30 THE
30 THE JAGUAR Wild forager Pauliina Tovainen (left) and Everfells founder Robert Nuorteva (above) are symbolic of the deep connection Finns have to the outdoors and nature. Below: The I-PACE is a serene way to explore this aspect of Finland
DESTINATION DRIVE lake, some hours out of the city. It’s just an assumed part of life here. We meet Robert Nuorteva in a cosy coffee shop in Helsinki. He is the founder of Everfells, a startup that connects wilderness guides with people seeking wilderness experiences. Robert recognises this collective Finnish urge. “Every Finn knows the feeling when you drive to your cabin from the city,” he says. “You step outside your car, close the door, and you’re hit by the silence. It’s never so silent, even at night, in the city – there’s always background noise. In our cabins it’s truly silent. Perfect silence.” Driving the I-PACE out into the Finnish taiga forest, the quiet hits you long before you get out of the car. Electric really does mean a silent drive. For someone brought up on the combustion engine, it feels slightly unreal. Did I miss something, you ask yourself? Can it be this easy? But it is this easy. Half an hour into the forest, the fact that it is ‘this easy’ starts to hit home. I can see from the Head Up Display on my windscreen that we’re travelling swiftly, but my ears convey only the soft rhythm of tyre on snow. There is no silence like the silence of the Arctic winter. Finns talk of five seasons, since there is midwinter and ‘spring winter’. In midwinter, the sun barely rises at all. People return to their cabin, heat up their traditional smoke saunas, and break holes in the lake ice to bathe. Saunas are perhaps the original blueprint for a lot of the modern architecture in Finland, with their distinctive wooden structure. As wilderness guide, Markku Janhonen – a native of the wild eastern Karelia region – explains, the sauna is an almost sacred space to Finns. “It’s normal for us to be quiet in the sauna,” he says. “It’s a silent place to sit and relax and observe the lake.” The sauna has been a sacred space for Finns since before Christianity – a place of reflection and even, since it was warm and clean, a place where children were born. There is something in the Finnish silence, and the heightening of the senses that such silence produces, that seems to hark back “ THE SILENCE HEIGHTENED MY SENSES. I NOTICED MY PERCEPTION STARTED INCREASING” to older knowledge. For instance, Markku explains the importance of pitch when cross-country lake skating during winter. “The sound of the ice as you skate over it tells you its depth,” he says. “When the pitch rises, the ice is thinner.” Similarly, wild food forager Pauliina Toivanen, of Helsinki Wildfoods, speaks to us of the sense of smell. “Your smell memory is pretty important,” she explains. “Learn the smells of poisonous and non-poisonous plants. Once you know the difference, you can’t really confuse them.” There may be nothing to forage when we meet her, but even the harshness of winter is good news for her. “Plants grow stronger in these conditions,” she says. “In fighting the cold, berries actually build more polyphenols.” She’s waiting for birch sap – the first forage of spring. After that, she will eat birch buds and leaves, dandelion, nettle, ground elder, rowanberries and fireweed. Pauliina recollects the time she went out riding a horse at night in Kuusamo, her ancestral area in the north of Finland. “It was an amazing experience for the way the nighttime and the silence heightened my senses. The horse was naturally able to navigate at night, but soon I noticed my perception started increasing. By the end, I could see more clearly and my hearing had become more acute. Snapping twigs now sounded really loud against the silence of the night.” It struck us then that this was our experience too. The Jaguar I-PACE is naturally silent and, when you sit in its cabin, that silence is further enhanced by clever encapsulation of the motor, acoustic lamination on the windscreen and aerodynamic design that minimises wind noise. It, too, is a calm that heightens the senses. When you stop the I-PACE, step out, and close the door behind you, you begin to hear the little things: the crunch of the snow beneath your boots; a woodpecker hammering on a distant trunk; the wind catching the tops of the pines. But, most of all, you hear the sound of silence. THE JAGUAR 31