16-Aug-2002 -- This Friday afternoon I had a couple of hours of spare time so I decided to visit the confluence 61N 25E. There were two reasons for that visit. The first one was that 61N 25E is the nearest primary confluence to my home and I think that it is a sort of a responsibility for a confluence hunter to check the "home confluence" too.

The second reason was the weather. In southern Finland the weather has been very warm and sunny for weeks. Temperatures at daytime were near 30 C when at the same time central Europe suffered from massive floods. When visit #1 to this confluence was made the temperature was -23 C so I was interested to record what the place would look like when the temperature there is 50 degrees C higher. The way the changing of seasons makes the scenery look different has always fascinated me. I have a sequence of pictures taken from the window of my study once a week during one year’s time to illustrate how the landscape alters when the seasons are changing.

Also in my mind the idea of this confluence project is very similar to that project presented in that fine movie Smoke by Wayne Wang. In the film cigar shop owner Auggie (Harvey Keitel) had a project that had consumed him for years: every morning at the same hour, he goes across the street from his shop on the corner of Third Street and Seventh Avenue in New York City Brooklyn and takes a single picture with his camera. About these pictures Auggie tells to his friend Paul (William Hurt): "They’re all the same, but each one is different from all the others." Auggie had a confluence project in time (no minutes, no seconds) instead of space. To my understanding in this degree confluence project both aspects can be considered.

Anyhow that Friday afternoon I took some maps and my GPS phone with me and drove 44 km west from my home in the town of Lahti along roads that got smaller and smaller, left my car by a field and then walked about 150 meters along the field where crops had just been harvested and there I was at 61N 25E. It took me about 35 minutes and I was 35.06 km from my home.

I was lucky that the field where the confluence was situated was not an oat field because all the fields of oat nearby were not yet harvested and it would not be possible to walk trough a field where the corn is still growing.

I am not quite sure how wide the idea of confluence pictures is but when driving back home I wondered what kind of views are there to be seen when standing exactly on parallel 61N in Lahti, which is the nearest town to confluence. I found a little wider view from a hill east from lake Vesijärvi and I enclose here also a picture taken 35.33 km exactly to east from the confluence 61N 25E. The view is to SW direction and the landmarks of Lahti, ski jumping hills, Sibelius Hall and one of the two radio towers are at sight.