Lost in Estonia

I have barely even finished watching season 4 of Lost, so please don't tell me what doesn't happen, and take into consideration that this allegory may be imperfect.

Estonia, says my friend on FB, IS the island, and he made a persuasive case. This guy, who, for what it's worth, will one day kayak around all 8 continents and whom I'm sure I remember from somewhere, has a point, and he's not the first to go down this path. The name of an e-zine which didn't pan out, Baltlantis, brilliantly encapsulated this quality from another, pre-Lost perspective.

Estonia as the Island... It may seem a consolation for an elusive ending, or obvious, and it may be breaking the Rules to put it out there like this, but it's tantalizing to consider the evidence.

First of all, Estonia doesn't really show up on cultural radar or maps. Have you noticed? This extends to all attempts to represent the country. Statistically improbably, we have had more foul-ups (15 of them) with the national flag being raised wrong at international ceremonies than any other country; and more than any other region, the country's outlines on newspaper maps are often distorted, there might as well be a permanent watermark over it reading "not quite to scale", or even "mappa mundi".

No matter how many Financial Times profiles are run about Estonia's economic success, you will still get a blank look from most ordinary people -- I don't mean uneducated schmoes but people on the ground in the US who have real jobs and participate in the real economy. More than 16 years after the country got normal Western banks, I still follow an elaborate set of personal superstitions whenever I arrive back in the hope that the rental car company will not recognize my credit card as a debit card or as not being issued yet.

Not to belabor the point, but if you tell someone that cafes in Estonia had WiFi a full 2-3 years before the US, back when libraries in the US still required you to sign up for time slots and show your ID, people will look at you funny. I have this slip of paper from the earlier part of the decade reading, "Estonia had WiFi before the US. No matter what happens, this is true. Remember this. K". I don't remember writing it anymore.

Go on at any greater length about Estonia and it's not out of the question you will get committed in an old-school mental ward -- certainly this is true when travelling in Russia.

**

So, if you wanted to hide a island, disappear a country, or an El Dorado, or bottle an evil spirit, you wouldn't put it in an exotic location like the South Pacific where it would be tourist-infested in no time flat, though I do see the wisdom in an obscure location in Indonesia. No, you would put it in a backwater, some arm of a shallow quasi-inland sea, where a guy on a boat could barely see the land over the tops of the reeds.

Come to think of it, this whole region -- call it a Europa-Ext. or auxiliary Europe -- is so convenient, it facilitates later additions. In much the same way as the geography of Lost is somewhat open-ended, accommodating ancient temples, you could create a whole new town somewhere in south central Estonia and you could claim that it was there all along, and probably get away with it.

We're wired, but almost too wired. You could go days without talking with a living person in Estonia, just punching numbers into a computer, to the point that you would lose your bearing in relation to Cartesian reality. A slogan for Estonia could be: Small enough to fake. Multiply surprising.

As for Dharma, well, as we know, Estonia was pretty much deprived a true hippie era by the Soviets . We had an AM radio garage band sort of 1960s at best, followed immediately by the bad hairstyles and fashions of the decades that followed. Still, the Soviets are like the Dharma Initiative in so many ways, basically putting the island -- I mean, Estonia -- in a deep freeze for years, keeping some lush nature unspoiled, while they erected hatches and ugly pylons in other places to keep themselves safe in an uneasy truce with the indigenes.

But does Estonia even exist, or are we all dead? Säästumarket is probably hell. A grey April 23 can be hell. Is it Hell?

And if it's Hell, why can I get to Tunisia anytime without booking a charter flight and with no more trouble than an occasional nosebleed? Why are local tour operators going bankrupt -- they could really run with this technology?

Anyway, most of this is blitheringly obvious. Some of it is also idle speculation of the kind aristocratic intellectuals used to engage in. Is it a door or a perception of a door? I don't know, pal -- hit the door with your fist.

But I find the curious coincidences and synchronicity irresistible.

While researching local alternative newspapers back in March, I came across pictures of Giustino and Mingus wearing Soviet-issue jumpsuits participating in a cornerstone laying for a Karksi-Nuia cultural centre in the 1970s. I knew there was something suspicious about how those two picked up Estonian. It was faster than Jin's English improvement in the actual Lost. And Giustino is always talking about returning.

Then there's AnTyx, who goes one better than Ricardo Alpert -- he seems to have reverse-aged while the rest of us put on extra pounds and wear and tear. Think about it indeed. I look like I'm 41 or 42 thanks to life in Estonia, while this mysterious consigliere figure is pulling a Benjamin Button. Who is he? Who is responsible for manipulating these players? Who put Estonia where it was, and why?

Watch the video again, is all I can say.

U-Strip post-flight

U-Strip turned out to be a misnomer for our stateside sally -- air travel was free of obstacles going out -- but based on observations and experiences, I wouldn't be surprised if cavity searches are soon introduced after people's flights land in Europe.

On the way to JFK, we only went through one (1) security check. In Tallinn, right at the beginning. There was nothing in Helsinki. The expression "waltzed through" comes to mind. This was very different from the transit airport just a few years ago, when my wife was questioned by an Icelandic official (luckily the intermediate stop was in Iceland that time, so at least that part made sense) about her Syrian visa in her old passport.

The one security check in Tallinn's new-look airport seemed pretty professional, if not very rigorous. This is a bit delicate to say without offending local sensibilities, but I do wonder if the Americans are aware that that was it. I'm glad of course, that they entrust this weighty responsibility to us, and certainly the people who guard the US Embassy would do a bang-up job at keeping garment bombers off planes, but well...If the same procedure applies to international itineraries originating in Tampere, Finland, where you could toss things to your friend waiting in the cafe - which was past security check -- eventually some bad seed will exploit it.

I'm guessing, though, that the Americans have learned from their mistakes -- though in writing that, I automatically wince -- and now rely on high-tech detection, common sense, and probably a massive amount of profiling. And coming back, the JFK screeners, all of whom would have been singled out for racial profiling themselves, were professional and -- this is key and different from other airports -- supervised by an older gentleman wearing a different outfit and no sense of humour. We did not have to deal with him directly. Nor did we undergo any cavity searches or X-rays. We had to take our shoes off but not our underwear. My half-eaten jar of almond butter (volume of jar: greater than 150 grams, probably 100 grams of almond butter) was allowed to pass.

When we got to Finland, the first thing all the transit passengers had to do was to go through a security check. Huh? The almond butter, which while in the air had stayed reasonably solid and in the jar, was now to my surprise flagged for further inspection. I then witnessed a dialogue (trilogue) between three Finnish screeners on whether the almond butter was a gel or not. I thought I heard one say something about what would happen if it "started flowing". In the end, one informed me it was in fact neither a colloid nor a solid, it was a liquid.

Since the attending screener and I both seemed to be waiting for the other to do something, I asked if I could spread it on a sandwich -- I don't like throwing away food -- and they said that would be OK. It seemed the jar was the problem -- the fact it was over 150 ml in volume. But if I took the almond butter out of the jar, and smeared it into a regulation Zip-Loc bag, or a sandwich, things would be all right. And then, I assume, the empty jar would also be OK. It was the fact that the substance was in the jar. Note to terrorists.

I reflected that whatever case of anal fecklessness the Americans were suffering for a few years when it came to liquids and gels and underwear is now being passed on to the Europeans, while the Americans themselves were returning to normalcy.

That wasn't all in Helsinki. We cleared customs, walking through a green line. Yes, I know what you are thinking -- our bags were probably checked through to Tallinn and in transit on some baggage cart -- but there you go. We then showed our passports to the EU border police as we neared our gate. The only thing I can conclude from this is that Helsinki airport is modular, was taken apart during the recent NATO summit in the region or something, then reassembled incorrectly. But that's wacky.

In Tallinn, we got to watch as a zoned-out policewoman dragged a drug dog over people's suitcases on the baggage belt, without so much as a by-your-leave. Yes, nothing says "former Soviet" or "Eastern Europe" better than blanket customs checks; at least apparently they are too lazy to actually search bags by hand. Predictably, the dog found nothing narcotic - the shizzit probably just went out the other way, to Finland, hello? -- but it did pick up something non-narcotic that it would have liked to eat in the last of the bags and slobbered all over it. Luckily the stupid policewoman had the decency, though I would not say decorum, to get the dog out of there before the bag was actually chewed through. Pathetic and noxious.

*

We did have one brief strange moment with the US border inspector, something that hadn't happened before. I had all eight passports out (my wife doesn't have a US passport but, not to be outdone by the rest of the crew, she has her visa in her old EU passport and travels on her new one so she has two as well) and was juggling the sheaf when the inspector said, "I wouldn't show those if I was you." What - did he think we were agents or something, had been naturalized?** I didn't ask anything, pretended to be confused. He left us alone and let us through. But dual citizens ius sanguinis, heads up. Might be wise to keep the passports separate.

** I suspect that this is just an authoritarian phenomenon. It's very common in about 80% of American cops, too. They let you know that have your number while not having any intention to really proceed. When we were coming back from a trip to Mexico in 2004, the US customs inspector ended up with our car keys. We were searching the car ourselves, going through all the places the officials had just searched, looking for them, when the guy came back, whistling, and tossing the keys rhythmically in his hand. I'll bet cop manuals include a chapter or two on things you can do to keep people off balance.