Phys ed was another matter entirely. I’m probably not breaking any news by revealing that I wasn’t the most athletic guy on the Fennoscandia peninsula. I was skinny then, too, believe it or not. Gymnastics was actually okay to participate in. But when we would have soccer or ice hockey, it would be time for me to skip class.
This showed up in my grades. In Finland you get graded on a scale of four to ten. So I would earn tens and some nines for math, physics, biology, and everything else—but sevens for phys ed. Once there was a six. I earned a six in woodworking, too. That wasn’t my strong sport, either. Other guys have well-crafted napkin holders or stools as souvenirs of woodworking class. All I have are a few splinters still lodged in my thumb after all these years. This is where it should be mentioned that my father-in-law was the one who built the fine swing set in our backyard on which my daughters spend so many happy hours.
My high school wasn’t one of those institutions for exceptionally smart or ambitious kids, which are common in most U.S. cities. Such schools are pretty much against how Finland works. Finnish schools don’t separate out the good students—or the losers, for that matter. However, each school did have its specialty, a subject that was not required but that you couldn’t get at any other school. In the case of Norssen High School, it was Latin. And Latin was fun. More fun than learning Finnish and English.
Too bad it’s a dead language. I’d love to get together with a few buddies and tell jokes in Latin or maybe discuss operating-system design strategies.
It was also fun to spend time in the coffee shop near school. It was a hangout for certain people, basically those who weren’t hiding behind the school smoking cigarettes. You would go there instead of phys ed, or you would go there if you had an hour break between classes, which sometimes happened.
The place had been a haven for geeks since the days of slide rules. Also, it was the only café that let students buy things on account. That meant you would place your order and they would keep a written list of everything you ate or drank, and then when you somehow got the money together you would pay for it. Knowing the Finnish mania for technology, it’s probably all recorded in a database these days.
My order was always the same: a Coke and a doughnut.
So young and already such a health food nut.
Generally speaking, I was better in school than my sister, Sara, who was more sociable, easier to look at, nicer to people—and, I should add, has been hired to translate this book into Swedish. But she beat me in the end because she took exams in more subjects. My interests were narrower. I was known as the Math Guy.
In fact, the only time I brought girls home was when they wanted to be tutored. It didn’t happen all that many times, and it was never my idea, but my father harbors fantasies that they were interested in more than math tutoring. (In his mind, somehow they had bought into his Stately Nose = Stately Man equation.) If they were looking for any math-guy action, they certainly didn’t have a willing partner. I mean, I could never even figure out what they were referring to by “heavy petting.” I had spent time taking care of a neighbor’s fifteen-pound cat and couldn’t figure out what the big deal was.
Yes, I was definitely a geek. No question about it. This is before geekdom became sexy. Well, I guess it’s not really sexy but hipper. What you had was someone who was both a geek and shy—or is that redundant?
So I would be sitting in front of a computer and be perfectly happy.
For high school graduation in Finland, you wear a fluffy white hat with a black band. There’s a ceremony in which they hand out diplomas, and when you come home all your relatives are there with lots of champagne, flowers, and cake. And there’s also a party for the entire class at a local restaurant. We did all that, and I guess I had fun, but I don’t remember anything special about it. But ask me about the specs on my 68008-chip machine and I can rattle them off with total recall.
VI
My first year at university was actually quite productive. I managed to earn the number of credits—which are called “study weeks” in the Finnish system—that one is supposed to earn. It was the only year that happened. Maybe it was the excitement of the new environment, or the opportunity to delve deeply into the topics, or because it was more comfortable for me to study than to become a social animal and puke on my friends with ritualistic regularity. I don’t know what to blame for my adequate performance in that first year. But rest assured, it didn’t happen again. My academic career took a sharp nosedive.
At that point a major hadn’t been determined. Eventually computers became my major, with physics and math as minors. One of the problems was that in the entire University of Helsinki there was only one other Swedish-speaking student who wanted to major in computers, Lars Wirzenius. The two of us joined Spektrum, the social organization for Swedish-speaking science students, which actually turned out to be a lot of fun. The club was comprised of students in the hard sciences, such as physics and chemistry. Translation: It’s all guys.
But we did share our clubroom with the counterpart organization for Swedish-speaking students in the soft sciences, such as biology and psychology. That way, we were able to interact with females, as awkward as it might have been for some of us. Okay, all of us.
Spektrum had many of the trappings of an American-style fraternity, but you didn’t have to live with the other guys or ever deal with anyone who wasn’t interested in science. We had regular Wednesday night meetings where I learned the difference between a pilsner and an ale. On rare occasions there were vodka-ingesting contests. But much of that didn’t happen until later in my university career. And there was ample time for it to happen: I studied at the university for eight years, emerging with nothing more than a mere master’s degree. (I’m not counting the honorary doctorate the university issued to me in June 2000.)
But that first year was a blur of streetcar commutes between lecture classes and my bedroom, which was gathering piles of books and computer equipment. I’d lie in bed reading a Douglas Adams sci-fi thriller, then toss it on the floor and pick up a physics text, then roll out of bed and sit at the computer writing a program for a new game. The kitchen is right outside the bedroom and I’d stumble in for some coffee or corn crunchies.
Maybe your sister is somewhere around, or maybe she is out with friends. Or maybe she is living with your father these days. Maybe your mother is there or maybe she is working or maybe she is out with her journalist friends. Or a friend is over and you are wedged into the kitchen, drinking cup after cup of tea and watching Bevis and Butthead in English on MTV and thinking about going somewhere to play snooker but it is just too cold outside.
And happily, there is no phys ed in this lifetime.
That will happen next year. All year. When the Finnish Army calls every male. Many guys do their army duty immediately following high school. For me, instead, it seemed to make more sense to wait until after completing a year at the university.
In Finland you have a choice: You either do the army for eight months or social services for a year. If you show strong religious reasons or some other significant excuse, you could get around both. For me, there wasn’t such an out. And the option of social services didn’t feel right.
It wasn’t because I had anything against helping humanity. It probably had more to do with a fear that social services duty ran the risk of actually being
more
boring than army duty. I can’t believe I’m being so candid. But talk to someone who has gone the social services route and you find that if you haven’t already lined up a good place to perform them, you will be randomly assigned to an uninteresting place. And I couldn’t conscientiously object. As much as I wouldn’t have objected to shirking my patriotic duty, the fact is I actually do have a conscience: When push comes to shove, I don’t have strong convictions against guns or killing people.
So if you opt for the army there are two new choices to make. You could go for the required eight months as a regular Joe, or go to officer training school and do eleven months as an officer. It occurred to me that it might be slightly more interesting to be an officer, despite the additional 129,600 minutes. It would also be a way of getting something more out of it.
That’s how your (then) 120-pound hero became a second lieutenant in the reserves of the Finnish Army. My job was fire controller. It’s not exactly rocket science. You are given the coordinates for the big guns. You read the map of where you are and then you triangulate on where you want to shoot. You do the coordinates calculations and then you radio them in or communicate using telephone wire that you helped lay out. You’re telling the guns where to shoot.
I remember being very nervous before going into the army, not knowing what to expect. Some people had older brothers or someone to talk to about the army, so they knew what to anticipate. There was nobody to tell me what would be happening. Well, everybody knows in general that the army isn’t going to be fun. It’s something perpetuated by everybody being there. But I didn’t have a clear idea of what it would be like, and that made me nervous. It’s sort of how I feel about having people read this book.
The most difficult times in the army involve walking around the Lapland woods with what seem like tons of cable. Frankly, I think it
is
tons of cable. Before officers school, you would be ordered to run around with a huge roll of cable on your stomach and two on your back, and you have to run for, like, ten freaking miles. Other times you’re just standing around waiting for things to happen.
Or you ski for too long to the place where you put up the tent. That’s when I realized that if God had meant us to ski, He/She/It would have equipped us with elongated fiberglass pads instead of feet. Wait a second, I don’t necessarily believe in God.
Then you have to get the tent set up and the fire going before you can eat. You’re cold and hungry and tired because you haven’t slept in two days. I understand that people actually pay good money to participate in such extreme outdoor adventures as “character-building experiences.” They should just join the Finnish Army.
Actually, the outdoor marathons didn’t happen often, but they happened. I calculated that during eleven months with the army, I spent more than 100 days in the woods. Finland has abundant woods: 70 percent of the country is covered with forest. I felt as if I visited it all.
My job as an officer was to be the fire control leader for a group of five. That just means you’re supposed to know how things work, and make them seem more complicated than they really are. But it just wasn’t that interesting and I wasn’t a very good leader. I certainly wasn’t good at giving orders. I took them well—the trick is not to take it personally—but I didn’t feel that it was my mission in life to do the best job.
Not then.
Did I mention how cold it gets in Lapland?
Come to think of it, I really hated it while I was there. But it was one of those things: After it was over it immediately became a wonderful experience.
It also gave me something to discuss with virtually any Finnish male for the rest of my life. In fact, some people suggest that the major reason for the required army duty is to give Finnish men something to talk about over beer for as long as they live. They all have something miserable in common. They hated the Army, but they’re happy to talk about it afterward.
VII
While we’re on the subject, let me tell you some more about Finland. We probably have more reindeer than any place on Earth. We also have a healthy share of both alcoholics and fans of tango dancing. Spend a winter in Finland and you understand the roots of all the drinking. There’s no excuse for the tangoistas, but, thankfully, they are all pretty much concentrated in small towns, where you never have to encounter them.
A recent survey determined that Finnish males are the most virile in Europe. It must be all the reindeer meat, or the hours spent in saunas. This is a nation that literally is home to more saunas than cars. Nobody actually knows how this religion started, but the tradition, at least in some places, is to build the sauna first, then the house. Many apartment buildings contain a sauna on the first-floor level or the top floor, and every family gets its own private hour—like Thursdays, 7 to 8 P.M. (Thursdays and Fridays tend to be sauna days.) That way, you don’t have to endure the horror of seeing your neighbors naked. I was once thumbing through an English-language guidebook to Finland that went to great lengths to warn the reader that Finns never have sex in saunas, and how they would be horrified to learn that such a violation has taken place or was even a mere fantasy in the tourist’s mind. I couldn’t stop laughing when I read that, because the sauna is such a neutral place in the Finnish home that the book might just as appropriately have warned against having sex on the kitchen floor. I don’t think it’s any big deal. In remote locales babies are born in saunas—the only places with hot water—and that’s where you go to die, according to some traditions. These rules don’t apply to my family, by the way, which has a laid-back approach to the whole thing.
There are other traits that distinguish Finns from other members of the human species. For example, there’s this silence tradition. Nobody talks much. They just sort of stand around not saying anything. This is another rule that doesn’t apply to my family, which I will generously describe as “offbeat.”
Finns are stoic to a fault. Silent suffering and fierce determination might be what helped us survive in the face of domination by Russia, a succession of bloody wars, and weather that sucks. But these days, it just seems odd. The German writer Bertolt Brecht lived briefly in Finland during World War II and made the famous observation about patrons of a railway station café there “remaining silent in two languages.” He left for the United States via Vladivostock the first chance he could.