Polar Huns

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This week's Ask the Pilot features a short bit about Finland that is funny if a bit stereotypically unenlightened. The Finn singing Blister in the Sun is likely lucky he lived to see another flight.

First, what's the deal with Finland? My column seems to be inordinately popular there, for reasons I can't explain. Asking around, I'm told the Finns are among the planet's most Internet savvy populations, but still, five letters in less than a week? Certain places I take for granted. I receive semi-frequent mail from Australia, as an example. The Aussies speak English and have a rich aviation history. Finland I'm not so sure of.

What few things I know about Finland don't explain the mystery. For instance, I know the Finns hate being called Scandinavian. That's because they're not. The Finnish language, unlike Swedish or Norwegian or Danish, branches from the same family of tongues -- Finno-Ugrian -- that claims Hungarian.

Thus you can think of the Finns, maybe, as an alienated, dislocated community of Polar Huns. I'm also told the summertime mosquitoes in Lapland are the world's most voracious.

Possibly for these reasons, enormous groups of young Finns routinely flee their homeland. At least for the weekend. They proceed via ferry, across the gulf from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, where they spend the next three days gorging on cheap Russian liquor. Then, in what must be a truly grotesque scene of en-masse hangover and seasickness, they catch the ferry home again. St. Petersburg as a sort of Baltic Cancun.

Maybe things have changed, but that's how it was in February 1986, when I spent five days in Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was still called) at the Pribaltiskaya Hotel. What the Pribaltiskaya lacked in luxuries it made up for with a well-stocked bar and a tolerance for obnoxious revelry. The boat from Helsinki arrived on Friday afternoon, and by 8 p.m. hundreds of Finns were collapsed into unconscious pig-piles in the stairwells, elevators and hallways. Piles of drunken bodies were giving off fumes like gasoline-soaked firewood. Those still ambulatory were climbing the flagpoles and jumping head-first into the laundry chutes.

All right, in fairness I'll add that groups of partying Swedish kids were up to much the same thing. I quickly lost track of which drunken posses were the Finns and which were the Swedes.

The Swedes, it turns out, became easier to spot because many of them were weeping. Only hours earlier, Sweden's beloved prime minister, Olof Palme, had been assassinated in Stockholm. As details of the killing trickled in, distraught teenagers huddled around each other in the hotel restaurant, downing bottle after bottle of $3 champagne; pouring vodka onto the tables and slapping the puddles with their hands.

Finnair, to politely change the subject, is Finland's national airline. Founded in 1923, it operates a 60-strong fleet as far as Bangkok, Shanghai and Hong Kong. In fact it was Finnair that flew me from New York to Russia back in '86, by way of Helsinki. The airline has a good reputation and is popular for its routes to Eastern Europe. Then again, it also calls itself "the official airline of Santa Claus" and is known for cramming 10-abreast seating into its MD-11s instead of the standard nine.

In '86 it was an old DC-10, predecessor of the MD-11, and it too had the 10-abreast squeeze. Then we suffered a flat tire during a fuel stop in Montreal.

Even more disturbing than the three-hour delay and deep vein thrombosis, however, was the whacked-out man sitting behind me. This young, disheveled, and very inebriated Finn insisted on singing, full voice, all the way across the Atlantic.

First it was Grace Jones, whose songs are intolerable in any form, let alone in a Finno-Ugrian accent at 2 in the morning. This was followed by the entire Violent Femmes first album, a heretofore terrific record that I could never again listen to without shuddering, thanks to the demented Finn's drooling renditions of "Blister in the Sun" and "Please Do Not Go."

On the return I spent a snowy afternoon in Helsinki, where the highlight was finding a pizza place. Finland is known for pizza about as much as it's known for coconuts, but nothing tasted better after a week and a half of Soviet food.

And, never, ever, tempt fate by asking what more could go wrong in your wretched little life as my back is now out again for the second time in 2 years. There are few things that make you feel quite so helpless as lying in bed and being either completely unable to move or being able to move but only with an acute pain that I fail to describe adequately. It does give you a new appreciation for a body part that we take for granted. On the upside, the drugs leftover from the last time this happened are actually some really good shit. :) Better living made possible by DuPont.