Arnarstapi

I woke up late and moseyed over to the nearest restaurant, where I got a nice salad for breakfast. Then I grabbed my camera and went exploring.

Every two hours, a giant tourbus would pull into the town and spew out a crowd of people, then let them walk around or eat food for a while before sucking them all back in and departing, just in time for the next tourbus. The people were usually older than 50 years, wearing shorts or khaki pants covered in pockets, and festooned with camera gear. Just about everyone had a telescoping “selfie stick” with something stuck on the end — a small camera, a video recorder, a cellphone.

I couldn’t help thinking: If humans were all just a little less coordinated and a lot less mindful of cleaning up corpses, this whole area would be ringed with dead people clutching selfie sticks. They’d step right off the cliffs while backing up for that perfect photo. Animals would scavenge the corpses, and a thousand years from now, alien archeologists would unearth a pile of bones hidden beneath 20 tons of selfie sticks.

Some alien scientist would make a presentation about it, to a skeptical audience: “We think their entire civilization was based on these.  They would carry them from place to place one at a time, in great migrations, and when enough of them piled up, they would build a new settlement.”

Switch to the next slide: Artistic reconstructions of primitive huts, clothing, suspension bridges — all made of selfie sticks. “This recreation is called the Empire Stick Building.” Flintstones-style cars made of selfie sticks, parked at the base. Next slide: An animation, running in loop:  “How we think the humans cooked food.” Selfie-stick pans, selfie-stick iceboxes, telescoping selfie-stick utensils.

“We believe they hunted by attaching small flat stones to the end of these, and flinging them at caribou.” Well, that wouldn’t be too far off at least. “Truly a versatile species. But there’s just one thing we can’t figure out … How did blind humans get around?”

It was honestly quite shocking how close one could get to these nesting birds without them seeming to care. … Of course, they could be feeling quite a lot of stress, and just refusing to abandon their nests. It’s not like you can look at a bird’s expression and tell.

Better to stay back a bit.