Summer months in Finland have been unusually warm this year. While the temperature hovers around 25°C, which I really don’t find to be exceptionally warm, there’s been practically no rain in almost two months. Which does feel rather unusual. Anyway, the country has been going through the driest period in the last hundred years. As a consequence both farmers and firefighters have been struggling to get a grip on nature. And to get a grip on neighboring country’s politics.

Naturally the weather does not end at any political borders. Thus at least north-western part of Russia has been going through the same drought that’s present in Finland. While Finnish firefighters are trying to stay ahead of the nature and are diligently putting out fires, their Russian counterparts are doing very little while facing the same kind of fires.

The fires have in the last few weeks reached such size and strength that smoke has covered pretty much the whole central and southern Finland. It doesn’t take a super sensitive person in, for instance, Helsinki to sniff out that something is burning and quite intensely too. Not to mention that the very same smoke can also be clearly seen as a strong yellowish haze.

OK, one can understand, fires can get big and out of hand making them difficult to put out. But how did they get to such proportions in Russia? They simply did not bother to put them out. Supposedly they started doing something about the problem only after being tapped on the shoulder by the Finnish government. And even when Finnish firefighters have crossed the border to help their comrades, they were sent back home and told not to come back. Unbelievable.

However, the nice weather also has other persistent consequences which are endemic over here. I need not point out again that Finland is the country of thousands of lakes and that when the weather heats up people flock to any kind of water to cool off (read at least the previous week’s post for more details, if you haven’t yet). Combining the water and people is perfectly fine, but adding alcohol to the mixture causes nothing but trouble.

Why? I guess that’s obvious: people drown easily. How? Now, that’s a different story, several actually. The weather is nice, the water refreshing, booze flows in streams, life couldn’t be sweeter. Then problems materialize, seemingly out of nowhere. The obvious deadly combination is that the drunk person decides to go for a swim … and they return only after being pulled out the next day by the too often too late rescue crew.

The less obvious way of drowning, but equally common (if not even the most common) is that they decide to either go fishing or rowing on a, let’s get this straight, placid lake. They climb into a boat with an extra bottle of Koskenkorva (which by the way, literally means “an area by the rapids” - the name that could hardly be more appropriate for the occasion) or other favorite kind of booze and dip paddles into the water. Sooner or later the bladder gets full. It desperately needs to be emptied. He stands up, opens the zipper, wobbles for a bit and oops … capsizes the boat. Pretty much a death sentence.

Bingeing turns into tragedy … and statistic according to which during the summer most men by far drown in lakes with their zippers wide open. And the nicer the weather the more of them there is. Which, if one thinks a bit, is quite sad. Maybe it’s about time the weather turns cold and rainy after all.

Urinate responsibly my friends.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 8:58 am and is filed under Culture, Finland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.