MY ON-THE-SIDE reading these days has been Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road, her harrowing account of a life spent with madman Neal Cassady, the worldly inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s Off the Road, as well as Cody Pomeray in Visions of Cody. Neal Cassady, the “archetypal American male,” whose honey on the East Coast calls his wife Carolyn on the West Coast to inform of her pregnancy (and the accompanying shock, for only she, Carolyn, should have been the one to carry his potent seed). This street urchin of skid row slums, pool houses, bus stations and bus station toilets, penning pretentious letters, skulking around bedding teenage girls and hunting for used cars while knocking up multiple women and plundering poet Allen Ginsberg on the side (and listening to the ball game on the radio — dirty Neal was obsessed). Neal Cassady apparently had sex with anything that moved, making him a wise choice of material for the sagacious Kerouac, himself then just an upstart wannabe Thomas Wolfe trying to break into a heavily gay literary establishment where you had to sleep around to get anywhere (Capote, Vidal), and here come the beatniks roaring in with their Mexican prostitutes, zen, yab-yum, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Somewhere along the lines there is a schism though as Kerouac turns to the Buddha (“the root of suffering is desire”) which overlaps with his French Canadian Catholic upbringing to cast away sin, and the Cassadys are deep into Hinduism and, well, they just can’t see eye to eye. I am reminded too much of my high school days, all these would-be men and women of the world sitting at diners at the edge of the universe contemplating such big things over steaming cups of black coffee with no particular place to go. I feel as if I went to school with Neal, that maybe he was a year or two older, maybe class of ’96 or ’97, and maybe he was in my chemistry class too, and never showed up for class except to take the final exam (which he miraculously aced), or if he did show up, he had his hoodie pulled up and was listening to The Bends on his Walkman. Such are the Neal Cassadys of the world. They are always there alongside you for the wild ride. Until one day they are not.

GUSTAF IS AN EXILE Estonian. He was born in Sweden and went to sea as a teenager. He worked a line from New Orleans to Calcutta, but also more local work, transporting lumber from Finland to West Germany. He worked all up and down the coast, and in his own words, had two girlfriends waiting for him in every harbor. Some would turn up by coincidence when he arrived, with others he maintained a fleeting correspondence of letters or postcards. These literary courtships might last six months or so. In this way he learned to understand the flow of the water of life. He still remembers one of these port honeys though, a local youth by the name of … the name of? He puts his palm to his forehead and the words thus escape his lips like a long-forgotten prayer. B I R G I T T A L I N D S T R Ö M. That was her name. “Birgitta Lindström! She was the most beautiful being I have seen. And all we did was hold hands and kiss. We walked through the twilight of summer in Vaasa holding hands, and reclining beneath the trees in the parks. It never became dark there, never fully dark.” Gustaf pauses and I am amazed that after nearly 60 years, he still remembers her name. You would think she would be long erased, but she still managed to flutter out of his memory and land on the ground, like an old photograph. I imagine she had curly hair and was quite voluptuous and gentle. But that is just my Birgitta Lindström. Maybe she was tall and lean and a firecracker. His Birgitta. Then we wonder. We wonder together what has become of Birgitta. I imagine she must be a grandmother now, if she is still alive. I hope that she is alive with a large brood of grandchildren gathered about her apron and that her Vaasa kitchen smells of fire, timber, pine and gingerbread. Then I realize that I will never forget my own Miss Lindström. You think she would fade from mind, but no, she is still there in the morning hours. You can feel the weight of her beside you. Then, with the first gray light of a December day, she’s vanished to the past. Those kinds of memories never leave. They linger.

FOR ME, THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN an intriguing disconnect between the town of Viljandi and the countryside that rings it. The two seem to exist in different dimensions. The town is bohemian, rambling, quaint. It’s a refuge for painters, musicians, actors, and writers. The land beyond the city is farm country, with rolling green hills and patches of pine and birch forest, cut by almost silent streams. It reminds me of the old Dutch settlements that line the Hudson River north of New York. 

Quiet country people live in these villages outside of Viljandi, smoking their pipes at night and tinkering with their tractors during the day. Sometimes you can see them out walking with a fishing rod in hand, or catch a glimpse of an old lady cycling by with a bucket full of mushrooms. The villages have pretty, poetic names. Saarepeedi. Tobraselja. Savikoti. There is one quiet village though that has always captured my imagination. The village is called Verilaske. 

I discovered the place when I wound up selling my car to a local do-it-yourself type who lives out in an adjacent village with a less interesting name. He arrived in his work overalls and we went out to his farm to complete the transaction. I remember how I drove quickly through the village and saw its sign. Verilaske? Veri (blood). Laske (‘to let’). A village for bloodletting? There was a stream there too. The Verilaske oja. Set back along the deeper part of the stream were some fine country houses.

Verilaske seemed like a quiet, unassuming place, and I couldn’t figure out why it would have such a name. Immediately, I drew up some theories. Perhaps there was a battle there at some point? Or maybe some quack doctor once lived in the village in the days when they used to bleed patients to cure them? The most believable theory was that this was a place once used for slaughtering pigs.

BACK IN TOWN, I asked around. What surprised me was that even old-timers in Viljandi barely knew the name Verilaske. They had lived in and around Viljandi their whole lives, but its villages were still a mystery. Sulev, the old school master who lives in Viiratsi, subscribed to the animal theory.  “You know, when they kill a pig, they cut its throat and let it bleed,” Sulev said and scratched his white beard. “I mean, you can’t honestly believe there was a battle out there? That just can’t be.”

Urmas, a sort of Viljandi hippie king who from time to time can be seen walking with a wizardly walking stick and partaking in pagan ceremonies, knew even less about the place. “I have lived here all my life, and I’ve never been to Verilaske,” said Urmas one afternoon at Restoran Ormisson. “But maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe people who go to Verilaske never return. I wouldn’t go back out there if I were you.”

A FEW DAYS LATER, I drove out to the village to give it another look over. I wanted to see if someone in Verilaske could tell me about its strange name. I stopped my car by the bridge and stared for a while in the slow-moving stream, which had a dark purple, nearly black color, like currant juice. Then I headed down a gravel road, hoping to find Verilaske’s main street.

At the end of the road though there was just a cluster of buildings, some old barns and a main house. Suddenly, a woman in an old-fashioned dress came out of one of the barns and sprinted to the main house. She ran in her dress with her head covered by a shawl, and one hand held the shawl tightly. There was an urgency, even terror, to her pace that bothered me. What was she running from? 

When I turned around, I noticed an old cat staring at me. A dirty cat covered in white fur. The look in its eyes was not fearful. It was evil, malevolent. The beast hissed at me. The sights of the running woman and the hissing cat unnerved me, and I turned and ran down the road to my car, jumped into the driver’s seat, started it up, and sped away. The speed limit was 50 kilometers per hour, but I easily doubled that. Verilaske did seem like the kind of place where a man could just disappear.

OF COURSE, I WENT BACK. One last time, I told myself. I had to push this Verilaske experience as far as it could go. On another sunny autumn day, I headed back into Verilaske. I wanted another taste of the village. I parked a ways down from the stream this time and began to walk toward it. There are some young birch trees on one side of the road, emerging from a forest, and I watched the trees as I walked toward the stream. Just then, I heard people talking. The talking was distant, but I could make out words, a woman’s voice and a child’s voice. Some men’s voices. I looked around but could see no one, and even at the houses in the distance not a soul stirred.

When I stopped, the voices halted. Yet when I started to walk again, I could hear the soft whispering. It was coming from the direction of the trees. Those thin white birch trees that lined the pine forest. That’s when I knew I had to leave the village. That was when I knew that Verilaske was haunted.

At home, I decided to do some final research. According to the Estonian Dictionary of Place Names, the origins of the village’s name are unclear. There is a legend connected with the place. Long ago, there was a battle between the Swedes and Russians in Viljandi County. Two high-ranking Estonians also lost their lives. “When Estonia was still spinning in the vortex of the Great Northern War, the two forces collided at the place known as Verilaske. The fighting was very fierce,” the book reported, “and many people were killed.” Due to this blood loss, the village has kept its name to this very day.

THE WANT you get for someone, the recurring want, like a warm and fragrant spring, that primitive and delicious want, and ever more want (and ever wanting more want), the want that sweeps and lingers in the flesh, overwhelms senses, and in a blink fades like the aftertaste of something sweet, a spoonful of honey, a face full of honeysuckle. That’s the kind of want I have.

THIS YEAR I TOOK IT upon myself to vote in the American presidential election. It was time to end the charades, the silliness, the scandal. I was tired of rioting, death, and pornographic actress intrigues, and yearned for the hand of some sturdy, stodgy lifelong political player to right the ship of state. Take the wheel, Biden, take the wheel and steer us back into the calm seas of unfulfilled political promises and soaring rhetoric based on some vague nostalgia for the Civil Rights Movement. 

For this has been the Democratic idea for what seems like my entire lifetime. They have been running on what has mostly been an empty tank, replaying the greatest hits of the Kennedys. Much is promised from year to year, but the best they can deliver seems to be peace and no civil war. Even in the now revered Obama age, the man himself appealed to America to reach for the stars, to achieve its own “Sputnik Moment.” Yet many Americans were not buying. 

The inspiring rhetoric and compromised projects led mostly nowhere.

Instead, it seems the whole country is drowning in seas of heavily armed, mentally confused vigilantes. A pirate crew of them was arrested recently for planning to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan. White supremacy, a simmering underground fire in recent years, has burst into white flames across the landscape. Even people who are not Europeans are getting in on it. Social media is soaking in sick deluges and torrents of propaganda. Hatred — of someone and preferably someone else — is the modern American business and business as of late has been good.

This is why it makes sense to vote for a rather average older gentleman from the State of Delaware. Delaware, the miniscule Atlantic state, among the most boring places in America. For in the hellfire of 2020, the Democrats’ boring promises of peace and no civil war actually sound pretty good. We must choose a boring peace, and at least delay or calm the ongoing internal divisions and strife that explode on a daily basis. There is an immediacy to voting in this strange year, a newfound urgency to stopping a narcissistic kleptocrat out to enrich his relatives and turn America into some kind of Latin American family dictatorship while the country suffocates under a pandemic and crackpot apocalyptic militias. The Trumps are to America what the Somozas were once to Nicaragua, watching the streets burn from the comfort of gilded toilets. 

So voting is the order of the day. Yet it was no easy task. First, I had to fill out a form online, print it out, sign it, date it, and mail it to my local board of elections in New York, where it apparently is still headed with an Estonian flag stamp affixed, one that I hope might arouse some wonder among the local officials. On top of that, I printed out my electronic ballot, marked the circles with a pen, and dispatched it. This process required me to resurrect some elementary school skills. The ballot was folded neatly inside a security envelope, which had to be signed and taped shut, which was then folded inside a mailing envelope, which also had to be sealed. Somehow Amazon had figured out how to confirm my order for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with a simple five-digit code, yet the local Board of Elections required me to undertake this curious, Japanese origami-like art project.

I was undeterred.

Sitting there in a bookstore café, surrounded by pensioners sipping coffee, I had the sense that I was crafting a paper airplane, one I would soon let fly across the room where it might strike an unsuspected café patron in the eye as he was perusing the diaries of Johannes Käbin or Nasta’s new hot astrology book. Yet even these dinosaurs of the Sputnik era could vote in Estonia with their identity cards and a click or two. All they had to do was log in with Mobiil-ID and cast their votes for their politicians of choice. Yes, I thought. Yes, I will vote for peace and no civil war this time. But there is so much more to accomplish once we achieve our long-awaited return to normalcy.

An Estonian version of this article appears in the 24 October edition of Postimees.

LOST ANOTHER FRIEND in recent weeks, not to death, but to marriage. When we are young and idealistic, we take on the costumes and pageantry of relationships without even knowing them, as if engaged in some profound dress-up party, but when you get older, when you observe the mind states of your friends as they evolve or rather transform during the course of their relationships, these occurrences leave room for worry. The woman outside the relationship is open, flowing, free, friendly, supportive, human. The man outside the relationship is bold, rough, adventurous, come-what-may, locked into achieving the whims of his own ego or life force. Yet put them together, and you get a sort of lethargic, post-coital slop bucket of guarded or changed personalities and shared dreams that are all too easily crushed or disjointed. Which is to say, congratulations on your great achievements, friends — and this happens with great frequency in life — but also, so sad to lose you. Up long lanes, they disappear, up long, guarded roads where men stand in trench coats with guns. The militarized estate of the relationship. It’s, as I said, a cosmic depression to watch, especially if your friend has undergone a thorough brainwashing in the wee hours and now can only revert to quoting his/her partner, “Ingrid thinks this,” or, well, “Thomas thinks that.” It’s like the shining of flashlights in bleak vacant windows of a once grand and busy hotel that has now been closed up for the winter season. Come back, friend, come back to me from the brink! One of these days the amnesia will wear off. One of these days you will shine free. One of these days the hotel will reopen.