AFTER THAT, I ran from the stage, and soon enough found myself waiting at the tracks at the Ronkonkoma station on Long Island. But I wasn’t alone. I had arrived back to my home island with a whole entourage of Estonians. They were standing on the platform, suitcases piled up. A hard frost had settled in, the tracks glistened with ice, small drifts of snow collapsed on each other. Again the familiar clanging, the ringing of the bells, that strange New York voice calling, “Next train to Greenport. Next train!”
In my time away, the waiting areas of the station had been redone in a white adobe style. And in the corner of this white adobe waiting area, the Estonians were building a fire. Someone had found a few pieces of broken wood along the tracks. From these arose the crackle of a yellow orange fire, the hiss of white smoke. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I reprimanded them. “This is a train station. You can’t just go starting fires wherever you are!”
“But we are cold,” said one of the Estonians, pulling her jacket tighter. “Meil on külm.” Then another Estonian arrived with a sack of coal. “Wait,” I said. “Don’t do that!” He dumped the coal onto the growing fire, and each one began to sparkle like a firecracker. Heidi was there, shivering in her dress, looking like Little Orphan Annie. “But we’re cold,” she said. “Aren’t we welcome here too?” “Of course, you’re welcome,” I said. “You’re just not allowed to start fires in train stations on Long Island.” “Why not?” Heidi asked. “Minu arust see on väga normaalne.”
“I found some reeds,” said a middle-aged Estonian woman. “Let’s see how well these babies burn.” She tossed them on. Now half of the waiting station pueblo was engulfed in flames. Just then I noticed that the bookkeeper Signe was standing in the back. She was dressed in a black coat and eyeing me. Yellow hair cut in a fringe, eyes ice blue. Eyes that said, you are mine. Now it was my turn to shiver. “Stand closer to the fire,” said Heidi, tugging on my sleeve. “What are you even looking at? You’ll catch cold.” The fire roared and crackled and another train arrived. Somebody had started playing a karmoška.
THE OLD MAN had been working on the plane for months. It was his own design. He spent hours sanding its wings in a brick building on the North Fork the locals called the airplane factory. He was like a Newfoundland shipbuilder of old, constructing his own flying machine in that prodigious, determined manner that is common throughout Yankeedom. To test the new aircraft, he had selected me and a red-haired woman, who were to fly it over the Long Island Sound up through Connecticut and Massachusetts and up into Maine. Of course, I said yes. There was nothing better to do.
But why Maine? The old man didn’t say. He was actually a mechanic during the working hours, of solid build, hands like metal dustpans. One day, it was ready. I bought protective outerwear at the local marine supplies store, I made sure to bring my phone charger, some snacks, a good book to read for when we landed. If we landed. It was a misty day, and I wondered how we would even be able to find Maine if we couldn’t see it. And how were we supposed to land? In some farmer’s cornfield? “Don’t worry,” said the red-headed woman. “Leave that part to me.”
She was wearing her flight jacket and a leather cap with goggles. She looked like Lucky Lindbergh. But who would sit in front and who would sit in back? That part was never decided. Who was the pilot of this wooden aircraft, cut from planks of beech and pine? She sat upfront; the wind was puffing her red hair about. We were set to start from the top of Radio Flyer Hill in New Suffolk. And like that, the plane rolled down the hill and smoothly transitioned to the air, gliding swiftly over the whitecapped waves of the sound. The wind took us higher and higher, and soon I could see the dark pines of New England, standing around like old farmers.
The old man sat by his radio, waiting eagerly for our radio transmission from Maine, sipping a celebratory glass of scotch whiskey. What would we do when we landed in Maine, me and the red-headed pilot? Where would we go? We had no place to sleep; no one was waiting for us there. Maybe we could find a barn nearby and dream off the thrill of flight in a warm hayloft.
‘I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU,’ my father said, ‘but I could really go for some burgers and fries.’ Together, we rounded up the troops: me, my three daughters, and a small toy poodle named Frodo, and began our walk into town. It was a cool, shadowy evening in America; the sidewalks were paved all the way down to the major intersection that doubled as the town center.
In reality, there was an old Presbyterian church, the Apple Bank, the new and improved firehouse and some commercial buildings. Starbucks, the true epicenter, was a way off in another shopping center. That was where others gathered to mingle and report on whose kid got into what Ivy League and thus was assured a swift pathway to financial success and class prestige.
When we reached the Long Island Burger Kiosk, we could see a pre-election pep rally was taking place. How had we not heard about this? How had we wandered in here? It was a vast hall; all its seats were full. On stage, there sat a line of recently fired generals. Admonishing them was the Secretary of War Pete Kegbreath, his silver pompadour glistening in the lights, his face sparkling with sweat.
He was saying, “To all of you, I would ask, ‘Cui bono?’ Who is benefitting from woke transgenderism? I’ll tell you who, the plastic surgeons who cut off men’s dicks and call it ‘gender affirmation surgery.’ The hormone makers, who sell you estrogen!”
With that, he unsheathed his own syringe. “And that’s why we have decided to come up with our own war serum, to counter the effects of transgender wokery. It’s laden with testosterone and other minerals and compounds that every warfighter needs to fight wars.”
He approached one of the generals and injected him with the serum. The old general began to shiver in his seat but otherwise was indifferent to what was happening. In his soul, he had already given up.
When the president came onto the stage, there were cheers and boos. Rory Lapp, the bestselling Estonian writer and poet, was in the middle of the melee. I saw him stand atop a chair, with his pink dinner party sweater tied around his waist, and thrust his middle finger into the air.
Then Rory began to shout, with an Estonian accent, “Fuck you!” Others began to join him. “Fuck you!” From the middle of the crowd, a dreadlocked Rastafarian baker from the small Estonian town of Viljandi stood. He shouted out, “Hail Satan!” The crowds began to shout after him, “Hail Satan! Hail Satan! Hail Satan!” Secretary of War Kegbreath nodded. He injected another general, who began to convulse under the blinding lights on the flag-draped stage.
In the corner, the president was quietly dancing.
The funny thing is, we just watched this go on the whole time, transfixed by the spectacle. Even the little toy poodle watched curiously. Soon our orders of burgers and fries were ready. Crisp East End potato fries, seasoned with sea salt. Is there anything better in this world?
MY FACE PRESSED against the glass; my face pressed against the glass. Again morning, my eyes open, and my face is pressed against the glass. I open one eye, then the other. They are both goopy, the glass has a veneer of sand grime on its outside. The glass is old. In a small font, Made in Czechoslovakia is printed in one corner. Surely, I’ve been drooling all over myself. I must have nodded off after the train left Narva Station behind. Where are we? Rakvere?
“Riverhead,” comes the husky voice over the speakers. “Riverhead Station, next stop.” I sit up. Have I been sleeping so long? Who knows how many hours it takes to travel from Narva to Riverhead on Long Island by train. I notice my old knapsack next to me. A twenty-something man is seated beside me, staring into stale air. He’s sipping from a 40-ounce of Olde English. The train pulls into Riverhead station, and I can see all of those houses that sprawl along the avenues and boulevards. There’s the courthouse, the bank, and I know exactly where to walk if you want to go to the aquarium. In fact, I decide I will head over there first. To see the seals.
As we disembark, I can see two women I know from Viljandi. One of them is Esmeralda. What is she doing in Riverhead? Of all godforsaken places? She is with Birgit, the festival organizer. They are walking with purpose. Maybe they have come here to recruit acts for next year’s festival? Esmeralda is milk white, she’s dressed in a green tank top, and her brown hair is up. She looks like she is sleepwalking. Her eyes are all strange and filmy. I call out to her as she strides in the direction of the aquarium. “Where are you going?” I yell. “Please come back.”
HARBOR STREET was always susceptible to floods. Whenever there was a big storm, a nor’easter, a hurricane, the gray seas of the harbor would thrash about and rise ominously. One winter, it lifted huge blocks of white ice up onto the lawns of waterfront homeowners, though one might have asked them why they acquired properties in such a place to begin with. During the winter storm it looked like Antarctica, only with ducks instead of penguins.
When I went back, it was just foggy and the water was at its mostly natural level. The whole area, with its sailboats, boathouses, captain’s cottages and the like, was engulfed in a dense blue mist. Even the green grass of the lawns and the hedges dripped with white moisture. I made the turn up the street in an old-fashioned car, the make of which I didn’t pay much attention to. An old neighbor was sitting in the driver’s seat; I was in the back. Yet, as I found, I was steering the car. I was controlling it with my mind. I could make it brake and accelerate.
Her name was Bettina. She was half asleep. What a funny car, one that could be piloted via telekinesis. Bettina was wrapped up in a blanket. I could only see the back of her head, all blonde and fluffy, like a newborn chick. I said, “Oh look, the guesthouse, does Andy still live there?” Bettina yawned and resettled herself into the driver’s seat. “No, he left many years ago,” she said. “But I have seen him around town.” I had known the workman Andy my whole life, both before and after his stint in juvenile hall. Fleischman and Andy had robbed a liquor store.
“What about Mangione and Schmidt?” I asked. “The carpenters?” “Dead,” she answered. “Mike Mangione died of a heart attack. Schmidt fell off a roof.” “Oh,” I said. The further we went down Harbor Street, the more I noticed that the houses were no longer where they used to be. The Deuteronomy Smith House was still there, the life’s work of the famous shipbuilder, but the others were gone. When we reached the end of the road, I realized that the turnoff that would bring us back around Ditch Road had disappeared too. Instead, a palatial new home had been constructed. The old road was now its driveway. It was lined with lanterns and small pools.
It then dawned on me that I was all alone with Bettina in a car. We were all alone at the end of a road that had no apparent exit. A man and a woman, alone in a car. Something in the atmosphere trembled at that moment. It pulsated away in different colors. “You know,” I told her. “We are all alone together here.” Bettina yawned again. “So what,” she said. “So what.”
THE AUDITORIUM hadn’t changed. The murals of the indigenous hunter-gatherers were still on the walls, paintings of the early colonists cutting ice from the bay. It was a school concert. For many years of my life, the seasons had been measured in school concerts. Christmas songs at Christmas, songs of springtime in spring. Musicals, Broadway, pop songs. Do you remember when we sang “Penny Lane”? And how Mr. Asunción played the stirring solo on his trumpet?
The auditorium was full of teenagers in white shirts. It was a Motown retrospective. They were doing “Dancing in the Streets” as they came down the aisles. I knew that the back of the auditorium connected to a secret hallway that led to the music classroom. I followed the singers down the aisle and disappeared into the darkness behind the sleepy American flag.
The secret hallway also hadn’t changed. It was full of boxes of equipment that were used for theatre arts productions. Costumes, scenic designs. We had once stood here, silently sweating in our concert clothes, waiting for the cue to go out on stage. There was a cool air in the hallway, I could hear them all singing. It was “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations.
And then I saw them. Two silver metal towers, modeled on the one in France. They had been used and reused in any number of plays. I took both of them with me, one under each arm. Somehow, I was able to carry both out the door into the school yard. I was able to get them by the crowds of applauding parents. In front of the school, I saw Brynhild’s dog first, then she came walking after him. She looked as she usually did, white, freckly, grotesque. She said, “Well, hello there. How does it feel to be a thief? Don’t you feel any shame?” She laughed when she said it. Brynhild’s weary laugh. She lay in the grass and toyed with some flowers, touching them. She was completely out of context here. The thing is that I didn’t feel ashamed at all. Theft came quite naturally to me. It was as if the old silver towers had always belonged to me.
BEING AN AMERICAN has never been easy. Even at the start, the idea of independence wasn’t exactly popular. About a third of people in the colonies supported the American Revolution, a third were on the side of the British Empire, and a third didn’t really care one way or the other or were just indifferent. As The Who sang in 1971, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” I fear I might have belonged to this third category. I’d like to say I would have been there with Franklin and Jefferson in Philadelphia.
But I can’t really be sure.
In recent years, American politics have been challenging. It’s hard to recall that Minnesota and Greenland were the main topics earlier this year. In the meantime, there’s been a war in Iran. Or is it a war? Is it still ongoing or is it over? Nobody knows. And nobody can even say if it was a war or some other kind of armed conflict. I feel strangely indifferent to it, but perhaps that reflects the same ambivalent feelings that presented at America’s moment of birth.
For me, America is not about flags, armies, and politics. And it isn’t even “American food.” During these years in which America has been wrestling with its soul, I have rediscovered my own origins. I’m happy to inform you that they do eat well there. Not barbecue, hamburgers, fries, or anything else considered to be typical American food. It’s at times easy to forget that America might be an idea, but it’s also a place, where each region has its culture and cuisine.
I am from the East Coast.
What that means is that our local nature found its way onto our plates and soup bowls. When I think of my childhood foods, there were no potatoes or schnitzels, as they have here in Estonia. There was no blood sausage, and dark rye was essentially unknown. The only real black bread available was at some German restaurant, though you could find pumpernickel in the stores. But it’s not the same thing.
We had lobsters, though, all kinds of crabs, shark and tuna steaks and bags full of clams and mussels. I remember one lovely summer, maybe 1985 or thereabouts, when my father was away on a business trip in England. My mother didn’t feel like making a big dinner that night and decided that our dinner would be a big bowl full of mussels with melted butter. There I sat with my brother on the deck, eating away. I have to admit; it was probably one of the best dinners I’ve ever had.
We lived in a village on the north shore of Long Island. Before the Second World War, this was a summer place, and many of the houses were built as summer cottages at first, before they were outfitted for year-round living. From my window, you could see the sound that separated Long Island from the State of Connecticut. At night, you could see lights glowing on the other side of the water. During the day, white sailboats and ships moved across the water, and sometimes you might hear the honk of a fog horn.
Our food culture was very influenced by New England and in some ways Long Island is a more natural part of that region. The City of New York has a colorful history, where the first Europeans who settled were the Dutch and their heritage lives on in local foods such as koolsla, cole slaw, a cabbage salad with mayonnaise. We did eat this, but more in restaurants or delis.
But my mother did take me to the seafood store regularly, where all kinds of surprises awaited. A usual purchase was soft-shell crabs. These were breaded and fried. I ate every part of them. I don’t even want to know what parts I ate, but there were certainly some unusual tasting parts. Were those the crab brains? Who knows. For me, they were the most nutritious food around.
There were also scallops, which were very welcome for dinner. These came straight from Peconic Bay on the eastern end of Long Island. But you could get these up and down Long Island and across New England and up into Maine, and from there on to Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. Who knows where the end of the scallop trail is. Scallops were a kind of delicacy, because they were more expensive. Clams were much more common. Truth be told, Justin Petrone’s first meal after breast milk was linguine in white clam sauce.
Just as an Estonian may dream of potato salad, black bread, beer and herring, I dream of shellfish.
In the seafood store, there were also lobsters sleeping in tubs, their claws held shut by colorful rubberbands. We ate lobster quite often. My mother would buy four or five and they would be put in a paperbag. At home, they would await their fate in the cold of the refrigerator until evening. Then they would be put into the boiling water. I remember how I could hear them tapping at the inside of the pot, trying to get out. But at some moment, there was no more tapping. The best parts were the claws, of course, and the rich and meaty tail.
Lobster was something special. They were expensive too and we would eat them at birthdays or some other special occasion. I have a weird memory of my father’s 38th birthday. I was about five years old and I remember how a lobster got up and tried to run across the table, away from my knife and fork. In the end, I did get him. What’s weird is how clear this memory is, even if it was probably a dream. Or was it?
It’s odd to think of how much time I have spent with crustaceans.
Once, in the seafood store, the owner decided to play a trick. He took out the lobster and put it on the floor. It began to move toward me. This was like a scene from a science fiction movie. I can still hear all of those legs tapping on the ceramic tiled floor.
It’s interesting that even McDonalds offers lobster rolls in New England. All you have to do is order your lobster roll and drive up to the next window. And there it is, in your hand. In New York, this is less common, so it was always a fun part of traveling north.
Just one ferry ride and the lobster roll is yours.
What a weird combination — a fast-food delicacy.
I haven’t even got to the soup. Our chowders are interesting. As a child, I knew two kinds. There was New England clam chowder and then Manhattan clam chowder. New England clam chowder is cream based and filling, Manhattan is tomato based and a bit spicier. I should acknowledge that when I was a kid, the waters around Manhattan were not the cleanest. So, I would wonder, peering into my soup, what kind of stuff was in the Manhattan clam chowder. Was there hospital waste in there? Dead bodies? That’s what I imagined was floating in it.
Everybody knew the mafia dumped their hits in the waters around New York.
If you head out farther east, or travel by ship to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, you’ll encounter quahog chowder. Quahog is an Algonquain word, it refers to a kind of clam with a very tough kind of meat. This is very everyday food. One summer when I was spending time at my friend’s grandparents’ house on the eastern end of Long Island, we spent the day collecting clams and made soup at night. So, if someone asks me about American food, this is what comes to mind. What we actually ate.
It’s nice to think and write about soup. It’s like getting your country back with every spoonful.
Long Island’s north shore looks out on Long Island Sound, its east will lead you to Europe, eventually, and its south shore opens up to the Atlantic. These are deep waters and so we often had swordfish, tuna, and mako shark steaks on our table. My father never really made dinner, that was mom’s specialty, but the grill was his domain. He would grill up some shark.
We ate Jaws with baby potatoes.
The indigenous people along the east coast were mainly Algonquians and they subsisted on maize, beans, and squash. In Tallinn, the Three Sisters refers to three old houses, but for indigenous people, the three sisters were just these three staple crops. In school I learned that there was often a big pot at the center of their homes into which they tossed all three, plus some venison or fish. If you were hungry, you just grabbed a bowl and helped yourself.
We never ate that way, exactly, but we did have the sweetest corn in the US, or so we told ourselves, and we knew that the corn we ate at the end of summer would be even sweeter. I had my own strategy for eating corn. Some just chomp away, with corn flying every which way, but I take my time. I do it systematically, so that every piece is properly eaten. Husking the corn was my favorite thing to do before dinner (or do you really want to put out the plates? I don’t.)
So there I would sit. But how many did we usually buy? Sixteen?
Even as suburbia was growing all around us, there were still some functional farms in existence. We would buy our corn from there.
For us, summer meant seafood, corn, and potatoes.
The potatoes were also cultivated on the local farms.
My grandmother wasn’t from the place where we lived. She came from down south. Her father was from North Carolina, and her mother was from Virginia. They had a different food culture. The climate there is warmer, the people are closer to the land. They had smoked hams, fried chicken. Lots of peanuts. Some farmers only grew peanuts. But corn had a special place of honor. My grandma would make me cornbread all the time. Every time I went to visit her, where she had her Elvis Presley Christmas album, she sent me home with bags full of cornbread.
The word for maize comes from an indigenous language — the Taino word mahiz. So I think there’s nothing more American than corn or maize. It’s probably one of the things that define it.
It’s interesting to think of American food today, a rainy morning in some Estonian cafe. Sometimes I even forget that I am from there, but then something odd happens, like I see a bunch of shipping pallets and think, for a moment, that they are lobster traps. Or I start to talk about lobsters and people look at me like I’m weird.
What kind of person talks about lobsters?
Once I had to find the Estonian word for spout, when I was writing about whales. People had no idea what it was. “You know, that spurt that comes out when the whale surfaces to breathe?” Then I realized that I was just from somewhere else. A place where people talk about whales and lobsters all the time. A place where your homeland comes with a hot bowl full of quahog chowder.
America is, after all, named after some Italian explorer named Amerigo. But maize and quahog? Those are real American words, if you ask me.
An Estonian version of this article appeared in the magazine GO Reisiajakiri earlier this year.
ON THE WAY HOME, I wound up as a stowaway, riding in the back of an old-fashioned mail bus. It had been recently refurbished, and the interior smelled of fresh pine. Crates of letters were stacked up on both sides of the coach. I knew that if I followed the north coast road, I would eventually make it home, but at some point, the road changed. It was generic and unfamiliar, and the forest here was so dense and green that I lost my bearings entirely.
There was also water on both sides of the road now, which made no sense. The south coast was a good 20 miles away. The mail bus rolled to a stop, and a wooden ladder descended mechanically from the back. Into the storage area walked the postman, wearing a striped jacket and a straw hat, as if he had just stepped out of 1910. “Another stowaway, huh?” he said.
The postman wasn’t angry. He fetched a few envelopes and went to stuff some mailboxes. “But where are we?” I asked him. “I thought this was Long Island.” The postman’s eyes narrowed. “You, good sir, are in the most exclusive part of Long Island. Pristine, undeveloped, inhabited by only the oldest, wealthiest families. It’s so off limits that it’s never appeared on any map.”
The postman went on. “See that, over there? That’s Fresh Pond. Most people think that’s the north shore. But out here, there’s this strip of unspoiled land, a grant to the settlers of these parts by His Majesty Charles II.” I stuck my head out of the mail bus and looked around. I saw no homes anywhere, just old-growth forest teeming with wildlife. The air here was so fresh it hurt just to breathe it. How could it be that there was a part of the island I had never seen?
“If it’s so exclusive, how do I get anywhere from here?” I asked. “I don’t think my parents know how to get here.” “Where are you going?” he asked. I told him the name of the town. “No worries,” he said, returning to the front of the bus. “I’ll drop you at the old post office. You’ll have to find your way home from there. And you can never tell anyone that you saw this place.”
WHAT BECAME of the furniture in my grandparents’ house? The little German table in the living room, the shining Buddha beside the couch, the little chair from my grandmother’s home in Virginia? It was here that I awoke in my bed, just as I had gone to sleep in Estonia, on the other side of the ocean. The Atlantic washed against the Netherlands and Denmark, and seeped through the straits, until it caressed the Baltic, which tugged it north to Estonia. Here I was back in the Long Island living room. Everything was a shade of drab brown or drab green.
“I need to make a cup of coffee.” This was my core impulse. Something to smack me over the head and wake me from my deep slumber. A small kitchenette had been installed right here in the corner, where the stereo used to be. I began to empty the contents of the espresso maker. As I did, the black coffee grounds flew into the air. As they landed, they glowed with fire. There were fiery ghost strands burning away all around the room. Each nestled in its own blaze. How could it be that none of these small fires started to spread? They all remained there, in place.
There might be some other explanation for the flickering fires in the living room. In the back, I could see the bedroom where my grandfather died. Or didn’t he die in the bathroom? It was quite dark in there; I could see the furniture in the shadows. But he wasn’t here anymore. He was gone, and grandma was in the kitchen, making cornbread again, all dressed in white. In the kitchen, there was an old metal scale that hung suspended across from the telephone. As I entered the kitchen, the scale began to dance about. “Don’t mind that,” my grandma said. “It’s just the ghosts. They like to play with it.” I also liked to play with it when I was young. How strange to be back in the old house. It was as if it was suspended in time. Nothing had changed. It could have been any year, but my grandma’s hair would always be white. There was nothing to be afraid of, though. The kitchen ghosts were playful. The fires didn’t catch.
THE OCEAN LINER docked at Patchogue on the south shore of Long Island and we finally disembarked. It had been years since I had been in Patchogue, maybe decades. Hadn’t I bought my first car, the blues mobile, from some nondescript Patchogue homeowner at some moment during the Clinton Administration? But that was a long time ago, and in the meantime, Patchogue had developed into a major Atlantic seaport and international metropolis. Parts of downtown had been declared car free and turned into pedestrian walking streets. It was hard to say what it reminded me of, maybe those winding shopping streets in Ireland and Wales. This was not your grandfather’s Patchogue.
Naturally, I was with my family. We were stunned, awed, by this great change that had taken place on the south shore of Long Island. Why, it was almost as if, after subsistence farming, and clamming and oystering and fishing for centuries, civilization had arrived. It just took time to take root. There was even a small Asian Quarter of Patchogue, where a streetfront spa offered fish pedicures. My wife and children stood in line and soon little garra ruffa fish were nibbling the dead skin from their heels. I tried it too, but it just wasn’t my thing. Instead I went and sat in the waiting area with a fellow islander who was reading The Wall Street Journal.
“Well, are we still at war with Iran?” I asked the man. He was older and Jewish and looked like Paul Simon. Maybe it was him? The man sighed loudly and folded the newspaper. Then he said, “After reading this newspaper, the honest answer is, I don’t know.” “Me neither,” I said. I dug into a cup full of delicious rum raisin ice cream, which had somehow materialized in my hands. “Nobody knows.”
