Thanksgiving

The airplane skims over a monotonously beautiful carpet of lakes, clouds, forest, and fields. The Land of Midnight Sun (well, actually, one out of five possible Lands of Midnight Sun; each Nordic nation with its twenty-four hours of summer daylight technically qualified to claim the title) reveals itself to you in puffs of white, geometries of emerald, bowls of aqua. It’s only a matter of minutes before you land and have to start apologizing.

Fourteen years ago, you cajoled your mother into using her Nordic superpowers to track down your long-lost Finnish cousins. (Pre-DNA for the masses, the Swedish side was too long, too lost to try.) Across the country, the majestic, blond descendants of those who remained behind in Finland 110 years ago stood awaiting you in airport reception halls, on ferry piers, at train stations. They proffered shy smiles, rehearsed conversation, hand-drawn signs, guest rooms outfitted with cheery Marimekko prints. And plenty of opportunities for naked sauna meet-and-greets.

It was touching and fascinating, but not particularly useful for the Afro-Viking girl seeking home. And so unlike your first trip to Nigeria. That journey, with its month-long power blackouts and year-long military dictatorship, its always-breaking-down busses and perpetually crashing airplanes, its sticky-fingered scholarship hosts and grabby university officials, was certainly more painful. And yet, with the promise of finding your unknown father and siblings, also certainly more useful in the identity department. And so, you proceeded to lose interest in Finland for fourteen years.

This busy corridor pretending to be an Arrivals Hall affords a different brand of anxiety. Much as you love travel, you detest this part, standing as exposed and vulnerable as the only Black girl at a junior high dance filled with slender blue-eyed blondes with Farrah Fawcett flips.

If you’re being picked up, part of you—the Abandoned Twin and Daughter part, the Undanceable Black girl part—invariably starts to hyperventilate, hahaha, fearing the worst. Even if you’re not being met, you always find yourself desperately searching strange faces and name placards just in case before averting your eyes and striding purposefully towards Ground Transportation and independent agency.

Passersby speed toward departure gates, angling roller bags and well-behaved children around the small cluster of welcomers meeting the passengers. It’s a challenge to see and be seen. Which is good if your cousins have decided that after fourteen years of silence, you’re full of shit. At least no one will see you looking unwanted like someone without people. But which is bad if your cousins are here and don’t spot you first, as you don’t know whom to be looking for and whether after fourteen years you’d recognize them anyway.

After forty minutes of wandering Terminal 2—strangely small and empty even for so small and empty a country as Finland—and parading past the silent baggage carousel, you step outside. Curbside pick-up looks large enough to accommodate two cars. The evening sky’s a sickly pastel, streaked with the toying-with-it-but-not-really-committed-to-setting sun. Speaking of commitment, you never really confirmed an airport pickup. You just blithely emailed Mom your flight info before heading off to Greece for a week, assuming that since she was arriving earlier today, she’d make arrangements with the cousins. She’s your mom, after all.

It takes a minute to decipher the numbers flashing on the Arrivals board: 04, 07, 17. It’s the Fourth of July 2017. The USA is 241 years old today. You’d forgotten, probably because 165 days into the Orange Menace, there’s really nothing to celebrate. But in five months, Finland will turn one hundred, a birthday you’d also forgotten, but one more worthy of celebration. The airport is plastered with blue-and-white #Suomi100 signs, signaling the hysteria that one hundred years free of Russian rule warrants. In three months, Nigeria, the baby, will turn fifty-seven. Independence is easy enough to say, but just like finding family, there’s nothing easy about birth. It’s bloody. Painful. Declarations of independence are invariably followed by civil war and other shit that effs your family up.

Speaking of family, you’ve just realized that you don’t actually remember any of the Finnish Cousins’ surnames or addresses. Every time Mom mentions a letter or email, you only half-listen, figuring that Prodigal Daughter You will pull the Proverbial All-Nighter on the plane, skim her emails, cram the family tree, review those vowel-heavy names before touching down. You’ve always tested well. But instead, what happened with the Nigerians in Athens threw you off your game, and now you’ve arrived shaky-legged to Finland to find yourself inadvertently reenacting your Nigerian husband’s first trip to the USA thirty-one years ago. Just replace sleepy Helsinki with eye-popping New York City, and Independence Day with Thanksgiving Day.

In the meantime, your iPhone battery is draining fast. You find an outlet, plug in, and drape yourself over your luggage, resisting the impulse to cry.

On a pre-cell phone Thursday in 1986, the Nigerian who would eventually become your husband decided to “pop in” to America without bothering to call. He spent the next six hours marveling at the wonders of LaGuardia Airport and dialing his brother’s apartment in Queens from a payphone every forty-five minutes. Finally, he decided it was time for a plan. Hoisting the huge New York City phone book on its metal cord, he flipped to the Es and Os that start most Nigerian surnames, and ran a mahogany finger down the columns of names until he found one he recognized from their hometown.

The hometown friend who picked up the phone reported having seen his brother at a couple of Nigerian parties earlier that evening and promised to call around to locate him. “It’s not just any Thursday, you know,” she lectured. “It’s Thanksgiving, which is a very big deal here in America.” At 2:00 a.m. his brother pulled up in a long Buick to continue the lecture: “Eh-eh, what’s wrong with you? You don’t just drop in to America-o!”

Three decades later, on Independence Day 2017 in Helsinki, you log on to Terminal 2’s free Wi-Fi and take to Facebook. Tapping your phone’s cracked screen, you confess your short-sightedness to 2,201 of your closest Facebook friends: Hey FB Fam, I didn’t think this through; so if you’re a cousin here in Finland feel free to get in touch. For reals!!!

For Reals or not, the jokes start to flow in, and you smile despite yourself. When you think about it, it is funny. When you think about it, you’ve showed up to Finland like a true Nigerian. Which is odd, since normally you’re a planner. And yet, with all your big arrivals—getting on a plane to an Ivy League college you’d never seen, shaving your head and walking into a Buddhist temple in a Thai forest, quitting your job and flying to a military-occupied country in search of father and siblings—you seem to rely on faith, literally and figuratively.

Five minutes later, Facebook delivers. Your phone vibrates, and the rubbery, florid face of a young man the size of a pinky-nail pops onto the screen. Facebook identifies him as living in your maternal family village some 475 kilometers north. The talking pinky-nail addresses you in serious, textbook English, while an older woman draped in linen with fashionable, cropped hair chirps over his shoulder, “Faith! Look, it’s Faith!”

Like a good Finn, he’s already done his due diligence. “Cousin Kati isn’t answering her phone,” he reports. “I’m guessing she left it at home.” (He is correct.) His second prediction is also correct: “She probably went to Terminal 1 instead of Terminal 2, because that’s where Holly arrived earlier today.”

At the mention of your mother, you relax. Contact has been established, Finnish wheels are turning. Just as quickly, you feel foolish. Really, how could you have thought that this sad little baggage carousel and cantilevered one-taxi stand was an international terminus? The very name Terminal 2 implies that there are others, or at least—as is the case here—a Terminal 1. Just then you hear yourself being paged in English.

“You’re brilliant!” you shout, yanking the phone charger out of the wall and piling your carry-on atop your roller bag. “Thanks for saving me!”

“I did no such thing,” tiny-cousin-head declares with characteristic Finnish modesty. He sounds alarmed you might think differently.

He rings off and promptly posts a series of dry, English-language responses beneath your Facebook post on being lost and found in Finland:

Hmm Cousin Kati; phones don’t do one much good if left at home do they?

Hmm How excited must one be to forget to check the Arrivals board?

You rush-drag your bags down the empty tunnel connecting the ghostly Terminal 2 to the bright, bustling Terminal 1, a real terminus where Cousin Kati awaits, arms open, immediately recognizable (no need to have worried after all) in standard Nordic uniform of slim Capri pants, navy-and-white striped boat-neck T, stylish German leather flats.

“Oh, poor Faith!” she coos, shaking her salt-and-pepper pageboy. “I am too terrible.” And with that, she folds you into her arms. Like a Finn. Like a Nigerian. Like family.

-Faith Adiele

Faith Adiele is the author of MEETING FAITH, a first-hand account of becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun that won the PEN Open Book Award and routinely appears on travel listicles. Her travel media credits include HBO-Max limited series A WORLD OF CALM, Sleep Stories for the CALM app, and the PBS documentary MY JOURNEY HOME about finding her Nigerian family. Her work appears in BEST WOMEN’S TRAVEL WRITING, OFF/ASSIGNMENT, O MAGAZINE, ETHICAL TRAVELER, and THERE SHE GOES Podcasts, A WOMAN ALONE, and PANORAMA: THE JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT TRAVEL, where she used to have a column. A member of the Black Travel Alliance and Airheart Explorer Series, she teaches at TravelCon, is a media expert in mindful and BIPOC travel, and founded VONA’s Traveling While BIPOC, the first writing workshop for travelers of color in the nation. She calls Oakland, Finland, Nigeria, and @meetingfaith home. Find her on Twitter and Instagram: @meetingfaith