For the first 20 years of my life I lived above my father’s workplace, the Kemijoki River Driving Association office. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty I had a summer job in that very same office working on the radio telephones. My task was to monitor the course of tugboats in the large body of inland water known as Kemijärvi, working as an intermediary when the captain needed onshore assistance. All kinds of things would happen: onboard fires and accidents were not unknown. In stormy weather it was very important to maintain a connection between the office and the tugboats.

The boats were always contacted according to the same drill, which I would imagine my father had learned in the war. For example, the tugboat “Uitto-5” I contacted thus: “Uitto-5, this is the office, do you copy, listening?” If the captain of the tugboat wished to contact the office, he would ask: “Office, this is Uitto-5, do you copy, listening?” To this I would reply: “Office copies, listening.” After this we took care of whatever was actionable.

The tugboats’ job was to transport the tarakat, the rafts surrounded by booms through Kemijärvi lake, where the current was not strong enough for the timber to float unassisted. For the management staff to have an idea of the amount of timber arriving upstream from Ylä-Kemijoki, Kitisenjoki and Luirojoki to the Keski-Kemijoki river system (itself held up at regular intervals by hydropower stations), the course of the tugboats had to be carefully monitored.

Part of my work was to regularly ask the ships’ captains about the location of their ship. The locations were marked on graph paper along with pauses and refuelling. In daytime and at weekends the staff working in the office also took care of radio telephone matters and my shift on weekdays was from 4 pm to midnight. The midnight sun in Lapland always brings to mind the end of a shift.

Before starting a summer job at the National Board of Antiquities  I had worked for two summers as a log driver at the mouth of the Kemijoki river in Kemi. The log driver’s job was to straighten the logs coming into the log trap on a raft, count 75 or 80 logs depending on which company owned the logs, write down the number on a metal tag (the ‘end mark’), attach it to a wire and take the tag to the operator of the wheel loader, who then attached the tag to a pile of logs. River driving is based on probability calculations: different companies’ share of the rafted timber was not based on each company getting the specific logs they had logged, but their calculated share.

During my last study summer I got a job at the National Board of Antiquities documenting the Kemijoki timber rafting as it took place then. I followed the work of one work team during the spring and summer from Ylä-Kemijoki to Autioniemi. I was on a tugboat in Kemijärvi for a day documenting and a couple of days at the logging camps of Luuksinsalmi and Luusua, in some logging camps in Ala-Kemijäki and finally quite a few days at the mouth of the Kemijoki river. I documented the Kitisenjoki river drivng by visiting the Portti logging camp in Sodankylä. I conducted interviews, drew ground plans and floor plans, took pictures and lived with the workers as participant-observer. I also collected artefacts for the collections of the National Museum - you can find my collected ethnographic material at the archives of the National Board of Antiquities.

This summer job proved to be of great use to me when I was working on my doctoral dissertation because I was familiar with the thinking and terminology of river driving. At the end of the 1980s, the city of Kemijärvi commissioned me to write an account on how the rafting relates to various places along the lake Kemijärvi drainage basin. The text I wrote, along with the map, are still at the layby near the crossroads of the road to Pyhätunturi.