The cat’s human arrived home while I was there, and grinned at me as he went inside.
I swung around towards the harbor and the downtown, and the first thing I spotted were these massive chunks of rubber and steel. There’s also a convenient take-out box on the ground for scale. What do you suppose these are for?
Hammershaimb studied Old Norse for years in Denmark, and was influential in the formation of the Faroese written language. The language itself is very old of course, but there had never been formal agreement on how it should be written down for modern purposes. During his time, there was some debate over whether it should be written phonetically to resemble the modern spoken language, or whether it should be derived from the old Nordic language. Hammershaimb argued for the latter.
When Janus Kamban constructed the monument in 1948 there was still lively debate between linguists in Iceland, Denmark, and Norway over the fate of the Faroese language, but the prevailing opinion was that Hammershaimb had been right, and without his advocacy the Nordic language would have faded into irrelevance.
(Hey, want a convenient map and inventory of all the statues and stuff around this city? Here’s an official one!)
I got coffee down by the harbor, and said hello to a few locals who were drawn to my bike. My final task in town was to buy a giant platter of sushi from the local restaurant and pin it to my backpack. This would be breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Then I was off, to the north. I had some hills to cover before the highway met the sea again. Along the way I saw another of those off-kilter road signs:
For a while it was just me, and the road, and the sea… And sheep. The shoulder of the road was wide enough to ignore the cars, and they all passed me at a respectful speed. “A bicyclist? Give that lunatic a wide berth; the lunacy might be contagious!”
As the road went upward to match the high side of the Kollafjarðartunnilin, a tunnel through the mountain to the village of Oyrareingir and beyond, I heard a faint whistling noise. It reminded me of a referee at a soccer game, blowing a whistle to stop the action, but in this case it was a constant rhythm of tweets, sounding out across the floor of the valley to my right.
I paused for a while, confused, and then finally realized that there was a rancher standing down there, blowing a whistle to direct the actions of a sheepdog.
It looked like the sheepdog was learning tricks for a competition. I used my zoom lens to grab some video.
Oh, to be a sheepdog! To have a body made for running, and senses keen for it, and enough brains to do some joyful task your human rancher sets for you, so a warm hearth and good food and praise are guaranteed. …And not too much brains, so you don’t care to question the arrangement.
Apparently there is a breed of dog called the Faroese Sheepdog, with some distinction from the more general Border Collie category. These dogs have a tougher job than usual: The sheep here don’t have much instinct for flocking and are kept “free range,” so they wander all over the place. The dogs are trained mainly to chase down a sheep, catch it by the wool at the shoulder or by the foreleg, and bring it to the ground to hold it so a rancher can close the distance and do whatever they need. Moving sheep around in flocks is something they do, but it’s not their career.
I stood there watching the dog move sheep around for half an hour at least, before I remembered that daylight isn’t infinite and there was still ground to cover. Onward, into the tunnel!
There was some kind of street faire in progress with lots of kids making noise, and tables set out with various home-baked goods. A woman was standing around with a horse offering free rides to brave youngsters.
I asked one of the locals if I could buy a slice of cake with my Icelandic or American money, but she only accepted Faroese or Danish money. A man standing close by overheard the exchange, and pulled a coin out of his pocket and handed it to me. “For you,” he said. “Have some!”
Now that’s just plain delightful. It was pretty good cake, too.
I rounded a corner and began going up a different fjord. The wind was with me for a change, so I felt like I could stop more often. I found a couple of derelict structures close to the water that looked interesting, and clamored down to touch them.
The colors of the Icelandic flag could be interpreted as “water around ice around lava”, but these colors… Hmm. Mist around fjords around wildflowers maybe?
The day turned to evening. When I rolled down the last hill and came to the town of Hósvík, I took a little video:
The owner of my AirBnB helped me stow the bike in the garage. He reported that there was no food in town, though there was a pizza place “up the road at Hvalvík.” Later I consulted a map and saw it was called “Joe Pizza”, and was half an hour away by bike. It would close before I got there.
As I unpacked my gear and settled in, I felt very thoughtful. Before I could crawl into the bed I had to type for a while and dig this out of my brain:
If you’re a person who likes solo activities, the first era of your life is an endless war against people and institutions that demand your attention. “Ugh, why won’t all these people go away so I can read?”
If you manage some victory against them, you enter a second era, full of ongoing satisfaction from all the progress you make on your solo activities. “I’ve read so many great books. It’s incredible. I’ve set up the perfect reading lounge. I love running my hands across the stacks, while I decide what to read next.”
But then you enter a third era. One you didn’t expect. You begin to suffer from being alone too often. Tragically, the only activities you’ve learned how to enjoy are solo activities. “I feel lonely. But people are so annoying. Let me browse the shelves and find a book to cheer me up…”
A difficult struggle begins. You need to play catch-up with all the skills you didn’t use when you were fighting to be alone. You can’t just avoid eye contact and fail to return calls any more. But the trouble is, every minute of the struggle, a part of you is terribly uncomfortable and screaming that your alone time is under threat, just like in the old days, and the only way to feel better is to stop this foolish socializing at once and go be alone. Half of your soul will bravely start a conversation with a stranger, and the other half will instantly start scrambling for a way to end the conversation and get this man out of your face.
After this struggle, scattered with small victories, you might see a fourth era: You like people, and can genuinely connect with them, and you also like time alone, and you have a collection of means to enjoy both.
Of course, this isn’t a perfect metaphor because these “eras” are really all happening at once, and we often leap around between them depending on life circumstances. But I do think that there is some kind of progression: I think introverts like me can only live in the fourth era long-term after we spend enough time in the earlier ones.
One of the astonishing facts about the world, that hits me in the face over and over again when I’m traveling like this, is just how many people are living in it. The sheer number of lives happening all at once around us is utterly, absolutely, incomprehensible; and the ways in which we can reach out, the connections we can make, the perspectives we can learn … there is no end to their variety and power.
And yet, even when we travel, so few of us actually reach out and connect. We go to a place to learn some history, see a building, feel some different weather, and the people around us are mostly just vendors of services. Why is that? Well, mostly because we already know more people than we can handle back home.
As much as I enjoyed my “second era” of being an introvert, my struggle in the “third era” is what truly gave me a shot at well-being; and that little toolkit I slowly put together – the one I use to build up a conversation with a stranger from nothing and dig for a connection, when I’m out here traveling on two wheels – gets just a little bit better with each use. Nevertheless, I feel an almost tragic sense of loss, when I think about how many more connections I could be making every single day, but don’t — because I’m too tired, or too busy working, or would just rather be enjoying the landscape.
Just today: The homeowner who waved hello when I stopped to pet his cat. The manager of the bike shop who gave me advice about the under-water tunnels. The conversation I could have started with the couple next to me at the cafe. The fishmonger who chatted me up in the harbor, as he stood hosing off the catch strung across the deck of his boat. The craggy old man with the flatcap and the pipe who looked like he’d just stepped out of a 300-year-old painting, who regarded my bike curiously. The questions I could have returned when an old woman stopped me to ask where I was riding to. The crowd of onlookers at the town festival I blundered across. The guy who gave me a Danish coin from his wallet when I tried to buy some cake. The woman next to him who asked about California. The kids who fired excited questions at me from their bikes. I could have taken all of these farther. I could have learned new names and made friends.
7,800,000,000 people, all living at once…
Assuming I live to be 85 years old, if I started shaking hands with a new person every single second for the rest of my waking life, I would still only meet one tenth of them. Meanwhile, during every one-second handshake … two people would die somewhere on the planet, and four more would be born. I could go on shaking hands forever … and just fall farther behind.
