THE HUNTINGTON Y was under construction again. There were just beams and cement floors. I was given a tour by an old friend whom I did not recognize but who seemed to know me quite well. He had on a blue jacket, his hair was cut short, and he wore glasses. In short, he looked rather like a real estate agent, or Mormon missionary lite. There he was, showing me around. The entire floor plan of the old Y.M.C.A. was recognizable to me. I remembered the first day I went to that school. How I had promised myself that I would not be a baby like the others and would not cry for my mother. I could remember it all so clearly. Like yesterday.
That was at least one day I had succeeded. We walked together to the room, which was the first on the left, or actually the right, because we entered from the rear side of the building. It looked smaller there. I could see its outline, and had a vague memory of doing some kind of arts and crafts at a table there. I remembered one of the girls, who had platinum blonde hair.
This girl seemed to stick out in my memory.
The place had been gutted of course, but in a way it was refreshing. The sunlight poured through the beams. I could look out on that part of Huntington and see the athletic fields. The breeze smelled fresh. After, we walked to the end of the hall. That’s where we had classes our second year of preschool at the Y. I remembered many things from that room, especially a small book called Ten Little Indians and an accompanying cassette. I could remember some of the lyrics from the song, “one lost his prayer-stick …” When Thanksgiving came, we were all divided up into Pilgrims and Indians. I wanted to be an Indian. They got to wear feathers. But the teachers put me into the Pilgrim group. I got the Pilgrim black hat with the gold buckle.
Looking around this empty room, it was hard to believe that it had all happened here. Those memories seemed so cloudy, they seemed to be submerged in in a gray haze of time. The 1980s? When was that? But now all had been reduced to its bare essence. Only the walls were left, with some scattered wires too. My friend and I decided to walk down the hall toward the pool. It at least was still there. Entirely intact. There were still people swimming in the pool.
Later, we descended the steps of the Huntington Y to the first floor. This had been turned into a sort of open air market, like the one at Balti Jaama Turg in Tallinn, or the Baltic Station Market, as it’s called in English. A woman, who looked something like a flapper from the 1920s, or at least had that kind of haircut, came up to me, and asked me if I would go fetch her dress. I went into a back hallway, which was also well lit, and saw an array of silver dresses hanging suspended from hooks along the wall in the light. Those 1920s la garçonne dresses. Which silver dress would fit the woman? I didn’t know anything about dresses. Which one would fit?
IGRAYNE TOOK A JOB teaching at an old manor house in the countryside. Her classroom was in the cellar. It had vaulted brick ceilings and no natural lighting. Supposedly these were part of an older system of fortifications erected during the Swedish Era. But they had been plastered white, thanks in part to EU funding which had provided for the entire upgrade and upkeep of the school. It was Christmas when I went there to help her with the students. The entire school had been decorated, and there was even a small tree in the corner of her room. She was an attractive though tormented young woman. The torment was the star attraction.
Yes, I liked her very much.
After the final lesson before the break, we walked to the elevator. As soon as the door shut behind us, or in front of us, our hands were all over each other. It was a nice, natural, and passionate feeling. I’m not sure if it could be called love, but it was certainly a form or manifestation of love. It was warm, it was soft. On the first floor, the elevator doors opened. There was a small crowd of Japanese tourists there, waiting. At first they were shocked. Naturally, they started taking pictures. Igrayne didn’t care. “Just keep going,” Igrayne told me. “Just keep going.”
THE TOWN HAD CHANGED while I was away, and I had only been away for a short while. Tall pines and birches has sprouted up in every park. Locals had put up field stone walls to demarcate their properties. The streets had crumbled too, and the roots of the trees had grown over the roads, so that it almost made it impossible to ride your bicycle from one end to another. But the inhabitants did ride their bikes. And scooters. Two little boys were doing tricks on their scooters at the corner of Posti Street and Koidu. There was a large barn set back some ways where there once was a series of apartment houses. It had been painted Swedish red. On the other side of the street, the Joala Park side, was a stone wall. Trees towered over every piece of prime town real estate. It was as if they were blocking out the sun.
When I arrived at my house, I was surprised to find Veikko, our old neighbor, working in the yard. I didn’t realize that we had become neighbors again. There he was spinning his metal saw round and round, cutting his wood silently. “Working?” I said to him. “I am,” came the answer, his nose close to the saw. Inside my house, I noticed that Saare Kika was there. He was standing in the kitchen, washing the floors. Then he picked up a large wooden pizza peel, the kind that looks like a shovel and that they use in places like Napoli to slide pizzas into wood-fired ovens. The pizza peel was just dripping with red sauce. Saare Kika tossed it into the sink. He has this stoic, silent-type, iron man aura to him. Rugged, determined features. He turned.
“Your life is a complete mess,” he said. “And I’ve come here to help you clean it up.”
I nodded along and looked him over. Then I noticed that Saare Kika had sprouted a pair of gray wings. Were they real wings? Or just part of an elaborate Halloween costume? This I could not really say for sure. But they were wings, dangling from his back as he scrubbed down the pizza peel in my sink. It reminded me of legends I had heard about The Mothman in both West Virginia and in and around Chicago. Dark, insect-like creatures with the bodies of men but the wings of moths. They called them ‘winged humanoids.’ One woman claimed to have seen several of them. I asked Saare Kika if he was the Mothman, but he just laughed at the question.
“Mothman? No,” he said, pulling the peel from my sink. “I am Batman,” Kika said. “I am Batman.”
WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE WRITER? Or who has been the most important writer in your life? People have often asked me this question. My answers change. Sometimes I say Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote every morning, even when his wife Zelda was in the psychiatric hospital. Sometimes I answer Henry Miller, who dared to write so poetically about the darker side of men and of the world. And certainly Ernest Hemingway haunts me, as he haunts every writer, with his strange, adventurous life story. But honestly, my guardian angel has been to this day Jack Kerouac, the author of On the Road. I see my life through the prism of his life, I understand myself through his books. Jack inspires me. Jack cautions me. I would like to write as well as Kerouac wrote his books. But I don’t want my life to have the same trajectory. I don’t want us to have a shared fate.
***
I was thinking about Jack one summery Saturday morning when I drove to Northport on Long Island. My parents live about half an hour east of there, but my mother is from Northport in part. Northport is a port town or perhaps village, about 70 kilometers from the center of Manhattan. It is drowning in greenery and there are lovely views. It used to be a summer place, to where city people would flee and go swimming. There were women with Victorian Era dresses and umbrellas to keep out of the sun and men in black top hats. You know what I’m talking about. They came from the city by train, to spend the summer by the sea. It reminds me of Haapsalu. But I went by car. When I got to Northport, I met up with some relatives. We went for a walk and told some stories. I’m not in the US so often. It was a nice summer morning and it was nice to spend time with my uncle and cousin and to drink some coffee. After our get together, I typed 34 Gilbert Street into the GPS and headed off in that direction. To get to Gilbert Street you have to take Main Street out of town, then turn onto Cherry Street and then again to Gilbert Street. It was interesting that I had been to Northport maybe a thousand times, but this was the first time I had ever been on this street. The house I had come to see was a white, wooden house, a typical working class house. The same kinds of houses are in Lowell, Massachusetts, where Jack was born. That’s why he wanted to live here, I’ve read.
Jack moved to Northport in 1958. Eisenhower was the president of the US. Khrushchev was the leader of the Soviet Union. Mao was building Communism in China. The Korean War was over and the Vietnam War hadn’t started. Kerouac was looking for a peaceful place that wasn’t too far from New York. He was already famous by this time. A year earlier appeared his most famous novel, On the Road. Kerouac was everywhere. On television. On the radio. In newspapers. In night clubs. He was the Beat Generation’s greatest prophet. A dutiful Catholic, Kerouac brought his mother Gabrielle Ange Lévesque to live with him in Northport. An older lady. Conservative. She had been born in Quebec at the end of the 19th century. Religious. Different. The Cold War was at its height and Kerouac hated Communism. He was, at his core, a Catholic, regardless of the fact that he did not exactly follow the church’s rules in his personal life. But the Communists had no faith. Kerouac yelled at the TV when they showed Khrushchev. His mother was making his pancakes and washing his socks. He was typing away at his typewriter too, when he wasn’t talking to fans who had climbed over the back fence, or he wasn’t at the local bar drunk again. Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother and Kerouac’s mother went to church at the same time in the same town. It probably happened, I think.
***
Neighbors later reported that mother and son fought a lot. What about, I don’t know. Nobody knew, because the Kerouacs’ loud arguments were in French. The youth of the town learned rather quickly that their new neighbor was the famous Jack Kerouac. It was hard for him to find a spare moment to write. They turned up at the front door, or chatted with him through the basement window. Kerouac even wrote about this in his 1962 book Big Sur. This was the first Kerouac book that I ever read. My girlfriend gave it to me when I was 16. I don’t know how much she even knew about Kerouac. Maybe she just bought it because of the title? But it was the right book for me. I especially liked the beginning. The story starts with Kerouac in San Francisco, waking up with a hangover to the sound of church bells. I went that summer to San Francisco and Big Sur and read that book along the way. There is one scene where Jack Kerouac is in bed with a woman and the woman’s child comes into the bedroom and watches. That was probably the first time I had ever read something like that in a book.
Through his life I learned that the world was much bigger and that adventures were waiting everywhere. That life was more of an interesting experience than anything else. Life was an experience, and a person could write about it as it happened, just like a photographer takes photos. His style was fluid, unique, and addictive. I think that once you get used to Jack Kerouac, it becomes harder to read more conventional literature. Books like Fifty Shades of Grey or The Da Vinci Code seem dull. Once you go on the road with Kerouac, there is no way back. And I am still on that road with Kerouac. In this way, I arrived at his old house, to take some photos of it and look it over. What did I expect anyway? That he would come outside, with garbage bags in his hands? That I would hear his mother yelling in the background? Ti Jean, my boy, your pancakes are ready! It was a hot, humid, and sunny day. Gilbert Street was quiet and empty. Some birds were singing away and there was a light breeze. The house is really just like any other. But when a writer like Kerouac has sat there with his typewriter, the importance of the house changes. People then come by and take pictures of it. They want to come face to face with the soul of that writer, at least just a little bit.
***
IT’S INTERESTING THAT Jack Kerouac wasn’t the only new inhabitant of Northport in 1958. Because my mother and her family showed up in town the same year. In some ways, my grandfather Frank and Kerouac were similar. Kerouac was born in 1922, and my grandfather Frank a year later. Kerouac’s home language was French. His parents were from Quebec and they moved to the US at the start of the 20th century to find work in New England, like many Quebecois did. Jack Kerouac’s real name was Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac. He attended Catholic school and his teachers were French-speaking nuns. Later, he praised the education he had received, and found that thanks to their rigid means of instruction, he had learned to write so well. I reminded my grandmother of this fact once when we spoke about Kerouac. To her, that crazy neighbor Kerouac wasn’t exactly an upstanding citizen, but the fact that he was a Catholic softened her position. Maybe he wasn’t so bad, she perhaps thought. If he was a Catholic, he was one of us. He just didn’t live his life the right way. Jack merely diverged from the road of Catholicism.
When he went to school, young Kerouac still didn’t speak English and had to learn as he went. He would study the dictionary to expand his vocabulary. It was the same for my grandfather. His parents were from Italy, and their home language was the Barese dialect. My grandfather also didn’t speak English until he started to go to school. A neighbor girl taught him how to speak it. My grandfather was ashamed of being different. He had a long Italian name. He had dark hair. For Americans, he was an outsider. Kerouac’s relationship with America was similar. He was an American in some regards, but he had a different perspective. He was both a local and a foreigner. But my grandfather lived a proper Catholic life. He was married by the age of 22. He had a job and five children. They lived on the edge of the City of New York, until one morning he took a ride out east to see what he could see. That’s how, one story goes, he discovered Northport, that same port town that Kerouac discovered around the same time. Both of them moved to Northport, and both took their mothers with them. Frank’s mother’s name was Maria. She made her son pizza, just like Kerouac’s mother Gabrielle made her son pancakes around the corner. In my mother’s home, they spoke both Italian and English. My mother is almost 77 now, and she still speaks English a bit differently. A professor of Italian once told her that she speaks like a child that has learned English from immigrants. The vocabulary and pronunciation are correct, but her sentence structure is a little off. The grammar is backwards, because she is using Italian grammar with English words. Sometimes I think that Kerouac’s bilingualism influenced his writing style. My mother never did meet with Kerouac, but her younger brother once recalled that on some nights he might have seen Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg playing baseball. This was at the beginning of the 1960s. These were dangerous characters. Before there were punks, and before there were hippies, there were Beatniks. Ginsberg was a gay poet, and Cassady was simply a wild and crazy guy. Kerouac himself was not quite right. Some say that he hit his head too many times when he played football in school. Maybe that’s why he wrote so well? There are different theories.
I can only imagine how my uncle, then aged about nine, accidentally came across Kerouac, Cassady, and Ginsberg. Actually, they looked quite average. They just lived different lives. It was a warm summer’s night and he rode his bike by the baseball field and saw them playing. Just some Americans out playing baseball. Now that moment seems like a historical event.
***
Kerouac’s father died young, and when he was ill, a young Jack Kerouac promised his ailing father that he would care for his mother Gabrielle forever. This was a promise he made before God. So Jack was obliged to live with his mother. Or he was unable to leave her home really. Of course, he was married three times in his life, and he had one daughter (though he argued for a time that the child was not his, which was disproven by a blood test). A proper Catholic would have been married just once and stayed married. But Kerouac was unable to live that life. He had all kinds of worldly adventures, but the road always led Kerouac back home to his mother. His mother’s place was his main address. They lived in Northport until 1964.
They only lived on Gilbert Street for a year and a half before moving to Earl Avenue, into a small house on the edge of town with a Dutch roof. There they stayed for two years. Their last address was on Judy Ann Court, in a one-storey house. They spent three more years there. My mother’s family lived a few streets closer to the center of town. The story that my uncle claimed to have seen Kerouac playing baseball with the other Beats is probably true. Carolyn Cassady wrote in her memoir Off the Road how her husband Neil, Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg would go and play baseball together. For some time, Jack and Carolyn were even lovers. Neal was particularly supportive of their relationship, as he had cheated on his wife Carolyn many times. So if his wife had a lover, things would be more equal, he thought. Classic.
It’s interesting to read from time to time that Kerouac was gay, like Ginsberg. Even Gary Snyder, who is 94 at the moment, and who inspired Kerouac’s character Japhy Ruder in his novel The Dharma Bums said in a recent interview that Jack hated women and was probably gay. But then we have Carolyn Cassady who writes about her passionate relationship with her husband’s pal. I’ve also read Joyce Johnson’s book, The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. Johnson described a very charming character with blue eyes who whispered to her in French. Johnson, who is also a successful writer, was Kerouac’s girlfriend for several years. She once wrote that in the world of the Beat Generation, women were girlfriends or muses, but she wanted to be more. She also wanted to be a writer. This fact has really stuck with me, although I have been quite similar to my Beat predecessors in terms of my own perspective.
But Jack Kerouac always had some woman. Always. One of these was the Afroamerican Alene Lee, who inspired his character Mardou in The Subterraneans. This book has been translated into Estonian. Its Estonian title is Pilvealused and the translator was Triinu Pakk-Allmann. The second novel to appear in Estonian is On the Road, or Teel, translated by Peeter Sauter. The most colorful female character in On the Road is a Mexican woman named Terry with whom he lived a while in California. One of my favorite quotes in the book belongs to Terry when she says to Sal Paradise, the main character, “I love love.” Johnson wrote that this relationship was one of his most stable, and that Jack might have stayed together with Terry, who gave him the freedom to roam. But no. Kerouac promised his father that he would take care of his mother. True to his word, he did so. His responsibilities to his family were his priority.
The writer Gore Vidal once wrote that he had a relationship with Kerouac though. And Joyce Johnson acknowledged there had been some intrigues with Ginsberg. Sexuality among the Beats is an interesting topic, especially because at that time in the “hetero world” things were just different. Men would go to visit prostitutes together. Jack writes about spending time with Mexico City prostitutes. It was just a regular thing. “Guys, let’s go get some prostitutes!” Even Ginsberg went with them. What did he do there? Read some Mexican girl one of his poems?
One of Kerouac’s loves was certainly Tristessa, a young Mexican junkie. Her real name was Esperanza. It’s hard to think that a man who wrote so much about women was gay. But maybe it would be more honest to accept that things have changed since those days. In the 1950s, there was limited awareness of the LGBTQ+ community. There weren’t parades with rainbow flags. Neal Cassady could sleep with Ginsberg and his wife Carolyn and not lose any sleep wondering about which letter best described his sexual orientation. Was he bisexual? Pansexual? Omnisexual? Was he a G, a B, or maybe even a Q? Neal was just Neal, and Jack was Jack. It was just a different time. In Joyce Johnson’s book there is an interesting fact that Jack didn’t think of himself as being gay, but that he actually wanted to be gay. Most of the best writers of the day were gay. Gore Vidal. Truman Capote. James Baldwin. He was almost ashamed that he wasn’t, because everyone knew that gay writers wrote so well. This fact really astonished me. It was like an inverted reality. Maybe it’s inspired me to write more honestly about women. Men’s interest in women is deep, intriguing, at times terrifying, but inspiring. There is more to unearth from that treasure trove.
***
MY GRANDPARENTS WERE devout Catholics, but Kerouac had a long relationship with Buddhism. Carolyn Cassady recalls in her memoir how Jack found Buddhism and started to believe that the world was an illusion and that reality was just emptiness. He tried to live as the Buddha. He even wrote Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha and The Dharma Bums during this period, as well as Desolation Angels. I have read The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, but Wake Up hasn’t found a place on my bookshelf just yet. I understand that he had personal problems, especially with alcohol, but also within his family system, which kept him in a sort of personal prison in life. Other people got to enjoy their freedom, but he had responsibilities. He could travel and write, but his mother was still waiting for her boy at home.
Carolyn acknowledged in his memoir that the new, Buddhist Kerouac wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. He became very stern and serious. He went up to a mountaintop in the summer to contemplate emptiness. Kerouac no longer wrote to his friends about his thoughts, but about the dharma. He was looking to be liberated from himself. As a Catholic, his life was full of disappointment and guilt. In both the family and the church, there was a lot of confusion, stress. This I understand well. I started school in Northport, and my first school was a Catholic school. Kerouac was, by that time, dead. He died in the summer of 1969. He was 47. When I was younger, 47 sounded kind of old. Now, at the age of 44, it sounds like a teenager to me. I was born a decade after Kerouac died. I started school six years later, as I said, there in Northport. These facts are not so deeply connected to me or my life story. They are just a coincidence. Because I didn’t know anything about Jack Kerouac’s Northport period when I was a little boy.
Still, his world was familiar to me. My grandfather died in Northport two summers before Jack. A heart attack. My grandmother lived long. Her house was full of crosses and angels. Lots of shining angels. My father’s uncles had a bar in Northport, but Kerouac’s favorite bar was another one called Gunther’s Tap Room. These days, Northport is a wealthier place. At that time, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was a rougher, working class down. There was a sand and gravel company nearby, and on their lunch breaks the workers would come to town, eat and drink. There were a lot of drunken bar fights. Pete Gunther, the bartender, who was the original owner’s son, was a teenager when he started working. He’s now long dead, but when I was 25 and working for a local newspaper, I met up with him and interviewed him about Jack Kerouac. There was even a sign on the wall that said, “Kerouac Drank Here.” Apparently, his alcoholism intensified during this period.
Pete Gunther, a bald older man with a round face, in general quite friendly. He told me straight that Jack Kerouac was a drunk. He was drunk every day of his life. This was like the scene in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden when the good son who believes his mother is dead finds out that she is very much alive and running a whorehouse in town. “Justin, your greatest hero was just some crazy drunk.” That’s what Pete Gunther related to me in our interview, more or less.
Jack once gave Gunther an autographed copy of one of his books in exchange for a beer, but Pete Gunther said he couldn’t make any sense of it. It was all crap, he said. He didn’t understand it. So he threw Kerouac’s book in the garbage. In some ways, I feel it was symbolic of how America treated him. Now that the original scroll of On the Road is displayed in museums, we can think that once upon a time a great writer lived in that small house over there. Or put up a sign that says, “Kerouac Drank Here.” Or try to collect memories of him from other people, people who once met him, or saw, perchance, him playing baseball with his friends. That summer when he died though people were more interested in hippies, the Vietnam War, and the Prague Spring. His best friend Neal had died a year prior in Mexico beside the railroad tracks. He was known to use drugs, but it was the rain and his lack of clothing that did him in.
When Neal died, Kerouac told his friends that he wanted to join his best friend in heaven. The writer and poet Gregory Corso, who you can see in Jack’s short film Pull My Daisy together with Ginsberg and the other Beats, recalled similarly. “Jack wanted to die,” he said. And so he did. He got into a bar fight and started bleeding inside. In the end, it was life-long alcoholism that took the life of Jack Kerouac. But he did want to be with the angels. Mr. Corso said so.
That morning, as I was looking over his first Northport home, I sat in my car for a while. I wanted to tell my old friend Jack not to drink so much. Leave your mother Gabrielle behind and go live with that Mexican girl. The one who said she loved love. Or some other girl. Or maybe even multiple girls. Life is for living, Jack. It’s too soon for wrestling with those angels.
When I was 16 and my girlfriend gave me my first Kerouac book, Big Sur, I started to write. I had read how Jack always had a notebook on him, and that he would write everything down. I can now see traces of that book in everything I write. So Kerouac continues to live on, quietly.
Here and there.
An Estonian version of this article, written by the author, appears here in the magazine Edasi.
ON THE WAY to Germany we had a layover in the clouds. We were probably midway over the Atlantic Ocean when we set down. The clouds were denser here, but also gauzy, like balls of cotton stretched out from both ends. Pieces of old aircraft had got stuck up here in these clouds. Commercial airliners, private planes. They bobbed up and down there like driftwood.
But there was more. Some people had moved into the cloudy layover. They were living up there. Maybe they were connected in some way to the airlines? There were islands of suburbia spread out between the clouds. It was like Daly City, California, except up in the sky. Hundreds of houses built in the same fashion. Driveways, football fields, and lawns, well, white, cloudy lawns. Each house had its own mailbox, of course. Strangle little place. We had lunch at a café.
We didn’t stay long. Just a few hours. The journey continued and we landed in Munich on time.
AT SOME MOMENT on Sunday evening I find myself in the grand hall of Viljandi’s Folk Music Center or Pärimusmuusika Ait looking for a good spot to rest a while and write. The hall is full of people, some standing, others gathering, talking and telling jokes. There are all kinds of people here, people with shaved faces and hairy chins, hippies, squares – but let’s be honest, most of them are a decade or more younger than I am. Beside the stage, three wonderfully light-haired girls are seated, one with shiny hoop earrings. I don’t know how old they are and don’t want to know. Two of them are looking at their phones, one has her head to her knees, apparently to just catch her breath. I watch them a moment more and then hoist myself up onto the edge of the stage. Every part of my body hurts: my legs, arms, back, and heart. My trustworthy satchel is wet from the rain, but my notebook is still dry. With a black pen, I begin to write. A few seconds later, a man appears before me, one with short hair and a brown sports jacket. He says he used to be my first daughter’s zoology teacher at the Viljandi Hobby School. That must have been a long time ago. His name is somewhat familiar, though I don’t recognize him. He has something in hand.
It’s a button. The kind you’d find on a jacket. There’s a trick too. There is something behind the button. This man goes around Viljandi installing these buttons on walls. When you tug the button, it pulls a piece of string behind it, and when the string goes back into the wall, the magic button plays beautiful music. “You just have to pull the button,” the man says. I don’t understand if I’m dreaming or not. I am at this moment so tired, that it all could be a hallucination. “That’s genius!” I say. The music is the same you would hear from a music box. “Why are you putting these buttons up?” I ask the man. “I wanted to bring a little more joy to the world,” he answers with a smile. Then the button man disappears into the crowds.
When the man is gone, I take some more time to unwind. The three girls are still sitting in the corner, looking half dead. It’s dark outside now. I actually have no idea what time it is, and only know, in a foggy way, that it is Sunday, which means that it’s the last day of Viljandi Folk. The concerts are still ongoing somewhere. And I promised Arno Tamm earlier that I would go see him during the final concert.
During one concert, I saw the American guitarist Jed Clark, who is from Arkansas and plays with the bluegrass band Midnight Ride, look out with tired eyes on Käevumägi, or the Well Hill, and a thousand or so beautiful people and say, “This festival is like a dream I don’t want to wake up from.” In the great hall of the Ait, I think that Jed is right. Earlier in the festival, I had a chat with him at the Green House Cafe. Jed told me in his soft Arkansas accent that Viljandi Folk was “just like paradise.”
I wasn’t so sure it was paradise. But a strange dream nonetheless.
***
“PEOPLE COME HERE from the US, from Canada, and they have a hard time believing that this is all real,” Tomás del Real, a Chilean musician, tells me the day after his concert was well received at the Jaak Johanson Stage. He performed on Saturday night, and people praised his performance the following morning. “It was all so intimate and cosy and yet so grand and so global,” some gushed to me. I had planned to go there, but somehow got lost along the way, and must admit that I don’t know exactly where I was when Tomás played that night. I allowed myself to live a little that evening and so everything from that evening has already faded into the mist. But I survived and supposedly the music was good.
“They see the lake, the castle ruins, and they think, what place is this?” Tomás continued his story. “For a festival, it’s a really great place, and the way the festival uses the surroundings, the aesthetics, are done with incredible taste. Nothing is overdone, everything is very natural, and they simply fill out the environment,” he said. Tomás is in some ways like me. A foreigner who came to Viljandi and got stuck here. Years before we came, Ruslan Trochynskyi, the trombonist from Svjata Vatra, arrived here from Ukraine and was similarly seduced. We are now like one big Folk family and not just us, who have come from abroad. Estonians have arrived here the same way. They come to Folk, go for a swim, and stay.
There is some kind of invisible pull. Even Tomás del Real, who is as clearheaded as they come, acknowledges this: “It is magnetic,” he admits.
I have of course heard criticism, that Estonian folk music is mostly fake and mostly synthetic, that the prices are too high, that this year’s Folk isn’t as good as last year’s, and so on. “These Folks are not like they used to be,” some say.
It is true that before there were fences and passes, folk was an anarchic experience and all kinds of weird people turned up in town. I called them the “zombie army” at the time, the drunks, Nazis, and rednecks. But all was permitted and the people enjoyed that anarchy. At some point, it was decided that Folk would be a bit safer and those days drew to a close. But the magic continued. Gates or no gates, the spirit of Folk cannot be contained. And the security staff are only looking for alcohol, really. They give your bag a squeeze and then wave you through with a grin. You have been examined. Go on your merry way.
I wanted to say, in response to this criticism, that whatever they have, people never seem to be satisfied with it. Something’s always missing from the picture. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is too familiar to me. I find myself on a train south, staring from a window. I think, what am I doing here in Viljandimaa? My heart is full of disappointment and melancholy. Other people, such as those from Tallinn, have said to me, “Why are you wasting your life in some hole in Estonia?”
Viljandi indeed is an odd place, one you can only reach intentionally. No one shows up here by accident. Folk does offer a lot of reasons for people to come here. It is a rich and deep event. For those who are never satisfied, I would say, take a look around. There is some value here. There is something different at least. I had these thoughts as I hid myself away in the press room in the cellar of the Pärimusmuusika Ait. Outside there was rain and thunder, and the Ait was full of soaking wet people. In the corner of the press room sat my one true love, the object of my affection. But who is this quiet girl? What’s her name?
She’s a coffee machine, naturally.
***
THERE ARE ALL KINDS of stories shared in the press room during the folk music festival. One day, after a concert by Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, I found myself seated again beside my beloved coffee machine listening to her purr. I must acknowledge that Folk is an exhausting experience. Even after just a few hours at Folk, a person is squeezed dry. All of that noise, all of those conversations and songs. Espressos are needed for a quick pick-me-up, so that one can still walk and write. The Italian group CGS is from Puglia, the province in Italy from which my mother’s family originates. One of their songs was about love, of course. This melancholic song describes a lovestruck man who sits beneath a woman’s window night after night, until the woman closes the window. But there he continues to wait until death, so devoted is he to the woman he loves. For me, this song was somehow refreshing. I have never heard of an Estonian who would do such a thing. Estonians are too practical for that. They wouldn’t waste their time in the name of Mediterranean love. But Mediterranean love is just like that. Passionate. Full of devotion.
“But in Estonia,” I tell a colleague in the press room, “if you sat underneath that window, the woman would call the police.” “Well, yeah,” she answered. “That could be really annoying.”
“But what do Estonians do when they fall in love?” I ask. “Does someone gift the other some potatoes? Or a bucket full of chanterelles?”
“No, no, they just enjoy their time together,” the woman explained.
“So that they are in the forest somewhere and one says to the other, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ Is that how they do it?”
The woman looked at me with her clear blue eyes. “If it’s love, then there’s no need to talk. You just have to feel it.” Simple. So, sitting underneath someone’s window isn’t especially welcome here in Estonia. But I have definitely wanted to sit beneath some women’s windows, at least a few times, whether I am allowed to or not.
***
LOVE WASN’T THE ONLY SUBJECT haunting me at Folk. Another was age, certainly. Not that I really needed to think about age so badly, but when most of the people around you are at least 20 years younger than you at least, and three of them are your own daughters, then it comes to mind. At some moment, Uncle Justin wound up in the company of some young ladies in their early-twenties and forgot for a while whether he was a responsible parent or just another one of the pack. So I went along with them. It was a good feeling. I started to feel like one of those older Beatniks, like the poet Allen Ginsberg or wild man Neal Cassady, when they joined forces with the young hippies of the 1960s. If things are moving in that direction, then why not go with it? Why not? Beautiful kids with beautiful eyes. Students who aren’t yet jaded or embittered. They still have hope. They go to sleep listening to music. They don’t make the sarcastic jokes of our generation. With them I am gentler, I listen more, and I’m supportive.
As I told a friend at Folk, we are some kind of bridge generation. There are those important icons from the days of the Singing Revolution: Mart Laar, Edgar Savisaar, Siim Kallas, Tiit Vähi, and the others. And then there are these fresh young people who know nothing about that era and for whom it’s all just history. We are in between them, people like Margus Tsahkna or Jüri Ratas, who were both at Folk. We know where the bodies are buried, metaphorically, but we don’t want to share that information with the kids. Let them enjoy their youth. Let them run around holding hands when it’s raining and the Zetod are rocking. When someone comes by and reaches out, we take their hand in ours and run along together.
The Puuluup concert was a truly strange sight though. Their music is one that really does haunt you. The Hiiu kannel has the kind of sound that makes it hard to determine where it’s coming from. It sounds as if someone is playing with time. If I could ever play the sky and the clouds, it might just sound like the sound of a Hiiu kannel. There were so many people at the concert, it looked like a sea or bubbling soup. I watched and listened. Afterwards, I arrived at the idea that I no longer had an age. Age was just a number. But I felt in that moment, standing on that hilltop looking down, that I was more like some kind of Hindu deity. The embodiment of Shiva or Kali. Even when I was a child I knew it. The world told me what my age was, but inside myself I couldn’t tell the difference whether I was three or four years old.
“I don’t feel old,” said the American folk musician David Crosby shortly before his death last year. “I feel the same way I have always felt. It’s just my body that has aged.”
I was and I am.
When Midnight Ride played on Kaevumägi, they called themselves the sons of Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. But I thought instead that nobody is actually the son of anybody. There is no before and there is no after. Music doesn’t age, just like souls do not age. Music is undying, as they say and exists at all times. All you have to do is to play it. I exist. In this way, we are all like music, undying, immortal. These were the thoughts I had during the Puuluup concert.
***
A DAY AFTER THE CONCERT, I met up with Ramo Teder, half of Puuluup, who with his long white hair looks like he could be the managing director of Santa Claus’ elf toy factory at the North Pole. Maybe because he lived in Finland for so many years. Ramo is actually from Viljandi. On social media, one can see a photo of Ramo when he was a punk at the end of the 1980s. He looks quite stylish, a combination of Johnny Rotten and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Puuluup is certainly not a punk group. There’s no “Anarchy in the UK” here, or in Estonia for that matter. But Ramo discussed how punk had influenced the ideas behind Puuluup.
“The idea that you have to overcome boundaries,” he said. The idea that all archetypes are tossed out the window. Estonian punk was different from American or British punk. Estonian punks were more like intellectuals. Most of the people in the Estonian SSR were standard issue. They wore the same clothes and had the same hairstyles. That some young man was walking around Viljandi with such hair was against the system. Hair, in this way, can be dangerous. There he now stands on stage, with a kannel in hand, age 53, singing about small birch trees. He also belongs to the tribe. Ramo is another brick in the Folk castle.
After the interview with Ramo, I found myself at the Eesti Etno concert. There were all kinds of musicians there, and they looked so happy. Were they too happy? I was dealing that week with the death of a high school friend. News about a friend’s suicide arrives slowly, even nowadays. Nobody talks about it on social media, only when you are famous. It took time to understand why this 43-year-old man had died “tragically and unexpectedly” as it said in a news article. But I eventually found out. So those Eesti Etno singers were singing and I was thinking about death and suicide.
One song did lift my mood. A young Indian was singing and the other sang along with him. At that point, I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing. Their clothes were so colorful. The music was so good. As sweet and satisfying as a mango lassi. It all looked like some kind of pajama party or Indian cult. Maybe some ashram had come to Estonia? Anyway, that was the right song for me at that moment, a person who was destabilized. Tragedy is like a little black cloud that follows you around everywhere. A song can help. Music can save lives. I would have liked to save my friend’s life the same way.
One night on the First Cherry Hill, as it is called, I thought I saw him, standing beneath a tree. But it was someone else.
***
DURING THE FESTIVAL, it becomes difficult to put one’s thoughts together. Looking through my notebook, I can find these kinds of scattered sentences and half-memories. “I left my journal in the press room, but Peeter the Estonian Swede came after me to tell me, and I ran back to get it, because my journal is full of kompromat that could make my life really difficult.” Or, “Some pharmacist from Tartu came up to me and started to talk about Paavo Matsin.” And, “Lauri Räpp was talking about resilience.”
The days melted together. There were a lot of concerts, for sure. The Italians. The Mexicans. The 6hunesseq-ians. Now that was a powerful concert, held in St. John’s Church at midnight. I fell asleep multiple times, because I was so tired, but the music was soft, warm, and enveloping, like a comfortable blanket. The musicians were out of view, because they were on the second floor, where the church’s orel is located. After they came down and people applauded. I guess I went home after that. I don’t quite remember. My friend found a rabbit in a park in Viljandi around the same time and took it into her tent. Later, she found the rabbit’s owner. These kinds of things happen during Folk. The mind no longer works. There is too much information, too much stimulation.
Then one day I met a man who told me that Lennart Meri’s book Silver White is the Bible of the Estonians, and how the Estonians, or rather the Baltic Finns, are very special people, and how Meri, Uku Masing, and Valdur Mikita had written “philosophical diamonds!” The man is working with a project called Valge Laev, or White Ship, to develop the higher intellect of the Baltic Finns. “But if the Estonians are so smart,” I told him, “then why do you need me for your project?” “Because you can help us bring it to the wider world!” came the answer. He had a fur hat and a green shirt. A beard. Sparkling blue eyes. Like a photo from the collection of Johannes Pääsuke. The green shirt was inside out. Of course, I agreed to help. When the Land of Mary calls you, you heed that call.
The following morning I have a slight hangover, because I thought the prior evening that I would allow myself to live a little. I asked myself, what would your favorite writer Scott Fitzgerald do if he was at Viljandi Folk? The answer arrived at once: start drinking wine! Life is for living! That night I wound up at the Untsakad concert at midnight. This was really like Anarchy in Estonia. I have never seen so many happy young people before. Untsakad are old men. They played at the first festival 31 years ago. But their fans are teenagers, or at university. I’m not sure what’s the attraction. Waltzes? Polkas? I like the Mexican band Kumbia Boruka more. They brought every cell in their bodies alive with their rhythms. They also appealed to writer Gert Kiiler, who said they reminded him of the show Miami Vice. “You know, they always have that kind of music playing somewhere in the background.” My friend, a Tallinn businesswoman who attends Folk regularly, recalled how she once had Don Johnson’s picture in her bathroom, so she could see him while she was taking a shower.
But Untsakad won over people’s hearts in the end. Even my 17-year-old daughter awoke the next morning and started to sing the “The Forest Brothers’ Song.” Ai-tsih, ai-tsah, ai velled, me metsavennad oleme! Which means something like, “we are the forest brothers, we are.” It really got inside her. For her the experience was also something like a dream. I received her rendition joyfully. “You’re a good forest brother’s daughter,” I thought, “even if your father is not a forest brother.”
***
SOME PEOPLE COME and go during Folk, but then there are people like me who are folk soldiers and stay until the last concert. We gather in the rain as Ando and Friends sing. Ando Kiviberg is the founder of Folk and the festival usually falls on his birthday. This year, he’s 55! Ando and Friends is some kind of variety show. Every kind of band performs there. The man himself is a Leo, naturally. He is the king of the jungle. There he is with his fuzzy face in his white suit and white hat, looking like some kind of Latin American drug dealer. He plays the bass and sings along. It’s nice to see the king in his element. The leader role suits him well. Ando is neither arrogant nor pretentious. He doesn’t think that he’s better than the others, no. But still they come, like small house cats, with their offerings to the Great Lion! Neither dead birds or mice, but songs. Silver Sepp has taken Tony Rennis’ 1962 Italian pop song, “Quando, Quando, Quando,” and made it over. The song’s new name is “Ando, Ando, Ando.”
At some moment, I get tired of all those bagpipes and fiddles and go to the other side of the Second Cherry Hill. There I stand beneath an umbrella and put on my headphones. I’d like to hear a little Led Zeppelin now. I am done with all of this folk music! I’d rather listen to “When the Levee Breaks.” To my surprise, these two things suit each other surprisingly well. I look up at the big screen and see Ando singing. But instead I hear Robert Plant’s voice. Ando is singing, “Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good!” It’s still raining. We are all soaked. Soon the levee really will break. An incredible combination. Ando and Zeppelin. My own levee really has broken. Then I realize that I have really lost it by now. I march over to the Ait. I look for a comfortable corner inside where a burned out writer can relax a little. Then that stranger appears with his magic button in hand. The three girls are in the corner and I am sitting on the edge of the stage. The man is showing me his button.
“That’s genius,” I say. My voice sounds distant, as if it belongs to someone else. “Just genius.”
An Estonian version of this article appears in Edasi, and the original was written by the author in Estonian and rewritten into English. The English and Estonian versions have some differences, so do read both!
I WAS IN THE SHOWER when her mother stopped by the house. My 77-year-old father received her. She was wearing sunglasses and walking a small dog, and was wearing an unusually business-like purple coat that might have belonged at one time to Prince. Her black hair was held back in a ponytail. She said she wanted to see me. I popped my head out of the shower and through the window could see her talking to my father on the front lawn. She gave him her business card and left. I did not detect one hint of a smile or jolly mood in that one. She looked cross and concerned.
Afterward my father gave me her business card. He told me I had to arrange a meeting with the woman. “She wants to know what’s been going on between you and her daughter,” he said while making coffee. “Is there something you want to tell me?” The black drink began to boil.
As far as I could recall nothing had been going on. We had just played board games with her and her brother Gustavo. Innocent stuff. Candy Land. Chutes and Ladders. Scrabble. Checkers. Battleship. “Direct hit! You sank my battleship.” That’s all I could remember. It was odd, because her daughter was a woman. By each and every metric. In the 18th century, she would be considered the unlucky, unmarried daughter. But in my memories, she was much younger, maybe about 14 years old. My board game memories didn’t seem to match the reality. Had I known the girl earlier than I remembered? What was this about? Maybe it was all a dream.
Still rattled with doubt, I made plans to meet and smooth things out with the mother. There had been nothing illicit or devious about my relationship with her daughter. Anything sexual was purely imaginary. Yes, she was a pretty girl, but that was the older version of her. We had been playing board games, that’s all. Just board games! I picked up the phone and dialed her. Sometimes you had to face the music, even if you thought or felt you were wholly innocent.
The phone rang a few times and then her mother picked up.
THERE WERE multiple archaeological teams in pursuit of the golden idol. We just happened to get to the source first, but the others weren’t far behind. It was like a real football pileup. So many people wanted it, this small rectangular piece of wood. It was adorned with golden symbols and engraved with the face of a goddess whose name was H. The name was inscribed across the idol in a strange and unknown alphabet. The goddess’ face had a small mouth that could talk or rather whisper. In this way it imparted its secrets.
We took the idol back with us. Along the way, the golden idol turned into a lion.
***
WE TOOK the idol along to Maggie’s Farm. It was beside the Port of Tallinn and had direct access to the sea. Maggie was outside hanging laundry to dry when we arrived. I was afraid the lion would eat the rest of her livestock, but it curled up in the barn with the donkeys and geese and took a well-deserved nap. At the farm, there was a small ceramic figurine of the philosopher John Locke, but its face had broken off. I took it as my task to replace the Locke figurine, but this turned out to be harder than it seemed. At the same time, she bustled about in the other room, rushing with the renovation work. A lamp needed to be installed. A ceiling needed to be repainted. “Stop messing around with John Locke!” Maggie scolded me. “I need your help over here.” We were fighting just like in the old days. She couldn’t slow down.
***
THE WIND PICKED UP and carried away the lion. But it was no longer in the shape of a lion, but a large golden sphere. It blew up and away along the coast, in the direction of Pirita. Naturally, I ran after that. On the way, I passed a seaside pub where utterly worthless characters, most of them British, were playing cards. I took a stone staircase down to the sea, where there was another beachside bar. A British bartender materialized and helped me to pull the floating golden sphere, that had once been a lion, and had also once been an idol, from the sea. It was lodged between two rocks in the coastal waters. This Brit was friendly. He had a mustache and apron. He said, “All in a day’s work,” and smiled once we had the idol in hand.
***
TRIUMPHANT I returned with the sphere. I felt like I mattered, that I was worth something, and therefore worthy of affection. When I got back to Maggie’s Farm though she didn’t even look at me. She was too busy planning another renovation. This time the roof would get an upgrade. Her fortune teller Magda was there with her hair pulled up inside a white scarf, and a small Andean flute band had congregated and began to play. “But we don’t need all this bread and circus,” I told Maggie. “I’ve got the idol right here!” She didn’t listen. “Everything we need is right here, in this idol. Let’s go inside the house and make love.” Maggie couldn’t hear me. She was telling the roofers what to do. The Andeans were playing their songs. The fortune teller held a finger to her lips. Nobody could hear me. Everyone else was too busy to listen.
north! 