Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

She was often late and sometimes missed entire meetings, even though meetings started at ten to accommodate working people like her. It would be her first insight into organizing; working people don’t have time to debate theory. That was why most socialist theorists and organizers weren’t from the working class.

His name had been Joel Hägglund, but because he’d gotten his name on a couple of blacklists he now went by Joseph, or Joe, Hillström. He’d been in America a little more than four years. Soon they were deeply into politics, he gently chiding her for her old-fashioned Marxist views, she staunchly defending them. “You’ll never get what you want through socialism. Marxist, revolutionary, Fabian, whatever,” he said. “America dangles the distant prize that anyone can get rich like Rockefeller. All you need to do is work harder and save more. If you don’t get rich, it’s your fault.”

“If there is injustice in any industry, everyone goes on strike. Everywhere. We don’t wait for Marxist bullshit about a workers’ paradise. We don’t wait for the Republicans or the Democrats. They’re both financed by capitalists.” He was looking at her, his eyes burning, burning away any lingering annoyance, any lingering doubt. “We organize! We take direct action. If we don’t get justice, we shut America down.”

Jouka mumbled, didn’t know where to look, so he looked at her shoes. She thought if she ever found an outgoing Finnish man maybe he’d look at her knees.

The conflict between labor and capital, spun out so elegantly in political and economic theories, was fundamentally about hunger outlasting avarice.

Excited, Matti asked Higgins, “Where is Finland?” “The same place as Ireland,” Higgins replied. “On paper, Ireland will fight alongside England, but the people won’t be gulled. Both of those bastard monarchies will be hard-pressed to get good Irishman and Finns to do their dirty work for them, by Jesus.”

“The Germans shoot down a British airplane; another British pilot dies,” he said, looking far beyond the walls. “The Royal Flying Corps sends another order for spruce to America. Purchasing agents dole out the order to people like me, who buy logs from people like Matti and Reder. Jouka makes good wages hauling logs to tidewater. Aino eats because of his wages, which Reder pays with money squeezed out of British taxpayers or borrowed from American banks. No one is clean.” He paused, then continued. “At the base of it all is the forest: planted, tended, and grown by none of us.”

During the summer strike, General of the Army John J. Pershing brought a favorite officer, Brice P. Disque, out of retirement, made him a lieutenant colonel, and told him to solve the labor mess in the Northwest—by any means. The army needed ten million board feet of spruce every month. The disgruntled loggers were producing two million. After several fruitless months of negotiating with both sides, Disque realized that unless the loggers got more pay, better living conditions, and safer working conditions, they would never log fast enough to meet production requirements. He also saw that the owners would never knuckle under to the IWW. Unable to break the impasse, he convinced Pershing to send in the army. It was a disaster that had all the loggers laughing and the owners totally frustrated. Out of the disaster, however, both management and labor could see that the government was willing to throw millions of dollars and thousands of drafted men at the problem, no matter how inefficient that solution was. Both the IWW and the owners would be sidelined. A week after the soldiers started logging, Disque and a small group of business and AF of L leaders met in the office of University of Washington president Henry Suzzallo. They formed a new union, firmly anti-Wobbly, called the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. “Loyal” was the key word. All its members would be required to swear a loyalty oath stating they would “stamp out any sedition or act of hostility against the Un...

“People are starving in Helsinki. Only a moron would go back.” “Food will be distributed for free once we take full control.” “Russia’s headed for civil war. Finland won’t escape it.” “Capitalist propaganda. How can there be a civil war when ninety-five percent of the country is working people?” “Yes, and two-thirds of them are farmers and ninety percent are Lutherans, just like Ilmari and my father. He hates what is happening in Finland. He wants General Mannerheim to stop the disaster that you call paradise.” “Well, he’d better get used to it, because it’s going to happen here, too.” “Aino, revolutions require visionary leaders. In America, the visionary leaders go into business.” On December 6, Pehr Evind Svinhufvud declared Finnish independence in Helsinki. Two days later there was a celebration dance at Suomi Hall. Many of the women hung hand-sewn flags showing various sizes of light blue cross on a white background in the style flown by Finnish fishermen and other private boat owners. Others showed crosses or designs of red and yellow, the colors of Finland’s coat of arms. Still others, however, showed a yellow hammer and sickle on a red background. Suomi Hall nearly became the first battlefield of the Finnish Civil War.

“You want a God that is good.” Her merry laugh rang out clean and clear. “That is what they taught us at the mission school. All wrong.” She laughed again. “In this world”—she looked at her open left hand—“good is good.” Then she looked at her open right hand. “And bad is bad. In the other world, where God lives”—she clasped her hands together—“there is …” She searched for some words, then putting her clasped hands directly in Ilmari’s face, said, “There is one thing, goodbad-badgood, not two.” Ilmari looked at her, puzzled. She laughed again. “It solves the stupid problem.” She went into a whiny tone of voice, “Why did God let Rauha die? Why did God let little children suffer?” Looking at the ground, Ilmari had to smile at her antics. “Christians only want Christmas not Good Friday.” She went into the whiny voice again. ““God is bad, boo-hoo.” She looked him in the eye. “God is the center of the world, not you. You grow up.” She let that sink in. Then she went on. “You are God. I am God. Everything is God. Everything means everything: good and bad, too.” “But, how can you say we’re God? We’re nothing like God.” She thought on this. “So, a baby in its mommy’s womb is part of the mommy, right?” “Yoh.” “But a baby in its mommy’s womb is also different from the mommy.” “Yoh.” “So why is this so hard? You have no trouble with a baby being part of mommy and not being part of mommy at the same time.” She laughed. “We are all babies in God’s womb.” After Vasutäti’s visit,

She could see the men hauling newly sawed lumber off the green chain, the final phase of the intricate conveyer system that moved a log and then a cant through the various saws that turned it into lumber. Green lumber was heavy and wet. It had been part of a living tree just days ago. On the other side of the yard were the railroad tracks on which she stood. Logs in from the river—lumber out to build houses or barracks—money in to pay for the logs with some left over for the workers. At the base of it all—timber. The forest was like a giant farm that nobody had planted and nobody replanted. From this immense cycle of pay and get to get and pay, here she was standing on a railroad track that just a few years before didn’t exist, looking down the track to the new mill, looking across the Columbia to the hills that hid Deep River from view, feeling like a leaf in a roaring creek in full flood with the war, heading where?

To ask a question? What question? To know. He wanted to know the secret of existence. He asked, “How does the universe work?” And Antero Vipunen said, “The wind chases the wind.” And it made wonderful, beautiful sense. He understood, truly. Then he asked, “How did it all start?” And Antero Vipunen said, “If nothingness is something, then nothingness exists. Nothing exists, always.” And Ilmari wept with the terrible beauty of it all.

“Do you mean Antero Vipunen is real or that Jesus isn’t?” She smiled at his obvious consternation. “God is like a rushing waterfall. If you stand in it and try to drink, you will be smashed into the rocks and lost downstream. Antero Vipunen and Jesus are also God, but they are the slow streams at the waterfall’s base that allow us to drink.” Ilmari wept. He’d lost the awe and the beauty of Antero Vipunen’s answer and here he was—again—nowhere special.

Oh, how easy it would be to take it all to the friend we have in Jesus. Bring it to the Lord in prayer. She laughed at herself. Then she started thinking: What’s wrong with comfort in hard times—even comfort based on a fairy tale? Why did she have to be the one who put aside her life and the people she loved for the betterment of society? If people like her didn’t do it, the world would surely be run by the bullies and tyrants, whether political or economic. When was it time to pass on the torch? She was suddenly tired of being tough-minded. She wished Aksel and the Bachelor Boys would come storming through the door. She smiled at the scene she’d just constructed with herself, Aino, the damsel in distress. Then she wondered: What’s wrong with that? It’s what she was.

Ilmari wanted to walk back to Ilmahenki alone. Mielikki his dead daughter. Mielikki, her namesake, his dead sister. Suomi, ordered, placid summers and fierce winters. Here, wild, cool summers and cooler winters. Rauha. He found himself looking at the old snag. It had once been nearly three hundred feet tall; then one day everything changed. The tree became a snag. Eventually, the snag would decay, fall to the ground, and become a nurse log for new trees. The new trees would grow, some to be three hundred feet tall, some to perish for lack of sunlight, and maybe someday there might even be another lightning strike and another snag. He’d first seen the snag as something dead. Now, he saw constant change and life everlasting.

Aksel sighed and began talking, she felt, as if to a child. “There will be drinking. A lot of men will be armed. You are going to tell inebriated armed men that people who they consider to be traitors to their country, people who they consider to be murderers, have been put in jail unjustly. What you are really saying is that those armed men, most of whom fought a war that they believed was to make a better, more just world, a world that is safe for democracy, a world their friends died for, were on the wrong side.” He spit out the last word. “You’re going to light a fire you can’t control.”

Men got the hard, physical things done—logging, building dams and roads, moving things that looked impossible to move. She’d always felt vaguely inferior because nature hadn’t designed her to do those things. But after these months of doing “unimportant work,” she’d come to realize that nature designed her for subtler but equally important things—that decisions about finding a new wife for a lonely brother, freeing up young girls for love, bringing together families and neighbors were as important as the things men did. Too many people—men and women both—didn’t see it or even count it. She looked at Kyllikki, who was pouring the coffee. Here was solidarity as fine as any she hoped for with the One Big Union.

Aino, despite an occasional crack about free love and the idiocy of marriage in earlier days, deep down never really believed what she was saying. Her single indiscretion with Joe Hillström had left her feeling flat and used, not only costing her job but also bringing pain to Jouka and the child she loved. She still thought society was cruel and petty; what she had done wasn’t morally wrong. It was, however, psychologically and emotionally wrong—at least for her.

“Power is the ability to reward or punish. It comes in different currencies: sex, giving or withholding; violence, actual or threatened. The best is money.”

“Ordinary people,” he said, “the little guy and his wife, will be thrown out of cannery work up and down the river. Truckers will be put out of work. Restaurants and butcher shops won’t have any fish. The price of fish will skyrocket and ordinary working-class housewives won’t be able to buy.” He gave her time to think about the chain of interrelated events. “The cannery owners will call for the National Guard. The politicians will be able to call the Guard out because they’ll say you’re hurting the little guy—and you are. And that’s what they’ll tell the voters. It doesn’t mean the strike is wrong. Just that you need to see beyond the self-righteous us versus them. Politics is just war by another means. And there’s no glory in war.” He turned away from her and took a long pull on his cigarette, looking into the darkness. “Believe me.” Aino was silent, her mind moving rapidly through images of Aksel at war, the civil war in Finland—Helsinki. “They won’t bring in the Guard,” she said quietly. “They did in Centralia.” “That’s because shooting and killing happened.” “Yes,” he said. “Exactly.” He was looking into the darkness. Quietly, he said, “Every fishing boat has a rifle onboard to kill sea lions or sharks that get in its nets or anyone corking its drift. These men don’t work for wages. They aren’t workers. Every fisherman is the king of his own country. Some will strike. Some, like me, won’t. It’ll be war, fisherman against fisherman.”

Before there was a Finland, there was The Kalevala. This collection of ancient songs from the shamanic past slept in the hearts and souls of Finns in the land they call Suomi. For centuries, Suomi dreamed of itself through the icy overtones of a vibrating kantele string or the songs of two old ones, who sang face-to-face, grasping each other’s hand and shoulder, as they had learned from the old ones who went before them. In the mid-nineteenth century, The Kalevala came to Finnish consciousness primarily through the collection efforts of a medical doctor, Elias Lönnrot. Lönnrot was stationed in the eastern and most isolated part of the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland, called the Kaleva District. He grew to love the old songs he found there, preserved out of reach of the encroachments of modern civilization. He noticed that the songs often shared the same characters, so he published these songs in the form of a single epic poem. This was in 1835 when the Finnish people suffered under Russian domination. The publication of The Kalevala was an important part of the awakening of the Finns, playing a key role in the revival of the Finnish language, which was under pressure from both Swedish and Russian. The revival of Finnish led to a greater identity as an autonomous people. This eventually led to nationhood and independence amid the turmoil of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Before this awakening, Finnish mythical heroes were unknown, repressed by the Catholic Church of the Swed...