I woke up early, checked the time and listened to the announcements, then tried to nap a bit more. The captain’s voice blared out from the speaker on the wall inside my room, declaring that we all needed to be out and gathered in the hallways, and making my heart bounce off the top of my skull. No more sleep for me. In half an hour I was out sitting next to my bags in a hallway with only 5 hours of sleep.
I felt exhausted. I had to move my bags to be nearer a window and get cell signal, and from there I looked at maps and prices and found a hotel in a city 15 miles south of the ferry dock for a decent price. The weather report was good so I figured I would ride there even though I was tired, keeping the day from being a total waste in terms of ground covered.
When I moved my bags I accidentally left behind my Airpods case, and when I went back to look for it, it was gone. I double-checked all my bags and it was definitely missing. I threaded my way up the long hallway to the reception desk, passing a long stream of people exiting the boat, and asked an attendant if they’d seen a headphones case. I held up my other case to show her. She nodded, turned around, and pulled my case out of a drawer. True to that Danish sense of courtesy, someone had found the case and walked it all the way over to the lost items desk. Back home in Oakland, someone would have just jammed it in a pocket and strolled away.
Thank you, kind stranger who found these, wherever you are!
You need a vehicle like this, in case you need to, like, run over a beer can in the road or something.
I had to stand around for a long time waiting for cars to move, since me and the other cyclist had been boxed in by three very long tour buses parked too close for a bike to squeeze between. I moved my bike several times to make space for the buses to turn, and the other cyclist followed my lead. Finally I got a gap in the outgoing traffic, and I was down the ramp and in Denmark.
It was a pretty grand entrance, actually. The first thing I saw beyond the ship was a busy staging area full of moving vehicles, then a procession of metal cylinders in the distance, disappearing up past the ceiling of the cargo bay. When I emerged I saw that each cylinder was the trunk of a gigantic wind turbine, the blades gracefully rotating as flocks of birds sailed between them. Then the shadow of the boat ended and I felt a wash of warm sun all over my face and arms — the first I’d felt in weeks. I was so distracted I had to pull the bike over into a cargo stacking space and just hang out there, absorbing sunlight, for ten minutes. I also took the time to remove my sweater. Wouldn’t be needing that…
The wind gently guided me onto a side-road, and after only a few minutes I was well away from the ship and moving into town. I was starving so my first stop was a little cafe. The woman behind the counter had light blond hair and a deep brown tan. She reminded me of being a kid at the beach in California, running around in Junior Lifeguards class with all the other little tan blond kids. I settled down at a table outside in the sun, and ate a massive open-faced sandwich and most of a mocha.
Back on land that can grow vegetables! Eaten open-faced, of course.
Back on land that can grow vegetables! Eaten open-faced, of course.
As I ate, I chatted with my Mom and gave my impressions of the country, and learned a bit of family history.
Me
Wow, Denmark is as amazing as I remember it for biking… Bike lanes in many places, extremely polite drivers, nice and flat, and SUNSHINE!!!!
A 70 year old man held the door for me at the cafe I visited, since I had bike bags in my hands. I just saw two women in their 80’s out for a walk together with sticks and a walker, and both waved and grinned at me.
Mom
That’s how I remember the people too! Friendly, slightly reserved, and very polite! I believe “gracious” is the best word.
Me
Good word!
Going from extreme hills and 90mph winds to this is quite a shock. Camping in the Faroe Islands weather would have been a disaster, but there are campsites all over Denmark, more than anywhere else I’ve seen. I wonder if grandpa got an interest in camping from memories of Denmark? Or was he too young?
Mom
Your grandad was only five when they came here, so I doubt it.
Me
Hmm, well perhaps even at the age of five he had some interest in camping already cultivated.
Mom
Part of his growing up was in San Francisco very near Golden Gate Park where he spent a lot of time. Later there were many trips to Muir Woods.
Me
I did not know that!
Mom
Also, my uncle Happy, Denny’s father, was in the class above my mother at Berkeley High, so later they must have lived in Berkeley.
Me
I assume Berkeley is where grandpa met grandma?
Mom
I think so. Mother had a friend Essie in her dance troupe who was his cousin, so it was through her that they met.
Did you visit Copenhagen the last time you were there? That was where your grandad was born.
Me
It’s on my itinerary! I fly out from there.
I was now both nourished and totally wired, and it was time to ride. The Danish countryside did not disappoint, and I stopped constantly for photos.
It was wonderful. A enchanting reminder of just how relaxing and healing a bike ride can be. The sun warmed me, the air was fresh, the wind was behind me, the hills were gentle, the cars were shockingly polite and no one was speeding, and there were nice separated bike paths and birds and farm animals all around.
I stopped near a field and saw a mound of apples, left out for horses and cattle to find, and picked a few out for myself.
I sliced it with my pocket knife and used the backpack as a kitchen table, and stood there eating perfectly ripe apple by the side of a field on a quiet country road for half an hour.
I don’t care who you are, I could convert you to love bicycle touring in one week by getting you a long-wheelbase recumbent bicycle and putting you at the northwest end of Denmark, and giving you a phone and a sweater and telling you to cycle to the southeast corner. By the time you arrived you would be in such a state of nourished relaxed sun-tanned bliss that bicycle touring would forevermore be part of your life.
I also passed through a bunch of little towns. I felt very slightly disoriented by the transition between houses and countryside, and when I realized why I laughed to myself: I come from a place where farmland is in one region, and communities are usually pressed together in another. Mostly because of the presence of suburbs defined by the automobile, but also because parcels of farmland are generally bigger back home, with the houses on them set way back from the road.
There are parts of California where one can cruise from farmland to houses to farmland in the space of a few miles on a bike, but they aren’t typical. I was getting the impression that in Denmark, it’s like this by default, everywhere outside major cities.
I learned later on that this is the pattern in the north of Denmark, but suburbs and sprawl appear as one goes south, making the experience more like California.
Also, you know how I could tell this was a low-crime area relative to Oakland? Two things: Unlocked bicycles are everywhere, and even the young women out jogging alone look up and smile hello as I ride by.
One woman was out walking her dog, and she saw me and made her dog sit down on the grass next to the sidewalk so I could pass more easily.
I saw people out and about, but even as I entered an actual city, I consistently saw fewer people in public than I was expecting. Were the Danes still largely sequestered due to COVID restrictions, even a year and a half after the pandemic? Perhaps the vaccine roll-out was slower here than back home? Or was life just slower here?
By the time the 15 miles was done I was in fine spirits. The city had a quaint central area, and I took a bunch more photos, then checked into the hotel without trouble and re-fitted the bike for an evening out. From there I imported and sorted photos in a cafe while enjoying another tuna sandwich.
In spite of the lack of sleep on the ferry, I felt awake. On a whim I decided to see a movie. The local cinema was showing a recent American release, “Dune”, in English with Danish subtitles. I rolled the bike over and almost wondered if I should bother locking it to the rack or just leave it standing there like most of the others.
Everybody milling about with snacks, before the movie.
The movie itself was kind of disappointing, but I still had a good time. It was a very posh theater experience, and hanging out in close quarters with a bunch of Danish people felt oddly comfortable. They stood very near each other and made a low hum of conversation, sounding more like a classy dinner party without a band, instead of a bunch of strangers in public. It was interesting comparing it to the standoffish Icelanders I’d been dealing with. In fact, I couldn’t remember seeing that many people so close together anywhere in Iceland, except inside a few of the tourist-filled restaurants in the capital city, and the noise in those was appalling.
I spent the day indoors, trying to get my body to stop aching. Took a nap in the middle of the day.
The AirBnB owner came by to chat, and decided to give me a ride to the local restaurant up the road, and wait while I grabbed my phone-in meal. What a greta guy! Along the way we chatted a bit about work and travel schedules. He said he wanted to visit the US some time. I told him he was welcome to stay in my spare room if he ever visited San Francisco.
He asked about my journey and I talked a little about Iceland and Denmark, and how I had been able to negotiate remote work. He said that getting time off to travel was a very different situation in the Faroe Islands: If you wanted to take time off, you just went up to your boss and said, “I want to take three months off,” and your boss would nod and off you’d go.
In the evening I watched more brainless Marvel entertainment: “Thor” and part of “The Avengers” There were whole middle sections of both movies that I’d completely forgotten. After that I stayed up much later than I expected to, writing short email responses. My mind was scratching at the old relationship question again, asking, “What do I want in a partner now, given that I’ve turned down so many different kinds of people over these last few years?”
Matt
I had no idea you were out there! Aren’t those the islands off the West Coast, off San Francisco?
Me
Uh…
Matt
The ones we dumped a ton of radioactive nuclear waste around? Or am I… I think I’m mixing that up.
By the time I passed the pizza joint up the road it had started and stopped raining twice. The joint itself was closed. Glad I bought stuff the previous night!
I crossed over the bridge just beyond to the town of Oyrarbakki, then stopped at a gas station. They sold two-part epoxy which would have been a much better material for repairing my mirror and headphones, but I had already used the superglue. Oh well! Nothing on the shelves was inspiring, but I grabbed some peanuts and a chocolate bar anyway.
I doubt there were ever covered wagons in the Faroe Islands. They’d never get up any of the hills.
I doubt there were ever covered wagons in the Faroe Islands. They’d never get up any of the hills.
At the checkout counter I noticed this headline on a local paper. It was about the recent slaughter of dolphins during the yearly hunt called “the grind” that the Faroese consider a tradition. Over 1400 dolphins had been killed this year, which was causing an international backlash. The massacre had occurred in a fjord just a few kilometers away from where I was standing.
Here’s the best I can do to puzzle out a translation:
Sunday night’s massive killing, which is the largest in our history, has put the Faroe Islands in the crosshairs of the international media. It is worse than the previous massive killing in the Faroe Islands, but there are also several examples of poachers letting large groups pass, precisely because it would have been overkill to slaughter them.
I was not at all surprised by the defensive tone of the reporter.
On the way out of the little town I accidentally missed a left turn, and rode up a big slope alongside the hill for no reason. Whoops!
For the next couple of hours I rode north. Rain and sunlight passed over the road multiple times. I put on music by Joe Hisashi and reveled in it.
I arrived at the coastal town of Eiði, a picturesque collection of houses on rolling hills, dominated by a church with an orderly graveyard tacked onto the side. I went to the one store in town and parked there, then rambled around inside for a while trying to find things I actually wanted to eat. I bought a pear and a banana, plus a little box of chocolate milk. The town cafe was closed, but that was alright: I wasn’t hungry enough for a full meal.
I poked up and down a few streets, then went up towards the church and looked down the road towards the campsite. I was expecting it to have quite a few trailers and RVs in it, like I’d seen in the campsite across the bay, but there were only a few. It looked very exposed to the wind, and I didn’t fancy the idea of setting up a tent in the rain and having it nearly ripped out of the ground some time at night.
I decided to continue up over the pass and get to Gjógv. It meant that I wouldn’t have a day to spend climbing Slættaratindur, the tallest peak in Faroe, but on the other hand, the peak was lost in cloud cover now and would almost definitely be lost in cloud cover tomorrow as well. Might as well skip it.
Before leaving town I stopped at the little Fisk And Kips wagon parked by the church. The wind was blasting all around and I had a hard time finding a place to rest the bike, but eventually located a sheltered alcove built into a set of public bathrooms nearby. I hunkered down in there to eat the meal, and it was totally delicious. The chef had given me four huge chunks of fish which seemed excessive. Maybe he knew how hungry bike tourists are in general? I could feel my body drawing the heat out of the food as I ate it.
Then I started uphill, due east, towards the base of Slættaratindur. The wind was at my back and seemed to shove me up the road. I barely had to pedal as the highway squiggled for a bit, past sheep laying low in the grass. Soon I reached a plateau where I could look northwest out to sea, and see two rock formations called Risin og Kellingin, or the Giant and the Witch.
As the legend goes, these are the remains of two creatures from Iceland, who came to try and steal the Faroe islands and haul them back to Iceland with a giant rope. But the task was too difficult and as they struggled the sun rose, turning them to stone.
A bit farther up the road, I came across a strange formation of shells mixed into dirt. It was as though someone had collected an enormous quantity of shells, then heaped dirt on top of them, and the dirt had eroded on one side causing the shells to spill out.
What in the world was this? An early settler trash midden? Why so far from the water? Is it the effort of a farmer or a soil scientist, trying to enhance the topsoil or provide nourishment to animals? I could not figure it out. Why would shells be mixed with fully-formed soil, 300 meters up from sea level?
My best theory was that it was cheap reinforcement for the soil used to shore up the highway. Perhaps some time in the future I would find an answer.
After some long pauses to snack and empty my bladder, I wiggled my way to the top of the pass, at the highest point of the road. Slættaratindur loomed up into the mist to the north of me. The wind made the clouds move alarmingly fast.
Have a picnic here at the highest pass in the Faroe Islands!
I sat around for a bit, admiring the mountain, and then began the descent. At a fork in the road I went left. Below me to the west I could see the town of Funningur, but my destination was north.
Just past the fork a gust of wind battered the bike and my side mirror snapped off. As soon as it hit the pavement, the wind tried to scoot it along over the edge of the road. “Hey! I need that!” I yelled at the wind, and chased comedically after the mirror as it scooted away. I scooped it up just before it sailed down towards Funningur, and jammed it into a bag. Perhaps I could glue it on again tomorrow.
The wind shuffled a bit, then began to push at my back again, moving me upward over another small mountain pass. Then the road was just a long gentle coast downward to Gjógv, and I had to apply my brakes constantly because the wind kept speeding me up like a poltergeist intent on murder.
“Whoo-eee!” I shouted, but in my mind I also thought, “I hope the wind isn’t blowing this way tomorrow, or going back up over this pass is going to suck.”
As soon as I swung the bike into the town, I aimed for a restaurant. It was late in the day but they were happy to feed me. I ate a good meal plus dessert, and used the wifi to figure out a riding schedule for the next few days.
On the wall I noticed this cool old map. I was in the town in the upper right.
I also did some shopping for a new jacket, but left the item in the electronic cart, since there was no point in ordering it yet. Even if I had my nephew prepare me a package for DHL to send, where would he send it? Copenhagen? I’d be there only a few days before flying home.
I went from the restaurant to my AirBnB, and unpacked my gear all over the dining room so things could dry out. The bike was dripping on the floor so I laid a few towels under it. While I was fumbling in the kitchen I noticed these cool glass drawers:
I was tired, but felt the need to settle down before crawling under the covers. I opened the laptop and rattled off a few notes.
An interesting thought: There are car campers, and there are backpackers. As a cycle tourist, I carry an amount of gear somewhere between these two groups. But it skews toward the backpacker, because unlike the car camper I still have to use my own energy to move all my stuff around. I pay a price for additional weight, just not as high a price as a backpacker.
My biggest extravagance? Definitely my camera. With the extra lens and the battery, it adds 3.7kg – eight pounds – to my load.
If I had all the relevant statistics, I could probably come up with an accurate estimate of how much time I have lost from every day of biking, by spending additional energy pedaling up hills because of the added weight of the camera. My completely unsubstantiated back-of-the-envelope calculation, sitting there in the gloom of a cement-walled house on the windy shore of an island in the North Atlantic, put the cost at an extra 15 minutes out of an 8-hour day, or about 3% of my time on the bike.
Considering the fact that this extra 3 percent of my time on a hill would also be spent looking at beautiful terrain and listening to a podcast, that’s a pretty good tradeoff…
The cat’s human arrived home while I was there, and grinned at me as he went inside.
I swung around towards the harbor and the downtown, and the first thing I spotted were these massive chunks of rubber and steel. There’s also a convenient take-out box on the ground for scale. What do you suppose these are for?
Hammershaimb studied Old Norse for years in Denmark, and was influential in the formation of the Faroese written language. The language itself is very old of course, but there had never been formal agreement on how it should be written down for modern purposes. During his time, there was some debate over whether it should be written phonetically to resemble the modern spoken language, or whether it should be derived from the old Nordic language. Hammershaimb argued for the latter.
When Janus Kamban constructed the monument in 1948 there was still lively debate between linguists in Iceland, Denmark, and Norway over the fate of the Faroese language, but the prevailing opinion was that Hammershaimb had been right, and without his advocacy the Nordic language would have faded into irrelevance.
(Hey, want a convenient map and inventory of all the statues and stuff around this city? Here’s an official one!)
I got coffee down by the harbor, and said hello to a few locals who were drawn to my bike. My final task in town was to buy a giant platter of sushi from the local restaurant and pin it to my backpack. This would be breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Then I was off, to the north. I had some hills to cover before the highway met the sea again. Along the way I saw another of those off-kilter road signs:
For a while it was just me, and the road, and the sea… And sheep. The shoulder of the road was wide enough to ignore the cars, and they all passed me at a respectful speed. “A bicyclist? Give that lunatic a wide berth; the lunacy might be contagious!”
As the road went upward to match the high side of the Kollafjarðartunnilin, a tunnel through the mountain to the village of Oyrareingir and beyond, I heard a faint whistling noise. It reminded me of a referee at a soccer game, blowing a whistle to stop the action, but in this case it was a constant rhythm of tweets, sounding out across the floor of the valley to my right.
I paused for a while, confused, and then finally realized that there was a rancher standing down there, blowing a whistle to direct the actions of a sheepdog.
It looked like the sheepdog was learning tricks for a competition. I used my zoom lens to grab some video.
Oh, to be a sheepdog! To have a body made for running, and senses keen for it, and enough brains to do some joyful task your human rancher sets for you, so a warm hearth and good food and praise are guaranteed. …And not too much brains, so you don’t care to question the arrangement.
Apparently there is a breed of dog called the Faroese Sheepdog, with some distinction from the more general Border Collie category. These dogs have a tougher job than usual: The sheep here don’t have much instinct for flocking and are kept “free range,” so they wander all over the place. The dogs are trained mainly to chase down a sheep, catch it by the wool at the shoulder or by the foreleg, and bring it to the ground to hold it so a rancher can close the distance and do whatever they need. Moving sheep around in flocks is something they do, but it’s not their career.
I stood there watching the dog move sheep around for half an hour at least, before I remembered that daylight isn’t infinite and there was still ground to cover. Onward, into the tunnel!
There was some kind of street faire in progress with lots of kids making noise, and tables set out with various home-baked goods. A woman was standing around with a horse offering free rides to brave youngsters.
I asked one of the locals if I could buy a slice of cake with my Icelandic or American money, but she only accepted Faroese or Danish money. A man standing close by overheard the exchange, and pulled a coin out of his pocket and handed it to me. “For you,” he said. “Have some!”
Now that’s just plain delightful. It was pretty good cake, too.
I rounded a corner and began going up a different fjord. The wind was with me for a change, so I felt like I could stop more often. I found a couple of derelict structures close to the water that looked interesting, and clamored down to touch them.
The colors of the Icelandic flag could be interpreted as “water around ice around lava”, but these colors… Hmm. Mist around fjords around wildflowers maybe?
The day turned to evening. When I rolled down the last hill and came to the town of Hósvík, I took a little video:
The owner of my AirBnB helped me stow the bike in the garage. He reported that there was no food in town, though there was a pizza place “up the road at Hvalvík.” Later I consulted a map and saw it was called “Joe Pizza”, and was half an hour away by bike. It would close before I got there.
As I unpacked my gear and settled in, I felt very thoughtful. Before I could crawl into the bed I had to type for a while and dig this out of my brain:
If you’re a person who likes solo activities, the first era of your life is an endless war against people and institutions that demand your attention. “Ugh, why won’t all these people go away so I can read?”
If you manage some victory against them, you enter a second era, full of ongoing satisfaction from all the progress you make on your solo activities. “I’ve read so many great books. It’s incredible. I’ve set up the perfect reading lounge. I love running my hands across the stacks, while I decide what to read next.”
But then you enter a third era. One you didn’t expect. You begin to suffer from being alone too often. Tragically, the only activities you’ve learned how to enjoy are solo activities. “I feel lonely. But people are so annoying. Let me browse the shelves and find a book to cheer me up…”
A difficult struggle begins. You need to play catch-up with all the skills you didn’t use when you were fighting to be alone. You can’t just avoid eye contact and fail to return calls any more. But the trouble is, every minute of the struggle, a part of you is terribly uncomfortable and screaming that your alone time is under threat, just like in the old days, and the only way to feel better is to stop this foolish socializing at once and go be alone. Half of your soul will bravely start a conversation with a stranger, and the other half will instantly start scrambling for a way to end the conversation and get this man out of your face.
After this struggle, scattered with small victories, you might see a fourth era: You like people, and can genuinely connect with them, and you also like time alone, and you have a collection of means to enjoy both.
Of course, this isn’t a perfect metaphor because these “eras” are really all happening at once, and we often leap around between them depending on life circumstances. But I do think that there is some kind of progression: I think introverts like me can only live in the fourth era long-term after we spend enough time in the earlier ones.
One of the astonishing facts about the world, that hits me in the face over and over again when I’m traveling like this, is just how many people are living in it. The sheer number of lives happening all at once around us is utterly, absolutely, incomprehensible; and the ways in which we can reach out, the connections we can make, the perspectives we can learn … there is no end to their variety and power.
And yet, even when we travel, so few of us actually reach out and connect. We go to a place to learn some history, see a building, feel some different weather, and the people around us are mostly just vendors of services. Why is that? Well, mostly because we already know more people than we can handle back home.
As much as I enjoyed my “second era” of being an introvert, my struggle in the “third era” is what truly gave me a shot at well-being; and that little toolkit I slowly put together – the one I use to build up a conversation with a stranger from nothing and dig for a connection, when I’m out here traveling on two wheels – gets just a little bit better with each use. Nevertheless, I feel an almost tragic sense of loss, when I think about how many more connections I could be making every single day, but don’t — because I’m too tired, or too busy working, or would just rather be enjoying the landscape.
Just today: The homeowner who waved hello when I stopped to pet his cat. The manager of the bike shop who gave me advice about the under-water tunnels. The conversation I could have started with the couple next to me at the cafe. The fishmonger who chatted me up in the harbor, as he stood hosing off the catch strung across the deck of his boat. The craggy old man with the flatcap and the pipe who looked like he’d just stepped out of a 300-year-old painting, who regarded my bike curiously. The questions I could have returned when an old woman stopped me to ask where I was riding to. The crowd of onlookers at the town festival I blundered across. The guy who gave me a Danish coin from his wallet when I tried to buy some cake. The woman next to him who asked about California. The kids who fired excited questions at me from their bikes. I could have taken all of these farther. I could have learned new names and made friends.
7,800,000,000 people, all living at once…
Assuming I live to be 85 years old, if I started shaking hands with a new person every single second for the rest of my waking life, I would still only meet one tenth of them. Meanwhile, during every one-second handshake … two people would die somewhere on the planet, and four more would be born. I could go on shaking hands forever … and just fall farther behind.
I grew up near San Francisco and was no stranger to a good fish market, but the method of capture and preparation on display here felt interesting to me.
I found a cafe next to the one I’d visited yesterday, and got a really delightful smoked salmon and egg plate with a salad, a muffin, and a mocha. An 80-something woman in a motorized chair came out and parked next to me, which would have been companionable except she started smoking one cigarette after another nonstop, and the air blowing in from the sea pushed the smoke into my face. Even so, the air was a lot fresher than inside, and I was warm with my rain pants and hat on, so I stayed put.
She struggled to light each new cigarette, carefully propping it in her mouth and then leaning way down to reach the lighter in her hands, and I waged a bit of an internal war over whether I should be chivalrous and hold her lighter, or whether I should refrain from making it easier for her to kill herself, which she seemed determined to pursue. In the end I split the difference and said nothing.
I was also amused by the sight of a table full of American men – or at least, men speaking English in an American accent (so they could have been Dutch, for example) – talking about real estate prices in different countries and how best to take advantage of the rapidly recovering global economy. They all had the same style of dress: Short immaculate haircuts, no beards, collared shirts with short sleeves that were tight against their arms, slacks, business-casual shoes, ostentatiously rugged-looking wristwatches. A perfectly coordinated performance of wealthy masculinity I was familiar with back home in the Silicon Valley. I couldn’t help contrasting them, and their conversation, with the fishmongers I’d seen outside in their seaworthy outfits and cold-insulating beards and hats.
I suppose generally the comparison is between a mode of dress that’s mostly utilitarian – the fishermen – and a mode that’s for social signaling. I can relate to both, of course. I wear sweats on my bike so my legs can move, but I’m wearing pants today because I’m not biking very far and I feel more civilized in them, and that’s a purely social motive. But what I was seeing here also had an element of class division. Poking it further, I realized I had a default feeling towards the American men somewhere between suspicion and hostility, that I didn’t feel towards the fishermen.
I had to pause my work and think about this, because it was bugging me.
My Dad would always grumble, “If you don’t like the way I look, don’t look.” He was a big dude when I was growing up (not so much now at the age of 87), and definitely into eating healthy and exercise, but he never wore clothing designed to accent his musculature. It’s not hard to show off: Just wear short sleeves and a shirt that’s maybe half a size too small, even when it’s cold, and better yet, cross your arms with your fists next to your biceps to make them stick out; that sort of thing.
I observed him in little pieces over my teenage years and learned that he looked down on men who did that. He called it “looking macho”. I never asked him why but it was easy enough to connect the dots: He was big partly because of genes, and partly because he’d spent most of his youth doing farm labor to help the family survive. Same with his teenage friends. He wasn’t the biggest among them, which meant he got picked on as much as he picked on others, and he had a temper, and that meant lots of trouble and fights. In that era I think he learned two things:
The slightly overweight guy in the loose dirty work clothes could usually kick the crap out of the guy in the tight shirt.
He has nothing to gain by doing so, and knows it.
Then later on – probably in college – he learned a third thing on top of that, which led to the attitude I saw:
The guy in the tight shirt doesn’t know thing number 2, and doesn’t believe thing number 1, and that makes him kind of a fool.
He’s dressing that way as a social signal – maybe to fit in with a wealthy crowd, maybe to attract women, and also as a show of intimidation – and he thinks that the reason the pudgy hulk in the corner isn’t in his face is because it’s working. Taking that back another level, he’s demonstrating that he assumes that guy is his competitor, rather than his potential friend. And to my Dad, that’s the real sin: Acting like you have more to gain from fighting rather than cooperating. Fighting’s easy, win or lose. Avoiding a fight and forming an alliance instead — that’s the smarter play. Definitely the attitude of someone who grew up in the shadow of World War II.
Years ago I asked my Mom why she’d been drawn to him, when they met. She laughed and said she’d actually wanted to go on a date with his housemate to a basketball game, but the housemate stood her up, and Dad was home so he volunteered to take her instead. My Mom was even more intensely the outgoing, chatty version of herself back then, and she found in my Dad a guy who could more than easily make good conversation, and was handsome, but completely un-macho, which suited her just fine because she’d lost patience for male competition — “boys with toys,” as she put it. Even if toys implied wealth, her family had wealth, so that didn’t impress her either.
And there it was. I was suspicious of a signal because it had implications about being “macho” – about male exclusivity and dominance – and I was suspicious of men who liked to broadcast that signal. If Rudyard Kipling told them, “Don’t look too good, nor talk too wise,” they would reply, “Why not?”
Of course, that’s a lot of assumptions to make based on a mode of dress. There are people in my own extended family who fit that mode and don’t seem to be aware of how it looks to people very different from them, mostly because … well, how would it ever come up in regular conversation? And, dress standards vary hugely from one social stratum to the next, even in the same place, and here I was at a ferry terminal 1/3 of the way around the planet applying my perspective from back home, so how could that even work?
If I asked one of the locals selling fish nearby, he would probably say, “Eh, they bring in money and they don’t leave a mess, I’m fine with them.” And if I asked the men at the table to give an opinion, it would probably be, “Yeah the Faroese are alright; they’re polite and honest and they stay out of our way.” And then they would get back to talking about real estate.
So, this all says much more about me than it does about the people I’m seeing, doesn’t it.
When the cafe closed I rode further up into the town, picking streets randomly. There was more art to be found!
I parked outside another cafe I’d passed a few times before. It was very cozy inside. Groups of people were chatting together, creating a level of engagement that I almost never saw at cafes in my home town, which had been colonized almost completely by people with sketchpads and laptops — like mine, ha haaa! I was so delighted by a pair of young men playing chess together that I asked them to pose for a photo.
I got a sandwich and a hot chocolate, and settled in to do some writing. As the evening wore on, the group speaking Faroese at the table next to me was replaced by a couple speaking French, then a group speaking rapid-fire Ukranian or Polish. I could only parse a tiny fraction of their words with my very limited Russian, but it was fun to try.
The sandwich was good and the cocoa was marvelous. I was having a grand time but around 10:00pm I crashed into tiredness, almost to the point of being unsteady on my feet. So I stacked my dishes, then rode through the light rain back to the AirBnB and let myself in.
I’d only been in the quiet house for 20 minutes when I decided it was time to crawl into bed. The sudden crash was disturbing. Was I fighting a cold? Could this be COVID-19, blunted by the vaccination? I wasn’t sure.
