Memoir—Summer “Exchanges” to Finland and France As An Impressionable Youth

Because I’m living right now in a kind of “insider’s” Turkey, I’ve been thinking a lot about two Summer experiences I had when I was an early teen—total immersions in foreign environments. When you’re living outside of your native country, you do a lot of thinking about yourself and how much of it is a product of your native environment—you make a lot of comparisons between where you come from and where you are, trying to figure out the differences, and probably also making a lot of mistakes—identifying as “cultural” tendencies that are specific to the individuals with whom you have contact. In any case, it is an experience of disorientation that sometimes, especially if you don’t know the language well, feels like being a child again, listening to and observing everything for clues as to what is really going on.

In the Summers after ninth and tenth grade I was sent on “exchange” to Finland and France, through a program that connected families with prospective young visitors from other countries. In reality, there was no “exchange”—a family just took you in for the Summer. Nor was there any special structure to the program—whatever the family did, you did.

In Finland I stayed in Helsinki with a family that claimed to be the second richest in the country. The father, who was originally Swedish, proudly drove me around his two underground parking garages (beneath downtown shopping malls). These were the only underground parking lots in Helsinki at the time, and brought him great wealth, with which he and his wife would travel around Europe, shopping.

For most of that Summer, they were abroad, shopping, leaving me and Sebastian, their son, in the care of two ancient grandparents who lived in the basement apartment with their equally ancient, mop-like dog. I believe that these were Sebastian’s father’s father and mother’s mother, who, having been widowed by their respective mates, had hit upon the convenient solution of becoming a couple themselves.

The house was a five-story, rectangular, wood-faced structure like an apartment building (which it may originally have been). Sebastian (or “Seba,” as he was called) and I lived on the top floor and almost never saw the grandparents. Occasionally the grandmother would come up in the elevator to check on us, calling out “Se-e-b-a-a!” “Se-e-b-a-a!” while I hid in my bedroom, for fear of having to talk to her in my very limited French (she spoke Finnish and French, but not English). We saw her maybe three times the whole Summer.

Seba and I were, I guess, around 14 years old. He was more experienced than I was in the ways of bad kid-ness, probably because kids in Helsinki, from the age of around 10, begin spending their evenings and weekends gathering in large, asphalt youth-parks, with maybe 100 other youths aged 10-18, drinking and skateboarding around.
All of Seba’s friends were from the projects of Helsinki, and in addition to drinking and skateboarding while listening to the Beastie Boys, they liked to break into these octagonal kiosks that are all over the city and steal candy and money.

The first three things I was ok with: I drank a lot of Carlsberg and Elephant beer that Summer, created elaborate grip-tape designs (spider web with spider for myself, and Marijuana leaf with Playboy Bunny for Seba, at his request) for two skateboards that Seba and I would use to skate all over Helsinki, listened to the Beastie Boys on somebody’s boom box that had been painted pink, and whose speakers had stolen VW symbols affixed to them, and enjoyed Seba’s father’s sauna, swimming pool, projection tv and vast collection of VHS films to the fullest.

I drew the line, however (for some reason), at breaking into kiosks, which was done by climbing on top of them and opening the roof-panel. On those occasions when Seba and friends would decide to knock over a kiosk, I would politely excuse myself and walk home. I can’t clearly recall my thoughts at the time, but I think I knew it was “wrong” and was scared of ending up in a Finnish jail and being bailed out (or being unable to be bailed out) by my furious parents.

One evening, early in the Summer, Seba and I were in the youth park with a bottle of Gin. I had never tasted Gin before, but this did not daunt me from drinking half a bottle while sitting on a bench, talking to random Finnish teens about America. When a third of the bottle was empty, I announced to all the girls who were present that in America, all girls want to sleep with me, and suggested that they might like to do the same. When half of the bottle was gone, I vomited, rolled off the bench, and lay there, where I remained until Seba and a group of his friends grew tired of the youth park and carried me home. Somebody gave me a bath and put me to bed.

The next morning I awoke to find Seba leaning over my bed, grinning and holding out a cup, which I took and drained. The contents, it turned out, had been 120 proof rum from South America, which Seba claimed would instantly cure my hangover, which I guess it did. I then walked out into the hallway, where many Finnish youths were sleeping or slowly waking up, Seba’s parents being in France or somewhere. They all leered knowingly at me and I knew, although I could not remember anything, that I must have made a complete idiot of myself.

It is a testament to my good sense that I did not drink myself into oblivion ever again that Summer, and to the good sense of my stomach that I couldn’t touch Gin for maybe a decade after that night.

Seba’s family (like all Finnish, middle and upper-middle class families) had a Summer house about an hour’s drive north of Helsinki (I forget the name of the town). We went there once or twice during the Summer when his parents were back in town and stayed for a couple of days each time. I remember the place as a woodland Paradise, where Seba’s grandma made the best sausages and bread I have ever tasted. These we ate hot out of the oven with a delicious, sweet-hot Finnish mustard from a tube (which I have often thought of but have never seen since that Summer).

About thirty feet from the house there was a wooden sauna and a lake. The men and the women of the household would use the sauna in shifts, for modesty’s sake, stripping naked and turning beet red as somebody poured water onto the burning coals and the little wooden house was filled with steam and the spicy smell of seasoned wood (from the fire below the coals). When you had become as red as you could endure being, you would run, naked, out of the sauna-house and jump into the cold lake. Every nerve in your body would then experience a kind of screaming momentary epiphany, leaving you energized, calm and focused. Then you would repeat the process all over again.

Seba’s family also had a motorboat on that lake, and they put me in a wetsuit and taught me to waterski. I picked up the basics after four or five attempts, and was happily upright and skiing around the lake for the rest of that day.
There was also a girl there—a cousin of the family, I think, with whom I would lie in the sun on a rock and hold hands. She did not speak English and I didn’t know any Finnish. Seba made a lot of fun of me for this mini-relationship, because he thought the girl was ugly.

There were other things too—side trips to Denmark (with the family) and to Leningrad (with the exchange organization), but what I remember most vividly is being a kid on my own, with Seba, skating around, drinking, eating pancakes, and living as free as any kid could wish to be from the (perhaps not unwisely) oppressive rules and requirements of grown-ups. All told, I survived pretty well without any supervision, and learned some things about my own resilience and limits that I couldn’t have learned at home.

Simultaneously, though I was only dimly aware of the fact, my sister was in the early stages of diagnosis of a cancer that would almost kill her that Fall, and would leave her with a prosthetic knee-joint. In retrospect, I think this was my parents’ main motivation for sending me away.

France, the following Summer, was a completely different experience. My host family, who lived in Paris, were a couple in their mid-sixties. The man was retired from the World Bank, skeletally thin, possessed of a long, wispy beard, and very serious about Astrology, which he practiced with elaborate, detailed charts and maps, casting the futures not only of friends and relatives, but of whole nations and Humanity itself. For most of the Summer he sat in a chair, smoking unfiltered Gaulois cigarettes, reading his way through the Complete Works of Freud in eight or ten volumes. He said almost nothing to me the whole Summer, aside from offering once to read my future, which I refused because it (and he) scared me.

That Summer, for me, was mostly about reading. I spent a lot of time alone, reading Big Books and feeling deep, vague stirrings of meaningfulness. I “read” Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness (from which I understood and felt only a dark and primitive sense of ancient, scary impulses), Nietzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (from which I understood nothing at all), and The Lord of the Rings (the book I understood best and enjoyed most that Summer). I also watched (in French) the movie “Le Grand Bleu” (“The Big Blue”) about an air-tankless competitive diver with an almost mystical relationship with the sea, which, along with Lord of the Rings inspired me to write sprawling, pompous metaphysical poems which I would send to my then-girlfriend, who had moved to Kentucky that Summer for good.

My host mother was more talkative and physically energetic than her husband, and she would involve me in all kinds of physical activities, especially when we were staying in their family’s ancient “chateau” in the South of France. We spent most of the Summer in that house, which was built in the 1600’s and was really more like a one-story monastery than what I think of as a chateau. The walls were made of cool, smooth, white stone and bore old wooden crosses. All around the place was the vineyard country of Savoie, where Vins de Table are produced—miles and miles in every direction of rolling hills covered with rows of grapevines, with the occasional white house in the middle of them. Nearby, on one side, were the French Alps, separating France and Italy. Every Friday a farmer would come to the house in a wagon, bringing a big wheel of cheese (usually “Tomme De Savoie”—a semi-soft, musty, delicious cow’s milk cheese), fresh bread and eggs, and a cherry tart.

The rest of the time, the couple (and I) ate 1) wheat bread spread with vegetable lard and sprinkled with flaked yeast and 2) brown rice. That was pretty much it. As a result of this diet, and the fact that the mother was always making me hike and bike to the point of nervous collapse, I was always in a state of semi-starvation, and would frequently sneak into the kitchen at night (in between chapters of Lord of the Rings) to steal delicious savory biscuits—crumbly, salty, buttery boxed crackers with burnt edges. I stole so many of these that, on my departure at the end of the Summer, the mother gave me two boxes to take home with me.

The physical component of the Summer involved mainly hiking and biking. My host mother was in incredible shape, and would ride or hike for long distances, very fast, without the slightest sign of fatigue. I, on the other hand, was a pathetic, soft, non-athletic kid who began each excursion panting and sweating, and ended up almost always in tears, saying (in French) “it’s too much!” “take me home!” “I’m dying!” The French cast a cold ear on such complaints, basically ignoring them altogether.

One time, on the way back from a biking trip, I either rode ahead or fell behind and got lost. I ended up in a tiny wine-country village, and went into a restaurant to ask for help. I told the owner the names of my host parents, he found them in the phone book, and they came to rescue me.

The main difference between the French Summer and the Finnish one was that, in France, I was living the solitary, alienated existence of a little Hamlet or Young Werther, very conscious of my own identity as a young intellectual/mystic, penetrating the realms of the inner consciousness, and the mysteries of Philosophy and the Ocean. My daytime identity, by contrast, was that of the solitary, alienated Pathetic Wimp, being dragged, whimpering, all over the countryside. In both cases, I had no companions of my own age, and could not really relate in any way to my host parents, who were old and very weird people.

In Finland, on the other hand, my life was outward-directed. I was constantly interacting with other people, people my own age, and doing exactly whatever I wanted to do. Actually, I had a great time in both places. France was strange but exciting: I was opening up to a kind of isolated, personal, intellectual life that was new and mysterious to me. I felt misunderstood, and I kind of liked it, because I was coming to a new kind of understanding of myself as distinct from (and ultimately, inaccessible to) other people. In Finland, self and identity were not really at issue, because I was constantly involved in some kind of social activity. There was no separation between myself and other people because from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep (and sleep was rare that Summer, with only two or three hours of darkness per night) I was part of a Group (almost a gang, come to think of it, what with all the theft).

The structure of this piece feels like it is pressuring me into deriving some kind of cutesy lesson from all of this. My fault—I have a tendency to fall into these kinds of fascistic narrative structures that leave me, at the end, rebelling against the corner I’ve painted myself into: “Finland and France: Two Contrasting Lessons in Extroverted and Introverted Living.”

No lessons, please. At the end of the Finland trip, Seba’s parents took us to Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, which is a kind of outdoor park with lots of stores, flowers and ferris wheels. Many of the stores there sell handmade pipes and tobacco. I bought a little pipe on a keychain and some tobacco to smoke in it. As I was packing to go home, it suddenly hit me that, in America, I would not be able to wander around with my friends, smoking this pipe. That, in fact, if I brought the pipe home, I would be in Big Trouble. With deep regret, I buried it at the bottom of a drawer in the room I was staying in, underneath a pile of old, unused, miscellaneous things. It’s probably still there.