Tales of the Incredible Hoke Robertson

Christmas always brings to my wife Arminta’s mind the time we had in Finland, in 1962. We traveled to this quiet country so I could participate in the yearly climb up Finland’s highest peak, Chattermolarn. Of course the Finns are very polite, but not very jovial. However my knowledge of their language gave us a good “in” and we got along famously. That year we were planning on the dreaded frontal assault which few had ever attempted. As we made our final ascent up the near sheer face, one of the climbers named Juko slipped! I quickly calculated that there wasn’t any safe way to grab him before he fell, so I leapt to him and as I passed him I gave him a hard shove which put him back on the narrow ledge; but of course due to the third law of thermodynamics, the shove insured my inalterable descent.

Unfortunately this meant I was now falling the 4273 meters to the base camp. My mind quickly began thinking of how I could survive this predicament and I was aided by my recent doctoral thesis on the Finns struggle against the Russians in WWII. As my research had uncovered and as some of you may know, when air gets too cold, radio waves will not transmit through it as they cannot propagate when air gets to a certain density. To overcome this communications problem the Finns developed a technique in 1936 which allowed them to travel short distances very quickly in rough terrain so they could send messages about battle conditions and needed troop movements during their epic struggle with the Soviet Union. Standing alone against the Russian hordes, the determined Finns had a hard go of it.

Each time they made camp, the Finns would bend tall Larch trees over until the tips reached the ground and then tied them down with a rope. When they needed to send a message, a solemn Finn would lock his arms and legs around the tip of the tree and the others would cut the rope, flinging the Finn several hundred meters in the desired direction. The trick of course was to grab a tree near the hoped-for landing area and hold on tight until it stopped flopping back and forth. Not a few Finns had problems with this which is why Finland today has the most advanced bone setting techniques in the world. Thus was the sport of Flogginbornin born. To this day there are Russians who will swear that Finns can fly.

Anyway, as I picked up speed down the cliff, I notice a stout fir tree right in my path and as I reached it I hooked one of the top limbs with my pickaxe. Sure enough, the tree bent right over and then snapped back hurling me about 300 yards down range. As I approached the ground again, I located another tree and repeated the process, shooting back in the opposite direction, but this time with less speed due to the second law of thermodynamics. On one of these back-and-forths, I was able to use my Leatherman tool saw to cut the tree near the top, just below the point on which I was hanging. As the tree bent to the ground, I finished the cutting and the top of it separated from the trunk. I lightly landed on the soft snow with the upper six feet of tree, now deftly severed.

The Finns were amazed at my feat, and just a little bit jealous given that I had broken the word record for Flogginbornin. Anyway, Arminta and I used the tree top as our Christmas tree that year. HOKE ROBERTSON