Michael Jackson saved my soul, sort of

I was in the fourth grade and I was militantly anti-rock. Along with some other nerds, we were more into war games and geopolitics. We pretended that we had countries and vied for control of a wooded creek watershed that ran through North Arlington. We brought our diplomacy or lack thereof to school. I remember for a time we would refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance -- after all, we represented the "Democratic United Provinces", or D.U.P., didn't we? Today, in the post-Oklahoma City, post-Columbine, post-9/11 age, we would have got in a world of trouble for this, as I was also making drawings of rockets that would defend the Gulf Branch territory against what we expected would, any day, be a US crackdown against our breakaway provinces.

Luckily this was before adolescence, so we were not yet considered complete outcasts. The doors of opportunity had not yet closed. I think some of our classmates got weary of our cant but since they couldn't beat us they "joined" us, establishing their own countries -- with names like Duran Duran, the Union of Hall & Oates, and Michael Jacksonia, which I assume was a kingdom. Thriller had come out by then. People were moonwalking at school variety shows, and soon after, breakdancing, despite warnings from more conservative quarters (one claim I remember was "twisted testicles"). The one or two black kids who were bussed in from south Arlington (in the world's most pathetic attempt at integration) had risen in social stature. We resisted the beats, but by the end of the year, it was clear that even the Hall and Oates unionists were no pushover. It was a rock revolution. The Democratic United Provinces faded into memory, and I produced my own debut single copy cassette tape LP, "Shakedancin'", the melodies of which I copied from top 40 radio. I wouldn't say that I turned into a hip, urban kid but considering my budding potential as a Nazi geek in a trench coat, Michael Jackson might have saved my soul with his pioneering inspiration -- it was safe, fun, pop, perfect for a ten-year-old. I thought, and still do, that his gulps and squeals were a little too much -- but that was just Michael.

If he was an angel, he deserved a better fate. Even spared the indignity of the Pepsi commercial incident, which started the decline. Perhaps he could have been devoured by his pet tiger under mysterious circumstances in 1984 or something.

Ego day in Tartu

I was in Tartu today, one of those president-goes-to-Baghdad secret trips. Only my wife and my closest advisers knew. Picked up a package and accessed a faster connection for some work I had to download and upload. I also de-stressed by being totally by myself for a few hours. Besides work, I managed to do a few other important things.

1. Went shopping for new running shoes. Parked on Aleksandri (apparently many areas are free on Saturday - unlike Tallinn where free Saturday parking begins at 3pm) and walked down to the Tasku. But it was 8:55am and Tasku opened at 10am. Something seems to always be getting in the way of me and Tasku, when Tasku isn't getting in between me and the bus station. So I went to the Kaubamaja and bought a pair of Merrell day-hikers marked down 30%. Looks like these sorts of hybrid rugged shoes with their earthy colours, light weight and soft as silk enveloping feel -- companies like Salomon, Montvale and Merrell -- have really arrived in Estonia. Frankly, I don't see any argument for buying a pair of cheesy looking sneakers made by the Adidases and Reeboks of the world, though some of them did make me think of Michael Jackson and the 1980s.

2. Aura 50 m swimming pool. Not only much cleaner than the local Anne canal, but beats the sweaty gym socks off Kalev Spa in Tallinn. Half the price, too. It's odd because as far as I know Tartu has only one real quality poolfor its 100,000 people (there is no ujula or swimming pool on Ujula tn) but Aura always seems uncrowded and clean. And the sauna is spacious and a claimed 85 degrees C -- that's hot even for an institutional sauna. Lobster effect.

3. Driving around. Not everything in this town is scenic -- I remember the first time I came into town from the south, on Turu. A bleak stretch followed, every bit as nondescript as Peterburi mnt in Tallinn (the US equivalent is the last section of the NJ turnpike between Newark and the Holland Tunnel). But in general, this walking-size city is a good drive. Intersections and right of way are clearly marked in places like Karlova. Compare that to the similarly warren-like district of Kadriorg in Tallinn, which is simply confusing.

4. Lunch. This is someone else's blog topic...but I went to Little Italy -- well, Gildi street in the Old Town, which offers both a generic Italian restaurant and La Dolce Vita, which is clearly the local Controvento. I pretended to be American but sat there perusing a copy of the 50 best restaurants issue of KÖÖK magazine, in which all 50 restaurants appeared to be in Tallinn, at least as far as I got when the food arrived. I have to say the only problem I have had with Italian food anywhere is that it has tended to be a little briny. Clearly I made a mistake by ordering out of season -- fresh and green brimming-over plates were carried to nearby tables while I ate tortellini in brodo followed by a pasta alla putanesca. Both very salty but at least the latter was spicy. I had a green tea as a beverage, and they brought literally about a half gallon pot to the table. Either they don't get many solo diners or they are aware their food has a lot of salt in it.

5. Books. My wife and I have been reading more. Both of us on relatively poppy Oprah stuff. Last time I was in Tartu, I went to the Apollo book store -- when I finally found it in its new location -- and man, was I disappointed: no cafe and practically no English books. I was warned that the situation in Tasku wasn't much better with English so I didn't seek out the Rahva Raamat. I went to the University book store around the corner from Little Italy. Not much had changed. Still two storeys, some classics and interesting scholarly offerings, but kind of desultory and unsatisfying. Maybe there is a good bookstore lurking somewhere in Tartu and I haven't found it yet...

Neighbours

First of all, our strangest neighbours are mute -- a series of wood carvings of devils that line a wooded path to the Ilumetsa meteorite craters a couple clicks away. It's half pagan Galleria dei Busti, half tiny annex of the Lithuanian devil museum. Six thousand years ago, it rained fire here, which gave birth to legends, although unlike the Kaali meteorites, which were witnessed by lost sailors and influenced the mythology of the entire continent, presumably few among the international set were around in this landlocked area to witness the Ilumetsa event. The largest crater is 80 metres across and because of the tall trees that surround it, seems half as deep. The legends are of a horror-show vein -- churches sinking into the bottom of the hole, lost travellers -- suggesting that this is not a great place to think about camping. It was spooky enough in the rain.

On the way to the meteorite craters, I checked out Ilumetsa station from the window of the train -- the next-to-last stop on the Tartu-Orava line. It's just one imposing station house surrounded by well-tended gardens. If the train stopped here as well, which it appeared it did, it would save a few minutes as it is only 4 km from our house, right on the main road to Põlva.

The only logical way to the platform seemed to be the driveway, which was posted with a private property/do not enter sign, which I understand is mainly targeted at vehicles. We gingerly approached and we were greeted by a woman gardening in the rain, who was friendly. Upon learning that we were the new proprietors of Endla talu, she complimented us on tidying up the place, though I fear she was confusing us with the former owners, -- we've deliberately left a corridor of brush along the road and none of our modest improvements are visible.

She noted somewhat proudly that Ilumetsa station had a EU-standard platform -- cities like Pärnu and Tartu apparently do not. She confirmed that indeed she either did not see how the train line -- the truncated remnant of the Tartu-Petseri line -- keeps operating but that she was crossing her fingers as it is convenient for them to get there from Tartu, where they have a flat.

On the business/construction side of things, we also had a visitor from Äksi, the father of a university friend of my wife's, who physically was basically another version of the Estonian humorist and fisherman Vladislav Korzhets, this one driving a British Volvo wagon and drinking birch sap tapped that morning, and always talking at 90 decibels.

People who have checked out the logs of our buildings have been of two types -- knife-jabbing and knuckle-rapping. Korzhets's tool was an impressive knife, which he said had "sent many pigs into the next world" and which he had bought from a Seto for two bottles of beer.

Korzhets said our square-log house was solid and could probably be picked up with a crane and deposited onto a proper foundation. Although he agreed that the bottom logs would need to be replaced, he was low-key (American log replacement websites leave the impression that rot jumps from log to log like wildfire, and I assume the worst).

The mystery of the storage closet was resolved. There is a thick, organic smell there and white crystalline solid caked on the walls. We were entertaining all sorts of theories, including that it was boric acid against insects or that it was itself some sort of macrofungus. Korzhets did what we did not dare do -- tasted the substance -- and pronounced it salty, then over my vehement protests, offered the kids a taste, too. He deducted that a hunter had used the cabin. That salted hides had been hanging against the wall. The stain on the wall was not used motor oil (which the woodshed is painted with), but merely blood.

Korzhets also recommended starting work with the roof, but at last it was clear what this meant: the hole where the chimney juts out has to be widened so that when the house is jacked up, the chimney doesn't get pushed over.

For the foundation work, he called up a contact from the Seto side of the river who was unemployed, waiting for the lucrative chanterelle mushroom season to begin. Said to be a good man, and decent bricklayer, around 50 but looks 70, has not touched a drop for five years after seeing a witch in Tartu. This is an important point, as we want to minimize such risks as no-shows when the house is jacked up. He is the son of the original knife-owner, so there's a history there, but he is in remission.

He showed up a couple minutes later with his buddy and seemed sort of befuddled, though I think it was an attempt to not look overeager at the possible work. Probably the contrast with Korzhets, who emanated authority, but they struck me as simpletons. I thought of of the two labourers we hired by the hour in 2006 when we were building our third room in our Tallinn apartment. I'd pick them up on Tartu mnt where they were doing demolition by day. They would arrive and scratch their heads at what tools they needed. Then I would take them to Estpak so they could show me what to buy, inevitably forgetting something. They built a cinderblock wall, which held, but after they built a door frame and the door would not close, they stood scratching heads and looked at me to tell them what to do. In the end, nothing was that bad with these city gremlins -- it was just the pay-as-you-go method and the lack of a qualified general contractor that irked me. These Seto guys have been property owners or at least managers for a long time, they seem friendly and they have their own homes and transport.

St. John's Day

Our greatest nemesis so far is a cat. This one doesn't catch any mice, just digs out stuff from the compost pile and vandalizes the garden. Every night the cat crosses the direct-seeded lettuce patch in the same place, wiping out the rows. Sometimes it will have planted its paws deep into the soil as if admiring its footprint or it rolls in it, I suppose because it is the darkest and warmest patch of land around. We are the kind of people who might leave a saucer of milk out for cats and little people, but if this continues, it's fencing and BB guns.

**

One secondary reason for moving away from the city was to get some creative synergy. Being, originally, a spoiled American used to detached homes, I have always been uneasy about living in a cube with other people on the other side of the walls, floors and ceilings, even if they are very quiet. (I don't believe you can dream other people's dreams, but occasionally there must be interference.)

The band Traffic were among the modern-era pioneers of the practice of moving away from it all to make music in 1967, though Dylan and the Band were woodshedding at Big Pink in upstate NY the same year; naturally there are a near infinite number of writers in cabins, such as Annie Dillard from my home state. I'm marvelling at where they get their energy. Sure, some of the famous settings are more suburban than we like to think (even Thoreau's Walden was far from wilderness back then) but it's still a different life.

Even in a crumbly city of old buildings like Tallinn, it seems like greenery is constantly eroding the edges and overgrowing the old limestone. It takes a lot of energy to keep a place in the countryside feeling and looking civilized -- the main example here being keeping the herbage at bay in the nearly 24-hour vegetative growth cycle of the summer days.

So far I have been barely able to put together a blog post. My old guitar stands in the corner practically untouched. It reminds me of how I always bring books on backpacking trips but never end up reading as much as I would like.

Still, I wouldn't trade this life for anything. Just ringing the scythe against the grass can be relaxing.

**

I went into the big midsummer holiday reluctantly. One slightly silly reason is that it would mean a temporary drop in the quality of meals, to obligatory grilled meat and tomatoes and cucumbers. But mainly, it's in the middle of the work week, and we still haven't completed any big projects. In a country where it is very hard to get a straight answer from locals on anything, we have not got a straight answer on the house/cabin and what should be done first. One blustery guy who came over even contradicted Mingus and said we should start with the roof and chimney, which sounds insane.

St. John's Day just seems like a day of too many fires. I like fires, but we had the sauna, the wood barbecue grill, the stove inside the house and a bonfire all going yesterday. The holiday is connected to the ancient calendar but like Christmas, it has become displaced from the solstice by a few days and arguably re-dedicated to power and meat worship.

There's nothing to harvest yet for us except for hay and a couple radish leaves, hardly cause for celebration, and the significance of a victory in the War of Independence, while no doubt moving, seems remote, as does the opening of the huge monument in Tallinn.

Every day the side of one barn probably tilts a micron more. Though we bought the property having written these off as usable structures, I'd like to get a sense of closure, but it has been hard to get answers, let alone workmen. And yet the unemployment rate is the highest in the country here, around 15%.

But it's important to approach these things one day at a time, one step at a time. I did empty the outhouse, which I won't go into, but it necessitated a swim in the River Mädajõgi afterward, which turned out to be incredibly pleasant -- once you get past the clumps of marsh grass there's a deep channel with a clay bottom, and transparent, brown water -- a pristine bog, really. No, I did not wash myself in the river.

Niitsiku

I had never seen one of these double or triple rainbows before. Then again I did not see a bolt of lightning until I was 12 (I thought it was just a non-localized white flash).

ROAD TEST: KÕU wireless Internet

Estonia is fully covered by wireless Internet. No secret, as they say. There's mobile phones, first of all, as 99.9% of Estonia has been covered by cell networks for years. And then, for gigabyte-hungry home consumers out in the mosquito-crazed woods, there is KÕU, which offers unlimited access for about $25 a month and one of a selection of proprietary receivers costing $150-300.

KÕU, which means "thunder" and is not to my knowledge an acronym (much like "SPA" is not an acronym), is operated by the national energy company. Presumably by the same department that will bring us wireless electricity in a couple years.

KÕU runs on MIULFV, or minimal-impact ultra-low-frequency vibrations. I don't know if there's such a thing as MIULFV, but that is what I tell myself, in the hopes that this thing isn't going to kill the honeybees.

KÕU is fairly immune to the usual speed limitations of fixed Internet networks. You can surf in style using a mobile KÕU modem in a car going 120 km/h down the road. As long as you're driving an automatic, of course.

And -- as long as you're close to a transmitter tower. There are 101 KÕU transmitters across Estonia. That happens to be the same as the number of MPs in parliament, except in the case of KÕU it seems it's not quite enough transmitters, as opposed to too many MPs. Though each transmitter can serve 300 customers at a time, some places fall more than 10 km from a tower and then things get a bit slower.

Our place in Põlvamaa is one of those areas, and it has taken us back to the days of the 56K modem. That said, we expected worse and it has been remarkably consistent. We haven't experienced a situation where 300 people are already using our transmitter tower. Judging from the people ahead of me in line at the Eesti Energia office in Põlva one day, and from the people who shop at the Bauhof, this figure may not be reached anytime soon, despite the impressive computer literacy figures nationwide.

Our receiver is nifty, a little bulkier than a typical modem but with a portable mode. It can be powered by USB -- only then you can't use it as a router for other computers.

We tried plugging it in and setting up a home wireless network, but the signal just wasn't strong enough. It just "acquired network signal" interminably.

As a modem, though, it works dependably. And probably because no one uses KÕU in towns, the signal strength is wonderful there. As it was going down the Tartu-Tallinn highway in a bus today for most of the distance, though people did look somewhat askance at the big white box in the seat next to me. With people having a healthy respect for all things IT-related, no one asked the modem to change seats, though.

Country life, a couple days later

So far there doesn’t seem to be too much of a mosquito problem, even down on the floodplain. As it is, we’re perched far enough away and above the river (in Estonian terms this means 15 feet higher) as to be in a different ecosystem. I suppose it could all change if the wind changes or the weather gets really warm.

The birch and spruce on all sides of the old farm are attractive enough. Land seems fertile, clayey, largely free of rocks. Seems like there’s some old potato and strawberry fields that have been taken over by weeds. Double-digging a 100 sq ft garden was fairly easy -- just started in what was a random thicket of ground-elder.

I've now checked out the environs on foot, too. For what it’s worth, the opposite bank of the river is clad in a really beautiful pine-heath forest with no settlement. It could be a coastal area. Not wilderness, of course, but quite empty. I also jogged near the lake that was mentioned as a selling point but which we discounted as a factor. Nice properties but I didn't feel that Estonian sense of covetousness – lake shores are marshy, practically unapproachable except for the odd boardwalk, and the trails down are longer and even steeper than our path to the river.

We still don’t have power. Like the day we lost power in Morocco, it has not been unwelcome, but now I’m getting impatient. It should be a matter of days. We have a power line that runs across the property, there’s a spur leading to the house. They just need to install a new meter ,then a separate trip is required to physically connect the juice.


One unpleasant discovery. This pile of crumbling asbestos-cement corrugated roofing tile. People never cease to amaze me. On one hand , it’s great that the odl roof was removed and a new resin-based variety installed. But why neatly stack the old stuff in the barn? At least outside, the elements would keep it wetted down.

Country life, first days

We bought our country house on Wednesday -- the one we looked at, on the Vana-Võromaa side of the border from Setomaa. I arrived the next day, the car loaded full of our belongings for the summer. The whole family should be here by Sunday.

The rain -- more than a month's worth fell in about three days -- has been a blessing. It's kept any bugs off and it's been cold enough to give me a good reason to heat the place. The chimney/roof did not catch on fire -- nice.

The place was overgrown to fantastic proportions -- some civilized, soft grass around the buildings but much was of the wild carrot variety.

I bought a scythe along with gardening and digging tools and have been slaying.
I slew the ground-elder and Queen Anne's lace. Then I slew dandelions, timothy, and nettles, and slew as well the odd buttercup.

Besides reclaiming land from weeds, I've also busied myself with clearing a trail from the sauna out back through the forest down to the river. It isn't our land, but logging activity has ended there, and the last half is floodplain that is in a landscape protection reserve. It's a bit too far to make a dash from the sauna, but...

Next projects: cleaning the well and planting a garden.

Misappointments and obamanations

If you'll remember, I was guardedly optimistic about Obama. I just thought the hype was silly (starting with the whole first-black-president-not-to-be-descended-from-former-slaves thing, considering that a Native American-descended-from-rightful-land-owners has not yet assumed highest office). I thought he got a little too much credit for his oratory, as refreshing as it is after the grammatical wilderness of the Bush years.

I never thought it would be like this: discretionary bailouts on the domestic front and Orwellian Dick-inspired initiatives on the international front.

Do ALL presidential administrations have this talent at creating deeply cynical or clinically descriptive names for initiatives? I guess they do? In any case, "prolonged detention" is upsetting. Now I can have the following nightmare: the US and Russia sign a sweeping cooperation pact, under which I could be held indefinitely in a federal prison for my likelihood of failing to give the Red Army sufficient credit for liberating Estonia -- while the US government takes away my small business. Note, though, that last link has been spammed extensively by right-wing bloggers and is probably inherently not to be trusted.

Even on the environment -- where Bush had the "Healthy Forests Initiative" and you would expect a real change -- Obama is baffling, failing to give polar bears equal treatment. Like in other areas (military tribunals come to mind) he didn't reverse Bush where it really counts. Actually, there are a number of other Western and Northern species where the phrase "not out of the woods" comes to mind -- grizzlies, wolves -- and some that are rather recently "in the woods" -- salmon. There is no more important value to me in America than the national forests. Who's the pick to run them? Homer Wilkes, an urban planning guy from Mississippi, yeah, someone who no doubt hikes the Shoshone backcountry all the time and worries about pine beetle devastation...when he is not designing facilities.

But the way Obama has taken over the terrorism rhetoric in a way that I did not even hear from Bush is particularly vexing to me. As far as I am concerned, the only terrorism going on is nested references to terrorism made by politicians. Obama is a canny, youthful leader who should be able to recognize and discount a dogma from a mile away -- and here he is, essentially talking about how some guys engaged in asymmetric warfare against their own central governments ten thousand miles away could beat the US in the race to the perfect, state-of-the-art civilian mass murder disaster. As if. You know, what now really terrifies and terrorizes me is what sorts of indefinite initiatives will be instituted even if something does happen ("Three brown men held in plot to blow up Delaware"), not so much the act itself.