Foglo, photographed in March. A horse idly grazes along Foglovagen Road, which cuts under two bridges and through three central islands of the archipelago.Credit...Nick Ballón

A Mother Journeys Through Grief Across Finland’s Many Islands

The beauty and calm of the Aland archipelago is deceptive. Isolation encourages contemplation — but can it offer respite as well?

“THE ALAND ISLANDS — where?” It was the first question my friends asked when I told them of my plan to travel there. “An archipelago in the Baltic Sea,” I would say, “between Sweden and Finland.” But that didn’t quite seem to explain the place. “There are more than 6,700 islands there, and around 65 of them are inhabitable.” Then their interest would be piqued: “How did you find it?”

The same question was also asked by the Alanders I met. “I found it on the map,” I said. What better way to discover a new place than to rotate a globe — these days digitally — and to set one’s heart on an unfamiliar or unheard-of destination? (In 2018, 93 million American citizens traveled abroad. The same year, a total of 520 of them stayed on Aland.)

The archipelago is far geographically from my home in Princeton, N.J., though I was also searching for a different kind of distance. Two summers ago, I lost a teenage son to suicide. Two seasons ago, I was next to my father when the doctors took him off life support. “The only thing grief has taught me,” Emerson wrote in 1844, in “Experience,” after the death of his young son, “is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality. ... An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists.”

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In the past 18 months, I have reread “Hamlet” many times, written in the years after the death of Shakespeare’s son. I have listened to the compositions of Smetana and Dvorak, in which they mourned the deaths of their children. But Emerson’s words, which are less accessible, made me wonder if his mind had traveled further. I was not unrealistic enough to expect grief to vanish on a trip, but I wanted to see if it could shed some light on Emerson’s thinking.

THE FERRY RIDE from Stockholm to the port of Mariehamn (on the archipelago’s largest island, Mainland Aland) — the town is the capital of the Aland Islands and is in fact its only town — takes about five hours. It was a sunny day in late June. The sea was a vivid ultramarine. The sky, streaked with wisps of unmoving cloud, was only a shade lighter. Red cottages lined the coast, white ferries traveled between islands, seabirds congregated on skerries. Such images, which one can describe with only stock language, are available on the internet. What is the difference between beauty preserved as still image and beauty experienced in person, in time?

At first, the question seems easy to answer: Journeying through that landscape is a fuller experience. Is that so, though? When I look at the photos taken on the trip, I often have an acute reaction — the land and the sea have become part of my memory now. But no one can stare at a photo or a postcard for five hours. Soon one’s mind drifts elsewhere — to hopes and distresses, regrets and anticipations, joys and despairs, to the lives of the departed and the cold fact that they no longer are here. These feelings and thoughts grant us an interior landscape, which, like the memory of a ferry ride, we experience, but often fleetingly.

On that June morning, however, I watched the sea and the sky, the islands and the boats, my mind void of any thought about the past, and incapable of forming a language for the future remembrance. Is it possible, I wonder, that one can fully experience something only on what Emerson calls “the surface”?

ALAND IS A Swedish-speaking autonomous region of Finland and consists of 16 municipalities. The island population is close to 30,000; around 12,000 live in Mariehamn. The smallest municipality, Sottunga, had 91 residents in 2018.

On the afternoon of my arrival in Mariehamn, I had tea with Karin Erlandsson, a local writer and journalist. We went to the shore, a five-minute walk from the town center, where she laid a picnic on a blanket.

I had imagined the beach to be austere, but it was golden and sandy. Children — some not yet able to walk steadily — ran in and out of the water. The summer before, Karin said, the sea had been especially warm. From there our talk turned to climate change, felt vividly on Aland — in the rising water temperature, which has created algae problems; in the more extreme storms, one of which, the previous winter, blew away the upper half of Karin’s holiday cottage.

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A young forest, on Lemland, in the Herroskatan nature trail in one of Aland’s many nature preserves. Seaside meadows abut groves of trees, where narrow-leaved helleborine and common milkwort grow in abandon.Credit...Nick Ballón

We discussed Brexit, the refugee situation (Aland admitted three families in 2017), teenage angst (a survey shows that the youths on Aland are not as happy as their peers on mainland Finland) and local news (Karin translated some headlines of that day for me: “A Man Is Convicted to Two Years in Prison for Many Crimes”; “Driver Had to Steer Down in the Ditch to Avoid a Collision With a Roe Deer”).

Later, I went to the Aland Museum in Mariehamn, which houses the Cultural History Museum of Aland and the Aland Islands Art Museum. Early settlement began with the arrival of the nomads in the Stone Age, who hunted for seals and birds, and fished. Farming began in the Bronze Age, and by the Middle Ages, Aland was part of Sweden. Over the successive centuries, its strategic position in the Baltic led to the military presence of the Germans, the Russians, the French and the British. In 1856, Aland was demilitarized, a fact of which the islanders are proud. Prior to the war between Russia and Sweden in 1809, Finland and Aland had been part of the Kingdom of Sweden. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the archipelago sought to reunite with Sweden, but Finland, a unified entity with the Aland Islands under Russian rule, demanded its independence and refused to forsake Aland. In 1921, the League of Nations stepped in to broker a deal granting Finland sovereignty over the islands, provided the country guaranteed Alanders an independent system of self-government. Today, 87 percent of the Aland population speak Swedish.

“We Alanders are confident. We live on islands. It’s all water around us. An island is always the center of the world,” Karin said, laughing. “But we understand life on an island. Sometimes the weather is bad and the ferries do not stop. You can feel trapped. Or you can say, ‘Ah well, it’s just nature.’”

WATER IS EVERYWHERE. Drive any direction from Mariehamn for five minutes — or better, ride a bicycle — and you will come to an inlet, a cove, a patch of rocky or sandy beach. There is no briny fragrance: The Baltic Sea, fed by freshwater runoff from the surrounding land, has very little salinity. It’s noticeably calm: The water’s ebb and flow are no more than ripples. On a clear day, the sun, which in the summer doesn’t set until 11 at night, seems to shine forever onto the rocks at the shallow bottom along the coastline.

Yet it is a deceptive calm, just as the white night — that perpetual dusk or dawn during the few hours when the sun is not in the sky — is an illusion of some sort as well, giving one a false sense of ... what? Hope? Productivity? Unlimited possibilities? A summer visitor, I would not see the falling leaves in the autumn, the long darkness in the winter, the raging storms or the iced-over Baltic that looks solid enough to cross on skates but that only experienced locals understand how to navigate.

On a sunny morning, I rented a bicycle for a solo trip. My destination was Jarso, an island less than seven miles south of Mariehamn. I marked on the map the islands I would pass: Granholm, Styrso, Rodgrund, Nato, all connected by bridges. Aland is a perfect place for cyclists. Even as I cycled on the highway, the cars were infrequent, the sea breeze abundant.

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A wooden barn in Eckero, a fishing harbor, which is the shortest crossing to Sweden.Credit...Nick Ballón

Outside Mariehamn, I instantly became lost. I missed the turn onto the highway and rode onto a tree-lined path that cut through a village. On both sides were horse paddocks, houses with blooming gardens, boats moored along the inlets. A red-and-yellow maypole from the midsummer celebration stood among the green trees. This could have been a fairy-tale village, though I observed a few properties with emergency generators — a reminder of the power outages that will occur during winter’s more extreme storms.

I stopped at what I thought was the first bridge on the route. On one side of the bridge was open water, and not far beyond were a few islands, with trees and cottages and more moored boats. On the other side was marshland, above which a wooden bridge, marked private, led to a house hidden by the trees. I checked the map; it seemed as though I had already passed a few islands. I repeatedly found myself disoriented — on Aland, sometimes the departure from one island and the arrival on another is less perceptible than one hopes.

A couple of islands later, I arrived at Nato. According to the guidebook, there was a nature reserve. I got off the bike and in no time was lost again. I walked up a lane that led to a small inlet, around which several houses and their boats rested undisturbed. Is there a house without a boat on Aland? Islands give one the illusion of being isolated when needed: Bridges and boats provide the freedom to come and go.

At the end of the lane, three adults and two teenagers were working with scythes and forks — making hay, which I had read about in novels but had never seen with my own eyes. I was especially interested in the two boys, no older than 18, unhurriedly gathering the cut grass on their forks.

One of the men directed me to the nature reserve, where I was the only hiker. I have always loved solitude, but without the crowdedness of human interactions — on a city street, in the virtual world — my aloneness felt no more than a neutral existence. Halfway into the woods, there was a grove of hazelnut trees. Their perfect geometric arrangement formed a green, winding tunnel. Wild orchids, mosses and lichen, unseen birds chirruping, a coastal meadow with soft grass carpeting the slight descent to the waterfront — all these sights were pleasant, but I experienced them with a sense of distance.

Beyond the meadow, the sky and the water, both intensely blue, met at the horizon, where there was another unseen island. There, too, might be another woodland and another coastal meadow like this, and there, too, a solitary traveler could be looking at the sky and the water — but this thought only touched me as superficially as did the tip of a tree branch I passed beneath.

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A green buoy afloat in the Baltic Sea along the ferry route from Stockholm to Mariehamn.Credit...Nick Ballón

On that day, and on the subsequent days, on foot, on bicycles or taking a ferry to another island, I was baffled by the unexpected gap between what I had expected to feel and what I did feel. Here was a place my older son would never see. Here were the stories I could never share with him: of harvesting wheat in the summer heat when I was in the first grade; of bicycling to school in one of Beijing’s infamous sandstorms (I was a middle schooler, arriving with my face covered with sand, mud clinging to my eyelashes — I never would have imagined that one day I would be riding a bicycle for pleasure); of marching for weeks in the mountains when I was in the Chinese army (the hiking reminded me of those long days of walking). These memories seemed all the more definitive while I was on the islands of Aland.

ON ANOTHER SUNNY day, I started early for Foglo, a group of islands in the southern archipelago. Foglo made world news in recent years: A 19th-century schooner was discovered to have been wrecked off the islands. In 2010, divers salvaged 168 bottles of the world’s oldest champagne from the cargo. Preserved for 170 years at 160 feet underwater, it was still of good quality.

The ferry ride, which took around 45 minutes, was the quintessential experience of journeying across an archipelago, the routes well marked by buoys, poles and lighthouses. Green islands loomed on the horizon in every direction, and nearer, white sailboats lingered. Once in a while, a mute swan came as though out of nowhere. So still, so impeccable in its posture, it looked like a marble sculpture — but no marble sculpture could move with such ease.

From Foglo terminal, I drove to all the islands crossable by bridges, stopping each time when I reached the sea. On both sides of the roads were cow pastures and barns, potato fields and orchards, the sights of prosperous farm life.

When I reached the very eastern end of Foglo, there was a public beach, empty but for a hammock, a shower shed, a picnic table and two benches. Had there been a palm tree or two, it would have looked like one of those hidden beaches on Kauai, Hawaii, where my children and my father had once disturbed a tiny crab while digging a sand castle. The beaches on Kauai had been full of tourists then, and we had been a different family.

What does contentment mean when life is full of the unexpected and the unwanted? That day, nearly hypnotized by the sea, the islands, the white sails, the sun that moved imperceptibly in the sky, I asked myself this question. Part of my life is what I have striven to make it be: I emigrated to America, I built a family, I became a writer. Part of my life has wounded me. I have experienced joy and darkness, I have learned suffering and willfulness, but I have never known discontentment or contentment. I had not even thought about those words until I was on Aland.

The etymology of the words — “contentment,” “contented” — comes from Latin, continere: “to hold together, to hold in.” It strikes me that when people write congratulatory messages, their wishes are for happiness, and in condolence letters, people mention peace as an alternative to grief. In any of life’s moments, contentment seems a lesser state: How many of us would wish that a friend or a beloved have a life of contentment, or a life free of discontentment? How many of us would make that the ambition of our own lives?

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The Baltic Sea, as seen from the Hastersboda hiking trail.Credit...Nick Ballón

It is my habit, before visiting a place, to read a few novels set there. And when I returned from Foglo, I opened “Ice,” Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s 2012 novel (translated in 2016 by Thomas Teal) set in the post-World War II era of Aland, and reread some favorite passages.

“Ice” is a novel of Aland, but the place it depicts, one far from the center of a nation or the world, also feels near to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Shen Congwen’s Phoenix in Southwest China, John McGahern’s Leitrim, Ireland, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Iowa. History, politics and religion do not manifest themselves as headlines or dramas; rather, they are woven into the tapestry of everyday life. Perhaps all places — landlocked or surrounded by water — are islands.

Toward the end of “Ice,” Sanna, a young girl who just lost her father in a drowning accident, is saying farewell to her favorite guardian, a teenager named Cecilia, before moving away permanently.

Sanna is frighteningly wise and sensible. She doesn’t ask even once if she can go with Cecilia a little farther. Nor does she beg Cecilia to stay. She doesn’t say she’s scared to walk home alone. Dusk comes quickly in August, and now they both have to go. She dries her eyes with the sleeves of her sweater and starts to run. Cecilia walks out onto the bridge and stops and looks around. Sanna is so little and slim that she quickly disappears among the junipers and shadows. The path is empty, as if she had never existed.

There is no way for Sanna to leave her own life: “She’s in it all the time, and she’s afraid.” This is the same for many — most — of us. Perhaps contentment has nothing to do with what kind of life one has: harsh or easy, painful or joyful, profound or superficial. Perhaps true contentment — to hold oneself together, to hold everything in — is simply an agreement to be in life, to be in it all the time. True contentment does not make one an idealist.

THIS SENSE OF contentment continued through another day of island hopping to Tofto, Vardo and Aloren; on a visit to Kastelholm, a medieval castle surrounded by fjordlike bays; on my daily walk by the waterfront near midnight, after the last ray of sunshine vanished.

Karin, the journalist I had met on the first day, had grown up in Finland, in the Swedish-speaking region, and moved to Aland for her husband. Aland, she said, would be her home forever. A young woman at the car rental told me that she had moved with her parents from Finland to Aland when she was 2. Aland’s population has been steadily increasing in the past 50 years, and, more and more, it’s because people born outside Aland have moved here. The majority are from Sweden and Finland; some are from other Scandinavian and Baltic countries; some are South American, Asian and African immigrants.

I learned all this, along with many other facts about Aland, by writing to Katrin Sjogren, Aland’s prime minister. “Her phone number and her address are listed in the telephone book,” Karin had told me.

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The view from the ferry as it arrives at Foglo.Credit...Nick Ballón

Upon returning home to Princeton, I have spent a lot of time studying the statistics about Aland. Weather, water supply, population, housing, incomes and assets, social welfare, trade, hunting and fishing, records of important life events — births, deaths, marriages, divorces, immigration, emigration — all fascinate me. Who were Aland’s 46 Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2017? The four suicides in 2016, all male — who were they? What happened to the 123 seals hunted in 2015, and the 179 elks? The 300 women employed in “sea transport enterprises” in 2016 — how many of them were mothers, and how many of them worked on long-distance cruise ships, absent from their children’s daily lives?

As a visitor, I could skim on the surface of the place, but these human stories, which I will never get to know, remind me of another Emerson line that I’ve often thought of: “Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand.”

Is contentment, I wonder, an urge to make quicksand our anchorage, or, rather, an invention of buoyancy?

TOWARD THE END of the trip, my melancholy caught up with me. This time, I was cycling north to Eckero, a little over 18 miles from Mariehamn.

The landscape — unlike that of the ride south to Jarso, where the trees and the flowers and the village road made a perfect storybook setting — felt bleaker. It was July, but already the woods — birches, firs and pines — were becoming autumnal, the tall branches naked at places, the bodies of downed trees strewn around in others. The sky, leaden with clouds, seemed ominous. Long uphill rides exhausted me. As I pushed my bike on foot, I studied the Icelandic horses, the cows and their calves, the flock of sheep huddling under the trees along the road, all at ease. Is this what Emerson called reality? Grief did not bring me closer to it, nor did it insert a distance in between.

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A simple tin-roofed house alongside Foglovagen Road.Credit...Nick Ballón

When I arrived in Eckero, an Elvis look-alike on a sign made me pause. “Graceland, Home of Aland Elvis” was written underneath. A few minutes later, I came to the waterfront, where an old fishing harbor lay beneath an overcast sky. Aged boathouses — rusty red, grayish brown, wooden panels peeled off — cast their shadows in the water. There was no boat and no fisherman; the harbor could be called peaceful or desolate. But these were only adjectives; the harbor itself did not dwell upon its peacefulness or desolation.

“Life only avails, not the having lived” — perhaps the fishing harbor would provide a good footnote to Emerson’s observation. Or my trip to Aland. I went there neither to evade old memories nor to make new ones. It did teach me the meaning of contentment, which has nothing to do with holding onto. When we hold onto something — a moment, a memory — the loss is imminent, if not already permanent. But when we hold together and hold in — we are talking about life that avails, life not lived.

One day near the end of my stay, I asked the hotel receptionist to translate a newspaper story for me. It was July 4. “From apple orchard to Big Apple,” read the caption beneath a photo of a young woman sitting in an orchard, with a giant red apple suspended above her head like a hot-air balloon. The woman, the receptionist explained, used to work on an Aland apple orchard and would be going to work as a law clerk in New York City in the fall — from one island to another.

On the day of my arrival, Karin laughed when I said I had chosen to visit Aland. “Why didn’t you pick an exotic place?” she said. “A tropical island, for instance.”

There is nothing exotic about Aland, though before leaving, I did wonder about coming back, and how I would spend my next holiday here. Perhaps I would hike to all the islands, or I could train myself to become a better cyclist and traverse them that way. Perhaps I could even dream of being a more adventurous traveler.

But it’s equally possible that it may be a long time before I return, when the contents of my life are further shifted.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 114 of T Magazine with the headline: To Hold Oneself Together. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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