts of river restoration measures on a number of fish species attests them positive results: The populations of high-valued salmonoid species – i.e. grayling, trout and whitefish – have increased in the rapid water reaches on all monitored rivers, both in absolute numbers and in terms of shares of the overall fish biomass, which was equally testified to have increased (Huhtala 2008). During the official concluding event of the restoration works, a representative of the Finnish Ministry for Agriculture and Forestry (Maa- ja Metsätalousministeriö) recalled that his ministry had found it necessary to develop the Kemi River for a new use after timber floating activities had ended there. The most promising option had been the development of the fishery, and large investments had subsequently been made to this end. The representative of the Finnish Employment and Economic Development Centre (Työ- ja Elinkeinokeskus) at the event emphasised that fostering a productive fishery for high-valued species should be targeted particularly at leisure and tourist fishers, not at so-called professional fishermen who earn a share of their income from catching and selling fish. He considers developing “tourist fishing” (matkailukalastus) in Lapland to be an economically especially promising path. Related to the reinstallation of rapids and the reintroduction of valued fish species in the Kemi River is the decade-old discussion about fish ladders past the hydroelectricity dams on the river (e.g., Ponnikas et al. 2002). Because the catchment continues to hold large areas of suitable spawning grounds and early life-cycle habitat for migratory fish, plans have been made to construct fish passages past the five hydroelectric dams along the lower river so that trout, whitefish, and particularly salmon can access appropriate river stretches on the tributaries, especially on the Ounas River, a tributary of over three hundred kilometres without a single hydroelectric dam. In spite of a number of additional challenges – including the need for radical reform of current fishing practices – many people are confident in the potential of reintroducing especially salmon to the lower Kemi River and into the Ounas River. Tourism operators,

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in particular, expect high returns on reintroduction investments (Hietala 2009). Plans exist to build fish ladders within approximately ten years. Simultaneously, adult salmon are to be caught at the river mouth and transported to suitable places along the Ounas River to spawn there. The costs of this project are immense, in spite of EU co-sponsorship. Nonetheless, the time seems to be right for investing in a leisure and tourism river, and even the major hydroelectricity company appears to be ready to sacrifice a few cubic metres of water per second for the fish ladders. One of the most outspoken proponents of fish ladders is the Regional Council of Lapland, which sees the economic development of Lapland as its main purpose. Reintroducing migratory fish in the Kemi River is only one of the many tourism-enhancing programmes, on which the Council works or has worked. However, in spite of the Council’s support for leisure fishing and nature-based tourism, it continues to propagate older development ideas of large infrastructure projects, which on the Kemi River tends to mean constructing reservoirs. Therefore, the same programme that supports the reintroduction of salmon to the river also suggests building three further reservoirs in the catchment, all of which are located in or linked to protected areas (Lapin Liitto 2008). The most contentious of these suggestions concerns a re-opening of the Vuotos reservoir project after the Supreme Court had dismissed it as environmentally too detrimental only a few years earlier. Although nature-based tourism is gaining momentum in the catchment and challenges the hegemony of established hydroelectricity interests in setting the agenda for the river, the established rival is not surrendering yet. Just as international customers and EU-wide nature conservation standards and directives have fostered the strength and importance of nature-based tourism along the Kemi River, international agreements and EU directives are equally cited by proponents of renewed dam construction. Finland is signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, and further hydropower constructions are seen as one means to lower the country’s carbon dioxide emissions (Energiateollisuus ry 2008, Kemijoki Oy 2008c). Furthermore, the EU water framework directive (2000/60/EC) and the flood directive (2007/60/EC) are quoted in order to justify the need for more reservoirs, or the futility of nature conservation on the Kemi River. Thus, some forces that shape the human utilisation of the river originate far beyond the region’s, and even the country’s borders. Clearly, however, the hegemony of hydroelectricity generation over the Kemi River is showing signs of weakening, particularly in the face of the recent rival, nature-based tourism. The struggle is far from over, and even once one rival displaces the other in dominating human utilisation of the river, it is unlikely that any one river use will come to dictate the river’s agenda for a long period of time. It is just as unlikely that hydropower dams are destined to rule the Kemi River for ever. Hydropower manager Erkki once remarked that one day, hydroelectricity dams might be decommissioned on the Kemi River. He had seen the heyday of timber floating and had experienced how, for the sake of the wood-processing industry, his home river lost most of its fish. After the river had been turned into an efficient timber transporting network, many of these manipulations were reversed. So why should not hydroelectric power stations also be dismantled some day?

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

The continuing genesis of a river The reshaping of the Kemi River according to the dominant rivals of the day continues. Whether this means constructing more reservoirs or deconstructing existing ones is secondary. To an extent, the river will always be made to flow according to human desires. But alongside these human influences, the river continues to shape and reshape itself, partly influenced by human use, but to a large degree through forces wholly unrelated to human activity. The terrain through which the river flows, for instance, continues to rise, elongating the river by a few centimetres each year (Saarnisto 2005, Jones 1977). It has even been projected that, over the coming two thousand years, this process will lead to the confluence of the Kemi River with its major neighbour, the Tornio River, a few dozen kilometres downstream of their present estuaries. Furthermore, the isostatic uplift is calculated – despite rising sea levels – to turn the Gulf of Bothnia into a freshwater lake, located higher than the main section of the Baltic Sea, over the same period of time (Mäkinen 1998: 13). Less dramatic developments, occurring over shorter time spans, are continuing along the river. The most obvious of these are the incessant processes of erosion and sedimentation along the river’s flow (Johansson 2005b). Many people living on the river or regularly visiting particular sites for swimming and other leisure activities emphasise how each summer, bank, beaches, gravel beds and sand bars are shaped differently; sometimes, a sand bar may disappear completely, or a new beach appear where none had been the year before. Of course, this process is also influenced by human activities. Forest drainage, for instance, has increased the load of sediments in the river, and the locations of hydroelectric dams affect where these sediments will accumulate (Saarnisto 2005: 168–170). But this does not stop the dynamic of the river itself. Where terrain – built by geological forces, human engineers, or whatever processes – allows, the river develops meanders that are widened until they cut themselves off from the watercourse, only to develop new meanders elsewhere. The same is true for changes of river course, which have been documented in detail for smaller rivers on the boggy headwaters of the Kemi River’s tributaries (Caselius 1971).

Conclusion This chapter has shown that strong influences of human utilisation are clearly evident in the past and present faces of the Kemi River. But it has also demonstrated that these are only some among many factors contributing to what the river has been, is today, and will be in the future. In the discourse of river restoration this future is often constructed in the image of the past. In fact, disputes between proponents of additional dams and advocates of river restoration sometimes sound like arguments about the direction of time: Should the Kemi River be made to look like it did before, or further developed into some-

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thing ever more suitable for modern society?12 In reality, this contradiction is spurious, since all interaction with the river necessarily turns it into something new, even though the ideal might be a condition long past. Thus, “re-instating” rapids on the Kemi River is a highly ambivalent matter. Where exactly the rocks and holes had been before channelling, and where exactly they would be today in the event that no channelling had occurred is difficult if not impossible to ascertain. But in fact, it is not even necessary, because what is built today, just like former constructions in and of the river, represents a manipulation of the river for a particular purpose. In this case, the purpose is to increase the numbers both of particular, highly valued fish species and of particular human users, namely customers of “nature-based” tourism. In many ways, the argument that rapids should be “re-naturalised” today resembles the argument presented by proponents of reservoir construction a few decades earlier (e.g., Korpela 1977: 9). Where the reservoirs of Lokka and Porttipahta are situated today, lakes had been located about ten thousand years ago, when the glaciers covering Fennoscandia were retreating and the melt-water was caught in ice-dammed basins (Johansson 2005a: 127–139). Thus, constructing hydropower-reservoirs could be presented as amounting to little more than “re-instating” a lake that had been there before in any case. “Re-creating” is thus always a form of “creating”, because it selectively relates to a very particular state, while a host of other past states are ignored. A related issue concerns the question of power regarding human influences on the river. There are always multiple and conflicting utilisations of the river. And as I have indicated in this chapter, one of these utilisations has usually emerged as a dominant form of river use, according to which the river was managed physically and socially, and to which the other utilisations were subordinated, so that they could only be practised so long as they did not infringe upon the dominant one. In the examples mentioned above, dominance on the river has always been a function of wider sociocultural, political and economic dominance: The priorities of state, market or other societal powers were usually reflected in the Kemi River. To an extent, finance seems to have become the general currency13 of transformation on the Kemi River – what pays more is granted preferred access and is therefore able to apply its particular version of the river. Because of the generally wide scale of such shifts of priority, Kemi River dwellers were only rarely involved in decisions concerning the major developments from one hegemonic rival to another. Rather, the decisive forces tended to come from elsewhere, usually brokered by the Finnish state and the industries of the economic sector that was regarded as most profitable at the time. River dwellers have learned to deal with shifts in river dominance similarly to changes in climate – nothing much could be done about them, other than to adapt. 12

13

The term “modern society” here implies above all the implications for the river of maintaining a reliable electricity grid in a country that is strongly dependant on electronic high-tech. The more electricity is used, the more “regulative capacity” to stabilise the grid is needed; and hydroelectricity is the most important means of generating this capacity (see chapter nine). On the other hand, finance is of course only one among many expressions of social, economic and political power in the catchment, in the province, in Finland, and in the EU. Acts, laws, regulations, and EU directives all play their part as well, and so do court proceedings, letters-to-the-editor, radio programmes and internet discussion fora.

4. Shaping and reshaping the river: Towards an environmental history

In the face of the many and profound transformations on the river, however, the very ideas of “change” and “adaptation” seem questionable. If people or a landscape are considered to “change”, this presumes that they have existed in a rather stable state before the change and will do afterwards (Palang et al. 2004). If people and ecosystems “adapt” to such “changes”, it is assumed that they do so from one stable state of being to another. However, the environmental history of the Kemi River suggests that the only continuity on the river lies in the constancy of transformation (cf. Hastrup 1992a: 4–5, Hodges 2008, Bergson 1911). Indeed, so profound are these transformations of the river – in all its aspects including landscape, course and currents, fisheries and other biological life, and of course human interaction – that it seems better not to speak about “changes of the river” at all, but instead to consider the dynamics of transformation as part of the river itself. Ingold has noted that “it is contradictory to say that a society – or any other kind of entity – is constantly changing […]. The antinomies of persistence and change are […] the result of a dissection of this continuous movement into discontinuous steps” (1986: 155). Along the Kemi River, there are no changes that interrupt periods of persistence, but the river – and life around it – shows how indeed continuity is change, existence is transformation. Not only does the river flow along – always influenced by rocks, rainfall and economic fashions – but so also do history, biographies, and the landscape. All of them are constantly altering and being altered, and in the process becoming what they are (cf. Ingold 2000: 189–208). Of course, some of these movements happen more quickly than others, and some are more significant ecologically or in terms of human utilisation of the river. As indicated above, the transformation of the Kemi River from a salmon fishing river to a timber transporting river took place very quickly, over the course of only a few years. Similarly, the hydroelectric dam blocking the migration of salmon and other fish up the river was built in less than five years. Still more suddenly, for many people, timber floating disappeared from the river after the 1991 season. As I have tried to show, however, such shifts are in fact not so much radical changes between stable states as ever-continuing processes, an ongoing development by which the river incessantly comes into being. The distinction between ‘relatively stable’ and ‘relatively changing’ times emerges rather from the articulation of different temporalities that are invoked to make sense of transformations on the river (cf. Hastrup 1992a, Hodges 2008). I have shown that these developments are only in part shaped by human beings. To a great degree they are influenced by a host of geological, hydrological, biological and meteorological factors. It is human beings, however, who interpret some phases as constant and others as changing, assigning different eras to particular periods of time. Although the story told in this chapter has also been divided into eras, the emphasis has been not only on the pervasiveness, but also on the transience of different dominant images and utilisations of the river. This chapter has made clear that the Kemi River is continuously shaped and reshaped.

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5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

Introduction Fishing is probably the single most important activity integrating the Kemi River and its inhabitants. Simple angling is open to everyone under the centuries-old “everyman’s right” (jokamiehenoikeus), and licenses for more sophisticated fishing can be acquired easily and cheaply. While fishing, people spend time on the river, and by experiencing its movements and eating its fish they internalise some of the stream; through fishing, people also actively contribute to shaping the river, by manipulating its flow, by restocking particular species, and of course by fishing out biomass. This chapter discusses some of the relations, activities and skills that integrate river dwellers with the river through fish and fishing. How do river dwellers fish? How do they value their catches? In what respect is river fishing a negotiation of flows? And how does dealing with fish also imply dealing with other human beings and a host of biological dynamics (cf. Scarce 2000)? A central theme of the chapter will be the particular knowledge about river and fish that is relevant for fishing. The core challenge in fishing is to catch a creature in an environment (water) in which this creature is much more at home than the catcher. Moreover, the physical characteristics of water usually obstruct human vision beyond the surface, so that fishers frequently have to infer what is in the water from what they can detect on the surface. Therefore, most fishing on the Kemi River is achieved by some form of trap that compensates for fishers’ perceptual and kinetic limitations in the water by drawing on their knowledge of fish behaviour.1 I will suggest that through empathy – the attempt to understand the experiences of another being – river

1

The only exception from this seems to have been the practice of spearing fish when it was preparing to spawn in rather shallow waters. This was done at night, from boats that carried a fire on an iron frame fixed to the prow. The spears (arina) were wooden shafts on which fork-like, barbed iron heads were mounted. Since the 18th century, this technique has been banned multiple times, because of its adverse effects on fish reproduction, and today it seems virtually absent from the river (Vilkuna 1975: 339–41).

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dwellers shape and adjust their images of the fish’s life-worlds. In short, this chapter illustrates how river fishing, a topic virtually absent from anthropological literature (see review by Acheson 1981 who mentions only maritime fisheries and studies of social relations limited to humans), engenders a peculiarly intense form of engagement with the river.

Fishing for fish and good times It seems that for many people, spending time on the river is tantamount to fishing. Whenever they plan an activity that implies being near to water, they take a fishing rod along. Hellevi, for example, has been fishing on the Kemi River her whole life. Born in 1934, she has worked as a shopkeeper for many years, and has lived close to her workplace in different larger and smaller villages around. On the weekends, however, she would – whenever possible – go fishing with friends or family. Long retired, she lives today in the house her father rebuilt after the war. From her living room window, she can see the river flowing by, but that is not enough for her. At least once a day, she walks down to the riverside to take a closer look at the stream. Sometimes she just looks, but more often she takes a fishing rod along. When she fishes at her “home-beach” (kotiranta), she is usually on her own, but when she embarks on trips – either by boat on the river or by car to one of the lakes in the region – she tends to go in company. During summer, Hellevi and her fishing companion sometimes row a few kilometres up and down the river, fishing and chatting. In autumn, they travel to lakes on the eastern border of Finland, dozens of kilometres away, in order to fish there. In the winter, the ladies shift their fishing trips to the river or closer-by lakes. Hellevi sometimes wonders what other people think of them, when they see them sitting on the ice for hours, notwithstanding cold winds or sleet downpour – but she likes angling, being outside and in good company, too much to really care. Although such casual fishing, practiced alongside other activities or with a pronounced social aspect, is very popular, it constitutes a rather different endeavour from that kind of fishing people practise primarily for the sake of catching fish. When people really go for fish, they also want to catch some. As one man boasts, he does not consider it satisfactory when, after a night of lure fishing with his companion, they have caught less than fifteen kilogramme of fish; and only when they have caught more than twentyfive kilogramme, he deems it a success. That these two approaches to fishing – as a means to obtain fish, and as an activity alongside other tasks – are often not clearly separable in practice, is epitomised by the ubiquitous fishing competitions on the Kemi River. Finns seem to have a tendency to turn every other activity into a competition, and fishing is no exception. Often, however, the social aspect is valued more than the competitive dimension. The burbot ice-fishing competition of the established firms of Rovaniemi, for example, had an atmosphere more like a school trip than a contest. The setting of the event, a cold and pitch-dark evening in early February, could have triggered a fierce competition of teeth-gritting anglers. What happened, however, was that liquor bottles already began to circle on the bus transporting the competitors to the fishing grounds, and as soon as all the anglers had settled over

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

their ice holes, the first contestants continued the circling, leaving their fishing rod behind for a chat and a shot here and there. Spending time together on the ice, and sharing the experience of darkness and icy winds, seemed to be more important than actually catching burbot. Also, the few fish that were caught during this competition were somewhat sidelined by the large number of sausages that were fried after the two-hour fishing period. And the bottle of cognac that the winning team received as a first prize was empty before the bus had reached Rovaniemi on the way back. Just like Hellevi, Timo is a skilled and experienced fisher. At the moment, however, Timo cannot afford to spend nearly as much time fishing as he would like, because he is still working full-time. Born in 1956, in a village on the upper Ounas River, he works at the University of Lapland, in the provincial capital Rovaniemi, over two hundred river kilometres downstream. He has studied in far-away Helsinki and lived in Oulu, but he keeps returning to his childhood home, often to do work, but also in order to fish. Particularly during spring, when the ice cover on the river breaks open and the flowing-water fishing season begins again, Timo enjoys being at his home river; but also during late winter, when ice-hole fishing parties populate the frozen-up surfaces of the watercourses surrounding the village, he spends time there. Timo contends that ice-fishing provides at least as many opportunities for collaboration as it does for competition, even though in the end every angler sits crouched over her or his own hole holding his or her own fishing rod. The other year, for instance, a group of ice fishers formed around the idea of transporting a barbecue grill and firewood onto the ice, so that caught fish could be roasted immediately. There are few places along the Kemi River where people have to revert to fishing when they crave fish. Shops and huge supermarkets are stocked well in fresh and deep-frozen fish, and are spread out throughout the catchment. Nonetheless, many people actually fish in order to eat their catch. Burbot is caught in the winter, and not only makes a delicious soup, but also its pureed liver is said to be most suitable baby nutrition. In spring, vendace can be caught in some lakes, and pike swim to the shore and up the flooded creeks, where they can be easily trapped. The small vendace are fried and eaten without removing heads and tails, pike is usually filleted and fried in butter, or cut in pieces and boiled in a soup. The summer provides grayling, trout, brook-trout and roach; from the latter, tasty fish-balls are prepared, the former three can be fried or just lightly cured and eaten raw. In autumn, whitefish are caught, and the winter provides perch, which is said to taste best when smoked. In the relations of the Kemi River and its inhabitants, fish seem to provide a crucial aspect. Catching and eating fish provides to river dwellers a taste of the river, resonating with the rhythms of discharge, fish behaviour and fishing seasons. A sense of belonging to the river is fostered through eating self-caught fish instead of fish bought in the store. Hellevi, for the sheer amount of time she spends fishing regularly, is clearly a fisherwoman. However, never in her life has she actually made a living from it in the modern sense of earning an income by practising a particular activity, or by selling a product. Neither does Timo live off fishing, even though he possesses an equally wide range of fishing skills and experiences. In fact, there has probably never been anyone on the Kemi River who made a living solely from fish – other than the pastor of the parish of Kemi, who gained – at times – a considerable amount of fish tithe, but did not do very much fish-

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ing himself (Vilkuna 1975: 60–74). Nevertheless, the river is – and has been throughout history – littered with fishermen and -women. There is a group of people who are considered “professional fishers” (ammattikalastaja),2 for instance, on the Lokka hydropower reservoir and on the river mouth. That does not mean, however, that these fishers earn all, and not even most, of their income from fishing.

Private fishing grounds and fleeting fish Among many other principles, Finnish law has adopted from the Swedish legal tradition the rule that the water belongs to the same owner as the adjacent land (see Vilkuna 1975: 51). This means that the stretch of the river running through a patch of land is owned privately by the land owner; if two land-owners hold property on opposite sides of the river, their patches of river ownership meet in mid-stream. While the private share of land ownership in Lapland is particularly high along the major rivers, the Finnish state still owns an exceptionally large share of the catchment, especially further upstream. Watercourses not owned by the state are administered by fishery associations, of which the local land-owners are members. Only these land and water owners are allowed to fish in their waters with nets, traps and any gear that is more sophisticated than a simple hook on a fixed line. Traditionally, the right to fish seriously has thus been limited to those owning the shore; and it is sometimes feared that if highly valuable migratory fish are to be reintroduced to the river, only these land and water owners will benefit. One problem of private ownership of a river section, however, is that water, fish and other organisms are in no way bound to remain within or outside that particular patch (cf. Bear and Eden 2008). Such problems are less pronounced in lakes that are more secluded from larger watercourses. In fact, it is common practice for a group of fishermen to rent such a lake – usually from the state – and with it the right to fish there. The tenants usually restock the lake with a preferred species of fish, such as whitefish or even trout, and use it almost like an agricultural feeder. They can be sure that for every quantity of fish seeded in the lake, they will reap a certain number of adult fish. In the river, this method would be futile – before the fish would reach the desired size, most of them would have swum away or have been caught by other fishermen or predators (see Ingold 1976: 90–102, for the problematic dynamics of restocking and water ownership in northern Lapland).

Fishing techniques: Inversions of the fish’s life story How do river dwellers actually catch fish? Getting hold of an animal that is easily deterred and that moves and hides in the river much too cleverly for humans to track or follow 2

In Finland, people earning 30% or more of their income by selling fish are officially classified as professional fishers, and even those who make between 15 and 30% are still counted as professionals, even though in a somewhat limited sense (Kalatalouden Keskusliitto 2008). These numbers are a clear indicator that fishing throughout Finland is considered, and probably has always been considered, as one element within a wider livelihood, necessarily integrated with other such elements, like hunting and collecting berries, farming and forestry, and of course paid work.

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

is mostly achieved by trapping rather than direct pursuit. The fish is caught by its own actions, which only succeeds if the trap is set up adequately. But what is an adequately installed trap, and how do river dwellers learn what makes a good trap? In what follows I argue that this knowledge is created by engaging empathetically with target fish. Empathy focuses river dwellers’ attention on the behaviour of the fish, and provides them with a model for explaining and predicting such behaviour. I use here the concept of empathy because it highlights the importance of resonance, in the sense of “a feeling-thinking engagement” (Wikan 1992: 476), for understanding and catching fish. Empathy with more experienced practitioners is critical in acquiring particular skills (Gieser 2008). Through relating empathetically to a teacher – observing and imitating her actions and sharing the emotions they engender – the apprentice gains some of the teacher’s sensibilities and skills. This applies in part to the non-human world as well. In the anthropology of human-animal relations, it is frequently noted that certain animals are considered as other-than-human persons by many people (Ingold 2000), especially by hunters (e.g., Nadasdy 2007, Brightman 1993). In spite of animals’ obvious otherness, certain characteristics are attributed to them that identify them as persons nonetheless. Therefore, humans can, to a degree, engage in empathetic relationships with animals (Willerslev 2004).3 Following Wispé (1986: 318), empathy is here understood as “a way of knowing”, that is “the attempt by one self-aware self to comprehend un-judgementally the positive and negative experiences of another self”.4 As Zahavi (2008: 517) adds, however, “this does not entail that the other’s experience is literally transmitted to us. Rather, it amounts to experiencing, say, the other person’s emotion without being in the corresponding emotional state yourself.” There is thus an inherent tension in empathetic relations, which revolves around the apparent contradiction between assuming the perspective of the other being, and keeping a critical distance from the other’s emotional state. Willerslev (2004), describing hunting practices and narratives among northeastern Siberian Yukaghirs, is confronted by the same tension. Hunters explain that they need to be able to assume the appearance and viewpoint of their prey, but only to an extent. If they immerse themselves too far into the reality of the animal, they will not succeed in hunting, but lose their human selves. Therefore, Yukaghirs must cautiously manage their empathetic relations with prey animals. The hunter must be “not animal”, but equally “not not-animal”. “In other words, the success of the hunter rests in his ability to keep up a ‘double perspective’” (ibid.: 639).

3

4

I do not want to claim that Kemi River dwellers are ‘hunters’ when they fish, although many do hunt other animals in season, such as moose. I refer to the literature on hunting in this context only because it is in this literature that relations between humans and non-domestic animals have been most widely discussed. Wispé also clearly distinguishes empathy from sympathy. “The object of empathy is to ‘understand’ the other person. The object of sympathy is the other person’s ‘well-being’” (1986: 318). Empathy can thus define a relation even if it is ultimately geared at killing person with whom one is empathetic. This is a tension with which, for instance, Brightman (1993) seems to be struggling when he tries to reconcile the apparent contradictions of benefactive and advesarial models in Cree hunting.

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Applying these insights to the river dwellers observing and catching fish might seem far-fetched, but it has been tried before and yielded critical insights, not only in the literature on hunters, but also in the context of fishing. Ota, for instance, writes that Melanesian “underwater spear-gun fishing is centred on fishermen’s physical movements and skills, and their consequent empathy with the movements of the fish” (2006: 218). Also along the Kemi River, fishing is grounded in an empathetic endeavour to comprehend fish experiences and behaviour. A closer investigation of fishing gear used along the Kemi River clarifies this point. Gell (1996: 27) has argued that an effective trap “is both a model of its creator, the hunter, and a model of its victim, the prey animal. But more than this, the trap embodies a scenario, which is the dramatic nexus that binds these two protagonists together”. In order to set such a trap, people create “lethal parodies of the animal’s Umwelt” that “may actually reflect the outward form of the victim [... or] represent parameters of the animal’s natural behaviour, which are subverted to entrap it” (ibid.). Thus, the secret of fishing seems to lie in the knowledge of fish habitat and behaviour, and the ability to create traps that work as an inverted fish-in-its-environment, representing a microcosm of fish behaviour, currents, river bed, vegetation, etc. How do river dwellers come to know the movements and responses of fish so well that they can invert them in their traps? Until they are lifted from the water, the actual fish can only rarely be seen directly. In fishing however, ‘seeing’ is not so much ‘looking at objects’ as correctly interpreting environmental dynamics and ripples on the water. River dwellers come to know fish by deducing their experiences from glimpses of fins and movements on the water surface or by inferring their situation from river bed characteristics, temperature or vegetation, or in a word, by empathising with them. In this light, the fish that the fisher looks out for and empathises with is not the specimen bounded by scales and fins, as it would appear, for instance, on a fishmonger’s counter or in a natural history book. Rather, the fisher interacts with the total phenomenon of the fish-inits-environment, which includes – alongside the natural-history-book specimen – the ripples in the water, flashes of colour, sounds, and rocks in the river bed. A skilled fisher thus can ‘see’ a fish even if the ‘natural-history-book-fish’ remains invisible. Tellingly, Clark (1999) illustrates his plea for recognising the fundamental embodiment and situatedness of cognition with the example of a fish. The speed and agility of the Bluefin tuna cannot be accounted for in terms of its inner strength, but require the tuna to “find and exploit naturally occurring currents so as to gain speed, and use tail flaps to create additional vortices and pressure gradients, which are then used for rapid acceleration and turning” (ibid.: 345). What the tuna is and what it does depends as much on structures and movements in its environment as on its inner capabilities. The fish in the world “is thus a fish-as-embedded-in, and as actively exploiting, its local environment” (ibid.). Similarly, I would argue, are fish for Kemi River fishers the fish-in-theriver, including rocks, splashes and ripples. How correct their deductions and inferences are, and how appropriate the chosen fishing technique, river dwellers mostly learn by actually catching fish, however. A hooked fish usually implies that the fisher did the right thing at the right time; an empty net means she misinterpreted something about fish and their environment. Of course, learning how to fish is not reducible to the interactions of fisher and fish-in-theriver, but is also mediated through learning from more experienced fishers and sharing

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

experiences and techniques. Children, for instance, are often given fishing rods at a rather young age, so that they can imitate the adults’ fishing activities, or get practical instructions about where and how to cast the line, attach the bait, or haul in a fish. Although river dwellers are cautious not to reveal their favourite fishing grounds to strangers, they are keen narrators of fishing stories, which are often very detailed about how a particular catch was accomplished, which lure was used, and how the weather and river conditions were. In sum, river dwellers learn about fish by scanning waves and vegetation, checking lines and nets, and listening to or watching one another. On the Kemi River, fish are generally trapped either on a hook or in a net. Both can be considered traps as none of them actively catches fish, but their success hinges on the fish itself taking the bait or entering the net (or at least not escaping from it in time). Lure fishing is based on offering some form of bait to the fish, which gets caught on the hook upon trying to swallow it. This bait can be an organism that the fish is likely to feed on, or an emulation thereof; alternatively, objects that are likely to catch the fish’s attention can be used as bait. The second general type of fishing technique is based on trapping the fish in some kind of structure, usually a net. This technique either takes advantage of a particular movement of the catching gear, or of a particular movement of the fish.

Lure fishing The basic principle of lure fishing is that the fish, moving about freely in the water, has to be persuaded in some way to bite into a hook, where it gets caught. Such persuasion is accomplished by a combination of two factors: the taste, visual and olfactory characteristics of the bait on the one hand, and the positioning and movement of the bait within the water on the other. This still presupposes, however, that the fish is hungry, active or aggressive enough to go for the bait, which is not always the case. Then, an angler can do everything right and still end up without a catch. Furthermore, once the fish gets stuck on the hook, it must yet be hauled out of the water, which can require a lot of skill by the fisher, and also a degree of luck. Many fish put on a considerable fight when hooked, and they do not always remain on the hook until they are exhausted enough to be landed. Lure fishing techniques range from the simple angling with a fixed line and an earthworm-baited hook to the sophisticated fly-fishing and multiple-rod trolling methods. Simple angling takes place throughout the year, with only minor differences in gear. Most important in angling seems to be the choice of bait and the position of the hook relative to the river bottom. When a fish is taking the bait, this is usually recognised not directly, but through the movement of a float or similar device on the fishing line. During the summer, fly fishing is a popular technique. It is usually practised on rapid water river sections. In fly fishing, hooks are decorated in a certain way to resemble insects that target fish are likely to prey on. Some say that it is best to fish with a lure that resembles the insects that are actually around over and on the water. Fly-fishing has a long history on the Kemi River, but the mobile rod is a rather new technique. Traditionally, fly lures were used with so-called “grayling-boards” (harrilautoja), wooden rafts that pulled a line across a river section from which the flies extended onto the water surface. Alternatively, fly lures were attached to short rods fixed on a boat, and the movement of

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the flies on the water was induced by swaying the boat back and forth. The former method has been prohibited in 1964,5 the latter fallen into disuse. Probably the most widespread fishing technique on the Kemi River today is trolling (uistelu). It is based on fishing with a mobile line on a rod equipped with a reel. Either by casting out and hauling in the fishing line (heittouistelu), or propelled by the movement of a boat (vetouistelu), the lure is dragged through the water where it tends to perform some kind of specific movement which attracts the fish’s attention. While the cast-and-retrieve method is rather recent on the Kemi River, as it fundamentally depends on particular casting reels, trolling with a boat is longer established. For trolling lures, hooks can be inserted into small bait fish that are then pulled through the water, resembling live but somewhat awkwardly moving fish. Apart from the visual impression, the smell of the dead bait is also supposed to attract fish. Most often, however, metal or synthetic lures are used. In outdoor stores, and even in most supermarkets, an overwhelming variety of those lures is for sale; apart from the different basic types, size, weight and colour play a role and are available in all imaginable combinations. Some synthetic lures are made quite clearly to resemble fish: they have a fish-shaped body, a tail, fins and eyes. Other lures look little like real fish, such as the oval, slightly concave metal plate, called a “spoon” (lusikka). When pulled through the water, however, the lure spirals about rather irregularly, mimicking the movements of a hurt or otherwise peculiar fish, which is said to attract predator fish. The movement and bright varnish of “spoons” is more important than any direct resemblance to the shape of a live fish. Brightness and spinning movement are regarded as a sufficient approximation of a bait fish, and the success of “spoon” lures supports this opinion. This idea is taken to an extreme by another kind of lure that consists simply of a triple hook and a weight, to which a ring with a small metal plate is attached that rotates when pulled through the water. This lure – when observed closely and in an immobile state – looks nothing like a fish. Moving through the water at the right speed, however, it is a convincing attraction for many fish. Whether or not fish actually see a prey fish in the moving lure is considered secondary; what counts is that the bright and spinning object is taken to be something to bite into. As different as these various angling techniques may appear, they share the same preconditions. The fisher must convince the fish to swim to the hook and get caught. In order to do so, the angler has to explore the particular characteristics of the river at the catching place – its depths, currents, prevailing food, etc – investigate the whereabouts and preferences of the present fish, and combine these insights in the particular outfit and movements of lures and hooks. Frequently, this implies a series of trial-and-error, with more experienced fishers able to “understand” the fish more readily and adapt their technique accordingly.

5

Laki kalastuslain muuttamisesta (Act about changing the fishery act), 4./1964; http://www.finlex.fi/ fi/laki/alkup/1964/19640004, accessed 2009–03-30.

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

Net and trap fishing Lure fishing only works as long as fish are hungry, active or aggressive enough to actually swallow the hook. Many times, however, that is not the case. Furthermore, lure fishing requires the fishers to be continuously on the river or lake; they cannot accomplish many other tasks at the same time as fishing. Fishing with nets and traps does away with the first issue, and some techniques also with the second one. The basic mechanism of net fishing is that while water and very small fish can pass the meshes of a net or a trap, larger fish cannot. Most nets and traps are to a large extent invisible to fish, so that they hardly ever have a chance of perceiving the overall pattern of the fishing gear, and thus often swim readily into capture. There are two alternative principles for net fishing: stable traps and gillnets taking advantage of observed and regular movements of the fish, and mobile nets based on knowing the fish’s whereabouts and behaviour, and catching them through particular movements of the net.6 As in lure fishing, thus, net fishing is based on river dwellers’ empathy with the experiences of the target fish and their ability to devise catching mechanisms that function as an “inverse life-story” of the fish. Fishing with traps is a very old and ever popular method on the Kemi River. Probably the most famous example of such traps is the former salmon weirs on the main course of the river (Vilkuna 1975), although their use was limited to a rather well-defined group of old-established river dwellers. The weirs exploited the annual salmon migration up the river, by modifying parts of the stream in such a way as to induce the salmon to swim along a weir and into an enclosure equipped with nets, which were lifted out of the water at regular intervals. Much more widely practised, and still popular today, has been trapping pike in bow nets (rysä). In spring, pike swim to the shores and up smaller rivers and creeks to spawn. Because this movement is known and anticipated by river dwellers, they construct certain bow nets on the flooded shores. Similarly, lamprey has been caught on the mouth of the Kemi River, taking advantage of their seasonal migration pattern. To an extent, this continues in spite of a hydropower dam blocking the estuary (Yliniemi 1995b). A third popular method of trap fishing is practiced with a cage made from wire mesh, called katiska, and equipped with a bunch of brushwood. The technique takes advantage of the habit of some fish to hide under or next to sheltering objects on the ground of the watercourse. In trying to protect itself, the fish swims into the fisher-created “shelter” and thus into capture: the funnel-shaped entrance, of which there can be a few in one trap, allows them to enter, but not to leave the cage. Also fishing with gillnets, made from nylon and hardly visible, is rather popular along the Kemi River. A gillnet forms a wall in the water, weighted down by a heavy cord on the bottom, and held up by a buoyant cord on top. It is most effectively placed across a path that fish are known to move along, for instance between deeper depressions in the river bed, where fish spend especially warm days, and shallower reaches, where they move

6

Historically, dip nets provided a further popular means for catching migratory fish on Kemi River rapids (Vilkuna 1975: 318–329) alongside the methods mentioned below. I have not, however, seen them in use presently.

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when the air cools down. A fish that gets stuck in the meshes and tries to back out gets entangled ever more by the fins or gills – hence the name gillnet. Positioning a gillnet in the river has to take account of the different and changing currents to which the net will be exposed. To put it briefly, there are usually at least two directions of current in a river, the mainstream (päävirta) and a counter-stream (akanvirta, literally “old woman’s stream”). Even though the mainstream – typically in the deeper parts of the river bed – carries most of the water, the counter stream can also be of considerable force, particularly towards the shore, in more shallow parts, and on the inside of river bends. Instead of searching for a current-free river stretch, gillnets are best inserted in places, where both main- and counter-streams are present, but balance each other out. Just as fish take advantage of the interplay between main- and counter-stream for their movements, so does the river gillnet belong in a place where it is kept in position by these two opposing forces. In other places, resting spots for fish are deliberately built and equipped with a gillnet (laiska, literary “lazy”) (cf. Vilkuna 1975: 313–316). The gendered terminology of the opposing directions of currents warrants a brief remark on the relations of women and men along the river. In traditional Finnish society, a marked division of labour prevailed where women were responsible for work inside the house and around the farmstead, for instance managing cattle and processing dairy products, minding children and preparing food, while men’s tasks involved spending time outside of this realm, in hunting, fishing, haymaking, forestry and other activities (e.g., Frölander-Ulf 1989, Stark-Arola 2001). The pronounced complementarity of these tasks, coupled with the ascription of the outside domain to men, resonates with the terminology of the opposing streams in a river, where the main stream (although never referred to as male) is complemented by an “old woman’s” counter-stream.7 Gillnets are also used during the winter. When the water surface is frozen, the ice cover provides a convenient way of transporting the net to the fishing site and setting it up there. As the snow-covered ice sheet makes the water underneath invisible, however, appropriate fishing sites have to be explored already during the summer or autumn. A series of holes is drilled into the ice, and a line is passed under the ice from one hole to the next, along which the net is pulled into place under the ice. Alternative to such fixed nets and traps, mobile nets are also used and have a long history on the Kemi River (e.g. Vilkuna 1975: 281–312, Seppovaara 1972). They tend to catch fish in other places or during other seasons in the fishing year, for instance when the fish do not move about a lot. Like gillnets, dragnets have an upper and a lower rim, suspended

7

It must be noted that in general, Finnish women are rather self-conscious and, within particular limits, also active politically (Marakowitz 1996, Frölander-Ulf 1989). Finland was the first European country to introduce general suffrage (1906), it has a female president, and women like Helena and Anneli (chapter two) have become key figures of social movements. Furthermore, the specific term akka (old woman, hag) has – alongside its derogatory meaning – rather powerful connotations, resonating with the central role of the farm-wife (emäntä) or the mythical Queen of Northland (Pohjan Akka, Pohjalan Emäntä), the opponent of the (male) leader Väinämöinen in the Finnish “national epic” Kalevala. The significance of the akanvirta counter-stream for fishing and boating (chapter six) reflects these images of strong women, often in opposition or complementarity to what men would perceive as the “main” direction.

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

in the water by a set of buoys and weights on the respective upper and lower cords. Propelled by two boats or a boat and a person on the shore, these nets are moved around an area where fish are thought to be. Here, the net is supposed to move, not the fish. Whereas prohibited along many stretches today, dragnets used to be a widespread fishing method on the Kemi River. Only reaches without a strong current and with a reasonably obstacle-free river bed were appropriate for such river dragnets. That implies, of course, that places which were not obstacle-free or current-protected enough were sometimes altered in order to make them more suitable. Rocks were removed from the river bed, or logs were installed upstream from the catching site in order to deflect some of the current. Fishing with a dragnet has always been a group endeavour, usually including fishermen from several households. Nets and lures thus emerge as artefacts that come into being only through a combined effort of the water, in which they are suspended, the currents and movements, which hold them in place, the fishers’ actions – and sometimes collaboration – setting, pulling or propelling them, the characteristics of the fishing ground, and the material and structure of the fishing implements. When hung on a nail in the shed, the lure or net look nothing like effective catching devices. Not before they are employed in the right water spot, do they – literally – unfold to their potential, aimed of course at the final, and most crucial element in this unity, the fish. Without waters, currents, fish movements and feeding preferences, keen and skilful fishers, and currently a whole industry for fishing implements, net or lure would be nothing worth mentioning. But in exploring its use, the whole spectrum of this unity unfolds. All these fishing techniques rely on enticing the fish to be caught largely on its own accord. It has to be persuaded to swallow a hook, enter a net or swim into a trap, or at least not to escape it. The mesh size on many dragnets, for instance, is larger than the fish that they catch, but moving the net through the water in a certain fashion makes the fish swim along rather than through the meshes, until they end up in the hose in the centre of the net, where the mesh is too narrow for them to escape. By engaging empathetically with the fish-in-the-water, by observing their behaviour and deducing their experiences, river dwellers become skilled fishers. Through fishing, they learn about the rivers’ bed, currents and many aspects of fish behaviour, preferences and sensibilities.

Fish as river indicators Fish are not only a crucial aspect of the Kemi River, but also symbolise the river. River dwellers often judge the quality of a particular river stretch by the kinds and numbers of fish to be caught there. By eating fish, they taste the river, and assessments of fish and water quality usually go hand in hand. River dwellers distinguish not only separate species, but also various forms within these species, differentiated locally and seasonally. I will briefly portray the ambivalent valuation of a number of fish and then present two species, grayling and salmon, whose image and valuation are closely connected to the river dwellers’ understanding of a healthy river, and issues surrounding restocked fish, which are often taken to stand for industrial encroachment on the river. To many river

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dwellers, the fish are what the river is, an embodiment of its core characteristics, such as currents, water quality, movement, and rhythmic dynamics.

Rubbish fish, valuable fish At first sight, all Kemi River fish can be divided into two major categories, “valuable fish” (arvokala) and “rubbish fish” (roskakala). Trout, grayling and whitefish are usually associated with the former category, whereas roach, dace and ide are grouped with the latter. While it is great to catch a “valuable fish”, it is considered a waste of time, lures and net capacity to catch “rubbish fish”, which nevertheless happens frequently. More ambiguous is the classification of perch, burbot, pike and others that are sometimes, and by some river dwellers, assigned to the category of “valuable fish”, while at other times, and by other fishers, they are considered “rubbish fish”. An insightful example of this ambiguity is pike (Esox lucius). In fact, there seem to be two seasonally distinct forms of this fish. The pike that is caught in spring is called “spawning fish” (kutukala) or “ice-water pike” (houleveden hauki) and is considered a fine catch by most river dwellers. Once the spring flood has declined, the water temperature increases and pike start feeding again, however, the fish turns into a somewhat different kind in the eyes – and on the palate – of many fishers. Their flesh is said to acquire the taste of what they eat and where they live, which is often murky waters. Also, they hunt species that fishers would prefer catching themselves, such as grayling and trout. Some pike get trapped in small ponds when the flood ceases and have to make ends meet in the pond over the summer, until the water level rises high enough again to enable them to swim back to the river. This is why pike caught during the summer is often called “bogdog” (jänkäkoira) and considered hardly edible. Just as the cold and clear wintertime waters had made the fish a tasty catch in spring, the warm and cloudy waters of summer and the competitive hunting behaviour of pike make it a “bog-dog” later in the year. Its flesh, when caught in summer or autumn, is often said to taste like mud, wood, or bog. The appreciation of pike seems to follow the appreciation of the water quality in which it has recently lived – clean and cold water makes good fish, murky and warmer water makes unpleasant fish. This association of the quality of fish with the quality of water goes even further, and portrays alongside the seasonal dimension also a spatial one. People who generally appreciate the water quality of a river, also tend to like the taste of the pike caught there, such as an old fisher from the Tenniö River indicates. This same man, who calls pike from his river “the best fish in the world”, shortly after derided the poor quality of pike stuck in ponds or lakes over the summer; again, two types of water make two kinds of fish. On the lower main course of the river, where salmon used to be prevalent, pike has until recently been considered a “rubbish fish” altogether. A third dimension, illustrating the back and forth shifting of pike from “valuable fish” to “rubbish fish” and back, is historical. The ambivalent fish of today used to be valuable tax currency in the Middle Ages. The valuation of burbot (Lota lota) also underlies a pronounced seasonal pattern, in that it is highly appreciated when caught in winter, but not many river dwellers would consider it edible when caught during the summer. Only when obtained from cold water, burbot is a welcome catch. The colder the winter gets, the tastier the burbot. People often

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

list burbot with the rubbish fish, but only to immediately qualify this classification in that this is only valid during the summer. During the winter, they would endure hours in the cold winds on the river ice to catch a few of the then-delicacy. Today, the epitome of “rubbish fish” is roach (Rutilus rutilus). It thrives in stagnant waters and is said to be too small, too bony, and too tasteless to enjoy. Another popular description of such fish is kissakala, which means “fish that only the cat would eat”. Although referring to rubbish and cats posits an inedibility of these kinds of catch, such statements in fact convey more about the current state of fishing on the Kemi River than they do about the edibility of particular fish species. Roach has, for a long time, provided valuable nutrition to the inhabitants of the watershed, and some people continue to eat and enjoy it. Indeed, many fishers admit – shortly after they have called it a “rubbish fish” – that all fish can be eaten, and especially roach can be prepared in most tasty ways. The only challenge is to deal with the many small bones, but a number of time-tested recipes exist to do away with them, including fish-balls and seasoned fish preserve. Hellevi, who finds grayling the best fish to be had from the Kemi River, adds that the best fish preserve is made from “rubbish fish”. The less fat they have, the more readily the flesh absorbs the taste of the seasoning. While they are heated in the brine, the fish bones become soft and hardly discernible when eating. Also some fish-processing enterprises in other parts of the country are re-learning an appreciation of roach. One fish-processor from Kalajoki in the province of Oulu, for instance, has found out in experiments that the taste of roach – as preserve – is preferred over almost all other kinds of fish. Of course, such tests have to be carried out without telling the participants about the species beforehand, because roach continues to be stigmatised as “rubbish fish”. This also means, however, that fish-processing enterprises are experiencing a shortage of roach, because hardly a fisherman considers it worth selling, but most throw it away instead (Uusitalo 2008). What distinguishes “valuable fish” from “rubbish fish”? Apparently, the distinction lies on the one hand in the kind of water from which it is obtained, and on the other hand in the relative ease of its preparation into food. All “valuable fish” merely have to be cleaned, and can be eaten almost raw. Whitefish, in particular, is very often only cured with a bit of salt, and consumed in this way. Some fishermen praise the ease with which trout can be made into a soup in five minutes, even with a small camping stove when still on the boat, in order to get a warm drink on a cool fishing trip. The fish does not need to boil properly in order to kill potential germs or improve its taste. It is quite different to perch, pike, roach or other fish lower down in the hierarchy. These have to be fried, smoked or boiled properly to turn them into food for humans. They cannot be eaten lightly cured or almost raw, because their flesh is considered hazardous in that state and their bones are too thick, numerous or too intricately arranged. Less appreciated species are usually those that require more work for producing a given amount of food. Therefore, the more a recipe is needed, the lower the status of the fish; or conversely, the better the fish, the less hassle it takes to prepare it into food. Alongside the principle of preparation, also the type of water from which it originates influences the degree of appreciation of a particular fish species. This is most obvious in the cases of pike and burbot sketched above. Yet, the association of fish appreciation with the kind of water from where it is obtained goes further than this concern with wa-

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ter quality. It concerns not so much the mixture of biophysical substances in the water than the nature of the watercourse itself. The most highly valued fish on the present Kemi River are all definite river species. They all require the swiftly flowing, oxygen-rich waters of a rapid water section in at least one stage of their life cycle. Furthermore, they are all considered migratory to a degree, in that they move up and down the river for many dozens of kilometres. All less esteemed kinds of fish do not require a rapid water habitat, and are considered to be able to remain within a single pond or river pool throughout their entire life. This suggests that the more the catching of a fish is associated with clear river-water, the higher it is in the hierarchy.

Grayling – an indexical river fish One of the most popular fish to catch in the present Kemi River is grayling (Thymallus thymallus). It lives in cool, quickly-flowing and oxygen-rich river stretches, usually around rapids. Even though grayling weighs seldom more than one kilogramme, it is a highly appreciated catch among river dwellers. Hellevi, for instance, praises its taste over all other fish she knows. It can be fried, cooked, cured, and even eaten raw. Timo sometimes dreams about fishing for and struggling with grayling, particularly when he is stressed out at work. Often, Timo catches fish much larger and fiercer than grayling, such as pike, and hunts large moose in autumn – but it is not them he deals with in his dreams. Also in his waking life, he prefers catching a small grayling over a large trout, for the exciting struggle, its superior taste, and the feeling of participating in an old river-tradition. Recently, the Kemi River grayling population has somewhat suffered under the expansion of hydropower dams in the watershed. Although grayling do not require access to the sea, they are bound to rapid water sections, which necessarily disappear with the construction of a hydropower plant that uses exactly the energy inherent in rapids for electricity production. Therefore, every new hydropower station means diminishing grayling habitat. Many inhabitants of the Kemi River’s main channel remember that after the extinction of salmon, the disappearance of grayling with the construction of a hydropower reservoir inundating the local rapids represented a second – and sometimes equally devastating – deprivation they had to endure for the greater good of electricity production. During the ongoing struggles concerning the hydropower development of Sierilä, grayling has sometimes taken centre stage. This power station would inundate the last remaining rapids on the river between Lake Kemi and the Baltic Sea, thereby eliminating the last grayling population that reproduces in the river. Apart from purely ecological considerations, grayling in this stretch is considered attractive for leisure fishers, and therefore an asset to the location of Rovaniemi. Furthermore, grayling continues to be valued highly by river dwellers in the area, and the disappearance of grayling is considered by some as amounting to an erosion of riverside culture. In a series of workshops, which experimented with environmental art as a means of voicing protest against further hydropower developments in this location, grayling sculptures from snow and fire were used as a powerful image to convey a sense of how people are interwoven with the fate of the river: Were the dams to be built, grayling would disappear, and with it the practices

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

of catching it, its sight and taste, and the associated memories of people and the river (Stöckell 2008: 72–92). Because grayling lives predominantly in swiftly flowing waters, it is considered a downright river fish. Conversely, a Lappish river without grayling loses some of its “riverness”.

Salmon – fishing for a symbol Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is presently the most conspicuously present, and most conspicuously absent fish in the Kemi River. It is absent because, for many decades, the river’s population of this species has been extinct; but it is nevertheless generally present through the continuing discussions about its former abundance, about the dubious process of its extinction, and about possibilities for its reintroduction. The Kemi River is often portrayed as having been the stream richest in salmon, of all of Finland, of the Gulf of Bothnia, or the entire Baltic Sea. Many river dwellers have great stories to tell about the incredible abundance of salmon in the stream. The most common of these is that some labourers on the farms of the lower river had a clause added to their annual work contracts, which entitled them to food other than salmon every now and then. The point is that salmon was so greatly abundant, that it was eaten so much, that people were literally fed up with it – an idea somewhat removed from the everyday life of present river dwellers, most of whom have never caught a single salmon in the Kemi River. Adding to these stories of its former abundance is the esteem many people hold for this fish species. Salmon is sometimes called “the king of fish” (kalojen kuningas), for admiration of its size, fat content, migration journey and strength. Today, the only place on the Kemi River where salmon can be caught is the short stretch downstream from the hydropower dam at the river’s mouth. Young salmon are reintroduced annually into these waters, and return there after having spent a few years in the Baltic Sea. Because of an efficient sea fishery, however, very few salmon make it all the way back there, and even fewer pass the fish-ladder across the dam. This is partly because they had been inserted into the watercourse downstream of the dam; consequently it will be there that they look – in vain – for suitable spawning grounds. Furthermore, the area downstream of the dam has been designated a “terminal fishing area” (terminaalialue), where virtually no fishing restrictions apply, so that it is most difficult for fish to pass this stretch alive at all. Tapani, one of the few present river dwellers who still caught salmon during his youth, remembers the saying that with this fish, “food and money rose” up the river (Siinä nousi ruokaa ja rahaa). Monetary income from this salmon caught during early summer contributed a substantial share to the livelihoods of the participating households. For such former salmon fishers, as well as for a large share of the generation of their children, the sudden extinction of salmon on the Kemi River had traumatic consequences. Salmon – as well as catching, eating and selling it – had formed a significant part of the river dwellers’ life; and even though this was more pronounced in downstream sections, it has nevertheless been present even at the river’s sources (e.g. Paulaharju 1939, Seppovaara 1972). Not only did an important element of the river dwellers’ income disappear without replacement, but also they lost an important, meaningful activity that

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left a gaping hole in the course of their year, and the organisation of their summertime days and nights. The way in which salmon was extinguished on the Kemi River is remembered as a tragedy today. It is often seen as an index of the power of industrial interests and faraway decision-makers over the inhabitants of a region that is being sacrificed for the sake of others’ benefits (chapter four). When, after the Second Wold War, the destroyed bridge over the mouth of the river had to be rebuilt, a power company owned mostly by the pulp and paper industry seized the opportunity, pocketed the state funds for the reconstruction, and built a bridge – of sorts. In fact, it constructed a hydropower dam, over which a road led, but which simultaneously blocked the entrance of the river. Contrary to legislation, no proper fish-ladder was built along with the dam, and in spite of complaints and litigation induced by the fishers, the construction was not amended appropriately.8 Salmon gathered below the dam in huge masses during the coming few summers, and tried in vain to jump the over ten-metre-high waterfalls cascading from the power plant’s spill-gates. This soon resulted in the complete extinction of the salmon population. It took thirty years of legal action and political campaigning, until in 1979, compensatory fish were restocked in the river and some meagre damages were paid to the former salmon fishers of the Kemi River, many of whom had died in the meantime (Järvikoski and Kylämäki 1981, Pokka 1994: 120–174). What resulted was, in the words of many river dwellers, a “trauma” in their relations with the river. Without salmon, it was not considered a full river any longer, and there was little point in objecting to further modifications of a stream that had been robbed of its most important element, so that subsequent modifications for hydropower and timber floating purposes were easily realised. Others remember that the river was increasingly avoided by its inhabitants, because seeing its waters or fishing on the river reminded them too much of the loss they had suffered, and what remained of the Kemi River could not be appreciated in the light of this loss. The experience of having witnessed this major transformation of the river, and of having been unable to stop it, put many river dwellers to shame and turned the stream into a “taboo”. Subsequently, the further alteration of its flow was seen as the further decay of an already deceased phenomenon. Since the 1980s, the idea of reintroducing an independently reproducing population of Atlantic salmon into the Kemi River has been gaining in popularity9 (chapter four). Throughout the 1990s, the possibilities for reintroduction were studied (e.g. Viitala 1998,

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9

Strikingly, the installation of a fish-ladder would not even have implied any loss of hydropower potential for the power station of Isohaara. Virtually no water would have had to be diverted from the turbines in order to operate the fish passage. The average water discharge at Isohaara is 530 m3/sec., but because of its seasonal variation, the amount is much higher during spring and early summer. The first power station constructed there – until a second unit was completed in 1993 – could process only around 500 m3/sec. for hydroelectricity generation (Nevanlinna and Lax 1968: 27); the rest – which is more than twice that amount during spring and early summer – had to be discharged unused through the spill-gates, and could have easily facilitated the rise of salmon, if decision-makers had given enough priority to this option. The discussion about the exclusion of migratory fish from the river, the poor compensation, and possible reintroduction, has been predominantly in terms of salmon although other significant species – trout, whitefish and lamprey – were affected as well (Seppovaara 1972: 34).

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

Laine, Jokivirta and Katopodis 2002, Ponnikas et al. 2002), and in 2007, the Regional Council of Lapland held an “international fish passage conference” in Rovaniemi, emphasising the feasibility of salmon re-establishment in the Kemi River.10 A particular focus lay on building fish-ladders past the five hydroelectric dams on the river section downstream from Rovaniemi, which would open the way for ascending salmon to the large tributary Ounas River, where they would find plenty of spawning ground, because it is unaffected by hydroelectric dams (Ponnikas et al. 2002). The Council concluded that returning salmon to the river is possible and desirable, and merely a question of cost, because building and maintaining fish-ladders and other necessary measures is expensive. Sidelined in this rhetoric is the fact that salmon reintroduction is far more complicated than building fish ladders, because of the local specificity of fish sub-populations, watercourse transformations other than hydropower, and the fishery and pollution of the Baltic Sea, where the animals are to spend a large share of their lives. In spite of these difficulties, many inhabitants of the river are confident in the reintroduction, and the Regional Council of Lapland is busily devising ways of raising money to that end. Today, if a river dweller feels like eating salmon, she or he can easily get a nice, fresh fish from the nearest store, at a give-away price. It is likely to be a fish raised in a Norwegian fish farm, but the same Salmo salar as is envisioned to rise up the Kemi River, only without the high dioxin content from the Baltic Sea. The point, however, is not primarily to have access to fresh salmon, but to live on a river with a “natural”, i.e. independently reproducing, salmon population, a “salmon river” (lohijoki). The very certainty that one might actually catch a salmon in the river, even if that is prohibited or highly unlikely, seems to be the main objective of the grand project. Of course, there will be little “natural” about a salmon fishery, based on a complicated procedure of shifting stocks from one watershed to another, and maintained by a careful management of fish-ladders, spill-gates and fishing rates (cf. Scarce 1997); but it will still be Kemi River salmon, and the Kemi River is projected to regain some of the “riverness” it lost with its migratory fish stocks more than half a century ago. It is unlikely, however, that this salmon fishery will be any less restricted than it used to be in the past. It is meant to make the river more attractive for tourists and sports fishers, especially along the middle and upper reaches of the Ounas River. The rationale is that while salmon flesh itself might be cheap, the experience of catching a salmon on a river is an expensive commodity that the tourism industry is eager to sell. According to the Central Organisation of Finnish Leisure Fishers (Suomen vapaa-ajankalastajien keskusjärjestö), the economic surplus from one kilogramme of salmon caught by a tourist on a river amounts to over twenty times the money that is made by selling the same piece of fish in a store, after it is caught at sea (Knihtilä 2009). Instead of reaffirming the bonds between the river and its inhabitants, the reintroduction of salmon might further commodify these relations, and keep the majority of present river dwellers off the river even more. The experience of the Teno River on the Finnish-Norwegian border, where salmon fishing tourism has fundamentally upset the inhabitants’ relations with the stream (Burgess 1996), stands out as a daunting example of what might happen at the Kemi and Ounas Rivers. 10

See http://www.lapinliitto.fi/kalatie/index.html, accessed 2009–04-21.

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For the moment, salmon on the Kemi River remain as they have been for about six decades: conspicuously present and absent at the same time. As an organism in the river, it is wholly absent, but as a topic of people’s memories and dreams it is ever present. The salmon’s image does not reflect the former farm labourers’ concern about being fed up with its taste after a few weeks of little else but salmon to eat; neither is it seen as the strongly regulated and somewhat elitist resource it used to be on the river, and is likely to be made again. Instead, salmon epitomises the idea of a “natural”, “free” river, along which organisms can pass, in spite of hydropower dams and other constructions, and where they reproduce, in spite of industrial forestry and mining activities. Only a “salmon river” is seen as a river that satisfies all the criteria of “riverness”.

Fishing farmed fish Quite a large proportion of the present catches from the Kemi River comes from fish raised in hatcheries and put into the river to manipulate the respective species composition in the particular stretch. Most of these are species of “valuable fish”; most come from mandatory restocking measures (velvoiteistutukset) that the hydropower companies are required to implement as compensation to the river fisheries (Voimalohi Oy 2009). Hydropower dams are seen to have changed the river habitat to such a degree that independent reproduction of some species – and this concerns particularly the kinds more popular with fishers – is no longer possible, so that this part of the fishes’ life cycle has to happen in hatcheries. But also local fishery associations, the Finnish Forestry Authority and tourism operators restock particular fish on certain river stretches. Furthermore, some people buy young live fish and raise them over the summer in cages fastened in the river or in private lakes. River dwellers’ attitudes to restocked fish vary widely. For some, restocked rainbow trout provides adequate replacement for the salmon, brown trout and other species that have disappeared from the river with expanding hydroelectric production. Many people in fact have never experienced the Kemi River in any other way, so that such rainbow trout belongs to the river just as perch and pike do. Whether the fish was born in a hatchery basin or in a gravel-bed river stretch is of little importance, when it takes the bait and the angler struggles to get in onto the dry. If there were no restocking measures, fishing would be much more boring, and many highly valued species would not be found at all in the watershed. Some river dwellers, however, are more critical towards restocked fish. Some say such fish makes boring catches, because it does not “fight” properly when on the hook. Others do not appreciate the taste of restocked fish in comparison to naturally occurring fish (luonnonkala). One old fisherman considers restocked fish “worse than roach”. Still others consider the whole restocking complex a strategy that deflects from the real issues on the river: while river dwellers and tourists are caught up in the game of chasing restocked fish, they will not be likely to find it necessary to question why this restocking is necessary in the first place. Other fishers hold that hydroelectric dams are changing the river ecology so much that restocking with prestigious fish is a futile endeavour. The reservoirs that have replaced the former stream along many stretches provide a fine habitat for pike, which prey on young restocked whitefish and trout. Proponents of this view understand that severe manipulations of the river cannot be simply

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

glossed over by throwing a few popular fish in afterwards. In actual fishing, however, the opposition of those favouring restocking and those critical of it fades to an extent. Even for a critic of hydropower and restocking, it makes for a great success to see the net he put into the reservoir-river in front of his house splash up and down, and to find a fourand-half kilogramme trout in it.

Seasonalities of fishing Fishing on the Kemi River is a thoroughly seasonal activity. Where to fish, which equipment to use, and what fish to catch are all issues highly dependable on the time of year, time of day, the weather, and concomitant conditions of light and temperature. Fishing at night is often said to be more effective than fishing during the day; fishing right after a thunderstorm is supposed to yield abundant catches; but fishing with cold north winds is considered a waste of time, as no fish would move or bite under such conditions. During the course of the year, people fish most often during spring and autumn, a bit less during the summer, and least – although still a considerable amount – during winter. Probably the main reason for these fluctuations of fishing intensity over the year is the seasonality of fish behaviour: During spring, and continuing into early summer, virtually all fish rise upstream in the watercourse. Whether this migration covers hundreds of kilometres through sea and river, or merely a few hundred metres mostly within a single lake or until the next river rapids – spring is the time of year for a general upstream movement in the watershed. During the summer, this movement decreases. The warmer the water becomes, the less fish move about. Many linger in deeper pools in rivers and lakes, and look for food only when temperatures cool down a bit during the nights. During autumn, fish begin to travel again – some further, some less far – but generally downstream. After some pronounced activity during the formation of the ice cover on the watercourse, fish move only little during most of the winter. They remain in pools with enough water under the ice, feeding and swimming little, only to burst out in renewed activity with the breaking of the ice cover in the coming spring. On any particular day, however, not only such general dynamics influence the likelihood of catching a fish, but other factors are central as well. One of them is the speed and direction of the wind. The stronger and colder the wind is blowing, the less fish move or eat or show themselves at all. Other rhythms play a role, too, so that it can happen that one catches a large number of fish in the morning, but on a second fishing trip in the afternoon, not a single fish is caught. The increase in fish activity with the cooling of the waters is for some species brought to a climax with the formation of an ice cover on lakes and rivers. After the first wave of ice-hole fishing, however, both fish and fishing activities decrease considerably. Fishers who have laid a gillnet under the ice in early winter keep checking during the winter, but the exposed ice surface of a watercourse is not an inviting place to linger. This changes fundamentally in early spring, when days become longer and the sun is brightly reflected off the snow- and ice-covered landscape. This is the season that brings fishing parties on the ice of rivers and lakes, which continue until the ice cover becomes too fragile.

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With the seasons of the year, the effective lures obviously change as well. Fly fishing requires different flies at different times, and lures used in angling and trolling change colours with the seasons. Very bright colouring is promising in early summer, when small prey fish also exhibit pronounced colours. In later summer, lures should follow the development of colours in the water course, which tends towards more bronze tones. During autumn, finally, attractive lures are coloured almost exclusively in different shades of brown. The overall pattern of fishing activities results from a combination of the yearly rhythms of different species, which all have their more and less active phases during the course of the seasons. For instance, fish caught through the ice cover in early spring is predominantly perch, with a few roach, and smaller whitefish or pike. Large pike and whitefish are caught in later spring, once the waters are free of ice. Late spring was also the time of salmon and brown trout runs up the river. During the summer, grayling is caught, together with vendace, rainbow trout, trout, roach and brook-trout. Autumn again is a good time for catching whitefish, and on the lower river, trout and lamprey. During the winter, burbot is to be had through the ice-hole, accompanied by perch and others. Complementary to and resonating with the seasonal patterns of fish behaviour, fishing activities and successes are influenced by the presence or absence of a reliable ice cover, by the water temperature, by the amount of water in rivers and lakes, by the kinds and amount of nutrition available for the fish, and by effective fishery regulations (chapter ten). While some river dwellers are intimidated by the transforming states of solid ice and fluid water others emphasise that they merely imply a change of fishing techniques, and not at all a limitation of fishing. Furthermore, the availability of nutrition for fish affects their behaviour and fisheries. One link is the choice of lure that is thought to catch most efficiently: it is often considered that the best lures are those which most closely imitate the organisms that fish eat during the particular time of year or day. Many fishers observe that while the most pleasant time for fishing is before midsummer, the most rewarding catches come after that day – the reason for both being the same, namely mosquitoes. Until mid-June, the temperature of the water, where mosquito eggs have been laid, is usually still too cold for these insects to hatch. Therefore, fishers can enjoy shore and water without these nagging companions. On the other hand, however, the absence of insects also means scarcity of food for fish. The warming of the waters around midsummer, by allowing the eggs to hatch, changes both: catches become larger, and fishing trips beclouded by swarms of mosquitoes. Finally, the seasonal nature of fishing regulations impacts on fishing activities in the watershed. Some regulations apply to gear – for example prohibiting trolling with an engine below the hydropower station of Isohaara – and some to area, like the fishing ban for the uppermost ten kilometres of the river and all the tributaries entering this stretch. Many fishery regulations, however, have a seasonal character, because they are themselves based on observed fish behaviour. Some fish species are thus protected dur-

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

ing their spawning period;11 thus trout fishing is prohibited between mid-September and mid-November, and grayling net-fishing is banned for most of April and May. Resonating with all these seasonal variations of river ecology, fish, fishers and other factors – and paired with the Finnish fondness for fancy equipment – the fishing gear used over the course of a year varies considerably, from gillnets under the ice and icehole rods with jig lures, to bow nets and later dragnets, open water gillnets and different kinds of rods for plain angling, trolling, fly-fishing and spinnerbait casting, not to speak of the variety of fishing lines, let alone the universe of lures and baits. For a simple anthropological researcher, this seasonality of fishing gear was most starkly evident in the development of supermarket prices for the respective equipment: As soon as the season for fishing with this type of rod or that kind of lure was considered over, some of the products would suddenly be sold at half price.

Fishing as attention to the river As has become evident throughout the preceding pages, in order to catch fish, river dwellers pay close attention to what goes on in and around the river. Experienced fishers know that a watercourse is unlikely to be the same during morning and evening, spring and summer, or upstream and downstream. Eager fishers can, over time, acquire a vast repertoire of knowledge about the whereabouts, behaviour, and susceptibility to being caught of different fish under various conditions. Nevertheless, they also contend that the river and its fish always hold surprises that are impossible to foresee and require continuous attention to waters and fish alike. A gillnet, set at the right time in the right way in the right place, can yield only meagre catches because of a sudden change in wind direction; or it can catch so much fish that river dwellers have difficulties carrying them home. Therefore, no permanently valid rules can be applied in fishing other than the principle that efforts and techniques must be continually adjusted to the varying circumstances. This principle sharpens the senses for perceiving relevant changes in the watercourse. The major hydroelectricity company, for instance, sometimes receives complaints that the water level above or below a particular dam has exceeded the point allowed by the operation licence for that dam; such complaints often come from fishermen for whom a few centimetres of alteration in water level can make significant differences in the determination of suitable fishing spots or the position of nets. One fisherman, who lived at the confluence of the Kitinen and Kemi Rivers, directly witnessed each of the hydropower constructions on the former river simply because he fished with nets in front of his home. Whenever a further hydropower dam was built on the Kitinen River, the nets on the west-

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Large parts – namely all dammed stretches – of the Kemi River, however, are excluded from these prohibitions, because grayling and trout are not even supposed to reproduce there, as the required ecological preconditions – fast-flowing, oxygen-rich water and gravel beds – are considered absent. In these stretches, trout (or rainbow trout) and grayling are usually restocked from populations bred in hatcheries.

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ern shore of the confluence were hung with dirt, while the water on the eastern shore, from where the upper Kemi River came, remained clear. In Timo’s home village on the upper Ounas River, there are about ten named features in the river, such as rocks, that are used to gauge developments in the water level in order to judge which fishing technique is currently appropriate, and which fish are likely to be caught. Further upstream and downstream are more such rocks, some of which have never been seen directly, but the position and size of the eddies or waves they form on the water surface tells Timo about the state of the fishery at any specific stretch. When he drives across the bridge that now links the two shores of the village, he slows down and carefully watches up and down the river. He does that almost automatically, even when the reason for his journey has nothing to do with fishing. But he wants to be ready in case the water approaches a level where inserting nets into the river makes sense again. When Timo was studying in far-away Helsinki, a good deal of his summertime phone-calls home concerned these various indicators of the water level. When his brother told him, for instance, that the “shoulder of the swimming stone” (uimakiven olkapää) was visible, Timo made his way home as quickly as possible, because the best summer-fishing season had begun. The “swimming stone” is a rock with a round top that features a ledge, its “shoulder”, a few dozens of centimetres below. In spring, the entire rock is submerged in water, but in early summer, its top and later its ledge begin to protrude. Then, it is a good time to catch grayling. If rocks are not directly visible, their effects on the water surface are important indicators, as the position and magnitude of waves shift with different discharge. An experienced gillnetter, Timo remarks that people not paying attention to the river enough, and who put their nets in too early when discharge is still too high in spring, or leave them in too long when a snow-melting spell or rainstorm suddenly increases the discharge, will catch above all the vegetation of the river shore, onto which the net will be pushed by the changed currents. In order to catch fish in the Kemi River, people have thus to pay close attention to its waters and currents. This is partly a matter of perceiving the dynamics of water quality and discharge, but the skills of attending to the very fish that one intends to catch are also crucial. As has become clear, before a fisher decides on a type of lure or on a position for a net, she or he has first to engage empathetically with the fish. Where would a particular fish be found under the present conditions of water, air, time of day, and season? In which direction is that particular fish likely to move at the moment? What might it find attractive to bite on? To an extent, an experienced fisher – apart from taking in the various factors of light, current, temperature, air pressure, and the like – also knows how to take on the perspective of a fish, and imagine what this fish is likely to do in specific circumstances. Much of this has to be inferred from looking at the ‘total fish-in-the water’, because the ‘natural-history-book fish’ cannot usually be seen directly in the water. But casting a lure must always aim beyond the position where the fish is situated, in order to be able to pull the lure past the fish in an attractive way; should the cast lure splash into the water right above the fish, it will do little but scare off the fish. In fact, not chasing fish away can be as important as luring them to a particular position. If they are only approached in an appropriate way, fish can often be caught rather easily, but if the needs of a fish are not met, it is impossible to catch. Similarly, a gillnet has to be placed in a position

5. Fishing the Kemi River: Engagement and empathy with a flow

through which fish are actually going to move, which requires some understanding of and empathy with the behaviour of the targeted fish. In order to succeed in fishing, river dwellers adapt their fishing rhythms to the rhythm of the fish, a mechanism that has been associated with empathetic relations in the social sphere (Hall 1983: 165–168), not dissimilar to the “feeling-thinking engagement” that Wikan (1992: 476) calls “resonance”. This principle of empathy applies not only to the practices of setting up a net or fishing with a lure, but also to longer-term fishing activities. Timo, for example, recalls that when he spent time on the summertime river as a child, he and his friends would of course swim and play just like children do the world over. At the same time, however, they would also be keeping their eyes open for potentially appropriate burbot and grayling winter fishing grounds. While playing in the water, they acquired a detailed knowledge about the position of sand and gravel patches on the river bed in that particular year. They often built shallow rock weirs that were to channel the movement of fish into certain places, where later in the year fish traps could be set, or ice-holes drilled. Vilkuna (1975: 43–44) reports on a further dimension of empathy with fish in the river, namely that salmon were thought to understand human speech. Therefore, the word for salmon was not to be mentioned during the main catching season, lest the fish notice that humans are after them and avoid being caught. That fishing includes a degree of empathy with the fish is also reflected in Finnish fishing terminology. Pyytää, for instance, means “to fish”. The same word, however, also means “to ask for” or “to beg for” something. This implies that linguistically, when Finns go fishing, they really go “asking for fish”. Similarly, the verb used for catching a fish is saada, which also means “to receive”, “to get” and even “to be allowed to do something”. Thus, when Finns talk about the catch of the day, they actually relate what they “received” or what they “were allowed to get”. This means that fishing is not only about knowing where fish are, the skills to get them and the fanciest equipment to facilitate this, but also about asking to be allowed to take something from the water. Killing a fish becomes receiving a gift, for which a fisher can ask, but which he or she cannot claim12 (cf. BirdDavid 1990). To the extent that this linguistic parallel holds, fishing is asking for – and sometimes receiving – fish, an activity not based on the smart manipulation of a passive “nature” by a fisherman equipped with “culture” in the form of knowledge and fishing gear; instead, what emerges is a relation coined by mutuality and respect, in which the parties share with one another. And sharing and respect are evident not only linguistically. Distributing a particularly plentiful catch among neighbours and relatives is a practice that both Hellevi and Timo know well. And one fly-fisherman affirms that the first trout he catches each summer, he releases back into the water.

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This parallel is extended by various word derived from saada and pyytää: For example, pyyntö means “request”, pyydys means “trap”; saanti is a “receipt”, saalis is the “catch”. Therefore, when Kemi River dwellers fish, they put a request to the river, and the catch is what they receive.

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Conclusion Through catching fish, Kemi River dwellers engage with the water, the rhythms of discharge, temperature and biological processes, and of course with the life-worlds of the various fish species. River dwellers rarely know the stream in the abstract, but experience it as a stream of fish species, as habitat, spawning ground and catching place. Their means of fishing mirror their knowledge of this river-of-fish and their empathy with the fish-in-the-water. Fishers learn how to lure fish by the success they have in catching them, and I have suggested that empathy is what links fish and fishing. Deducing the experiences of the often invisible fish, river dwellers construct an image of their whereabouts, preferences and movements, and construct fishing gear accordingly. Just as a glove has to fit the human hand in a way that does justice to its anatomy without restricting its movements, successful traps and lures are an inverse image of the fish’s actions and habitat, the fish’s story ‘in reverse’. It has become clear that through fish, river dwellers are also engaging and implicated in the river in many other ways. Through restocking and habitat-alterations, they influence the species composition in the water. Through eating their catches, they internalise some of the river. While angling, they socialise and compete with one another. Through valuing different types of fish differently, they voice their appreciation of certain kinds of waters, and reflect on economic structures and recipe preferences. And through disputing on grayling conservation and salmon reintroduction, they appeal to their idea of what a proper river is meant to look – and taste – like. Indeed, the stream of fish that makes up the Kemi River is for river dwellers as significant as the stream of water. And it is a stream in itself: Seasonal movements up- and down the river, overwintering in one place, feeding in another and spawning in yet another keeps many species in continuous flow. Current fishing practices would be unthinkable without this rhythmic movement and behaviour. In many ways, the river of fish is much more concrete than the river of water, but of course resonates with it. Thus, many river dwellers talk about fish and fishing when they mean the Kemi River – fish are the river, and the river is fish.

6. Boating along the Kemi River: Claiming and understanding water through navigation

Introduction Life on the Kemi River is characterised by movement. Alongside the flows of water and fish (chapter five), river dwellers themselves move extensively through the catchment. While presently, this happens predominantly on roads (chapter eight), summertime travel used to be, until rather recently, a matter of navigating a boat. The lay-out and affordances of the river-as-travel-artery have significantly shaped the river dwellers’ sense of direction and geography (chapter three), and are probably responsible in part for the emergence of a distinct way of life along the river (chapter two). The coming three chapters discuss the modalities of these movements, contrasting river and road travel and transport and probing into the skills, meanings and sociocultural contexts involved. In the introduction to a collection of essays outlining “an anthropological approach to movement”, Kirby (2009: 15) posits: “Movement is, after all, life”. To understand the phenomena of life, human or otherwise, it is thus necessary to think of them in terms of flows, movements and trajectories, rather than as static entities or events located in a universal and isotropic, “Cartesian space”. In this, Kirby follows recent anthropological theorising about the primacy of movement in the emergence of experiences, places and beings, especially in the work of Ingold (e.g., 2000, 2007b, 2008, 2009a), and on a different note elsewhere (e.g., Clifford 1997) and in related disciplines (e.g., Sheets-Johnstone 1999, Urry 2000). The present chapter addresses questions concerning the skills, practices and meanings of boating on the Kemi River. River boating is essentially movement along another movement, a flow of boat in a flow of water. How are these particularities addressed in specific boating skills and boat design? How has the history of boating left its marks on the river, and what does it mean for river dwellers to boat today? And in what ways has the movement of boats been integrated with other aspects of the river?

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Boaters, boats and a flowing river This first section of the chapter highlights how the skills of navigating a boat on the Kemi River and the shape of suitable river boats are essentially geared to the flow of the river, its constant and in places rapid movement. I will show why good boat pilots have become known as “men who understand water”, how river-boats differ from lake-boats, and how skilful boaters and well-designed boats are performing in the currents. Ingold (e.g., 2000, 2001) convincingly argues that humans relate to their sociocultural and material surroundings through their situated, embodied skills, rather than through conscious design or plans and their practical realisation (cf. Suchman 2007). Kemi River dwellers would agree that boating on a river with its currents, shallows, rapids, eddies and protruding rocks is a highly skilful activity.1 Many river dwellers take pride in mastering this skill, but emphasise that it is something they can hardly explain; rather, boating is learned boating. Aimo, for instance, has throughout his life on the bank of the upper Kemi River learned to punt, row, steer and later operate an outboard engine on river boats. Other than for short trips around his house, Aimo always went on the river, at least as far as the village of Martti, forty river kilometres downstream, where the closest road access was situated. He recounts how the building material for their home, which had to be reconstructed after having been burnt during the war in 1944, was transported to his family’s place: by boat. The supplies provided by the state for rebuilding destroyed houses were delivered only as far as Martti. Boat-load by boat-load, the family punted these materials up the river and tracked them past the strongest rapids. While this was not an easy affair, it was a means of transport in which people were proficient, and still much easier than carrying the material over land. And – as the boating veteran, still living in the same place, but connected to the road networks for the last few decades, remarks with a laugh – the upstream trip from road’s end to his home was only less than a third of the distance that the soldiers, stationed at a border post on the river’s headwaters, had to cover. A few times he watched these inexperienced boaters turn over their vessel in a rapid water section, losing their supplies to the river and having to undertake the journey all over again. Aimo’s friend Meri-Matti, born in 1937, is also a proficient boater. Having long led the life of a reindeer herder, spending extended periods of time in the forests and bogs of eastern Lapland, he has often taken a boat to transport equipment and provisions to herding camps. Meri-Matti not only knows the names and basic characteristics of most of the rapid water sections of the rivers in his former reindeer herding district, but he has also learned how to boat through them without capsizing or ruining the boat. Currents and shallows provide challenges for boating along many river stretches, but it is rapids

1

By emphasising the skilfulness of boating, I do not mean that its current corollary, driving (chapter eight), is an activity that requires any less skill. However, these skills have a different focus and emphasis. Boating skills are geared on negotiating the various flows of the medium in which the activity takes place, the river. For driving skills, by contrast, the medium (a paved road) is of lesser importance, while other abilities are crucial, like those related to the high velocity of the movement.

6. Boating along the Kemi River: Claiming and understanding water through navigation

that are most difficult to navigate. Meri-Matti recounts that a skilful river boat pilot was commonly known as “rapids-descender” (koksenlaskija) or as “a man who understands water” (veen käsittävä mies). The second term, in particular, is interesting in that it does not refer to the rocks and reefs that scare the inexperienced anthropologist boater on the way through rapids, but instead focuses on the water itself. It is true that on rapids the water table is much closer to the riverbed than on other river stretches, and that it is indeed dangerous to hit a rock hiding beneath the surface. But in order to navigate through the rapids without getting stuck on a reef or being capsized by a wave, a pilot needs to be able to understand the water itself, how it flows and what that tells about the river bed underneath, which waves are safe to navigate on and which ones are not. It is, after all, the flowing water that pushes and pulls the boat through the rapids. And just as water is a flowing medium, so the decision-making and actions of a river boat pilot are not a series of discrete moments, but a process in flux (cf. Suchman 2007: 69–84). Rather than executing a previously-made plan, the “rapids-descender” improvises as he goes, based on experiences and embodied skills, but not in the sense of taking a number of separate decisions and actions one after the other. Conversely, each movement is situated in a wider context of navigation, for instance in that decisions in one moment arise out of alternatives that have been influenced by the flow of previous decisions and will, in turn, open or preclude the paths for future decisions. Rather than discrete moments, past, present and future decisions form part of an ongoing, continuous deciding or improvisation. Many river dwellers remember that not very long ago, and particularly during the nineteenth century, there was at least one family of “men who understand water” in each village located in the vicinity of major rapids. When inhabitants or travellers had to pass these rapids, a pilot from this family would be asked to navigate the boat safely through the dangerous river stretch. In order to be able to do this, the “rapids-descenders” had to know the navigation route (väylä) that circumvented the most critical reefs and currents of the rapids. Still today, some of the navigation routes on the major rapids are known, even if the rapids themselves have been inundated by hydropower dams decades ago. And for river dwellers who continue to take a boat onto the river, these routes remain significant when they pass some of the many rapids that still flow today. Especially because of the prevalence of outboard motors on most boats, it is essential to navigate through a channel without too many rocks close to the surface, as these easily break the engine’s delicate propellers. Therefore, the experience of a “man who understands water” continues to be most useful. Sometimes visiting boaters are accompanied by guides; but for the many boating tourists who lack a human guide, “paddling maps” (melontakarttoja) of the streams in eastern Lapland have been published where rapids are shown and instructions are given about the easiest navigation route (fig. 4.9). While such maps convey much useful information for unfamiliar boaters, they differ from human “rapids-descenders” in a crucial way. A “man who understands water” would not learn the navigation routes of rapids by heart and then descend along them for the rest of his life. As all river dwellers know, the course of the best navigation channel though a particular river stretch is forever shifting. During the spring flood for instance, the river is often so full of water that it is virtually impossible to get stuck on a reef. On the other hand, the increased force of the cur-

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rents shifts the location of waves and creates new eddies that have to be avoided instead. In summer, with warm temperatures and little precipitation, the same river section can run extremely dry, and so many rocks protrude from the river bed that people can cross it by leaping from one rock to the next. Then, boaters do not have to watch out for strong eddies so much as for a route deep enough for the boat to pass at all. This route will quite likely run somewhat differently from the navigation channel in spring. And in between these two extremes of flood and “dry period” (kuiva-aika) there can be many other scenarios in a given rapid water section, which all require different routes of descent. Much more dramatically, many rapids have been transformed in the context of timber floating and the subsequent programme of river restoration (jokikunnostus) (chapter four). Where a few decades earlier, all obstacles to the flow were to be removed, now as much fish habitat and as many oxygen-enriching waves as possible were installed. Again, this resulted in very different navigation routes through these sections, and some boaters even claim that some of these “restored” sections have become virtually impassable. Furthermore, because rocks and gravel have been rearranged so recently, they are even more prone to be shifted by flood waters and ice floes than rocks and gravel that have been in the river for a longer time. It is evident that flow conditions in a river, and especially along rapids, undergo dynamic shifts, both seasonally and historically. Some of them happen with human influence, others largely without. With the position of rocks and sandbanks, with the amount of water discharge, and with the resulting location of waves and eddies, the navigation channel through a rapid water section regularly changes. While the “paddling maps” help to guide novice boaters, they are no substitute for human experience with the river. Their suggestions of routes through the rapids are necessarily static, while the rapids themselves – and concomitantly the distribution of obstacles and dangers along them – are dynamic and shifting. The skill of a “rapids-descender” then lies not so much in knowing the location of rocks or the course of a navigation channel, as in the ability to derive from looking at the water surface – the waves, steps and twirls – where it is safe to steer the boat. He does not need to memorise all rapids in the vicinity, but he must “understand water”.

River boats River dwellers’ skills of dealing with the challenges of navigating in rapid water are not only reflected in their actual boating practices, but evident also in the very shape of river boats (e.g., Yliniemi 1995c). Most boats today are made from fibreglass, a material much easier to maintain than wood. Such boats are more resistant to moisture and freezing, can be left in the water much longer than wooden ones, and do not require annual maintenance such as painting with tar. Nevertheless, wooden boats continue to be appreciated. Not infrequently, people build a wooden boat themselves, usually under supervision of an instructor during a course at an adult education centre (kansalaisopisto). Also, a few professional boat-builders operate in the catchment, and it is significant to know by whom a particular boat has been made. In fact, even many fibreglass boats bear witness to the tradition – and hint at the higher esteem – of wooden boats, in that their synthetic, monolithic shells are shaped as if made from individual planks.

6. Boating along the Kemi River: Claiming and understanding water through navigation

The shape of traditional river boats is rather long and narrow with pointed prow and stern. The length is at least four or five times the span of the breadth, often this ratio is larger. The body of the boat is relatively flat, as the bottom planks lie almost horizontally on the water and the planks towards the sides are tilted only gradually. This allows boaters to stand upright on the bottom of the boat, which is often additionally covered by a flat sheet of boards. Also, the low rims of the boat afford unobstructed access to the river water, for instance when fishing. Timo, whom I introduced as an experienced fisher in the previous chapter, is also a keen boater and knows a lot about the adequacy of different boat designs on the river. He explains that apart from the arrangement of the planks that allows boaters to firmly stand in the boat even in rough currents, the shape of the keel, and correspondingly the bottom of the hull, is the most crucial characteristic. He shows me a boat his father has made many decades ago, which apparently has been propped up behind a shed on the riverbank for quite some time. In this position, however, the characteristic shape of the boat is clearly visible. Timo demonstrates that unlike in boats that are made for navigation on lakes, the keel of a river boat does not have its lowest point in the centre of the hull, but has two lowest points situated close to the prow and near the stern, while the keel curves slightly upwards towards the centre. With such a rounded w-shape, the weight in the boat is distributed in a way that keeps it stable in the current, prevents it from getting stuck on rocks and sandbanks, and makes it generally easier to handle in the river. Further to this curving shape, the keel should be made from a particularly hard wood, such as pine, in order to bestow stability on the boat, and to be slightly broader towards the centre than at the prow and stern. That the keel is such a significant element in a boat is reflected in the Finnish term for it, which literally translates as “mother wood” or “origin wood” (emäpuu). Only if the “mother wood” is shaped in the right way, will adding the planks yield a decent river boat; if the “mother wood” is faulty or ill-shaped, it is virtually impossible to build a tolerable boat. Timo’s own boat is shaped in this way, and so is his brother-in-law’s boat. This is not to say that all, or even most boats on the present Kemi River conform to this shape. In fact, as most of the boats are propelled by strong engines, many boaters do not even feel the difference between driving a river- or a lake boat, and the appreciation of well-shaped river boats has been fading accordingly. But those who prefer punting and rowing over using an outboard engine, or those who merely have a small engine attached to their boats, readily experience the difference between a u- and a w-shaped keel, and value the latter for navigation on the river.

Currents and rapids Dealing with the river’s flow, with the power of currents pulling and pushing anything that enters the steam, is thus the central preoccupation of boaters’ skills and vessel design. In fact, it is the currents that distinguish river boats and boating from navigating on lakes, and rapids – as the epitome of a flowing river – figure prominently in the accounts of river traffic. Because the river is characterised by a clear movement from upstream to downstream (chapter three), the currents make going into one direction much easier than into another.

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Granted, in times of engine-dominated boat travel on the Kemi River, the fundamental difference of moving upstream and downstream has become somewhat blurred. Propelled by a reasonably strong motor, going upstream takes little more effort2 than going downstream. Steering techniques and critical river spots of up- and downstream travel are somewhat different even for motorboats, but generally it is almost equally easy to go either way. This is in marked contrast to other ways of boating. Some rapids, for instance, could be passed only in a downstream direction, while going upstream was possible only by tracking the boat. Generally, rowing or punting downstream is much faster than going upstream, even for experienced punters who know how to avoid the strongest current and take advantage of counter-currents. When Aimo boasts about the record-breaking speed of his brother punting from their home the forty river kilometres to the village of Martti in only three hours, he admits that this concerned only the downstream passage. Upstream it took at least three times as long. Similarly, Timo has heard old rafters’ accounts of descending the Ounas River from Kittilä all the way to Rovaniemi and from there along the Kemi River to the estuary in manned timber rafts. During the height of the spring flood, experienced raft pilots could make the over three-hundred-kilometre-long downstream journey in about three days. Returning back upstream, punting up the river in boats that they had brought along on the timber rafts, however, took approximately three weeks – seven times the period of descending, even though the descent had been made only by the force of the current, without much propelling of the boat by human effort. Along rapid water sections, the difference of up- and downstream is most evident, even today. Ascending rapids, especially with a boat full of cargo or passengers, is much more difficult than steering downstream through them. Of course, this is also a precarious undertaking, as a boat is easily caught on a rock or capsized in the waves and eddies. But many river dwellers learn to navigate through rapids, and some become particularly skilful in this activity (cf. Sundqvist 1967, Toivainen 1967). Present inhabitants of the river stretch of Ossauskoski, a location of major rapids on the main course of the Kemi River before the construction of a hydropower dam in 1965, explain that the name of this rapid water section derives from the very skills necessary to steer a boat through it. While koski is the Finnish word for “rapids”, the first half of the name is supposedly based on the verb osata, which means “to command” or “to be able to”. Accordingly, the name of this river stretch can be rendered as “skill-rapids”, or “the rapids that should only be crossed by experienced boaters”. The damming of river sections has had mixed results for navigability. On the one hand, it resulted in a stream that in many places cannot be descended or ascended for longer stretches at all, because hydropower stations block the passage. On the other hand, the levelling of the water table has made the river very easy to navigate upstream from these stations, as currents have been stilled, rocks submerged and the power of the rapids concentrated into the turbine chamber. This also means, however, that “lake boats” thrive and the skills of “men who understand water” become redundant.

2

But it still takes more time and fuel than going downstream.

6. Boating along the Kemi River: Claiming and understanding water through navigation

Ways of boating Larger boats have remained an exception on the Kemi River.3 Only in timber floating, larger motorised vessels continued to be used throughout the catchment basin until 1991. Most boating has been and still is accomplished in smaller vessels, usually accommodating up to five persons but mostly manned by only one or two. The most widely used methods of moving and steering a boat have been rowing, punting and – more recently and ever more widespread – outboard engines. Punting and rowing have often been practiced in combination, but the former method has virtually fallen into oblivion. Until around the 1960s, however, punting constituted the most widely used way of moving a boat, particularly when moving upstream and when travelling on smaller streams. All river-boat navigation hinges on managing the relative speed of the boat vis-à-vis the currents. Travelling faster or slower than the currents bestows some control on the boaters, while drifting with the flow of the river severely limits a vessel’s navigability. Timo is one of the few keen punters I have met. He remembers that his father had already been somewhat of a river purist, cherishing the quietness of a rowing or punting boat trip, on which one could encounter fish and birds that would long have taken flight from the roar of an outboard engine. Timo explains that punting requires two persons standing upright in a river boat, one in the back and one in the prow. Each one holds a punting pole, usually made from dried spruce. Both persons push the boat forward by their poles, whereas the person in the prow should be concerned as much with steering the boat into the right direction. Moving upstream through rapids or on a larger river, the very outer edge of the water would be the best route to take, so close to the shore that the water is just about deep enough to carry the boat. Not only are currents usually weaker outside of the main channel, but close to the river bank there is often even some kind of counter-current (akanvirta), actually pushing upstream. Therefore, punting through a river section with strong currents is usually not so much about pitting human strength against the forces of the river, as it is about negotiating a suitable position of the boat by means of the punting poles. The same is true for going downstream. The punting poles can be used to slow down and even to stop the boat in stretches with fast currents. This can be very handy in order to take a closer look at approaching rapids or when fishing. Also for rowing a boat, usually at least two persons are required. One stands or sits in the rear of the vessel, steering the boat by a long oar. This is the pilot, or “stern-man” (perämies). The other one – or more – sits facing backwards, somewhere towards the front, and rows with two slightly smaller oars hinged on both sides of the boat. For moving along moderately flowing river stretches, this can be a very fast way of travelling, but ascending rapids is virtually impossible with this method. For descending rapids, on the other hand, this technique with one person steering and one or more rowing has been

3

Above all the prevalence of rapids on the Kemi River has precluded the navigability for larger vessels along most of the river. Only on two river stretches, on Lake Kemi and around Rovaniemi, where a relatively high population density coincided with an absence of larger rapids, regular ferry transport developed around 1900 (Orava 1967).

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rather popular. Even though the current of the rapids already accelerates the boat considerably, it is vital for the rower to keep the vessel at a speed still exceeding that of the water. As soon as a rowing boat slows down to or below the speed of the water, it ceases to be navigable by the pilot in the back, and is tossed about at the mercy of the currents. With the spread of outboard engines, the need for two people to cooperate when going by boat has practically vanished. These motors are so strong that the boater, sitting in the back of the boat like a “stern-man”, at the same time commands the power of the rower in propelling the vessel forward. Thus the possibilities for lone boating trips were significantly enlarged. In contrast, for punting and rowing the cooperation of the boaters is crucial. Timo explains, for instance, that it is essential for punters not to start arguing while on the water. Both would inevitably lose the argument, because each boater would have to struggle against two opponents – not only the other boater, but also the force of the river. Instead, punters have to find a way of communicating and agreeing with each other about the route to be taken and the way of achieving this, often without being able to discuss the issue at length, but by learning to interpret each other’s punting. Parallel with the technology and sociality of boating, preferred boat shapes and preferred boating routes also change. Strong currents are most often not a problem for boats equipped with motors, but frequently unsuitable for rowers or punters. On the other hand, shallow sections, that leave only a few centimetres of water under the boat’s keel, can be easily navigated when punting, but are impassable with outboard engines without risking damage to the propeller. All kinds of boat motors are used on the present Kemi River. On the dammed sections, these engines can have capacities exceeding twenty horsepower, usually attached to vessels that look little like the traditional river-boat. On all other river stretches, where rapids and shallows impede the use of such large engines, outboard motors tend to have about five to ten horsepower. Strong engines can help to show off on lakes or reservoirs, but they are of little use on the flowing river.

Boating as relating with the river Today, boats belong to the Kemi River almost as much as its waters. Boats populate the river and its banks as long as the stream is not covered by a layer of ice. Mostly when fishing, but also for other purposes and often simply as an end in itself, people take a boat on the river. But what does it mean for river dwellers to boat on the Kemi? What histories and narratives are invoked by boat travelling? And how do place names remind river dweller of boating traditions? While during the winter most boats are stored away or invisible, covered by a thick layer of snow, the summer river landscape is, in places, littered with boats – some on the shore, others on the water. Even most of the more urban inhabitants of Rovaniemi and Kemijärvi have boats and enjoy spending time on the water, which belongs to a satisfactory summer-experience. Talking about the river with a group of men, for instance, one of them claimed that “Every man needs to have a boat”. This probably implied for him that having access to a boat, and thereby to the river waters, was essential to being a river dweller.

6. Boating along the Kemi River: Claiming and understanding water through navigation

The fact that he talks about “men” also reflects a further dimension. As mentioned in chapter five, fishing and other activities that may require a boat have traditionally been considered men’s tasks. Still today, boating is foremost a male activity, especially considering the operation of outboard engines. Thereby, river access and entitlements to its benefits display gender inequalities, a relation that has been frequently noted regarding water, and other resource, issues (e.g., Strang 2005b, Frölander-Ulf 1989). This does not imply, however, that boating and fishing are closed to women. Indeed, as Frölander-Ulf (1989: 38) notices in her study of Eastern Finnish farming, whereas men would seldom have the skills and the will to perform “female” tasks, women often engaged in “male” tasks, and some became very proficient in them. Fölander-Ulf interprets this as an internalised acceptance of the value hierarchy of these tasks, which made women’s adoption of male practices a status improvement. But she also notices, along with others (e.g., Ingold 1988, n.d.), that in the course of the restructuring of rural Lapland during the second half of the twentieth century, many social and economic relations have changed, in particular gender roles. On the Kemi River, it is evident that women are, and have long been, boating, even though clearly less frequently than men. Some women, like Hellevi (chapter five), own a boat, and some spend so much time boating that for instance Tapani’s mother (chapter two) almost gave birth to her son in a boat.

Claiming the river through boating Taking a boat on the river is not only a popular activity, but also imbued with deep meanings of public river access, the centuries-old river culture, and the river dwellers’ skills of handling boats in difficult currents. Recently, this symbolism has often been invoked in a political context, through demonstrations undertaken by boat on the river. Usually, these “rowing” demonstrations have been aimed at vocalising citizens’ opposition to planned hydropower projects, such as the Ounas River Rowing (Ounasjokisoutu), the Vuotos Rowing (Vuotos-soutu) and the Kemi River Rowing (Kemijokisoutu). Taking a boat onto the river seems to be a widely known way of claiming the stream, particularly emphasising the rights of ordinary river dwellers to its waters, as opposed to the interests of hydropower companies. All these “rowing” demonstrations follow the main river current downstream, thereby taking advantage of the same power that a hydroelectric plant would harvest, and riding on a stream in a manner that has been practiced for centuries, but would become fundamentally altered with the damming of the respective river section. A recent addition to the tradition of river boating as a political and media-effective event was provided in the summer of 2008 by a press conference with subsequent multiple-day boat trip on the most upstream section of the Kemi River. Unlike earlier events, it was not set up as a mass demonstration but was limited to a number of “experts” who deliberated before and during the trip about possible and desirable futures of the upper part of the river. Topics included plans for a large-scale open pit mine on the headwaters of the catchment (Pöyry Environment Oy 2008), and the continuing fears of the area’s inhabitants of the construction of the Vuotos Reservoir, in spite of the Supreme Court’s ruling against it. The boaters proposed countering the ideas of industrial development for the region – as exemplified by the hazardous mine and the large reservoir –

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with an alternative development vision of declaring the upper Kemi River area a National Park and supporting the nascent “nature-based tourism” (luonnonmatkailu) there. Making these claims during a boat trip emphasised the centrality of the river for their ideas, and fortified their claims by enacting their belonging in the tradition of river dwellers. An environmental artist, working with the movement opposing the hydropower project of Sierilä, powerfully tapped into the river boat symbolism with some of the artwork he developed partly in collaboration with inhabitants of the river stretch concerned. During an event that culminated in burning three fire sculptures on the river bank, the largest sculpture depicted a huge rowlock with a ten metres long oar, symbolising the ongoing engagement of people and the river manifested both in the recent “rowing” demonstrations and in centuries-old courses of travel and transport (Stöckell 2008: 93–108). A few months later, the same artist presented an exhibition at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, which was centred on a wooden boat. The vessel did not have the shape of anything like a river-boat, however, but was modelled on a cast for a reinforced concrete structure. The rounded sides and pointed ends of a real boat were replaced by a plain, right-angled construction. The “boat” thus forcefully opposed the flow of the river, and the movement inherent to boating, with the rigid solidity of a hydropower dam and the stagnancy of the resulting reservoir. The artist explains that in dammed river sections, real river-boats are dying out with the disappearance of the currents for which they are made; along with them, the skills and memories of river boating also fade. Once a structure of reinforced concrete blocks the river, the boat is turned into a “coffin”. In place of an oar, the exhibition “boat” was equipped with an uprooted tree, the oar blade being replaced by the roots, spreading into thin air and symbolising the social and ecological uprooting caused by damming a river (ibid.: 108–113). In both cases, taking a boat to the river, and along and across its currents, was taken as a powerful symbol for the intertwined histories of river dwellers and river.

Traditions of boating Artists, activists and demonstrators tap into a long, and well-appreciated, tradition of boating in the catchment. When speaking of the significance of the Kemi River for the people living and working along its banks, many of these river dwellers are quick to point out that “in the old days” the river provided the “main artery” (valtaväylä), transporting its inhabitants, goods, merchants, soldiers and state representatives throughout the area. In fact, the oldest map depicting the catchment in detail, drawn in 1642, presents – along with the names of many river branches – information on whether they are navigable (Ahnlund 1928). The script “navigable” appears in letters as large as the respective branch’s name, illustrating that for those reading the map, the name of a stream was no more important than whether or not one could take a boat on it. While the representation of rivers and lakes, as well as that of settlements and churches, is realised in a most detailed manner, not a single road is marked on the map. It can be assumed that probably a few routes of land transport did exist in the region during the seventeenth century, but they appear as not significant enough to make it onto the map. What integrated settlements and its people were not solid roads, but flowing rivers.

6. Boating along the Kemi River: Claiming and understanding water through navigation

River dwellers frequently portray the history of living and working along the Kemi River as a continuous coming and going up and down the stream. They know many accounts of how the river-as-artery has brought war-raids and tax-collectors, but also enabled their ancestors to travel to the oceans in order to fish during years of crop-failure. Most river dwellers went to church by boat, over sometimes considerable distances (fig. 6.1).

Figure 6.1: Journey undertaken by inhabitants of Kittilä to attend mass in Sodankylä until Kittilä became an independent parish in the nineteenth century. As most travel and transport of the time, the journey followed the river courses, but necessitated a transition from the subcatchment area of the Ounas River to that of the Kitinen River. This portage was realised on the headwaters of the Sotka and Jeesiö Rivers, where only a short stretch of land separated the small lakes draining into the Sotka and the Jeesiö (see insert). This stretch of land continues to be called “portage land” (muotkamaa) on current maps. Two of the small lakes on the route, although located on either side of the watershed, bear almost the same name (Shallow Lake Sika and Deep Lake Sika).

Some still remember going shopping by boat, and most can tell stories of the manifold farming tasks for which boating was indispensable until recently. For instance, dairy farms were integrated along a so-called “boat-road” (venetie), where a boat would pass daily to pick up the farms’ milk produce and deliver it to the nearest dairy. As grazing

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land was often situated on river or lake islands, or on the shore opposite from the farmstead, even milking the cows twice daily necessitated taking a boat. Sheep were boated to river islands to graze, and river dwellers took boats to cut their winter-supply of hay on banks and islands (Linkola, Porkka and Sammallahti 1967).

Boating place names The long traditions of travel and transport along the rivers and lakes have been inscribed on the landscape as place names, which frequently refer to the relative ease of travelling through the place (Niemi 2008). Rivers are subdivided into a series of sections that are usually named according to the kind or intensity of current, in combination with another distinguishing feature (cf. Toivainen 1967). Koski refers to a rapid water river section, niva to a section with strong currents but waveless water table, and suvanto describes a stretch with very slow current. The Kemi River rapids between the mouth of the Ounas River and a hill named Ounasvaara, for instance, were called Ounaskoski, and the village a few kilometres into the Ounas River from there bears the name Nivankylä, literally “fast-currentvillage”. The river section just upstream from Nivankylä is called Sinettäsuvanto, literally the “slowly-flowing-stretch-of-Sinettä”, where Sinettä is the name of the next village. The catchment basin is littered with such place names, which are at the same time instructions for travel and transport. Other relevant place names include those with väylä (navigation channel), kari (reef), korva (foamy wave, literally “ear”), and köngäs (very steep drop in river bed, almost like a waterfall). These place names usually survive even the disappearance of the phenomena they described. The Ounaskoski, for instance, ceased to be a rapid water section with the damming of that river stretch in 1960; simultaneously, the waves of Suutarinkorva, located a bit upstream, vanished. Nevertheless, the places have retained their names, both on the maps and in people’s talk. Similarly, place names reflecting actual travelling practices persist, in spite of the abandonment of the respective practices. Many settlements on a watercourse, for instance, feature a place whose name includes huuto, which is a call or a shout. These are locations on the shore where travellers on foot would call for someone to pick them up on a boat and row them across the river or lake. Also, many places on the divide of catchment basins or sub-basins, which were used as portages, continue to be called muotkajärvi, muotkamaa, or muotkavaara, which is Lake Portage, Portage Land, or Portage Hill respectively.

Moving along the river Boating emerges as a way of travelling thoroughly integrated with the landscape through which proceeds. From a boater’s perspective, the river does not divide the landscape, but opens it up for travel and transport. Thus, crossing a river only developed into a problem with the decline in boating and the dependence of a solid traffic substrate. This section explores some of the relations of river course, boat travel and landscape. How has boating been integrated with other activities? How does it relate to the geographical layout of

6. Boating along the Kemi River: Claiming and understanding water through navigation

river and catchment? How has the practice of travelling along rivers been extended even beyond the watersheds? Meri-Matti remembers, for instance, that until recently most reindeer herders travelled on foot through forests and bogs during the seasons when they could not use skis or snowmobiles, but transported supplies and provisions to the herding areas by boat. Nobody wanted to carry a tent or pots and pans on the shoulders while making his way through the forest. Thus, Meri-Matti loaded these heavier goods onto his boat, punted it up one of the many small rivers, whereby he could reach nearly every reindeer fence in the catchment. The course of the river might have made many detours, and might have proceeded in countless meanders instead of a straight trajectory towards the destination; but following this course on a boat was still preferred to carrying the material on foot. Besides, the small and secluded rivers provided excellent fishing grounds that could be enjoyed at the same time. Today, even in the most remote corners of the Kemi River basin, this kind of boat transport has become unnecessary, because not only are ever more forestry roads penetrating the backwoods, but also the availability of all-terrain quad-bikes furnishes a summertime alternative to the wintertime snowmobile. With this development of accelerated transport, fishing has simultaneously become an activity that has to be practised on its own, as a “leisure” activity (chapters two and five). While it used to be integrated with other activities associated with moving through the landscape, this very movement has now become a single-purpose activity, making fishing a leftover hobby, to be practiced when there are no more urgent things to be done. The acceleration and disembedding of travelling from other activities and landscape aspects has also transformed the very practice of moving about. As will be argued in chapter eight, travellers have become more like “transported passengers” than the “wayfarers” they used to be (cf. Ingold 2007b).

Portages Quite often, a particular stream was significant for traffic not only because it led to a certain location, but also because it provided access to a neighbouring catchment basin or sub-basin. In fact, the transport routes afforded by rivers were not limited to the watershed, but frequently extended beyond it. In a landscape with as flat a relief as most parts of central and eastern Lapland, water divides are not steep mountains, but very often most shallow ridges, or even two sides of a bog. These can, of course, be passed with ease, dragging the boat over a short trajectory of land or even along an especially maintained track, as the example of the church-bound journey above has demonstrated. In MeriMatti’s illustration of the navigability of eastern Lapland, he mentions a fair number of such portages as well (fig. 6.2). For instance, at a particular point between the upper Värriö River and the Naruska River that flows into the Tenniö River, boaters could portage quite easily. The ridge, along which boats had to be dragged to change from the Värriöto the Naruska/Tenniö River, is accordingly called Portage Ridge (Muotkaselkä) still today.

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Figure 6.2: Portages on the headwaters of the Kemi and Luiro Rivers, from Meri-Matti’s account. The respective portages are P1 between Värriö- and Naruska Rivers; P2 between Vouhtu- and Sota Rivers; P3 between Suomu- and (a) Luiro- or (b) Kopsus Rivers; and P4 between Tenniö- and Tuntsa Rivers. Note that only those rivers mentioned in MeriMatti’s description are included in the figure. In fact, the “mycelium” of streams is much denser than depicted here.

(Note: A considerable portion of the Luiro River – approximately around the script “Luiro River” in the figure – is covered by the hydropower reservoir of Lokka since 1967.)

Not more complicated than passing from one sub-basin to the other have been the portages to neighbouring catchments. The most famous of these connects the Kemi River to the Tuloma catchment, draining into the Arctic Ocean at Murmansk, via a portage

6. Boating along the Kemi River: Claiming and understanding water through navigation

called Sotataival. The latter part of the word, taival, translates as “journey” or “portage”, while the first part refers to the Sota River that can be accessed through the portage. In order to do so, travellers approaching from the direction of Savukoski had to ascend the Kemi River up to the little tributary Vouhtu River. Punting up this brook, they would reach a pond where they had to get out from their boats to drag them across the Sotataival portage. Re-entering the waters at the other side of the gentle divide, they descended the Sota River into the Nuortti River, which flowed into the Tuloma River and finally the Arctic Ocean. Other waterways to the Tuloma River that Meri-Matti knows of ascend the Luiro River to its very headwaters, either along the Luiro River itself all the way to Lake Luiro, or its tributary Kopsus River towards Lake Kopsus. From these lakes, portages were possible that lead to the Suomu River, which flows via the Lutto- into the Tuloma River. Another route led from the Kemi River basin to the Tuntsa River that drains towards the White Sea. This passage required boating up the Tenniö River into one of the lakes at its headwaters, where a portage towards the neighbouring catchment basin was feasible. On the map, this place is still called Muotkalahti, “Portage Bay”. Dragging a boat along a portage was thus a habitual practice for people travelling up and down the river. Portaging was, however, not only necessary for passing from one catchment basin into the next, but also for passing particularly strong rapids when going along a single river. While descending a rapid water section was often feasible – given the skills of the pilot and his or her familiarity with the navigable route – ascending it was usually much harder and often impossible. Therefore, there tended to be a path along one of the banks of such river sections where boaters could walk and drag their boats along, either in the water close to the shore or on the dry behind them. Many locations of such passages continue to bear the name taival,4 as also used in portages like the abovementioned Sotataival. On the former rapids of Säpsä on the middle reaches of the Kemi River, for instance, a place on the southern river bank is called Säpsäntaival. Presumably, this place afforded a land route bypassing the rapids (cf. Sundqvist 1967). Downstream from Rovaniemi, where the Kemi River used to descend the rapids of Valajaskoski, the map shows a place on the western river bank called Puolentaipaleenkankaat. This term translates as the “Heath at Halfway of the Portage”, suggesting that a shore route along the rapids used to pass there. Still further downstream, in the municipality of Keminmaa, the most powerful rapids of the Kemi River used to roar along, before they were dammed in 1976. These rapids were called Taivalkoski – “Portage Rapids” in literal translation.5 Apparently these rapids had long been considered too fierce to navigate by boat, making a land bypass necessary there. Passing rapids and passing a watershed have many similarities, practical and otherwise. Both arise from a mode of travelling that uses river courses as means and di-

4 5

Sometimes, the related word taipale is used synonymously with taival, also meaning the journey over land, undertaken during a boat trip. Interestingly, another Taivalkoski exists in the neighbouring Ii River catchment basin, where the name of the rapids has been applied even to the riverside village. This confirms that boating along rivers has long been central for the inhabitants of the area, and attests to the vital importance of information about those stretches on which portaging was absolutely necessary.

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rections of transport. Both necessitate stepping on dry land and dragging the boat for a while, only to re-enter the water on the other side. The rocks and eddies of rapids or the ridge of a watershed are merely minor interruptions of a journey primarily undertaken by boat. And finally, it cannot be coincidence that both activities are called by the same term (taival), which in Finnish also means “journey”. In many ways, portaging past rapids or over a water divide when travelling by boat corresponds to crossing a river or a lake when travelling over land. In the former, the waterway is the means of transport, while land or rocks are obstacles; in the latter it is the other way around and land and rocks are the substrate of transport, while the waterway becomes an obstacle.

Boating in a world of roads Every skill is situated within a socioeconomic context that facilitates its development or makes it redundant (Harris 2005). Boating along the Kemi River is no exception, and with the proliferation of roads and cars, this activity has undergone major transformations. Rovaniemi could be reached by country road by the 1840s, but most other village centres6 were linked to the network by around 1900. By the 1960s, even places on the upper Kemi or Kitinen Rivers were connected to the network (Mäkipuro 1967). While many people, having grown up or worked in these more remote parts of the catchment basin, have travelled along the rivers for many decades, present river dwellers usually drive cars. Boating has become more selective and geared towards car travel. For instance, launching and landing boats has become increasingly concentrated around “boatlaunching places” (venelaskupaikat) that are constructed solely for this purpose, often by the hydroelectricity company,7 as a compensation for the eroding river banks. A suitable place to launch and land a boat requires access to the road network. Earlier, where a trail or road (e.g., portages) began depended on the characteristics of the river, whereas now, the road network determines the places at which a boat trip can start or end. That the river used to be the prime means of transport is also reflected in the very structure of settlements that spread along the river’s course rather than inland. Villages formed on both sides of the river simultaneously. The river running through the centre of a village was not so much a divider as an integrator of the houses and activities on both sides (e.g., Kempas and Pränni 2002). While today, settlements, farms, and places in general are approached from the road, not long ago, they have been approached from the river. Consequently, the representative side of a farm had to be the one facing the river, whereas today the first impression visitors get when entering a farm is on the side facing the road.

6 7

According to Mäkipuro (1967: 264) these were Kemijärvi (1850s), Kittilä (1889) and Sodankylä (1902), as well as Ivalo (1913) in the neighbouring catchment. Along the dammed sections of the river, the water table is usually kept high enough for boating, and – apart from the areas immediately upstream and downstream from dams – these sections provide rather safe boating grounds. Because of the incessant change in water level on such sections (chapter nine), river banks tend to be strongly eroded, and accessing the river, particularly with a boat, is somewhat difficult on places without such boat launches.

6. Boating along the Kemi River: Claiming and understanding water through navigation

This shift in orientation from the river to the road, as well as the striking recentness of this development, can be inferred from the case of a dwelling on the upper Kemi River (fig. 6.3). The original smallholder farm, established in the late 1930s, had been built at the river shore, because getting to and from this place was achieved mainly along the river. The river remained, in spite of the many difficult-to-navigate rapids on this stretch, the most convenient means of transport. Only later, when roads were built and ferries operated along this curving river stretch, did roads attain more significance. At the same time, i.e. during the second half of the twentieth century, cars, buses and other forms of motorised road traffic became more abundant throughout the catchment. It is therefore not surprising that when the heir of the original smallholding decided to construct a new residential building in the 1980s, he preferred the roadside to the riverbank. Nor is it probably a coincidence that the latter house-builder was occupied in public road maintenance for many summers of his working life. Having grown up on the river bank, crossing the river every day by boat in order to get to school, he witnessed the fundamental reworking of travel and transport in the catchment basin, from a movement guided by the courses of rivers to one determined by the road network.

Figure 6.3: Two generations of homes on the Kemi River. Both building phases were oriented towards the respective artery for travel and transport. While the original buildings were thus constructed on the riverbank, the newer building is situated by the roadside.

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Conclusion This chapter has shown that boating along the Kemi River has long been the most important way to get around and continues to be a popular and deeply significant activity. The skills involved in manoeuvring a boat through the flowing water – particularly around rapids – have been mastered by many river dwellers, thereby acquiring a unique sense of movement-within-movement. Along many river stretches, hydropower dams have transformed the stream into lake-like reservoirs, sidelining river-boats and riverskills. Yet, I have argued that the present river is unthinkable without boats, and river dwellers are hardly conceivable if not as boaters. The movement of the Kemi River’s waters is paralleled, used and negotiated by the movements of river dwellers travelling on its waters in boats.

7. Timber floating down the river: Managing flow and friction of people, wood and water

Introduction The Kemi River has been used, until recently, for floating timber, another activity that resonated well with its particular flow. In spite of a multitude of meanders, eddies and counter-currents, the river flows predominantly in one direction, carrying substances downstream. Furthermore, it funnels water and other matter from an immense catchment into the narrow confines of the estuary, ideally suited for an economic process that requires resource extraction throughout a wide periphery for processing in a single centre. Moreover, river dwellers – experienced in dealing with the river’s currents through boating and fishing – were well-situated to become excellently skilled rafters. This chapter approaches timber floating from two perspectives. First, it investigates the embodied skills that river dwellers developed as rafters. What were considered the abilities of a good rafter? Which challenges were rafters exposed to, and how did they deal with them? And second, it explores floating management as the attentive coordination of numerous rhythms. How were the rhythmic dynamics of river discharge and course, temperatures and the weather, and rafters’ seasonal capacities juggled to get logs to the saw-mills? Timber floating emerges as the negotiation of a flow within a flow, transported along by the currents of the river, the coordinated construction and operation of floating routes, and the skilled practice of river dwellers. Thus far, the streams of water, fish and boats along the Kemi River have predominantly been described as instances of flow. The analysis of timber floating now provides an opportunity to add a crucial qualification to this concept. Wherever something flows in the world, there is not only movement, but also friction. Different processes move at different tempos, at different angles and in different directions from others, ‘rubbing’, impeding or enabling each other. In the flow of a river, in fact, most energy goes into friction with the banks, the bed and among different sections of the stream (Ackroyd 2008: 14, Schwenk 1965). And equally in social and political processes, it is the friction of various movements that makes up social life (Tsing 2005). Managing flows on the Kemi River is thus fundamentally also a management of friction.

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River dwellers as rafters Seasonally working as rafters has shaped the lives of many river dwellers (e.g., Snellman 1996), for instance that of Paavo, who was fourteen years old when he made his first money in timber floating. It was the summer of 1948, and along with many other young workers, Paavo worked ten hours a day, distributing logs that had been floated down the river to their different owners. His workplace was at the estuary of the Simo River, the southern neighbour of the Kemi River. The town of Simo, located on the estuary, was Paavo’s hometown, and he is proud to come from a place that is known for producing highly skilful rafters. The most skilful rafters would, after the end of the Simo floating season, move on to the Kemi River, that large watercourse to the north where floating lasted at least one month longer because of its immense size. And so did Paavo. Already during his forestry studies in Helsinki, he returned to Lapland each summer to work for the Kemi River Floating Association. He must have made a reasonably good impression on his superiors, because he was promised a job in floating management once he had finished his studies. For his first job after graduation, he was sent to the upstream section of the Kitinen River, where he worked for the season and followed the “tail”, the final logs of the season, downstream along the Kitinen River, into the Kemi River, across Lake Kemi and all the way to the wood-processing plants at the estuary. The head of the Floating Association deemed this the most appropriate way to introduce his novice into the intricacies of timber floating management. Paavo spent most of his time between March and August on the river and says he learnt a lot during this summer, most of all about the challenges of coordinating an activity that depended both on the fluctuating dynamics of a large catchment and on the moods of a large number of human workers. In autumn, when the “tail” had reached the estuary, Paavo was sent to the tributary Tenniö River, where he was to participate in the clearing of a floating channel through the stream. With bulldozers and tractors, larger rocks were removed from the rapid water reaches, and a four to five-metre-wide section was cleared along the entire river between the Russian border and the confluence with the Kemi River. When the winter made works on the freezing river impracticable, Paavo worked for the Finnish Forest Authority. As soon as spring set in, however, he was back in timber floating. In 1963 he worked first on the headwaters of the Kemi River, later in the summer he was sent to a timber barrier upstream from Lake Kemi, where the logs were bundled to be tugged across the lake. During the following five years, he was in charge of the timber sorting mechanism in the river’s estuary, overseeing a large array of floating channels and workers, through which the mass of logs was distributed to their various owners. After 1968, Paavo continued to work for the Finnish Forest Authority but mostly in areas other than timber floating, for instance as instructor in the Lappish forestry school and later as chief forestry inspector for the establishment of National Parks. Nevertheless, he continued to engage indirectly with floating throughout his career, as floating was tied up with many forestry issues until the early 1990s. Today, Paavo is retired and lives in Rovaniemi. This does not mean, however, that his connection with timber floating has come to an end. A founding member of the recently established Kemi River Floating Tradition Association (Kemijoen uit-

7. Timber floating down the river: Managing flow and friction of people, wood and water

toperinne ry), he opposes, for instance, the overtly rapid and totalising decommissioning of all timber floating structures in the watershed that has recently gained momentum. Kala-Erkki has also gained considerable experience in timber floating throughout his life. Born in 1937, he is two years younger than Paavo. He has, however, never attended a forestry school in the national capital, or been in permanent employment for more than a few years. Timber floating belonged to the many odd jobs that this “jack of all trades”, as a friend calls him, has done over his working life. He has kept a reindeer herd, worked as a lumberjack, as a construction worker, crane operator, carpenter and fisherman. In timber floating, he has sometimes worked closer to his home on Lake Kemi, sometimes very far away from it, for instance in the estuary. His activities as a rafter were mostly rather close to the logs and rather far away from the higher management echelons. In fact, he stopped working for the Floating Association when rafting became increasingly mechanised and less labour-intensive in the late 1960s, which lead to a dismissal of unskilled workers. Instead, he concentrated on finding other, often seasonal employment. For Kala-Erkki’s contemporary Meri-Matti, timber floating also meant little more than one of many kinds of seasonal employment. Meri-Matti has been first and foremost a reindeer herder in the association of Kemi-Sompio, the largest reindeer herding district in Finland located on the headwaters of the Kemi River. Growing up on a farm at the river bank, he learned to deal with its currents by boating and fishing, and by damming brooks in order to fertilise surrounding fields. In timber floating, Meri-Matti could also put his river experience to a good use. In some years, he worked for the Floating Association, in others for subcontractors in charge of a smaller tributary. And in one year, he – together with a friend – bought, felled and floated two thousand cubic metres of timber from a section of state-owned forest. Today, a few people live in Lapland who have – like Paavo – experienced timber floating on the Kemi River from the perspective of management, coordination and administration. Many more, however, particularly among the male population aged forty and above, know timber floating as Kala-Erkki and Meri-Matti do, primarily through their direct involvement with moving or stranded logs, with boats and booms, and with the river’s currents and eddies. For many, floating work provided seasonal monetary income and could be integrated well with other types of seasonal work, such as logging and dairyfarming that had their labour peaks during different times of year. Although the practical involvement of river dwellers with timber floating decreased steadily since the 1960s, when declining amounts of timber and the spread of motor boats and other machines made unskilled workers ever more redundant, floating continued to be essential for the Kemi River and its inhabitants until 1991, the very last summer it was practised. Logs on the river and associated booms and barriers along and across the stream dominated the summertime catchment, children played on the passing logs, bark shreds lined the shores, and in many places timber covered the entire river from bank to bank, so that the environs of the river smelled distinctly of fresh wood.

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Practicalities of timber floating The types of work in timber floating, and associated skills and management, differed according to their relative position in the catchment basin and the respective characteristics of the watercourse. Discharge quantities, river bed characteristics, current velocity and concomitant need for and capacity of regulation of log- and water-flow resonated with different challenges and skills. Narrow brooks were transformed into chutes for a few logs at a time, the water table closely adjusted through regulation dams. This was impossible on larger rivers, where the timber, rather than discharge, was strategically guided, held back and released. And linear progression of currents and logs was practically absent on lakes, where timber had to be tugged across instead of moving downstream spontaneously. This section focuses on the question of how specific management devices and skills answered to the task of guiding the flow of timber along the particular kinds of flow of the watercourse.

Floating timber on brooks In timber floating on smaller tributaries, so-called “brook-floating” (purouitto), work groups were contracted to float the produce of a particular logging camp to the next larger stream. This task had to be achieved in the rather short flooding period of the smaller waterways that can be a matter of one week. A further challenge was that the logs had to reach the larger stream before the respective group of rafters there had passed the mouth of the brook. The winding waterways had to be lined with booms and the water discharge had to be carefully regulated with particular dams (tammi) that were constructed along the brooks and on smaller lakes so that they could release different amounts of water according to present demand (see Hämäläinen 1997: 60–84 for a detailed description of this system on the Vuotos River). Thus, numerous seasonal reservoirs have been operated on many of the smaller streams on the catchment area. They reserved water when no logs were on the stream or when a particularly large amount of melt-water flooded the brook during a warm spell. Conversely during very cold days, they had to release as much water as possible, as the melting of the snow was slowed down and the brook ran dry. As soon as the weather turned slightly warmer, the dam would have to be partially closed again, because if the water level exceeded the lining booms, logs would be washed onto the shores and sometimes even far into forests. The latter meant that rafters had to revert to the most strenuous “shoulder floating” (olkkapääuitto), which implied carrying the logs back to the river manually. Tammi dams were also used to ease the insertion of logs into the watercourse. When the dams were constructed and closed in autumn, a small reservoir formed upstream of the dam. Over the winter, this reservoir would form a thick ice cover, where the timber felled in the nearest wintertime forestry camp could be collected and inventoried. When snow and ice melted in spring, the timber was already on the water and could be guided from the reservoir into the brook by regulating the discharge at the tammi dam. The first floated logs were often used to construct barriers along particular stretches of the river bank, where the current would wash timber onto the shore or into a bog inun-

7. Timber floating down the river: Managing flow and friction of people, wood and water

dated by the flood waters. Rafters stood along these barriers and arranged the floating timber into a suitable alignment with long wooden poles, often with an iron hook top. Finally, once the logs had been floated to the mouth of the smaller stream, the booms that had been placed along particularly difficult stretches were pushed into the stream as well. Commencing upstream and progressing downstream, logs that had for a few days served as booms were floated as timber just like the logs they had previously held in the stream.

Floating timber on larger rivers A second type of work took place on the main course and larger tributaries of the river. The Kemi River Floating Association orchestrated and supervised the annual floating activities on these reaches. It subdivided the watercourses into several stretches (uittopiiri) of twenty to thirty kilometres in length and allocated one timber floating team to each stretch. The team was responsible for fixing booms and other preparations, purging log jams and ensuring that no logs remained on the shores. The team was headed by a foreman, and manned by ten to twenty usually male rafters and often a female cook. Each group needed at least a few people who were acquainted with the particular river stretch, because of the individual characteristics of river bends, rapids and currents. Different kinds of booms were in operation on the Kemi River, some of them leading along the river, other across the stream. All of them usually consisted of thick spruce logs, often two or more bound together by iron chains or steel wire, that were linked through strong wires or shackles to form a chain. Spruce wood was known to preserve very well in the water,1 and to keep afloat even when very wet. Such chains were fixed in strategic places along the river, guiding the logs along a particular route. They were fastened with anchors, on rocks, or specially-built concrete pillars. Chains of booms that lead across the entire stream were used to regulate the extent to which timber descended a particular watercourse. These barriers were called vastuu, which also means “responsibility”. For example, they were necessary to be able to float logs on one particular river stretch at a time. As mentioned above, brooks and small streams had to be floated during the peak of the spring flood, lest their water level be too low. On larger rivers, however, floating had to await the decline of the spring flow, when water levels were still high, but the amount of discharge was decreasing. Floating timber with rising water levels led to logs gathering on the shores instead of remaining in the stream. Therefore, vastuu barriers were installed at certain intervals along the rivers, to hold back logs so long as the flood on the downstream river section was still swelling. In the course of the floating season, timber then descended a particular river section by section, from one barrier to the next, depending on water discharge and the availability of rafters. Furthermore, vastuu barriers were installed upstream from hydropower dams, in order to collect timber in large enough amounts that the operation of the log chute was worthwhile. Because water used for washing logs past the dams was lost energy to the hydropower producers, the chute was only opened when enough timber had gathered at 1

Because of its stability and persistence in water, spruce was also the material most often used for making other timber floating equipment, such as the long poles for pushing logs around.

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the barrier. Finally, such barriers were used to temporarily store some share of the timber on the river, before it reached the estuary (chapter four). The mechanism used for sorting the logs according to their owners could only be installed in the estuary during the summer, when most of the spring flood had receded. Once it was in operation, usually from early June onwards, only a certain number of logs could be sorted every day. Thus timber could only be gradually let downstream, so as not to cause the collapse of the sorting station. Another purpose of cross-river log-barriers was to safeguard the operation of ferries across the stream. Above crossing-places a barrier was operated that could be closed to hold back the stream of floating timber when the ferry needed to cross the river. This was usually realised by a chain of booms, where one shackle consisted of a long wire on a coil. When the coil was released, the current and incoming timber would push the barrier apart, so that logs could pass downstream. Before the ferry could cross, the coil was hauled in, closing the barrier which held back the timber so long as the ferry was on the river. Of course, all such vastuu barriers had limited capacities for retaining large amounts of timber, given the varying strength of the current. Meri-Matti, for instance, remembers that the barrier at the confluence of the Tenniö River with its tributary Pyhä River once had to hold back so many logs that everyone in the rafting team was convinced any additional log would inevitably make the barrier burst. Luckily though, neither did further logs approach, nor did the current increase. But suddenly, the foreman noticed a small bird flying towards the barrier. He commanded his team to scare the bird away, for the barrier was so strained that even the additional weight of a bird would break it open. The bird, however, was not impressed by the men’s shouting and jumping, and it landed on the logs. The rafters stood terrified and helplessly on the shore, waiting for the barrier to burst. It took a while until they realised that fortunately, the bird’s weight did not break the barrier; still they were relieved when they were finally ordered to release the timber to continue downstream. Other chains of booms were installed along the river rather than across it. Such booms were needed primarily to keep timber from washing onto the river banks or forming logjams. Therefore, they were installed on the outer bank of sharp bends, along reefs and rapids, and across secondary channels or river bays where logs would be likely to become trapped due to low currents. Positioning these barriers in the river required considerable skill. Not only did they have to be fixed on the upstream and downstream ends; they also had to be anchored at certain places along their length because of the strong, and sometimes divergent currents exerting force on the boom chains (fig. 7.1).

7. Timber floating down the river: Managing flow and friction of people, wood and water

Figure 7.1: Two types of timber floating barriers in the river. The vastuu barrier holds back timber approaching from upstream and from the tributary. The boom chain prevents logs from getting stuck on protruding rocks or on the banks of the river bend. Because of the different directions of the main current along the chain, it has to be held in place not only by pillars on both ends, but by various anchors in different sections.

Part of floating work happened on the river banks, but much of it required moving and operating in boats. It is no coincidence that a rafting team was sometimes called “boat-group” (venekunta),2 and that the Timber Floating Association maintained over a hundred boats with outboard engines (Itkonen 2001: 160). The most important boats in the timber floating fleet were the so-called “coil boats” (keluvene), which were – as the name suggests – equipped with a coil that held a rope or wire. These boats were essential for installing and maintaining the boom chains, as well as for purging logjams. By anchoring the boat in the river bed and fixing the wire to an object that needed to be

2

This term is also used in other contexts where the respective activity is necessarily practiced by a group of people on the same boat, such as in fishing.

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moved, such as a boom of a barrier or a log causing a logjam, considerable force could be exerted even on stretches with extremely strong currents. Towards the end of the season, when all timber had been inserted into the stream, the “tail” (häntä) was floated. This meant that, starting from upstream, rafters would move down the river following the final logs, clearing the last remaining wood from the shores and accumulating more and more local rafting groups on the way, often until the mouth of the respective tributary. Each season, thus, not only timber moved downstream along the rivers of the catchment basin, but workers did as well. This procession usually took on a rather festive character. Annual festival-like fairs, for instance in the village of Suvanto close to the mouth of the Kitinen River, are remembered by rafters and villagers alike. Pastries were prepared and sold to the rafters, who enjoyed them accompanied by plentiful drinking and occasional brawls. Music was played and dances were held that are said to have been so exhilarating that they ruined the soles of a rafter’s brand-new boots (cf. Pihkala, Sippola and Yli-Tepsa 1986: 57). Finally, after the “tail” had passed a particular stretch, the team of rafters in charge had to deconstruct the chains of booms and drag them along the river to particular storage sites. The booms themselves were stored in sheltered bays or cut-off river channels of the watercourse, where the spring flood would not wash them away before the next floating season. Other equipment, such as boats, metal chains and tools, was stored in certain buildings that the Floating Association maintained throughout the catchment.

Floating timber without current: Lakes and reservoirs Timber floating on lakes – and later on hydropower reservoirs – was a third type of work. Before the 1960s, there was only one major lake on the Kemi River, which is rather unusual for Finnish watercourses that are most often dominated by lakes rather than streams. In part, this is why the Kemi River has been praised as such a great river for timber floating, and such a problematic one for hydroelectricity generation, for which the storage capacity of lakes is a welcome attribute (Itkonen 1967: 151, Salokangas 1968: 27). While a river’s current provides for the transport by itself, a lake merely holds the logs – locomotion has to be provided from elsewhere. Therefore, an immense barrier had to be constructed annually upstream of Lake Kemi, which was used to funnel logs into huge, ring-shaped, floating enclosures, made mostly from logs as well. These were then tugged across the lake. Because the power of the tugging boats was not sufficient to move such a heavy load in the way a barge would, they tugged the timber the way a coil-boat would, i.e. only when anchored. Thus they proceeded step by step across the lake to the point where the river “begins again”, i.e. the current is strong enough to take over the task of locomotion. This method had long been established on Lake Kemi, originally by wooden rafts on which horses hauled in the coils, before it spread more widely throughout the catchment basin with the increase of hydropower dams and corresponding reservoirs (Itkonen 2001: 44). With the spread of hydropower dams, the number of river stretches increased where timber had to be tugged. Had the difficulty of timber floating for a long time been to avoid or purge logjams, the rocks and sandbanks that had caused these problems were mostly drowned when damming the river. However, the very “riverness” of the respective stretch was lost as well. On the large reservoirs of Lokka and Porttipahta, as well as

7. Timber floating down the river: Managing flow and friction of people, wood and water

on most of the other dammed river sections, the current was too weak to transport the logs downstream. Particularly with headwind, timber never flowed down the river as it had done before, but additional boats with strong engines had to be employed to pull the logs past these stretches. Kala-Erkki’s different tasks as a rafter illustrate this point. He worked for the Floating Association for eight seasons, from the age of seventeen to twenty-five. During the first four summers he joined a rafting team that was responsible for the rapids of Juukoski, downstream from Lake Kemi. In this team, most effort went into pushing timber that had been caught on protruding rocks or on the river bank back into the stream and to solve eventual logjams. Once all the logs had been floated past these rapids, the rafters followed the “tail”, sometimes all the way to Rovaniemi, over a hundred river kilometres downstream. After these four years, Kala-Erkki worked on timber tug-boats, first on Lake Kemi and later on the reservoir of the Isohaara hydropower station. On Lake Kemi, the construction of dams and the concurring rise of the water level had enlarged the tugging distance so much, that a faster and more efficient way of transport across the lake had to be invented. The circumference of the boom rings could not be increased substantially, however, because a bridge had to be passed on the way, with piers no further than 78 metres apart. This problem was solved by constructing what Paavo calls “cigar rafts” (sikaarilautta), consisting of a number of round timber floats, each no more than seventy metres in perimeter, attached to one another forming a long chain (cf. Itkonen 2001: 132). This immense, over seven-hundred-metre-long “cigar” was tugged by a large boat in the same way as smaller rafts had been before. A second, auxiliary boat was working on the far end of the chain, making sure the “cigar” remained straight, particularly for the passage under the bridge. The spread of hydropower dams also necessitated the development of a further type of work, namely that of funnelling timber from the river-turned-reservoirs into particular log chutes (uittoränni, uittokouru) along which the timber could be floated past the dam. Aerial photographs of hydropower stations during the floating season often depict a mass of timber, covering the reservoir from bank to bank, being channelled by a set of booms into one tiny spot, the intake of the log chute. Aided by a motorised “surfacecurrent accelerator” (pintavirrankehittäjä), the rafters were to make sure that the largest possible amount of timber passed the dam while spilling the least possible amount of water.

Sorting timber in the estuary The estuary had the highest concentration of timber-floating employees in the entire catchment. Here, the logs were distributed to the different owners through a mechanism with the dimensions of a whole village – many hundred metres broad and over one-kilometre-long – swimming on the waters of the estuary. Paavo recounts that when he was supervising work in the estuary, each summer about three thousand beams alone had to be fixed in the river bed in order to hold the floating construction in place. During the winter, this construction was stored on dry land, dissembled into parts. Left in the estuary it would not have survived a single spring flood.

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The logs, before having been pushed into the river, had been marked with particular shapes, and later colours, according to the owning company.3 At the sorting mechanism (erottelu, sortteeri), the logs were then channelled through a series of canals on the edges of which workers watched for logs with markings of a particular shape, which they would then drag into a side canal leading to the wood store of the corresponding company. The sorting of timber happened under severe time pressure, because it could not be started until the end of the spring flood in early June, but had to finish before water and constructions began to freeze in the autumn, usually around late September. Work was done in three eight-hour shifts around the clock, as the mechanism and workers had to deal with the constantly approaching stream of logs throughout the summer. It is not surprising that when the sorting workers went on strike in 1949, this caused an immense stir. It must have been a bit like in a factory where workers are on strike but the conveyor belts cannot be switched off, constantly conveying more material that nobody handles. Dealing with the high seasonal concentration of rafters – lumberjacks, students, both male and female – in the estuary was almost as big a challenge for the forestry companies as was dealing with the task of allocating the timber to its owners. Paavo narrates that the barracks village where many of the rafters were housed had to be furnished with a jail, and two extra police officers were employed solely for keeping law and order around the sorting mechanism in summer. Whereas workers could be controlled to some extent, however, other factors were more difficult to manage. Paavo remembers that when heavy storms blew across the sea, work at the sorting mechanism had to be interrupted. Similarly, if the river’s discharge increased too much due to heavy rains or a second flood peak, the mechanism was at risk of being washed away. And finally, the wooden and often wet components of the sorting mechanism frequently froze during the cold nights of September, further delaying and endangering working conditions.

Dangers and skills The preceding paragraphs have indicated that alongside complex coordination efforts, timber floating was fundamentally enabled by the rafters’ experiences and embodied skills. This section will address questions concerning the relationship of a rafter’s specific skills and the river’s flow. It will be shown how timber floating was about negotiating the flow of logs along the flow of water. Because of the centrality of flow, rapids figure prominently in former rafters’ accounts, epitomising the river’s strength, currents and flow, which generally moved downstream but often assumed all kinds of directions. Rafters had to manage timber movement so that it was driven by some currents, but unaffected by others, guiding it along particular routes and avoiding others. Periodically interrupting this flow was as crucial as clearing jams. The art of floating lay in affecting the right mix of flow and friction in the movement of water and timber.

3

Marking wood with certain symbols belonging to the respective owner was based on an old tradition of wood markings in the region. Logs for sale, but also other wooden objects, such as tools or boats, often bore a specific shape carved into the wood. Such marks were usually family property.

7. Timber floating down the river: Managing flow and friction of people, wood and water

When river dwellers remember timber floating today, they frequently talk about the formidable challenges of working as a rafter. First of all, rafting happened under constant time pressure. This pressure was often directly passed on to the rafters who worked long hours to make full use of the light arctic nights during the high floating season. The basic wages for rafters were often meagre, so that working for the Floating Association made sense only if one was willing to do plenty of overtime. Meri-Matti remembers that as a rafter he sometimes worked eighteen hours a day. Elsewhere, it has been noted that a rafter could only get some rest when the tammi dam was closed and no floating was possible because of low water levels (Pursimo 1992: 32, cf. Norvanto 1989: 25–26). Another challenge was posed by the forces of the river itself. Whereas on some river stretches, timber would flow downstream without serious complications, in many sections there were problematic eddies, protruding rocks, sharp bends or shallow gravel banks that caused logjams or other obstructions. Such difficulties were particularly evident on rapids, where the current increases and the water level drops. Many stories are told of rafters drowning in rapids while trying to solve a logjam, running onto a rock or colliding with a log while boating, even though the Floating Association made its employees wear lifejackets long before they became popular in the river basin. The ease with which a flooding river can move a heavy log – generally regarded as very handy – thus occasionally had tragic consequences, when logs capsized boats, knocked rafters unconscious or drowned them. Special rafting competitions were held regularly, celebrating the “log-skills” (tukkitaito) that rafters gathered while working with timber on the water. Disciplines included balancing along boom chains or timber rafts, navigating on logs or performing acrobatic shows on floating timber. Paavo remembers the names of a few very accomplished rafters who acquired a degree of fame through their “log-skills”. At least one of them also became an important floating foreman on the Kitinen River, one of the most important tributaries in terms of timber floating. This man4 had grown up on a particularly rapids-rich stretch of the Kitinen River, and passing up, down and across its currents had formed part of his family’s life for generations. River dwellers appear to have made particularly apt rafters; and practising timber floating must have conversely conferred and developed the skills needed to deal with the river. So famous did these rafter skills become during the 1950s and 1960s that the Finnish contribution to the World Fair of 1967 in Montreal included shows by such rafters, including the floating foreman from the Kitinen River (Pokka 1994: 80). The most admired skill was descending a foaming rapid river stretch, standing merely on a log, and navigating only with an iron-tip wooden pole. Descending rapids had long been one of the most difficult challenges in timber floating, and mastering the challenge was a most esteemed skill. The competition disciplines of balancing and navigating on logs were thus directly taken from the work practices of rafters. Until the early twentieth century, when timber was still largely floated in manned rafts, navigating through rapids was equally a highly valued skill. Past the rapids of Taivalkoski, the largest drop in the river’s main course, timber rafts 4

His name was Pauli Yliaska, and his home was located close to the particularly steep rapids of Askanportti (cf. his last name: “Upper Aska”). His father was said to have been a famous rapids pilot (Pokka 1994: 72–85).

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were navigated by particular local pilots, who were familiar not only with the only safe route (lauttaväylä) along rocks and eddies, but also with the exact position that the oars at prow and stern had to assume at certain sections of the rapids in order to force the raft along this route. It is interesting to note that both with changes in the organisation of timber floating and with the transformation of the river, rafting skills were also transformed. With the abandonment of raft floating, the practical skills of navigating rafts were forgotten, and the rules of oar positions for descending Taivalkoski became folklore. Today, Taivalkoski is the name of the hydropower dam, which transforms the same energy into electricity that formerly preoccupied the rafters. Similarly during the 1980s and 1990s, the rapids on the Kitinen River, home of the famous “log-skills” champion, were being dammed for hydropower production, and the challenges of timber floating shifted from passing rapids and avoiding logjams to making the wood float downstream at all and passing hydropower dams. Avoiding and clearing logjams (ruhka) constituted further formidable and sometimes lethal challenges for rafters. When a log, often floating along partially submerged in the water, got caught on a rock, a sandbank or the shore of a sharp river bend, it frequently happened that it accumulated further timber approaching with the current, forming a jam and eventually blocking large sections or even the entire width of the stream, and causing dangerous eddies that jeopardised boating in its vicinity. The more timber accumulated to the jam, the heavier was the pressure exerted on the initial log, and the more difficult it became to clear the jam. It was of course futile to try to work against the current and remove logs from the upstream end of the jam. Instead the initial log, the so-called “key-wood” (avainpuu) or “lock-wood” (lukkopuu), had to be pulled out, so that the current itself would be allowed to clear the jam by gradually washing away the timber and diluting the jam. Partly because of their evident dangers, accounts of logjam-clearing are not infrequently infused with a degree of bragging. Paavo, for instance, proudly recounts his first encounter with a logjam when working as a foreman for the Floating Association. His new colleagues were keen to test how well the recent forestry graduate knew the real business of rafting. A few days after his arrival on the Kitinen River, Paavo was chosen to identify the “key wood” on a large logjam and pull it out, while the rafting team gathered on the shore to judge the skills of the new guy. Paavo, however, had been keen for this opportunity to prove his abilities to his fellows. The usual procedure for clearing large logjams was that a boat would transport a rafter to the safe, upstream end of the jam, from where he had to balance along the jam to its dangerous, downstream end. There he had to find and loosen the log or logs upon which the jam hinged, and subsequently make his way back to the boat as quickly as possible, while the logjam was disintegrating gradually. Paavo followed this procedure, but embellished it somewhat by showing off some of his “log-skills”. On the way down the logjam, conscious of being watched by a fair number of colleagues, he inserted a few twirls, jumps and “dances” into his walk, using his rafting staff as balancing pole or dancing partner. At the downstream end of the jam, Paavo found that the “key-wood” was stuck too tightly to get it loose himself. He did manage to attach a wire to the log though, so that it could be pulled out by a coil boat anchored at the river bank. When the logjam

7. Timber floating down the river: Managing flow and friction of people, wood and water

finally began to disintegrate, Paavo was cool enough not to run back to his boat as quickly as possible, but instead presented a few more tricks on the way back over the logs that were being pulled apart by the current. When he had finally reached the shore again, he could be sure that no rafter would any longer dare to doubt his timber floating skills. Meri-Matti’s memories of timber floating also include logjam experiences. On the Tenniö River, tributary to the upstream section of the Kemi River, Meri-Matti was once ordered to clear a logjam that had formed in a stretch with particularly ferocious eddies and strong currents. Together with a companion, he was transported by boat to the upstream end of the jam and balanced towards the lower end. The closer they came to the alleged position of the “key-wood”, the stronger the currents pulled at the timber, hurling logs into the air as if they were little sticks. Meri-Matti remembers that this was in fact a “living logjam” (elävä ruhka), continually shifting and extremely dangerous to work on. Together with his companion, he finally managed to loosen the “key-wood”, and the logjam disintegrated quickly. As fast as he could, Meri-Matti ran back towards the boats waiting at the upstream end of the jam. He had to leap from one log to the next, paying so much attention to his staying afloat on top of the timber that he lost sight of his companion. When at last Meri-Matti had luckily reached the boat, he believed his companion drowned or crushed between the shifting logs; only when he was back on the shore he found out that the other rafter had been picked up by another boat and was safe on dry land, too. Their colleagues who had been watching on the riverside were naturally impressed by the two rafters’ performance on the “living logjam” in the gushing currents.

Managing the rhythms of timber transport Rafters’ skills were integrated into the larger spatiotemporal management of the floating season, which above all was a management of rhythms. Floating on the tributaries and on the main routes had to be attuned to each other, and also geared towards flood dynamics, weather developments and workers’ abilities. This type of “management”, however, cannot be equated to the “control” of these phenomena, but must be understood as engaged adjustments of capacities to shifting circumstances, more akin to “management” in the sense of “making ends meet”.5 Since its establishment in 1901, one of the most complicated tasks of the Kemi River Floating Association was to make sure that floating in the upstream tributaries was completed in time, so that the timber could be transported further with the load descending the main course. The Kemi River’s main course measures about six hundred kilometres, but the total distance of floating channels during the 1950s and early 1960s was around three thousand kilometres annually, including over twenty tributaries, subdivided into

5

That management is, in fact, frequently more about appropriate situated action than about devising and executing great plans is mirrored in the semiotics of the term itself, which can mean coping with a situation as much as controlling it.

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122 work-group sections manned by a total of 1776 rafters (in 1957),6 and spread over an area of over 50 000 km2 (Itkonen 2001: 135–136, 147). Throughout the watershed, the Floating Association coordinated the amounts of timber and the availability of working teams with the varying meteorological conditions of precipitation, temperature and concomitant discharge in the different parts of the catchment basin. Depending on the circumstances, rain in one sub-basin could cause a temporary flood somewhere downstream, or end a precarious water shortage elsewhere. The Association organised regular aeroplane flights over the rivers and frequent information transfer from the Finnish Meteorological Institute. Field telephones, leftovers from the Second World War, were sometimes used to communicate between upstream and downstream sections of a river, for instance concerning timber amounts, logjams or discharge levels. The Floating Association also devised special maps of the catchment basin, depicting rivers and brooks on which floating was organised during that particular year, the location of vastuu barriers, timber insertion ramps (lanssi) and other relevant infrastructure, as well as the subdivision of the streams into various working stretches (fig. 4.4). Thus, the Association viewed the Kemi River as a set of floating channels, most often represented as an arrangement of straight lines, all leading towards the timber sorting mechanism. This particular view of the river – not only in terms of straight lines linking felling sites (or insertion ramps) and wood-processing factories, but also as the entire catchment basin at a single glance – resonates well with the general approach of the Association towards the Kemi River. The stream was first and foremost a set of channels to transport logs through a vast region poor in infrastructure. This watershed-view was taken so far that during the early 1950s, for instance, timber was floated along the Kemi River even from the part of the catchment that had been ceded to the Soviet Union half a decade before. Economic incentives coupled with the logic of the river facilitated the crossing of this border already at a time when memories of the war were still very fresh and evacuees from the ceded territories were only beginning to resettle in the remainder of the country. Finnish forestry companies had bought timber from the Soviet Union in the ceded section of Salla, and Soviet-felled trees were floated by Finnish rafters. The practical logic of floating catchment overrode the political logic of bounded national territory. Looking at the Kemi River with this catchment-view also engendered timber floating activities that went beyond the watershed itself. Because the Floating Association approached the river as a set of transport routes, it worked at extending its reach, moving upstream to ever more remote tributaries. Once this was underway, projects began to be envisaged that would link forests outside the catchment to the floating routes. For instance, from 1913 to 1916, a major forestry company felled timber in the very east of Lapland, in an area draining into the Arctic Ocean. An enthusiastic manager imported two

6

This figure includes the workers at the timber sorting mechanism, some of which worked on the river banks earlier in the season and continued to work in the estuary later on. Itkonen (2001: 147) states that during 1957, the Kemi River Floating Association employed 1124 rafters along the rivers and 868 workers in the sorting mechanism, with employment totalling in 1776 people, some of who thus must have worked both on the river and in the estuary.

7. Timber floating down the river: Managing flow and friction of people, wood and water

huge steam-powered forestry “locomotives” (veturit) from the USA, which were arduously transported to the forestry camp and assembled there. For the coming two winters,7 the “locomotives” then pulled large sleighs full of logs over a thirty kilometre trajectory from the neighbouring catchment basin to the upstream Kemi River (Pelkonen 1989). Two decades later, when the availability of road vehicles had increased in Finland, an even more ambitious project was launched. Timber felled in the area of Raja-Jooseppi, still further beyond the watershed, was meant to be transported by truck to the headwaters of the Luiro River and thus into the Kemi River floating realm. Because of the Second World War and its aftermath, however, logs were never transported along the partially completed roads, which today remain a somewhat bizarre sight in the remote forest area (Sandström 2009). Nevertheless, after post-war reconstruction and the spread of roads throughout Lapland, it became common practice to haul timber from felling sites located beyond the watershed, such as the municipality of Inari or even forests in the Soviet Union, to particular places on the Kemi River. Thus, the Kemi River transported much more timber than actually grew in its catchment. Until motor boats, forest tractors and roads led to a continuous decrease of labour requirements in timber floating from the 1960s onwards, many river dwellers benefited significantly from monetary income as rafters. Many say that especially during the difficult times of post-war reconstruction they depended strongly on the money earned in floating. Also for the many smallholders in the catchment basin, the number of which increased strongly after the Second Wold War, income from work in timber floating was essential for making ends meet, as their small farms and few cows could never have supported their families. The shortfall of seasonal income from forestry and timber floating, alongside the phasing-out of state support for farming, led to the abandonment of many of these smallholdings in the 1960s. Because of its dependence on the water level in the river, timber floating had a strongly seasonal character. The rhythms of discharge waves and freezing and thawing implied more and less suitable floating rivers. Over the second half of the twentieth century, some of these seasonal variations of discharge have been altered as a result of hydropower management, but the general pattern remained valid throughout the years of timber floating on the Kemi River. During winter, thus, timber floating required very little activity. Forestry companies announced the location and amount of timber that required floating during the coming season, plans were devised and equipment maintained or restocked. During winter, the summer- or springtime rafters would work in forestry camps, as long as this was still a labour-intensive sector before the 1960s, on their own smallholdings or with their reindeer herds. As soon as the snow began to melt, however, people were hired by the Floating Association or local rafting groups. One of the first tasks was always to prepare each stream for floating, installing booms et cetera. In order to access stored booms on time, rafters spread ashes or sand on the ice cover of the storage bays so that it would melt more quickly. Immediately after the largest ice floes had been washed past the respective river

7

Had the First World War not impeded the supply of spare parts from the USA, the huge tractors would have probably enlarged the timber floating reach of the Kemi River for many more years.

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stretch, the rafters began to drag the booms into place, often working under very dangerous conditions, because of the strong spring flood currents, icy waters, and eventual ice floes on the river. All these preparations had to be finished before the flood began to decline and actual floating could commence. Once timber was floating down the river, rafters with their characteristic boats and long working poles (keksi) populated the river and its banks. While grownups and youths earned some money by these activities, children “played floating”, for instance by balancing on booms and passing logs. Later, autumn brought increased discharges, but also the first nights with sub-zero temperatures, causing freezing gear and other drawbacks. Before the river began to form an ice cover, floating activities had to be completed and floating constructions dismantled. Should logs – once they were in the river – not reach the sorting mechanism before the winter, they would be lost because with the next spring flood they would be most probably washed into the sea. During the 1950s and 1960s heyday of timber floating, this season lasted from May until October, occupying the entire time of year when the Kemi River was free of ice.

From livelihood to folklore After the rather sudden end of timber floating, the consequences were felt strongly both on the river and among river dwellers. The river, on the one hand, was gradually cleared of most constructions that had been built for timber floating, and many other manipulations were reversed over the coming fifteen or so years. River dwellers, on the other hand, felt the consequences most directly in the sudden lack of seasonal employment during late spring and over the summer. Another – and probably equally significant – consequence for river dwellers was that with timber floating they lost the last form of engagement with the Kemi River that counted as real work, as opposed to fishing or other activities that had for some time already been considered as leisure. The only remaining way to make a living from the river was by running dams, which has been a task for only a few highly trained specialists. Therefore it is not surprising that some river dwellers have organised to preserve some of the timber floating tradition of the Kemi River. Paavo, for instance, argues that timber floating on the Kemi River has over its roughly a hundred and fifty years of practice developed a particular culture, with distinct practices and language, that is worth preserving. It would be wrong to erase floating cabins, dams and pillars from the river as if to pretend they had never been there. On the contrary, such constructions should be viewed as memorials (muistomerkit), documenting a bygone river use that has been very significant in shaping the river and its inhabitants, and keeping alive stories and memories about logjams, skilful rafters and a river smelling of wood. In fact, the timber floating heritage is also being discovered by tourism operators, who are selling some of the rafter romantic to summertime visitors.8 Tourists are taken on boat trips to former rafters’ huts, and some former floating camps have been made 8

See, for instance, the online programme of one Rovaniemi-based operator at http://www.erasetti wildnorth.fi/EN/rovaniemi/programs/summer.html (accessed 2009–07-08).

7. Timber floating down the river: Managing flow and friction of people, wood and water

into “wilderness cabins”. Paavo has heard that on a small river in Kittilä, the Forest Authority offers timber floating as a group-building activity for company outings or tourism groups. Furthermore, an entire holiday village run by the Forest Authority on the Rauta River north of Rovaniemi has recently been equipped with discarded booms and other timber floating equipment, drawing on the same appeal of rafter romantic. The manager of the complex remembers how difficult it was to get a hold of such equipment only about ten years after the end of timber floating activities; so great had been the speed of getting rid of all traces of rafting on the river. But he feels proud that the holiday village appears in its present shape with all the timber floating relics, because both his father and grandfather had worked as rafters and he thus claims to have “rafter’s blood” running in his veins.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that timber floating on the Kemi River has been about the management of one flow (wood) within another (water) by means of a third (rafters). Logs were made to flow along the stream, but not entirely on the river’s terms. Boom chains were installed to limit and direct timber movement along particular routes and in certain quantities; regulation dams were operated on smaller tributaries to even out discharge irregularities; and logjams were avoided and cleared at the risk of rafters’ lives. The particular movement of timber was engendered by exposing it to a certain combination of flow and friction, of acceleration and retardation, in short, by the management of rhythm. A case in point is the “coil-boat” that affected timber movement through a combination of friction (its anchor) and flow (its navigation and movement of the cable), whereby rafters tugged logs along lakes, pulled boom chains in place, and removed “keywoods” from logjams. The activities and skills associated with timber floating suggest that living with a river is never only a question of flow, but as much an issue of friction. Recently, the concept of friction in anthropology has been coined by Anna Tsing (2005), who uses it to draw attention to the actual, messy and context-specific manifestations and negotiations of global flows of capital, information and matter in Indonesia’s rainforest. “Speaking of friction is a reminder of the importance of interaction in defining movement, cultural form, and agency. Friction is not just about slowing things down. Friction is required to keep global power in motion” (ibid.: 6). Just as global flows do not move about smoothly like “a well-oiled machine”, but are caught up in particular contexts that both empower and inflect these flows, I have shown that timber floating relies not just on the general flow of the river, but becomes empowered and inflected by the various skilled practices of the rafters. Only in the interaction of currents, booms, boats, rafting poles and river dwellers did timber floating come to be so successful.

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8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

Introduction Roughly twenty years ago, forestry enterprises decided to transport the bulk of their timber from the forests to the pulp- and paper-mills by truck, along a road network that had undergone an immense expansion throughout the twentieth century, instead of floating it along the Kemi River. Like many other river users, these enterprises thereby aimed to benefit from a rather new, but already omnipresent form of transport in the catchment basin. Flows of people and goods along the river were transformed into flows along the roads, thereby altering not only traffic practices, but many other aspects of life on the river, too. The density and quality of the present road network is surprising, given the low population numbers in the area and the high costs of maintaining roads in the harsh climate. Only a good 180 000 people live in the province of Lapland, where a network of over 6000 km asphalted- and more than another 3000 km of gravel-roads criss-crosses the landscape.1 This infrastructure suggests a life of fast movement, of generalised accessibility of formerly remote areas, without requiring specialised skills, locally-derived knowledge or social contacts with the area’s inhabitants, and of year-round, permanent means of transport, unhampered by the seasonalities of river, light or temperature. Philosopher Otto Friedrich Bollnow has contrasted the “auto route” with the “hiking path” (1961: 36), observing that while the paved road engenders quick displacement from one place to another, it turns the landscape through which it passes into a mere panorama, “remote as a picture” (ibid.), and the world into a one-dimensional space made up only of distances. The hiking path, conversely, “clings to the natural landscape. It curves and winds […,] does not shoot for a destination but rests in itself. It invites loitering” (ibid.). These observations mirror Ingold’s distinction between the “wayfarer” 1

Most unreferenced numbers concerning the road network have been gathered from a variety of more or less informal sources during a visit at the Rovaniemi office of the National Roads Administration (Tiehallinto) on June 2nd 2009. Special thanks are due to Raimo Autti, who facilitated this visit.

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and the “transported passenger” (2007b: 79). Do river-dwellers proceeding along a river course travel in the manner of a wayfarer, whereas dashing by on roads they are “transported” through a landscape they hardly take in? Ingold emphasises that the idea of pure transport is ultimately an illusion, as travelling inevitably takes time and the journeys people make when passing from one place to another enter as much into their personal biographies as the activities they pursue once at their destinations. But he adds that the very infrastructure of modern transport, such as the road network or the design of cars, restrict travellers to a mode of movement that engenders a somewhat narrower experience of the environment they pass through. This chapter discusses some of the dynamics of the recent road-network growth in the catchment and portrays some implications for river dwellers’ lives (see Ortlieb 2000: 179–200 for implications for farmers in the catchment). To what extent are river dwellers becoming “transported passengers” as the “auto route” has replaced the river as the principal transport artery? How are modern roads related to former modes of movement, especially to summertime boating and seasonal winter-roads? How has the river – from being the prime facilitator for traffic – become an obstacle for movement, and how is this dealt with? And how does the sociocultural and institutional context supporting road traffic differ from the context of river travel? Approaching these questions, I introduce two Finnish concepts of movement, and show how they refer to both road- and river-traffic. Then, I trace some of the developments of road-and-car transport across the catchment, and subsequently analyse the relations of road- and river-courses. I describe temporary and permanent means by which roads cross the river, and analyse the seasonality of roads and road-traffic. Finally, I discuss the Finnish concept of keli, which speaks of the essential relations between movement and the weather-world (cf. Ingold 2007a).

Modes of movement In an area characterised by low population density, limited biological productivity but manifold if seasonally and geographically spread-out economic opportunities, getting around has long been a common concern (chapter six). Permanent roads have introduced a novel way of meeting this concern, and have brought along new connotations of movement. The current spectrum of meanings of two verbs often used when talking about travelling illustrates this shift. Whereas both verbs refer to modern road traffic, they can also imply wayfaring. The first verb is liikkua, which translates as “to move”, but also “to travel” or “to drive”. The word for traffic (liikenne) is derived from this verb (Kulonen 1995). While liikkua can thus describe the action of participating in modern car traffic, quickly driving from one place to the other, it is also used in the sense of “moving about”, spending time and visiting an area while travelling through it. Moreover, it can imply getting to know people, by “moving” with them. This is similar to the other verb, kulkea, which means “to walk”, but also “to drive”, “to travel” or “to proceed along a course”. On the one hand, it is the root of the word for modern transport (kuljetus), on the other, the verb refers to following a path or a course. Furthermore, to say that someone has done her share of travelling in an area (hän on siellä kulkenut) implies that this person really knows her way

8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

around there (cf. Berglund 2009). In this sense, kulkea is more like getting familiar with rapids, river bends and currents than covering a stretch of asphalted road. Etymologically, the word is also closely related to verbs denoting “to flow” or “to move downstream” (Itkonen 1992). The ambiguities of both liikkua and kulkea clearly illustrate that getting around for Finns can be both a mode of movement that is oriented solely towards reaching a destination and another mode where movement through a landscape – along a path, winterroad or river course – is continually responsive to the social and ecological environment through which it proceeds. While the point of a kulku (journey) might be that a traveller reaches her destination, this traveller will be somewhat kulkenut (“travelled”, i.e. experienced) in the area she has passed through on the way. The contrast between these two aspects of movement is evident, for instance, in the quality of the surfaces on which different forms of travel proceed. Whereas river traffic happened literally in the water, boats and logs half-submerged in the medium that carried them, travelling on roads implies a sealed substratum, clearly set off from the travellers (cf. Ingold 2004, 2007a, 2008, Ingold and Lee Vergunst 2008). The developments of travel and transport in the Kemi River catchment, which I will present in the following, suggest that with the displacement of river-traffic by road-traffic, the emphasis in concepts of movement – as evident in liikkua and kulkea – has shifted from “moving along and around” to “moving straight towards a destination”. Where boating along the river or slowly proceeding along winter-roads constituted an activity integrated with the social and ecological landscape, driving a car along a motorway seems much more divorced from this landscape, focussing more exclusively on connecting the points of departure and destination. In order to navigate a boat with travellers and cargo on the river, people had to know where the difficult reaches were, how to descend different rapids, and which portages to take. High water provided different courses than low water, and different routes again were required during the winter. Travelling along a winter-road also presupposed familiarity with snow conditions, the ability to tell a track from a snow-drift, and the regular contact with inhabitants of roadand riverside due to particular boarding arrangements. Spending the night at somebody else’s place belonged to moving about. Today boarding and visiting are mostly specialised activities that are done separately from travelling. Similarly, travelling by boat often included contact with other river-dwellers, for instance to ask for help in navigating across rapids. Boaters also habitually took a fishing rod along, catching fish while travelling and thus eating part of the river while they were moving on another part of it. Timber floaters could ensure the smooth progression of logs only in so far as they understood the currents and rhythms of the river. And when they followed the “tail” downstream at the end of the season, they spurred local festivities and caused public scenes. Whereas river travel a good half-century ago meant active engagement with people, animals and elements along the way, contemporary road travel minimises such engagement. Roads are constructed so as to allow for high speeds and a clear sight ahead, and are mostly bordered by monotonous forests that appear like impenetrable walls to the traveller. For the driver to watch the landscape through which the road leads would be dangerous, for his passengers it would be mere contemplation. In present car transport, the world ‘out there’ seems to make itself felt only by way of the recurring impracticalities

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of kelirikko, when fresh or melting snow compromises road surfaces, and the occasional annoyance of reindeer or danger of moose on the road.

Permanent roads and their predecessors The current road network in the Kemi River catchment thus assumes an ambivalent role. On the one hand, roads engender new, fast connections, a “dromocratic condition” that has been described as indexical of modernity and progress (Árnason, Hafsteinsson and Grétarsdóttir 2007). On the other hand, a retired road construction engineer from Lapland claims that “a road is a better developed form of the river” (Tie on joen parempi kehittänyt muoto), emphasising the continuity between river- and road-transport. In fact, the present Finnish Road Administration grew out of the Department of Road- and Waterworks that started off developing Lappish waterways as much as building roads there (Räme 1974, Mäkelä 2000: 11–43). Modern roads can be seen as an improved version of the seasonal winter-roads of the past, or as short-cuts for winding waterways. But does this image not gloss over a number of stark discontinuities between different forms of transport? Whom and what are present roads benefiting, and who and what is losing out? In what ways – as suggested above – are experience and skills involved in travelling fundamentally different? Eila lives on the Ara River, tributary to the upper Kemi River. The hamlet where she grew up around 1960 had been connected to the road network by a dead-end access before she was born; today, the road from the village centre of Savukoski to the village of Tanhua and further to the village of Lokka or the municipal centre of Sodankylä passes there. Long before modern roads had been built in this area, a multitude of waterways and footpaths crisscrossing the landscape were used to move about and to these neighbouring, and far-away, places. Eila knows many of these old traffic routes and has developed an eye for spotting long-abandoned roads and paths leading through forests and bogs. But she – reindeer-herding instructor, arts and crafts manufacturer, politically active citizen, grandmother of three toddlers and wife of a reindeer herder – also moves around in a car, on the roads that extend even throughout the sparsely populated municipality of Savukoski, with no less than four square kilometres of area for each inhabitant. While during the first half of the twentieth century, roads connected only the larger population centres, the entire catchment basin has been made comfortably accessible by car in a period of only two generations. In fact, most road construction took place during the first two decades after the Second World War, in part under the initiative of developing farming in Lapland, in part as a large-scale state-sponsored employment programme. Since about 1970, the total length of the road network in Lapland has remained rather constant at slightly over 9000 km, and existing roads have been upgraded and improved. Whereas most roads in mid-twentieth-century Lapland had gravel cover, the proportion of asphalted roads increased steadily during the last third of the century. By 1980, there were as many asphalted roads in the province as there were gravel-roads, and by 2005 the proportion of asphalt-roads had increased to twice that of gravel-roads. Before, permanent roads in the catchment had been few and did not connect up to a network in any way similar to the present system of roads. Furthermore, such older

8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

roads were usually little more than tracks along the drier sections of the landscape, on which people could walk or ride a horse (hevostie, “horse road”), sometimes even drive a cart (kärrytie, “cart road”), but which were utterly unfit for motorised travel or for advancing quickly. The very inadequacy of such roads probably helps explain the popularity of winter-roads and the extent of boat travel. Only where boat travel was not possible during the summer, for instance along major rapids, on the rivers’ headwaters where the waterways were too shallow for navigation, or through hills or bogs that lacked rivers altogether, did river dwellers revert to summer roads. The tributary Ara River, for instance, has long been used as part of a travel route. Eila explains that coming from the village of Savukoski, travellers habitually punted up this stream until they reached a particular location where the river became too small to carry a boat. At this place, a footpath started that ran parallel to the water course and towards the villages of Seitajärvi and Lokka. Eila remembers that Seitajärvi was not connected to the road network until 1963, and from there to Lokka a direct road connection was never built. For a long time, most roads in the catchment were accessible only seasonally, so-called “winter-roads” (talviteitä). The high proportion of water in the landscape that made travel “over land” difficult during the summer, provided a most adequate traffic substrate during the winter. Most often, winter-roads consisted mainly of a more or less cleared track, marked by spruce twigs or wooden poles at particular intervals and paved with snow compacted by sleighs, horseshoes, reindeer hooves and human boots. Such tracks frequently went along frozen bogs and lakes because no trees or bushes obstructed the travellers there. Eero calls these winter-roads varsitiet, adapting a term more commonly used for iceroads constructed in wintertime logging camps. He has titled a collection of his poems and stories, many of which deal with travelling and the river, “On the marked winterroad” (Yliniemi 1998). In the foreword, he mentions the importance of these tracks for river-dwellers in the past and compares life to a journey on such a track, moving along, looking out for the signs, and being lost every now and then. In many places, winter-roads were built near the river, and often they crossed the stream. The reason for this association of river and road was the need for lodging. In order to obtain a warm meal and a sheltered place to spend the often extremely cold arctic winter nights, travellers depended on the existing settlement. Because most of this settlement in the Kemi River area has been located along the rivers, winter-roads never proceeded too far from the rivers either. Traffic by horse- or reindeer-drawn sleigh along these winter-roads worked so well, that many journeys for transporting precious or heavy goods were undertaken particularly during the winter. For instance, the Christian population of the catchment would usually bury their dead only once winter-roads were accessible and the body could be taken out of a temporary grave and transferred to the graveyard with due dignity by sleigh. Furthermore, representatives of church, state and market usually visited the inhabitants of the more remote sections of the catchment basin during the winter. It was also presumably for such travellers, that the Swedish Crown devised a system of hostels, named kestikievari (“inn”), throughout large parts of Lapland already during the

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seventeenth century. Travellers were guaranteed a meal, a bed for the night, and a lift or guide to the next such house (Niemi 2000: 53–54). Over time, this network was developed further, and in some places it was continued until the first half of the twentieth century. Today, river dwellers often remember which farmstead in the vicinity had been the local inn, and some even remember a few stories about the more illustrious travellers. A number of present restaurants and hotels also bear the former title as part of their name. And a proponent of alternative development in the region sees the possibility of modelling a more sustainable tourism strategy on the very tradition of kestikievari hostels, particularly emphasising the closeness between host and visitor (Niemi 2003). In forestry, the transport-enabling characteristics of frozen water and ground were utilised well into the second half of the twentieth century, when long-distance winterroads were no longer built. First of all, logging camps were held only during the winter months, partly because of the very accessibility of the forests when the ground was frozen solid. But also more specifically, in order to transport logs from the felling site to the timber launching spot at the nearest watercourse where they were to be floated, particular winter-roads (varsitiet) were built. These roads had to be especially enduring as they had to withstand heavy horse-drawn sleighs loaded with massive logs. Building such roads was a cumbersome, albeit indispensable task, as one former forestry worker from the upstream Kemi River remembers. His task had been to look after the logging camp’s horses during the early 1960s. Between two and seven o’clock at night, when temperatures were around –35°C, he and his colleagues had to break a hole into the ice cover of the nearest lake and manually pump the extremely cold water into a 1500-litre barrel on a horse-sleigh fast enough that it would not freeze in the process. The barrel was then drawn to the location of the planned road, and the water released gradually to spray the snowy ground underneath. Slowly proceeding forward, the barrel-sleigh thus created a narrow road of water that quickly congealed into hard ice, a most suitable track for log transport. This practice of laying water-roads across the landscape, using the frozen water as travel substrate, can on the one hand be seen as an extension of the river-and-lake ‘mycelium’ and their transport-enabling features during the winter. On the other hand, ‘icing’ a forest track is almost like ‘asphalting’ a road, only at temperatures about fifty degrees Celsius colder, and with considerably simpler technology. Finally, the current version of winter-roads, snowmobile tracks, continues to be of central importance to tourism operators.

Expansion of road network and car travel Roads for motorised travel began to extend upstream from Rovaniemi only a good one hundred years ago (chapter six). With Finnish independence and the addition of territory in the northeast, affording access to the Arctic Ocean, road construction in Lapland experienced a first boom (Mäkelä 2000: 59–63). This first wave of road building in the early twentieth century was targeted mainly at passing through Lapland rather than connecting the different parts of the province with one another, and some river dwellers continue to feel that the road network has not been developed for the area’s inhabitants.

8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

Eila, for instance, finds that the fine transport arteries have been built predominantly to serve the economic and political interests of groups from outside Lapland. The bulk of transport was not to flow within the province but out of it, and the roads provided a means of draining the area of its riches, including timber, ores and hydropower. Eila forcefully states this view while driving on a road approaching the village of Lokka from the south. This road had been built during the 1960s, together with the dam impounding the hydropower reservoir of Lokka and flooding the original road to the village, which had connected it to its former neighbouring villages of Riesto, Korvanen and Vuotso to the north. Since 1967, Riesto and Korvanen have disappeared beneath the reservoir, and getting to Vuotso requires a long detour via the southbound road. Similarly, a retired road-construction engineer knows that the road from Kittilä to Inari, along with a number of others in northern Lapland, has been built solely by the Finnish Forest Authority, in order to make the area’s vast remote forests accessible for exploitation. Not only the network of roads, but also the number of cars in the Kemi River area grew rapidly during the second half of the twentieth century. Timo knows stories about the first cars that came to his home village on the upper Ounas River. The first car owned by a person from the area belonged to a lady who lived in a village about twenty kilometres east of Timo’s home. Because the road ended on the western river bank, however, this lady had to park her car there, cross the Ounas River by boat and walk the remaining journey home. Later, during the Second World War and in the immediate post-war period, no villagers owned any motor vehicles at all. Only from the 1950s onwards did river dwellers begin to drive cars more widely. Other remarkable memories have concerned the enlargement and improvement of existing roads. For example, in Rovaniemi, the three siblings of an established family of river dwellers from Saarenkylä, the “island village” at the confluence of the Kemi and Ounas Rivers (fig. 3.2), have seen many forms of their village. Born in the 1920s and 1930s, they grew up in a most rural place, characterised by spread-out farms. They lived through post-war reconstruction and the decline of many farms, and witnessed the suburbanisation of the former farmland during the last ten years. Probably the most pronounced change for them, however, was triggered by the upgrading of the road connecting Rovaniemi to Kuusamo towards the east. It was enlarged in 1957, and rerouted through their village. From then on, the formerly quiet location turned into a busy transit corridor. In fact, further west on the island, the main road connecting Rovaniemi to the north of the province has long passed the village. But also there the dimensions of recent road extension are immense. This is best illustrated by the size of the bridges crossing the river channel on the island’s northern side, to which one of the siblings led me. The first bridge built by the Road Administration was completed in the 1920s, replacing an older bridge that had been constructed, it is said, by a local coppersmith. This bridge, having miraculously survived the havoc of the Lapland War, carried all goods and travellers on the State Highway (valtatie) until it was considered too small, and a further bridge with two lanes was constructed next to it. Today however, even this much larger bridge only carries local traffic, while the State Highway runs over an immense bridge with four lanes about one kilometre further west. The original bridge from the 1920s appears absurdly tiny in relation to this motorway, and provides barely enough space for the bicycle track passing there.

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Hellevi from the upper Kemi River remembers that there had been a road past her family home already in the 1930s and 1940s when she grew up. She remembers this road as in constantly bad shape though, blotched with pot-holes and only adequate for sturdy horse- or reindeer-carts. Although most traffic already went along this road instead of on the river, which was somewhat difficult to navigate on this stretch, vehicles moved slowly and were spaced out far, so that she could play with her friends almost undisturbed in the road. She recounts sledging in the winter from the nearby hill across the road and down to the river bank past her family home without having to look out for traffic at all. While she tells this, sitting in her house close to the very road she described, her account is accompanied by the frequent growl of large trucks passing by. Presently, no river dweller would allow her children to play on this road or cross it on a sledge-ride.

Road-expansion as self-reinforcing process Not only Hellevi’s experience, but also many other stories of roads in the Kemi River area suggest that once a road has been built, it attracts its own traffic, which then requires improved roads, extended snow-plough services, a petrol station,2 and so forth. In the village of Autti, for instance, on the middle reaches of the Kemi River, roads had played a minor role until the 1970s. On the southern bank of the river, the main road between Rovaniemi and Kuusamo ran past the village centre; on the northern bank there was a road connecting the hydropower station of Pirttikoski with Kemijärvi in the north and Rovaniemi in the west. But the village itself was largely cut off from these transport arteries. This detachment was corroborated by the fact that it was very difficult to cross the river in Autti (fig. 8.1). Anneli, who lived in a farm on the northern river bank for most of her life, has long faced the difficulties of crossing to the village centre on the other side. The dam of Pirttikoski had diverted the river’s waters through a tunnel, and the former river bed was used as a mere spill-channel for floodwater. The farmers did of course find ways of crossing the rocky river bed by tractor during the summer, but cars were neither necessary nor practicable in such an environment. In order to cross, car drivers from Autti would have to drive to the ferry of Pekkala, fifteen kilometres downstream and back on the other side. With the completion of a further hydropower dam at Vanttauskoski in 1972, which also served as a bridge, the Pekkala ferry was closed down, and the detour to cross the river reached almost fifty kilometres.

2

Tellingly, petrol stations constitute sociocultural focal points in many places along the river today, which people frequent for a host of purposes other than fuelling their cars, including having coffee and discussing village matters.

8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

Figure 8.1: Main roads around the village centre of Autti. Car traffic in the village remained marginal, even though the main roads along the river banks had existed for decades, until 1975, when a connecting road was built across the river and through the village centre.

This changed dramatically in 1975 with the construction of an “Autti connecting road” (Auttin yhdystie) leading over a newly built bridge from one side of the village to the other. Road and bridge connected not only the two transit routes on the river banks, but also the village. Anneli has collected a number of newspaper articles covering this novelty, mostly from the regional paper Lapin Kansa. These clippings suggest that it was not primarily for connecting the two banks of the village that the bridge was built. Instead, its advantages for long-distance travel are praised, such as short-cutting the distance from Kuusamo to Kemijärvi by forty kilometres. One journalist mentions the hopes that this connection will help villagers to remain living in their native homes – presumably by enlarging the possibilities of commuting to school and work elsewhere. But the new road and bridge engendered an even wider-reaching development. Anneli recounts that when the bridge linked Autti more closely to the road network, it suddenly felt necessary for her and other villagers to obtain a driver’s licence and get a car. Another article from her collection reports on a driving course held in Autti during the late 1970s, where the pupils’ average age was fifty years. Anneli herself had held a tractordriver’s licence since she had been seventeen years old, but it was not until she had turned forty, in 1977, that she felt the need to get a licence for driving cars as well. A large section of the newspaper article about the driving course reads like a list of advantages that car travel holds for villagers. The first is the speed of reaching far-away centres. If a milking machine malfunctions during the morning milking turn, it is argued, the farmwife can easily drive to the shop in Rovaniemi to buy a spare part and have it fixed before the

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evening turn. By bus, this journey would take the whole day and keep her from doing more useful things. The options of taking a boat or consulting a local blacksmith are not even considered in writing at all. Apart from the possibility of quickly reaching distant places by car, other reasons for embracing this way of travelling include that it would be “somewhat embarrassing” (melko noloa) for a farmer to take his wife berry-picking by tractor. Driving a car is portrayed as simply a must, even for such traditional journeys as fishing- or berry-picking-trips. While the expansion of the road network has thus clearly engendered an increase in car traffic around the village of Autti, the enlarged traffic load again seems to have called for upgrading the roads. This is suggested, for instance, in another clipping from Anneli’s collection that talks about a meeting of the village’s Centre Party members in 1977. The main concern of this meeting appears to have been an initiative to install street lights along particular sections of the roads around the village. Road expansion and increasing numbers of cars have thus been mutually reinforcing factors in the Kemi River area. Once set off, this process acquired formidable momentum. One lady from the lower Ounas River, for instance, mentions that her childhood home had been one of the few buildings in the province that was not burned to the ground during the Lapland War in autumn 1944. When the motorway between Rovaniemi and Kittilä was improved about twenty years ago, however, the building stood in the way of the plans for constructing a faster transport route. Without much ado, the historical house was bought from the family and demolished to enable more efficient traffic.

The need for fast, long-distance traffic Regularly travelling long distances through the catchment basin has become everyday practice for many river dwellers. Trips to work or school have turned into considerable journeys in many areas. Markku, for instance, can see from his home window the building of the village school that he used to attend as a child. His school trip spanned about three hundred metres. This school, however, was closed in 1966, and Markku’s three children have to travel to school in the centre of Pelkosenniemi, about twenty kilometres away. Usually, they are transported back and forth by a school bus, which picks up pupils from different villages as it goes along. Sometimes Markku gives them a lift, driving the forty kilometre round trip by car. In the not-so distant past, a public bus used to pass by the village on its way to the centre of Pelkosenniemi, but the transport company has dropped this stop – and the associated journey back and forth a ten kilometre access road – from the itinerary. This means that not only for leaving school at odd times, but also for getting to work, often in Pelkosenniemi, Pyhätunturi or Kemijärvi, going shopping, accessing health care, or visiting friends and relatives, villagers are dependent on their own cars. Thus, the ability to drive a car seems to have become essential to life in rural Lapland. A retired teacher who had worked and lived for a long time in a riverside village has personally experienced this dependency. In 1959 she had moved to Pirttikoski, the settlement built for the hydropower company’s employees across from the village of Autti, where she worked in the school until her retirement in 1991. Along with her husband she decided then to stay in Pirttikoski, because they both liked the place and its wilderness

8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

appeal. In 2001, however, when her husband died, the teacher felt compelled to move to the centre of Rovaniemi, mainly because she did not have a driver’s licence. Without a car she felt unable to access the places she depended on for living in her home. The coupled developments of road-and-car infrastructure extension and fast, long-distance travel have made driving such an integral part of life in a riverside village. This need for everyday driving cannot be explained solely by the expansion of the road network. Out-migration from Lappish villages, particularly between the 1950s and 1970s, has been a central factor in the development towards long-distance car journeys. The very reason for closing down the school in Markku’s home village and the disappearance of shops and services from Autti and Pirttikoski has been that the number of pupils, shop customers and hairdresser’s clients have decreased so sharply. This emptying of villages, coupled of course with the increasing availability of roads and vehicles, led to a concentration of public and commercial services in the larger population centres. While it no longer seemed to make economic or political sense to run a shop or school in a shrinking village, it appeared much more efficient to bus children to school and to do the shopping by car. It remains striking, however, that such commuting is achieved mainly by private cars, and that public transport is so scarce in the catchment basin. There are regular bus services along the main highways, but most villages that are not located right there are very difficult to reach. Hellevi cautions that this has been very different only a few decades ago. When she worked as a shop-keeper in different villages around the upper Kemi River between the 1950s and 1980s, she could easily visit her parents’ place over the weekends without owning a car. Bus services connected even remote villages by a regular schedule. From the village of Martti, for instance, located far upstream on the river, a bus would leave to Rovaniemi each morning, and return each evening. Today, neither the village shop in Martti nor the bus connection with Rovaniemi exists any longer. Hellevi observes that everybody now has to drive a car to get around, and so does the seventy-five-yearold lady. But not only people move along the road network for considerable distances and at substantial speed; so also do goods. Evidently the largest amount of such goods is timber, especially since the end of floating activities. One river dweller jokingly remarks that whereas logs used to pass his house on the eastern side, where the river flows by, they are now “floated” along the western side of the house, where the road passes. Many river dwellers judge this development critically. Not only does truck-transport provide much less employment for the region’s inhabitants than timber floating did; but the heavy transporters, often exceeding sixty tonnes of weight, severely damage the roads to the detriment of other regular drivers. Alongside timber, also milk is currently travelling long distances at great speed along the Lappish road network. In spite of the sharp decrease in dairy farming in the catchment basin during the second half of the twentieth century, a number of dairy farms continue to work (Ortlieb 2000). However, not a single dairy exists in the entire province of Lapland to process the milk. Thus, all farmers along the river tell the same story: Every other day, their milk is picked up by a dairy truck and transported all the way to the city of Oulu in the neighbouring province. For milk from Matti’s farm on the middle reaches of the Kemi River, this means a journey of about 250 km, the milk from upstream farms

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travels even further. The absolute climax of this system is that even milk from the municipality of Utsjoki, located on the Teno River in the far north of the province, is also processed in Oulu, spelling out a milk journey of almost seven hundred kilometres. If someone from that municipality then goes out to buy milk in a supermarket, she might end up with a locally-produced substance that has travelled from that very place to Oulu and back, a total trajectory of approximately 1400 km. Compared to the modest fifteen kilometre horse-track journey that the milk from Tapani’s natal farm travelled to the dairy in Rovaniemi, or the probably twenty-kilometre “boat-road” connecting Erkki’s home smallholding to the dairy in Kemijärvi, this hauling back and forth of milk is most impressive. Matti acknowledges that the present system is somewhat crazy. But, he cautions, it is the only economically viable solution in an area so sparsely populated as Lapland. What he does not mention, however, is that without the intricate and well-maintained road network in the province, such a solution of fast and long-distance transport would not be possible or economically viable at all.

A world structured by roads With travel practices, also the spatial focus has been shifting from the river towards the road. Not only were homes increasingly built along the roads instead of along the rivers, but also all kinds of geographical reference points changed from a river- to a road-focus. Matti’s dairy farm, located in Oikarainen on the road between Rovaniemi and Kuusamo, for instance, still bears the name of the former farmers (Körkö) combined with the original location of the farmhouse, Kumpukörkö, which translates as “Körkö-on-themound”. This mound, rising very close to the riverbank, is uninhabited today, because in 1938 Matti’s grandfather had preferred to construct the new farmstead closer to the road, which provided access to Rovaniemi even then. Nevertheless, the Kemi River remained an important transport artery until Matti’s childhood (chapter three). When referring to going east, for instance, his family members would speak of moving “up” or “up the Kemi River”. Going west was accordingly referred to as moving “down”. Today however, references to the direction of the current have increasingly been replaced by references to places that the road would pass through. Now, an eastward movement is referred to as “towards Vanttauskoski”, invoking the village and hydropower dam upstream, and going westwards is called “to town” or “to Rovaniemi”. Even when roads and cars proceed along the river, they are sidelining the formerly so fundamental difference of moving up- or downstream, which river dwellers had over many generations internalised in muscle, language and mental geography. Instead of the direction of currents, the layout of roads is increasingly central for people’s moving about and perceiving the landscape. Therefore it is not surprising that rivers are becoming ever more invisible from roads and villages, whereas roads are very well maintained. This is manifested both in the sophisticated organisation of road-works and winter-service in the province, and in the activities of the road-side population, like the voluntary workgroups (talkoot) regularly cleaning the rubbish off the roadsides.

8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

Roads and river courses In the face of the evident discontinuities of road- and river-traffic, it is striking that to a great degree road network and traffic flows follow the courses of the rivers (fig. 8.2). Given the overall relatively flat topography in the catchment, this phenomenon cannot be explained with reference to the terrain. I assume, instead, that roads follow the rivers because they connect human settlement that has historically grown along the banks. This suggests a fundamental difference between road- and river-traffic in the catchment along the Kemi River: Whereas rivers flow along, rarely taking the fastest course from source to sea, and settlements aligned themselves with this flow, roads do not align their course to landscape or flow, but are built to connect the various settlements, conceived as bounded entities. Much as a line that is drawn freely differs from a line built up by connecting a series of dots (Ingold 2007b), so progressing along a river with aligned settlements is fundamentally unlike travelling on roads that link these settlements.

Figure 8.2: Major rivers and major roads in the Kemi River catchment. Most roads follow river courses where it is possible. This is particularly evident for the lower and middle Kemi River, as well as the Kitinen, Ounas and Rauta River. The same is true in the neighbouring Tornio River basin.

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There are, of course, a few exceptions to this general pattern, usually when the road passes from one sub-catchment into the next, as for instance between Sodankylä (Kitinen River) and Kittilä (Ounas River). But even such roads have not been built without regard to previously established travel routes (cf. the historical church journey, fig. 5.1). The main road north of Kittilä is a case in point. Between Rovaniemi and Kittilä, this road roughly follows the course of the Ounas River, but further north it passes the watershed into the Tornio River catchment towards the centre of Muonio. This road, as Timo explains, follows a minor tributary by the name of Kulku River (see kulkea, above). It can thus be assumed that many – if not most – roads within and beyond the Kemi River catchment basin have been built along previously established travel routes, many of which followed the river courses. By continually upgrading the roads in order to allow for more and faster traffic, the courses of the motorways have, over time, been progressively moved away from the river bank along many stretches. Driving down the river out of the centre of Rovaniemi, a friend once told me to turn into a road previously unknown to me. I had habitually simply followed the motorway, which I knew went along the river more or less. My friend was surprised that I did not know that the “real” river road went along this route. The route of the motorway, although generally covering the same journey along the river between Rovaniemi and Kemi, is a rather recent addition to the original river-bank roads and often runs more than a kilometre inland from it. Downstream from Tervola, the motorway even abandons the older road altogether and proceeds around five kilometres or more towards the northwest, cutting off most river bends (fig 8.3).

Figure 8.3: Three parallel generations of permanent roads on the lower Kemi River from right (oldest) to left (newest). Note the decreasing degree of orientation to the river course. The first road integrated the old farms on the river bank and provided land access to the old centre of Kemi, a few kilometres downstream.

8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

On another occasion, Eero explains that even the older riverside road is not older than the 1930s. Guided by the existing pattern of settlement and local tracks, the first KemiRovaniemi road did not proceed only on the western side of the river, as the present motorway and its 1930s successor do. Rather, travellers crossed the river three times between the estuary and Rovaniemi (cf. Lilja 2002). This journey, although conducted on the road, was thus still tightly connected to the river, and thus differs fundamentally from the current dashing along the motorway, five kilometres away from the river bank and at speeds that make contemplating the river a risky venture. But even where the road proceeds closer to the river and vehicles are driven more slowly, the river fades into oblivion along many stretches. Whereas a few decades ago, there would have been mostly fields and hay meadows between river and road, many of them have been thickly overgrown with bushes, effectively hiding the river from the traveller. As Matti remarks, it can happen that a traveller drives along the riverside road for long distances, wondering where the river is. Even if river and road remain the same, a change in land use practices can thus enlarge the gap between the experience of travel and the flow of the river. The naming of different roads also illustrates how their purpose has been shifting away from the immediate life along the course of the river, towards covering ever further distances at once. The oldest road in figure 8.3 is called Kemi Mouth Road (Keminsuuntie), referring to the river’s estuary about five kilometres away. The second oldest road, built not always directly along the river but still through inhabited land, connected the centre of Kemi with Rovaniemi. Its name Rovaniemi Road (Rovaniementie) refers to this destination, a good one hundred road kilometres upstream. The newest road, and National Highway (Valtatie), is built far away from river and river-dwellers, its name referring to the Arctic Ocean (Jäämerentie), which would be over six hundred kilometres away. By referring to ever further away destinations, roads literally omit and by-pass ever more places along the journey. Roads in the Kemi River area thus proceed not so much primarily along the rivers – as geographical phenomena – but along routes significant for human life, which – for historical reasons – frequently are located along the rivers. The run of the Kemi River directed the establishment of human settlement and other activities in a time when it served as the main transport route, as the “stream of life” (elämän virta). Whereas the physical flow of the river is largely insignificant for the present road network, the places, activities and routes established in relation to this river remain crucial. Therefore the roads follow the rivers, even though they do not do so directly. They connect rather than go along.

Driving across the river: seasonal and permanent bridges In the village of Oikarainen on the middle reaches of the Kemi River, the main road leads straight to the river – and abruptly ends there. In fact, it ends in a ferry-jetty on the river bank, which is linked to a similar jetty on the opposite bank by a set of steel cables and a ferry proceeding along the cables from one river bank to the other (fig. 8.4). With its paved deck providing space for two or three cars, the ferry looks like a direct ex-

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tension of the road, possibly even like a piece of road moving across the river. A ferry has been in operation in this place since the beginning of the twentieth century, the ferryman says. It formed part of the road between Rovaniemi and Kuusamo, which included three ferry-crossings. Until mid-century, the ferry was used predominantly by long-distance travellers. The inhabitants of Oikarainen usually crossed the river by boat. Only very few people had cars at all. Today, however, the ferry is essential for life in the village and beyond, whereas the long-distance highway had been rerouted across a hydropower dam upstream. The ferry operates seven days a week, from six o’clock in the morning to eleven o’clock at night. Each day, around one hundred cars are transported across the river. The ferryman explains that when people cannot pass the river here, villagers from the southern shore have to drive an almost forty kilometre detour to the next bridge to bring their children to school on the northern shore. Otherwise getting to school can be a matter of a few hundred metres.

Figure 8.4: Ferry crossing the Kemi River in Oikarainen, as an extension of the road.

As in Oikarainen, the expansion of road network and car travel posed the challenge of crossing the river in many places throughout the watershed. The most adequate solution in terms of the road system is to build a bridge across the river, so that the road continues uninterrupted. Bridges however, particularly those that are to withstand the powerful spring floods of the Kemi River, are difficult and expensive to construct.3 Therefore, many 3

Because of the difficulty of building a bridge across a stream as powerful as the Kemi River during the spring flood, a number of early bridges in the watershed were temporary constructions, put up after the spring flood and deconstructed in early winter, when the river began to freeze. In the centre of Rovaniemi alone, there were two such bridges for a few summers in the late 1940s, after

8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

crossings in the watershed have first been equipped with ferries to transport travellers, vehicles and goods across, but progressively been equipped with permanent bridges. Before the Second World War, there had been merely three permanent bridges across the river’s main course, one in Kemi and two in Rovaniemi, which all served both as railway- and road-bridges. All other major crossings were realised by ferries during the summer and by ice-bridge during the winter, as sketched below. In other words, river crossings during the early days of road traffic were closely attuned to the rhythms of the river. Ferries themselves were floating road-sections, susceptible to currents and discharge fluctuations, and suitable only during summer and early autumn. Permanent bridges, conversely, are structured to ignore seasonal dynamics. Just as the numbers of ferries grew during the first half of the twentieth century, so did the number of permanent bridges increase during the second half of the century, successively replacing the summer-ferry-winter-ice-bridge crossings. Many of these crossings proceeded on the hydropower dams that spread along the river’s main course during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s along with the expansion of car traffic. In the three places where integrated railway and road bridges had been reconstructed after the war, supplementary bridges were constructed for car-use only. Today, there are twenty-three bridges across the main course of the Kemi River, with many more across its tributaries, particularly the Ounas and Kitinen Rivers. The ferry of Oikarainen is the last of its kind in the catchment basin, and even this one is to be replaced by a bridge in 2010. During the winter, when the freezing rivers were suitable neither for boating nor for ferry-crossings, river dwellers relied on an alternative, and much easier way to get across, namely the thick ice cover. Whereas along slower-flowing stretches the ice would form spontaneously, river dwellers actively “built” ice bridges in other locations. Probably the most impressive account of such ice-bridge construction comes from the fisher-farmers on the rapids of Narkauskoski on the lower Kemi River. On these rapids the ice-strips that formed along the shores never grew very far towards the middle of the river, because the currents were too strong, stopping the freezing water from congealing (chapter ten). In order to slow the current down, inhabitants met in early winter to saw off a sixty to eighty-metre-long ice floe from the frozen strip at the eastern shore, fixed the downstream tip of the floe to the river bank and pushed the upstream end into the current. The stream would turn the immense floe and push it into a position perpendicular to the current, where it would get stuck on the opposite shore and a series of rocks in the rapids. The barrier thus created made the current slow down enough for a reliable ice cover to form upstream from the ice floe (Huhtaniska 1990).

Roads and rhythms Whereas river crossings dependent on ferries and ice bridges bore direct witness to the marked seasonal variations on the Kemi River, permanent bridges seem to negate the seasons, providing an undeviating path throughout the year. But do they? Upon closer the previous crossings had been destroyed in the Lapland War. But temporary bridges were known throughout the watershed, for instance on the rapids of Pirttikoski.

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inspection, modern road traffic does display a number of seasonal variations. Probably the most immediately obvious is the difference in speed limits. On many roads the speed limit is reduced4 by twenty kilometres per hour during the winter. The great majority of roads in the catchment basin develop a layer of packed snow and ice during the winter, on which car-wheel traction is somewhat less than on asphalted- and even gravel-roads, in spite of the wintertime use of studded tyres. The seasonal aspect of permanent roads is even more evident in the possibilities and limitations provided by the winter-service. Most of the larger roads in the catchment are frequented by snowploughs5 and serve as transport routes throughout the year. Roads that lack a ploughing service, however, become difficult or impossible to pass after the first snowstorm of the season, no matter whether they are asphalted, gravel-covered or mere “cart-tracks”. River dwellers with private access roads, for instance, have to organise their own winter-service, lest they will be unable to reach or leave their houses by car for part of the year. Where a public winter-service does exist, it clears a route through the snow, but does so rather selectively. On the shoulders of the roads a high wall of snow tends to accumulate, making stopping, turning back or into an unploughed side-road very difficult. A further markedly seasonal phenomenon on permanent roads in the catchment area is the amount of traffic. During the summer, the number of cars driving on Lappish roads is about twenty-five percent higher than the annual average, as the statistics of the Finnish Road Administration (Tiehallinto) show. In fact, the Road Administration even keeps separate records for “annual average 24h traffic” (vuoden keskimääräinen vuorokausiliikenne, KVL) and “summertime average 24h traffic” (kesän keskimääräinen vuorokausiliikenne, KKVL). In 2005, a daily 520 cars drove on an average Lappish road stretch (KVL). The number for the three summer months (KKVL) in the same year amounted to 653. During summer months, traffic per day was about forty percent more than during the rest of the year. Winter- and summertime traffic landscapes thus differ both in speed, options and amount of travel. But whereas driving a car is usually possible throughout the watershed both during the summer and during the winter, it is in the periods of transition in spring and autumn when most problems occur for travellers. When the first snow falls or the roads freeze over during the first autumn nights, traffic runs into problems. The same is true for the period in spring when snow and ground melt, softening the wintertime road cover and causing potholes, mud-puddles and road cover erosion, especially on gravel roads. The period when the wintertime travel landscape is disrupted by rising temperatures of air and ground is widely known as “kelirikko time” (kelirikkoaika) in Finland. To a lesser extent also the disruption of the summertime traffic conditions by icy roads and slushy snow is called kelirikko. For example, Anneli explains in mid-May that she has not been able to go ice-fishing in her favourite lake since the beginning of the month, because of

4 5

This could also be phrased the other way around: During the summer, speed limits are increased, because of the improved traction and concomitant road safety. See, e.g. the website of the Finnish Road Administration (Tiehallinto) at http://www.tiehallinto.fi/ pls/wwwedit/docs/20711.PDF, accessed 2009–07-21.

8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

the kelirikko on the gravel road leading there. Her two neighbours only nod in agreement – yes, it is this time of year again.

Keli – movement in the world Kelirikko is a derivate of a concept used more widely in the context of travel, transport and beyond, namely keli. The notion of keli, used in the singular or plural form, generally describes the environmental condition enabling a particular activity to be performed outside, often in the context of movement. Keli is frequently used synonymously with “the weather” (sää, ilma). One river dweller remarks that people from southern Finland are often irritated by the extent of “northern small-talk”, when all they hear during their stay in Lapland is conversations about the weather. In fact, such exchange of information and estimation of weather conditions is not at all the triviality for which it is mistaken by “southerners”, but essential for people whose life is full of outside activities in dairy farming, fishing, transport, forestry, or tourism enterprises. The preoccupation with keli has not diminished with the shift of traffic from the river to the roads. In spite of its appeal, road transport is still an activity-in-the-world, subject to temperature, precipitation and the frozen or liquid state of water. Being aware of the state of one’s environment – road conditions, snow conditions, wind and weather conditions, temperatures of air, water and ground, capacity of the ice cover, etc. – is indispensable for deciding which activity is viable at the moment, and which is not. The concept of keli today refers to any such conditions. Hankikeli, for instance, means that the snow cover has formed a hard crust, on which people can walk without sinking in. Terassikeli refers to conditions that allow people to have a drink sitting outside, on the terrace. There are good conditions for boating (hyvä keli veneilemään), when the wind does not blow too strongly; good conditions for skiing (hyvä keli hiihtämään), when the snow cover is solid and neither too cold nor too warm; and good conditions for camping (hyvä keli ulkoilemaan) or for taking a walk (… kävelemään). There can be hiihtokeli (“skiing conditions”), metsästyskeli (“hunting conditions”), kalastuskeli (“fishing conditions”) and sienikeli (“mushroom conditions”). That these concepts are specifically focussed on each respective activity and cannot be equated with the general idea of “nice weather” is indicated by one river dweller’s account of fishing in late autumn. This man rows his boat through the lowest section of the Kemi River as long as possible in autumn, lure-fishing for trout. He explains that fishing-keli is adequate so long as fishing lines and other equipment do not freeze. What he does not mention at all is the trenchant cold wind and the frequent rains that afflict the river during this time of year. Probably most casual onlookers would describe such a state as “bad weather”, whereas what the fisherman describes is not as generalised as the weather; kalastuskeli implies the specific conditions necessary for fishing, nothing more or less. Most commonly, the concept of keli is used in the context of travel and transport. A Finnish etymological dictionary renders the word keli as “the trafficability of roads (in

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winter)”6 (Itkonen 1992). In this use, it is a shorthand for the conditions of roads, ice bridges and skiing tracks. That these conditions usually depend on the weather is emphasised in another Finnish dictionary that defines keli as “the possibility to travel by some means of transport owing to the weather-dependant state of roads or terrain” or, more succinctly, as “the suitability for travel on roads and terrain depending on the weather”7 (Sadeniemi 1980). Throughout the province of Lapland, there are around fifty “keli-cameras” (kelikamerat) on different sections of the main roads, which take pictures of the road every ten minutes. Travellers can download these pictures from the internet home page of the Road Administration.8 Moreover, the website provides information about the temperatures of road and air, the local precipitation and the state of the road cover. The latter is specifically termed “keli” on the website. Of course, the Road Administration also uses this information, together with a number of further parameters measured at the cameras, for instance in order to coordinate the winter-service. Many keli terms describe snow conditions. The most widely known expression is the above-mentioned hankikeli, describing snow with a firm crust on which people can walk. This usually occurs during early spring, when the bright sun softens the top snow layer during the day, which is then frozen solid during the cold night. Thereby, hankikeli often exists during spring mornings, but disappears again in the afternoon, when the top snow layer has been softened anew. Meri-Matti also uses the word keli to describe snow conditions that have implications for skiing or sleighing. Apart from the general lumikelit (“snow conditions”), meaning a continuous snow cover, he mentions vittumainen keli (“shitty conditions”), when travellers sink or break into the ice or snow, and hyvä keli (“good conditions”), when the snow carries a skier or snowmobile, but is still soft enough that reindeer can dig through it to obtain food from the ground underneath. Furthermore, he mentions jänkäkeli (“bog conditions”) as a shorthand for an environment in which bogs are frozen up to a degree that they support travellers. Favourable conditions for outdoor activities can change quickly, for instance because of intensifying sunshine and increasing air temperatures during spring days. One of these dynamics concerns the night-day alterations of supporting hankikeli and the slushy snow Markku calls sosekeli (“mush-conditions”), which disables all movement. Similarly when fresh, cold and dry snow, which Markku calls vitikeli, is met by warm air, it forms vititakkala that sticks to skis and snowmobiles and thereby blocks their progression. Also jääkeli (“ice conditions”) can occur in spring, when melt-water or rain spills onto a road or track and freezes there, making it very slippery and difficult to move on. If keli thus refers to the conditions of snow, ice and road that enable travel and transport, kelirikko – literally “the break-up of keli” – describes a state where these conditions

6 7 8

In the original reference, this is in German: Die Befahrbarkeit der Straßen (im Winter). Mead and Smeds (1967: 24) translate keli as “the condition of going“, especially in winter. In the Finnish original, this reads “mahdollisuus liikkua kulkuneuvoilla säästä riippuvan teiden tai maaston kuntoisuuden vuoksi; teiden tai maaston säästä riippuva kulkukelpoisuus”. The overview web page can be found at http://www.tiehallinto.fi/alk/kelikamerat/kelikamerat_5 .html (accessed 2009–07-22), where a list of camera locations and a map of Lapland function as links to the respective images.

8. Roads across the catchment: Acceleration, transformation and the seasonal world

are not met. It refers to an obstacle to movement. The problem of kelirikko is encountered not only on the roads, but also with river crossings dependent on ice-bridges and ferries during different times of the year. The ferry extends the road across the summertime river, while the snowploughed ice bridge crossing the wintertime river is hardly discernible from the rest of the road that is covered in snow and ice as well. Only during the formation of the ice crust on the river and during its disintegration do these crossings become problematic. The two traffic-friendly states of winter- and summer-crossing are thus interrupted by periods of kelirikko, transitory states of river water where the “breakup of transport conditions” complicates travel and transport. The winter of 2007–08, for instance, was a rather mild one, and the river froze up neither early nor for particularly long. Although the ferry of Oikarainen had been pulled out of the river in November, the ice bridge could not be crossed before February. In early April, the ice cover already became too weak to carry vehicles, but the ferry only took up its duty in mid-May. Over four months of the year, the inhabitants of Oikarainen had thus been driving a forty kilometre journey to get from one side of the village to the other. The extent of kelirikko depends of course not only on the state of water, air, sunlight and temperature, but as much on the particular activity, for which the favourable conditions (keli) are “broken” or absent. When I asked Matti, the dairy farmer from Oikarainen, how he feels about the annual limitations of kelirikko, he smiled and answered that they fit so well into the yearly cycle of activities in and around the farm that he hardly experiences them as limitations at all. The dynamics of shifting suitabilities for different activities and modes of transport are integral to life in this region and people have traditional ways of dealing with them. They have learnt to anticipate the different states of temperature, water and light, and prepare for them accordingly (chapter ten). Before the kelirikko time in autumn, for instance, on-farm supplies of firewood or animal fodder are restocked, so that the need to cross the river or cover long distances to fetch them does not even arise when roads, ice and snow become impassable. The livestock is also transferred to pastures closer by. Once the kelirikko phase sets in, the farming household engages in activities focused closer around the farmstead, such as repairing equipment, so that travel does not even become necessary. While winter is traditionally the time of forestry work and other outside jobs that can only be realised when ground and watercourses are frozen, the next kelirikko phase in spring is again spent working closer around the farmstead, for example making firewood or preparing for the coming growing season. The summer has usually been the busiest season on the farm, and Matti tells me that in his experience people are quite happy about the periods of kelirikko, when many activities involving travelling come to a halt. Only then do farmers finally find the time to do some of the things that had been impossible during the busier seasons, when every possibility afforded by frozen ground or long days has to be seized.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that road traffic across the Kemi River catchment is as new as it is pervasive. The concomitant shifts in the flows of travel and transport have redefined social relations and spatial scales along the river. Roads and cars have transformed the

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role of the river for transport, from a facilitator to an obstacle, inverted the perspective from which river dwellers perceive the river and life along its banks, extended the reach of motorised river dwellers, facilitated the growing dependence of centralised shops and services, and contributed to an externalisation of the river from the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Conversely, this chapter has shown that previous river-travel left its mark on the road-network, as the new arteries connect places established through the former means of transport. Nevertheless, I have argued that even modern transport necessarily remains caught up in the rhythms of meteorological dynamics, ecological processes and social life as epitomised by continuing preoccupations with keli.

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

Introduction As many former river activities have shifted to the road network, the river has been turned increasingly into a specialised electricity-producing stream. This chapter analyses the practicalities and politics of transforming and using the river as a hydropower source. How is hydroelectricity generated on the Kemi River? What does this hegemonic rival imply for other river uses? How has it transformed the river and the river dwellers? And what relations does hydropower management foster between the engineers and the flow of the river? In analysing the work of engineers, Suchman (2001) adopts the concept of “heterogeneous engineering” to account for the various social, economic, political and embodied aspects of technology production and use. She argues that the bridgeconstruction project she investigates is “as much a form of persuasive storytelling as of analysis, calculation, inscription, and work with concrete and steel” (ibid.: 168), and adds that “the most modern projects [...] can happen only through the presence of skilled, embodied practice” (ibid.: 174).1 Woven in with the omnipresent computers, large machinery, and abstract representations are thus complex sociocultural negotiations facilitating and emerging from the project, as well as the continuous embodied engagement with screens, paper, colleagues and building materials. Technology does not exist outside human engagement and skills, but is part and parcel of our relations with one another and our non-human environment (Ingold 2000). Hydropower infrastructure, probably the most sophisticated technology on the Kemi River today, bears witness to this. In spite of its pointed technological complexity, it is as much about dealing with river dwellers, about negotiating engineers’ aspirations with shareholder interests, and about seeing and feeling the water and ice of the river, as it is about working the machinery to transform physical energy. Dealing with the power of the river and the power of electric charges, hydroelectricity managers simultaneously negotiate the powers of money, of political climate and of tradition. 1

The concept of “heterogeneous engineering”, Suchman takes from Law (1987), the term “persuasive storytelling” was coined by Throgmorton (1996).

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Juho has experienced different sides in this power play. Born in the late 1950s, he grew up on the banks of the Ii River in the neighbouring province of Oulu. When the first hydropower stations were built on the lower Ii River in the 1960s, Juho became critically inclined against such river manipulation, and made no secret of his opposition to the plans for extending hydropower developments to his home river stretch. In 1982, after completing his university studies in mathematics, it was therefore slightly awkward when he applied for a job at Kemijoki Ltd, the company that had just extensively altered the major catchment basin in northern Finland, and was asked in the job interview about his position concerning the widely-debated plans of impounding a hydropower reservoir not far from Juho’s home. Juho remembers that he openly admitted his opposition to the Ii River development, but was given the job nevertheless. One has to be able to distinguish private from societal interests, he explains. Society needs hydroelectricity, people need their homes. Juho understands the value of both, but he also knows how difficult it is to compare these different interests. Today, Juho works as the “mathematician” of Kemijoki Ltd and describes his work as merely “logical thinking” in order to solve a variety of technological, hydrological and public-relations problems. During the many years of his work he has learnt that producing hydroelectricity is far more than a technological challenge, and includes looking after river dwellers as much as it is about looking after the river and the turbines. And working in the company’s section responsible for “production”, he is familiar with many of the intricacies this implies.

In the hydropower hub A few doors up from Juho’s office at Kemijoki Ltd, three men work in a room equipped with twenty-six computer screens, seven telephones, a number of video projectors and a host of further technological devices. Screens and telephones are arranged along a desk stretching in a half-circle through the room. Behind the screens, grey panels form the back wall of the room, no windows afford a view of the outside, all attention can be focussed on the screens. One man is speaking on the phone, another one quickly clicks through a programme on one of the computers. A short, high-pitched warning signal sounds and a button on a small panel lightens. The man on the computer briefly looks up from his screen to another one, presses the lightened button to extinguish the lamp, and resumes his work. The room forms part of the hydropower company’s headquarters. It is commonly referred to as the “control room” (valvomo), from where hydroelectricity production throughout the catchment basin is steered and monitored. All turbines and floodgates of the large power stations from the headwater reservoirs to the last dam on the estuary can be remote-controlled from this room. The screens in the control room show figures, graphs, maps and tables related to past, present and projected amounts of water in the river and of electricity in the power grid. A computer programme sees to it that the needed electrical energy is produced corresponding to the hydro-energy available at the different power stations. And these calculations are regularly adjusted manually when

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

the engineers have other ideas than the computer programme. It looks as if the entire river can be made to flow according to the mouse-clicks of the hydropower engineers. Erkki oversees the work in the “control room”. One of his colleagues claims that Erkki knows exactly what effect a certain discharge through the turbines of any power station has for the amount and timing of water available at all the downstream power stations. Erkki himself would probably not make such a bold claim for himself, but he admits that it might take three years of work in the “control room” before a novice can responsibly “drive the river” (ajaa jokea). So many decisions have to be taken all the time; about where along the chain of power stations to use how much water for turning the turbines and producing the appropriate amount of energy; and about where to contain water so that there will be enough energy to meet the projected electricity demand, but not too much water that would flood a river stretch and endanger riverside buildings and activities (cf. Korva 1997). With a host of high-tech equipment at their service, it is ultimately Erkki and his colleagues who decide about the strategy for running the power stations – and thereby significantly influence what is going on along the river. The dams and power stations, huge constructions of reinforced concrete, steel and earth, have become mere sites for executing orders given elsewhere. Although it is in these locations that the actual electricity is produced, including the energy running the computer programmes in the “control room”, not many people are around. Only during daytime are the power stations manned, and even then the employees spend most of their time maintaining the machines, checking oil and water temperatures but merely following the actual energy production on computer screens reflecting the production goals set in Rovaniemi. Erkki and his colleagues in Rovaniemi appreciate this centralisation. What happens on upstream power stations is usually most significant for what happens at downstream stations, and the management of downstream dams has particular implications for the options and constrains upstream. The all-catchment view necessary for “driving a river” can be most adequately achieved from a central hub, the engineers argue. The general working routine of electricity production is rather repetitive. Each afternoon the “control room” receives an electricity order from its main shareholder. The order consists of a series of electricity volumes for each one of the coming twenty-four hours, which the Kemi River2 is to produce. Automatically, the computer programme

2

In fact, the equation of the hydropower production of Kemijoki Ltd with the hydropower generated along the Kemi River only holds to an extent. Two major and three minor power stations in the catchment basin are not owned by the company. Furthermore, the company has acquired four medium-capacity hydropower stations in southern and eastern Finland, where it also produces electricity. By and large, however, the equation of river and company in terms of electricity production works: Out of the 1155 MW installed in the catchment basin, 1010 MW are located in stations that belong to Kemijoki Ltd, while the capacity at the company’s hydropower stations in other catchment basins amounts to a mere 68 MW (Kemijoki Oy 2009: 50). Thus, over 87% of the capacity in the Kemi River basin is owned by this one company, and only 6% of the company’s capacity lies outside of the watershed. Furthermore, in practice Kemijoki Ltd also manages the electricity production at the two other major stations in the Kemi River catchment basin, so that the people in the “control room” dispose over 1146 MW, corresponding to over 99% of the installed hydropower capacity.

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then translates this order into production targets for the individual power stations. In doing this, the programme processes a host of data, including information about precipitation and temperatures, decades’ worth of meteorological and hydrological records, the estimated amount of water available in different river sections, the installed capacity of turbines at the various power stations, the time the water is likely to take to travel from one dam to another, the upper and lower limits of the water table upstream and downstream of hydropower dams as defined in the respective licenses, and the projections for the coming days and weeks as to hydrology, climate and electricity demand. The outcome of this calculation is an “optimal” allocation consisting of a series of twenty-four production targets for each power station for each hour of the coming day. Once the computer has allocated its production targets to the different power stations, “control room” personnel usually alter these allocations. On the desk, in between the telephones and computer keyboards, a few pieces of yellow post-it papers are fixed, displaying short notes and warnings about special features on or of the river that currently have to be taken into account. This can be the holding of a fishing competition around Rovaniemi, for which the water table of the river section there should be particularly high. Or it is the construction or repairing of a bridge, which requires a particularly low water table at the respective river stretch. It can also be the incipient formation of an ice cover on a river stretch, for which the discharge – and particularly changes in discharge – must be kept slow in order to allow the top water level to freeze. It seems almost exceptional that nobody in the “control room” should manipulate the system to produce the ordered amount of energy in another way than is calculated as “optimal” by the computer programme. One engineer admits that the amount of technology in the “control room” may seem overwhelming at first glance, but he emphasises that in fact the humans are the “masters” in this room, the computers are only their tools, or “slaves”. The engineers know that their decisions have very real effects on how the river flows and are aware of the great responsibility that this position implies. Therefore they can consult the huge amounts of data stored in their computer systems and continually being transmitted from a large number of measuring stations in the catchment basin. Although working in the “control room” does not necessarily include looking at, swimming in or boating on the river directly, the computer screens afford a series of focussed glances at particular aspects of the stream, which are deemed relevant for the task of hydroelectricity generation. A histogram representing the current and anticipated future water levels at different points along the river, for instance, is one such specialised glance. The water levels are essential for the hydropower company, as they indicate how much water is – and will be – available for use in the turbines. Just as importantly, these water levels also have to be adjusted in relation to the minimum and maximum allowed levels as defined by the respective dam licences. The hydropower producers in the “control room” thus perceive a rather specialised river on their computer screens, a stream of graphs, numbers and maps. It is a river tailored to the generation of electricity, providing the information necessary for this task, nothing more or less. That there are dwellings along the banks, boats on the river and fish in the water is insignificant and therefore excluded. But still, the stream of data behaves like a river; what happens upstream has downstream effects, and frequently vice versa as well; the direction of the flow integrates different areas and its power enables

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

certain human activities. The manipulations of the stream by assigning certain production strategies have implications on the real Kemi River, which are then again reflected in the virtual data-river. While this system works quite well in itself, some of the “control room” staff is clearly aware of its limitations. Erkki, for instance, would like to be able to access more direct impressions from the river and the dams. While the abstract configuration of data in diagrams and figures does have its merits, he finds it equally important to actually see what the river looks like around the power stations in order to take decisions concerning production allocations. At the moment, there is only one camera sending images to the “control room”. But not only would Erkki like to see more cameras accessible from the “control room”, he would also like to be able to hear what happens in the power stations. When a turbine malfunctions, he explains, all that can be known through the screens in Rovaniemi is how far its electricity output deviates from the norm. If, however, microphones were installed in the machine chambers, then the manager on duty could listen to whether or not the turbine still turns correctly. The difference between a correctly spinning turbine and one slightly out of balance can hardly be inferred from electrical circuits, but it can be readily heard. Does this imply an ever-increasing degree of control over the river? At first glance, the amount of technology and remote-control possibilities in the “control room” conveys this impression. But the people in this room know better. Juho, for instance, explains that the decisions made by the managers do determine the river sections affected by hydropower dams to a great extent. But this, he cautions, is only true for short-term, daily or weekly developments. Regarding the wider catchment and a longer time-horizon, especially the course of the seasons with their unpredictable developments of precipitation, temperature, ice conditions and water discharge, the river is largely beyond the control of anybody, including the engineers in the high-tech “control room”. Confronting the river throughout the year, the hydropower company has to adapt to the rhythms of the river just like all other river dwellers. In fact, the very Finnish word valvomo, which is commonly translated as “control room”, is derived from the verb valvoa, which means “to stay awake”, “to monitor” or “to keep watch”. The central hub of hydropower management on the Kemi River is thus not primarily a place of “control”, but essentially a “lookout” on the river. What is controlled in the “control room” is the infrastructure and activities of hydropower managers – but not the river. The machinery, in turn, negotiates the streams of water (and many biological processes), but these streams are also influenced by so many dynamics which are not controlled in the “control room” that it would be severely misleading to speak of the hydropower managers’ work as “controlling” the river.

Producing, selling and supplying electricity How is hydroelectricity actually produced? And under which conditions and premises is it so significant for the modern electricity grid? While orchestrated in the “control room”, the actual electricity generation does not take place there but in the power stations along the river. The principle of hydropower is straightforward. Like many other river uses, it

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arises out of the articulation of flow and friction. In flowing down a particular relief, the river embodies energy. Damming the river concentrates part of the stream’s drop in the location of the dam. When the river’s flow is channelled through a tunnel along the bottom of the dam, the entire power of the dammed river stretch is further focussed in the tunnel. Therefore, this tunnel is the location around which machine chambers are built and where turbines are situated. The amount of electricity generated at the dam then mainly depends on three factors. The first is the extent of the head of water, i.e. the relation of the water levels upstream and downstream of the dam. The higher the head, the more energy the water embodies. The second factor is the amount of water funnelled through the tunnel and hence propelling the turbines. Generally, the higher the discharge, measured in cubic metres per second (m3 /s), i.e. the more abundant the flow, the more energy is available at the dam. The third factor concerns the technology of the turbines and the design of the tunnel along which the water passes through the dam. The lower in the ground the turbines are located, the better in terms of electricity production and turbine wear. Depending on the course and dimension of the tunnel, the water is channelled more or less evenly and swiftly from one side of the dam to the other. The technology of generator and turbine, for example the position and arrangement of propeller blades, finally determine how much of the hydropower thus focussed can be turned into electric energy. A bit less than a quarter of all electricity produced in Finland comes from hydropower. In 2008, Kemijoki Ltd alone generated 7.3% of all Finnish-produced electricity, corresponding to about one third of the country’s hydroelectric output (Kemijoki Oy 2009: 9). The largest sources of electricity in Finland are based on thermal power, often in combination with district heating facilities, and nuclear power. Overall however, Finland imports electricity from abroad, as the country’s production facilities do not cover its electricity consumption. Most imported electric energy comes from Russia in the east, other trading partners are Estonia in the south, and the Scandinavian countries in the west. With the latter countries – Norway, Sweden and Denmark – Finland is even integrated in a common electricity market, which not only levels energy prices across the national borders, but also implies that considerable amounts of electricity are transferred back and forth between these countries, depending on where demand is highest and where production takes place at any moment in time. The dynamics of “Nordpool”,3 as the common electricity market is called, link the electricity produced on the Kemi River to consumers as far away as Denmark and imply that the timing and amount of water flowing through the dams on the river are influenced by developments taking place over a thousand kilometres away from the watershed. As I write these lines, the situation on the Finnish side of the electricity market can be represented as in figure 9.1, a diagram taken from the website of the company managing the national power grid in Finland.4 It portrays the amount of electric energy consumed in Finland only a few moments ago, current sources of production and the amount of imported energy. 3 4

See http://www.nordpool.com/asa/ (accessed on 2009–07-29). The company’s name is Fingrid; its English-language website can be accessed at http://www.fingr id.fi/portal/in_english/ (accessed 2009–07-29).

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

Figure 9.1: Electricity consumption, production and import in Finland at a quarter to three in the afternoon of July 29th , 2009. At the moment, 8259 MW of electricity are used, but only 5847 MW – 1414 MW of which is hydroelectricity – are produced within the borders of the country. Therefore, 2312 MW have to be imported. Most of this electricity comes from Sweden at the moment, some from Russia and a bit from Norway. Simultaneously, a small amount of electricity is exported to Estonia. From http://www.fingrid.fi/portal/in_english/electricity_market/state_of_power_syste m/, accessed on 2009–07-29.

The fact that the Finnish electricity grid is linked up with the power lines of its neighbouring countries illustrates how electricity generation on the Kemi River is tied in with dynamics originating far beyond its watershed. That electricity prices in Finland – and therefore the incentive to produce electricity – are actually determined through the extensive Nordpool market, further corroborates this insight. These integrations with large markets and many foreign countries have tangible implications for the Kemi River. For when electricity is cheap, for example because of some excess capacity of Russian power plants, the turbines rest and the flow along large parts of the river comes to a halt. But when electricity is expensive, say because of a lack of wind to propel Denmark’s wind turbines, the inlets to turbines on the Kemi River are likely to be opened, resulting in higher than usual discharge in the river. In effect, the fluctuating demand for electricity and the concomitantly fluctuating prices engender a pattern of discharge fluctuations on the Kemi River that mirrors the daily, weekly and yearly routines of the electricity consumers. Juxtaposing a figure depicting weekly fluctuations in electricity market prices with a figure tracing the amount of hydroelectricity produced at the Kemi River during the course of one week, these parallels become strikingly visible (figs 9.2 and 9.3). The same fluctuations in prices over the course of days and weeks are reflected in fluctuations in production – and hence discharge – on the Kemi River. At night, only little electric energy is consumed so that both prices on the market and discharge on the river are low. Usually, electricity prices are so

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low that it makes economic sense to save the available water in the reservoirs upstream from the dams for later, when discharging this water will yield much higher prices. In the morning when human and business activities increase, the price for electricity rises quickly. Hydropower producers can take advantage of this by activating more turbines, selling the electricity produced with the water accumulated overnight at these higher prices.

Figure 9.2: Electricity prices measured in Euros, on the Nordpool market during week 30 in 2009. A clear pattern of high prices (around 35€) during daytime and low prices (between 0 and 28€) at night is visible over the week. Furthermore, overall prices are somewhat lower on the weekend than during working days. From http://www.nordpool.com/system/flags/elspot/area/all/ accessed 2009–07-29.

During midday, the morning-time increase of demand and price has usually levelled off (fig 9.2), and other electricity sources have taken over some of the load, so that hydroelectric production decreases slightly (fig 9.3). Some thermal power plants are cheaper than hydropower in producing the large amounts of electricity needed during the day; but no power source is as versatile as hydropower in quickly adjusting – upwards or downwards – the amount of produced energy. Therefore, it becomes useful again in the evening, when overall demand decreases with business and industrial activity slowing down, and people switching off their electrical stoves and sauna ovens at home. Also this transition in electricity load is smoothly enabled by hydropower. During the night, there

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

is little fluctuation in electricity demand, so that hydropower stations are nearly shut down, and the water again accumulates in the reservoirs.

Figure 9.3: Combined electricity production at all Kemi River power stations during week 39 in 2008. MA, TI, KE… SU refer to the days of the week from Monday through Sunday. Clearly visible are the daily fluctuations of the amount of electricity produced, oscillating between around 150 MW during the night and 800 MW during morning and evening peaks of production. Less clear, but nevertheless visible is the weekly pattern with somewhat reduced peaks during the weekend. The principles of hydropower imply that at moments of high production, water discharge in the river will also be high, while during periods of low production, discharges will be low as well. From Kemijoki Oy (2009: 11).

The versatility of water enables a production technology that can generate energy only during periods of peak demand and high prices, while storing the energy during phases of low demand and electricity prices. Taken to its extreme, this means that the river should be shut down into a reservoir as long as electricity prices are low, and drained at maximum discharge when these prices reach their maximum. A young Kemijoki Ltd engineer explains that one of the core challenges of the company is to reconcile the logic of the accountant with the logic of the engineer. The accountants of the main shareholding company, on the one hand, are eager to maximise the economic profits of hydroelectricity production on the river. The engineers in charge of producing this electricity, on the other hand, try to maximise the efficiency of the process. While the former aim at making the highest amount of money from the available water, the latter would prefer to work towards the highest amount of electricity from this water. These two strategies are often quite different. For instance, producing a lot of electricity during periods of high demand and price often means working the turbines beyond their maximum efficiency. As with most machines, the relation between input (discharge) and output (electricity) of turbines is such that beyond a particular point a further increase in input will raise the output at a smaller rate than before. Thus, more water per megawatt has to be expended if production is raised beyond this point. Economically this can make sense, as the electricity price during such peak periods is a mul-

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tiple of the price during times of low demand. But in terms of the energy efficiency of hydropower, this is a drawback. Furthermore, the young engineer adds, efficiency on the Kemi River means much more than transforming all available hydropower into electricity. It also means maintaining a good relationship with the riverbank inhabitants, for whom extreme fluctuations of the river water table often have negative repercussions, for instance in terms of fishing or of moving on the river ice. If the hydropower company wants to be able to continue its work, and possibly even extend its “harnessing” (valjastaa) of the river, it has to prove to the river dwellers that electricity production on the Kemi River neither harms other river uses nor greatly affects the stream’s ecology. The young engineer concludes that ultimately, the job of his company is to translate and adapt the electricity orders from the main shareholder to the realities of this particular river. The stocks of the main shareholder are principally owned by US American pensioners, most of whom probably do not even know where Lapland is, let alone the Kemi River. Adapting these pensioners’ interests in keeping their pensions high to the interests of the Kemi River dwellers in a river with a solid ice cover during the winter, modest floods during the spring and only slight changes in daily water table fluctuations during the summer – this is the major challenge of working at Kemijoki Ltd. Today, most permanent dwellings in the Kemi River catchment area are linked to the national electricity grid. Electricity lines also lead to many summer cabins, even to some lacking road access. But just as the road network penetrated the catchment basin only during the twentieth century, power lines were also a rare sight in the recent past. Electricity supply was even slower to spread through the area than roads were (Myllyntaus 1991). In fact, during most of the first half of the twentieth century, Rovaniemi only had one small wood-fuelled electricity generator, as an old river dweller remembers. The connection of riverbank dwellings to the national power grid only slowly developed with the completion of hydropower stations on the Kemi River during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Still today, electricity lines are being extended to more and more buildings, often summer cabins. Presently, the amount of electricity produced in the province of Lapland – mainly by means of Kemi River hydropower – roughly equals the amount consumed there. In this respect the province differs from the rest of the country, that overall has to import electricity. A few decades ago, this dynamic was even more pronounced, when Lapland was a net exporter of electric energy to southern Finland. The expansion of hydropower production on the Kemi River had proceeded at a pace much faster than the electrification of the province. While this was clearly in line with the national strategy of using Kemi River hydropower for fuelling the entire country’s energy supply (Nevanlinna and Lax 1968, Holm 1991), not just that of its northernmost province, it created many hostilities among the river dwellers towards the hydropower company. Kemijoki Ltd was seen as just another actor in the southern project of robbing the north of its resources (cf. Massa 1994). Today, as Lappish electricity consumption has caught up with Kemi River hydroelectricity production, and nuclear power and other sources have shrunk the proportion of the river’s hydropower in the national grid, these feelings of dispossession have somewhat decreased among river dwellers. But a certain amount of unease towards the “harnessing” of the river remains, particularly in so far as the specific qualities of hydropower – its

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

quick adaptability to fluctuating demand – continues to be used in response to dynamics happening far away from the catchment basin. Instead of letting the river flow as it does and turning this energy into electricity, the discharge is restricted and augmented according to rhythms of life in Helsinki, Copenhagen and other distant places.

Hydropower as stabiliser of the electricity grid Although the Kemi River provides, in absolute numbers, for only a small share of the electricity consumed in Finland, the people in the “control room” emphasise that in terms of the viability of the entire grid, it plays a vital role. As sketched above, hydropower is much more capable of quickly adjusting its output to fluctuations in electricity demand. But it does more than easing the morning- and evening shifts in energy consumption. During the entire day and night, small shifts in electricity consumption occur ceaselessly, as lamps, machines, radiators or stoves connected to the grid are switched on and off. In order to maintain a stable current, these shifts have to be met instantaneously, and only hydropower has the ability to react so quickly. If electricity provision and consumption deviate too far, the electric grid collapses, there will be blackouts in homes and processes of industrial production will be interrupted. In order to avoid such a scenario, particular capacities of electricity generation are reserved for quickly adjusting production and levelling the frequency in the grid. The Kemi River provides over a third of this capacity for the Finnish grid.5 For the discharge at the river this implies in turn an additional rhythm, interacting with the others. Each generator is equipped with a computerised steering module that measures the frequency in the grid and automatically adjusts its production to the measured fluctuations. Some of this stabilising is actually realised by the very physical properties of hydroelectricity generation, without the need for high-tech modules. Because of the sheer weight of the turbines and the immense forces of the water pressing past them, the turbines’ torsional moment is not easily altered and thereby keeps the electrical current stable by continuing to turn at a particular speed even though the resistance on the generators’ coils increases with higher electricity consumption. Again it is the friction around the turbines, relating to flow in the river, that maintains another flow, that of electricity.

Seasons of water and electricity Alongside the daily, short-term and immediate regulation of the electricity grid, Kemi River hydropower is also used for meeting some of the fluctuations in electricity demand occurring over the course of the year. Typically, less electricity is used during the summer than during the winter, mostly because of consumption for heating and lighting. The availability of water in the Kemi River, however, displays a somewhat different pattern. While the watercourse floods during late spring and early summer, discharge diminishes significantly with the freezing of precipitation, ground and river in early winter. Thus,

5

See Kemijoki Ltd website, http://www.kemijoki.fi/ (accessed 2009–07-30); the cited information is located in the sub-site “Uusiutuva energialähde” (Renewable energy source), and further under “Säätösähkö” (Regulation electricity).

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when electricity demand is high, hydropower is limited, whereas when water is plentiful, electricity consumption is below average. This mismatch has been tackled by constructing large reservoirs that are designed to impound some of the spring flood waters and retain them until the winter, when they are released into the river and the power houses (e.g., Kivekäs 1985). The two reservoirs on the headwaters of the Luiro and Kitinen Rivers, Lokka and Porttipahta, have been linked by a channel so that most of the water from the headwaters of both rivers is drained along a single trajectory, namely through the seven hydropower stations on the middle and lower Kitinen River. In this way, Kemijoki Ltd did not have to construct dams on both rivers, but could concentrate its investments on the Kitinen River. This has substantially increased the discharge in this stream, and significantly reduced flow along the Luiro River. In terms of hydroelectricity production, however, this is a success story, as less flood water is discharged through the spill gates in spring, and more hydropower is available during winter to turn the turbines on the Kitinen and Kemi Rivers. While the water level of these reservoirs is fairly stable during summer and autumn, their capacities for storing water and hydropower are utilised mostly during winter and early spring, when they are covered by a thick ice crust. This ice crust typically descends with the water table, eventually covering the ground of the reservoir in the more shallow areas. After this ice has melted in spring, the spring flood water gradually refills the reservoir to its summertime level. Nowhere in the catchment basin is this practice so much disputed as on Lake Kemi, famous for being the “most intensely regulated natural lake in Finland”.6 While the area’s inhabitants had become used to the seasonal fluctuations of a lake over the millennialong settlement of the lake’s shores, humans and animals have obviously experienced a number of difficulties since the adjustment of these fluctuations to the variations in electricity demand. The summertime amplitude of water level fluctuations is now only sixtyfive centimetres, but during the winter, the water table is drained by seven metres on the lower lake, and by three metres on the upper lake. During spring, the seven metres of water level decrease translate into strips of exposed reservoir bottom hundreds of metres wide along the shores of the former lake. This muddy landscape, littered with stumps and roots of the trees that had once grown there and had been quickly cut before the first filling of the reservoir, is considered a menace by many inhabitants of the area. The plainest reason for this is that it looks bad, smells bad and hinders access to the remaining waters of the lake-turned-reservoir. But it also hampers the reproduction of certain fish species, particularly pike. Kala-Erkki explains that pike usually spawn during the spring flood, preferably in the vegetation of flooded shore areas, bogs or creeks. In Lake Kemi, however, the water does not flood the shores any more, but is channelled through until rather late in the flood. Often, the water does not reach its highest level until June, when the spawning season of pike is past. Instead, pike have spawned on the “mud”, as Kala-Erkki calls the lake shore in spring, which is the bottom of the lake during the summer. Few eggs survive, and 6

This phrase comes from a panel of the 1998 “Kemi River, my love” exhibition in the Regional Museum of Lapland in Rovaniemi (“Nykyisellään Kemijärvi on maan voimakkaimmin säännöstelty luonnonjärvi.”).

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

pike have to be bred in farms and restocked in the lake. During winter and early spring, the lowering of the water table and ice crust substantially limits fish habitat and fishing possibilities. Also, the ice layer weighing on the lake bottom unsettles the sediments and pollutes the remaining water. Many fish species do not hold out in such an environment, and those that survive escape into the river downstream. For hydropower generation and the prevention of flooding downstream, the reservoir of Lake Kemi provides a valuable tool; for many inhabitants, however, its use as a reservoir compromises accessing and benefiting from the lake. Their claims for a reduction of the amplitude of water table regulation or for bringing forward the refilling period in spring are inevitably defeated by the hegemony of hydropower (cf. Väntänen et al. 2004).

River dwellers and river-robbers Most of the hydropower constructions on the Kemi River, particularly those completed during the late 1940s until the 1970s, have been realised in a manner that largely ignored the interests and traditions of river dwellers, imposing a plan thought out by distant decision-makers. The single purpose was to provide electricity for Finnish industries under reconstruction and in a process of rapid mechanisation. Just as the case had been with wood-processing industries, Lapland was considered a source of raw material needed to fuel enterprises based elsewhere, typically in the south of Finland (cf. Massa 1994). The sheer amount of electricity produced, as well as the layout of the long-distance power lines leading south, were regarded as clear indicators that hydropower was yet another means of draining the north of its riches for the benefit of the south. Much of the affected riverside population felt it was being robbed of its river that has so often been called the region’s “stream of life” (elämän virta). Consequently, the hydropower company became widely known as “river-robber” (jokirosvo). Presently, Kemijoki Ltd is still referred to as “river-robber” by people who want to make a point. Tapsa, for instance, strategically mentions the term when he wants to emphasise his opposition to discourses and practices of industrial modernisation in northern Finland. Born in 1951 in Pelkosenniemi on the upper Kemi River, he lives on the shore of Lake Kemi today, working as a free-lance journalist, photographer and political activist. He propagates alternative tourism as regional development strategy, engages in issues of nature conversation, and is a passionate collector of oral histories. One of the overarching topics in his work is the Kemi River, and he admits that he plans – one day – to write the “epic” of the river. Tapsa has collected accounts of the early articulation of opposition to the hydropower company on the upper Kemi River and around Lake Kemi. Many suggest that resistance towards the great plans of “harnessing” the river was often sparked by the arrogant and condescending approach of the salesmen who came to buy hydropower shares from the river dwellers. Such behaviour frequently continued in subsequent phases of planning and building dams, during which many river dwellers felt offended by the attitude of the representatives of Kemijoki Ltd. Some recall that when these representatives depended on the river dwellers, they would at once be extremely friendly, only to revert to snooti-

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ness once they had got what they wanted. Tapsa concludes that the “river-robber” was seen as only one more proof of the rule that nothing good has ever come to Lapland from the south. Eila also knows many stories of the nasty ways of the hydropower company during their construction boom of the 1960s. She has been particularly struck by the company’s attitude towards river dwellers. In the autobiography of a former Kemijoki Ltd chief construction engineer she has read in what low esteem the riverside population was held by senior hydropower staff. They were thought to be ignorant and backward, and were treated accordingly. If their ignorant and backward ways conflicted with the plans of the hydropower company, they had to be brought into line by force. Eila tells the story of a Mr Ukkola, who lived in the area of the reservoir of Porttipahta. This man refused to sell his land to be inundated, and he remained on his property until the police came to transport him off. The reservoir was filled and Mr Ukkola’s home was drowned. He would not accept any money in compensation from the hydropower company, and continued to live in a trailer on the shore of the reservoir until his death, almost like a monument to the violence of hydropower construction. The spokeswoman of the Lapland office of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (SLL) explains that throughout post-war history, people in Lapland have learnt that the “river-robber” always gets its way, as it disposes of loads of money, works with mean tricks and has the country’s powerful on its side. Therefore, many river dwellers today react to new hydropower projects as if resistance was futile and non-compliance would only result in problems for themselves. Furthermore, Kemijoki Ltd wields considerable influence along those river stretches where the company has bought land and water areas in preparation for planned hydropower developments. Helena, the key figure of the social movement opposing the Vuotos reservoir plans, makes it clear that the hydropower company can manipulate almost any activity in the area of the formerly planned reservoir. In spite of the legally sanctioned abandoning of the project, the company still owns most of the area that had been planned to be inundated with the construction of the reservoir. Helena explains that it is today largely in the hands of Kemijoki Ltd whether or not new inhabitants and economic activities will be able to enter the area. On the other hand, the “harnessing” of the Kemi River represents a famous success story of post-war reconstruction, industrial development and modernisation in Finland, and a monument to the skills of the country’s engineers. A retired employee from Pirttikoski clearly remembers the fame of this power station, as the “largest tunnel hydropower plant in Finland”, and the second largest in the world. The pensioner recounts the power station’s visitors included not only the country’s presidents Kekkonen and Koivisto, but also such esteemed international guests as Leonid Brezhnev from the Soviet Union and Josip Tito from Yugoslavia. Helena, however, having for decades struggled against the plans of the Vuotos reservoir project, does not buy into this image of the company as a developer of the region and the country. She finds it impertinent how Kemijoki Ltd frequently presents itself as a benefactor of the river, while really all the company is out for is damming it and messing with its flow. According to Helena, the superficially environmentally and socially aware hydroelectricity producer is merely a “river-robber” in disguise.

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

Owning hydropower If Kemijoki Ltd is habitually referred to as a “river-robber”, what is it that people feel has been “robbed”? The river water today is largely the same as it used to be a century ago; and the river course, even though somewhat wider in places, runs along a very similar trajectory as before. I suggest the most severe loss for river dwellers has been the altering of the river’s rhythmic flow, when its currents, rapids and seasonal dynamics were dammed. With the particular rhythms of the river – discharge, freezing, fish movements, etc. – at the mercy of a big company, river dwellers felt their river had been taken away from them. The river has often been associated with its rapids and particular fish species, which all disappeared with hydropower developments. Without the rapids, as the most focussed phenomena of the river’s flow and friction, there was little left to differentiate the river from a lake. Without salmon and grayling, the watercourse did not even “taste” any different than a lake any more. Thus, the river had been stolen, and river dwellers were left merely with a band of water, but without the river. How is this idea of ownership and loss reflected in real-estate discourse? Many river dwellers report that Kemijoki Ltd “owns the river”, or its waters, or its flow. And the impression surely arises in the face of the strong economic and technological grip that the company has on the river. But ownership of the Kemi River has many dimensions. The river of fish, for instance, is owned and regulated by various fishery associations and the Finnish Forest Authority. Access to the waters for boating and angling, and for strolls along the river bank is guaranteed to all by the constitutional “Everyman’s Right”. And ownership of a plot of riverbank land grants access to net fishing on the corresponding river stretch. Can a river, however, be owned (cf. Blomley 2008)? Ownership of watercourses in Finland is modelled on land ownership, and therefore exhibits certain peculiarities. An environmental law scholar in Rovaniemi explains that generally, a riverbank plot extends beyond the shore into the water, conferring the ownership of a section of the river bed to the owner of the plot. Usually in mid-river, the river bed plot ends as it meets the plot extending from the opposite shore. While ownership of the river bed does confer certain rights on the owner – such as to fish with a net or to make structural modifications in the river – it does not include the ownership of the water running through the river. Access to and power over the water is regulated by different means, but is not a direct function of the territory through which it flows, just as the air above a plot of land is not the property of the landowner. The water itself remains a common pool resource that is subject to the Finnish Environmental Licence Authority. Nevertheless, buying river bed plots, riverside land and river islands belongs to the routine preparations of Kemijoki Ltd for new dam projects. The company owns over ninety percent of the area of the former Vuotos reservoir project and about sixty percent of the area to be inundated by the dam of Sierilä. Even though the former project has been abandoned and the latter put on hold, Kemijoki Ltd thus continues to wield considerable power over these areas, as its real estate managers can practically decide what happens on the river and what does not. Kemijoki Ltd is often accused of treating the Vuotos area almost as if it were the bottom of the reservoir that the company had planned there, neglecting forest management and other landowner’s

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duties and contributing to the continuing social, economic and aesthetic degradation of the area. Because of the importance of riverside land ownership, plots whose owners refuse to sell to Kemijoki Ltd attain high symbolic value. Matti’s farm on the river stretch of the planned Sierilä reservoir is such a place, and so is the land owned by the “Power of Vuotos Ltd” on which activists built a cabin. Whereas the river itself cannot thus be owned, it is crucial – both symbolically and practically – who owns and what goes on along the river banks. The environmental law scholar, however, points out that in a legal sense, land ownership is not decisive for the success of hydropower constructions. The Supreme Court decision against the Vuotos reservoir project, for instance, was based on assumed general repercussions for the river and the Baltic Sea, not on ownership circumstances in the area to be inundated. And Matti points to the other side of the coin: If a licence is granted for the construction and operation of a dam at Sierilä, his farm can be inundated without compensation. The critical aspect of river ownership for hydroelectricity generation is thus neither the territory, through which the water flows or on which it is stored, nor the river, which cannot be owned at all. Instead, the company planning to build a hydropower station must own the energy inherent in the water descending a certain height along the river course. This energy is called “rapids real estate” (koskitila) and originally referred to the ownership of a rapid water section that was relevant for the operation of a mill. During the Finnish land reform (isojako), initiated in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing in more peripheral areas until well into the twentieth, the ownership of rapids was divided along with forest-, farmland and watercourses, creating so-called “rapidsshares” (koskiosuus) owned by the various landowners. These shares remained highly abstract objects for many river dwellers, who were surprised when, during the early twentieth century, businessmen travelled to their villages to offer them money in exchange for these rights. It is indeed confusing that the right to the energy of the descending water, “the rapids”, can be traded independently of the land through which this water descends. There are stories of “rapids”-traders tricking, pressuring or making the owner drunk, in order to get their signature for the transaction of the “rapids-shares”. Other stories tell of the huge sums of money that such traders could make at the time, buying the shares cheaply from unaware river dwellers and selling them expensively to the hydropower companies eager to build dams and produce electricity. Today, owning these hydropower rights pays off quite well. Juho is known among his colleagues as the man who can calculate how much money a cubic metre of water in the Kemi River is worth in terms of the electricity it generates. When asked, Juho says that such calculations are based on a rather simple function of elevation, electricity price, and the efficiency and capacity of power stations. Of course the electricity price fluctuates dramatically over the course of a day, and Juho must factor in a plethora of placespecific environmental, hydrological and legal factors; but the basic algorithm remains valid. What this also implies is that hydropower stations, once installed, can produce large amounts of electricity at rather low costs, making the ownership of “rapids real estate” and the licences for building and operating power stations a lucrative affair. The ownership of the somewhat abstract “rapids real estate” is thus valued even higher than real estate of actual watercourses. On the Kemi River, owning the river bed

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

– and thus the “water area” (vesialue) – is not considered particularly attractive. The river bank, on the other hand, is regarded as very valuable. The area where land and water meet, where the river can be accessed and contemplated, is seen as a most appropriate location for a summer home. Therefore, plots that have previously been used in farming, forestry or timber floating are recently being sold at good rates as summer cabin lots. During the early twentieth century, when the “rapids real estate” was bought along the Kemi River, the rich and powerful of the time secured their share of the hydropower rights. These included the Finnish state, as an enthusiastic promoter of economic development in the region, and the forest and wood-processing companies, also state-owned in part, active in the area and in need for electric energy. Therefore it is not surprising that the main shareholders of the companies producing hydroelectricity on the Kemi River today comprise the wood-processing industry and the state (e.g., Kemijoki Oy 2009: 5).

Managing hydropower and social relations If the hydropower of the river is thus largely controlled by Kemijoki Ltd, electricity production should be predominantly a technical affair. But is that the case? To what extent do hydropower managers feel accountable and responsible to the riverside population? And how do they negotiate the goal of electricity production with the interests of other river dwellers.

Transparency or manipulation? The current public face of Kemijoki Ltd seems much more transparent, friendly and open to public concerns than it must have been during its early decades. One engineer explains that the company has recently been focussing much more on communication with the riverside population, and hydroelectricity production is thus much better understood and more accepted than earlier. The company publishes annual reports, environmental accounts, and brochures concerning plans and construction projects. Each hydropower station is equipped with an information panel displaying technical details of the particular plant alongside some general statements about the company and the Kemi River as hydroelectricity generator. Until recently, especially before the official abandonment of the Vuotos reservoir project, Kemijoki Ltd regularly published a journal under the title of “Current News” (Virta Uutiset),7 which was distributed among the riverside population. The latest construction project in Oikarainen, concerning the dam and power station of Sierilä, has been in preparation for over ten years, but building activities have not yet begun. Instead, the company keeps trying to persuade river dwellers and environmental groups of the project’s benefits, and attempts to influence public opinion instead of single-handedly beginning to build the dam. A slide show, shown to visitors of the power station of Pirttikoski, depicts roughly as many scenes of the area’s landscape, plants and

7

While the English translation of the title embodies a double pun, the Finnish word virta in fact only signifies “current” as in “stream” or “electrical current” (thus one pun as it is). But it does not mean “recent” as well.

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animals as it shows hydropower constructions, and one of its core statements is that water is absolutely the same before and after it has passed along a turbine. Alongside the environmental benignity of hydropower, the fact that it represents a renewable and above all “home-grown” (kotimainen) source of energy is also frequently emphasised. The discomforting certainty that a large share of the electricity consumed in Finland has to be imported from its powerful neighbour, Russia, is often invoked as a reason to increase national electricity production capacities. In 1998, the Provincial Museum of Lapland organised an exhibition about the past, present and future of hydropower in Lapland, in close cooperation with Kemijoki Ltd. Not only did the hydropower company finance about half of the exhibition’s expenses, it was also responsible for a large part of the very content on display. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the exhibition took a rather uncritical stance towards hydropower developments on the Kemi River. It was entitled “Kemi River, my love – Stream of life and of light” (Kemijoki armaani – Elämän ja valon virta), thus appropriating the popular expression of the “stream of life” by adding electricity (“light”) to it. From the planning documents for the exhibition the image of a somewhat technology-focussed display emerges, which justified the damming of the Kemi River by showing a dwelling with electrical kitchen appliances and telephones. Quite a few river dwellers accept this reasoning. Even Anneli, who has experienced the silencing of most of the rapids around her home village, says that after all electricity has become absolutely necessary, and has to be produced somewhere. Further to changing its rhetoric, Kemijoki Ltd has also begun to confront existing setbacks of hydropower production, such as the erosion of riverbanks with altered flow regimes, or the ecological and aesthetic repercussions of the draw-down zones of reservoirs, by organising workshops with river dwellers, carrying out landscaping activities and paying for fish restocking. Many river dwellers appreciate this development in the public relations strategy of the hydropower company, but not all find it convincing. Not only Helena sees the current friendliness and glossy brochures as a disguise for the essential “river-robber”; Eero also interprets the company’s demeanour as a “bread and circuses” strategy to divert attention from the real issues. Also the SLL spokeswoman cautions that most discussions with Kemijoki Ltd representatives only show how far out of the question the priority of hydroelectricity is (see chapter four). The river dwellers’ feeling of powerlessness, built during half a century of unremitting hydropower expansion, is thus exacerbated even further. Kala-Erkki has many reasons to complain about the utilisation of Lake Kemi as a hydropower reservoir for its many repercussions for fish and fishing. One problem is that before damming the lake, many tree stumps remained in the ground and have been gradually eroded out over the previous forty years. He knows of recent, half-hearted efforts by the hydropower company to remove some of these tree stumps, but calls them “child’s play”. If the hydropower company really was out to support local fishermen, it would go about this task more often than a few weeks in a year, and probably even reconsider some of the very fluctuations that erode the ground and jeopardise fishing.

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

Communicating through river water Juho, Erkki and other people in the hydropower company who are actually in charge of electricity production know that the most important medium of Kemijoki Ltd’s public relations is neither glossy magazines nor drift-wood removal from reservoirs or wellplanned exhibitions, but looking after the river. One of the central points of conflict between hydropower company and river dwellers is the amplitude of daily and yearly fluctuations of the water table in the river. Once a dam is constructed and in operation, this structure itself rarely seems to be the subject of conflict any longer. The amplitude of water level fluctuations, however, frequently becomes a new focus of conflict, as the regulation of discharge creates a shoreline quite unlike the banks of un-dammed lakes or rivers. No vegetation survives the frequent changes of inundation and exposure, and all but larger rocks are soon eroded, turning the banks of many dammed river stretches and especially of the larger reservoirs into areas difficult to access and ecologically strongly modified. The legally required lower and upper limits are often closely watched not only in the “control room”, but also by boaters, fishers and riverside residents. Should the latter notice a breach of these limits, Kemijoki Ltd can be sure of receiving complaints soon. Because of the delicacy of the issue, the “control room” personnel try to minimise water table fluctuations even more than is mandatory. On the reservoir of Isohaara, for instance, the fluctuation limit specified in the operation licence is one metre. In practice, however, the variation of the water table is kept at sixty centimetres, a measure that has resulted from discussions and consultations with inhabitants of this most contentious river stretch. Where sixty years ago the first hydropower dam in the watershed had been built eradicating the river’s salmon population and inundating large tracts of riverbanks and islands, the current major hydropower company tries to make the situation as unproblematic for river dwellers as possible. To this end, the “control room” personnel sometimes even have to debate with the representatives of their major shareholder who gives out the daily electricity order. If meeting this demand would require “driving” the river too roughly, Erkki and his colleagues call the shareholder to negotiate an adjustment of the ordered amount of electricity. This can be a fraught issue, as the shareholder has often sold the electricity in advance. But upsetting the riverside population, they figure, would be much more detrimental. Such issues are especially evident during the periods of freezing and melting on the river. One third of the population of Lapland lives along the Kemi River around Rovaniemi, in the seventy kilometre stretch between the hydropower dams of Vanttauskoski and Valajaskoski. Erkki indicates that this river section has therefore to be treated particularly gently. Floods must be avoided and a reliable ice crust must be allowed to form as early as possible. Erkki points out that ironically, however, this stretch is also the part of the river over which the hydropower company has least control, because most of the part upstream from Rovaniemi is not dammed, and in the town centre itself the large un-dammed tributary Ounas River flows into the Kemi River. Nevertheless, most river dwellers blame Kemijoki Ltd for all the irregularities that happen anywhere along the river’s main course and even beyond.

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The responsibility of hydroelectricity production The general alterations of the Kemi River by hydropower constructions are so evident that many river dwellers see the entire catchment basin as under the responsibility of the hydropower company. This is reflected, for instance, in the currently most common name by which Kemijoki Ltd is referred to, “River Company” (Jokiyhtiö). The company might have “robbed” the river from its previous owners, and probably has been most prominent when commissioning the huge hydropower dams across the river, which earned it the occasional designation of “Power-station Company” (Voimalaitosyhtiö); but today it is most widely known as the firm managing the river, responsible for the river, or even identified with the river. As a result, many developments in the catchment area are attributed to the activities of Kemijoki Ltd, especially the not so popular ones. In early 2008, for example, a particular dynamic of temperatures and water level led to the damaging of about a hundred and fifty permanent boating piers and other fixed structures. In most places of the watershed, piers and other constructions tend to be removed from the water in autumn, to protect them from the forces of the ice and the vagaries of the spring flood. On Lake Kemi, however, the inhabitants had grown used to the hydropower company regulating the water table in a predictable manner that included lowering the water and ice levels throughout the winter and refilling the lake only in late spring towards the end of the flood, so that permanent piers seemed viable. In fact, this dynamic has become accepted so much as the “nature” of the lake, that Kemijoki Ltd had to agree to pay compensations for the damaged constructions. One hydropower engineer remembers that one spring, when parts of the municipal centre of Kittilä were flooded, a number of people blamed Kemijoki Ltd for having caused the flooding by not discharging enough water through downstream dams. The engineer explains that this alleged causation is hardly plausible as Kittilä is situated on the un-dammed Ounas River, 150 km upstream from its confluence with the Kemi River main course where the next power station is situated. Between Kittilä and the dam, the river descends a number of rapids, totalling an elevation differential of over one hundred metres, which would have to be levelled before any upstream consequences of the dam could be felt. Regardless of these hydrological dynamics, the engineer remembers, the argument attributing partial responsibility for the Kittilä flooding the hydropower company was not unpopular during the early search for explanations of the incident. Kemijoki Ltd is deemed responsible for the river, in particular for its main course where most of the dams are. This river is considered a mechanism created, utilised and managed by the hydropower company. Not only is Kemijoki Ltd called the “River Company”, but also the river is considered an instrument owned by the company.

River mangers from Lapland In general, Erkki and his colleagues emphasise that they do their best to treat the riverside population in a considerate and friendly manner. Only in this way can they earn the respect of other river dwellers, which they know is a rather difficult task given the problematic history of their company. But there is another side to the considerate and friendly treatment that hydropower producers want to extend to the riverside population. Hy-

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

dropower personnel also live by the river and use it for fishing, boating, skiing and more. And so do their friends, relatives and in-laws. Being gentle in river management thus amounts to being polite to a very concrete, and often rather close, set of people, including one’s own person. The division of river dwellers into those who affect the stream by hydropower production and those affected by it thus becomes extremely blurred in practice. Juho once invited me to an ice-fishing competition held downstream from the dam of Petäjäskoski, in which Kemijoki Ltd participated along with the local village association and a number of other firms and organisations from Rovaniemi. I asked Juho what he thinks the competitors from the village association think about sitting side by side on the river ice with the employees of the “river-robber”. He replied that the dam of Petäjäskoski is about the same age as himself. Not many people are likely to remember the river or the adjacent landscape before the dam, and those who do have had over fifty years to get acquainted to it. Moreover, many employees of the hydropower company are related to the inhabitants of the dammed river stretch; for many years, Kemijoki Ltd even ran an entire village around the dam of Petäjäskoski. Therefore, Juho said, he did not expect any animosities during the ice-fishing competition. And neither did I notice any. On a different occasion, Juho explains another aspect of the close ties between hydropower personnel and the social and ecological dynamics of the Kemi River. In order to appropriately generate electricity, hydropower managers have to know the actual river. This is a valuable asset for the employees, as first of all they become more experienced and hence more appreciated instead of redundant when they grow older; and secondly the power station management cannot be “moved to China” to save labour costs.

Observing the river In spite of the large amount of data and the most sophisticated computer models available to the hydroelectricity producers, they do not rely solely on these indirect observations. Erkki and Juho undertake various trips to specific sites along the river in order to obtain a direct impression of its flow, ice crust or snow cover. Especially in autumn and in spring, such observation is necessary because the river is particularly difficult to deal with during the phases of transition from a river covered in ice to a river of open water and vice versa. One crucial but unknown variable each year is the extent of the spring flood. Depending on the “water equivalent” of the accumulated snow in the catchment basin and the dynamics of temperature increase during spring, a flood can be large or small, early or late, long or short, and with one high peak or multiple lower ones (see chapter ten). In spite of a number of meteorological measuring stations, decades’ worth of past hydrological data, and advanced computer programmes, these developments are most difficult if not impossible to predict. Erkki and Juho embark on a “snow-flight” (lumilento) each spring to take a look at the extent of water and snow in the upper catchment basin in order to plan how to deal with the flood. On the one hand, the responsibilities of the “River Company” imply that they have to avoid flooding along the river. On the other hand, they must not spill more water past the turbines than absolutely necessary, and fill up the

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reservoirs soon enough, in order to maximise the efficiency of the power stations and produce enough electricity over the coming year. Therefore, Erkki and Juho fly in a small aeroplane over the headwaters of the Kemi River and a few strategic tributaries, in order to gauge the amount of water to come flowing into the main river over the course of the spring. Most significant are those tributaries where discharge can increase rapidly and extensively with the melting of the snow, for instance along the upper Kemi River and its tributaries Värriö and Tenniö Rivers. Far away from hydropower stations and meteorological measuring equipment, it is very difficult to assess how the springtime melting of snow and surging of watercourse develops in this part of the catchment, making it crucial for Erkki and Juho to find out how much water they still have to expect from this area. On the small Cessna plane, Erkki sits in front, next to the pilot. Before taking off, they have discussed the general route of the flight, and Erkki occasionally suggests minor changes of course or flying circles over a particular area to take a closer look. Sometimes the plane comes rather close to the ground, but most of the time it flies a few hundred metres high. Erkki comments on the amount of snow on the ground and the amount of water in bogs, lakes and rivers. In the back of the plane, Juho shares the narrow bench with the lucky anthropologist who was allowed to come along. We communicate by microphones on headsets, as the noise of the plane makes all other conversation impossible. Juho sometimes adds to Erkki’s comments. With a digital camera he takes pictures of some of the locations over which we fly. On a sheet of paper, he takes notes about the amount of water in the landscape. After having passed the headwaters of the upper Kemi River, and continuing towards the tributaries of the Kitinen River, the notes on Juho’s sheet already give a rather clear impression: The spring flood on the Kemi River will be rather small in 2008; the cool temperatures, warming up only gradually, and the comparatively small amount of snow still in the upper catchment suggest that the reservoirs can soon be refilled without risking flooding. After returning to the airport in Rovaniemi, Erkki and Juho will have a brief chat about their assessment of the snowmelt situation and decide on the general strategy to manage dams and spill-gates during the coming weeks. Alongside the “snow-flight”, hydropower managers also employ other means of observing the Kemi River directly. Erkki for instance is a passionate cross-country skier, who sometimes chooses tracks that he deems particularly revealing about the state of the river ice. On a springtime meeting with representatives from the fire brigade, the environmental administration and other bodies, Erkki once mentioned that he had recently been “studying” (tutkia) the ice conditions of the hydropower reservoir Lake Olkka, by skiing across it. When some of those present expressed their surprise at this research method, Erkki explained that skiing provides a rather exact image of water level and ice characteristics, which can be helpful indicators when estimating the development of the coming spring flood. While skiing, he can feel the texture and magnitude of snow, he can see how far the water table – and hence the ice crust – has declined, and he can hear how the ice sounds when he puts weight on it. Also in early winter when an ice crust forms on the river, Juho and Erkki find it important to take direct looks at the stream in order to prepare strategies of hydropower management. The company is interested in a quick formation of the ice crust, both for

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

physical or engineering and for social or political reasons. The social or political reasons for Kemijoki Ltd’s interests in the quick formation of an ice cover are due to the popularity of the frozen-over river. While accessing a river in the process of forming an ice crust is rather dangerous, river dwellers very much enjoy cross-country skiing, ice-fishing, snowmobiling and other activities on the river ice. A freezing river surface implies waiting river dwellers, a frozen river surface means happy ones. Also, most river dwellers are aware of the fact that the fluctuations in the amount of discharge engendered by hydropower production jeopardise freezing. In order to maintain good relations with the riverside population, Erkki and his team thus try to run the hydropower stations in a way that facilitates the quick formation of a complete and reliable ice crust on the Kemi River. Observing water levels, discharge numbers and electricity loads in the “control room”, however, does not allow for gearing hydropower generation to the formation of an ice crust. Instead, Erkki and Juho drive along the river – especially the critical stretch between Rovaniemi and Vanttauskoski – and observe the state of the forming ice cover. On the occasion when they took me along on this trip, they stopped at a number of critical sites where they generally make observations, and finally concluded that, at the moment, the ice cover was still rather fragile because of the mild temperatures, but treated carefully for another week, it should be able to form thoroughly. Erkki and Juho planned to revisit the river in the coming week in order to see to what extent their predictions and management decisions had been successful. The Kemi River is thus viewed in a variety of ways, from a variety of perspectives. The computer screens in the “control room” show particular images of the river, maps and other special representations afford different views (see figs. 4.1-9). Other visualisations have been a miniature model of hydropower construction sites, which was used to gauge the effects of different arrangements of dams, spill-gates and powerhouse, aerial photographs, flood-risk maps and a rendering of the entire catchment in terms of hydropower potential. Some views clearly demarcate the watershed divide, others emphasise the continuity of adjacent catchments. The river as electricity producer even extends much further, integrated as it is through the Nordpool market with Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Alongside these specialised views, the river is also approached directly, by hydropower managers and other river dwellers looking at it when standing on the bank, flying in a small plane, or navigating a boat. These means of “direct” observations differ as much from one another as they do as a whole from the maps-and-figures representations. But the image of the Kemi River that hydropower managers – as well as other river dwellers – hold is necessarily an amalgam of different sources, closer and more remote views, more direct and more abstract encounters. Probably all river dwellers read maps; most farmsteads display an aerial photograph of their farm and the river in the living room; many inhabitants are proficient internet-users and consult abstract representations of their stream. But they also fish, boat, swim, and spend time along the river. Some aspects of its stream are easier perceived on a computer screen, others in a shaking boat. Thus, when Erkki and Juho embark on their observation trips, they do not negate the significance of graphs and figures, but complete the picture of the river with the aspects that can be inferred only by directly looking at waters and ice.

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Hydropower developments as displacement Anthropological research has been emphasising that the places that constitute parts of people’s life-worlds and form significant aspects of their identity are not pre-given phenomena, but are actively “made” into what they are (Feld and Basso 1996, Gupta and Ferguson 1997b, Ingold 2005, 2009a). “Pausing” (Tuan 1977) or “dwelling” (Ingold 2000) in and around a location forms this location both in the minds of the inhabitants and in the lie of the land (Tilley 1994, Hirsch 1995). As Bender (1993, 2001, 2002) has emphasised, such processes of place-making are potentially deeply political and unequal. “Landscapes contain the traces of past activities, [… but:] Some pasts are more audible than others” (Bender 2001: 4). On the Kemi River, this is most evident in the major physical and semiotic transformations that many places along the banks have undergone in the context of hydropower developments. Some places have been imbued with particular meanings, others have been “un-made”, and still others have been transformed into sites of memory for the places they used to be. In what follows, I shall indicate how the various displacements associated with hydropower developments have been moments of making and reconfiguring places along the river. I use “displacement” as a shorthand for forceful alteration of the relations between people and their environments, including the movement of people or substances from one place to another, but also the concomitant transformations of landscape, power and rhythms. How has the river landscape changed with damming the stream? What has this implied for the relations of river dwellers with the river? How did dams restructure the spatial and temporal rhythms of the Kemi River? And how has damming instilled a feeling of powerlessness among the river dwellers?

... of people The river banks, being the most densely populated and most intensely used area of the region, were in many places inundated by hydropower damming, so that many people and activities have been displaced, particularly between the 1950s and 1970s. Tapani’s account (chapter two) suggests that this was hard on all river dwellers who had to abandon their homes and livelihoods, but particularly severe for people who had identified with the particular place (often a farm) throughout their lives and lacked vocational training to adapt to another situation. Particularly in so far as Finnish fisher-farmers constitute a “house society” (chapter three), where place, buildings and inhabitants form an organic whole, the loss of these places and the fruits of people’s engagement with them inevitably has devastating effects. While some, like Tapani’s family, were forced to leave their homes to make way for a hydropower development, others were attracted by the employment opportunities that these developments brought with them. On the lower and middle reaches of the river, two entire villages were built by Kemijoki Ltd during the 1950s to house the thousands of workers needed for the huge dam constructions (Leppänen 2001, Mikola 1990). This extensive movement of people does not seem to have been regarded as very problematic, other than in purely technical terms. Possibly this was due to the fact that since the 1940s, the population of Lapland, and of other Finnish regions as well, had been on

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

the move a number of times, especially during the evacuation of the province during the Lapland War of 1944 and the ensuing reconstruction and resettlement period. Furthermore, a reorganization of human population seems to have been accepted as part of the process of modernisation of Finland as a whole, and of the country’s more peripheral regions in particular. Helena recounts that such displacement of people for the sake of hydropower developments was never discussed when she was in school (chapter two). Eila knows of a number of suicides that took place in the context of actual or allegedly imminent displacement. Two brothers from one of the villages that had to be emptied to make way for the reservoir of Lokka are said to have preferred death to moving to the municipal centre of Sodankylä. And on the Kemi River bank where the Vuotos reservoir project loomed for decades, two women committed suicide after selling their homes. This was even more of a shock as in Lapland suicides have been considered a men’s affair, as Eila explains. The area of Vuotos is a striking indicator of how large-scale hydropower projects can displace people and alternative futures even without being necessarily realised. Further to the spatial shuffling of physical human beings, hydropower developments also reconfigured their perspectives, confidence and senses of place. A sociologist who has been involved in the social impact assessment of migratory fish reintroduction has found that with the division of the Kemi River main course into a series of dammed sections, the sense of solidarity of river dwellers has also become subdivided.8 Whereas in the early initiatives for fish passages or compensatory measures the riverside population had usually been united under the same cause, in more recent discussions the fissures between the populations of different river sections have been much more pronounced.

... of landscape Damming a river transforms waters and banks fundamentally, and river dwellers had long though it impossible that a permanent dam could impound the stream (Tikkanen and Tikkanen 1972, Pokka 1994: 155). But dams did work, considerably raising the water level in places, inundating and eroding the river banks that have for generations been hayfields, fishing grounds, swimming beaches, crossing places, and homes.9 Alongside the inundation of the river banks and shallow river islands, the rising waters also inundate the river itself. Where there had been swift currents and exciting rapids before, the waters of the pool upstream from a dam usually look more like a lake than a river. Losing rapids has been portrayed as equally devastating as losing a home. A popular figure of speech along the Kemi River is to say that it is no longer a river, but rather a “series of reservoirs”. Dammed river sections neither look, sound, feel nor taste like the previous stream. Even in pro-hydropower accounts there is talk of a “lakelandscape” (järvimaisema) into which the river will be or has been converted. The water

8 9

Kalle Reinikainen, personal communication 2008–12-18. It is one of the ironies of the ongoing transformation of the river that only in the process of building the dams that would destroy the river banks were these strips of ancient settlement investigated archaeologically, revealing a large array of informative objects and dwellings from eight thousand years of human life on the river (Pylkkänen 1974).

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itself might be very similar in both, but they differ widely in the phenomenal experience and the activities they afford, from fish species all the way to the sound of the rapids that suddenly ceased. Quite succinctly, Patrick McCully’s book (2001) on dams is titled “Silenced Rivers”. Furthermore, hydropower dams tend to trigger the construction of a number of auxiliary structures that transform the landscape even more (fig. 9.4). Among these are embankments along the forebay reservoir that visually sever the link between river dwellers and water. Moreover, the radical changes in hydrology affected by dams sometimes create secondary lakes (from brooks cut off by a dam) or dry river beds, into which sills, known as “hidden dams” (piilopadot) or “beauty dams” (kauneuspadot), have been installed to dam some water and make the river bed look a bit more like the watercourse it used to be.10

... of rhythms A significant result of damming a river is that it divides the stream into sections. The general continuity that the stream had afforded in terms of hydrological processes, animal habitat, social relations (see above), travel and transport is severely compromised by channelling the entire river through a turbine chamber. Spatial rhythms of rapids and pools – and associated crossing, fishing and swimming places – are thereby replaced by that of dam and reservoir. Other river uses had gradually to adapt to this newly emerging rhythm (fig. 9.5). As sketched above, the temporal rhythms of the river have also been strongly affected by damming. These include the dynamics of fish movement and reproduction, but above all the rhythms of discharge, water level, freezing and thawing. Alongside the dynamics of precipitation and temperature, the electricity market has emerged as a vital influence on the flow of the river, which many river dwellers seem to deplore more that the damming itself (chapter ten).

10

Such hidden dams have very similar functions to the sill constructed across Lake Kemi (see above): The alterations of the watercourse engendered by damming, channelling and regulating it in one location are to be ameliorated in another location, which is affected by the original alteration through integration along the same river.

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

Figure 9.4: Submerged islands, channels and river banks, widened watercourse and subsidiary constructions three to ten kilometres upstream from the Petäjäskoski hydropower station on the lower Kemi River. Hatched dark blue areas indicate the former stream, hatched light blue patches represent former river islands. Earth dams lining some of the shoreline appear as black lines. Where the water from tributary brooks has to be pumped beyond such dams, small ponds are visible on the western river bank. Detail from a map published by the real-estate section of Kemijoki Ltd in 1998, retrieved in the library of the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi; (Kemijoki Valajaskosken voimalaitokselta Jaatilaan; entinen ja nykyinen jokiuoma; vertailukartta).

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Figure 9.5: Adaptation of timber floating work districts (uittopiirit) on the upper Kitinen River according to the divisions created by hydropower dams. Work district boundaries before 1984 are marked on the left, the boundaries after the reform are indicated on the right side. One border, formerly located at a cross-river timber barrier (Puivuvannon Vastuu), was shifted upstream to the planned hydropower dam of Kurittukoski; and a new division of work districts was established at the brand new Vajukoski hydropower dam. The boundary at Porttipahta had coincided with the location of a hydropower dam even before this reform, as a dam had already been built there in 1970, impounding the large reservoir above. From Oulun Maakunta-arkisto, Kemijoen uittoyhdistuksen kokoelma, folder 1e:3.

9. The power of water: Hydroelectricity, river management and displacement

... of power The most significant effect of hydropower developments on Kemi River dwellers is arguably the feeling of loss and alienation that many experience in the face of a river that seems to be largely in the hands of a few specialists (cf. Van der Vleuten and Disco 2004, for an account of highly professionalized water management in the Netherlands, and Strang 2004, for a contemporary version of Wittfogel’s ideas on water and power). With hydropower, influencing the river is achieved less by the skilful activities of a large group of river dwellers – as farmers, as fishermen, as boaters or as rafters – than through a huge infrastructure run by a very small group of experts. River dwellers may still fish or boat on the river, but they can do so only to the extent that it does not compromise hydroelectricity generation. Also the ends, to which the river is made to flow more or less swiftly, have become rather abstract. From the creation of fishing places to the fertilisation of hayfields or the transportation of timber, the river’s flow is increasingly made to conform to the dynamics of a huge electricity grid and to the strategies of firms traded in the stock market. Not only has the physical power of the river been focussed in a few dams, but also the river dwellers’ agency to affect the river has been concentrated virtually in the hands of a few “control room” engineers. Dams symbolise the alienation of river dwellers from the Kemi River. Some river dwellers feel strongly that the impacts of hydropower developments on the river are first and foremost “mental”. A narrative about life on the river after the first hydropower dam destroyed the salmon fishery (Tiuraniemi 1996) foregrounds the depression and hopelessness of river dwellers who have been dispossessed of one of their most significant activities. Many felt betrayed by the “masters” (herrat) who bought out the “rapids real estate”, and let down by the state that allowed dams to be built. The riverbank inhabitants’ despondency in relation to the river thus emerges as a reaction to their losing the upper hand, in what happens on their stream, to external actors – particularly industries and the state – who have taken over their river. Of course, river dwellers do not simply stand by passively and let the “masters” take over. Helena’s story, the successful legal protection of the tributary Ounas River, the struggles against the dam of Sierilä, and the initiative to turn the area intended for a flood protection reservoir into a national park all prove that people know to articulate their interests, and that conflict is an inherent aspect of life along the river. Nevertheless, many river dwellers have experienced the usurpation of their stream by large companies and the state as utterly inevitable, and they feel displaced even if still living on the river bank. Arguably, the displacement of power over the Kemi River, the “stream of life” that had been so central in the river dwellers’ world, has been one of the most important effects of hydropower constructions in the catchment basin. If the “stream of life” was manipulated by strangers and according to strange ends, then life itself had to be reinvented.

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Conclusion Hydroelectricity production represents the most encompassing river use in the history of the Kemi River, bringing about the most specialised and totalising regulations of its flow. Nonetheless, as Ingold’s (2000) and Suchman’s (2001) works have suggested, even the most sophisticated technologies remain embedded in a meshwork of social, political, ecological and hydrological processes. I have indicated how hydropower managers look to river dwellers’ subjectivities and attend to the capricious rhythms of the river as much as they run their advanced machinery. While their electronic monitors provide them with vital information, they acknowledge the need to supplement their images of the river with direct observations to inform their strategizing. Nevertheless, hydropower producers have been called “river-robbers”, indicating the Kemi River’s perceived loss of “riverness” with damming. While the river water remains a public good and is still commonly accessible in most places, I have suggested that the removal or modification of its spatiotemporal rhythms, of rapids and pools, high and low water, fish spawning and ice break-up, has been experienced as an act of river-robbery. Only a short while after the land reform had turned the “rapids real estate” from a communal to a private good, this most central aspect of the river – its heterogeneous flow, currents, or power – was bought up by outsiders and dammed. Flow and friction of its waters were put to one particular use, making the river unattractive or unsuitable for many other uses. This chapter has shown how today, the rhythm of the Fennoscandian electricity market constitutes a significant factor for the flow of the Kemi River, more so than all other river uses. In order to make the river into an effective (regulation-) electricity generator, places along its banks were made, re-made and un-made. The foregoing rendition of displacement indicates how people, landscapes, rhythms and the distribution of power were fundamentally transformed in the process. I have suggested that the river continues to flow despite these transformations, but does so in a very different way, as river pools and rapids gave way to reservoirs and dams, and the rhythm of electricity prices is as significant for the pattern of discharge as the rhythms of precipitation and temperature.

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

Introduction Throughout the preceding chapters it has become clear how life on the Kemi River is inherently seasonal. Different fish are caught with different techniques and in different places over the course of the year and according to shorter-term river dynamics. Different boating and timber floating routes are accessible during different times of year, snow-and-ice tracks provide travel substrate during the winter, and even modern road transport displays clear seasonal dynamics. Hydroelectricity generation, finally, is a seasonal activity par excellence, as it negotiates rhythms of temperature, light, electricity prices and river flow. In this chapter, instead of reifying a particular number of “seasons” – as in winter, spring, summer and autumn – I discuss temporality and seasonality on the river in the context of a larger spectrum of rhythms, including those of longer and shorter duration. I indicate how these various rhythms of river and river dwellers together constitute a “dance of life”, to take Edward Hall’s (1983) image of a world constituted by multiple, mutually adjusting and adjusted rhythms (cf. Rosaldo 1993). Ingold (2000: 194) has argued that temporality is the duration immanent in practising an activity or accomplishing a task. Life happens in time, but it is not a series of events that can be ordered along a uniform and external temporal trajectory. Instead, time is embodied and enacted, an integral part of the activity practised. Further, Ingold likens the “taskscape” of social life, the interactive whole of related tasks, to musical performance, as both are characterised by a variety of interweaving rhythmic cycles and repetitions, which in their resonances produce perceivable forms, i.e. the music or the landscape (ibid.: 197–198). He particularly emphasises that the rhythmicity of these movements is not to be mistaken for “metronomic” repetitions. Rhythms are integral to people’s activities, quite unlike the workings of a metronome which externally divide an undifferentiated process into equal segments. Thereby, Ingold invokes the opposition between “social time” and “clock time” or “sidereal time” (cf. Thompson 1967), the former corresponding to the idea of rhythmic temporality laid out above, the latter to the concept of time as an objective reality, de-

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fined by the movements of the earth around the sun and around its own axis, external to human activities and perception. While Ingold indicates that people can attune their activities to the temporal segments of clock-time (2000: 333), he maintains that time as experienced necessarily inheres in the rhythms of performing various and related tasks. As the rhythms of multiple human activities interweave in the social “taskscape”, they also interweave with the rhythms of many other phenomena, including the activities of animals, the dynamics of plant growth and decay, the seasons, the weather and the alternations of day and night (ibid.: 200). Because these processes are ongoing, the landscape is continuously made by the articulation of the various rhythms, never finished but always under construction. Following this argument, life on the river can be understood as a polyrhythmic phenomenon, constituted by the relations of the various rhythms of human activities, river conditions, the seasons and many other phenomena. Rather than imagining this everevolving phenomenon as an array of “natural” rhythms – such as the dynamics of river discharge and the fluctuations of temperature – to which the rhythms of the human taskscape adapt, I will present the rhythms of river and river dwellers as constituted by both human and non-human factors. River dwellers do not attune their lives solely to an externally functioning array of “natural” rhythms so much as they actively negotiate and manipulate, for instance, the dynamics of freezing and discharge, thus participating in the formation of a rhythmic world that is simultaneously “natural” and “social”. In order to illustrate this point, let me outline one of the central polyrhythmic phenomena of life on the river: the seasons.

Seasons and seasonality River dwellers’ activities, infrastructure, places of residence, animal and plant life, and the dynamics of light, temperature, snow cover and river discharge are strikingly different throughout the course of the year. So pronounced are these seasonal variations that it may be warranted to take the river dweller seriously who once jokingly remarked to me that he actually needs two heads, one for winter and one for summer. During different intervals of the year, the river and its inhabitants almost constitute different worlds. But what is a season? And how many of them are there on the Kemi River?

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Social seasonality The Oxford English Dictionary lists twenty-one meanings for the noun “season”,1 many of which define it as a particular period of the year, among others with reference to light, the weather, plant growth, animal behaviour, a frequented place, agricultural operations or other human activities. Furthermore, a considerable number of meanings hinge on the certain quality of such a period, defining season, for instance as “right, proper, due or appointed time; a fit or favourable occasion, an opportunity”. I hope to show that in anthropological terms these two groups of meanings coincide, in that seasons constitute recurring periods of particular, resonating processes, including meteorological, hydrological and sociocultural dynamics. This approach differs considerably from Orlove’s concept of seasons, “defined as the periods that the year is divided into, each of which is characterised by specific natural conditions or phenomena; these conditions and phenomena are usually, but not always, atmospheric. Taken together, the seasons ‘fill up’ the year with at most brief inter-seasonal periods. Seasons can vary in length” (2003: 127). Having before characterised the year as “a natural unit” (ibid.: 126), Orlove takes the individual seasons to be “characterised by specific natural conditions”. With so much “nature” in the definition, it is not hard to see why Orlove should study seasons mostly as linguistic concepts – how people name seasons – rather than as parts of their life-worlds – how people live seasonally. Over a century ago, Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat outlined an anthropological approach to seasons and seasonality in the context of a summary ethnography of Inuit societies (Mauss 1979). In spite of its limitations, stemming from a commitment to the Durkheimian opposition of free individuals and a disciplining society, their study introduced a fascinating appraisal of seasonal variations of social and ecological phenomena. Seasons are not, in their analysis, merely physical phenomena, but come into being in the rhythms of subsistence activities, rituals, residence arrangements, taboos and a range of further social dynamics. Just as, in Ingold’s terms, temporality is the sense of time as embodied in and intrinsic to particular tasks, Mauss and Beuchat treat seasonality as the sense of the seasons engendered through the rhythms intrinsic in social forms. Although their work has often been interpreted as an argument from environmental determinism – the ecological conditions determining the social forms – the essay can be read in a more nuanced manner that brings out the resonances of social and ecological rhythms rather than their mutual determination (e.g., Harris 1998). Mauss and Beuchat observe that there are two fundamentally different periods in the social and ecological world of the Inuit, that of winter and that of summer. This binary seasonality is, however,

1

I consulted the online version of the dictionary (http://www.oed.com/), where the entry on season can be found typing the term into the “search” box (the resulting direct link is too long to reproduce here); accessed 2009–12-15. Jones (2007: 18–9), consulting the Merriam-Webster dictionary instead, reaches very similar conclusions. Finnish words for “season” are vuodenaika, literally “time of year” (corresponding, for instance, to the German Jahreszeit), and sesonki, a Finnicization of the Swedish or English word which is used synonymously with kausi (a period of time) and usually refers to a period associated with a certain phenomenon or activity, such as tourism or the ripening of a particular berry.

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considered only the most apparent of a potential multitude of rhythms in sociocultural phenomena. Social life does not continue at the same level throughout the year; it goes through regular, successive phases of increased and decreased intensity, of activity and repose, of exertion and recuperation. […] Instead of being the necessary and determining cause of an entire system, truly seasonal factors may merely mark the most opportune occasions in the year for these two phases to occur. […] Furthermore, though this major seasonal rhythm is the most apparent, it may not be the only one; there are probably other lesser rhythms within each season, each month, each week, each day. Each social function probably has a rhythm of its own. (Mauss 1979: 78–79) In his famous study of the East African Nuer, Evans-Pritchard (1969 [1940]) also writes extensively about spatiotemporal rhythms, his analysis clearly influenced by Mauss and Durkheim. Consequently, he treats seasonality as a distinctly social phenomenon, separate both from individual persons and from the non-human environment, for instance when he states that “the concept of seasons is derived from social activities rather than from the climatic changes which determine them” (ibid.: 95–96). On the other hand, Evans-Pritchard relates that for knowing the seasons, the Nuer observe the movements of the moon, bird species, winds, and most importantly water dynamics, vegetation and the movement of fish, and that “the conceptual cycle is dependent on the cycle of activities from which it derives its meaning and function [...] since time is to them a relation between activities” (ibid.: 100). Even though his final analysis is Durkheimian, he emphasises that “[i]t is the activities themselves, chiefly of an economic kind, which are basic to the system and furnish most of its units and notations, and the passage of time is perceived in the relation of activities to one another” (ibid.: 102). Taking into account that “economic” here refers to most activities involving the material world, the similarities between this statement and Ingold’s (2000: 194–198, 323–326) argument about temporality are striking. As long as the conceptual framework remains Durkheimian, based on an opposition of nature and society on the one hand, and of individuals and society on the other, analyses of seasonality will inevitably run into the difficulty of having to somehow re-integrate these categories, which however goes against the grain of this very approach. Often, anthropologists end up presenting an analysis that sees the individual bounded by society, and the society bounded by nature (as noted by Harris 1998: 67). Or, the framework presents the individual as living half in nature (where he or she is subject to seasonally varying foods, light intensity and moods) and half in society (which structures individual experiences, integrates them into ritual or pathologises them). Simon Harrison, for instance, analysing seasonal moods in Papua New Guinea (2001) and illustrating the culturally constructed dimensions of “seasonal affective disorders” (SAD) (2004a), seems to follow the second line of thought, identifying a “general opposition: between social time and the time of nature and the body. SAD is culture-bound in the sense that it arises [...] from dichotomies between natural and social time which tend to be commonly experienced only in certain kinds of societies. Some societies, by contrast, show a strong imperative to keep natural and social time consonant and to close any gaps between them” (2004a: 598).

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Mark Harris recognises these limitations of the Durkheimian approach and attempts to integrate Mauss and Beuchat’s insights with Ingold’s observations on temporality in his discussion of the seasonal forms of social life on the Amazon floodplain (1998). Following Ingold, Harris argues “for a dwelling perspective of seasonality” (ibid.: 66), which is to avoid the Durkheimian “contradiction between ecological determinism and social constructivism, presuming that humans construct their worlds before they live in them, and yet that human beings are in some way determined by these worlds” (ibid.: 67). Treating seasonality, instead, as “embodied periodicity, produced in the attendance of people to their environment” (ibid.: 66), he presents the seasonality of life in Parú on the Lower Middle Amazon that varies most radically between a period of economic scarcity, illness and kinaesthetic limitation to people’s houses when the river floods the plain, and a period of relative abundance, happiness and village festivals, when river discharges are low. Harris concludes that the periodicity of social life on the Amazon floodplain is neither due to pressure and necessity, nor to an environmentally-imposed social structure to which individuals conform. Instead, [...] for Parúaros the annual rhythm is inherent in the process of social life. Seasonality is intrinsic to people’s engagement with, and perceptual alertness to, a changing environment which, in turn, is integrated with the changing constellations of their social relationships. (ibid.: 79) In the further analysis of the rhythmic dynamics of life on the Kemi River, I will endorse this understanding of seasonality, not as determined by “society” or “nature”, but as emerging from situated practices and attentive engagement in a socio-ecological taskscape. Apart from the works mentioned thus far, not many publications in anthropology and related disciplines approach seasonality as a theoretical concept, even though many ethnographic accounts deal with seasonality as a phenomenon (Jones 2007 presents a massive bibliography of ethnographic and geographic literature on seasonal phenomena in Fennoscandia alone). Those that do address the issue explicitly tend to treat seasonality as a natural phenomenon, to which humans adapt or under which they suffer. This figures, for instance, in seasonality studies by human ecologists (e.g., Malmberg 1984, Ulijaszek and Strickland 1993), development anthropologists (e.g., Chambers 1982, HussAshmore, Curry and Hitchcock 1988) and human geographers (e.g., Mead and Smeds 1967, Palang et al. 2005, Palang, Sooväli and Printsmann 2007). This chapter tries to grasp the inherent seasonality of life on the Kemi River, following Ingold’s and Harris’ insights and concentrating on the resonances produced by the articulation of various rhythms. As the analysis below will illustrate, the cycles of human activities in the taskscape not only respond to cycles of the non-human environment, but actively shape them as well. If social relations extend beyond the human sphere, non-human rhythms will be affected by, as much as affecting, human ones.

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Resonating rhythms on the Kemi River The rhythms of human practices, animal activities, snow cover, river discharge, temperature and light along the Kemi River give rise to a multitude of recurrent instances that can be called seasons. That human tasks – in fishing, travelling and producing and using electricity – display considerable rhythmic variations has been amply demonstrated in previous chapters. This association of particular activities with certain periods and localities is not arbitrary. The English word “season”, for instance, is etymologically derived from the Latin term for “sowing” (Jones 2007: 18–19), i.e. the period that resonates with performing a particular activity. The seasonalities of hydroelectricity generation, traffic and fishing are in turn integrated with a variety of other seasonal patterns in the river dwellers’ activities. Most work and employment has been limited to a particular time of year and a particular location, and some of it continues to be. Until fifty years ago, forestry work took place mostly during the winter, drainage canals can only be dug in summer, and most agricultural activities take place during the summer, too. Timber floating also worked best in early summer, while reindeer work has labour peaks in spring and autumn. Finally, work with tourists, a highly seasonal activity in general (Ball 1989, Baum and Lundtorp 2001, Jolliffe and Farnsworth 2003) is concentrated in the winter, where it resonates both with the probability of snow cover and the Christmas holidays of Julian and Gregorian calendars. In order to survive in such a world of seasonal activities, river dwellers have learnt to develop a number of different skills rather than specialising in one single activity. Some argue that this versatility has enabled them to better adapt to a changing world – including shifting national priorities, international economic developments, and global climate change – than other people in remote places. Others have observed that this seasonal variety of work and employment has conjured up “rootless men” (juuretomia miehiä), so-called “flying lumberjacks” (lentojätkät) who would work in lumber camps in winter, in timber sorting in the summer, and spend the periods in between mostly drunk in Rovaniemi. Whatever the moral judgements, it is obvious how the rhythms of life on the Kemi River are reflected in the personalities of river dwellers. And this is certainly not a relation limited to past eras of pre-industrial life. Even elderly, urban residents of Rovaniemi, for instance, who do not practise seasonal activities for their livelihood, retain a distinct sense of their rhythmically alternating environment, for instance while gardening in the summer or shovelling snow in the winter, living through long light days during some parts of the year and rarely seeing the sun during others. And even in a technologically highly advanced country like Finland, seasonal variations continue to be felt profoundly. The dairy farmer Matti, for instance, explains that the rapid mechanisation of agriculture he has witnessed did not change his dependence on seasonal dynamics very much at all. In some respects, running his farm today has to be in tune with the seasons even more than in the past, for example because the heavy machinery that is currently used cannot operate on moist ground. As much as moist ground shapes seasons, the structures that humans build and deconstruct during the course of a year contribute to the emergence of seasons. These temporary structures include and have included fishing implements, boat landing stages, ice

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

bridges and summertime “trestle bridges” (pukkisiltoja), timber floating implements, and temporary graves. And even “permanent” structures like roads, dams and bridges bear witness to the seasonality of the world around, for instance in the hydropower dams’ spill-gates, in the combination of triple-glazing and insect screens on house windows, and in that bridge piers look extremely oversized for the river in late summer. Furthermore, river dwellers exhibit a clear seasonal pattern of residence, spending winter and workdays in one place, summers and holidays in a summer home (mökki) often built intentionally simply in structure and facilities and in a place with a distinct rural or even wilderness character, usually in the vicinity of a lake or river (see Jones 2007: 28–29 for a summary review of Northern European second home use). Along with the occupancy of these scattered summer homes oscillate the economic fortunes of a central institution in rural Finland, the village shop (kyläkauppa). While during winter, many of them are on the verge of bankruptcy or even close down temporarily, they thrive during summer when the surrounding summer houses are inhabited by people for whom shopping in the local store belongs to the rural summer experience and sets this time of year apart from the everyday, when groceries are bought in huge supermarkets. Resonating with human rhythms of activities, sentiment and residence, also animals and plants – naturally, I am tempted to write – display seasonal variations. The general growing season is short and intensive; it is said to be risky, for instance, to plant potatoes before early June, and first night frosts can set in as early as mid-August (cf. Ortlieb 2000: e.g. 56–58). Alongside the harvesting of hay and potatoes, almost each week or two a new species of berries begins to ripen. And many people feel almost compelled to leave work early or dedicate entire weekends to berry picking and preparation, not to waste the moment. In autumn, the hunting seasons are also scheduled, first for different birds, later for moose. This is accompanied by the rhythmic transformation in the various hues of foliage and flowers. A progression of colours, each indexical of a particular season, is evident in many other aspects of river life on the river, for instance in the painting of fishing tackle. Another important set of rhythms on the river is that of birds, most significantly those of migratory species. When such birds return after a long, silent winter, it is a great spectacle and above all an explosion of sounds. For instance, the annual re-arrival of gulls in Rovaniemi or the spotting of a flock of swans (e.g., Rautio 2008) make big news in local and regional newspapers. Different rhythms of plants and animals are evident along the river, resonating with other rhythms of waters, temperatures, light and river dwellers’ activities, and also constituting particular seasons in the river dwellers’ sense of temporality. When the ice crust breaks on the river, a particular small insect swarms the riverbank homes in great numbers, only to disappear a few days later. When the waters warm around midsummer, mosquitoes begin bothering the river dwellers, and with the first night frosts they disappear again. And the chapter on fishing has shown how fish behaviour, fishing and fish appreciation varies rhythmically. Human, animal and plant cycles of activity, growth, reproduction and decay along the river all resonate with the rhythms of light, temperature, snow cover and river discharge. These dynamics have annual horizons, but they also vary significantly on a daily basis. The articulation of these meteorological rhythms with one another and with hu-

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man, animal and plant life provides a core element for the Finnish understanding of seasons as particular periods of the year (see below, and cf. Mead and Smeds 1967: 28–50). So far, my presentation of rhythms has been rather straightforward: In practising their various activities river dwellers tune in with the rhythms enabling or impeding their tasks, in an orchestra-like process of attending to each other and to the rhythms of animals, plants and meteorological phenomena. Seasons arise out of this rhythmic interplay. However, this only captures part of the process of seasonal temporality. Many events and periods of time are codified in Finland, assigned to particular calendar days and thereby subject to sidereal time instead of the social time of mutually resonating processes. Hunting and closed seasons are cases in point. Although probably based on rutting, migrating and spawning behaviour of the respective species, they have been assigned to particular dates in the year, independent of fluctuations and variations in actual animal behaviour (cf. Scott 1998). Furthermore, school holidays regulate the numbers of families on the river ice – during the “skiing vacation” (hiihtoloma) in spring – or on its bathing places (uimarantoja) during summer vacation. To a lesser degree this also hold true for the rhythms of weekdaysweekends and work/schooldays-evenings. The Finnish word for “June” translates literally as “summer-month” (kesäkuu),2 and many people hold that with the beginning of this month, summer starts, irrespective of temperature or potential snow or ice cover. Around Midsummer3 (Juhannus), river dwellers gather around large bonfires, usually on a river or lake shore, even if it is still rather cold in a particular year. And during July, the “hay-month” (heinäkuu), many offices are completely empty, no work is expected to get done, and all life seems to go on in and around people’s summer cottages. The month of July provides a vivid example of how the socio-ecological taskscape has been codified in an absolute calendar. It derives its name from an activity (haymaking)4 that had to be in tune with a host of meteorological and biological processes (precipitation, the growing season, etc.) and other human activities (not least those that had to be postponed until afterwards). In presently referring to the exact interval between June 30 and August 1, however, it has lost this resonance. Is the river dwellers’ sense of the seasons thus losing its reference to the taskscape and instead being codified into a calendar that works externally to meteorological phenomena, river dynamics and human activities? In my experience, this is not the case. Instead, “fixed” calendar days are integrated into the ebb and flow of the taskscape. Only when it is “activated” by the practices of river dwellers, does any fixed date or time become meaningful. Skiing vacation without a proper snow cover and people actually skiing is just another few days off school. And even though the summer officially begins on June 1, river

2 3 4

The association of months with particular seasons holds for most Finnish months, including syyskuu, the “autumn-month” September, and joulukuu, the “Christmas-month” December. Here, indeed, “sidereal time” – as exemplified by the summer solstice – directly figures in river dwellers’ temporal universe. As typical of European agricultural contexts, a large number of phenomenal observations regarding temporal weather patterns and associated activities have been codified into a sidereal calendar in the form of country lore, for instance by attributing particular characteristics (e.g., “cold”, “rainy”) to certain Saints that belong to specific dates in the Lutheran liturgical calendar.

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dwellers do not actually regard it as summer – and move to their summer home – before it is warm enough, bird life has returned and summer-fish can be caught. The sheer presence of clock- or sidereal time markers does not, thus, automatically and once-andfor-all subvert life to its objective order (cf. Ingold 2000: 328–330, Mazzullo and Ingold 2008: 33–34). Rather, these markers are integrated into the taskscape, influenced by and influencing other human rhythms.

Two, four, eight – or what? If life on the river is characterised by seasonal variations, it must be asked what kind of seasons river dwellers perceive, how many of them there are, and how they are demarcated. So far, I have mainly presented the seasonality of life on the Kemi River, without considering the categories of seasons proper. It will become clear that, although both phenomena are interrelated, the classification of seasons is a moment of cultural definition, whereas the reckoning of seasonal temporality emerges from involvement in the taskscape. In many ways, it seems that there are principally two seasons on the river, a cold and dark one (winter) and a light and warm one (summer). Temperature and light extremes point to such a division into a winter- and a summer-world, as much as do traffic rules, residence patterns, store opening times, the presence or absence of ice on watercourses, and the difference of landscapes covered in snow or in vegetation. This view would imply that all other phenomena are derivative of or transitory between these two basic periods. It is clear, however, that neither the dynamics of the river, nor the senses of temporality of the river dwellers, can be subsumed under this binary classification of the year. Both in winter and in summer, for instance, the river discharge tends to be rather low, and during both periods accessing the river is rather easy. It seems more adequate to regard spring and autumn as primary periods as well, rather than just as transitory states between winter and summer, in order to grasp phenomena like the spring flood or “broken transport conditions” (kelirikko). Furthermore, the temporal patterns of darkness and light, of cold and warm, of snow cover and vegetation, and of ice and open waters do not coincide, but lag and have different durations, so that it cannot be claimed that winter easily corresponds to darkness, snow and frozen watercourses. While daylight is indeed rare during Kemi River winters, perceived brightness depends almost as much on snow cover and cloud density. Therefore, many people hold late autumn to be the darkest season, before a continuous snow cover has formed and while heavy clouds often shield the little sunlight that is left. With a permanent snow cover and clearer skies in winter, the world appears brighter in spite of the further diminished amount of daylight. As days get longer again towards spring and sunlight is reflected off the omnipresent snow, the brightest days in the year occur. Summer days may have longer hours of daylight, but their light is hardly as intensive as that of early spring. These observations warrant a temporal categorisation of four seasons, following also the Finnish language that features four words for different “times of year” (vuodenajat), namely kevät (spring), kesä (summer), syksy, (autumn) and talvi (winter). Many river dwellers, however, reject this categorisation as too crude to accommodate the different conditions over the course of the year. Instead of four basic temporal

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units, there is a common understanding that Lapland is subject to eight seasons. Even the provincial capital calls itself “City of eight seasons” on its official website.5 Following a link, we are told that in Lapland, four seasons have not been considered sufficient, but the diversity of significant combinations of light, temperature and snow have made four further, intermediary seasons necessary. These are “autumn-winter” (syystalvi), “springwinter” (kevättalvi), “spring-summer” (kevätkesä) and “autumn-summer” (syyskesä). Each of these eight seasons provides different affordances and limitations for the activities of the region’s inhabitants, who have little choice but to adapt their ways of life and of thinking to this rhythm. Finally, the text explains that even the Rovaniemi city website is altered in colour and content according to the eight seasons. In this classification, the website articulates a view that has been expressed alike by river dwellers (e.g., Niemi 2004b, Jokela 2006: 51–52), by an anthropologist studying Swedish Saami (Manker 1963), and by a number of Soviet scholars investigating Siberian ecology (cited in Palang, Printsmann and Sooväli 2007: 8–9): The seasonal dynamics influencing life in northern Eurasia can meaningfully be grouped into eight, rather than four or two, distinct temporal units, i.e. seasons. While such classification of temporal patterns into a particular number of distinct seasons is of course a sociocultural construct, it must at the same time be regarded as much as a reflection of the distinct rhythms of light, temperature and river discharge, and the various human activities that resonate with those (Orlove 2003). During the period usually described as “spring”, for instance, two entirely different landscapes, resonating with very different taskscapes, prevail. While during early spring, or “spring-winter” (kevättalvi), sunlight is very bright, but a snow layer still covers the ground and rivers and lakes are still frozen up, in late spring (kevät) the snow melts, the ice breaks open, and vegetation begins to grow again. On the river, this means that different fish species can be caught, and different methods have to be used because of the different ice conditions. The fact that in early spring the river is still frozen up, while in late spring it floods and carries large ice floes, also implies that it is rather easy to access during the former, and a rather dangerous place during the latter period. Similar observations can be made for the other three additional seasons. A season, in this understanding, is a recurring period of time characterised by an amalgam of environmental conditions and human activities, a distinct socio-ecological taskscape, of which there are certainly more than four in the river dwellers’ year, and probably even more than eight. The definition of boundaries between particular seasons, however, does not emerge directly from the flow of the taskscape, but is a matter of cultural convention. In this respect, the seasons may be likened to colours in a paintbox. While the colour spectrum perceptible to humans covers a wide range of hues and shades, gradually merging into one another, the ascription of particular names to certain areas of this spectrum is a culturally specific classificatory issue (Berlin and Kay 1969). Nonetheless, however many basic colours people may distinguish – i.e. however many

5

The “international site” – as opposed to the one for Finnish and Rovaniemi people themselves – of the provincial capital is http://rovaniemi.fi/Kansainvalinen_sivusto/English.iw3. The same allusion to “eight seasons” is made, however, also on the “ordinary”, Finnish-language website of Rovaniemi, http://www.rovaniemi.fi/suomeksi.iw3. Accessed 2009–12-02.

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colours there are in the paint-box – it is clear that in order to paint a picture of a realworld scene, the painter has to subtly mix and blend the paints at hand to obtain the heterogeneous and ever-variable colours she perceives and tries to render on canvas. The seasons are thus not concrete blocks of time – just as colours are not discrete chunks of the colour spectrum – but abstract, homogenised qualities of a wider, heterogeneous reality. The analogy between colours and seasons is supported by the range of terms derived from the root ‘temper’, such as ‘temperature’ (weather), ‘tempera’ (colours) and ‘temperament’ (condition). As Ingold points out, these terms share the “twin connotations of mixing or blending and fine-tuning” (2010a: S133), highlighting the importance of ongoing attention and adjustments in the engagement with the world. Were a painter to paint this world, particular colours are likely to dominate the painting during different times of the year – yellow in spring, green in summer, red in autumn, and white in winter. But each painting would not be constituted by one colour alone. Rather, it is the ‘tempering’ – the “mingling in due proportion”6 – that transfers the actual (visual) experience to the canvas. If the “experience of weather […] is the very temperament of our being” (ibid.: S122, emphasis omitted), then the seasons must be understood as analogous to the colours that make up a painting, as ideal types that blend into each other to make a polychrome picture.

Seasons as rhythms Over the course of the year, the association of the rhythms of landscape and river with those of the river dwellers’ activities is so significant that the seasons seem to suggest a “right moment” for many practices. It is this “right moment” that river dwellers look forward to in fishing, berry picking, hunting, swimming (including ice swimming), putting boats and piers into the river and taking them out, and many other activities. At the same time, however, the acknowledgement of a “right moment” for particular practices also conveys a sense of anxiety that one might miss just this moment. If the appropriate activity is not performed at the suitable moment, river dwellers frequently feel that they have wasted a precious opportunity. In this way, seasonal temporality corresponds much more to time as kairos, “right” or “engaged” time, than to time as chronos, “absolute” or “detached” time (cf. Gault 1995, Rosaldo 1993, Ingold 2000: 335, Frost Benedict 2002, Metcalfe 2006). In a spatiotemporal universe constituted by right moments instead of an independent chronometer, seasons and other rhythms constitute time rather than happen in time (Harris 1998, Ingold 2000).7 Whereas Ben Orlove, in an essay entitled “How people name seasons”, explicitly distinguishes “basic” seasons and “minor” or “sub-seasons” (2003: 126, 129), this seems less relevant for the approach developed here. Orlove appears to be interested in the seasons

6 7

Oxford English Dictionary online, http://dictionary.oed.com/ accessed 2010–06-10. And this does not seem to be specific to the Kemi River. The very English words “time” and “year”, for instance, have been shown to be etymologically derived from fundamentally periodic concepts, namely the ebb and flow of the tides, and the growing season, respectively (Olwig 2005).

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as conceptually bounded temporal phenomena, rather than in seasonality, the periodicity of socio-ecological life. Above I have argued that seasons – like colours – provide a way of naming certain characteristics of the ever-transforming, polychrome world. Now I must add that these labels, however many they may be, have to be considered alongside the various other periodicities of the socio-ecological landscape, together contributing to the identification of successive “right moments” for specific activities along the river. The seasons emerge in the interplay of a plethora of social and ecological rhythms of longer and shorter duration. Once the seasons are understood as connoting qualities of time that can blend in with one another, rather than mutually exclusive and reified temporal blocks (e.g., Tuller 1990), they no longer stand in the way of appreciating the fundamental seasonality of socio-ecological life, formed by the articulation of various rhythms. In emphasizing the rhythms that constitute the spatiotemporal world, I follow Henri Lefebvre (2004) who is famous for arguing that instead of focussing on things and products in social and material life, it is more fruitful to analyse the underlying rhythmical processes that bring these things into being and produce the products, as well as transform them further. He establishes the human body – with its own rhythms of pulse, heartbeat, food intake and digestion, wake and sleep, and growth and decay – as the “metronome”8 (ibid.: 19) for perceiving the rhythms of the world around, some of which are much faster, others following much longer cycles. Only in relation to the human body do some processes appear dynamic and others static. Rocks, walls or a tree’s trunk might look inert at first glance; in fact, however, they are momentary phenomena of a series of interrelated rhythms of building, erosion and the general flow of materials, by which they are integrated “in a dramatic becoming, in an ensemble full of meaning” (ibid.: 23). Lefebvre claims that by eliciting the rhythms behind the momentary glimpses of the “present”, and by understanding the directly visible as “presences” of underlying patterns, the social and ecological world can be grasped more adequately (see also Ingold 2000: 200–203, Buttimer 1976, Mels 2004). Adopting an approach based on multiple and interlocking rhythms is well suited to investigating the sociocultural and ecological processes that make up a river, both in terms of longer-term dynamics and briefer periods. Alongside the temporal dimension of rhythms, they also have an inherently spatial aspect (Lefebvre 2004, Hall 1983, Mels 2004, Olwig 2005), which is critically needed to examine dynamics along a river. For example, fish behaviour – of moving up- or downstream, of feeding or resting – is rhythmical, and so are the meandering motions of the currents and the processes of erosion and sedimentation. As has become clear throughout the last chapters, rhythms are plentiful on the river; and the seasons, whether they be two, four or eight, are only one significant rhythmical pattern among many. Indeed, once we shift our attention on these multiple and interrelated rhythms, whether a particular recurring phase is considered a season, a “minor” or “sub-season”, or just another spatiotemporal pattern, is a matter of secondary importance. Moreover, the very insistence on regularity in the mathematical sense must be abandoned, because rhythms are patterns of recurring intensity and moderation, but 8

The “metronome” of the human body must of course be distinguished from the “metronome” of sidereal time as understood by Ingold (2000: 197).

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

not the repetitive, invariable strokes of the mechanical (rather than bodily) metronome (Ingold 2000: 197). Alongside annual cycles there are manifold other rhythms on the river, many of them of a shorter duration. One particularly significant rhythm lies in the extreme temperature differential of days and nights during spring. Whereas in early spring, days are so warm that the snow begins to melt and turns slushy in the afternoons, nights are usually cold enough to freeze the upper snow layer into a hard crust that people can walk on during late night and in the morning (hanki). In late spring, the day-night temperature differential means that during the days, much more snow melts and is released into the river than during the night, so that river water levels fluctuate accordingly. This also implies that the moment of the long-awaited ice break-up (jäänlähtö) happens usually in the afternoon, as the ice crust is under most pressure from the swollen rivers at this time of day. Other daily rhythms shape the river and its environment throughout the year, such as many river dwellers’ daily commuting to work places, schools and “hobby” activities. Daily and weekly rhythms are also strongly discernible in the river’s discharge, as I showed in chapter nine. These are, in turn, integrated with river dwellers’ other weekly patterns, including the weekday-weekend sequence and associated practices, including electricity consumption. So ubiquitous are these rhythmic dynamics on the river and beyond that many people speak of the river, the landscape, or the world in general as being in a state of “constant change”. What seems a contradiction in terms at first glance – things would ordinarily be considered to be either constant or changing – is in fact a statement about the rhythmic dynamics that constitute the social and ecological world (see chapter four). The constancy lies in the patterns and trajectories in which it changes, or rather transforms, in the continuous process of becoming what it is (Lefebvre 2004, Rose 2000, Ingold 2000: 201, Harris 1998: 79). Rhythms – including those of the seasons – constitute the form, or path, of this process, emerging from recurring temporal moments that are constituted by a particular interplay among various rhythmical phenomena including human activities and the weather.

The course of the seasons River dwellers have not usually spoken to me about a particular, bounded season but about the course of the seasons as a process. When relating their home river to me, they frequently described the river throughout the year, most often starting with ice break up in late spring, itself a period of transformation rather than stagnancy. Similarly, a book about issues of the Vuotos reservoir project, even though focussed on the inhabitants of the project area, is structured according to the course of the seasons, from spring to summer of the following year (Tennilä and Lintunen 1998). From this I draw the conclusion that the dynamic transformation inherent in the interplay of different rhythms, whether seasonal or other, is more important than the different phases on their own. Not only is the summer in the catchment only “hot” when compared to the “cold” of other seasons, but also the summer is only meaningful in that it is itself a manifestation of an ongoing process that proceeds, to take an arbitrary point in

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the continuum, from spring where waters become fluid and biological life picks up pace, towards autumn, when waters become solid and biological processes slow down. Therefore, it is not so important when – in terms of the solar calendar – different phenomena, including the seasons, begin and end, but rather it is significant when they happen in the sequence of other meaningful events. Therefore, it can be assumed that none of the various forms the river assumes during the year is regarded as primary. The river is the one flooding its banks, the one so dry that rocks and sandbanks are exposed, the one covered in a thick ice crust and the one of swiftly flowing waters. Presumably, none of these states is regarded as a derivation of a more basic form of the river, an ideal state. Each time of the year belongs to a particular form, or even kind, of river, each of which is an aspect of the real, the essential river. This also implies that when people experience one particular state of the river, say on a dry and warm summer day, they simultaneously imagine how the same river stretch would look and feel like during different times of the year, the week, the day or during different weather conditions. Buildings are constructed at a distance from the waters in summer, having in mind the water table of the spring flood. Boat navigation channels on an autumn trip might be inaccessible in summer. And when, on a summertime boat tour, I came across a rusty, metal barrel partly filled with half-burned pieces of wood, standing on a lake shore in a place surrounded mostly by bogs and water, I first though that this phenomenon looks somewhat “out of place”. My guide, however, found the barrel not surprising at all and explained that during winter, this place lies on a popular snowmobile route, as bogs and waters freeze up thoroughly. The barrel is used by people who fish through the ice in winter and early spring, in order to make a fire on the lake and fry some freshly-caught fish. It was not “out of place” at all, merely “out of time” – or, to phrase it in a combined way: “out of season”.

Seasonal subjectivities This multiplicity of rivers and landscapes that the Kemi River and its surroundings assume over the course of a year is generally regarded as the “natural”, proper state of affairs. Seasonal variations seem to belong to life, just like the variations any person experiences in the course of growing up and ageing. A retired hydropower technician, who has long been responsible for monitoring power stations on the river’s middle reaches, explains that the marked variations of the river do pose challenges, but never result in serious problems, even in hydroelectricity generation. One has to keep watch and be able to respond, if necessary by stopping the turbines and discharging the water through the spill-gates. But the variations of the stream belong to the river as much as its waters do. It is striking that this ongoing transformation seems to be experienced not so much as a series of scarcities, but as a stream of possibilities or “affordances” (Ingold 2000: 166–168). Of course, seasonal variation implies the continuous arrival of both favourable and not so appreciated things, and the parting from both unpleasant and pleasant aspects. But it is the former that river dwellers emphasise. They yearn for the coming season, enjoy when it has arrived, but soon go on to look forward to what is to come next. In talking about the course of the seasons – and the dynamics of one kind of river transforming into another – river dwellers frequently alluded to the inherent joy of this pro-

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

cess. Rather than describing the onset of the winter as a period where all those fun things that could be done during summer are no longer possible, it has often been portrayed to me as a time when river dwellers look forward to their first skiing trips or to the moment the ice is thick enough for walking across. Once the river is frozen over and the snow cover is fine, people enjoy this but at the same time look forward to the coming increase in sunlight; and once days are brighter they take advantage of the light but already await the break-up of the ice crust (cf. chapter five on seasonal fish taste). People look forward to the coming state, only to long for the next state once they have reached it and are enjoying its benefits. Both experiencing such radically different states of the world over the course of the year, and experiencing the transformation of one state into the other, thus seem to be sources of joy for river dwellers. The dairy-farmer Matti, for instance, tells me how strange he would find it if everything would constantly remain the same. He cannot imagine that anyone would prefer a life without seasonally different landscapes, activities and food. And just as different food and other experiences belong to different periods, so do the longings for them. In the taskscape, meteorological phenomena are so closely bound up with activities, experiences and emotions that the occurrence of seasonality is in effect an amalgam all these various motions. A particular season does not indicate to river dwellers when it is the right time to do or feel something, but this season includes the very activities and emotions, without which it would not be what it is, but merely an unusual spell of weather. As all seasons are bound up with a certain form of engagement, many river dwellers state that they do not have any favourite time of year. Each season is said to have its specific beauty, and each affords particular things that others do not. For many central Europeans, this is especially striking concerning the winter, this dark and cold period that has been imagined as only habitable with the attitude of a soldier at war (Mead and Smeds 1967). Instead, people from Lapland appreciate the winter as an essential aspect of their world, as beautiful and pleasant as any other season (Huhmarniemi, Jokela and Vuorjoki 2003, 2004). In the course of these meteorological, emotional and “activated”9 seasons, transformation is essential. Practising one seasonal activity usually includes preparing for the next season. River-dweller and writer Tapani Niemi (2004b) calls this “the seasons changing in us”. He elaborates that in resonance with the Lapland environment, its inhabitants are also “in a constant state of transition, always going somewhere”. In January the northern man starts talking about the upcoming spring and the ice breaking from the Kemi River, birds returning, and going fishing for spring pike. When the long-awaited moment happens, [our] man might be working with the fish but is already thinking about tomorrow (ibid.: 39). This incessant preparation for what is to come is aimed at both the imminent limitations, such as colder nights or degraded transport conditions (kelirikko), and the forthcoming possibilities, such as the movement of particular fish species. The key is to be prepared 9

This is not to say that people press buttons to make a season come about, but that practising certain activities is part and parcel of the presence of a particular season.

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for what will happen, in order to be able to act appropriately at the moment that social and environmental conditions are right (cf. Ortlieb 2000: 141–178, Ingold and Kurttila 2000: 190–191, Mazzullo and Ingold 2008: 34). In attending to the rhythms of water, light, temperature and calendars, river dwellers are thus highly conscious of the regular patterns over the course of time, but they also know that seasonality is nothing like mere repetition. Forms of the river and activities of its inhabitants may recur in similar sequences, but they are never exactly the same in expression, duration or (calendar) timing. All springs are similar, but different – floods might be stronger or weaker, plants may begin to grow earlier or later, and the movement of fish may be more or less pronounced. River dwellers can therefore prepare for what is to come, but they can never predict when it will materialise, or exactly how it will be.

Regularities and regulation on the river Taskscapes on the river are constituted by the resonances of the rhythms of human activities with each other and with non-human spatiotemporally periodic patterns. But resonating implies mutual adjustment, not a one-sided adaptation to any one given rhythm. Neither do non-human dynamics determine human rhythms, nor vice-versa, but both arise out of their total interplay. Focusing here on life along the river, we must ask: Are there any particularly riverine dynamics to which human activities are adjusted, and which are, in turn, adjusted to correspond with human activities? In what follows, I will present two such rhythmic dynamics – freezing/thawing and discharge – indicating how their periodicity impacts on and is impacted by the rhythms of human activities.

Waters and ice For river dwellers, one of the most significant rhythms of the river lies in the alternation of a liquid and a solid river surface. River dwellers habitually take frozen watercourses as a clear indicator for winter, while rivers and lakes free of ice signify summer. The periods in between, the formation and disintegration of a reliable ice crust, indicate autumn and spring respectively. Almost as if a purely categorical matter (Douglas 1966), the river comprised of ice only and water only seems suitable for many activities, while the river comprised of a bit of both seems awkward if not dangerous.

A river freezing over In autumn, when nights are below freezing point, also the water begins to freeze,10 first in smaller and very still ponds and lakes, then on quieter and shallower river stretches. Typically, the water along river banks, around islands and in bays with slower currents

10

Although river dwellers generally explain the annual rhythms of ice and waters by a narrative beginning in spring, I will start this account in late autumn. Thereby I probably shift the focus somewhat from the river’s waters to its ice, but writing for an audience that is likely not to take for granted that a river is a band of ice as much as it is a stream of water, I consider this shift appropriate if not necessary.

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develops an ice crust rather quickly, whereas along the main channel of the river, even water colder than 0°C does not congeal into ice. Because of its constant movement in currents and eddies, the water may form tiny ice crystals, so-called frazil ice (suppo), but does not form a continuous ice sheet. Only when such freezing-cold water touches a surface, such as a rock, the river bed or the ice sheets along the banks, does it solidify. Thus the ice crust gradually extends from the banks and bays towards the main current, which is finally bridged on some stretches, but remains free of ice throughout the winter in strong rapids and downstream from hydropower stations, where the water moves too fiercely to ever congeal. Places that do not freeze at all provide a peculiar sight when air temperatures drop to -20°C or colder, as the water – considerably warmer at around the freezing point – evaporates in a cloud of ice-fog over the open spot. River dwellers call this phenomenon “rapids fog” (koskisumut, also häkärä) and notice that the air around such places feels considerably colder than on completely frozen-over river stretches. The first, thin ice crust on a water course is called riitto, and is not expected to carry the weight of a human being. Only once the crust is strong enough to sustain walking across do river dwellers call it jää (ice). Of course, this accumulation of an ice cover is not as linear a process as the above description may have suggested. There can be very cold days and nights, when entire river stretches freeze over in a very short period, only to be followed by a warmer period in which the ice crust shatters again. It can take three months from the first riitto on the river bank to the formation of a reliable ice cover across its span. Whereas all properly frozen river surfaces are widely used by river dwellers as snowmobile routes and cross-country ski tracks, for ice fishing and even “ice golf”, stretches that remain open continue to pose a challenge throughout the winter. On the one hand, water without or with only a thin ice crust presents a risk of drowning for river dwellers. On the other hand, the resulting emergence of frazil ice, this awkward intermediary form between fluid and solid water, is regarded as the major difficulty. It might clog up the flow, for instance by sticking to the bottom of the ice layer further downstream, or to rocks on the river bed. A barrier can build up that is referred to as “frazil dam” (suppopato), which can raise the water table to dangerous levels in spite of the reduced wintertime discharge in the river. A local flooding event can thus occur when the amount of water in the river is at its lowest point. Furthermore, frazil ice can flow into the power stations and stick to the wings of a turbine, thereby causing imbalances and potentially damaging the machinery. A widely recognised problem with the restoration of rapids is that it creates river stretches that do not freeze up well, and thus contribute to frazil challenges. River dwellers who have built a summer home close to a stretch that has recently been restored, may now experience flooding at a place that has not been inundated for close to a century, because the rapids had been channelled for timber floating purposes. River dwellers are equally anxious about the reliability of the ice cover. Probably the most relevant factor for the variability of ice conditions is the currents. As indicated above, the stronger the currents, the weaker the ice cover. An existing ice crust can be “eroded” from underneath by increased currents. Because the course of the main currents in a river changes with the amount of discharge, the spots where the ice is being eroded may shift accordingly. These dynamics have been intensified with the

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ramification of hydropower regulation capacities. Water from reservoirs that is discharged during the winter not only counteracts some of the drop in water level, but is also warmer than other river water and thus erodes the ice even more. Most stretches along the Kemi River form a reliable ice crust, and even rather close to open spots the ice grows thick and strong, at places to a thickness of more than one metre. Under the ice the river water continues to flow. Because no precipitation reaches the watercourse and the ground is frozen, discharge is reduced throughout the winter, when only water from submerged springs continues to feed the river. As the river runs drier and retreats to its deepest channel, some of the ice cover settles on the river bed, and ice fishers have to look for this channel when they drill their holes through the ice crust. On hydropower reservoirs, this dynamic is most pronounced, as the stored water is emptied over the winter, lowering the ice layer, for instance, by two-and-a-half metres in Upper Lake Suoli and seven metres in Lake Kemi.

The “leaving-of-the-ices” When snowmelt sets in during late spring, the ice crust – weakened by increased solar radiation – usually bursts open with the increased river discharge. The ice layer disintegrates into floes that slowly start to shift and then make their way downstream. In some places, the river pushes large numbers of floes onto the banks where they accumulate in enormous, “house-high” heaps, which can shift the banks, uproot trees and crush buildings. This event, when the river suddenly starts to move again and simultaneously displays so much power, presents a most significant moment in the river dwellers’ year. It has been described to me as a “huge, impressive show”, as a “very exciting time of year” and as “the greatest event of the year”. People say that until a few decades ago, everybody gathered along the banks to watch this fascinating spectacle, and even school lessons were interrupted so that children could attend the “leaving-of-the-ices” (jäidenlähtö, or sometimes in singular jäänlähtö). Some river dwellers remember the custom of spring-cleaning the house and dumping on the river ice the resulting rubbish and dirt, which would then disappear along with the solidity of the stream. Probably each village in the catchment organises a “leaving-of-the-ices lottery” (jäidenlähtöveikkaus) in which river dwellers compete to predict the exact date and time that the river ice breaks open in front of the village (e.g., Vehmas 2008a, 2008b). Most critical for river dwellers is when some floes get stuck in the stream and impede the waters and incoming floes, so that an ice dam (jääpato) develops that raises not only the water table but also the ice floes floating on that water to a dangerous level for riverside dwellers, buildings and other infrastructure. Such dams are particularly likely to occur in shallow river stretches, such as the “necks” of rapids, or where the river bed is exceptionally narrow, like at Pahtajankurkku (literally “cliff-gorge”), a few kilometres downstream from Rovaniemi. Also, ice dams develop more readily during spring floods with comparatively low discharges, whereas during really large floods the floes are washed out more easily. This implies that the greatest flooding events and concurrent damages do not necessarily occur with the greatest overall flood, but are contingent on rather specific features, such as the local characteristics of the river bed, a particular proportion of ice floes and water discharge, and – chance. A large ice dam may form in one year at

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

a certain location, but the next year the floes might just float by in spite of very similar conditions. Or, what is probably most common, a few ice floes will get stuck, raise the water table a little bit but disintegrate before a larger barrier builds. Erkki explained to me that in most years, newspaper readers learn of a new ice dam on the Ounas River every day or so during the spring flood. First, they may read about flooding in Kittilä, later in Kaukonen, then Iisinki, in the next paper there would be talk of Patokoski, a day or two afterwards an ice dam might be reported from Marraskoski and so forth. In fact, however, this is the same ice dam travelling down the river and blocking it occasionally. All river dwellers have exciting memories of ice dams and the concurrent flooding or blocking of river crossings. Some have shown me pictures of riverside buildings submerged in a sea of water and ice floes, others have related stories to me about livestock endangered by approaching masses of ice, or about their crossing the river over an ice dam in order to fetch provisions from the other side. Also the only major accident in hydropower construction on the river was caused by an ice dam that raised the water level higher than the coffer dams protecting the building site for a power station. Over the past half century, however, the leaving-of-the-ices has lost some of its spectacular appeal for many river dwellers. With increased hydropower development and weaker ice due to milder winters, the stream appears ever less potent to its inhabitants, many of whom feel deprived of the seasonal spectacle, awe and worries in relation to ice dams.

Managing waters and ice On the many reaches of the catchment where dams do not impound the river, ice dams continue to be regarded as an annual challenge. The Environmental Centre of Lapland has been trying to abate ice dams by a variety of means, including blasting and removing ice with excavators. The former has yielded mixed results, and the latter is only feasible in smaller streams. Presently, the Environmental Centre has a particular tank-like vehicle saw long parallel cuts into the ice layer of susceptible river stretches in spring. Following the direction of the main current, these cuts are to ease the downstream movement of the ice floes during the “leaving-of-the-ices”. But it is not only the springtime mix of waters and ice that is being managed on the Kemi River. Also in winter, river dwellers look to it that the freezing and thawing of the river serve their needs, for instance in the construction and maintenance of ice bridges, the ice roads through lumber camps, or the spreading of ashes to accelerate the “leavingof-the-ices”. Also hydropower management is very concerned with water and ice. Engineers emphasise the need to “drive the river easily” during the period of freezing, and practice humpautus, the “bouncy dance” with the river, to break the ice crust (see chapter nine). Generally, river dwellers’ management of water and ice aims at creating unambiguous conditions – either reliable, solid ice or freely flowing liquid water. The intermediate states – riitto, frazil or ice dams – are all considered dangerous and are avoided.

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Discharge – the rhythms of currents and water levels As with the rhythms of freezing and thawing, it makes little sense to approach the rhythms of water discharge on the Kemi River in a two-tiered manner, describing first a presumed “natural” state and contrasting that with alleged “human-induced” rhythms, because the actual fluctuations of discharge as they happen today emerge from the interplay of a host of rhythms. The rhythmical phenomenon of the river is shaped by its total environment that includes human users and technologies as much as topography and the weather – and even that has been acknowledged to be anthropogenic in part.

Yearly rhythms Over the course of a year, the amount of water flowing through the river varies dramatically. While average discharge on the lower Kemi River is said to be 530 m3 /s, spring flood discharges of a gigantic 4400 m3 /s and winter discharges of merely 62 m3 /s have been recorded (e.g., Salokangas 1968: 27). Because a fluctuating discharge translates into fluctuating water levels in the river, the topography of the stream also displays rhythmic variations. Some river islands, for instance, are proper islands only with higher water levels in spring and autumn, but peninsulas in summer when one of the channels dividing them from the shores dries up. Discharge and water level also influence which gravel banks protrude through the water and which ones remain hidden, which course the main current follows, and many other aspects of the river. River dwellers have long learned to take advantage of the rhythms of discharge, and to adapt them to their particular needs. Meri-Matti, for example, recounts how his family annually constructed a wood-and-earthen barrier in the brook running through one of their hayfields, in order to make the spring flood water spread around and settle on the field to fertilise it. After about three weeks of inundation, they would demolish the barrier so that the field would dry and hay could begin to grow. While this practice was intended to actually amplify the flooding of the increased springtime discharge, current hydropower management results in somewhat diminishing seasonal extremes of discharge and water level. During spring, some of the melt-water is retained in reservoirs, during summer, water levels in dammed sections are held rather constant, and during winter, the reservoirs are gradually emptied, increasing seasonal discharge. The hydropower company Kemijoki Ltd occasionally presents the societal benefits of a dammed watercourse by juxtaposing two photographs of the summertime river as it flows through central Rovaniemi, one taken in the 1950s, the other one close to the present. Whereas the older photograph depicts a largely dry river bed, full of rocks and gravel banks, the more recent one is dominated by a smooth water table in which the sun is reflected and a few people are bathing. The intended message is, of course, that with the construction of a hydropower dam downstream from the centre, people from Rovaniemi can now enjoy the beautiful and peaceful waters instead of having to put up with a bleak and useless, probably even dangerous, river bed. Another version of the recent view of the river stretch shows a number of boats with trolling equipment on the water, advertising a popular fishing competition that is organised each summer, but would have been impossible on the un-dammed river.

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

A further message, however, reveals that through the construction and operation of dams, hydropower engineers manage the rhythms of the river, and thereby significantly influence the seasons of its inhabitants. The disappearance of the summertime “dry period” with the ramification of dams has been noted in many places along the river. One river dweller in Pelkosenniemi has even observed that the damming of Lake Kemi about seventy kilometres downstream is affecting his riverside buildings. Because the river never recedes far during summer, the banks are constantly moist and pass on this moisture to the storage shed and boathouse. Along many stretches of the river, hydropower discharge regulation has thus redefined what summer is. The same goes for late spring, when the flood with the “leaving-ofthe-ices” used to be an impressive sight. Now, river dwellers grown up close to dams remember instead that they used to watch the spectacle of spill-gates opening up and huge waterfalls thundering down. When the warning signal on the dam sounded, the children knew that it was time to go to the river and look at the seasonal waterfall emerging.

Daily and weekly rhythms Discharge also displays a multitude of rhythms with shorter frequency, again suggesting that there is more to the seasonality of life on the river than a particular number of seasons. One most significant factor influencing discharge dynamics is rain, itself a highly variable phenomenon and difficult to predict. Rain – and other aspects of the weather – introduces a particular sequence of events on the river that is clearly rhythmical. For after the occasion of rainfall in a particular part of the catchment, parts of this water gather in the watercourses, which pass them on to the larger rivers that carry the increased load downstream and all the way to the sea. Water dumped onto one section of the river can thus be felt in other parts of the river with certain time lags and degrees of intensity. This rhythmic relationship is sometimes described as the progression of a wave, albeit a very different one from the waves that occur in rapids and around protruding rocks. The latter is a standing wave, through which water passes constantly, but which hardly moves its form. The former, on the contrary, is an impulse that travels faster than the water of which it is made. Whereas in standing waves, water travels and form is fixed, in discharge waves the form travels and the water lags behind (Schwenk 1965). The deeper the water, the more prominently this difference emerges on the river. This also means that an impulse wave is propagated faster on a dammed, i.e. deep, than on an un-dammed river stretch that is shallow in places and descends rapids which considerably increase the friction on the flow. Juho states explicitly that in hydropower management “we don’t mind molecules”. What is relevant is not the water itself, but only the wave effect. It has come to his attention that in the earlier days of the hydropower company, an experiment was conducted on the river, aiming at measuring the speed of the progression of water as matter, rather than the movement of the discharge wave. Thus, a particular substance was released into the river at one hydropower dam, and measuring devices targeting this substance were installed at the next dam downstream. The engineers knew that the wave effect between the dams takes about one hour, but when the substance had still not been detected after three days, the experiment was abandoned. The water into which the testing substance had been immersed might have been caught in an eddy, ended up in a shallow and barely

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moving river section or in a bay, seeped into the ground, evaporated, or even been swallowed by animals or ingested by plants. For Juho, this goes to show that the actual water is far less relevant for hydropower management than the discharge wave effects. Hydropower managers in particular know the dynamics of discharge waves on the river, as they are obliged to keep the water level at dammed river sections in particular limits and have to make sure that enough water is available at each power station during peak production periods. Waves both have critical downstream effects and propagate upstream, at least on lakes and dammed river sections. The dam that regulates the water table of Lake Kemi, for instance, is allowed to alter its discharge by a maximum of 350 m3 /s per day. If this amount is exceeded, the wave induced into the reservoir-lake would be regarded as too dangerous. If the dam at the mouth of the lake opens its turbines and spill-gates too quickly, this wave would push downstream; if it closes them too rapidly, the wave would flow upstream. In fact, hydropower engineers group the power stations on the Kemi River main course into two groups according to discharge rhythms. The upper group is a series of three power stations11 that discharge their waters straight into the river section dammed by the next station. This means that there are no rapids or other particularly shallow sections that increase friction on the discharge wave, which therefore passes rather quickly – in the course of approximately an hour – from one station to the next. Downstream of this group, an un-dammed river section12 follows and the large Rauta and Ounas Rivers join the main course. Further downstream the lower group is located, consisting of five power stations13 that practically dam the entire river drop between Rovaniemi and the sea. While again the wave takes only about one hour from one of these stations to the next, it takes between twelve and twenty-four hours between the two groups, in the course of which it has spread and been diluted so much that it is noticeable only to a limited degree. This time lag in the wave effect is generally more pronounced during winter, with low discharges, than during late spring and early summer, when the water table is high. The reason for this difference is again friction: With less discharge, the share of the water closer to the river bed increases and comparatively more energy is spent rubbing on rocks and gravel than pushing the wave ahead. The forebay reservoirs at hydropower stations provide graphical sites for comprehending the rhythmical nature of discharge in the river. Power stations are best utilised when most of the discharge occurs during morning and evening hours, as explained in chapter nine. However, the water used to propel the turbines at one station, or rather the wave induced by this discharge, is not immediately available at the following power station, but typically arrives there at a time of lower electricity demand and is best stored until the next peak in demand and prices. Thus, the dynamic at each dam becomes a microcosm of the pattern discernible at the large reservoirs: During times of high water

11 12 13

These are Seitakorva, Pirttikoski and Vanttauskoski. This is the location of the currently debated plans for constructing the power station of Sierilä (see chapter four). The lower group consists of the power stations of Valajaskoski, Petäjäskoski, Ossauskoski, Taivalkoski and Isohaara.

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

availability, the material is not needed, whereas in periods of high demand, water abundance is limited. What is morning and evening for the daily rhythm, is winter and early spring in the yearly cycle; late spring and early autumn correspond to nights and midday. Because of these dynamics of flow and time lag, hydroelectricity production is mirrored extensively in the rhythms of river discharge (fig. 10.1). Hydropower dams regulating discharge and water level are thus sites of both creating and experiencing waves, very much like many other places on the river.

Figure 10.1: Water level between two dams and its relation to the daily fluctuations of electricity price. Based on a sketch drawn by Juho on November 2nd 2007.

Alongside the rhythms of temperature and precipitation, electricity prices are thus manifested in river discharge. In Saarenkylä, the island located at the confluence of Ounas and Kemi River (fig. 3.2), the articulation of some of these rhythms is graphically reflected on the narrow canal that separates the islands from the mainland in the north and northeast. During those periods that the Kemi River carries particularly large amounts of water, the canal flows westwards, from the Kemi into the Ounas River. When discharge from the Ounas River is particularly high, the water in the canal switches directions and flows eastwards. The relative magnitude of the two streams at any one instant depends on a number of hydrologic rhythms, including timing, quantity and location of rainfall, temperature dynamics, land-use and electricity prices. Some of these factors follow a sidereal temporality, other rhythms are largely independent of clock-time. In terms of land-use the drainage systems, in particular, have fundamentally altered the hydrology of smaller watercourses and the dynamics of discharge waves. Drainage ditches have diminished the water-holding capacity of the catchment, which now spills most of its water load straight into the rivers. The effects of rainfall and snowmelt are thus much more pronounced in the watercourse. Simultaneously, when a river stretch experiences high water levels, the drainage ditches collect water from the river and lead

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it inland, thus aggravating the extent of possible flooding. Tapsa tells me that the simultaneous modernisation of river and river dwellers has led to an overall acceleration of processes, from water discharge and flood developments to the hectic working day of present riverbank inhabitants. What used to take time, go along in meanders and eddies, and linger on in bogs, currently runs straight, quickly and rationally.

Hydrology and management Juho observes that hydropower managers cannot change the total amount of water flowing down the river. Only the timing of this flow can be manipulated along some stretches. He means that dams cannot alter the fundamental givens of the hydrological cycle, and over the course of a year, the same amount of water runs from sources to sea with or without dams. According to this statement, river management emerges basically as the management of discharge rhythms. And river dwellers have engaged in such management for centuries, in fishing, agriculture and transport. This heritage is invoked by a monument on the dam of Seitakorva, the barrier that regulates the hydropower reservoir of Lake Kemi (fig. 10.2). The monument consists of a scrap turbine wing set behind an old millstone. Although the grain millstone is rather large in diameter, the turbine wing towers over it, even though it represents only a fraction of the entire turbine. The monument speaks of the continuity of hydropower utilisation on the Kemi River, where the huge dam and regulation channel that can lower and raise the water table in the lake by seven metres is portrayed as the logical extension of the water mill of which the millstone was once part. The sheer scales of the two implements juxtaposed in the monument, however, belies this claim. It is true that hydropower utilisation has a long history on the river, but no other form has been as totalising as current electricity production. Water was indeed dammed and re-channelled for powering water-mills that ground grain and sawed timber.14 But these would never dam an entire river. Moreover, most of these small mills were owned and operated by river dweller families or cooperatives (e.g., Luusua 1998), rather than by large industrial or state-owned companies.

14

In upstream areas of the catchment, mills were an extremely rare sight until the nineteenth century, when barley cultivation was adopted more widely.

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

Figure 10.2: Hydropower monument on Seitakorva dam. Continuity of river uses, or qualitatively new industry?

It appears that the introduction of rhythms derived from the electricity market into the discharge of the Kemi River is the central issue of river dwellers’ discontent with hydropower and Kemijoki Ltd. Many river dwellers have grudgingly accepted the transformation of large tracts of their home river into wide and level, reservoir-like basins. But the management of the river’s discharge rhythms and water level fluctuations by a centralised company seems to be taken more seriously than the loss of land inundated by the dams and reservoirs. When Kala-Erkki, for instance, lists the numerous disadvantages that hydroelectricity production has for fish and fishing on Lake Kemi, he hardly ever mentions the fact that it has been dammed. The problems he finds most critical all emerge from the regulation of its discharge and water level: the deterioration of water quality, the disappearance of winter habitat for fish, or the inability of pike to spawn in spring (see chapters five and nine) (cf. Saari and Marttunen 2003, Kerätär et al. 2003, Väntänen et al. 2004, Marttunen et al. 2004). Veronica Strang (2004, 2005b, 2005c) argues that whoever is in charge of the water is also in power over the people who depend on this water. To some extent, Kemi River

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dwellers seem to feel similarly. They experience the hydropower-induced fluctuations of discharge and water level as an incessant proof that a powerful, abstract force is in power on their river and thus infringes significantly on their everyday lives.

Floods and flood control The most prominent feature of the rhythmic dynamics of river discharge is of course its floods, in particular the spring flood (Ahvenainen 1967b). It is a much anticipated event in the year on the river, both as a marker of spring and recommencing movement and life, and as a somewhat peculiar event with uncertainties and dangers. Large floods and inundations are remembered decades after they have receded, and every river dweller has heard of the greatest flood in recorded history, Saulin Tulva (“Saul’s Flood”) in 1859 when the Kemi River exceeded its summertime water level by ten metres in Rovaniemi. Even during ordinary floods, the water level rises about three metres along many river stretches, corresponding to an increase of discharge by the factor of ten or more, compared to the summertime amount. River dwellers have experienced a great variety of floods, in terms of duration, peak discharge and other rhythmical phenomena and remember them in many stories. The most recent exceptionally high flood happened in 1993, when over 4500 m3/s thundered down the lower river. This experience is habitually invoked as point of reference to judge present flood developments. Trying to gauge the extent and potential damage caused by a particular flood, river dwellers make water levels and discharge expectations a prominent topic in conversations and newspaper coverage during late spring (Ranta 2008, Hietala 2008, Välimaa 2008, Tanner 2008, Vehmas 2008c, Keränen 2008). They know that magnitude and extent of a flood in a particular year emerges out of an interplay of various catchment-wide, meteorological and historical factors, including snow cover, dynamics of temperature increase, length of melting period, extent of ground frost, and timing of plant growth. Alongside the flood extremes, also the rhythmical dynamics over the course of each flood are significant to river dwellers. Eero, on the lower Kemi River, for instance, explains that there is no one flood that increases discharge in front of his home, but actually three of them. The first one happens around Mother’s Day (second Sunday of May), when the snow in the vicinity has melted so much that it induces the “leaving-of-the-ices”. A few weeks later, Eero notices a second rise in water level, during the so-called “mountainflood” (tunturitulva). This happens when the flood peak of some of the areas further north and east – the “mountains” – makes itself felt downstream. Finally, in mid-June a second “mountain-flood” usually flows by Eero’s place, indicating that the snow has melted on the headwaters. Also Juho knows from experience in hydroelectricity generation that there can be up to four floods a year. Alongside the biggest one in late spring, there can be one or two “summer floods” (kesätulvat) and an additional “autumn flood” (syystulva). The large potential amplitude of floods on the Kemi River and the difficulties in forecasting, let alone managing, a flooding river have brought flood control onto the river dwellers’ agenda. Basically, flood control is to alleviate some of the problems that have come about in negotiating discharge rhythms with major developments of the twentieth century. The first and probably most fundamental of these is the development of permanency, regarding constructions of all kinds and river dwellers’ activities, including

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

bridges and employment. In order to safeguard the continuity of permanent structures and activities, river discharge must also be made somewhat more consistent. The second development is that of urban planning, in particular the spread of residential areas in Rovaniemi and Kittilä into flood-prone terrain. Because in designing the growth of such built-up centres, planners have assumed that the river would remain within its banks, it now has to be made to conform to this idea. The third development is the acceleration of hydrological speed in the catchment, especially through forest and bog drainage and the channelling of river stretches, as has been explained above. For some river dwellers, controlling the flooding of the Kemi River by constructing additional reservoirs is the logical conclusion from these developments. Others, like Kala-Erkki, find this approach absurd. He argues that river dwellers have learned to live with floods for hundreds of springs without the need to impound the meltwater. Building homes and infrastructure in low-lying areas close to the river is simply irresponsible. Everybody knew the places where the Arktikum Museum in Rovaniemi or the new housing developments in Saarenkylä have been constructed to be typical floodlands. Of course, they did not get affected every single year, but every decade or so there was a larger spring flood that inundated these stretches. Erkki explains that the main argument between these two positions is constructed as pitting the interests of upstream people against the interests of downstream inhabitants. Either Lake Kemi is managed as a flood-retention reservoir in spring, or the new homes, roads and shops in Saarenkylä are endangered. Only when the reservoir-lake is held empty for a long period each spring can it be used to hold back some of the huge discharge that could possibly emerge from the upper catchment. A flood that requires such measures, however, might happen in any year, but only rarely does. Thus, most springs, the lake remains empty pretty long in anticipation of a potential flood peak that does not materialise in a huge quantity, so that the lake is refilled gradually afterwards. In the meantime, Lake Kemi inhabitants, both human and non-human, have to live and die with the consequences of a lowered reservoir-lake with extensive drawdown zones. One central device for predicting and managing floods is a computer model that integrates various hydrological and meteorological measurements in the catchment with information on flood developments from multiple decades. A simplified version of this “watercourse model programme” (vesistömallijärjestelmä) is available to the public on the websites of the Finnish Environmental Administration.15 This programme reveals measured and projected discharge and water levels at various river stretches in the form of a number of graphs with different time horizons (fig. 10.3). Doubtless, the “watercourse model programme” is a most sophisticated device for forecasting discharge, flood risks, ice break-up and a number of other relevant parameters. However, hydropower managers working even with a much more sophisticated version of this programme also know that it is severely limited in many respects. First of all, it is said to lack sufficient data, which is costly to obtain in the extensive catchment. This leads to conditions, under which the model programme “makes too sweeping statements with too little data” as one engineer put it. 15

The relevant site for the Kemi River catchment is http://wwwi2.ymparisto.fi/i2/65/index.html (accessed 2009–12-20), but similar models exist for most watercourses in Finland.

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Figure 10.3: Measured and projected discharge at Savukoski upper Kemi River, on 20 December 2009 from the “watercourse model programme” (vesistömallijärjestelmä), http://wwwi2.ymparisto.fi/i2/65/q65savuky/wqfi.html (accessed 2009–12-20). This particular graph displays discharge one year into the past and another one into the future. The vertical line in the centre indicates the present. Towards the left of that is a line representing past discharge and a series of circles marking actually measured amounts of discharge in time. The right side of the graph represents three different scenarios, a very high flood, a very low flood, and an intermediary, most probable one. The shaded area stands for all possible amounts of discharge in time.

Furthermore, the predictions are based on particular assumptions not only about the weather, but also about the hydropower managers’ decisions as to how spill-gates and turbine inlets are to be strategically opened and closed. And not even these managers can forecast exactly how this will happen in the course of the coming year. Finally, the model makes claims about discharge, which is a dimension very difficult to actually measure in a river. Instead, the water level is measured, and the corresponding discharge is inferred. If the water level should rise for any other reason than an increase in discharge, however, such as through being impounded by an ice dam, the programme calculates downstream effects as if the rise were caused by more discharge. This amount of water, however, never existed on the real river, and as long as the programme still assumes it flows somewhere in the watercourse, many of its predictions are bound to be incorrect. Furthermore, what causes actual flooding is frequently not the mere discharge exceeding the amount of water held by the river banks, but the obstruction of discharge in general, especially by ice dams as sketched above. The “watercourse model programme”, however defines a “damage level” (vahinkoraja) for various river stretches only in terms of discharge. Of course, predicting ice dams is utterly impossible. But it thereby directs

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

discussions about floods and flood control into a particular path that links well with the logic of flood control16 reservoirs aiming at reducing overall discharge. In order to abate dangerous discharges, current propagators of flood control, such as the Council of Lapland, envision a number of additional reservoirs on the river’s headwaters. As the “only viable place” for the largest basin they propose the river stretch upstream from Pelkosenniemi, the exact same location as the Vuotos hydropower reservoir that had been prohibited by the Supreme Court only a few years previously. Alongside the classical arguments that have been used in the context of hydropower constructions (employment, income for municipalities, etc.) the Council refers to a Flood Directive of the European Union that calls on member states to assess, chart and devise coping strategies for their country’s flood risks (see chapter four). Reservoir critics and environmental administration staff agree, however, that an approach to flood control centred on large reservoirs and claiming social and ecological benefits might merely shift the rhythm of severe flooding from spring to autumn, as smaller summer- and autumn floods are likely to have much stronger impacts than hitherto. Especially because climate change scenarios predict the increase of such floods, effective flood control reservoirs would have to be left partially empty throughout the summer. Shore dwellers would have to put up with wide, ugly drawdown zones, animals with further habitat disturbance, and hydropower management with lower capacities of stored hydropower for the winter. One river dweller who owns a summer home on the upper Kemi River has come to deal with flood control in a way very different from regulation dams. He recounts that in one year, the flood had reached the summer home, destroyed the porch and inundated the floor by around ten centimetres. The following summer, he lifted the cabin by twenty centimetres in order to avoid flooding next time. During the coming spring, however, the summer home was flooded nonetheless, this time the water even stood half a metre on its floor. That was when he realised that either he must move the cabin further away from the beautiful spot on the river, or he had to find ways of dealing with being flooded. Because of his love for the river, he has opted for the latter alternative. He knows that the wood of the construction dries rather quickly after a flood; only rugs, upholstery and electrical instruments are seriously damaged by contact with water. So he clears the cabin of those things in autumn and has little to worry about.

Conclusion: Rhythms of transformation Life on the Kemi River is characterised by pronounced rhythms in human-ecological taskscapes, constituted by freezing, thawing, flooding, hydroelectricity generation, animal behaviour, plant growth and decay, and the various activities of river dwellers. Even the courses of rivers have been described as rhythmic, for instance in the to-andfro movement of meanders or the sequence of pools and rapids (Schwenk 1965, Leopold 16

Ice dams, and the severe flooding events triggered by some of them, as I have mentioned above, predominantly occur with moderate discharges. Flooding events are thus not directly linked to absolute discharge.

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1994). And just as the river comes about through the interplay of these various spatiotemporal rhythms, it is also transformed in a rhythmic manner. For instance, the period of the spring flood is rather short in relation to the entire year, and the years with great floods are few and far between. But these moments of maximum discharge and power have disproportionally high impacts on the river and its course. Strong ice floes can carve off large parts of the banks and shift large rocks, mighty discharges can relocate entire gravel banks or uproot trees, and persistent ice dams can, during such strong floods, result in the creation of entirely new river beds, when the incoming water finds another outlet past the dam. River restorationists are aware of this and admit that their careful design of rapids can be rearranged in the moment of one large flood. As much as the courses of the Kemi River and its tributaries resonate with the rhythms of the waters, ice and sediment they carry along, they have naturally also been made to resonate with human rhythms in the catchment. As I have pointed out, it is often spurious to distinguish “natural” from “cultural” factors in the present form of the river, as humans are participating in its shaping alongside a large number of other factors, adapting some and adapting to others (cf. Harrison 2004b). That along the Kemi River, the human and the hydrological are impossible to separate is probably most evident in the famous lake-drainage (järvenlasku) projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the ones that did not quite work out as planned. Possibly the most well-known of these is Rovan Niku’s lake-drainage that is said to have taken place on the headwaters of the Ounas River around 1860. This story has been published (Paulaharju 1963), but many river dwellers can tell versions of it, too. I re-tell the narrative here to illustrate how what the river is comes into being through the intertwining of manifold rhythms. In this story, the decisive rhythms include the long winters (and concomitant need for large hay harvests), the spring flood (and related unusually high water level), and the work-practices of river dwellers (who prefer to do jobs closer to the farmstead during the springtime kelirikko). Rovan Niku, who owned a sizeable dairy herd of around twenty head, aimed to increase his hay harvest by diverting some water from the local Lake Vuontis. Thereby, not only was his poorly-yielding hay-meadow adjacent to the lake to be irrigated and fertilised, but also he hoped that some of the lake bottom emerging with a decline in the water table would turn out to be fertile and productive ground. Over a few years Rovan Niku had tried in vain to dig a canal in the rocky ground of the lakeshore. Then, during one spring, he finally succeeded in creating a small ditch carrying water from the lake into his meadow. Pleased by this success he took a break, only to be soon alarmed by an unfamiliar roar. Looking back at his ditch he realised that the water from the lake was rushing through it much more powerfully than anticipated, and was thereby steadily increasing the size of the ditch and the amount of discharge. There was little Rovan Niku could do, except stand and watch how his “ditch” grew into a proper stream, while Lake Vuontis successively shrunk. Its water level is said to have declined by seven metres, decreasing it to a fraction of its previous size. The earlier Vuontis River draining the lake into the Ounas River ran dry for the most part, and is presently known as the “Old River” (Vanhajoki) (fig. 10.4). What started as a small ditch, on the other hand, has become the current Vuontis River.

10. Rhythms, regularities and regulation: The temporality of the river

Figure 10.4: “Old River” and new Vuontis River on the upper Ounas River – created by flood, erosion and human hands.

How are we thus to understand life on the Kemi River as a dynamic product of resonating rhythms? How do flowing waters figure in human activities and vice versa? Renato Rosaldo (1993) has adopted the image of the meander to portray the open-ended and improvised practices of visiting among the Ilongot in the Philippines. He finds that the “social grace” enacted in visiting practices is “a culturally valued quality of human intelligence, [that] consists of one’s responsiveness to whims, desires and contingencies” (ibid.: 257), establishing “the tempo and rhythms that shape the dance of life” (ibid.: 268). In a similar way, Andrew Pickering, analysing the interplay of scientists and their machines, describes the “dialectic of resistance and accommodation” (1995: 22) as a “dance of agency” between human intentions, practices and relations on the one hand, and material agency on the other. He draws attention to the temporality of scientific practice by highlighting the emergent character of scientists’ engagement with the world, and in particular with the devices they create to measure and manipulate it. The results of this engagement cannot be known in advance, but they come into being through what Pickering calls “the mangle of practice” that “sees science as an evolving field of human and material agencies reciprocally engaged in a play of resistance and accommodation in which the former seeks to capture the latter” (ibid.: 23). Although I prefer the simultaneity of Rosaldo’s metaphor of the “dance of life” to the turn-taking dialectics of Pickering’s “dance of agency” (on top of some reservations concerning the idea of ”material agency”, see Ingold 2010b: 94–97), the latter must be credited for introducing non-human dancing partners onto the floor. I suggest that life on the Kemi River, although shaped by radically different circumstances than that

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of Ilongot hunter-horticulturalists or European particle-physics researchers, can be viewed through this lens, as a “dance of life” (cf. Hall 1983) in which humans and nonhumans embody and adjust to various rhythmic phenomena, establishing an evertransforming taskscape. Summer-home occupation resonates with temperature, light and the schedules of vacations and the school-year; river discharge is a manifestation of the rhythms of precipitation, temperature and electricity consumption; river banks are carved by seasonally-occurring ice floes, the spring flood, and the summertime activities of river dwellers; and fishing necessitates the coordination of seasonal fish behaviour, prevailing colours and fishing tackle, among others. Indeed, as Mazzullo and Ingold (2008: 34–37) have indicated, in a world constituted by movement, the distinction between landscape and taskscape collapses, as even rocks, trees and the traces of past activities are in the process of flowing in and out of other forms, integrated with the inhabitants’ activities. This chapter has presented some of the rhythms that characterise the Kemi River and life on its banks, including human activities, residence, infrastructure, plant growth, animal behaviour, discharge waves, and fluctuations of light and temperature. Only in the interplay, or resonance (Ho 1991, Wikan 1992), of all these rhythms can life on the Kemi River be understood. I have argued against a focus on the seasons of the year and for approaching them, instead, as a subgroup of a wider range of rhythms. It has become clear that a rhythmsperspective gives critical insights into the association of spatial and temporal patterns on the river, for instance in upstream-downstream relations or the dynamics of discharge waves. On the river, all these rhythms influence each other and together shape the current, but fleeting, appearance of waters and humans. Rather than as an object, I have described the river as both outcome and facilitator of the social and ecological processes around it, as a constituent of the taskscape of central Lapland. And as Ingold (2000) has pointed out, this taskscape is fundamentally temporal, constituting “right moments” and undergoing continual transformation (cf. Bender 2002) in the process.

11. Conclusion

In the end of this journey along the Kemi River, having proceeded from river dwellers’ biographies, along a fluid topology and an environmental history, to fishing, travelling and hydroelectricity, and finally to the various spatiotemporal regularities and regulations of the riverine world, it is time to draw some conclusions. In what follows, I first summarise the key issues from the previous chapters and formulate some implications. Then, I outline what – for river dwellers – constitutes a river, and how this links to ideas of movement, transformation and freedom. And finally, I re-focus on the question of “thinking like a river”, illustrating how Kemi River dwellers are continually occupied with negotiating rhythmic flows that make their very engagement in the world an instance of “thinking like a river”.

Dwelling along a river: Rhythmic flows and mutual construction This book has investigated the narratives and practicalities of living with, and as part, of the rhythmic flows that constitute the Kemi River. I have indicated how life on the river emerges as a “fluid space” (Ingold 2009b) of resonating rhythms of river dwellers, fish, currents, hydropower management and more. Human rhythms are harmonised with those of the river, and the river is made to flow according to human needs. Dynamics of air temperature, the state of aggregation of water, discharge, light, winds and precipitation pulsate in an interplay with river accessibility, ways of transport, fish movement, taste and availability, and hydropower regulation of short- and long-term horizons. Harris has pointed out that, in a world never finished but constantly in formation, “seasonality is the periodicity of the creative movement itself” (1998: 79). As I have demonstrated, on the Kemi River there are manifold rhythms, both shorter and longer, alongside the annual cycles, but the basic insight remains intact: The river dwellers’ world comes into being through periodic movement, as a meshwork of various rhythmic flows. Furthermore, I have shown that this image of resonating flows does not imply a particular natural rhythm to which sociocultural processes are geared. Rather, the rhythms of riverine life emerge from an interplay of all movements present, some of them human, many not. Shifts of a river channel may prompt the relocation of settlement (cf.

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Lathrap 1968, Harrison 2004b), not unlike the changes induced by hydropower developments (e.g., Tikkanen and Tikkanen 1972, Järvikoski 1979). But also smaller-scale activities of humans and animals along the river – including seasonal damming of brooks to fertilise hay-meadows, the setting of fishing nets or the building and maintaining of fishing places – alter the rhythms of river water to fit other rhythmic dynamics. I have also demonstrated that dwelling with a river means shaping it and being shaped by it, regulating its flows and being confined and enabled by them. Springtime discharges facilitated timber floating; regulation dams on small brooks allowed rafters to gear those discharges to their particular needs. The river’s ice crust made it a wintertime means of transport in places; in other places river dwellers “built” an ice bridge to cross. Other human activities impacted on the river’s rhythms largely unintentionally. Forest drainage and the channelling of rapids, for instance, accelerated hydrological dynamics like flood peaks and summer droughts, although the intention was to improve wood growth and transport. And, probably most visibly, the rhythm of pools and rapids along the river has – along many stretches – been transformed into one of reservoir and hydropower dam. Whereas damming is among the most contentious and ideologically charged human alterations of a river (e.g., McCully 2001), dams provide sophisticated mechanisms to negotiate discharge rhythms with the rhythms of electricity consumption. I have indicated how understanding life on the river as a meshwork of rhythms has the potential to solve a number of conceptual impasses that an approach based on “inversion” (Ingold 1993, 2008), and on the objectification of persons, things and landscapes, seems inevitably to entail (Mels 2004, Lefebvre 2004). Moreover, taking rhythms seriously also sheds a somewhat critical light on the meaningfulness of averages, for instance average temperature or average water flow in a river. For people engaging with the river, much more relevant than average amounts of discharge are the markedly different seasonal stages of water, during spring, winter and summer, windy and sunny days, or after a rainstorm. The river can have way too much or far too little water for casting a net, going boating or floating logs. Similarly, to state that the average temperature in Rovaniemi is about +0.5°C completely misses the point that temperatures in winter average around -10°C, and in summer around +10°C. And even that is still a rather crude approximation to real life, because some winter nights can be as cold as -40°C, and summer days over +30°C. Much more relevant for river dwellers is, for instance, when the first night frosts set in, when (and in which place) it is safe to plant potatoes, or when the river ice breaks open. And, of course, these rhythms are managed and manipulated, intentionally and unintentionally, by the river dwellers’ very dwelling. Planting potatoes in drier and higher fields makes them less susceptible to frost; barraging the river slows down the current and supports freezing; and regulating discharge and water levels optimises hydroelectricity production and facilitates many other processes, while inhibiting others.

Rhythms and power I have illustrated how hydropower issues index a further aspect of reality as entwined rhythms, namely the aspect of power. In this book, however, I have chosen not to ap-

11. Conclusion

proach this issue in established terms of social science, such as those based on Foucault’s work (e.g. 1977). Instead, I have described struggles and transformations in terms of the particular flows and frictions that enable some developments and hinder other. Thereby, I have intended to move beyond an understanding of power as mainly discursive and instead portray struggles between and accommodations to competing claims and actions in a more physically and practically grounded idiom. I have approached conflict and rival uses of the river in terms of the rhythms they embody, engender and displace. Not all rhythms have the power to make others adapt to their patterns, and many are fundamentally altered in the process of particular ‘strong’ rhythms’ being introduced or gaining strength. The spatiotemporal patterns associated with hydropower have not only displaced people and landscapes, but also made new places and suggested new relations of river and inhabitants. Whoever determines particular flows and forms (cf. Shields 1997, Bender 2001, Ingold 2005) thus exerts power over life on the river. The question of power is thus closely entwined with the argument that rhythmic flows do not exist in a well-greased universe, but are subject to friction (Tsing 2005). In fact, without this friction of various rhythms rubbing against each other, of dissonances and resonances, these flows would hardly be discernible. I have demonstrated that only in relating to another through friction do flows become meaningful materially and socioculturally. This is the principle of hydroelectricity generation and watercourse regulation, of navigating a boat and of operating fishing gear, as much as it is the underlying dynamic of social, cultural, technological and ecological transformation (Mol and Law 1994, Shields 1997, Lefebvre 2004). In indicating how global flows require and remake particular channels, which in turn have to be actively constructed and maintained, Tsing’s work points to the significance of friction in the articulation of movement. Alongside a turning wheel on pavement and the rubbing together of two sticks to light a fire (2005), she uses a creek as a metaphor to illustrate the concept. “As the water rushes down, it carves rock and gravel; it deposits silt on slow turns; it switches courses and breaks earth dams after a sudden storm. As the creek flows, it makes and remakes its channels” (2000: 327). She goes on to say that also the putatively global movements of information, people and money function in a similar way. “These world-making ‘flows,’ too, are not just interconnections but also the recarving of channels and the remapping of the possibilities of geography” (ibid.). Arguing that globalisation is not an abstract process but a series of particular, and sometimes contradictory, context-specific projects, Tsing suggests that “we might stop making a distinction between ‘global’ forces and ‘local’ places […] obscuring the ways that the cultural processes of all ‘place’ making and all ‘force’ making are both local and global, that is, both socially and culturally particular and productive of widely spreading interactions” (2000: 352, emphases in the original). In this book, I have not focussed on localglobal interrelations, but on the associations and manifestations of various movements in work, everyday life and their ongoing transformations. The general idea, however, remains the same: Along the Kemi River, ‘flowing’ and ‘local’ are not opposed moments, but mutually constitutive through the frictions of encounter and practice. I have portrayed these dynamics as both metaphorical and material. In both respects, the flows of waters, fish and traffic are channelled by particular contexts and yet have consequences along the river far beyond these contexts. Discursive and physical flows and frictions go hand

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in hand, not only in Lapland, but probably concerning water uses and meanings more generally (Strang 2004, 2008b). Concerning the rhythms of life along the Kemi River, I have found the idea of friction very suitable for conveying the dynamic affordances and resistances that different rhythmic phenomena display in relation to each other, and in the processes of mutual adaptation. It draws attention to the fact that rhythmic flows would be meaningless without their interplay, rubbing against each other when moving at different tempos or angles, weakening or gaining strength in their combinations. Unlike Sandy Toussaint (2008), who understands Tsing’s friction as a shorthand for conflicts over localised issues that involve non-local influences, I apply the concept much more widely. Because there are movements and transformations everywhere, friction also always exists. Clifford Geertz (2000: xii) even alludes to the idea that things make sense only through friction. Quoting Wittgenstein, he invokes the friction on “the rough ground” of empirical fieldwork as the distinctive characteristic of anthropology vis-à-vis philosophy. Without friction, walking is impossible – it would be mere slipping. And so, according to Geertz, is thinking dependent on the “traction” it experiences in real world encounters. Thought, then, needs a context different from itself to be fruitful. A central implication of such necessary, omnipresent friction in the articulation of various rhythms is the pervasiveness of conflicts and power relations. Lefebvre (2004) also writes about “arrythmia,” the state in which various rhythms do not harmonise, and he alludes to the political dimensions of conflicting rhythms. But his treatment appears quite generalised, sidelining the actual struggles and negotiations in the articulation of these different dynamics. Only when Lefebvre’s generalised rhythmanalysis is combined with Tsing’s attention to friction can we begin to appreciate the significance and complexities of the everyday encounter of various and conflicting rhythms. This encounter can have traumatic effects, such as the extinction of salmon through the interruption of their migration route; it can be the cradle of dexterity and source of pride, as in skilful boating or timber floating; and it can be the basis of hydropower management, regulating the flow if the river to fit the demands of electricity consumption. In all these cases, power is the ability of one rhythm to fit in with others, either by adapting to them or by making them adapt. Over the past century, and to an extent for a much longer period, the prevalence of certain dominant rhythms has successively turned the river into an increasingly specialised space. I have shown that only those rhythms that were able to resonate with the dominant ones remained on the river, while others were displaced. Whereas the river used to be open to a variety of different rhythmical activities, including travel and transport, or fish movements and fishing, it has recently become geared towards accommodating first and foremost the rhythm of electricity production. At the same time, roads have been developed as an ever more general means of transport, suggesting another dimension of the co-development of the river and its inhabitants. The specialisation of the river has been made possible, in part, by the generalisation of road transport, and of course by a host of other processes, including the substitution of fish migration routes and spawning grounds by hatcheries and restocking. Moreover, the material presented raises questions concerning the idea of “control” in a world of rhythmic flows. Although different rhythms inevitably conflict with and

11. Conclusion

accommodate each other, it seems impossible that one of them would control others. Various skilful activities, such as navigating a boat or managing a system of hydropower stations, require a person to be ‘in control’ on the river, but this is quite different from ‘controlling’ the river. A boater needs to keep balance, to judge what visible waves and eddies imply for the navigable route, and physically make the boat go there. A successful boater makes it look as if the river is flowing just in order to carry his boat. But the boater does not control the river; he controls the movements of his boat within that river. It is the same for the hydropower manager. She programmes turbine intakes and spill-gates at over a dozen power stations, skilfully “driving the river” to meet particular production targets within hydrologically possible and socially acceptable boundaries. She controls the dams (in case the technology does not fail), but does not control the river. Even though her actions have much more perceptible consequences for the river than those of the boater, her control also lies in mastering her activity, not in coercing the river.

River and “community” Throughout the book I have shown how the Kemi River continuously comes into being. It does not emerge as a distinct place, and neither as a series of places connected by its waters. Rather, I have portrayed life on its banks as constituting a “fluid space”, which Mol and Law (1994) explain as encompassing various places, but in contrast to the concepts of “region” and “network”, imagines them as unbound, transforming and unstably related. But what does this make of river dwellers? I explained that they do not primarily identify themselves as river dwellers, but that they do feel distinct from the inhabitants of other parts of the country, and that the river – and practising particular activities there – is integral to this sense of belonging. Can river dwellers then be considered a “community”? Or are they merely a number of persons who happen to live along a common watercourse? While anthropologists and human geographers have put a lot of effort into questioning established ideas about the “local” (e.g., Raffles 2002b, Tsing 2000) and “place” (e.g., Ingold 2007b, 2009a, Gupta and Ferguson 1997b, Massey 2005), little work seems to be done concerning the equally basic concept of “community”. Anthropologists agree that just as places are being made by people, ideas and materials flowing in and out, so are communities constituted by and integrated in these wider processes(e.g., Raffles 1999, 2002a, Olwig and Hastrup 1997, Gupta and Ferguson 1997a). Nevertheless, communities continue to be viewed as localised, bounded groups of people, maybe spread out over a number of such locations, such as in trans-national diasporas, but still spatially bounded. Kemi River dwellers cannot be called a “community” in this respect. But because they do constitute a social space, sharing certain memories, skills, narratives and experiences, much of which is centred on the river, I have treated them as a unity that usually has been reserved for communities in the classical sense. I want to propose that just as the Kemi River is integral to making places and topologies, it is also instrumental in forging a kind of riverbank “community”. This is not a community where members readily rally round a common label or political authority. Whether or not they do so is contingent on many factors, as indicated in chapters two and nine: vis-à-vis the country’s south, river dwellers seem to be much more united than regarding the relations among river dwellers

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from various sections of the catchment or different historical periods of arrival on the banks. The community of river dwellers appears similar to Mol and Law’s fluid space (1994: 659–664), as it does not portray clear boundaries, it is constituted through mixtures and distillations, and it shows a remarkable robustness. Fighting for compensations for the collapse of the entire salmon fishery, river dwellers united to protest in Helsinki. But concerning the question of salmon reintroduction, with a perceived imbalance in the distribution of costs and benefits, the inhabitants of different river sections oppose each other (chapter nine). In some issues, established families are pitted against newcomers, in others, upstream inhabitants against downstream inhabitants. Nevertheless, in these shifting and fluid circumstances, Kemi River dwellers do constitute a community, which is evident in at least three respects. First, they are integrated by a number of common activities and related experiences, including certain ways of fishing, timber floating, and boating. Second, they have endured and mastered a common fate and set of challenges, including the aftermath of the Second World War and major political-economic transformations in the 1960s and 1970s. And third, they share a common stock of stories and discourses, including the ideal of a “free river” and the jokes about a peculiar lumberjack named Nätti-Jussi. Some river dwellers have kinship ties, others work or have worked together, and still others do not have any such classical social relation. But they are integrated by another relation, namely be the flow of the Kemi River. This material relation channels, and has channelled for a long time, ideas, materials and people, and thus makes possible a human community that is not bounded by a watershed or a language, but fluid and malleable, bound together by various and shifting flows. This is the community of Kemi River dwellers. Approaching the people on the banks of the Kemi River in this way has allowed me to explore some of these commonalities and their integration through social and material processes along the river. Thereby I have been able to demonstrate how the river, along with the social and ecological life along its banks, constitutes neither a place nor a community in the classical senses, but a spatial and societal phenomenon of great significance nevertheless. Instead of solid boundaries, however, this phenomenon is based on rhythmical flows and frictions.

Environmental history and the anthropology of rhythms Finally, beyond reflecting on the meanings of water and its uses along the Kemi River, this book has pointed to a few issues of wider scope, two of which I would like to mention again here. The first concerns the benefits of engaging anthropological analysis with environmental history. That critical insights can be gained by integrating these two fields is evident not only in that some of the best environmental history draws heavily on anthropological sources (e.g., Cronon 1983, White 1996), but also in the recognition that people’s everyday practices and skills develop in the context of wider political-economic and environmental transformations (e.g., Harris 2005) that foster particular activities and knowledges and inhibit others. Environmental history becomes meaningful through taking up anthropological analyses of practice, relations, narrative and meaning; and anthropol-

11. Conclusion

ogy gains perspective by setting its subject within an environmental-historic context. In this book, this integration of disciplines has aided me, for instance, in articulating the relatedness of the river and river dwellers by showing that while humans have been shaping the stream, they have been simultaneously shaped by it, too. Also, the cultural significance of salmon today can only be grasped in the context of the history of river uses and transformations, of shifting hegemonies and political-economic constellations. And people’s stories about present or drowned river-places often refer to their creation or disappearance, highlighting the fundamentally temporal dimensions of a place. While I still believe that understanding people’s lives must be based on comprehending their practical engagements with one another and the world around them, their experiences and their narratives, I also hold that this comprehension is critically aided by relating it to the flows of environmental and wider institutional and political transformation. Second, I have indicated how focusing on rhythms in the study of the relations of people and their surroundings adds a new dimension to the insight that “landscape is a process” (Hirsch 1995: 22). If the rhythmical nature of social and ecological dynamics is acknowledged, the very landscape dissolves into a meshwork (Ingold 2007b) of articulating movements, integrated in a pulsating socio-ecological field of ever evolving and transforming dimensions (Ingold 2009a, 2009b, Mazzullo and Ingold 2008). On the Kemi River, this perspective elucidates how the movements of fish, the activities of river dwellers, water discharge, traffic volumes, electricity prices, and many other dynamics are entangled and mutually constitutive. Fish behaviour is rhythmical, and so are electricity consumption, temperature and discharge. Rather than starting from these phenomena as independent events or entities, treating them as rhythmic processes enmeshed with other rhythms illustrates how cold winters, extreme floods, large reservoirs, salmon reintroduction, electricity trading, summer-home use and boating routes are integrated. ‘Fleeting’ and ‘stable’ are only relative notions in such an animated world (Ingold 2006), and the landscape is in movement as much as the human life unfolding along its paths.

What is a river? Having thus touched on some implications of approaching the river as a meshwork of various rhythmic flows, I now focus back on the river, outlining some aspects of what river dwellers think a river is. Some observations hinge on the distinctions between rivers and lakes, some on the peculiarities of flowing water, and still others on ideas about “free” rivers.

Rivers and lakes, or the question of movement Many Kemi River dwellers clearly distinguish between lakes and rivers. Rivers have a readily discernible direction, which lakes lack. The current unmistakably indicates where down (-stream) is, organising river dwellers’ topology and facilitating many activities, above all timber floating. The current also leads to the quick accumulation of melting water and to

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a spectacular “leaving-of-the-ices” in spring. On lakes, by contrast, the ice melts in place and rather unspectacularly. To deal with the current, river dwellers have, for instance, devised special river boats that differ in a few crucial respects from “ordinary” lake boats. The elongated structure of the hull with two centres of gravity in prow and stern allows for a much more stable position in and negotiation of the currents. Of course, the river current is never a unidirectional, monolithic stream, but a “main stream” is always accompanied by a few counter streams and all kinds of eddies and waves. Skilfully ascending a river is therefore not primarily a question of strength, but of being able to negotiate the forces of different streams on the boat. Another crucial difference for the inhabitants of the region is the kind of fish that one can expect to catch in a river or in a lake. In lakes, fishers catch perch, pike and whitefish, amongst others. To a lesser extent, these species can also be caught in rivers, but there, fishermen look for trout and particularly grayling, species reliant on swiftly moving waters. As shown in chapter five, fish obtained from the moving waters of a river are considered very much superior to those caught in a stagnant pond. As rivers are thus characterised by movement, the widespread designation of rivers as “arteries” seems to make perfect sense. As in arteries, most important is the movement itself, the substances that are moving and the aspects thus integrated and sustained by the movement.

Fluidity, or the question of transformation and integration River dwellers habitually characterise the river as being in perpetual flux. Even in the coldest winter, it does not freeze completely, whereas most of the world is solid and quiet. What is true for ice conditions also applies to other material shapes on the river: nothing stays the same for very long. The river bed is continually eroded in some places and sedimented in others. A further distinctive feature of rivers is the speed by which discharge and water table may change. While the water level in lakes and bogs also varies with the seasons, rivers display a spring flood of a scale that can hardly be compared to other water bodies. Of course, water tables rise everywhere as the snow melts, but only on rivers can this be twenty times the summer volume. Things that happen up- or downstream from a particular stretch can also be felt in that locality. A rainstorm over the river’s headwaters, for instance, will be felt along the lower reaches as well – probably a few hours or days later – as the water table will rise, currents will change, probably the water quality will worsen, and nets will have to be rearranged. The impacts from the construction of hydropower dams on the river can often be felt tens of kilometres both upstream and downstream from the actual dam. Some of these upstream-downstream effects are caused by the very nature of a river’s currents. Placing a line of rocks across a stagnant body of water does little more than slightly raise the water table. Placing the same rocks across a river, however, creates a series of eddies, ensuing erosion and – above all – raises the water table considerably in the upstream stretch while lowering it just below. When the rapids on the Kemi River and its tributaries were recently “reinstalled” with rocks and holes, this led to a few prob-

11. Conclusion

lems with land- and cabin-owners upstream, who saw their property endangered by the higher water table. Finally, the fluidity of matter along the river also implies for many river uses that the flows concentrate energies from large areas along a relatively confined band. Waters and sediments, for example, gather from the wide catchment into the stream, and although the relations are not strictly cumulative, the main river course carries far-travelled substances. The same goes for fish (cf. Bear and Eden 2008). River fish hatch in one place, feed in another, overwinter in yet another and sometimes return to their birthplace to spawn. When a river dweller catches a fish, she harvests the energy from all these different places, integrated into the fish. This is most obvious in the case of salmon and other migratory fish that spawn in the river but grow mostly in the sea, only to return to the river. When caught there, river dwellers harvest an energy that the fish brought back from far away. Moreover, travel and transport as channelled by rivers and roads unite a wide array of trajectories along the river banks. The logic of the catchment, of headwaters feeding into tributaries and then into the main course, has facilitated timber floating, collecting logs from far distant felling sites and funnelling them to the mills in the estuary. If the biographies of living beings and artefacts are conceptualised as lines (Ingold 2007b), then rivers emerge as very dense bundles of such lines. Along the rivers, integrated with the flow of water, the movement of fish, transport infrastructure, human settlement and other threads, the life-lines of becoming seem to be winding particularly abundantly.

A “free river”, or the question of rapids Finally, what is distinctive about a river in the eyes of the people along the Kemi River can be partially distilled from the expression “free river” (vapaa joki). This usually describes a river that moves swiftly and perceptibly, in terms of both water and fish. Most often it implies a river or stretch not impounded by a dam. The upper Kemi and the Ounas River, for instance, are considered “free” in this respect, most other parts of the catchment are considered “built” (rakennettu), i.e. modified for hydropower management. The concept of a “free river” has also been used, however, in very different contexts. For example, when former rafters speak about the beginning of the floating season, they say that their work began as soon as the river was “free”, which in this case refers to an absence of ice cover. Moreover, many river dwellers remember the early 1990s as the time of boaters’ and fishers’ enthusiasm for the “free river”, which referred to the absence of neither dams nor ice, but to a stream free from logs after the end of timber floating. What do all these expressions of a “free river” have in common? Which aspect of the river is thought of as “free”? A “free river” seems more appealing to everyone, it appears open to more varied and pleasant activities and impressions than a stream that is dammed, frozen over or covered in floating timber. The common aspect of this “freedom” seems to be that the river water flows in a way that is directly discernible to humans and that can be accessed and used by them. Total discharge in a hydropower reservoir might be the same as in a “free river”, but phenomenally it looks, sounds and feels more like a lake than a stream; in winter, the river continues to flow underneath the ice crust, but

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in terms of direct perception and interaction this flow is largely insignificant; and although the river flows during timber floating operations in a very similar manner as it does without, a stream of water interspersed or occasionally even covered with logs is a fundamentally different environment for fishing and boating than one “free” of timber. If statements about a “free river” reveal anything of what the Kemi River is for its inhabitants, its essence, for them, seems to lie in the accessible and perceptible flow of its waters. River dwellers appear to have a rather clear idea of what a river is, and how this river is harmed and its riverness diminished by certain activities, including timber storage and damming. This idea resonates with the marked popularity among river dwellers and throughout Finland of rapid water reaches. Rapids seem to index a real, or free river,1 and to embody various connotations of nature, power and outdoor excitement. Rapids are crucial for river-dwelling fish species and important fishing sites; they provide challenges and sources of pride to boaters and rafters; and they embody the power harvested by – and frequently provide the location for – hydropower stations. All major and minor rapids on the Kemi River have been named, bearing witness to their importance for navigation and fishing, and today most hydropower dams carry the names of the major rapids they inundate. Larger rapids do not freeze over even during the coldest winters, challenging – as “free” bits – the general solidity of winter ice along the river. During spring, it is often on rapids that ice dams form and flood the surroundings. And throughout the year, rapids draw visitors, picnickers and day-trippers from near and far. The principle of a river – its flow, power, fish and attraction to humans – seems to be condensed in the phenomenon of rapids. Without its rapids, the lower Kemi River has become a mere “chain of reservoirs” for some river dwellers. But it was these very rapids that had made that river stretch so attractive for hydropower developments in the first place. With their spread, more and more river-fish have had to be raised in hatcheries to compensate for the loss of rapid-water spawning grounds, while the significance of traditional river boats and boating techniques has decreased. Presently, on the other hand, with the expansion of tourism, rapids are being “re-built” throughout the catchment to improve fish habitat and white-water excitement.

Imagining a river These observations, coupled with ethnographic findings from earlier chapters, suggest that for river dwellers, the core aspect of the Kemi River is its heterogeneous flow pattern. This view of the river resonates with their specific ways of experiencing and coming to know it, by fishing, boating, rafting, swimming, or looking at it – in short, by dwelling along the river. The river is movement, but movement of a particular kind. And if this particular, heterogeneous movement is replaced by a different form of flow, the stream ceases to be a real river in the eyes of many inhabitants, even though water and discharge remain. Arguably, river dwellers associate heterogeneity of flow – the sequence of pools

1

A Finnish act for the conservation of a number of rivers is called, accordingly, “Rapids Protection Act” (Koskiensuojelulaki, http://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/1987/19870035, accessed 2010–0304). This name alludes to the significance of rapids as locations for hydropower developments, ecological processes and sociocultural importance.

11. Conclusion

and ripples, the different kinds of standing waves and shallows, the dynamics of mainand counter-stream, and their seasonal variations – with a proper river. A river, then, is created not through its currents per se, but through the deflections in these currents, stemming from frictions between water and river bed, rocks and waves, and different sections of the stream, as well as the particular ways in which water moves under such conditions (cf. Schwenk 1965, Riegner 1989, Leopold 1994, Riegner and Wilkes 1998). A homogeneous stream of water, conversely, would not qualify as a river.

Figure 11.1: A river profile (a) for river dwellers, and (b) for hydropower planners.

Accordingly, the profile of a proper river in the river dwellers’ sense describes an irregularly waving, downward-sloping line. This contrasts sharply with the river profile as envisioned by hydropower planners (cf. fig. 4.8), which concentrates all its vertical extension in a number of places (dams), and reconfigures the remainder as parallel horizontals (reservoir water levels) (fig. 11.1). For the latter, the river is above all a combination of discharge and slope, together embodying its particular energy potential (chapter nine). Also this view, just like the river dwellers’ image, arises from their particular practices associated with the stream, managing water levels and gearing the discharge at dams to electricity demand. However, once this analytical view is applied to the real river, where discharge is regulated and slope concentrated, many river dwellers find that the river itself is lost. Even though overall discharge and total slope remain the same, dissecting the river into analytical entities and then reassembling them purposefully in concrete results in an ‘un-rivery’ watercourse. This visualisation reveals the striking similarities between these different conceptualisations of a river and different anthropological understandings of persistence and change (e.g., Ingold 1986: 151–158). Historical, social, biographical, experiential and cognitive processes are often depicted as comprising alternating phases of stasis and change. As I pointed out, however, in the preceding discussions of eras (chapter four) and of seasons (chapter ten), breaking up such processes into bounded phases or blocks is a classificatory abstraction from the flow of reality. Among many others (e.g., James 1892, Ingold 1986, 2007b, Hodges 2008), philosopher Henri Bergson (1911) has observed that…

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there is no essential difference between passing from one state to another and persisting in the same state. […] The apparent discontinuity of the psychical life is then due to our attention being fixed on it by a series of separate acts: actually there is only a gentle slope; but in following the broken line of our acts of attention, we think we perceive separate steps (ibid.: 2–3). As hydropower planners conceptually break up the river into steps of fall-head at power stations and water level in reservoirs, they recreate the actual river according to the same logic. Just as social life, however, is not constituted by an alteration of eras of persistence and events of change, so the river is not merely a combination of fall-head and water levels. The heterogeneous flow of multiple, mutually deflecting rhythms that constitutes the real Kemi River for many of its inhabitants is lost in this actualisation of the analytic imagination of the river.

Thinking like a river Let us now re-focus these insights on the core research question, whether Kemi River dwellers also “think like a river”, and if so, how this thinking is done. In the introduction, I provisionally defined “thinking like a river” as imagining the world in terms of rhythmic flows, enabling and impeding each other, and made real through the “friction” of practical encounters. All the ethnographic chapters have pointed to one or another aspect of such flows, frictions and rhythms in life on the river. This leads me to conclude that river dwellers do indeed think like a river. They do so, naturally, in a variety of ways, which surface in various forms of their practical engagement with the river, with the world around it and with one another, as well as in the manner they explain these activities and their historical development to an outsider like myself.

History As indicated in chapters two and four, and indeed throughout the book, river dwellers consider the past as a crucial explanation for current life on the river. Not only is the river a repository of memories – visible in place-names, physical structures and a growing collection of local histories – it is also a reminder of the continuity of transformation, physically, economically, technologically, and so forth. As river dwellers account for the present state of affairs in terms of historical developments, they construct an image of rhythmic flow, with some periods of rapid transformation and other more consistent ones. Thereby, history is seen as continuous flow that, through its very processes of transformation, can create perceived discontinuities, much like the cut-off ox-bow created by the continuous meandering of a stream. The extinction of salmon, for instance, is perceived as a marked discontinuity, but explained as the logical consequence of the ongoing processes of industrialisation, post-war reconstruction and the development of a relatively new nation-state.

11. Conclusion

Fishing As indicated in chapter five, the very practicalities of fishing in the river require fishers to think in terms of rhythmic flows. There is no one fishing method that can be employed throughout the year, nor is one particular place suitable for fishing year-round or a certain fish species endlessly sought after. Techniques, places, the desirability and availability of fish and fishing are in continuous flux. River dwellers adjust net positions and lure characteristics to the rhythms of water levels and discharge, pools and rapids, temperature, wind and precipitation. Of course, fishing always includes a degree of luck and of happening to be in the right place at the right time, but the more serious Kemi River fishers actively attend to these rhythms and configure their fishing accordingly, to make being in the right place at the right time less haphazard.

Travel and transport Navigating a boat on the river, particularly along un-dammed stretches, has been described in chapter six as movement within movement, as one flow in a series of others. Steering a boat past eddies, rocks and standing waves means being immersed in the various currents and counter-currents that flow past rocks and in and out of waves and along the banks. To negotiate the boat successfully past rocks and eddies and along the river one has to think in terms of these flows. Similarly, the management and practice of timber floating was little more than a management of rhythmic flows of waters, workers and wood. Only certain rates of discharge were suitable for floating, only so many logs could be processed daily at the sorting mechanism or held back by individual vastuu barriers, and particular numbers of workers were moving along different sections of the river. Both rafters and Floating Association managers had to think in terms of flow to guide timber to the mills. Finally, modern road traffic across the catchment continues to be understood in terms of a world in rhythmic transformation, epitomised by the concept of keli. A road is never just a road, but an element (itself a rhythmic phenomenon, as it guides the flow of traffic along a particular trajectory) integrated with a plethora of other rhythmic flows, most obviously those of the weather.

Hydropower Engineers managing dams and reservoirs that have been called “the antithesis of a river” (McCully 2001: 10) are probably least likely to “think like a river”. Nevertheless, as I have tried to show in chapter nine, thinking in terms of flows is indispensable for hydropower management. The very essence of this endeavour is to negotiate fluctuating discharges with fluctuating electricity prices, both instances of rhythmic flows that bear witness to a wider world in flux, with rhythmic dynamics of the seasons, the weather, day and night, working hours and electrical sauna use.

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Why river dwellers? The preceding observations beg the question of what is supposedly so special about river dwellers. Would not other people, whose lives and work are integrated with organic processes of growth and decay, who perceive patterned meteorological phenomena and fluctuations in daylight, or who even dwell in most post-modern, urban environments (Jauhiainen 2007), also potentially understand the world as constituted by rhythmic flows? I can well imagine that “thinking like a river” is not necessarily dependent on immediately dwelling with a river, but may indeed be much more widespread. In fact, it may constitute a central aspect of “pre-modern” thinking that is experiencing a revival under “post-modern” auspices (cf. Hall 1983, Giblett 1996), while it never quite left in between. Furthermore, considering the historical and contemporary significance of rivers for people, agriculture, cities, and states all over the world, it could be argued that river dwelling is an important aspect of humanity in the broadest sense. In some way or another, quite a large number of humans may be considered river dwellers. Nonetheless, life on the Kemi River seems to illustrate the rhythmic fluidity of matter, people and places particularly clearly. And other river research (e.g., Harris 2000, Mathur and da Cunha 2001, Raffles 2002a, Harrison 2004b, Blomley 2008) has documented similar dynamics. To a large extent, I would argue, this has to do with the rhythms of the river itself. Living along a river makes the rhythmic fluidity of the world much more obvious than living in many other environments is likely to do. And this is reflected not only in academic research, but also in the literary works engaging with rivers that I mentioned in the introduction. Part of this seems to be a direct result of the rhythmic fluctuations in the shape of the river and the corresponding human activities. The river’s flow is directly perceptible to the swimmer or boater, but more indirect indicators also point to the incessant fluctuation of river and associated activities. The graphs on hydropower managers’ computer screens, logs stranded on the banks or fishing nets washed out of place and filled with debris instead of fish all tell the same story of a rhythmic watercourse. Living with this watercourse, consequently, requires “thinking like a river”.

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