At Sea Again

The ferry would leave today, but not until 9:00pm. I had plenty of time to get there.

As I left the AirBnB I sent a message to the owner, thanking him again for the food run, and extending the San Francisco invitation again. I got a nice response a few minutes later as I was turning south on the highway, making for the Kollafjarðartunnilin and Tórshavn beyond.

Just around the bend I found a little grocery store and bought some nourishing snacks, then immediately ate half of them standing next to the bike.  I noticed a “Fisk And Kips” wagon very similar to the one I’d seen three days ago.  It hadn’t been there before.  Was there a fleet of them, always on the move?  Maybe so.  I wasn’t hungry enough for Fisk And Kips.

I listened to an NPR podcast about voting patterns and political donations, and thought about social media platforms, and how they always seemed to be a net drain on my sense of well-being.  That led to a focus on social media platforms as an influence on everyone’s well-being.  I challenged myself to come up with the shortest possible phrase to describe their core business model, and arrived at:

“Your privacy for our ads: What a deal!”

I yelled it out loud into the wind a few times and laughed very hard.

Later on in the day I decided to record a “timestamp” for the NPR Politics Podcast, and I sent it in with an up-to-the-minute photo of myself.  Who knows, maybe it will be used!

(Edit, several months later: They did in fact use it! That’s me introducing the October 7th 2021 episode of the NPR Politics podcast.)

This was the first day since Iceland that I was covering the same ground twice, and this time it wasn’t from two years earlier, but just a few days. I found myself less distracted by the scenery and more distracted by my own thoughts.

The relationship question was dragging me back into the recent past, and the sudden breakup that had defined the last winter season. It had been a very negative experience. It was reasonable that I had unresolved feelings about it, but I knew it was also possible my brain was walking back through this experience in order to express something going on in my body:  I was still tired, and I’d eaten poorly, and I was fighting what felt like a mild cold, and knowing that there could be a physical basis for something as ephemeral as my thoughts was often helpful in accepting them. However sensibly one word may seem to follow another, our inner narrative is driven by something that isn’t thought; by definition. It’s our physiology, brewing inside us, and the thoughts that join together on top of it have more in common with the foam on top of a cauldron than with the neat words we see on a printed page. Physiology is not rational. We can usually only be rational when it’s not churning so much.

This can be a very hard thing for someone who insists they are always thinking rationally to accept. I know it took me decades… (Typical man, aye?)

I remembered lying awake on worknights months ago, composing elegant monologues that I would deliver to her face if we ran into each other at the Tuesday farmer’s market back home in Oakland. It actually happened – we did run into each other, twice – but each time I was with one or more nephews, and she immediately about-faced and walked the other way. For the sake of my nephews I didn’t call after her, even though I was vibrating with rage for hours afterwards just at the sight of her. … That physiology, boiling over in the cauldron…

In the present, I rolled to the top of the first hill outside of town and paused at a turnout, recognizing it as the one where I’d taken the cool panorama of rolling clouds a few days earlier.  It felt like longer.  Timespans always do on a bike tour; events from just a few days ago can feel like they happened last month. Metabolism perhaps? All that sensory input?

I stood there muttering to myself and realized that I was making myself suffer, in isolation, for my own reasons and sense of injustice at what had happened. It was my own personal bear trap, and I was sticking my leg in over and over, and whether I kept doing that – or didn’t – made no difference whatsoever to her life or state of mind or sense of guilt.  She was not involved in this. The only thing I could do was stop sticking my leg in the bear trap as early as possible, and find ways to be kinder to myself and healthier instead.

Perhaps I could find a single thought to use as a brace, metaphorically speaking. To keep the trap from closing, so I could step away. After a few minutes of gazing at the rolling clouds, the thought I found was this: Regardless of whether this romantic partner acknowledged it, or even believed it, I had obviously been treated poorly by adult standards, and some amount of damage was expected. Feeling upset and wanting to find resolution was expected, and the stress of being denied that resolution was also expected. That’s the trap: Insisting on a resolution that will never arrive. … Now, why should I put my leg in there? No good reason. Step back out.

Be conscious of these cool rolling clouds and this fresh air instead. Perhaps with a few more days of good sleep and a few good meals I would stop wandering over to this awful thing again. I was honestly surprised to find it so close-at-hand today.

When I got to Tórshavn the press of buildings cut the worst of the wind, but it was still wet and cold.  On a whim I stopped at the bike shop and asked if they had any GPS trackers.  Nope! Next order of business: I knew the food on the boat was pricey and the water was terrible, so I got another platter of sushi at the same restaurant, then poured glasses of water into my water sack until it was full again. I was as prepared as I could be, but I still had a couple of hours to wait.

When I was packing to leave the restaurant I noticed my kickstand was extremely loose.  The lower bolt had come out, probably just in the last few minutes.  Thankfully the other bolt was secure, so the kickstand wasn’t lying in some random gutter a few streets away. All I needed was a spare from my tiny parts bag.

Standing at the curb in my rain gear, I detached all the bags and flipped the bike, removed the rear wheel, and corrected the problem.  There was no way I could ride with a loose kickstand. The second bolt could come out, or the metal brace could swing around and tangle up in my disc brake, and cause a thousand bucks in damage or more in a few seconds. I was glad I knew how to do this quickly, and had so much time before the ferry.

Job done, I coasted down to the old coffee shop from before and ordered another swiss mocha, even though it was 4:30pm.  I wanted a fancy drink after the last five days. I also had a work meeting to attend, and the mocha rented me a nice table for it.

When the hour came, I looped around the harbor to the ferry terminal and boarded without problems. I was surprised once again that all they needed was a glance at the ticket on my phone. No desire to check ID, or see a passport, or even ask for a COVID vaccination certificate.  Danish security is funny. It’s like, “You coming from the Faroe Islands? You’re probably too cold and/or stoic to be any trouble.”

Roping down the bike was easier this time. I was one of three cyclists again, but a different group than before.

I lingered by a porthole to get cell signal, then holed up in the room and watched more braindead Marvel films: “Thor 2” and “Thor 3.” I did some writing, did some music editing, and generally relaxed. Then I began to feel feverish. This wasn’t some kind of sea-sickness; I wasn’t prone to that. It felt more like a mild flu, including some digestive problems. Had I finally caught a variant of COVID-19?

I walked around the deck a little to see if fresh air would help. No luck.

The journey to Denmark from the Faroe Islands includes one whole day at sea. For the next 30 hours or so, I slept, tossing around on the tiny bed in my tiny room, conscious only of the surging ocean beneath the boat in the darkness. Occasionally I drank water from the sack I’d filled before embarking. Just as I remembered, the water available on the ship was either foul tasting or tourist-grade expensive.

Eventually the fever broke and I felt much better, but all the sleep had wrecked my body’s sense of day and night. It didn’t help that the transition to European time had cut two hours from the clock. I grazed on some cafeteria snacks while listening to an audiobook, then spent the final night on the boat drifting around in a haze of semi-sleep that wouldn’t make a great start to my Denmark ride.