Amazing Coast All Day

In the morning I went to settle my camping fee, and discovered a Nicelandic setup: Pay in the kitchen!

Today would be a quiet day, spent snacking along into a mild headwind. Headwinds are never nice, but this one did interesting things to the sea:

I switched between music and books all day, giving myself room to think. My mind kept coming back to the scene of the accident from yesterday, and the behavior of the people involved, especially the victim.

The young woman had not yelled or cried, or expressed any anguish at all — just a shell-shocked quiet. As a fellow introvert I knew there was a storm inside her head of course. It was just thoroughly walled in by learned social behavior and disposition. I wondered if that expression would come later – days or weeks from now – ambushing her in a safe isolated place, or perhaps somewhere embarrassingly public. If I was dealing with people back home in California I would anticipate that. But could I expect it here, with Icelanders? Perhaps the stoicism I see around me on the surface goes all the way to the core, and this young person already lives inside it, with no role models for something else.

It would be silly of course to extrapolate a single personality onto an entire country. But it’s still possible, and interesting, to talk about averages, and why those could exist. As I rode along, snapping the occasional picture of the rugged coast and forbidding mountains, I wondered if there was a geographical influence at work.

How much does this terrain influence the people living on it?

I thought about the young woman, and her entire age group. What must it be like, spending your teenage years in Icelandic terrain?

I amused myself by trying to puzzle it out. For one, the population here is either super-concentrated, or sparse. There aren’t a lot of suburbs around. If your family does farming or ranching, there is plenty of kid-appropriate work to be done. This makes me think that Icelandic kids are not likely to hang around together in large groups unattended, away from the grounding influence of adults.

The setting may be rural, but it’s not big enough to be anonymous. You can’t drive for half an hour and be among total strangers. Iceland is a small country and most of your socializing destinations are on a line, up or down the main road. So if you engage in some embarrassing young-person shenanigans, it’s very likely your parents will get wind of it, because they probably know some other parents over there by name.

Your parents are probably quiet people.  Farm work isn’t a dialogue-driven process. There isn’t a big dancing or singing tradition relative to elsewhere, though you do get a lot of wickedly funny verbal humor that you’ll appreciate more as an adult.

I wondered about this, actually. In rural places where the winter is harsh, there’s a long chunk of time where people are trapped indoors with each other. Being quiet and polite is a good way to avoid expensive conflict, but don’t people also need an outlet? Like, a tavern down in the middle of the village, where music is playing, and people are drinking and shouting over the din, and getting some chaos out of their system? Maybe a bit of dancing?

But if that exists here, what about young people? They wouldn’t have their own youth-oriented places to carouse. They’d be mixed in with the adults. And the adults would be watching.

It’s funny to contemplate the idea that a place apparently made of quiet wilderness could also be socially confining. But the terrain seems to push that way. You need to be prepared, and people need to know where you’re going. You can’t go skipping down to the beach for a roll in the surf and some sunbathing. You can’t go wandering into the woods, where the cover of trees gives you easy isolation, because there aren’t really any woods.

Now, I shouldn’t get carried away. Young people are going to find outlets wherever they are. I hear popular indoor activities for kids here are video games, D&D campaigns, drinking, playing in bands, chatting online, drinking, having movie nights, going to shows, drinking, endless flirting with potential romantic partners, and going on joyrides to any place where there’s a bit of privacy, even if it’s just a 24-hour mini-mart. That overlaps a whole lot with what my friends did back in Santa Cruz.

And sure, you can’t do casual outdoor stuff, but you can still be outside. There are field sports when the weather’s good. Get your legs working and the cold doesn’t matter so much. And anything that you can do on ice, is available in Iceland.

There’s also something to be said for the isolation of the country from its neighbors. It’s pretty hard to leave. You can’t hop in a car and drive for a while, and end up in Mexico, or go through an undersea tunnel and emerge in France, where people speak a different language and there is serious anonymity and weirdness. In Iceland you’re more likely to be exposed to other countries via incoming tourism, and that isn’t usually a positive filter. I mean, if my community back home was just comprised of the entitled action-hound subset that went on international vacations all the time, I’d probably be a serial arsonist. Let them all stay abroad, thank you very much.

That tourism – all those loud rude people coming in and setting a bad example – probably makes Icelanders want to double-down on their stoicism. Most of them, at least. And that’s another way geography contributes.

This pressure probably goes in another direction as well: If this terrain doesn’t fit your personality, then you can emigrate. The way is open, by the big airport and ferry terminal.

I had fun pondering all this, then switched to some Skyrim for a while to reset my brain.

A while after that, the sun broke through the clouds, and I rearranged my layers. It felt like an autumn day back home, and I felt a bit nostalgic. To feel connected to things in my home country I started listening to a news podcast. That sent my mind in quite a different direction.