October 17 2023

Migrant mania

Place

Tuning in and dropping out at Gilpin Hotel

It is 7:30 a.m. and already seventy degrees in Bowness-on-Windermere. A rare, early summer heatwave. My friend Ebele and I lower ourselves into a sunken outdoor hot tub in groggy disbelief. We appear to have woken up in Utopia. Llamas and alpacas frolic yards away as we sip coffees in silence. A butterfly lands on the decking. There’s no noise but for the bubbles, until a perfect breeze ruffles the fronds of the tree that’s dappling the sunlight. The grass could not be greener, skies cerulean. This is the definition of “bucolic,” I think. William Blake’s England, plus massage jets. His pastoral poems that plagued me in university start to make more sense (plenty of lambs here, too; the local “Herdies”).

Dave Seminara

Visiting with bears on the Russian border

Bear viewing in Finland can be a cloak-and-dagger affair. We were told to meet our guide, Pekka Veteläinen, at 5:45 on a Monday afternoon — not at a landmark, but at a set of GPS coordinates deep in the woods, fifty minutes outside a town called Kuusamo, just one kilometer short of the Russian border on logging road number 8691. Here are some of the instructions we received. Wear dark clothing. Take ready-made food with you. Bring cash because credit cards don’t work in this wilderness. We had an early dinner at a “wild food” certified restaurant in the Karelian town of Kuusamo — it’s Finland’s seventy-fifth biggest town, a distinction that means the place still has more reindeer than people.