Bury the Hackett: A Review of the Bern Band’s New EP No One Wins, Part III

IT’S KIND OF FITTING that we finally get to the fifth track on this six-track EP in this third and final installation of the review, because in my opinion, “Only Lonely” is the most Seattle-sounding song in the set. Seattle plays a big role in Bern Band lore. Bassist Dave Trump lives there, and drummer Cody Rahn is a self-described “West Coast person.” I’ve been to Seattle plenty of times myself, and can’t yet describe myself as a devotee or not. I’m not in love with the place, but I don’t hate it. I did find it amusing when, on an overcast cold day, I saw people there beaming about the “sunshine.” Seattle continues to filter into musical culture. Some people swear by Seattle, and want to parade you down to the original Starbucks, or even show you some club where Kurt Cobain took a dump back before Nirvana got big. The scene, man.

The scene!

There used to be more West Coast people in my life, with starry utopias in their eyes.

Plus all that weed.

I actually don’t know if the Bern Band used drugs in the making of this record.

D. TRUMP: The difference in Seattle-New York or the East-West sound is tough for me to pinpoint. My perspective is a bit diluted by now, but I still think I know it when I hear it. One aspect would be the sense of urgency that comes out of NY music — deciding on the direction then making the groove happen. Whereas the Seattle sound might be more inclined to let the direction and sound develop. Of course, there are exceptions that could blow that concept out of the water.

C. RAHN: For me being a West Coast person my whole life until moving to New York City in 2010, the energy in rock music out there when I was growing up had a powerful groove that always felt comfortable and laid back even when the music was exploding with intensity. Slower, never frantic. Always space to think in between the notes.

Of course, we have to mention Pearl Jam. The Bern Band’s last record, Just Not Today, was recorded in Seattle in the final days of 2019, before the pandemic reared its head. They recorded at Stone Gossard’s studio, which was once Pearl Jam’s rehearsal studio. Soundgarden’s Down on the Upside was also recorded there, guitarist Hackett recalls.

B. HACKETT: There was just a real Seattle feel to the whole recording. We recorded all the basic tracks ‘live, live,’ meaning there was no click track and we were all playing live in a big room, baffling was the only isolation we used. So they are all one take, live. Which adds such an amazing feel to that album. However, the downside to that recording was that we had a small window to capture everything in the studio, not much time to think through all that we would have liked.

One thing that’s come up with Hackett in talking about the guitar distortion on this record is the weather where we grew up on Long Island, and how the distortion reminds me of the fog that rolls in off the inlet where we used to hang out, known as Conscience Bay.

A more writerly name could not have been selected for a body of water adjacent to such introspective, philosophical lads as ourselves. Most of the houses in the area were built postwar, and in dialogue with a local historian, I learned that the area where we lived had once hosted a hospital during a smallpox outbreak in the 1770s. This rather melancholy detail has only made the guitar distortion seem more ghostly and ominous. Perhaps soldiers during the conflict with Britain had bathed their pox sores in the bay. The same bay we would frequent in our youth, when Pearl Jam and Soundgarden ruled. There’s definitely some “Fell on Black Days” in “Only Lonely.”

Which brings us to the final number, “Another Birthday Before Christmas.”

This one is more like a Hackett solo number, I have to admit. The acoustic guitar, the festive chorus. Even his voice sounds more like him here. This is him, with no masks or shields. Just him. I have to think, it got me wondering about how I even met Hackett. There is a class photo of us together in second grade, but I barely remember him from those years. We definitely were in band — school band — in fifth grade. He was also in my class from fourth through sixth grade. There was a particularly raucous sleepover party which must have been in 1990, because I gifted Hackett a cassette of Vanilla Ice’s hip hop masterpiece, To the Extreme, and we were so animated and sugar high that Hackett’s dad, “Jim,” took us all out jogging.

Later, I remember Jim being taken aback by listening to Vanilla Ice rap about “handcuffs and chains” on “Stop That Train.”

Things probably started to mesh around this point.

But Hackett is a Sagittarius. His birthday is before Christmas, as this festive number informs. What that means is something like this. You go to visit Hackett, but he’s not there, because he’s somewhere else. You go to Point B, but he’s also not there, because he’s too busy smoking something with Jimmy Buffett at an Allman Brothers concert. You go to the concert, but it’s over already. Jimi Hendrix was a Sagittarius. Remember that tune, “Highway Chile”?

“His guitar slung across his back. His dusty boots is his Cadillac. A flamin’ hair just a blowin’ in the wind. Ain’t seen a bed in so long, it’s a sin.” That’s him.

They call him the breeze, he keeps blowing down the road.

I like to think of Hackett as sort of an early breezy guitar hero. He was just that kind of kid. But his guitar heroics earned him enemies. And so one day, while I was standing in the auditorium of Paul J. Gelinas junior high school, someone pressed into my hand a cassette recorded by some Primus devotees — the kinds of kids who wore baggy pants, with expansive “wallet chains” — that was called “Bury the Hackett.” Whose side was I going to be on?

This was the circa 1995 musical equivalent of the Drake-Kendrick feud.

A whole cassette full of diss tracks.

Or at least Nirvana-Pearl Jam.

The hand-drawn cover of the Hackett diss project showed a guitar neck sticking out of some grass.

Not all was well on Long Island. Evil was lurking along those muddy inlets.

Would I betray my lifelong friend, and come over to the dark side, the sinister Primus side? Would I disavow jeans that fit, and a wallet I trusted enough to stay put in my pocket, or would I get those big pants and keep my wallet on a chain? Could I strike some kind of balance between these packs of musical rogues emerging in my midst? Danger, danger. No, it wasn’t always easy being loyal to the Breeze. But he’s still out playing his guitar, ain’t he? And those snotty Primus kids are accountants or something. Their wallet chains have gone crusty.

To borrow a line from Good Will Hunting, “How do you like them apples?”

old school

A LOT HAD CHANGED. The school used to sit on the top of a hill overlooking a nice green park, with tennis courts and such, and a baseball diamond, but in the intervening years, some genius had decided to expand it, so that it now resembled some sort of horrible municipal building erected in Philadelphia or Boston, or some other godforsaken concrete nightmare built with state money, and the green park was long gone, as was its murmuring pretty creek, to which our preschool teachers would take us in those happy new years for sunny picnics.

Yes, the happy years. The first day there was one of holding my breath, just so that I wouldn’t be the only little boy who cried for mother. I made it through that day and others. My first classroom was to the left, I remember, and the second one was down the hall. The swimming pool was down at the far right. It was here where we would change, and I still have a memory of a little boy telling me that he knew how we could spy on our swim instructors as they changed into their bathing suits. This was the first time this particular idea of voyeurism even popped into my young mind. The thought had just never occurred to me. Naked teachers?

Anyway, there I was again, at the entrance to the school. Somehow I got inside the building. The walls were all paneled, and there was a dry, beige carpet that ran the length of the hallways and corridors. There were some people seated at desks. I walked right by them, as well as beneath a large metal clock. What had happened to the place since I left? Almost nothing was familiar to me, but the shape of the building had been retained. Down the hall toward the swimming pool, I encountered a man with a moustache and and the baseball cap of a team that is generally ignored by the New York fans. Maybe it was the Montreal Expos? He had glasses and curly red hair. He said, “Excuse me, sir. Are you looking for something here?”

“I’m looking for the swimming pool,” I told the man in the Expos cap. “I used to go swimming here, when it was a preschool.” The man looked at me oddly. “Oh right, I have heard it used to be a preschool,” he said. “But I have never heard about a swimming pool. Oh well, nobody goes down to that end of the building anymore.” “Oh,” I said, imagining a caved-in swimming pool behind locked wooden doors, slowly being reclaimed by nature. Maybe at some point during the George W. Bush administration they had just forgotten it, left it to rot, focused on expanding the building over the nice green park and creek. Now only the squirrels knew of it.

“When did you go to school here, might I ask?” the man in the Expos hat asked me in the hallway there. “In 1984 or so,” I said and shrugged. “Probably 1983 to 1985 was when I was here,” I told the strange man. “Oh,” he said with a frown. “But that was before I was born, you know. That was before any of us were born.”

The Trump Files: A Review of the Bern Band’s New EP No One Wins, Part II

No, not that Trump.

If I had to pinpoint one moment when the ’90s began for me, it might have been seeing Jesus Jones’ “Right Here, Right Now” on MTV before heading off to play outfield in Little League. And if I had to pinpoint another moment, it was probably watching the introduction to the first episode of The X-Files on Fox, which debuted on 10 September 1993. A more unremarkable moment was probably watching Dave Trump and a friend storming into the locker room at Paul J. Gelinas Junior High School one morning wearing Soundgarden t-shirts and singing “Spoonman.”

This was probably the first time I even became aware of Dave Trump’s existence. He sort of stumbled through the door of my life like Kramer on Seinfeld and would always lurk after that. I do not know the provenance of this branch of the Trump family. I assumed some Irish or Scottish connection because of his remarkable orange afro, which has since either fallen out, been shaved away, or remains hidden beneath a series of ‘Jimmy the Newsboy’-style flat caps.

Trump was mostly soft spoken, observant and intelligent. He had an older brother who also lurked. He was there, at the edge of the 7/11 parking lot in his red truck, listening to The Clash. The older brother was supposedly responsible for introducing many younger kids in the community to good music. According to lore, students even older than him had given him crackly cassettes of groups like The Specials. There might have been a chain of musical command stretching back deep into the 1980s. Remember, as I said before, the internet at this time was nascent. These kinds of personal connections helped to guide one’s development.

How else would you hear The Specials in the early-ish ’90s? Those were the Ace of Base days. The Specials never guest starred on The X-Files. Or did they? Did Terry Hall get abducted?

“A Message to you, E.T.”?

I must have missed that episode.

Trump was even the bassist for a ska band. But on the new Bern Band EP he is solidly rock.

D. TRUMP: “Why rock as a genre? It allows us to pull from all our interests, leaving space for interpretation while giving us common ground to land on. There is an opportunity for each instrument to shine. For me, variety of genres has always been key and if you do choose to work in one specific genre, the challenge is to keep it interesting without being too frenetic. I want to find a contrast of tone or rhythm or emotion to enhance a song’s starting position. Sometimes it works, other times we circle back to the original idea. At a minimum, hopefully this pushes us to find the core of the song. That tension has been a central part of writing music with Brendan through the years: we can push each other in a direction that the other might not have initially intended.

Trump has been playing with Brendan Hackett more or less forever. They are bonded by common experiences, lots of them, and a near perfect ability to recall any line from Top Secret. In the early Oh-Ohs, they were in a rock group called Runna Muck, which made a rather dirty form of rock music. Later, Trump was in a group called War Pigeon with drummer Cody Rahn.

They specialized in songs about birds and conflicts.

According to Hackett, the trio actually cut some tracks between 2006 and 2008 called the Brendan and the Bandolero Sessions. Rahn and Hackett also worked together with Wendy Johnson in the Wendy Hackett Band, which was an alt-country outfit. The Bern Band developed out of a desire amongst Hackett and Rahn to rock out smelly dive bars on the Upper West Side. “Bern” was a nickname bestowed upon Hackett by Microsoft, which autocorrects his nickname “Bren” to Bern. The first Bern Band EP, Just Not Today, was recorded by the trio back in 2020. As you can see, their relationship and indeed its chemistry goes back much longer than that.

I actually filled in for Trump on some shows in the late ’90s with Hackett. We played the Allman Brothers’ “Statesboro Blues” and drunk Class of ’97 high school grads even danced on a deck. That’s about all I remember. I also remember that Trump was reading Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut when we all went skiing back in ’96, and that was the moment when I first learned about Vonnegut. Like I said, those Trump brothers could turn you on to new things.

D. TRUMP: I’ve spent countless hours digesting records with these guys. Driving in vans, sitting in dorm rooms, hanging by train tracks — we shared songs that informed each other’s passions and what drives our creative engines. I hesitate to get more specific as influence lists can be be too on the nose, meant to impress, or simply buried too deeply to be clearly heard in the music.

Trump lives in Seattle these days, having moved to the City of Spoonmen long ago. This has presented recording challenges for the bicoastal Bern Band, but ones that have not been insurmountable and, indeed, may have led to unexpected bursts of creativity in the studio.

In the previous part of this review, I remarked on the first two tracks on the EP. Now we shall explore the next two songs, “Slow Siren” and “Only Alright.” “Slow Siren” has foggy atmospherics. As I told Hackett, it reminded me of the autumn mist that wraps itself around the trees and inlets of Long Island where we all grew up, but might as well be inspired by the rainy weather at Trump’s newer home on Puget Sound. Trump was mostly responsible for this tune, I’ve heard. The song’s structure is familiar, but the Wall of Sound created is really inspiring. The tune trails off with what could be a wail of feedback, like a wind carrying the music away with it.

According to Hackett, Trump has become quite the producer since his orange afro, singing Soundgarden in the junior high locker room whilst reading Kurt Vonnegut days, and has become a sound chemist, sort of like the Beastie Boys were in their peak, Hello Nasty late ’90s period.

“Slow Siren” is just one potion from the lab.

“Only Alright” follows it right up with this really lovely slow number. I don’t want to overemphasize the Petty influence here — after all Tom was stealing left and right from Roger McGuinn of The Byrds — but man, it makes me sad to hear anything that sounds like Petty these days. “Sometimes the worst it gets is only alright,” well yeah, but that ain’t going to bring back Petty, Hackett. “And in the end, no one wins, we all lose …” Thanks a lot. Are you reading my mind? And the solo is just what you need, as sugartasty as a slice of pie at an Oklahoma truck stop diner.

Not like I have ever had one of those, but I have read about them.

B. HACKETT: (For) the album No One Wins, because it was started in COVID, we had nothing but time. I would demo the songs on a Roland 8-track (because I loathe computers) and send them to Dave, he would make comments and we would go from there. He would do the same, send me something he was working on and so forth. Then Cody and I would go to the studio (The Bunker, in Brooklyn) and record the drums and basic guitars together and then bounce the track to Dave who would add bass, or guitar or synth, et cetera. It was not an ideal way to work but we were able to really craft the songs. I have never been prouder of a group of songs we have done than this last endeavor.

C. RAHN: This music takes me back to late 60s and 70s rock sounds and everything from Deep Purple to The Doors to Led Zeppelin and that kind of energy informs the sounds I go for with the drums as well as how hard I hit, what embellishments I choose, and where I consider leaving space for the other guys to get out front and play. I want the performance to harken back to the music that influenced us as kids and display how it informed the music we make today.

D. TRUMP: I think we all get pretty introspective about our parts to a degree that people outside the project might not care about or notice. We talk about adding a bit of Nashville lead before the lyrics take us to Texas. What about if Lemmy played bass on an AC/DC song? Is the giant cowbell too big? Early Sabbath…but Ozzy was from Long Island. Is that backing vocal too Lennon-y? Yes, the big purple drum kit is essential to the sound. Was that too much or too little? I feel like we do this for ourselves. We’ve built a catalog of music going back about 18 years. That’s gotta be worth something.

SIDE NOTE: If you are a bass guitarist, you’ll need to hear Trump’s lines on this record. There is not one misplaced note. Those of you from the Jack Bruce “I’ll play what I want and clean it up later” school, take note. This guy knows what he’s doing. I do not say this lightly, or out of eternal gratitude for Vonnegut. Honest.

‘How Silly Can You Get?’ A Review of The Bern Band’s New EP, No One Wins, Part I

A scene from 1984’s *Top Secret*, starring Val Kilmer as Nick Rivers, an endless source of inspiration.

I WAS PLANNING to write something beautiful and majestic but I ran out of time. I’m thinking about that Zelda Fitzgerald comment, how Scott’s progress on Tender is the Night was being anthologized in Encyclopaedia Britannica. In this case, I can’t afford to wait nine years. The Bern Band will have come out with several EPs or albums by then.

What is this then? A loose attempt to review The Bern Band’s latest EP No One Wins. Free jazz. For some reason, each time I try to write about this EP, I start thinking about the movie Top Secret. According to Bern Band singer, guitarist, everyman Brendan Hackett, this film introduced him to adult silliness, but there is just so much more to it. I feel like this film defines our philosophy toward life. I cannot yet articulate how though, but it’s all there in the “How Silly Can You Get?” or “Skeet Surfing,” or, “What? Do I have to hear again what a great cause you and Nigel are fighting for? My only cause is my music.”

… is my music, is my music, is my music.

There is something haunting about that film, if only I know that I can repeat any line of it to Brendan, or bassist Dave Trump, and maybe even the drummer Cody, and I will get the following line repeated back.

“They’d have enough salt to last forever.”

“What phoney dog poo?”

Thirty-one summers ago, at a time when Billy Joel ruled the airwaves with “The River of Dreams,” which was his Long Island take on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” Brendan and I lived probably our last summer as non-musicians. We spent that summer watching goofy movies like Top Secret or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Essential learning for teenage boys. We made ridiculous movies with a camcorder that I hope have long been lost and will never be found. He might have had an acoustic guitar by then. I’m not sure. But by that fall, I had my bass guitar and we were playing. That might have been our last boyhood summer. Ninety-three. In those days, ahem, you heard music on the radio or in movies, or maybe your older sibling might have hipped you to some groups (which is how I wound up with Led Zeppelin IV). I remember working for Brendan’s uncle and hearing “A Day in the Life” on the radio. This was the only place you might hear it, unless your parents had some vinyls lying around, or you could scrape together some money to get a CD. This was a deluxe investment, because CDs were supposed to survive everything.

Even nuclear war.

That $11.99 or whatever at The Wiz on Long Island in 1993 went far.

So that is the sort of technological and musical milieu from which we emerged. After that we were musicians and half-men. We started playing music at a tender age, 13-14. You can’t really start bands any younger unless you go to one of those camps, or you’re a four-year-old guitar virtuoso on YouTube. This is important, because it shows that we got the bug so early. I say we, but Brendan of course took it as far as a person can go with it, and he’s still taking it there. He is in his car, driving to that musical future. I do find it kind of funny, because one aim of this group is to make the kinds of songs we heard on the radio growing up. But not “The River of Dreams”. No. Other tunes that might become apparent upon listening.

***

The first song on No One Wins is called WTLF. I don’t know what that stands for. Maybe, “What the living fuck?” Or is it loving fuck? A living, loving fuck? It could be, but it also seems too easy. It also looks at first glance like the name of a Long Island radio station. WBLI. WALK. WTLF. The kind of station that used to play the so-called classic rock that has served as the raw material for this musical project. For the Bern Band are definitely recyclers, but they make something new. They are up-cyclers. They are digging through the trash, spinning gold from memories of old Heartbreakers, Cheap Trick and Thin Lizzy records.

They take the banana leaves of 1970s rock and press them into exquisite high end 2020s musical goods.

Years ago when I was toying with the idea of becoming a music journalist, like David Fricke or Lester Bangs, god forbid, I remember someone saying that the riffs on a Weezer record were “hot dog plump.” But here, I would say the guitars are “peanut butter chunky.” This is the nuttiest, chunkiest, thickest variety of peanut butter rock guitar there is on the shelves. The song itself feels a bit off balance or disjointed, but in a good way. There are these tunes like WTLF that you need to listen to 25 times just to fully “get.”

The second track on the new Rolling Stones album is like that, “Get Close to You.” Every time I listen to it, I hear something new. But what does WTLF stand for anyway? Maybe these are weird chord names. I think Jefferson Airplane had a track called DCBA-25, which was a make of LSD on the streets of the Haight, but Paul Kantner also used to inform his chord changes. Or was it the other way around? Is there a variety of WTLF acid? Winnipeg Toronto Laval Fredericton. Were these stops on a Canadian tour? WTLF, indeed.

The next tune on the record is called “Misery.” This one could have had its own MTV Buzz Clip back in 1994. The chord changes are that familiar, but in a comfortable way, and the vocals are perfect. It’s one of those songs you already know, just from the first few seconds. It’s as if Soul Asylum and the Wallflowers decided to jam and invite Mike Campbell to play lead. In a way, and I am not afraid to say it, but that’s what this album reminds me of at times. It’s as if it’s a lost Heartbreakers project, but without Tom.

I know how much Brendan worshipped Petty. I used to play “Last Dance with Mary Jane” in a band with him in junior high school. That was probably one of the songs we learned to play so long ago. Did I have to sing? Maybe not. Maybe it was “King” Jim O’Rourke doing the singing on that joint? I remember playing that tune on a deck somewhere and kids coming through the woods to listen to us, somewhere on Long Island. But, anyway, King Petty is dead, and someone needs to step into the vacuum. There is just a hole there. Someone needs to pick up the flag and take this thing forward. Who better than Brendan to feel that hole and to try to fill it with his own music? That’s what music is anyway. Torches are passed. We pick them up and carry them forward in our own ways. The ending of this song is memorable. What I like about this EP is that there’s so much to explore. But I’m not done exploring this subject. There is more to come. We need to talk about Dave Trump, ska, Kurt Vonnegut, Seattle versus New York, and other things.

We’ve only talked about two tracks on the EP!

There is more to write about. But we shall get there. You will see.

a map of the school

THE SCHOOL was constructed in the Colonial Revival style sometime at the tail-end of the 1930s, financed by a local tycoon. It featured four large white columns, and incorporated elements of Federal and Georgian architecture. At its founding, it served as a public school for local students in Sowassetville and adjacent communities, from kindergarten through 12th grade, but eventually, as the population grew, it was developed into a middle school in the 1960s. I hadn’t been there in years, but when I was invited back, along with other members of the ninth grade class of 1995, I decided to return, to see if it could inspire any memories.

To my surprise, the interior of the school had been completely redone, and a large stone-surfaced park had been installed, along with a bronze memorial to the Estonian War of Independence (1918-1920). A solemn soldier stood at its precipice, holding a sword up into the air. His head was decorated with a wreath. In the front of the school, there was a new staircase leading to a second level. From this level, one could take a glass-enclosed corridor into a new extension of the school. It was like something from an aquarium. “I don’t remember any of this,” I told an old classmate, who was clutching unreturned library books, such as The Great Gatsby. “None of this was here when we were. It’s like the entire school has been changed.”

I went down a back staircase into a cafeteria. But only more confusion ensued. It was like a big billowing cloud of confusion. I was reminded of a New Order song by the same name. Because Raivo, my faithful translator, was seated at one of the booths in the cafeteria. He was there in a button-down shirt in one of the booths, digging through a Caesar salad. Raivo said that we had to get a translated version of one my short stories to the editors as soon as possible. I still was baffled to see him there. And then when I turned my head, I noticed that the lovely Atlacamani, the mysterious Azteca goddess of storms, was also seated in the cafeteria. She was wearing a red shirt and blue pants and was seated with musicians from the Viljandi Cultural Academy.

They were all eating fries.

El Scorcho, a Chilean folk singer with a slight mustache who lives and thrives in V Town, arrived with a tray full of food and drink. His guitar was slung across his back. He was wearing one of those gray ponchos they wear down in the Andes. He said, “You look so funny. You should see your face.” I said, “What’s going on? What are you all doing here?” El Scorcho just smiled. “A lot has changed since you went to junior high school,” he said. “Todo es diferente.”

the terrible truth about extreme estonia

It's unconventional. — It’s unconventional.

THE TERRIBLE TRUTH about the book Extreme Estonia is that I didn’t take it very seriously when it landed on my so-called desk. I was too biased, too doubtful, because the word “extreme” to me carried with it unwritten references to tattoos, piercings, snowboarding events sponsored by fast food companies, and bungee jumping.

And the pathetic thing about Estonia is that so much of it is not extreme in any way. There’s nothing particularly extreme about gazing at some fluffy white sheep under some fluffy white clouds on Saaremaa, is there, unless you happen to contract Lyme disease while doing it. Honestly, I almost fell asleep when I wrote about Saaremaa for Minu Eesti 2, because it was just such a relaxing place. But fortunately the extreme in Extreme Estonia refers more to the idea of being remote, outermost, farthest removed, and in this sense it is a very credible title for such an interesting book.

What Terhi Pääskyla-Malström does in Extreme Estonia is take readers to the extremities of this intriguing northern land. And what one learns while flipping through these 192 pages, is that there is a hell of a lot to experience up here. Sure, I have been to Haapsalu and to Narva and to Võru and to Pärnu, but I haven’t managed to get out to the Pakri Islands (and I probably never will). And given the pace of the book, the terrain covered, and the author’s wonderful sense of humor, one gets the sense that he or she has hitched a ride with Terhi and is finally going to all of those distant-feeling places, locations and settings I would bet that many Estonians have not even visited.

My favorite section of this book dealt with humorous place names in Estonia. Feel a sudden urge to visit Urge? Mustvee? Of course, we must! And why not say “I do” in Aidu? Good old Terhi! She’s a tremendously sympathetic writer. She can be honest and sarcastic at the same time, and her buoyant and informative text obliterated any doubts I had about this book. Doubt. It’s a peril that all writers face, that irritating question of who are you and why do you have any business writing a book about anything? Many readers ask authors this question, and the authors restrain themselves from answering back, “Well, if you have such doubts about my abilities, why don’t you go write a book yourself?”

But maybe Terhi doesn’t have these doubts. She seems like a courageous person, and her book inspired me to be more courageous too. Get out a bit more. See Estonia, see the world. Time to set away the laptop and trek out to that remotest, farthest removed, outermost point. And don’t forget to take along your copy of Extreme Estonia.

daddy, why can’t you just get a normal job?

LIKE MANY PEOPLE when I reached my late teens I made some big decisions based on a few loosely connected concepts that continue to track me to the present day. I was good at writing and could do it quickly and did not care for an academic major like psychology or anthropology. The way I saw it, journalism was practical, just a craft, like being an electrician or a mechanic. It was a job that needed to be done and I had some of the right skills to do it.

There were a few hints along the way that our lives as journalists might diverge from the college-educated mainstream though. “Don’t expect to get rich from this job,” one professor said. “You’ll meet a lot of alcoholics in this business,” another confessed. “Everyone has heard about the reporter who comes back to the office after a long day on the job, pulls out the whiskey, and gets to work, and I am here to tell you, it’s true.” To me, as a 19-year-old kid who liked to drink on the weekends, journalism seemed to promise everything I could ever want — a life spent writing, a career path lubricated by liquor, and, most of all, limited responsibility. It was the perfect job for the drifter at heart, and that was me.

Yet somehow I got settled. I meandered over to the other side of the world only to fall in love with a woman. Then we got married and have had three children and acquired real estate. And all the while I was writing. I got so used to writing that I started to write even when I wasn’t getting paid. I started one blog and another and then I started this one. My poor children have grown up watching their father stare at a small rectangular screen, sometimes even in awe of the speed in which letters sprout up across it. But they hate it too. They wish they had a father who went to work somewhere and then returned from that place. Or better yet, someone who does something physical, who produces something other than content.

My eldest daughter’s friend has a boat mechanic for a father. I’ve never seen him in action, but I imagine that he is walking around a lot with tools in his hands and perhaps rubbing his forehead from time to time when a particularly ugly job comes in. “It’s a damn shame what salt water does to good vessels,” he has a habit of saying. “It just destroys them.” “The wiring?” I ask. He nods. “The wiring. Everything.” Sometimes he goes to training courses in New Hampshire to learn about lake boating and kick it with other boat mechanics. The kids come too and they stop at the aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut, along the way. It all seems very nice.

My daughter senses this niceness too, which is why the other day while I was checking my email in the car she said, “Daddy, why can’t you just get a normal job?”

“A normal job?” I set down my device. “But being a journalist is a normal job.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“It isn’t?”

“No.”

“Well, what kind of job do you think I should get?”

“Why not be a boat mechanic?” she said and shrugged. “Jenny’s dad does that. He seems to like it.”

A boat mechanic? I thought. Only on the North Fork. Anywhere else and your kid would ask you to be a doctor or a restaurant owner. But on the North Fork, ask a child for a career option and she’s bound to mention something to do with boats or vineyards. And it’s not just Jenny’s Dad. Angie’s parents run a dock-building business. And Nate’s dad owns a berry farm.

“But I didn’t go to school to become a boat mechanic,” I said. “I went to school to become a journalist.”

“Are you serious? They actually have schools for that?”

“They do. And I don’t think I’d be a very good boat mechanic anyway. I’d probably screw the boats up more. They’d sink.”

She thought for a moment. “Yeah, you probably would,” she said. “But maybe you could try and write a little bit less sometimes. Okay Daddy?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try.”

welcome to greenport in summer, man

FORGIVE ME if I have forgotten what the on season in Greenport is like. There are vague memories, yes, faint stains of motorcycles and convertibles humming down Front Street with pop music drifting through the air, “‘Cause we’ll never be royals {royals} …”

There were lines in those days, lines at the cafes and in the supermarkets, and just on the streets everywhere. It was hard to walk down the sidewalks, because the other pedestrians didn’t seem to know where they were going, and they’d just drift along as if lost in a bit of fog or a dream.

And you couldn’t drive through town without almost knocking down an aloof couple that looked like Mr. and Mrs. Howell from Gilligan’s Island, stepping by accident into the street beside the maritime supplies store, as if all of Greenport was their own private yacht. They had all come from somewhere to here, but from where and for what purpose?

In the off season, there was no one on Front Street on the January Monday mornings, and I was the only other soul beside the shivering postman and icy police officer, sipping his hot coffee next to his car as the reassuring steam curled up and into the air. You learned how to dress like a North Forker, too, not like the on season crowd, but with the correct amount of neglect in the wardrobe. At first, you dressed down just to blend in, but soon enough your clothes were dirty from some automotive or domestic mishap, and you didn’t bother to shave anymore, and imagined yourself as a tough and able Nantucket whaler. You would walk out to the end of the main pier in the wind and stare at Shelter Island and stay for as long as you could until the weather sent you running for Aldo’s Coffeehouse’s womb-like warmth.

There were few truly good-looking people in Greenport in winter, most of them haggard and some just above the poverty line. So when the good-looking, well-dressed people started showing up and spending G’s, I began to sense that something was amiss. In a place where flannel never went out of style, what to make of that couple in form-fitting athletic clothes rollerblading down the street? And did you hear, they had British accents?

Something is happening in Greenport. It’s changing. Restaurants that were closed for months are now open and busy. Beautiful people sit around the patio tables, looking as if they are somewhere special, somewhere to be seen. Beyond them, crowds of youths prowl about with cool green growlers from the brewery. Should I think of them as fools, or welcome their cash injections into the local economy? The latter seems to be the local sentiment. On the main road, the children of East Marion are selling lemonade. Southold residents are dragging old furniture out on their lawns and asking top dollar for these East End vintage antiques. Soon the local berry farm will begin charging “tourist prices” — $10 for a jar of authentic North Fork blackberry jam, with all of that just folks country, melted-in, mmm-mmm-mmm goodness.

[This isn’t just your average, run-of-the-mill blackberry jam. Oh no. This jam is from the North Fork.]

It’s enough to make a man scream when someone who looks like somebody from Hollywood goes strolling down the street walking a tiny dog and eating ice cream. At the cozy corner nook in the village between the Georgian-owned cafe where they sell the tasty khatchapuri and the Turkish-owned liquor store where I am fond of idling away my time and restocking my Bedell 2010 First Crush red table wine — which only costs $20 — I asked David, who has always lived here, about the swarms of savage strangers.

“David, what the hell is going on?”

“What do you mean, man?”

“There are all of these well-dressed people here this week. They look good and have nice clothes. They can’t be from around here.”

“Oh, you mean the yuppies? Welcome to Greenport in summer, man.”

“But it’s not summer. It’s still May.”

“Memorial Day weekend. That’s what kicks it off.”

“It’s crazy.”

“What is?”

“I saw a couple bicycling through town this morning. They were wearing matching fanny packs.”

“But that’s just how it is, man. And believe me, it’s only going to get worse.”

And maybe it has. David is suddenly clean shaven and wearing a collared shirt. And I am too. It’s Greenport in summer. Gotta stuff the local scruff.

the tuesday afternoon dildo club

Just another letter from the swinging East End.

IN A COFFEEHOUSE on Front Street in Greenport, a group of ladies gathers every Tuesday to share and gossip. Some are younger, others older, some thinner, others larger. But they are loud. The round table in the front of the building seems to spin round and quake with nervous energy and laughter, and the conversation themes usually drift from polite updates on personal lives and real estate to down and dirty girl talk, and you’ll find your ears prick up each time an out of context word like “dildo” penetrates the otherwise mild and old-timey atmosphere of bean roasting smoke and recorded Italian folk singers.

I pretend not to listen to them as I work, but I cannot help but eavesdrop. I measure my own manhood in counterpoint to their strident womanhood, and this gives me great sadness. It seems that so many men and women define each other by gender. They cannot see past this very important dividing line. It envelopes all. The Tuesday afternoon dildo club issues bold communiques like, “But that’s men, they want to control you, they want to isolate you, my ex-husband was just like that.” When a woman’s husband actually entered the cafe to say hi, the gatherers adopted a faux friendliness of “Hi there you!” and pecks on the cheek that vanished the second he was out the door, followed by the telling postmortem, “Why do men feel like they need to do that? Intrude?”

The last confab of the Tuesday afternoon dildo club led me into even more peculiar territory. Someone mentioned Orient, the village where we live, and another person brought up all the “swinging” that goes on in Orient. Swinging? I paid swift notice. As in Swinging London?

“And it’s not just couples, it’s marrieds,” the first woman gushed.

“Really, marrieds, too?!” A second woman half-asked, half-gasped.

“Yeah, it’s huge out there,” the first one said, “not that I know from experience. I have just heard. And also on Shelter Island. And also Sag Harbor,” she said.

“Yes, yes, swinging is huge in Sag Harbor,” a third woman agreed, touching her chest to connote integrity and honesty, as if she knew even better than the first woman about Sag Harbor’s wild key parties. I imagined the nice young Latina cashier I saw at the deli in Sag Harbor, and the gentleman with the scarf and the Jack Kerouac glasses. Were they in on it too? So many things were going on around me and I had been oblivious all this time.

“Will you quiet down,” the first one said, “you are disturbing people. He’s trying to work.”

“No he’s not, he’s listening to us,” the second woman said. I cocked an eyebrow at the revelers seeking some acknowledgement of my humanity, our shared asexual existence, but one never came. Only more locker room talk and vibrant outbursts and chocolate dusted cappuccinos and rubbery pounding of fists on the table. To quote Monty Python, there was much rejoicing.

a true east end conundrum

A SNOW STORM! Some even say a “polar vortex.” Yes, it is cold out there, but people from colder climes with whom I am domiciled are laughing at you America, “You call it a vortex, we call it January!” There is panic, danger is afoot. In the Orient Post Office, the lady from Peconic informs, “I drove 20 miles per hour, all the way out here.” Heads shake. Disbelief! The causeway is cause for concern, with invisible sea on either side. There are many accidents, and even your tank-like Town and Country is no match for the slushy wushy. It trips up the breaks and you pull into the neighbor’s front yard all astonished.

In the evening, among the sheets white coming down, snowflakes so fine that you can only see them in the lantern lights, a call is received. “This is a message from Superintendent So-and-So,” says a voice over a crackly connection. “School for [RANDOM DATE INSERTED HERE] has been cancelled.” What the? I knew it was a bad storm, but can’t they just clean the roads? There aren’t many kids out here in this nape of the way, neck of the land, and there are only two school buses. But then I recalled that Superintendent So-and-So and Principal Who’s-it-What’s-it live on the SOUTH FORK. They ride the Shelter Island ferries to work. This must be the reason! The South Forkers can’t get to work, and no Southies equals no Schoolie.

It’s a true East End conundrum. Up island, the transit is between places on a map — the depot of home improvements, the authority of sports, but out here, down island, these places on the map are surrounded by water — Shelter Island, Robins Island, Gardiners Island. These are the American maritimes. To the east lies Plum Island and Fishers Island and Great Gull Island, and then there is Block Island and farther beyond you encounter those tasty Wampanoag names, Cuttyhunk, Penikese, Nashawena, and then even farther on, the gay bluffs of Aquinnah. Ferries matter out here among the trees and seasonal seafood restaurants. They matter.

But they never stopped running. The supermarket in Greenport is one of few stores open the following day, and the lady who talks all the time has made it to work. She lives on Shelter Island {“You know, not everybody on Shelter Island is rich” she said once while bagging my provisions} and today she is ever as blabberful, with the old-timey, “I remember the California oil spill back in ’64, remember that?”} “I’m surprised to see you here,” I said. “I thought they cancelled the ferries.” “No, the ferries never stop running,” she says. “Only if you get a moon tide or something will they cancel the ferries, but not last night.” “But they cancelled school. I figured they cancelled the schools because the ferries weren’t running.” “Oh no,” a wise-old chortle. “They cancelled school because they are afraid of lawsuits. If someone gets in an accident on the way to school, then the district is liable.” “You can really sue district for that?” “Sure, because the district ‘made them’ come in in such awful conditions.” “In this state you really feel the law on your neck all the time, huh.” “It’s the land of lawyers, all right,” she belly laughs. “Credit or Debit?”