Hurricane Winds

I got nine good hours, with occasional waking.  As I was walking around in my dream I heard myself snoring, so either I wasn’t entirely asleep, or my brain was playing a bizarre trick on me.

I coughed a bit. Was I recovering from something, or coming down with something else? Not a great time for it, here at the end of the world. I only had a few hours left in this AirBnB.

I lingered for a while in the dining room, enjoying the diffuse morning sunlight, and the cozy contrast of the inside heat with the blustery wind combing the hills outside.

As I was packing up I remembered that my mirror needed repairing, so I took out the glue kit I’d purchased in Iceland and made a go of it.

While the glue set I took another 20 minutes fixing the zipper on my jacket, which had jumped out of its track. Then I took a little walk around town.

A charming place! But I didn’t have a boat to launch here, and the weather wasn’t great for hiking. With only a couple more days on the islands it made sense to turn around and go right back up the hill.

The bike was nearly dry from yesterday, which was a shame because it was just going to get wet again today…

I rode to the edge of town where the road began ascending the valley, and once I was beyond the buildings the wind went from annoying to ferocious. It was coursing down the hill right into my face, pushing me and the bike directly away from where I needed to go.

Out of curiosity I called up the wind tracking app I’d installed a few days ago.

In the above image, the Faroe Islands are those little dots straight south from that formation that looks suspiciously like the eye of a hurricane, midway between Iceland and Norway.

In bike touring, you plan to go to the safest place, on the safest route, at the safest time and speed, and then you’re okay because you only break a couple of those rules when your plans change. Today there was bound to be trouble, because I was breaking all the rules at once. Even if I wanted to reschedule, I couldn’t because there was nowhere to stay in this town for the night, and if I tried to camp, my equipment would instantly be destroyed. And there was only one road out. And it wasn’t safe.

It was about 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) and 300 meters (1000 feet) up to the pass between this town and the next.  I tried pedaling at first, but the wind gusted unpredictably, throwing me off balance.  Only about 50 meters away from the last building I stumbled out of the seat and began to push the bike, walking on the left side so I could keep one hand on the front brake, which was the stronger of the two. The wind got worse as I began the ascent, and the gusts became so strong that unless I took defensive maneuvers they could knock me backward and onto the ground.

When a surge began to hit me, I gripped the brake and leaned my torso over the back of the seat, pushing the tires down onto the road with my weight and joining myself and the bike into one object.  As I did this, I turned my head to the right, facing downhill, because the wind was blowing rain at my head so fiercely it felt like a dozen needles piercing my skin.  It was so painful that the first few times I impulsively checked my face to make sure I wasn’t bleeding. With my head turned, the raindrops blasted the back of my helmet instead, making a sound every time like a bundle of dry spaghetti snapping slowly in half.

Fun fact I only learned later:  The winds on the northern and southern edges of the Faroe Islands are generally worse than the interior.

Some years are milder than others, and this year was mild in the sense that the summer was longer, delaying the onset of the tougher weather in the fall.  But that tougher weather did arrive, and I was in the midst of it.

In the distance I could see the wind churning the grass violently all across the hillside. All the animal pens were vacant: The animals were all indoors. I should be following their example.

The road out of Gjógv had numerous turnouts – little appendages of pavement on either side of the road – and I lingered at each one so that cars could pass me.  The driving rain worked into all the seams of my clothing, but the outer layer did still separate my clothes from the wind, allowing me to stay reasonably warm.

Just after the first turnout, the wind lashed at the bike, and the recently-superglued side mirror snapped right off and tumbled onto the road.  “Awww, come on!!” I yelled, then awkwardly turned the bike in a loop so I could get a few meters back down the hill and pick the mirror up. Honestly I had been lucky, because if the wind was gusting it could have just carried the mirror upward and out to sea.  I wedged it into my retention straps.  Maybe I could come up with a better repair plan later in Tórshavn.

Covering the 2.5 kilometers to the top of the mountain pass took hours. I have no idea how many. I couldn’t see the sun, and all I could hear was the wind. I kept hoping it would get less intense but it only got worse. Close to the top, it was averaging about 30 meters a second — just over 65 miles per hour. Many times I didn’t square myself and the bike into the wind quite quickly enough and was nearly blown off my feet. The gusting had no pattern. There was no safe window where I could relax my body.

Just before I reached the top, an especially hard blast shoved the bike out of my hands, and away to the right. It toppled over, and the combined slope and the wind began to actually push it several meters back down the road on its side.  No small feat, since the gear and bike combined weigh well over 45 kilograms (100 pounds.)

I jogged carefully after it and hunkered down on the leeward side, then very slowly pushed it upright. The journey down the road had scraped the corner off the netting on my seat, and put a tear in it longer than the palm of my hand.

I knew from a glance that it would probably continue to tear until the seat was unusable, but I didn’t know whether that gave me another day or another month.  The road also tore a hole in the rain cover over my backpack, which was annoying but much more fixable:  I could just slap a square of duct tape over that when I got to a city.

The most disappointing effect of the tumble only became clear to me after I’d pushed the bike another 15 meters or so, reaching the top.  I glanced up to see what my GPS said the elevation was, and the GPS was gone.  Apparently it had been popped off the handlebars when the bike fell.

“Awwwww, dangit,” I said into the wind.  I couldn’t even turn around to look where it might have fallen because I would be too off-balance, but ahead of me was a wire fence right across the top of the pass, with a gap for the road.  I struggled forward another 15 meters and shoved the bike over the cattle-guard, then turned left and lined it up against the fence so the wind was pressing it into the wire.  Then I walked back down the road, leaning back, going in small steps.  A surprise surge in the wind could send me face-first onto the downslope of the cement and push me, and if I was lucky it would only tear big holes in my clothing.  Anything less than lucky and I would break an arm.

The search was fruitless.  In my memory of how the bike fell, I saw the handlebars pointing off to the right, and that way led down the slope of the valley into the churning grass.  The GPS was a light plastic thing; it had most certainly been blown right over the edge and was probably 200 meters away tangled in some roots.  It was black.  I would never find it even if the weather was suddenly perfect.

“Well, crap,” I thought.  “It’s just going to sit there in the grass until the battery runs out, recording nothing.  Then it will probably remain undiscovered until the weather destroys it completely.  Talk about e-waste.”  I felt helpless.  I wasn’t even sure what to learn from the experience:  In 15 years of biking with a GPS as my constant companion, I had never once lost one from an impact.  This was a pretty special circumstance.

I mince-walked back up to the bike and turned it into the wind.  When I was over the top of the pass by about 30 meters the wind seemed to die down somewhat.  “Oh thank goodness,” I thought, and tried to get back on the bike.  The road zig-zagged sharply just ahead, and all seemed well until I went around the first bend, and the wind came back just as fiercely as it was on the other side of the pass.  I dismounted and returned to pushing.

But first I took a careful self-portrait to show my lunatic expression:

Yes folks, that is the face of a wind-blown lunatic, being stupid, out in stupid weather. Behold! Do not follow the example of this person!

I thought going downhill would make things easier, even if the wind was the same.  That turned out to be true and I did manage to coast for a good 500 meters on one straightaway, but then the road turned up again, and the wind added a layer of ferocity even more extreme than what I’d felt at the pass.  I was now being hit by gusts as hard as 40 meters a second — 90 miles per hour.  I had to lean over with my chest pressed to the side of the seat and push very hard just to take each single step forward.

Despite my best efforts to improve my tactics for bracing myself and moving at the right time, I lost control of the bike and it pitched over at least four more times.  Two women driving a small car passed me and asked if I was okay, and if perhaps they could carry some of my bags ahead to my destination, since their car was far too small for my bike.  I turned them down, partially out of stubborn politeness, but mostly for a reason I didn’t really want to explain to them:  I needed the bags as ballast, or the bike would surely be blown right off the road, with me tumbling along or chasing desperately behind it.  I gave them my bravest “I’m fine, just going very slow” reassurance and they went on their way, though I could tell they didn’t really buy it.

I assume they mentioned me to friends later on, with words like, “Crazy guy on a bike.” I cop to that.

It’s funny… I get a bike, and the exercise keeps me healthy, which saves my life, so it’s a good influence. But it compels me to go out into these dangerous situations and risk my life, so the bike is a bad influence. But then I put so much gear on the bike, that the sheer weight of it keeps me from getting killed. So, good influence?

Finally I pushed up to the intersection I’d passed before — the one where the road sent an offshoot way down to the east, making some angular turns and plummeting 300 meters to the tiny town of Funningur by the sea.  I was hoping that the wind would get progressively calmer as I moved downhill, but I could tell I’d have to keep pushing the bike at least until I got to the first major bend, where I would no longer be facing straight into the wind.

There was a guardrail at the intersection, and I pushed the bike over to it so it would be close when the wind gusted.  I stood there fiddling with my sheep-themed root beer bottle for about a minute, trying to decide if I should search for an AirBnB or a hotel in the town below, and suddenly the wind hit me harder than it had all day.  The bike was pushed sideways and back, with both tires skidding on the road – the brake made zero difference – and I was hurled back with it.  My butt hit the guardrail immediately, then the bike hit my stomach, then the wind pressed the bike hard into me as though a giant hand was trying to make me the gooey center of a sandwich in a panini-press.

If not for that guardrail – and how close I’d kept it – I would have absolutely been blasted right down the cliff.  Assuming the bike missed me, I might have managed to roll to a stop maybe 100 meters down, perhaps without a broken limb.  But the bike would definitely be broken in some way that I couldn’t ride it, and my gear would be scattered far and wide.  Assuming I could even move, my only option at that point would be to crawl around on the hillside trying to fetch my gear and hope that I could at least find my phone, and barring that, drag myself up to the road and flag down a car.

Luckily:  A guardrail.

After about five seconds the wind eased up enough for me to shove the bike outward and hunch over it, and when I looked up from that I noticed a truck had just passed me and was slowing down.  The driver had most certainly seen me get slammed against the rail.

It stopped only 10 meters away.  I bent forward and shoved the bike slowly up the road, sticking close to the guardrail, and managed to get up alongside the truck.  The window came down and a man leaned his head out, and yelled something.  The wind was howling, and I yelled back “I’m sorry I can’t hear you over the wind!!”

He paused for a moment, then put his truck in gear and moved it forward, angled to the left, closing the gap between him and the guardrail.  This made a little wedge where the wind wasn’t as bad, with me inside it.  “This guy knows what he’s doing,” I thought.  I gratefully pushed the bike ahead a bit more, drawing up close to the window again.

He leaned out and said, in a fantastic example of deadpan Norwegian humor, “It is a bit windy today.”

I laughed and agreed, and then paused for a moment.  I quickly thought to myself:  “Okay, so you’ve been out here for at least four hours, and managed to go about three kilometers.  There are no hotels, and the AirBnB you stayed at two days ago seems to be the only one available between you and Tórshavn, and it’s another 33 kilometers away.  At your current rate it would take you well over an entire day to get there.  Your seat mesh is torn, your rain cover is torn, your GPS is gone, your mirror is broken, your battery may be too wet to charge your phone, the only substantial food you have is two slices of pizza, and you’re soaking wet.  The wind almost succeeded in murdering you just moments ago and will doubtless try again another ten times before you’re even off this mountain, and it will likely get worse, not better.  Oh, and in about four hours it will get dark.  This man has an actual truck, with a bed.  He is driving the only kind of vehicle that can transport you, and you have not seen any other like it all day.”

I had just done all of Iceland without ever setting foot in a car — for the second time, in fact.  But the Faroe Islands was too much for me to handle just now.  If I didn’t set a limit I could walk away from, this environment was going to set a limit for me that I couldn’t.  It was time to ask a stranger for help.

I grinned and inclined my head back toward the bed of his truck.  “I don’t suppose you’d be wiling to give me a lift?”

He immediately nodded and set the parking brake, turned on his hazard lights, and stepped out of the truck.  He looked about 35, my height, and in good shape.  He was wearing a good rain jacket and pants.

As he opened the tailgate and rummaged around for straps, I brought the bike carefully around to the back.  Another car pulled up behind us on the road and an older man got out, in his 50’s with a grizzled face.  He smiled at me, traded a few words in Faroese with the first driver, and then pitched in to help lift my bicycle into the truck.  We laid it sideways, and as the wind slapped at all of us, the owner of the truck got out a retention strap and looped it through slots in the truck bed, passing it over the bike.  Then he cranked a ratchet, pressing the bike down just enough to stop it from moving.  I thought for a second that the pressure of the strap might bend the rack or crush some of my possessions, but I dismissed the thought immediately. Those were consequences I would accept.

He shut the tailgate.  I thanked the second man, and he waved and returned to his car.  Then I climbed into the cab of the truck, said, “Whoooo!!”, and thanked the driver.

“I knew the weather was going to be tough this morning,” I said, “but I had no idea the wind was going to get this bad.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “It looks like maybe 30 to 40 meters a second now.”

“Does the wind usually get this bad in September?”

He thought for a while as he negotiated the switchbacks down the mountain.  “It’s different each year.  We always get storms like this in the fall, sometimes two or three, sometimes ten or fifteen.”  His English was halting, but clear.  In the back of my head I wondered at the way English with a Norwegian accent sounds more to me like the American accent than the British one.  Was that the World War II influence?  Or did the American accent converge to a similar sound because it was being learned by people who previously spoke lots of German and Danish and Dutch, during colonial times?

(I asked Rachel, an actual linguist, about this years later, and she said I was onto something with the Danish influence, but I shouldn’t also discount the social influence of powerful and pervasive American media in modern times.)

We talked about a possible destination for me.  I said I was headed to an AirBnB in Hósvik.  He said he would drive me there.  I asked where he was heading before he picked me up.  He said Runavik.  I said he could just drop me off in Runavik and I could catch a bus since the wind wouldn’t be as bad there, but he insisted on driving me all the way to Hósvik, which was about 30 kilometers out of his way.  I thanked him again, trying to convey my earnest gratitude. It was quite possible he was saving my stubborn-ass life.

We chatted about other things. I learned his name was Sonni. He said his family had lived in the Faroes as long as anyone could remember. The earliest mention of his hometown in history books by name was 600 years ago, but people have been there since at least the viking era over 1000 years back.

I could tell he was working hard to come up with questions, and keep up with my American chatterbox style.  I slowed down a bit, and let the spattering of the rain and the churning of the wiper blades fill the cab for longer intervals, then offered easy topics. He asked about the weather in San Francisco and I compared the fog that rolls over the Golden Gate to the mist I’d seen on the ocean a few days ago.

And just like that, I was back in Hósvik.  The whole ride took about 25 minutes. Sonni helped me lower the bike to the ground, and I shook his hand and asked for a photo to put in my album. I offered him money but he smiled and turned it down, so I thanked him several more times.

As his truck pulled away I looked around, and a weird feeling of disorientation crept over me, as though I wasn’t really here.  How could I be?  Mere moments ago I’d been on the side of a mountain near a place it had taken me the entire day to get to.  Had I teleported? Well, yes. It was that “broken line” feeling of car travel.  I hadn’t experienced it since the shuttle from the Iceland airport over two months ago, and now, I could acutely feel the unnatural detachment from my surroundings that modern life usually grants me all the time.

How strange.

After I checked into the AirBnB I plundered my remaining food, which was almost nothing.  I ate several handfuls of gummi bears, the two slices of leftover pizza, a fistful of peanuts, and a Prince Polo bar.  That was everything I had, except for more peanuts, and my stomach didn’t want those. Actually it was a full-body thing: I wanted more protein and calories but I was too physically exhausted to eat.

I sat in the dim living room for a while, making a few notes about the day on my miraculously dry laptop. I think the only other time I’d experienced 40 meter-per-second wind was sticking my hand out the window of a car. And that was really not the same.

I had another day to get back to the ferry terminal, but I had to admit, at this point I would have traded that day for an extra one in Denmark, where the weather was bound to be entirely different.