It was audacious, foolhardy and more than a little bit crazy. But once Tom Sukanen got an idea in his head, it was hard to shake it. So when he decided to build a ship and sail it home to Finland, it didn't matter that he was in the middle of the Canadian prairies. Tom Sukanen was in his early 20s when he emigrated to Minnesota around the turn of the 20th century. He married, had a family, and farmed for a while. Then he literally walked away from it all, traveling about a thousand miles on foot to homestead with his brother in Saskatchewan. Tom returned to Minnesota some years later to find that his wife had died and his children had been sent to foster homes. He tried and failed to bring one of his sons back to Canada. Homesteading wasn't going all that well either, and he was losing heart. After visiting Finland in 1929, he returned to Saskatchewan where, at the age of 51, he began building the ship that would take him home to Finland. It was the
