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 at least 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, just sat there in awful silence. 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 to the point where a more intense expression of her feelings will just never arrive.

It would be silly of course to extrapolate one 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 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. 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 normalizing influence of adults.

Iceland may be rural, but it’s not quite big enough to be anonymous. All your socializing destinations are in town, where you stand a chance of blundering across some family friend who knows you. If you drove for an hour you might be among total strangers, but if your embarrassing young-person shenanigans have any real consequences – litter, vandalism, noise complaints – word might get back to your parents anyway.

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? Would they get their own youth-oriented places to carouse, or would they be mixed in with adults, as usual?

It’s a funny idea that a place made of quiet wilderness could also be socially confining. But the terrain seems to push that way. 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. If you want to be alone you need to hike into the hills, and for that you need gear, and people need to know where you’re going.

Another factor is the separation 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 the opposite direction too: If this terrain doesn’t fit your personality, then you can emigrate. The way is open, by the big airport and ferry terminal.

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.

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.

It was an NPR news report, talking about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. With a shock I realized it would be the 20th anniversary of them in about a week. Had it really been so many years? I could still remember exactly where I was, when I saw the first image that day…

In the report, people were being interviewed who were still active in a support group for the families of Flight 93, the plane that was hijacked with the intent of hitting the Capitol Building but crashed in a field instead. I listened as one of the interviewees, a woman with a low somber voice, reminisced about visiting the site of the crash only a little while after the incident. At the time, she gave a speech about her lost loved one to other bereaved people, sharing their grief, and their determination to build a memorial that would honor all those lost.

NPR rolled a short clip, of that earlier speech. It was the voice of a child.

That traumatic, era-defining splinter in modern history, shared by my whole generation, was now so far in the past that the children involved had grown up into middle age. That timid 11-year-old in the recording is now married and has school-aged children.

A terrible feeling rushed through me, as though two decades of my life had been skipped, and just yesterday I was in that small San Jose apartment staring at a television, watching the world get rearranged. Now suddenly I’m this grumpy old person, with all this gray hair, partway around the world on a bike. What happened? How the hell did I get here? Did I even live during those 20 years? What does any of it mean?

Tears blurred my vision and I had to roll the bike to a stop, and wander blindly to the side of the road so I could sit down in the grass for a while.

Needless to say this was not where I expected my nostalgia to lead. I pulled the phone off the bike and sent a few messages to family, checking in and centering myself. I drank some water. Felt the sun on my back; ran my hands over the grass.

As I calmed down I tried to understand the intensity of my reaction. I think it was because I had already passed into a post-post-9-11 era, and been living there a long time. The recording had dragged me back across two eras, to the beginning of the previous one.

For years the attack was a lens that shaped my politics, my sense of history, my relationships with Americans and non-Americans, et cetera, but that lens was eventually ground down into a temperate flatness: Politics couldn’t just be about terrorism any more. History wasn’t just about preventing my country from committing atrocities in the name of self-defense in the Middle East. Being American wasn’t just about debating the national stance on Muslims or Arabs or the dangers of petroleum dependency. I passed into another era. We all collectively needed to, because history just kept happening.

I’m here now, and there is so much more to think about than fire and smoke and the drumbeat of war, and for that I am intensely grateful.

Okay, back on the bike. Maybe some nice audiobook? Let’s see what’s ahead on the road…

I stopped for a while at a neat waterfall. A few picnic tables were nearby, but I had no food to eat on them. Bike tour metabolism is hard to plan for!

Then I began a long stretch of road that followed a narrow fjord (Hamarsfjörður on the map), with layered mountains visible on the opposite shore. The thick strata of the mountains were all tilted at a shallow but consistent angle, bending down towards the interior of the country. What immense forces were at work here?

Curious, I went poking around on my phone for some kind of geologic chart.

Since this was one of the long fjords on the eastern edge of the island, I was seeing a tilt down towards the point at which new land was being generated between the tectonic plates. Maybe the sheer weight of all the new layers in the middle, without the benefit of erosion to make them lighter, is causing the center of the island to sink a little bit, into the stew of molten rock that everything floats on?

An interesting theory! I made a note to go ask a geologist about it in the future. Also it was a pretty good reference to the colors of the Icelandic flag: “Blue around white around red” clearly means “sea around snow around volcanism.”

A ways after that I found an interesting memorial, in the form of a massive pile of rocks. A saint is buried here, and travelers consider it lucky to add a rock to his burial mound as they’re passing by. This has been going on for many, many years.

It’s funny how even extremely sensible people will do this, just to enjoy for a brief moment the whimsical idea that the spirits of dead saints can take a role in material affairs. I considered doing it myself, but the rain was picking up and the rocks were a bit slick. It would be hilarious if I went gathering rocks to boost my luck and busted an ankle.

Eventually I reached the town of Djúpivogur. The sign on the highway showed an encouraging number of little icons. There would be food and shelter!

With so much of my gear wet, and multiple days of camping behind me, I decided to try for a room. All the rooms were booked, but the hotel had a scattering of tiny wooden cabins behind the main building for a decent price. I grabbed one of those.

I went poking around the common area in pursuit of a shower and a washing machine, but they were all in use. A few people were splayed on a ratty-looking couch watching television. A miniature kitchen had a few abandoned tupperwares on the counter. Laundry was spread along the top of all the radiators. The place had that cavalier hostel atmosphere. Ah, my fellow tourists. Or rather: Aaaaa! My fellow tourists!

I was pretty hungry. Even a vending machine full of candy bars would have snared me. I tucked myself into the bed of the adorable little cabin and dreamed of snacks at the cafe in the morning.