Excerpt from Baltic Sea Diary

Two return artists and I stumbled off the magic bus that had driven us over a half dozen islands and two ferries. The residency founder welcomed us and walked us over to the sea, and I got in right away. She told me to taste the water so I could understand how low the salinity is and took a gulp to demonstrate.

The sea here is pleasantly cooling. In Helsinki it was just slightly warmer in all four places I dipped and sauna-ed: on blueberry island, and in the bay in the big park, and the other bay on the edge of the suburbs, and in the pot of seawater by the harbour in that beautiful urban poolscape. From all the ferries and standing on the islands around there the sea looked cold and crisp, but it was just a costume.

Swimming in this sea – it’s like a hybrid of ocean and lake swimming. This brackish water is buoyant, it’s warmer than the ocean water I’m familiar with. It feels so comfortable, so easy to stretch out in, to watch my body wiggle in; it’s a cradle. The waves aren’t big, and the water levels don’t change, and there are no tides. And when I look out into the enormous aura that the sea rolls past itself, I see that I am held by the tree line, which is surround sound here.

I don’t know where and when I’m going to swim today. It’s possible my time with the water will be watching the sweet little rifts in it from my room until the sky goes black.

Last night I couldn’t sleep for hours because whenever I closed my eyes I saw islands moving past me. I was back on the Uto ferry, and there were levels of green fuzziness and absence and sizes of rocks large and small and tiny and wide, and lighthouses too.

On the bus I looked hard into the woods and intermittent bays that came in and out of view as we throttled forward. In Turku, at the station, I popped onto another bus which flowed down the river of concrete that is the highway to Helsinki, looking through the window at farmland thinking how much it could be just outside my own city back in Canada, and how soon I would see that. As we got closer to where we were heading, the sea started to open up beside us again and I felt the freedom of that space and the softness of the moving streaks of colour that water holds and the golden sparkles it emits when it’s talking with the sun.