White Unicorns

It’s a dreadful scene and no one is permitted unescorted. Wash your hands and disinfect before entering. There’s a sign by the sink offering cheap parking, but that’s going to be little compensation.

There supine on the bed is your nine-kilo, 77-centimeter, one-year-old son: unconscious and stretched out before you with tubes in his nose, hands, and one between two of his tiny toes. His little limbs are lashed to the bed as if he were a suicide case.

You stand on the wrong side of his bed and it only gets worse. There is a roomful of them: a first-birthday balloon floats above the bedpost of one; a box of toys stands quiet on the windowsill of another. Some of them have been here for a while.

***

In the 1990s, there was a saying among foreigners: Get sick in Estonia and the only cure is a plane ticket out. Given the state of the healthcare system, it often seemed justified.

It was said that to get proper treatment a payment was necessary—and it didn’t have to be cash. I imagined Estonia’s top surgeons sipping tea from bone china in immaculately groomed gardens, surrounded by chickens, pigs, and cows which patients had given them in payment.

In case of illness, American Peace Corps volunteers I knew kept their own supply of syringes, so much did they fear rusty, harpoon-like Soviet needles.

A physician friend once told me that it was easier for a doctor to amputate than to set a broken leg. (He laughed when I took him seriously for a moment.)

But personal experience only served to validate the stereotype. In 1993, having taken a fall on the ice and suspecting a broken leg, I visited Mustamäe Hospital. Limping through its unmarked labyrinth, knocking on closed doors until I finally located a doctor. She stared at me for a long while, and I suspect the only reason she did not simply turn away was my accent. She agreed to do an xray, and in excruciating pain I dragged myself up two flights of stairs by the handrail while she led impatiently in front.

Once with Liina in Haapsalu, an emergency room physician, his face beet-red and breath like rocket fuel, was perturbed at being taken from his soap opera which blared in the background. He grabbed Liina’s wrist and twisted it. She screamed in equal parts agony and surprise.

“It’s not broken,” he said, and did an about-face to return to his television. (It wasn’t broken. An xray the next day at a private clinic proved him right.)

Soviet medical care is free, went the joke. And then the rejoinder: But care of this quality is free everywhere in the world. Truly, the plane ticket out was not a bad idea.

Although things have changed, memories like these still flood your mind when you visit a hospital today.

The Mustamäe Hospital, despite improvements to its facade, from many angles still appears from the outside as a horrific Soviet monster which feeds on the ill. Inside, though, and especially the children’s hospital, it’s a case study in how to resurrect an old commie building.

The equipment is modern and the hallways are spotless. The pastries in the children’s hospital café are as good or better than most in the city. The main hospital’s atrium café (in some freak accident of a public tender?) is actually run by Reval Café, a place regular human beings would otherwise delight in eating.

Estonia’s doctors today, in my experience, are superb. Though they may not know me, I have come to know many of them by name, and I am most every time impressed by their professionalism, commitment, and compassion.

And the nurses? As my mother was a nurse, I am probably predisposed to like all nurses. “You will only be allowed to stay home from school if you are bleeding to death,” was a familiar refrain of my mother’s, which perhaps epitomizes the spirit present in all good nurses, their instinctive ability to strike the right balance of taking no guff yet imparting some sympathy.

And beyond the medical staff, in the children’s hospital there are even occasional visiting magician clowns in lab coats, who I have seen make a sick little boy shriek with joy.

“Why is everyone so nice here?” I finally asked an allergist who showed herself to be the talkative sort. I noted that the myths of Soviet medicine sometimes still hang heavily over Estonia.

“It’s great to work with kids,” she said simply, and I wondered how were the state of things across the street at the big hospital. Was everyone there so nice, too? Or was the positive environment at the children’s hospital partly due to external factors, like community interest led by the Children’s Hospital Fund and the republic’s First Lady?

Of course it’s not all roses. Spend enough time anywhere and you start to notice stains on the carpet.

On some days you may begin to wonder if there are any ethnic Estonians left in the hospital at all. It can sometimes seem that Estonian may not be the best language to use when seeking medical care. But you soon realize that nearly everyone speaks enough. You meet a few native speakers, too, and it becomes apparent that, despite what we read in the papers, not everyone has yet gone to Finland.

You meet the wacky resident who delivers a lecture ad nauseum about how to weigh urine in diapers. He explains to you the meaning of the numbers to the left and right of the decimal point on the digital monitor. Kilos. Grams. (Ah, the thrill of science!)

I want to ask him how to know the difference between a “6” and a “9” on the digital thermometer, but Liina stops me. “Don’t make enemies here,” she says. Besides, one veteran doctor has already told the resident to shut up and stop spewing nonsense.

Then there’s the jailhouse food. While it may be good in the cafes, the food brought to your room causes you to wonder whether one of Stalin’s actuaries has conducted a calorie count, and you are being fed the bare minimum in order to keep you alive. This is somewhat mitigated by the very pleasant servers, who seem always in good spirits when they enter your room.

There is the pay parking lot patrolled so efficiently that its proceeds must fund half the hospital. Perhaps Liina and I are not the smartest parkers, but we have been fined three times, and we console ourselves by hoping the 35-euro fines might go to fund a new kidney machine or to fill the canyon-sized pothole at the turnoff to the hospital, and not go to put gasoline in some politician’s luxury automobile.

Once you’ve been there a while you disappear into the woodwork and start to hear private conversations in the elevator. Workers’ complaints about ridiculous bureaucracy. A nurse telling a doctor to stop treating them like dogs. There’s an ear doctor from Soviet era who still thinks it’s the Soviet era. And there are of course still a number of angry babushka types, who, in the words of a friend, are accumulating major karmic debt.

Some floors are run like prisons where the nurses are the guards. “We have rules here,” said Nurse Ratched, after she caught me sitting in the bed. “The bed is for mothers!”

“I thought the bed was for the parental guardian?” I replied. “And that would be me.”

She bared her teeth as a warning and moved on.

But other floors are little Utopias. Convalescing children do cartwheels in the hallways and socialize in the playroom. The staff is happy and smiling. For example, it would not be out of place on the third floor, I think, for a fairy princess to appear riding bareback atop a white unicorn.

***

When your infant son wakes in the ICU it’s the most unsettling part. He wants to cry out but can’t because of the tube in his nose. He thrashes about, pulling at his tethers. You can see the terror in his eyes. You place a hand flat on his chest and another on his forehead. But that doesn’t help at all; it only makes him want to be held.

After a while he steadies, he turns his head and stares you in the eyes. He melts you.

And you are as helpless as he. There is nothing for you to do but trust. Trust in fate, in your god, but mostly trust in the physicians and nurses.

And you do.

One Voice

“One voice can change a room. If it can change a room, then it can change a city…can change a state…can change a nation…can change the world.” Call me an idealist, but I believe it.

True, humanity may be doomed, but since you can’t sleep 24 hours a day, you might as well do something useful with your time. And trying to change the world is far more challenging than, say, real-estate development.

I’ve always wanted to be a speechwriter, and so I’ve drafted this one for President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. I invite other writers to do the same and publish the results in newspapers and websites around the country. Because once voice…

Commencement address of Toomas Hendrik Ilves to the graduating class of Tartu University, June 2011.

As I look out at your young, somewhat bored faces, I see you are expecting the usual pablum from a commencement speaker. It would be tempting to trot out the platitudes about how you are different than those who have gone before you and the great successes you will enjoy. But since that would no doubt bore us both, probably me more than you, and since your rector and I just shared a case of beer in the shade of a large oak, I have decided to spell out for you exactly how things are. [Note to self: Loosen bowtie; gaze thoughtfully over crowd.]

The usual commencement speech would entail me telling you that you are the future of Estonia, and that I am comfortable handing over the country to you. You would recognize the former to be a fact, and you would suspect the latter to be idle flattery. You would be right.

Quite frankly, some of you, despite your very good educations, scare me. If we cannot stop people of your age from driving cars into trees, if we cannot stop the spread of AIDS in our country, if we cannot find a solution for people of different ethnicities to live in productive harmony on this one small patch of earth, then there is not much hope for our future. I wonder whether you are up to this task.

Without boasting I will tell you my generation has accomplished a great deal. In a few short years, the names of my peers will be given to streets and public buildings. In this way, history will celebrate the problems we have solved more than the ones we will leave to you.

But since you are, like it or not, our future, I would like to remark briefly about the past and then offer a few words about your future, which is indeed the future of Estonia.

Most of you are around 20 years old. You have only heard stories of the period of history which ended with Estonia’s re-independence in 1991. And you may not be intimately familiar with the history of the last 20 years, as you have been busy — and rightly so — being young. But you have now reached the age where it is time I spoil your fun.

This first period I speak of, 20 years prior to your birth, was spent by many working for an independent state. The second 20 years after your birth were spent, so to speak, arranging a seat for you at the Big Table.

Since the year of your birth, Estonia has made the necessary sacrifices and changes to ensure our security through memberships in elite western clubs.

The list is long and impressive: The UN, the World Bank, the IMF, NATO, the EU, the Schengen zone, the OECD, and the Euro.

Estonia has been admired by and praised by the west for our significant achievements. We have been, in a way, the absolute best Boy Scout, earning every merit badge there is to have.

But I would remind you that many of these achievements were within an externally-prescribed context. We were given no guidebook, but the goals were clear.

The meaning of this is that Estonia is now an equal: no more and no less than our western allies. We worked 20 years, one might frame it, to arrive at the starting line. We “got to Denmark,” to tamper slightly with Fukuyama.

Some may hint that my generation of leaders, having achieved all there is to achieve under this merit-badge like structure, is now confused and adrift. Joakim Helenius has pointed out that to be among Europe’s five richest is not a vision. The Economist has noted our Prime Minister is "a manager, not a visionary." I would argue, however, that what Estonia has most needed was a highly disciplined manager. And that is what we got.

My generation’s work has laid the groundwork for you. We have brought you a stable, independent state, a state with a seat at the world’s table. But what will you do with it? Have you any idea?

I will suggest to you that the hardest work (and perhaps the most interesting) is still ahead: We are entering the era of original thinking.

This new era will require an entirely different type of change, a type which no external body can prescribe.

In 2010, Chris Patten outlined in the New York Review of Books what he thought Europe’s role in the world ought to be. As far as I am aware, such a thoughtful look at Estonia’s future role in Europe (and the world), has not been so cogently articulated by our statesmen. But maybe you ought to consider it.

So what can you do? [Note: Untie bowtie now — let it hang around neck.]

Start by ending the practice of constantly reminding ourselves that Estonia is small. This too easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I cannot imagine that citizens of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, or Liechtenstein so often begin their sentences with the words “Our country is so small…” One is as big as one imagines. Let us right here and now agree to repair our imaginations.

End “semu kapitalism.” A country with such scarce human resources as ours has no room for anything but a meritocracy. To compete in the world only our very best will suffice. Our partners in every walk of life must be selected on the basis of merit and experience alone, and there is no place to wonder “Kas sul on oma jope seal?”

Smash the glass ceiling. As Vello Vikerkaar has written, the best man for the job is a woman. Let key decisions be made around the conference table and not in the sauna or bordello. Our nation cannot afford a good ol’ boys club and must take talent where we find it.

Stop eating our own. It is entirely true that an Estonian’s favorite breakfast is another Estonian. You may laugh, but you should cry. Because this is not at all funny. It is rather a very telling statement about our self-esteem. The only solution is an Estonian-free diet.

Beware the communal ego. The Estonian media, though heavily criticized, devotes inordinate amounts of space to atta-boy articles celebrating how clever we Estonians are. Too much of this puts our culture at risk of indulging in the celebration of mediocrity. As the eminent professor Jack Gladney has noted: “We’re all brilliant…You call me brilliant, I call you brilliant. It’s a form of communal ego.”

Despite the advertising, our image abroad is not often “positively transforming” but rather one associated with crime, AIDS, or the grey pall of Eastern Europe. It is not always fair, but it is reality. Let us recognize it as such and begin to change it.

End the brain drain. Our talented doctors, scientists, and tech minds, as well as our qualified skilled laborers, are exiting the country faster than replacements enter. If this is not somehow reversed — perhaps by ending the bureaucratic water-boarding of our own Estonian companies who wish to employ foreigners – Estonia will continue on its path toward being nothing but the most distant suburb of Helsinki.

To make Estonia a viable employment market, our educational- and health care systems must rival any in Europe. Nobody, least of all Estonians, wants to be a citizen of a backwater nation.

Our “talendikoju” call has gone largely unheeded, perhaps because of young people’s proclivity for adventure, perhaps partly because an older generation’s call to a younger one is often naturally ignored. And while I recognize that an education abroad and a little bit of foreign work experience may not in themselves produce change in our country, these bring with them higher expectations for ourselves and others. These we desperately need.

After 50 years of forced separation from Europe, it is more contact with the world that we need, not less.

And last but not least, we must embrace the Russian-speaking population of Estonia as our own. I have been partly at fault here, I admit. I recognize that I am also the president of 400,000 Russian speakers. I recognize that they are not occupiers, nor are they representatives of occupiers. Perhaps what Russians know best, something we modern Estonians might remind ourselves of as we chase the Almighty Euro, [Note: Look directly into TV camera] is Не имей 100 рублей, а имей 100 друзей.

And as poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko remarked in 1993 at the University of Chicago: "We need to teach tolerance from childhood. The future for all of us is patriotism for all mankind."

Thank you.

[Note: In event of ovation, throw bowtie into crowd.]

***

Get more would-be speechwriting here.

A Three-Martini Breakfast

“Perhaps a tad bit of white tea?” offered the businessman, “before I tell you all about my philosophy of life?”

His sentence contained two clear reasons to run the other direction, and normally I would have, but I was being paid to interview him. But for money or not, if I was to endure what was surely to be his cliché-ridden, borrowed outlook on life, I was going to need something stronger than tea. “Got any whiskey?” I asked.

“No, but maybe you’d prefer Bai Hao Yinzhen?”

I had no idea what that meant, but I was very much afraid he might next suggest that we go get pedicures together. “As long as there’s plenty of alcohol in it,” I answered. But there wasn’t any alcohol in it. Bai hao Yinzhen, he explained, was also a tea.

***

The great thing about getting drunk in the morning, Sergei Dovlatov once wrote, is that you can take the rest of the day off. And Dovlatov had done enough journalism to know. While I never lived in Estonia in the Soviet time, the early 90s were close enough, with the bottle-in-the-desk-drawer office culture still largely intact.

It was usual to have a brandy with your morning coffee, a beer or two with lunch, and then a bottle of vodka or two at whoever’s place you ended up for dinner. All this alcohol consumption seemed to aid us in the office where I worked, though to an outside observer it might have appeared that our chief competence was the ability to take anything simple and make it excruciatingly complicated. But Estonia had no real international ambitions in those days: the focus was on a move to capitalism, and a bit of alcohol on the job was merely a transitional tool.

“You’ll be judged by what you eat and drink,” a kolkhoz director once announced when I visited for a tour of his farm. We got loaded and then drove around in his Volga to inspect the cows. Once a morning meeting with a brewery director turned into a two-hour drinking session culminating with a singalong to “The Brewer” where all present performed the last verse on top of the conference table. What the directors of those companies knew was, respectively, how to make a cow calve and how to brew beer. They had little use for parroting modern management books, utterances such as “two plus two equals five!” or “Business 2.0” or “win-win.” These men just rolled up their sleeves and, at least between the drinking, did their jobs. And they never asked if you needed a yixing pot or wanted yak butter with your beverage.

It sometimes seems the trouble with post-EU Estonia is that the previous work culture has been thrown out wholesale, the baby along with the bath water. The works of Vladimir Lenin have been replaced by Deepak Chopra, Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, and Michael Porter, whose chief contributions, it seems to me, have been to make us all take ourselves very seriously. Was it one of them who, when I wasn’t looking, replaced the alcohol with green tea?

I never worked in North America during the three-martini lunch period, but in the 1980s it was perfectly acceptable to eat lots of red meat and have a drink or two with lunch. We even enjoyed coming back to the office a bit lit. It offered additional courage for negotiations or for flirting with the office hottie.

But in a nascent business culture the pendulum swings wider, and I fear we are saddled with living like Buddhist monks for a while. Hang some wind chimes in your office, attend yoga classes at lunchtime, quote Sun Tzu to a visiting journalist.

***

My particular businessman started in about “CSR,” and though I know what it means I gave him the satisfaction of explaining it to me.

“Corporate Social Responsibility…” he continued, as if he had personally invented the concept and would be soon beatified for donating a couple of Chinese-made bicycles to an orphanage. He went on with the altruist act, throwing in terms like “synergy” and “human capital” and half a dozen other terms which had nothing to do with calves calving or beer brewing, until he realized that my mind was elsewhere.

“Aren’t you going to write any of this down?” he asked. How could I have explained to him that a good writer respects his readers?

But since it was a corporate assignment, and since I was being paid in part to make him feel good about himself, I told him that I had been blessed with an audiographic memory and that, anyway, he’d get to approve whatever I wrote. And then I said I was feeling a bit ill (which wasn’t a lie) and asked to use his bathroom. There, squirreled away in a stall, I phoned Liina and begged her to call me in exactly three minutes and shout into the receiver: “Warren Buffett called again. He wants to talk right now.”

“Who?” she asked.

“Warr-en Buff-ett,” I enunciated. “Just make sure you’re loud enough to be heard.”

Back in his office I excused myself when my phone rang. “This call I have to take.”

“I completely understand,” he said, after he overheard my brief conversation with Liina. And of course he understood, because after all it was his god of gods who needed to talk to me.

“Do you think he might come to Estonia?” the businessman asked.

“He’s an old-fashioned guy,” I replied, standing in the doorway. “He likes steak or burgers washed down with Cherry Coke. Or a beverage even stronger.”

With that I brought my hands together in front of my chest. “Namaste,” I said, bowing slightly as I stepped out into the world.

***

Postscript: Nature Photography Update

My April 23 story, “How to Become a Nature Photographer,” inspired a significant amount of reader feedback, including requests for tips on nature photography, but also a surprising number of suggestions about the best techniques for cooking roadkill fox (baked seems to be the favorite in Harjumaa, while southern Estonians prefer it grilled).

Jacques-Alain Finkeltroc, a photographer for Estonian Public Broadcasting whose activities were chronicled in the story, was recently honored by the Estonian Nature Photographers Association for his work photographing rodents in the Elistvere Animal Park.

Tarmo, a.k.a. Gagarin, was deluged with reader requests as to where one could purchase the Merino wool underwear. (Answer: Amazon.com.) Gagarin also recently garnered fame by photographing the five rarest animals on earth within the space of one single week: the Pinta Island Tortoise, the Baiji (river dolphin), the Vancouver Island Marmot, the Seychelles Sheath-tailed Bat, and the Javan Rhino. His expedition was financed by a grant from British Petroleum.

Powerpoint People

There’s an old Native American tradition that was still practiced the year I lived on a Dakota reservation. Every full moon, all those who had passed the manhood ritual would gather around the fire, and a pipe would be passed. It was not a pipe for smoking – most braves smoked Marlboros or rolled their own — but one for speaking. Tribe members patiently waited their turn, and when the pipe reached a brave’s hands, he might say what was on his mind. Or he might not. There was just as often silence.

In my exploration of Northern Europe I have discovered a Finno-Ugric tribe which keeps a similar ritual for allowing braves to speak. No pipe is passed, though. The Finno-Ugric tribe has replaced it with the cord to a Powerpoint projector.

And unlike the pipe, the cord is not passed peacefully, and a meeting can sometimes turn as aggressive as a game of lacrosse: it is custom that tribesmen attempt to grab the cord as it dangles from a ceiling-mounted projector near the center of the conference table.

“Here’s the point I’m making,” said Pekka, snatching the swinging cord from the hands of Heikki and plugging it into his laptop. Pekka stated his case, managing three or four painfully-constructed slides, until Kalevi, a brave of higher standing, yanked the cord from the socket of the Pekka’s laptop and plugged it into his own.

After a two-hour meeting, with the cord passed to half a dozen corporate warriors, no decision had been made on the issue, but all left satisfied. Each had had his chance to express himself and show at least some of the slides he had spent hours constructing. The meeting adjourned with promises to email presentations to each other.

I encountered this tribe when I was brought in to consult on a form of communication unfamiliar to them: the corporate magazine. They had come to me through their tribe’s medicine man who had traveled over the great water and had heard my name in context of the mystical practice of the printed word. Soon, my name and likeness were carried to his tribe and spread among their ranks via Powerpoint, and eventually I was invited to visit the tribe at its pleasant camp in a grassy meadow by the sea.

Though the vast majority of Northern tribes lead isolated existences, this one had seen the need to stretch beyond its borders in the name of commerce. More prescient members of the tribal council recognized a Powerpoint presentation in their native tongue was no more decipherable to the West than the smoke signals their forefathers had used. Just as their predecessors had come to eventually accept Colonel Colt and his invention as part of their future, the tribe believed that I and my words on papyrus in a widely-spoken language might be the key to their future.

Northern tribes are known to have accepted few outsiders, and those who have been received have generally returned to document the tribes’ consumption of copious quantities of alcohol and co-ed bathing rituals involving nudity, sweat, and birch branches. So I was not completely unprepared for their colorful oddities.

But I was indeed struck by the tribe’s devotion to Powerpoint as a communications tool. For it, they shunned all talk, and their corridors were as silent as a funeral home. This was clearly strong medicine.

“Perhaps we might talk over a cup of coffee,” I suggested to Pekka, after what I interpreted to be his victory in the conference room with the projector cord.

Pekka was silent for a long moment, perhaps because he had no specific slide to address my question. “Coffee,” he at long last uttered, “is in the silver pitcher at the far end of the table. Tea is in the black one.” There were sandwiches on the table, too, though they went unmentioned.

Though I was not successful with Pekka, after several weeks in the presence of this Finno-Ugric tribe, I twice managed to make eye contact with one I believed to be a single female. One day, I managed to engineer it where we were both walking through the same corridor in the same direction. I walked faster to catch up with her and just as she turned her head I removed a shiny blue can of Gin Long Drink from my pocket. “I have more,” I said.

She quickened her pace which I took as nervousness. “Could we not meet?” I said emboldened by her palpable quickness of breath. She stopped and looked at her feet. “I could tweet you,” she offered guardedly, and she dashed down a staircase on her right. I did not follow. Despite her beauty — she was a fine specimen — a 140-character limit was not going to allow me to complete the magazine.

I began to worry how I might write an entire magazine requiring 40,000 words if the most input I was to receive was a host of Powerpoint slides and random, 140-character tweets. I sought guidance from the medicine man who had brought me to the tribe.

“The drums say you have Gin Long Drink,” he said to me before I had even a chance to sit down. “Long Drink is strong medicine.”

Indeed. And I knew a ferryboat where it was kept.

The magazine proved a success. The stories celebrated the wisdom and cleverness of the tribe and enumerated the superior quality of its goods. And despite their worry that a photograph could steal a soul, they permitted my colleague Kaupo (whose name amused them) to make attractive, well-lit images of them in their daily routines. Pekka was photographed in front of a projection of a histogram, remote control in hand. Heikki was shown from behind, staring hard at a multi-color pie-chart slide on his computer.

As a show of thanks, I was invited to the tribe’s summer conclave, where after a welcome Powerpoint detailing the tribe’s seasonal successes, we adjourned to a row of chairs near a pristine lake. Male tribesmen removed their shirts to tan their pale bodies. Strong medicine in blue cans was passed, but it was still some time before the silence was broken.

“If you close your eyes and stare right at the sun,” said Pekka, “then the image you see is much like Powerpoint.” Braves all around grunted in assent.

***

Get more ethnography here.

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.