The Commonwealth

I awoke feeling refreshed. Perhaps it was the silence around me, perhaps the feeling of clarity from yesterday’s decision. Either way I was glad.

The light rain had continued all through the night, and the corners of my sleeping bag were damp again. I had about half an hour of relative sunlight with a constant wind, so I stood around eating a lettuce-forward breakfast, and the bag was mostly dry when I rolled it up. I had an actual room booked for tonight, so I could unroll everything in there to let the drying finish.

The few patrons around me had vanished in the early morning. With no other campers here, the site felt less like a campground and more like a tangle of animal paths and tiny clearings that I’d just wandered into. There were no markers to delineate spaces, and tall bushes crowded the sides of the road, which curved around continuously as if to avoid them. Perhaps that was true: Perhaps trees are so rare in Iceland that the locals would rather redirect a road than cut one down. If so, I liked it — even though I almost got lost on my way out.

The road squiggled on. When my phone caught a signal, I got an email update from my new okCupid friend. We were sharing meta-thoughts about dating. The rain had paused for the moment so I stopped on the shoulder and typed a response:

Later in the day I got an equally thoughtful response:

She proposed that we try a video chat when I got to the hotel, assuming there was coverage. I said that was a fine idea. We were both curious to see how we’d react to each other in “real time”.

Also I had to look up “proxemics.” What an interesting word!

I stowed the laptop again and kept pedaling. Around the next corner I saw a delightful sign:

There’s a replica Viking farm here? I AM SO INTO THIS.

It’s called Þjórsárdal. It’s a reconstruction of a Viking farm based on the layout of an archeological site in  the Þjórsárdalur Valley, which was buried under a thick blanket of volcanic ash when Hekla erupted in 1104. The eruption was not so sudden that people were buried – they had time to flee – but it was continuous enough that the entire area was rendered uninhabitable. Archeologists dream of this sort of thing!

The parking lot in Þjórsárdal was nearly empty. I just rolled the bike up and set the kickstand. Admission was cheap, but the lack of people also meant that most of the events and activities were cancelled.

I cued up the soundtrack to Skyrim – because I’m an incorrigible nerd – and walked slowly around, enraptured by the artifacts, the equipment, and the little informative placards.

The exterior turf construction was historically accurate, as well as the peg-and-hole interior construction, with the exception of the ticket booth and other modern areas used for running the business.

I was in the lodge house for at least an hour, reading everything and thinking deep thoughts about human lifespans and cultural transmission. What a cool place!

Eventually I ran out of stuff to stare at, and I knew I had a big hill to tackle and many more miles to ride, so I took a few photos in the parking lot and then got back in the saddle.

After the hill I rode out across a plateau. The terrain around me felt a little more volcanic; less grassy. Rain started and stopped half a dozen times. Even if there was time to set my gear out to dry, the sun never broke the clouds for longer than a few minutes at a time.

In the distance I spotted huge power lines, and eventually rolled past a hydroelectric power station. Another (relatively) free modern resource for Icelanders, to go along with geothermal heat and clean water, though I imagine the up-front investment was huge.

It fit the larger pattern, really: Iceland has amazing potential for renewable resources but the up-front cost could not be met without a massive influx of cash, technology, and material from elsewhere. The picture of the country as self-sufficient is very carefully framed.

Mostly I didn’t think about modern Icelanders, and just gazed at the weird and rugged terrain sliding past the bicycle.

In any other part of the world, I’d see a slender, chunky rock formation like this, and think “someone must have built a house here long ago…”

No wonder this terrain has been a substitute for alien planets in dozens of sci-fi films, of budgets high and low.

Eventually I reached the hotel. It was raining heavily when I propped the bike outside. The place was crowded, which was disorienting after my long solitary ride. Everyone indoors was walking around in slippers, or bare socks, or wearing shoe covers. Apparently there was a serious problem with tracking in the volcanic soil.

You know you’re back in civilization when you can get Kokteilsósa!

I turned both heaters on full blast and cracked the window, then laid my tent out on the bed. Like a gross-ass bike tourist I did my laundry in the shower, then shuffled things around to dry that as well.

Then it was time for my video chat with my new friend. Feeling weirdly nervous, I joined the hotel wifi and clicked the link.

As soon as my face appeared on the screen, she said, “Oh thank goodness, this isn’t some elaborate catfishing thing. You actually look like you!” I laughed.

She had been serious-looking in the photos. In real time, she smiled and laughed and took equal parts in sharing and asking questions. The give-and-take felt natural.  I knew I was being a bit over-enthusiastic but I couldn’t help it; I was nervous.  We’d only recently started talking, but she actually knew far more about me than anyone I’d been talking to in Iceland for weeks.

I only realized later that she seemed to be much more used to video meetings than I was.  Her setup was composed so that she sat way back from the camera, showing her whole upper body, and she was reclined comfortably.  The arrangement allowed her to express with their hands, and not worry so much about whether eye contact was constantly happening. Also, had she chosen that arrangement so I could confirm that she was the shape she claimed to be? My little hotel room was so small there was no way I could reciprocate.

We talked about the history of London, and the schedule of my road ahead in Iceland.  She talked about the “times of antiquity” and how Europe had plundered other parts of the world to gather artifacts.  She mentioned a book sitting over on her shelf, and recommended it to me.  She’d only gotten partway into it because she’d been reading it during her dissertation time.  She talked about Stephen Fry and some of his writing, and how her sister had accidentally run into him twice, and I mentioned his interview on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.  She didn’t care much for that podcast – the format was too boring – but she always liked Paula Poundstone.  Turns out we’d both seen her live in our youth.  She recommended another podcast called “Behind The Bastards”.

We talked for almost an hour and there wasn’t a second of dead air, which was nice. I had to sign off though, because there was some business to deal with involving my father. We agreed to chat again soon, though I cautioned that I would be entering the highlands and video would probably not work for the next week. The whole thing was delightful; so much so that I instantly began asking myself: “Why are you so far away from this person? Why did you want to go on this trip anyway?” And that, after a pretty amazing day of riding that included a surprise tour of a Viking farm. I had a bit of whiplash.

Then it was time to switch gears again: I had multiple phone appointments with caregivers and healthcare workers. My father and his wife were both struggling with dementia and had multiple people providing different kinds of assistance, and they all needed to be coordinated, and they all needed to be paid through a recalcitrant insurance system, and at the same time I was trying to get my father evaluated so he could potentially move into an “assisted living” home and share an apartment there with his wife.

The process was seriously hampered by the fact that I couldn’t make outgoing calls on my phone from Iceland. I had to contact my sister, who would call the person I needed, then call me up, and merge us into a conference call. Then she stayed on the line making notes, which we sent back and forth in the chat. She couldn’t do the talking for me, because I was the only person who had “power of attorney” and could make decisions about my Dad’s life.

It was a whole lot of stuff about doctor reports, and paperwork filings, and therapy approvals, and lots of arguing over who was qualified to evaluate my father and what it would mean. It dragged out for hours. I was grateful for the time difference at least, since it meant I was catching all these people early in the workday before ennui set in.

When that was done, all I could do was drop onto the sheets in a dead faint, with my laundry arrayed around me. What a weird life I’m leading.