Onward To The Settlement

I woke up at the Höfn campground for the last time. It was late morning. Last night I’d stayed up way too late in the common area doing work, trying to get ahead of things.

I stepped out of my tent, washed my face, and pedaled straight across town to the post office. No need to consult a map — I’d been there several times, nervously asking the one postal clerk about the package.

When he plopped it onto the counter I was kind of surprised.  After so many delays I had grown used to thinking the package didn’t actually exist, and I was just chasing an illusion in a bureaucracy.  I chatted with him about how long it had been stuck in customs, and how hard it was to get answers.

“Oh, I know what you mean.  They are a mess.  They really need to do something about it.  People come in here a lot, thinking we are the customs office, and yell at us because they can’t get their package.  I have to tell them I don’t know anything. When we do try to help, we contact customs and we get no answer.”

So even Iceland’s own government-run post office can’t reach the customs agency.  I suspected that they were doing that gross trick that many badly run businesses do, and deliberately obscuring all the methods used to contact them so they are shielded from people’s complaints.  In the back of my head I suddenly saw a parallel with the last US president, and how his response to the bad COVID testing numbers coming out of his administration was to try and halt the testing itself. No numbers, no problem; right?

After a few more commiserating words with the clerk, I thanked him again and walked out with my package.

I tore it open on a sunny patch of lawn right next to the post office, and set about swapping the tire.  As I did so I laughed at how accustomed I’d grown to the casual ways of small-town Iceland.  The clerk had not asked me for any kind of identification.  I just told him my name, and he walked into the back and brought me a box.  I no longer noticed this kind of stuff.

And I knew, without a doubt, that I could take my luggage and bike apart and spread it around on this lawn right next to the post office parking lot for half an hour, and no one would harass me or even be particularly surprised.  As long as I cleaned up my mess, no harm done. Many small towns in America would send me a local cop in about 30 minutes, cruising by to make sure I wasn’t some drug-addled hobo planning to break into a car, or rip parts off the equipment around the building, or defecate in a bush.

Actually, I had been depending on the good grace of Iceland since I woke up:  I’d ridden across town, away from my tent, leaving two bags full of extremely expensive gear tucked inside it.  I thought for a good while but I couldn’t come up with any other example of a place I’d been where I felt comfortable enough to do that.  Anywhere else, and I’d have packed up every item, leaving behind only a flat square of grass. Even if I felt I could trust the locals, I wouldn’t want to trust my fellow tourists.

(… Especially if I was at a hostel.  In the past, young bohemian travelers living their “best life” at a hostel have taken an extremely flexible view of the borders between their property, public property, and my property.  If it’s not nailed down then it must be for communal use; and if they can pry it up, then it wasn’t nailed down. Heeey, maaan, we’re all here to share, right?)

I’m certain that Icelanders get really upset with tourists sometimes. We’re such a mixed bag. I get the impression we’re seen like a migratory birds:  Not exactly loved, but accepted as part of a process.  We fly in for a season, wander awkwardly around the landscape pooping out little piles of money, then bugger off when the weather turns.

Tinkering with the bike and thinking about migration brought me to the idea of interconnected economies again. Iceland just keeps leading me to it. How many threads could wrap around the world, plunging into the soil of distant countries, tracing the origin of the things I consume here in one average day? A hundred, perhaps? How many of these threads am I pulling when I do something completely unremarkable, like use a crosswalk, or eat a candy bar?

I looked around: Hey, is the grass on this lawn native grass? Did the cement poured to make this curb come from a ship? How about the rebar it was poured onto?

(Answers: Grass: Hard to tell, considering the legacy of the Vikings. Cement: Yes, most likely from a large supplier in Norway. Rebar: Yes, most likely from an American company with a branch office in Ísafjörður or Reykjavík.)

I installed the new tire, noting that it rolled perfectly but didn’t have a whole lot of tread left.  I decided to keep the old one packed away for a few days, just in case the replacement decided to suddenly explode.

My 20-inch tubes were a literal patchwork. With the good one inside the new tire, I decided it was time to apply my remaining patch to the other one. At least patches were a thing I could potentially buy at a bicycle shop … assuming there were any in this quadrant of the island.

I handed the box back to the clerk for recycling, waved goodbye again, then hit the supermarket next door – the only one in town – and filled a sack with food so I would be well stocked for the next three days of traveling.  Then I zipped back across town to the campsite, where I settled at a public table in time to do a work meeting. Once that was done I gathered everything from my campsite and said an overdue goodbye to Höfn.

As I pedaled north in a pocket of comfortable silence created by the wind matching my speed, I thought back two weeks to the terrain I’d passed heading into town.  The memory felt like it was of a different country.  I felt less like I was resuming my journey, and more like I was embarking on second one.  My mind had been thoroughly elsewhere. Mostly back at work. Now here I was again, setting out.

What exciting things lay ahead? For one, the first tunnel of this tour.

… But before that, it was time to make a detour, to an intriguing map marker I’d pinned several years ago. A campground and restaurant built near an abandoned movie set.

That would leave me about 1 month to check out the Faroe Islands and Denmark, and possibly go north into Norway and Sweden.  Not nearly enough time.  I decided I should file that “work abroad” paperwork after all, even if it only bought me a few more weeks.

I found the campsite in the late evening, and set up my tent in some extreme wind. With one guyline tied around a big rock I got the walls stable enough, but every now and then the wind would kick up alarmingly and shove the roof of the tent downward.  As I laid inside in my sleeping bag watching a really cute but poorly-aged anime called “Ruin Explorers”, the wall of the tent kept diving unpredictably down onto my head, and smooshed gently across my face.  Rather than being annoyed, I started laughing. It was like being aggressively flirted with by one of those dancing noodle men you see outside car dealerships with a fan blowing air into it.

“HI!  I’M YOUR TENT!  MMMWAH!! … HI AGAIN, I’M YOUR TENT!!  I LOOOOVE YOU.  MMMWAH! LET’S GET PHYSICAL!”

When it was time to sleep I got up and rotated the sleeping bag around so I was facing downwind.  The tent wall made out with my feet all night, which was satisfactory for us both.