How to Become a Nature Photographer

Every third Estonian claims to be a nature photographer. If you don’t believe me check the census data. It’s just one of those peculiarities of the country.

Most don’t sell their photos and, if you corner them, they’ll admit they’re not professional nature photographers, but rather masons or dentists or accountants or lawyers. But if you meet them in a dark bar on the edge of the wilderness, before you even have your drink ordered, they’ll identify themselves as nature photographers.

Jacques-Alain Finkeltroc, a news shooter for ERR’s English-language website, is one of them. “Veux-tu aller avec ton roi à Soomaa?” Jacques barked over the telephone. Or something like that. I don’t speak French, but that never stops Jacques. Each time I remind him I’m from the other part of Canada, which he is only able to remember until the next time he calls.

When I finally got Jacques to switch to English he informed me that we’d been invited to accompany some nature photographers on a canoe trip in Soomaa. Since it was the flood season, they were making their annual pilgrimage, and if I would quickly stuff some dry clothes into a plastic bag then two authentic nature photographers would be in front of my house within an hour.

“Where could the damned thing be?” Tarmo the nature photographer was rummaging around inside his car, tossing thermos mugs and maps this way and that. “My hand lotion. I need my hand lotion!” After he found it and greased up, he offered me his hand. “I’m Tarmo. They say hand lotion is addictive, but I’m not sure.” I rubbed into my skin what Tarmo left on me, half wondering if I’d soon want another hit.

As we drove toward Pärnu, Tarmo and Jacques sat in the front, discussing their choice of long underwear. Jacques was wearing French military-issue polyester, while Tarmo had new Merino wool.

“Smell me,” said Tarmo, shoving an arm in Jacques’ face.

“All I smell is hand lotion,” said Jacques. “But it’s nice.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” explained Tarmo. “In two days you’ll smell like Vello’s butt, and I’ll still smell like, well, hand lotion.”

I thought about joining the conversation, but I had no idea what type of underwear I had. Liina bought it for me several years ago and so far it had kept me warm. But today it was five degrees and raining, and we’d spend all day sitting in Tarmo’s canoe. Maybe I should have thought more about my underwear.

Throughout the drive, when Tarmo and Jacques weren’t discussing the newest in keep-warm fabric, they were talking about Janno, one of Estonia’s more famous nature photographers, a photo god of sorts, who had just published a series of polar bear photos which had drawn more than 100,000 visitors to his blog. This was of course the dream of any creative human: to have another human want to look at his work. And 100,000 was quite a few other humans. We were due to meet Janno in just over an hour, board canoes, and photograph the rainy, flooded wilds.

But when we arrived Janno wasn’t there. After a series of phone calls, half of them disconnecting mid-stream due to lack of signal, it was determined that Janno had left his telephone at home. Some other nature photographers, who did not have their own canoes, would rent them from the Viljandi side, and we would somehow meet on the water. Janno would presumably be among them.

“It’s gonna be a goddamned song festival,” announced Tarmo, pocketing his telephone and reporting the intel he’d gleaned from the conversations. “Every canoe in Estonia is currently in Soomaa. There may even be a Nature Omnibus.”

“I thought those were mostly full of pensioners?” I said. “And it is a weekend, right?”

Tarmo and Jacques looked at me like I’d peed in their camera bags. It was clear that nature photographers considered themselves the eagles of the forest, soaring majestically, high above the ground-dwellers who must forage for nuts under leaves and logs. “Well,” Tarmo conceded, after a long silence. “The pensioners won’t go too far in their boats. We’ll just go farther.”

And so, after another application of hand lotion, Jacques and I stepped off the dry road into our canoe and floated into the flood plain.

Soon followed Tarmo, but I would never have recognized him. He was paddling hard in a short sea kayak, dressed in a yellow dry suit, a rubber gasket sealed tightly around his neck, his head crowned with an astronaut’s cap. “They call him Gagarin,” said Jacques from the stern. “He not only dresses like that, but he’ll go anywhere to get a photo.”

It was true. On a dare, Tarmo had once crawled into a den of hibernating bears to get a photo of the cubs. To increase his odds inside the den, he wore a hockey goalie’s mask, thick fingerless gloves, and fired a series of shots with and without a flash. Shouting to his friends to extract him, they pulled him out by his feet and then all ran to the safety of a metal cage where they examined the photos. Tarmo had given the bears redeye. And so it was with nature photographers. You could risk your life in a den of bears and they would still criticize your work.

We spent the entire day navigating through the song festival looking for perfect light and for Janno. Nature was replaced by throngs of canoes crashing through forest cover and the occasional shriek, sometimes from joy and occasionally from an overturned boat.

Though few photos were taken due to the rain, we did not find Janno until the evening when we beached our boats and he arrived by car. “Smell this,” was the introduction I got from Tarmo, who led me to Janno’s car and insisted I sniff.

“Hand lotion?” I ventured a guess.

“No, smartass. A dead fox. Janno picked one up off the road last week and can’t get the smell out.”

“Picked it up, why? To eat?”

Tarmo considered this a question not worth answering, shook his head, and ordered everyone in their cars. We would be heading for a meal and a sauna in a Kilingi-Nõmme guesthouse. The cold and wet had spoiled everyone’s appetite for camping.

At dinner it became clear that Janno had picked up the dead animal to give it to a wounded feral dog, recovering under a friend’s care. Janno’s tales of his unsuccessful attempts to rid his car of the smell led to more discussions of the superiority of Merino wool underwear (Tarmo encouraged everyone to smell him) and eventually to the discussion of photography. Janno’s polar bear photos had already been stolen and circulated around the globe. He had received no money of course, and many of the thieves had even removed his name and replaced it with their own. As if to add insult to injury, the Kilingi-Nõmme guesthouse was distributing Estonian government-funded country tourism brochures which featured a cover photo by Janno. A photo for which he’d received neither money nor credit.

“You should sue them,” I offered, trying to whip the shooters into a frenzy. “Set their office building on fire,” added Jacques. But the photographers only shook their heads, as if to suggest that suing someone or setting something on fire were distinctly North American and French behaviors, respectively.

The next day the sun shined brightly – another curse for photographers – and we were too late on the water to take advantage of any of the morning fog. This day there were even more canoeists, but the Sunday boaters were more well-behaved. A flotilla passed which was full of Centre Party politicians. We passed an internet guru. A well-known banker. Even a former porn star. It was a floating song festival and well worth the trip, even though nature is better viewed alone.

On the way home we crossed the Pärnu River and witnessed a canoe ram a tree head-on and capsize. First on the scene, we pulled over to assist, and as Jacques tied together every piece of rope he could find, Tarmo climbed into his Gagarin suit.

The canoe washed far downstream and the couple clung to a tree in mid-current, stranded with their bodies half in the near-freezing water. Tarmo grabbed the rope and headed upstream for the bridge.

“What’s he going up there for?” I asked Jacques, as the treed woman screamed for help. “He could wade out right here by the woman.”

“Do you know how much that suit cost?” asked Jacques. “You spend that kind of money then you've got to have drama.”

And with that Tarmo leapt off the bridge into the swiftest current and drifted down to the girl clinging to the tree branch. He fixed a line under her arms, swam until he had sure footing, and then pulled the girl to the bank. He repeated the procedure with the man, though without the action-hero bridge leap.

“Thank you,” panted the couple who by this time were being whisked to a waiting car which would take them to a nearby sauna.

“All in a day’s work for a nature photographer,” replied Tarmo in a faux-deep voice. As he walked to the car he clapped me on the back. “Say, Vello,” he offered, “any chance you want to smell my underwear now?”

Of Caca and Springtime

“You better pick that up!” she shouted at me from the other side of the fence. My Siberian Husky Mundo had just crapped near her apartment building.

“I don’t have a bag with me,” I replied. “But I’ll come back later and get it.”

“No you won’t!” she bellowed.

I usually carry several plastic bags, though on that day I had simply forgotten to resupply my coat pocket.

“What’s your postbox number?” I asked in an even tone of voice.

“Why do you want to know?” This woman obviously had problems much bigger than dog shit, and they’d eaten away at her, making her suspicious of everything and everybody until she’d become a troll under the bridge.

“I need to know your postbox number,” I continued in the same level tone, “because that’s where I’m going to put the dog shit. Otherwise, how will you know that I’ve cleaned it up?”

That old cow just stared at me, and before she could come up with some other little problem I blew her a kiss and moved on. I would have come back to pick up the dog shit, too, if she hadn’t have been such a bitch.

For readers who like stories with clear lessons, this one has nothing to do with dog shit. The moral of the story is Don’t be a bitch (with the corollary that then there’ll be a lot less shit in your life). But, since dog shit is so topical at the moment – since it has even inspired a work of literature by Estonia’s most famous living author – I feel compelled to publicly comment: For the record, should I ever decide to run for parliament, I am in favor of cleaning up dog shit from public places.

I often like to walk Mundo near the sea in Pirita and as the snow melts around the TOP Hotel the earth gives up its treasures: rotting husks of Roman candles, rusty syringes, used condoms, kinder surprise shells, last summer’s chicken bones, and of course a veritable minefield of dog shit. It’s the time of year when the city epitomizes the Soviet maxim that if something belongs to everyone then it belongs to no one.

Recently, I heard about a campaign to point out the dog shit everywhere by placing little yellow flags to mark each pile. This is a nice gesture, but for it to work it would require that the majority of citizens access their conscience. This might work in cities where space is truly at a premium or in rich socialist countries where the angry are fewer. But in Tallinn, given the still vast gulf between the haves and have nots, the sense I get is that too much bitterness still remains. Your dog crapping and your Lexus-driving neighbor stepping in it in his thin-soled Italian shoes provides an immediate sense of satisfaction and in a small but important way helps reset society’s delicate emotional balance.

My wife Liina — who like me considers herself an amateur psychologist but who also has a soft spot for conspiracy theories – has floated the idea that there’s a reason we are given little yellow flags and not parks crawling with municipal cops with their flammable green uniforms and inbred eyes: If the city were to take away our dog shit (or, for example, the 10,000 swans we’re not supposed to feed) we might turn our attention to more serious issues, like a serious discussion of Estonia’s presence in Afghanistan, Narva’s dreadful HIV record, human trafficking or god-knows-what. Dog shit, Liina says, is the modern opiate of the masses.

Liina makes her case by pointing out that mayors of much bigger cities have shown the world that where there’s a will there’s a way. Giuliani solved New York’s litter problem and crime problems almost overnight. Boris Johnson and Mike Bloomberg are recognized for making their cities cleaner, calmer, and greener. Liina contends even an incompetent administrator, if he had the desire, could quickly solve Tallinn’s dog shit problem (and its snow- and ice removal problems).

I’m not sure I buy Liina’s theory, not least because intelligent discussion about Afghanistan and HIV would serve to draw attention away from the city government to the federal government, a clear advantage for the Centre Party, but also because there is likely a very good reason why no one gives a damn about the dog shit. It could be the fact that many city offices are still staffed by the Homo Sovieticus generation who are simply accustomed to dog shit in public places. And it’s likely Mr. Savisaar does not stroll through parks in the season of the melt: his daily walk is from the heated leather seat of a Mercedes Benz E350 CDI 4Matic directly to his door.

I have met Mr. Savisaar only once, at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon. Those of us seated at his table asked him questions in our accented Estonian, and he briefly huddled with advisor Heido Vitsur over each question before – as if Mr. Savisaar had his hand shoved up inside him and was moving his lips — Mr. Vitsur answered our questions. I wasn’t able to form too many conclusions, except that Mr. Savisaar is not comfortable around westerners.

I recently saw Mr. Savisaar again at the press conference where he revealed his contention that the 1.5 million euros was for the Lasnamäe church. With a deft hand and without a single visible drop of sweat, he played flawlessly to thirty journalists in the room. It was a masterly performance.

Add to his stagecraft a personal history right out of Oliver Twist, and you have the perfect makings for a long profile in a well-known American magazine, to whom I actually tried to peddle the story of a three-dimensional profile of what makes Mr. Savisaar tick. They were not interested, sadly, the editor bluntly asking “Why would Americans give a shit about that?” While it seemed no less relevant to me than a story that same magazine ran about a minor politician in Central America, I guess I was simply too minor a writer to guarantee them readers for a profile no matter how interesting I could make an Eastern European politician. And so there was little left to do than write about dog shit in Postimees. (Full disclosure: Dog shit was their idea.)

Without knowing the man, what I am willing to conclude is that Mr. Savisaar is very bright, and I am sure that if he were to set his sights on dog shit in Tallinn, he would be able to eradicate it. But my sense is that his interest in the city of Tallinn is not equal to his interest in Estonian politics — city goings-on must bore the poor man to death. What of course we need to rid the city of dog shit, is a leadership more committed to the city itself than to a certain ideology or class of voters.

I find it interesting that in Estonia one may easily find plenty of people who are proud to be Estonian (or Mulgilased, Muhulased, or Whateverlased). It’s easy to find people who are proud to be from Tartu or Viljandi or Pärnu or Haapsalu. But I’ve met very few people who are genuinely proud to hail from Tallinn. (A certain breed of Tallinner — elitists more often than not — are often proud that they are not from the countryside.) Being neither a tiny town nor a big city, Tallinn somehow lacks any distinct identity; it’s the capital city we have to have, the city center a vast collection of architectural mistakes and monuments to the vanity of small-timers, and, except for the Old Town and its remarkable residential neighborhoods, the city is a rather forgettable gray blob.

It would be tempting to say that what Tallinn needs is some big event to inspire and bring us together as a community, like being named a Cultural Capital of Europe. But what Tallinn really needs is a leadership who cares both passionately and visibly about it. A leader who can make inspiring speeches about why we should care for our neighbors (Mr. Ilves’ speeches on this topic seem rote). A leadership who clearly gives a damn and can make us believe that cleaning up dog shit is about a lot more than cleaning up dog shit.

Until that happens, however, I wouldn’t place to much faith in yellow flags. Keep wearing those thick-soled shoes.

***

Thick-soled shoes available here.

A Wider Berth

Almost daily, for the eleven-and-a-half months of the year when Estonia is covered with snow, someone will ask me if I ski. This is a test with only one correct answer.

“But do you cross country ski?” they follow up, their look showing they think they’ve got me now.

“Absolutely,” I reply. And then before they can think too long I quickly add: “Of course, unlike you I wasn’t born on skis. I learned in army survival courses, which required me to ski fast enough to catch a wild horse, kill it with my knife, and then gut it and sleep inside its still-warm carcass on a cold Canadian arctic night.”

This usually effectively ends the skiing discussion and allows us to move on to other topics.

Of course the answer Estonians expect to hear is that I am a downhill skier, which is, in their minds, hardly a skier at all. As with ski resorts anywhere, visit one of Estonia’s two or three “mountains” and you’ll find the sort of people which residents of mountain country derogatorily refer to as “flatlanders”: Unfit pussies in designer ski wear who are present more for the après ski than the skiing itself. It is no wonder cross-country skiers would avoid them.

In Estonia it is debatable whether it is worse to be a downhill skier or a non-skier. So, if one does not want to be thought less of, it is always best to lie.

Estonians’ devotion to cross country skiing is worthy of scientific study. My friend Gunnar took part in the Tartu marathon this year--63 kilometers in minus-25 degree Celsius weather--just because he thought it was an experience he should have. My friend Ahti, who is just a regular guy and not especially ski-crazy can be found at least three nights a week on the lighted ski trail in Pirita. The prime minister is there, too, more than he’ll publicly admit. How do I know all this? I sometimes go there to walk the dog.

The rest of the world has yet to fully embrace this sport for a variety of reasons, mainly of which is that it’s terribly boring. (The Americans have cross-country ski teams, but this is hardly out of enthusiasm for the sport: it is rather to not be completely ignorant in the case that someone someday finds a way to actually make money off the sport.)

What could possibly be fun about skiing on flat ground? If all one wants to do is sweat, then running is a better substitute, and the gear is a fraction of the price.

I understand that cross country is a quiet sport, and I do see appeal here: one can quietly approach game and kill it with less trouble.

But cross country as a spectator sport is a let-down, crowds cheering for a half second as the skiers fly by and disappear into the trees. Skiing is even less conducive to televised broadcast than bowling or yoga.

Add personalities like Smigun, Veerpalu, and Mae, and it still holds no appeal. Who wants to listen to a skier in an interview say things like, “I’ve trained really hard” or “my team did a great job on the wax”? And when do ski fans do anything more than stand alongside the trail and wave flags? (In the Tour de France, fans used to throw tacks in front of the cyclists!)

The biathalon improves skiing only slightly, because it has a hint of an element of suspense: will the Chinese skier miss his target and accidentally shoot the Russian? What if the skier forgets and leaves a round in the chamber and falls hard rounding a turn which is packed with spectators?

If you want to give cross-country skiing more universal appeal, then you have to add back the element which makes all popular sports popular: violence.

What if Kristina Smigun were to ski through a forest inhabited by wolves and feral dogs? (Or ski through Bucharest, if no wolf population can be found.) What if contestants were required to ski across the Russian border at night armed only with a puukko and return with the scalps of a dozen Russian soldiers? (Or perhaps Latvian scalps, as the international community would hardly take notice of a few less Latvians.) Or what if prisoners were put on skis and forced to cross a clearing which is simultaneously shelled by artillery and strafed by fighter jets? One could easily argue that cross country skiing has not been interesting since the Winter War.

Despite the sport’s shortcomings, though, each year I give it a fresh try. Just as I’ve tried to give a chance to beet soup, head cheese, and Baltman suits, I approach skiing with an open mind. So what if there’s nothing on the trail to kill? So what if the sport causes the release of no more adrenalin than billiards? Onward I ski, striving not toward a finish line, but toward understanding.

And there goes the prime minister past me. Again. And again he in his spandex superhero costume cannot hide his disdain for my baggy wool Swedish army surplus trousers and my worn-out wool sweater. “Eest ära!” shouts one of his bodyguards, as if my pace is holding up the machinations of the Estonian state.

“Up yours!” I shout back. “Try sleeping inside a horse!” And then all three of them, Ansip and his body guards, slow their pace and turn back to have a look.

“That’s right,” I say. “A horse.” And next time, they give me a wider berth.

***

Oprah recommends Inherit the Family.

Eurovision’s Dirty Little Secret

Although it’s enough for most viewers to tap their feet to the Eurovision beat, something within my soul compels me to listen to lyrics and attempt to divine their meaning.

For example, these lines from the Sven Lõhmus song which will represent Estonia at the contest in May:

Daylight fading away

Night silhouettes in the sky

LED lights are flashing in towers

It’s Manhattan’s magical time

Ballerinas dancing to Swan Lake

On a river made of diamonds and pearls

Everything’s a little bit weird now […]

One-two-seven-three down the Rockefeller street

Everything is a little surreal

Weird and surreal, indeed, because I have no clue what Getter Jaani is singing about. Perhaps the author chose “weird” and “surreal” because the phrase “incredibly fucking stupid” is so hard to rhyme in English?

Apologies. I don’t mean to be cynical, but as far as I know, offices in skyscrapers are still not illuminated by LEDs (which would be confined to stairwells or parking garages, and in any case not pronounced like the chemical element with the symbol Pb). The nearest Rockefeller Street is in Randolph, Massachusetts (population 30,000), the definite article has no place before “Street” in that context, and wouldn't 1273 on the Avenue of the Americas would be near the Time Life building, somewhere uptown of Rockefeller Plaza?

Readers will no doubt rally around Mr. Lõhmus, invoking a defense of “nonsense literature,” a legitimate genre that defies language conventions or logical reasoning – and the “Rockefeller Street” lyrics certainly do that. But they do not meet the second test of nonsense literature, which is to have an excess of meaning rather than a lack of.

But wait, readers will interject: it’s so easy to be critical. Anybody can laugh at a Eurovision song.

True, but I have done more. I have, in fact, discovered the genesis of Eurovision lyrics, the fountain from which they all gush. And, it turns out, Sven Lõhmus is not to blame.

Take these lyrics for example:

I like to play with toys

Let’s all have a party

Watch me blow bubbles

It’s fun to make music

Goodbye

Set the words to a catchy tune, add Getter Jaani’s voice, a few godawful dancers, and viewers will shriek at their television screens in orgasmic pleasure.

Or imagine these words recited by a beat poet backed by a contrabass:

When you cook onions and broccoli, why do they stink up the kitchen?

Why is the smell of a dead animal attractive to a vulture but disgusting to you and me?

And why does your morning breath smell so bad that your mom runs screaming from the room?

All are no less worthy of Eurovision than “Rockefeller Street.” And they require no expenditure of creative energy since they are already written: All the passages were excerpted from books in my ten-month-old son Robert’s personal library, a veritable Eurovision gold mine.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I beg the reader to put himself in foreign shoes for a moment. If the Estonian language, instead of English, dominated the world, then how might you be moved if song lyrics were taken from books titled, Vaata, raputa, ja loe; Ahvenapoiss Sulev; or Pese ennast-sa?

Or what if a contingency of foreigners were to compose lyrics in the Estonian language for songs romanticizing your infamous industrialists? Titles like “Hanschmidt Puiestee,” “Kruuda Tänav,” or “Armin Karu Avenüü”?

The solution is for Mr. Lõhmus and his songwriting colleagues to expand their reading lists. What if they sought poets for inspiration? Jaan Kaplinski has some good lines. Or there’s Karl-Martin Sinijärv, who not only is a fine poet but boasts some of the coolest threads in town. And anyone who borrows from a poet immediately basks in associative glory. In this fashion it’s possible to climb several rungs in the cultural ladder by simply leaving the public library’s children’s section.

And if Estonian poetry won’t suffice and international flair is desired, there’s the American master, Wallace Stevens, whose material cries out for song lyrics.

Let the lamp affix its beam

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Were these Eurovision lyrics, a whole new class of listeners might join, who would speculate that the song is about a “forced choice between the gross physicality of death and the animal greed of life.” And the lyricist himself might fire back with an overarching statement that a poem must “resist the intelligence.”

As it stands now we are without that debate, and a lone Postimees columnist is left to hope that the significance of 1273 might amount to more than Tommy Tutone’s 1982 hit, “867-5309/Jenny.” The latter caused thousands to dial the number and ask for Jenny. Yet the former, I fear, will cause only this one curious listener to plug the address into Google Maps.

***

Visit our lovely gift shop.

Gastarbeiter

Imagine everybody who has ever wronged you being in one place at one time, trapped somewhere they cannot escape.

For anyone who has ever built a house in Estonia, that place is the 9:30 p.m. Tallink Friday ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn. It is packed stem to stern with gastarbeiter returning from a week of blessing Finland with their craftsmanship and work ethic.

The ferry crowd resembles a parade of mafia middle management: thousands of short-haired thugs clad head to toe in black. Many sport bling. A few wear arm jewelry, peroxide vixens in heels ever ready to heed the disco’s call.

Looking at the men, I feel I know them all. And some I actually do.

In the pub with three pints before him is Andrus, who got drunk one afternoon and disappeared from ceiling work for 30 days, announcing upon his return that he’d been down with a virus.

By the one-armed bandit is another bandit, Mart the electrician, who worked assiduously for a month and then vanished with several thousand kroons intended to buy a fusebox.

There is Sven the mason who, while boasting of the young masons he had taught their craft, constructed an oven for me that only produced smoke. (He blamed the chimney, forgetting that he’d built that, too.)

Pulling a trolley full of gin long drink is Edgar, who did not own a single tool except a hammer (the only thing he couldn’t get from Ramirent, according to him).

And there, rocking out on his iPod, is Marek, an enthusiastic plumber who disappeared on the second day of work leaving his brand new cordless drill and a dirty pair of sneakers in the middle of my living room floor. He never returned to claim either.

It is a boat full of David Copperfields, all with highly polished disappearing acts. Even those I don’t know personally, I still feel I know their stories, and I mention this to the Finn I’m traveling with.

“They can’t behave like that in Finland,” he says. “They wouldn’t last even a day.”

But I wonder. It seems many have made a career out of lasting less than a day.

I nod to Andrus in the pub, and he looks away. Despite the fact we paid the same for a ticket, owing to the crowd on the 9:30 boat it is more his boat than mine, and I suppose we must play be his rules. A year ago I might have challenged him here, throwing down my glove and drawing my rapier for some therapeutic slashing and thrusting.

But my anger has transformed to wonder. I am dumbstruck by the construction culture: it calls into question everything I have learned about the self-correcting free market system. How can so much incompetence and laziness exist for so long? There are good Estonian workers, yes. Highly professional workers. (So hold your mail!) But they are not this crowd. What could the five workers I know possibly do in Finland? Do they sweep up the sawdust of sober Finnish carpenters? Or do I misread the situation and the explanation truly lies in how an Estonian friend, having seen the horror in my eyes while seated in the passenger seat of his car, explained his aggressive driving: “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t drive like this in your country.”

I wonder for a moment how we would all behave if this ferry went down. Would we degenerate to mayhem and thievery of the nature William Langewiesche described taking place aboard the Estonia in his 2004 Atlantic Monthly article? Or would things reflect the civility expressed by the film line given the Titanic musician: “Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you”?

And if the ferry did go down and all of us with it, would the country of Finland grind to a halt?

I ask, because I, too, am a gastarbeiter.

For several years now, the larger portion of my income has come from Finland. For Finnish firms international enough to need me, I write their magazines, their newsletters, the speeches their CEOs make at the stock exchanges.

I am a double gastarbeiter. I have left Canada for Estonia and, for part of each week, I leave Estonia for Finland. I console myself with the belief that what I do Finns cannot do for themselves. A speech in English by a non-native speaker made to a western audience too often resembles a Monty Python skit. I save the Finns from themselves. Or so I tell myself in order to believe I am different from the other gastarbeiters on the ferry.

But if the ferry went down and I knew I was doomed, Langewiesche would likely have no cause to chronicle my noble behavior. I would grab a lifeboat oar and help speed the journey of Andrus, Mart, Sven, Edgar, and Marek. “Godspeed, boys,” I might utter with each delivered blow.

***

Visit our Dept. of Shameless Commerce.

Go West, Young Man

At the emergency room — don’t ask — Liina was admitted immediately while I hung out in the waiting room with Robert. Having rushed to the hospital without packing baby food, I tried to buy juice from the vending machine. But holding a crying seven-month-old and trying to feed enough air-light 10-cent-kroon coins into a slot proved too much to manage. More fell on the floor than went into the machine.

“Here, let me help,” said an attractive young woman, who fed her own coins into the machine. The apple juice box plopped to the bottom.

“Here, take mine,” and I reached out to hand the young lady my coins.

“You keep them,” she said. “I’m leaving Estonia tomorrow and won’t have any use for kroons.”

Helena was twenty-three and studied art history at a university in Scotland.

“Will you come back to Estonia?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said flatly, and we agreed that there were currently few opportunities for young people in Estonia, or at least for art history majors.

“I know you from Facebook,” said Helena’s mother, joining the conversation from a wheelchair. We had barely enough time to determine our mutual acquaintances when the nurse wheeled the mother away for an x-ray.

“She fell on the ice in Old Town,” explained Helena. “She lives in Norway and was supposed to return home tomorrow.”

“Sometimes I’m not too keen on Estonia,” Helena said. “I fell in the very same spot a week before and people seemed angry that they had to walk around me.” She admitted that her mother had said people were nice to her, even stopping to ask if she was all right. “Maybe it was me.”

The nurse approached again and Helena stood for a chat and returned to her seat.

“Maybe they thought you were a foreigner?” I offered half seriously, suggesting they thought she was a soft westerner accustomed to cities where property owners keep their sidewalks clear of snow and ice.

“It could be,” she agreed. “Whenever I go into shops in Old Town they speak English to me.”

The nurse returned and Helena stood to receive the report that her mother’s leg had a dangerous break. The doctors would operate immediately.

“Well, I don’t know how long you’ve lived in Scotland, but you definitely don’t look or move like an Estonian,” I told her as she gathered her things to join her mother.

“What do you mean?”

It’s not often I get an invitation to deliver my armchair analyses, but I enjoy it when I do. I rose and mimicked Helena’s body language when she received the news of her mother. I put my hands on my hips with elbows behind me. I arched my body back and up in a bowed, I’m ready-to-hear-you posture. “You see, Helena,” I said. “You’re exposing yourself here. This is a vulnerable position. But it’s very confident, too. It shows you fear nothing from this establishment. Most Estonians would not strike this pose.”

“How would an Estonian stand?” she asked.

“Well, there could be many ways, but generally not your way. An Estonian’s pose would cede power to the hospital worker.”

Behind us they wheeled out her mother and pushed her toward a door to another part of the hospital. I raised my hand in salute. Helena stood and offered me her hand. I wished them both good luck abroad.

I looked down at baby Robert in my arms and wondered at what age he might pack his bags and leave Estonia. Although he’s only seven-months old, I’m already plotting his future (to the dismay of his mother). I’d like him to attend primary and secondary school in Estonia, but I think it would then be good for him to leave.

The American professor Robert Rebein has written of small places. Roughly: Small towns give you everything and ask nothing in return, except that you leave and never come back.

I think the same might be said of a small country, at least to some extent. Or, if we want to consider the case of Tallinn, I can think of few towns of 400,000 in North America which are able to offer enough to keep all its sons at home. It would be asking too much, both of the town and of the sons.

I’d like my Robert to leave Estonia so that he may better understand himself and the world. Liina will disagree, but I contend a city without a famous song written about is no place for young people. Small towns are where you settle after you’ve already had your adventures. Liina argues that travel broadens your horizons, and that’s true. But travel is not the same as living abroad for an extended period without the comfort of your pinginaaber and the friends you grew up with. The tourist, as G.K. Chesterson pointed out, “sees what he has come to see.”

There are surely exceptions. E. Faye Jones, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most successful disciples, apparently cheekily declared he would remain in Arkansas and let the world come to him. But that declaration was made later in life, after he’d ventured abroad for a turn flying torpedo bombers in the Pacific Theatre and lived in a half-dozen cities he wasn’t born in.

Maybe Urmas Sisask can stare at the planets from Jäneda and find inspiration. But then, I’d argue, he has as much access to the universe sitting with his piano in his garden under a dark Estonian sky than he would from any place.

But most of us aren’t exceptions.

It’s said there are 130,000 Estonians like Helena and her mother who have packed up and left. I say good for them. I even say we ought to raise a glass every time someone like Helena throws a few items into a bag and ventures out to strike a claim in the big bad world.

I sometimes think that the Talendikoju program ought not to be an invitation for Estonians to return, but rather a giant exchange program, where we bring foreigners in to do jobs which need done, and where we export as many young Estonians as we possibly can.

Not all will return. But those who do will enrich the rest of us. They’ll come back with the confidence of Helena, postures erect from knowing that they are no less than anyone else, and that they are very often more.

And they’ll carry with them higher expectations. Higher expectations for themselves and for the society in which they live.

***

Visit our lovely gift shop.

Donkey Jockeys

It’s a matter of professionalism. And a simple matter of self-respect. But everyone I make this argument to tells me to shut the hell up, that I’m simply wrong, or that I should accept that the battle is lost before it’s begun.

They tell me my criticism is minor compared to the larger crisis in journalism, the major issues we ought to be wrestling with to improve the state of things. But I’d argue the first crisis to be dealt with is the one journalists have created for themselves: their identity crisis.

Lately I’ve been getting out to a few press conferences. I don’t go so much as to write about Mr. Savisaar’s quit-picking-on-me rant du jour or to hear IMF representatives think twice before saying nothing. I go to get out of the house, to see how the world is turning, and enjoy the bizarre, snail-paced spectacle of what Estonians call the pressikas.

The press conferences I’ve witnessed are pretty much interchangeable. The gray mass of journalists quietly trickles into the appointed room, invariably choosing seats at the back of the room. Among the reporters are many sleepy young men in worn sweaters and jeans, hair jutting out in random places in the fashion American collegiates refer to as “nappy head.”

After a short delay, a suit-clad young man with a boyband haircut appears and provides speaker introductions vaguely reminiscent of Vegas nightclubs, even though the speakers are already known to all and name cards are present in front of each.

The speakers themselves appear professional, wearing suits, ties and shined shoes. But they seem terribly annoyed, as if they would very much rather be somewhere else and have deigned only under great duress to attend the press conference that they themselves have organized. Their expressions cast them as the adults who have agreed to indulge the children.

And so the two sides face off: the Narcoleptic Self-styled Bohemians versus the Antsy Irritated Establishment.

As I see the regular lament and hand-wringing about Estonia’s media, it more or less goes like this: The critics say that experienced journalists are too few, most of the senior ones having left long ago to pursue other, better remunerating ventures. Politicians seem to be routinely grumpy with the press, as if they cannot get a fair break, when, by western standards, it has always seemed to me that they tend to get off easy when question time arrives.

The press itself is refreshingly introspective, occasionally even self-flagellating. There is acknowledgement in their own pages that they could do better and they mourn the turn toward yellow led by a compete-for-clicks environment.

While I find neither the Bohemians or Establishment more in the right, it seems to me that like many other areas of Estonian life, the debate itself is healthy, and as long as it goes on we are only in for an improved quality of the press. Where the head goes, the body will follow.

What I would like to see—and where I am told my cause is lost—is an improvement in the appearance of the press. It is my belief that a polished exterior is often the mark of an organized interior. And when that is not the case, an exterior may rally an interior to live up to its example.

Not all Estonian journalists dress down, of course. Should Priit Pullerits, Priit Hõbemägi, or Sirje Rank be in attendance, they will be as professionally clad as their foreign colleagues who may be witnessed on C-SPAN pelting Mr. Obama with questions.

But while Estonia’s politicians and businessmen seem to have too little respect for the press, I can only hold the press responsible for having too little respect for itself.

“What you need to get through your thick foreign head,” says my wife Liina, who was briefly employed in public broadcasting during the Soviet era, “is that the press were bohemians. If you were in the press in Soviet times, then you were a rebel and you dressed the rebel part.”

To which I of course respond that it’s been 20 years since the Soviet Union and most of the journalists attending the press conferences are too young to remember it.

It is also difficult for me to see journalists as rebels. We are every bit a part of The System. One may argue our role is to keep the rest of the system honest (and I’d agree), but does that not make us more policeman than rebel? Have a look at a policeman’s haircut. Would he function better in his job with hair down to his ass?

And, most importantly, if a journalist can write like a rebel, then he hardly need worry about dressing like one. (Flaubert: “In order to write like a revolutionary, you need to live like a bourgeois.”)

A nattily-dressed Estonian editor friend of mine argues that she can’t pay her staff well enough to ask them to dress professionally. But I lack sympathy. Journalists are paid poorly in most societies and the more respectable newspapers still require them to turn out in a tie. And I argue that an affordable, presentable pair of trousers, jacket, and tie cost far less than the designer jeans some of her reporters wear low enough to reveal their pubic hair.

It isn’t as simple as everyone putting on a necktie, my editor friend argues. She’s right, of course. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt things. People treat you how you treat yourself, a motivational consultant once said. My French writer friend Guillaume says that his stylish countrymen “dress to show respect for a place and for ourselves.” Would a well-dressed, attentive, whip-smart journalist inspire better answers from the subjects he interviews? The Antsy Irritated Establishment can best answer that.

A tie-requiring editor I know in the United States likes to inspire his reporters by borrowing from Jeremiah when he sends them out into the world. He tells them to let their subjects “hear the snorting of our warhorses, let them feel the ground tremble beneath their feet, as we approach to devour the land and all that fills it, the city and those who dwell in it.”

Of course it’s hard to leave that impression if you show up riding a donkey.

***

Read it in Estonian and join in the mudslinging here.