Don’t forget to be there

There’s a wilderness of land and people out there. More than anyone could know. And then there’s this other wilderness, almost entirely decoupled from the first one, that exists in people’s heads. It’s made of shorthand summaries and untested assumptions about the first wilderness, and it’s cramped and twisted like a funhouse ride and teeming with deranged fictional characters.

People who have done some traveling across the first wilderness – especially if it’s for fun – just love to creep into conversations and point out features of the second wilderness, all the time believing they are saying something meaningful, accurate, and wise about the first. They sorely want it to be true. Sometimes, sounding knowledgeable in the power play of the conversation at hand is what matters. We all love to play the wise mentor role.

This is how you get twenty-something know-it-alls at parties who say stuff like:

  • “Seattle is just a worse version of San Francisco.”
  • “People from Missouri are bigots.”
  • “New York is gross.”
  • “Everyone in Paris is so rude!”
  • “There’s more to do in Los Angeles than anywhere else.”
  • “All these new people moving to Austin are ruining the place.”
  • “People in Italy really know how to live.”
  • “Watsonville is full of Mexican illegals and if you go there you’ll get stabbed.”

(That last example may seem especially upsetting, but unfortunately, the inner wilderness is a place that can foster opinions that are not just pointless, but vicious as well.)

I know about this because I’ve caught myself doing it a few times. It’s very tempting to point out some very personal, very subjective chunk of my own second wilderness and declare that everyone else will see exactly the same thing if they just go where I did. I keep trying to rein myself in, and talk about statistics instead, or give purely logistical advice.

But, paving the world around us with generalities and wishful thinking is a very human behavior. We do it to stave off madness in the face of an ultimately unknowable universe, because we are all far less capable of dealing with uncertainty than we want to admit. And sometimes our confidence needs the boost we can get by talking out loud, and we say something at a party like, “Oh I would never enjoy living in Canada.” … Conveniently forgetting the fact that 37 million people live there, and if they have a pretty good time of it, we probably could too. It would be no less honest – but far less flattering – to rephrase that confident statement as, “I’m mostly ignorant of how to enjoy life in a place like Canada and I want to remain that way, because I need to narrow down my choices for the sake of sanity.” I mean, let’s admit it: Learning is work, and sometimes we have to prioritize.

I have to be okay with this, and so does everyone else, because we’re all only human. I really only bring it up because sometimes it’s very useful to recognize that we’re wandering around in the second wilderness – in the funhouse of our own assumptions – and if we just wake up a little and look around in more detail, we can find really useful connections, and gain new confidence. Every new place I go I’m astonished at how poorly I actually see things, and how much I lean on previous knowledge and trust that things will be predictable. I have to stop and go back, sometimes more than once, and ask “What did I just see? What did I just ignore?” and most important of all, “What’s being hidden from me because I’m a stranger?”

If you’re traveling, take a page of advice from a slow-ass bicycle tourist, and slow way down for a bit. Ask yourself a couple of those questions and give yourself time to seek an answer. Chances are, it will lead you somewhere way more interesting than the next picturesque monument on the madcap package bus tour you were offered by the tourist bureau. It was hard enough getting to that new place — so don’t forget to be there when you get there.

Returning to Reykjavik

Is it a hotel? Or a bank? Or a warehouse? Or a donut shop? You won't know until you walk inside.

Very unlikely that a hobbit lives here.
Cool bridge!
Local cat shenanigans!
FORD: Found On Road Dead.

I don't think anyone alive knows how anachronistic this really is -- or isn't.

I think it means "talk to the hand"?

Need to spruce up your gravel lot? PAINT THE ROCKS!

Items and such. These sorts of things can quickly get out of control...

In Iceland, we make random monuments to marine life. Dig it.

Time for a real meal!

Who is this guy??

I wonder what the story here is. Does someone just really like their pirated television shows?

Various keys to the AirBnB.

Another AirBnB, another eclectic book collection.

From country to city

I packed up early in the morning. There was plenty of daylight to see by of course, since this time of year “night” is mostly of a state of mind.

Decked out and ready for more adventuring.

I headed out on the coastal road instead of returning to the highway. A few days ago I’d scanned ahead using satellite view on my phone, and confirmed it was paved. It was a nice discovery and a lovely road; far more interesting than the main one.

Ahh, those cute flowers!

I was on it for about two hours, and that entire time I was not passed by a single car in either direction. Delightful!

Cold and spooky!
The windy, wet road ahead.
Is this the result of a hundred years of birds nesting?
Bird on the lookout.
I assume this is where the postal worker delivers the packages.
If this were in Oakland, it would be an art collective surrounded by a homeless camp.
It looked neat, but not neat enough for me to make a detour.
Cold winters can destory anything eventually.

A bird posed for me on a ruined house, so I lingered for a while, lining up a shot and chomping a handful of peanuts — the very last of my food.

The bird posed for me.

I took some video of the tundra-like volcanic landscape and the modest farmsteads, feeling glad for my layers of clothing.

“This is what it’s like to cross the interior,” I thought. “Except the interior is more barren, colder, and has far worse roads, including river crossings. So, hmm. Maybe it’s not really like this at all.” An idea was percolating in my head to diverge from the coast somewhere along my tour, but I didn’t have details yet.

There were some gravel patches but the ground was hard beneath, so the bike handled them well.  I was tempted to think it would do well on the gravel roads farther upland, but experience told me there would be deep gravel and even mud up there. My skinny tires would have trouble.

Eventually the coastal road crossed under the main highway and turned into gravel beyond it, so I switched to the highway.

Back on the main highway, headed toward the capital!

Fortunately I didn't have to go down this road.

I rolled onto the wide shoulder and started the audiobook “Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed”, and skipped to the chapter about the Vikings and the colonization of Iceland, Greenland, and other areas. The cars that shot past me were a strong reminder of the forces at play here.

Iceland is the most ecologically damaged country in Europe.  It’s generally the fault of the vikings.  During the relatively brief time they were there trying all their traditional survival methods, they deforested the island by over 80 percent.  Today, Iceland is 94 percent deforested.  Almost all the trees that remain have been behind fences that shield them from grazing animals.

What's that they say about rolling stones? Pfft.

The other major disaster has been soil erosion.  Relative to other places the vikings were familiar with, soil in Iceland dries up and blows away very quickly.  Large areas of it are accumulated volcanic ash, built up over thousands of years and then held down by plants.  The vikings ripped up the plants or burned them to make space for crops, and the soil disappeared almost before their eyes.

The parable of the three little pigs ends here.

I think of this, and then I think of being a kid back home in the politically left-leaning town of Santa Cruz, and the history I was taught where colonizers from Europe displaced and murdered the indigenous people of North America and began changing the face of the continent. I’d been told the continent was essentially a static place before Europeans arrived, and that the people before them had lived in a state of harmony with their surroundings, and their societies were egalitarian and peaceful, and they were generally disease and hardship free until colonizers came along with infections and guns and horses and corrupted and ruined everything for them.

It was a well-meaning mixture of history and mythology, designed to be an antidote – a corrective – to the patriotic nonsense that existed around me, about America somehow being destined to occupy the lands it claimed. It was meant to counter the cultural imperialism that lingers even now, driven originally by an intense racism, where the colonizers believed it was their duty to “civilize” lands being held by “primitive” people, and confine or exterminate them if they resisted. The early American story is basically naked opportunism justified by religious dogma and buttressed by ignorance, and this needs to be acknowledged. A larger part of the culture wants to pretend this history never happened, and my teachers and peers in Santa Cruz felt (and I still strongly feel) that letting America forget it would be the first decisive step in letting it repeat.

But the tribes of America had not been perfect back then. They were an astonishingly diverse collection of peoples spread across a giant area of land and they were as different as they were alike, each struggling with warfare, slavery, subsistence, disease, and ecological damage on their own terms. They also did change the face of the continent long before Europeans arrived, primarily through deforestation in the east, by setting fires for various purposes over a span of about 2000 years. These aspects of their history were left out, because we were busy trying to correct for a larger, more dangerous misconception, and to counter the absurd assumption that the indigenous Americans were “primitive.” Their ecological destruction through attempts at land management were not relevant to the case.

But I have to wonder: How much mythologizing is healthy here? If you smooth the wrinkles out of a portrait too well, it seems to me you run the risk of turning the subject into something unreal. Something that exists apart from contemporary life. You drive a wedge between the history, and the flesh-and-blood people who are the living embodiment of it today, who have practical needs and problems and need to be considered part of your own world, rather than an abstraction or an irretrievable myth. Perhaps too much mythologizing becomes an “othering” — even a sort of embalming.

I suppose the question is academic. The larger struggle has been in simply getting American culture to recognize that the native tribes have a history, full stop. That American history didn’t just start with Columbus blundering his plunder-boats across the ocean, and that the native tribes are still here, still making history with everyone else.

This was all rolling around, back and forth, in my mind as I pedaled along, in the pauses between sentences as Jared Diamond outlined the grim history of Iceland. At its most abstract, what I was thinking about was a collision of mythologies, and also the use of mythology as an instrument, to humanize or dehumanize people, as the tellers felt necessary.

I began to consider the Vikings through the same lens. The modern people of Iceland have embraced even the apocryphal operatic horned helmet in honor of the Vikings. It’s on their walls, clothing, even their roadsigns. The mythology seems harmless and fun; a source of entertainment if not of a very mixed sense of pride for a population that can still trace itself almost entirely back to Viking ancestors — or at least, to the women and children the Vikings abducted from elsewhere. But, what are we celebrating here? Certainly not their stewardship of the land.

Yes, the helmet has horns. I don't know what to think of that.

Short summary: The Vikings showed up, and knowing very little about ecology and having no free time to study it, they chopped down almost every damn tree in a dozen generations. They pillaged, kidnapped, and enslaved people to drive their civilization for 300 years, then succumbed to their own mismanagement and infighting, leaving behind ruins, tiny sheep, and beleaguered fishermen, who converted to Christianity and kept on keepin’ on for hundreds of years through famine and volcanic mayhem as they were absorbed into a Nordic trading bureaucracy and mostly exploited by it.

Finally around World War I, Iceland regained independence, and so-called modern civilization quickly arrived on the heels of wartime activity. Now the island is ringed by a paved road, multiple international shipping routes, and a giant airport. In less than a hundred years, life has gotten far easier and safer for everyone, but the ecological pressure has also gotten far worse. Determined ecologists are running experiments to restore trees, and farmers are a lot more conscious of soil conditions, but the trend is still downward, and the tourism dollar is a seriously mixed blessing.

I wonder how much of the Icelandic people’s embrace of the Vikings is myth-making for tourists. Is there a similar pressure in their culture, like in modern Americans, to forget the atrocities of their ancestors? And how much more selective does all of this look, when we consider that there’s about six hundred years of history separating the end of the Vikings and the beginning of modern Icelandic society that is not factored in? Is it too boring? Too sparse to comment upon? Perhaps it’s just not currently useful in our current battles over tourism and ecology?

There is, I suppose, one inevitable positive outcome, if you take the long view. In time, Iceland will experience another catastrophic volcanic eruption, intense enough to drive out and blast away the humans and everything they have wrought, leaving behind a cooling hunk of re-fertilized land. The best we can do with that is detect it far enough in advance to get out of the way.

Hopefully this trip won't end up in hell!

Anyway, I poked some thoughts into my phone and pedaled along, and a bunch of hours passed. The area urbanized around me. I arrived at the hotel I’d booked online.

It was 7:00am, and there was a crowd of people with luggage standing around outside. I assumed they were either waiting for a shuttle or waiting for breakfast.  Taking a closer look, I saw all of them were rough-looking men, some smoking cigarettes one after the other.  To their credit, they scrupulously collected and disposed of each butt they stamped out on the pavement.

The lobby opened and everyone crowded inside for the free breakfast.  I talked to the clerk and he said the hotel had been full the previous night so I would have to wait for a room to be cleaned, which would probably take three hours.  “Sorry,” he said, “but maybe have some coffee or something while you wait?”  He gestured to the breakfast area.

So I filled up a plate and ate six slices of bread with a heap of tuna and a slice of cheese on each one, plus two hard-boiled eggs. It was touring metabolism, back in force.

Another free breakfast, this one much fancier than the last!

Around me I counted heads and observed that there were almost 30 men, all dressed either for work or for hiking.  Some had fancy gore-tex jackets and hiking shoes, some had overalls and toolbelts.  One table had six electricians at it – at least, judging by the tools – all glowering at their plates and chowing down.  Almost no one spoke.

I was one of them.  I ate until I felt full, then took the bike a few blocks over to the Bónus food store, which I can’t help thinking of as the “Piggly Wiggly of Iceland.”

I know that’s supposed to be an accent mark, but to my non-Icelandic eye it looks like that pig is being sliced with a razor blade.

The bakery attached to the store was already open, so I wandered inside and got some additional snacks.

It's all about the bakeries.

I hate to say it, but they look tastier than they actually are.

I spent about an hour organizing photos since my brain was too fried to work, then packed up again and went to the hotel.  The clerk walked over and handed me a key card.  “Room 433, fourth floor,” he said.

I thanked him sincerely.  Several elevator trips later, with my gear and the bike, I was safe in room 433, burrowing under the covers at 10:00 in the morning.

First step when you get into a hotel room: Close all those day-blocking curtains.

I woke up after almost 7 hours of sleep.  Took a shower, drank some water, went right back to sleep.

Two hours later I woke up again.  Finally I felt rested enough to use my brain and get some work done.

Not much in Vogar

Fragmented sleep again.  Still getting used to the time difference and the light.

I had a very unpleasant dream that I’d recently moved house, and suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen my cat Mira for three days.  I went wandering around the property noticing all kinds of things that were dangerous for an old three-legged kitty:  Steep hills, a muddy creekside, animal dens, a road, rival cats.  Then I saw her, in the middle of a flooded pit filled with dead branches, swimming weakly, trying to move toward me but stuck in the debris.  I rushed down and plucked her from the water and cradled her in my arms. 

She felt warm, which was a good sign, but she had a wound in her stomach that was bleeding.  I implored my neighbors for help getting a towel to wrap her in, and finding a car to get to the vet, but my neighbors just stared, so I set about doing things myself.  Then I woke up, in the semi-darkness of the tiny cabin, with the wind streaming by outside.

“Mira is safe in the little Oakland back yard, and your nephew feeds her every day,” I reassured myself.  “She may be far away but she’s in good hands.” I took hold of the thought like a tiny brush, and ran it across my mind, settling myself. The wind outside ebbed away leaving absolute silence.

I unfolded myself from the bed and ate some chips and peanuts, aired out the room a bit, and then laid down for another long nap.  By the time I woke up again it was noon, and five hours had passed.

I dressed and boarded the bike to have a look around town. Top of my list was food, because all I had for the day was one package of peanuts, and my metabolism was awake and burning in “tour mode” now.

A groovy black sand beach. But a bit cold for swimming.

There were no shops, except for one small place that was closed for the weekend. There was a decrepit restaurant that had shut down some time during the pandemic. I asked at the local hotel but the clerk had no idea where I could eat, unless I rode to the next town.

I decided to stay just for the day, rather than two, and booked a hotel partway to Reykjavik. I could nap here some more, then get up early.

Anyone trying to drive this is definitely quackers.

The town of Keflavik had clearly benefitted from the international airport nearby. The town of Vogar had clearly not. The government had built an excellent, wide highway connecting Keflavik to the capital, and it blew right past Vogar.

A little bit of history everywhere you go.

Nevertheless, the township had a little money to spare for preservation, and I learned about some early post-Viking settlers.

Local lore of Vogar.

When I got back to the cabins, I saw a giant row of tents appearing all at once. Some package tour no doubt. Hello fellow explorers! I was tempted to ask if they had any food.

Lots of campers setting up together. They pulled all this gear directly out of a large van.

It was another windy night. I had the electric heater cranked up, but the lack of air circulation in the tiny space felt a bit dangerous, so I used some of my gear to prop open a window.

Keeping the window partially open in the wind.

That weird hybrid sense of comfort and dread that comes with being isolated in a rugged place was upon me again, and in a few minutes I was asleep.

Flowers and trails and boats, oh my!

Only a few hours of irregular sleep, and when I opened my eyes it was half an hour before my 10:45am “oh crap get out” alarm. I always do this; calculating the absolute minimum amount of time I’d need to get out of a hotel room in the morning and then setting my alarm based on that. The idea is, sleep is super important, and I’d rather stay asleep if my body wants to, for as long as it wants, and then pack up in a rush, instead of waking myself up pointlessly with an hour or two to spare. But if I wake up organically before that alarm, that’s great.

As it was, with only half an hour difference, I’d never fall back asleep in time. Might as well get up and start packing…

As soon as I rolled out of bed, the shriek of a wood-cutting instrument pierced in from the hallway just outside my door.  I peeked outside, and saw two workmen cutting a hole in the drywall above my bathroom, trying to find the extent of a leak from an upper floor.

I jammed in earphones and finished my few remaining packing tasks, then shoved the bike into the hallway and pushed my two empty suitcases out behind it.  The workmen had a ladder and a lamp on a stand blocking the way to the lobby, but there was a rear exit so I muscled the bike around to that.

So, with the bike loaded, the box shipped, and the hotel room cleared out, there was only one thing to deal with: These cheap-o suitcases I’d used on the airplane.

A container big enough to dispose of a suitcase.

Getting rid of trash in Iceland is quite hard, actually. It’s rare to find an open-access dumpster you can just chuck things into. Luckily there was one behind the hotel. I was probably not supposed to be using it at all. The very idea that one person would generate an amount of waste that would require a dumpster is appalling to Icelanders, no doubt.

But no one was looking, so I stuffed them in.

Only one of these gets you back into the room...

They handed it to me before I knew what it was! I swear!

Checking my pockets afterward I discovered there was one more thing to discard: The hotel key. In fact I had two of them. How had that happened? And this plastic bottle of “Icelandic water” they gave me on check-in… What an embarrassment. I chucked that in too.

I rode down towards the city, and stopped at the shoulder of the hill to look down into the bay, thinking, “This will be the last time I get this view.  Better enjoy it.”  Then I realized, “It was the last time last time as well.  You never know!  If there’s a next time perhaps you’ll be sharing this view with a nephew or a girlfriend.”

At the bottom of the hill I turned right, headed for the Subway again.  I wanted a meatball sandwich but they were out of meatballs, so I got a tuna salad in a to-go box and ate it sitting near the window while I organized photos.

Several dozen pop songs from the 80’s played as I sat there.  I remembered hating most of this music when I was young because it was always being piped into my consciousness at what felt like very inappropriate times.  It was the same now.  I wanted to eat my tuna salad and look at my little collection of Iceland photos.  I did not want this activity underscored by some flashy vocalist doing a go-for-broke screaming chorus about how broken his life was since his lover vanished.  “WELL TAKE A LOOK AT ME NOOOW-OOWWW!  THERE’S JUST AN EMPTY SPAAACE!”  Shut up Phil Collins, and get out of my Iceland photos.

How do people just carry on with their lives in these spaces – eating and talking and thinking – with this stuff burrowing into their ears? I will never understand it.

After an hour I packed up again and cruised around town, debating with myself about whether to buy more snacks.

I don't know what it means, but it's compelling.
This is how you grow sunflowers up here.
The massive Skipasmíðastöð Njarðvíkur in Keflavik
This is growing all over Iceland.
Iceland is a pretty safe place from predators.
Gotta stick close to mom's butt!

I couldn’t help stopping by the Viking museum for a photo or two. It’s just so cute!

I prefer my two-wheeled vessel!

Perhaps I should put some anachronistic horns on my helmet?

Actually my plan was to spend the night in the little camping area in front of the museum, but when I went inside to pay for my spot, the outrageously attractive woman behind the counter told me that the campsites had all been shut down for the season due to lack of cleaning staff and tourism. She offered to find me alternative lodgings using her phone, and in less than a minute she did, pointing me to a campground in the tiny hamlet of Vogar that offered sites for ten dollars a day. I reserved one on my phone, and thanked her.

There didn’t seem to be anyone else in the whole museum. A slow day in a slow season. I asked if there was still food left in the brunch area and she told me in her melodic English that they weren’t doing brunch, but there were some pastries in the kitchen area if I wanted to go pick one out. I wandered over there and gabbed one, then wandered back.

She asked if I wanted museum admission too, but I told her I’d already gone through it top-to-bottom a few years ago. We chatted about the best times to visit Iceland, and what tourists usually tried to see in a rush on their typical one-week timeframe.

Her eyes were almond-shaped and angled downward towards the bridge of her nose, giving her a catlike gaze, which she held on me for much longer than seemed necessary in a simple shop transaction. They were an intense, otherworldly green. She put her elbows on the counter and leaned forward to talk to me.

In the back of my mind, some lunatic part of me jumped up and shouted, “Hey! Forget about this bicycle trip and just hunker down here, and ask this lady on a date! And then stay for three months and then apply for a work visa and then get some of your stuff shipped here and then get an apartment and get hitched and have some Icelandic kids! IT’S A GREAT IDEA DO IT. LOOK AT THOSE EEEYES.”

That lunatic is not in charge. I threw a chair at him and he ducked back down. Then I tore myself away from the woman’s gaze, wished her a fine day, and walked outside.

I had a work meeting coming up and the museum closed at 4:00pm, right in the middle of the meeting, so I couldn’t have it there.  The Subway had free wifi. I decided more snacks was a good idea after all, and rode back down there a second time, ordering a steak sandwich in the form of a wrap.

Meeting done, I used the bathroom a final time (very important!) and then set off for Vogar, hoping to be there before my next work meeting started so I could use their wifi — assuming they had any.

The pace was casual. I could have cycled the shoulder of the main highway but I knew there was this fine coastal path. I slowed way down and waved hello to four different people walking dogs of various sizes.

I remember these cliffs from last time. So lovely.

Some time in the last few years, whimsical residents had started painting little heart shapes all along the path!

Little hearts all along the path!

Apparently other people love this path as much as I do.

I zig-zagged out to the main highway and began to plod along.  The wind intensified and began to deliver sleet into my face.  I realized I’d forgotten to put the rain cover on my backpack, so I stopped to do that. I also noticed that my gloves were leaking a little bit at the fingers.  Why do gloves always do this within a year, no matter how expensive and fancy they claim to be? Am I just getting unlucky?

“I hope there’s a place to dry some of this stuff in Vogar,” I muttered, “Or I’m gonna hate being in my tent.”

The dense skyline in the roadsign is a little misleading...

Vogar was not very far away. The shoulder was narrow but there was zero traffic. The sleet turned into rain, blasting sideways into my eyes and forcing me to put on sunglasses even though the cloud cover stole the light. After a while I remembered that I brought a new piece of gear for this very situation: Little plastic goggles!

Too much water; not enough light.

Aaah; that's better!

They were pretty effective. I could see and my face was a little warmer as well. After a while my gloves got so wet that wiping them clear was difficult, but they were still better than the sunglasses. Good job, previous me!

When I got to the campground I discovered that they also had cute little cabins for only a bit more money. I had an AirBnB scheduled in Reykjavik but I had budgeted two days to get there, and I was a day ahead of schedule now, so I rented a cabin for two days. If it proved comfortable I would rent it for a third night and fill the gap.

Yep, it's tiny, but that means the heater is more effective!

Four coathooks but just one coat? No problem!

There wasn’t enough room for the bicycle, so I parked it next to the door. I briefly thought about trying to lock it to something, but … This is Iceland.

I arrayed my gear around the room, pointed at the space heater, then did some corresponding with workmates.  I was too fatigued to write code but I could do all my other job-related tasks.  By 10:00pm I was pooped, so I deployed the sleeping bag onto the bed and played some ambient music.  Only halfway through the playlist, I was out.

As dark as it gets in this tiny room.