The weather was good for roaming. On the north side of town I found a long series of stone platforms with egg sculptures on top of them – the “Eggs of Merry Bay” – and many other smaller statues and signs scattered along the coast.
Small monument to Hans Jonatan, former Danish slave and the first known person of African descent to settle in Iceland.
I did of course eat several meals in the local cafe, while I slowly went through a massive backlog of photos and tinkered with my GPS recordings. In the afternoon I switched to work, and caught up with my fellow software developers in the status meeting.
Once again I was amused by the fact that a meeting I sometimes lost sleep over because it was so early in the morning back home was now happening around dinnertime. This “round Earth” conspiracy sure is elaborate!
I also took some time to ride out to a little exhibition of stones created by a local collector. No, it’s not the much-publicized Petrea’s Stone Collection – that’s farther down the road and was closed when I passed it – this is the site of JFS Handcrafts, a shop run by a delightful man named Jón.
Outside the Steinasafn (Stone Museum) in Djúpivogur.
Outside the Steinasafn (Stone Museum) in Djúpivogur.
We bonded a little bit over our mutual appreciation of Pink Floyd, but mostly I just quietly wandered around the space and stared at the incredible variety of rocks. Jón had personally collected every one, and gave details on the geology and origins of anything I pointed out.
It was a relaxing day, and I was grateful for the clear weather. Tomorrow promised more rain. Even though I would be wearing the rainpants all day, I tried washing my thoroughly stained sweats again, using the sink in the common area. Perhaps in a few days I would look somewhat less like I didn’t know the difference between a campfire and a toilet seat.
Didn’t get a chance to pay for your spot? Be a good citizen and leave some cash.
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.
Aha! I think I found the Icelandic version of Pride Rock!
Aha! I think I found the Icelandic version of Pride Rock!
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.
That's a lot o' geese!
Shallow tidewater, good for straining some nutrition out with your beak.
I don't think I've ever seen so many geese in one spot before.
Just another amazing scene on the Iceland coast.
Lovely calm waters for a goose convention.
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?
This bay is protected by a long thin arm of land that smooths the waves on the ocean.
This bay is protected by a long thin arm of land that smooths the waves on the ocean.
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.
Geese on the water near the Hvalnes Nature Reserve Beach.
Am I enjoying this day? Yes; yes I am!
Geese on the Icelandic coast.
Honk honk honk honk honk!
A long, narrow stripe of beach, with the sea beyond.
Geese enjoying the fair Iceland weather.
Time for a nap!
This is the same stuff that's in the pillow packed into a compression sack on my bike!
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?
Got a piece of cardboard? Maybe you can slide down!
Got a piece of cardboard? Maybe you can slide down!
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.
Lighthouse or giant carrot?
Clouds chopping the top off the nearby peaks.
Quite astonishingly windy on this particular chunk of road.
Up along the coast road we go!
Ready to hit the beach?
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.
Lots of travelers want you to know they've been here before you.
Lots of pedaling, running out of food, and having an excellent day.
A nice view of the next hour of riding.
Random rainbow!
Such nifty contours on these hills...
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 formed 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…
Awww, don’t run over the dude! He’s just walkin’ here!
Awww, don’t run over the dude! He’s just walkin’ here!
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!
It's a teeny waterfall! I approve.
Hey, yo, check out dis heah waterfall!
Often I find myself wondering how long ago any given rock wall was built on this island. 50 years? 300?
Pedal on the way down, pedal on the way up. Then catch breath and do it again!
That's way too tilted to be a house foundation. Some kind of waterside animal pen?
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.”
Cairn you see what's in the photo?
Tired, but determined.
The fog appears to be clawing its way over the peaks.
Roadside columns.
Leaning layers in the landscape.
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.
Apparently there's an old religious dude buried right around here.
That looks like enough rocks to hold down a deacon!
Qutie an impressive stack built up over the years.
I am amused by the way this burial site has been turned into a picnic spot.
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.
Whole lotta symbols in the next town. Not sure what a bunch of them mean…
Whole lotta symbols in the next town. Not sure what a bunch of them mean…
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.
If you don’t dry your frillies on the radiatior, some other camper will come by and do the same.
If you don’t dry your frillies on the radiatior, some other camper will come by and do the same.
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.
The morning was cold enough that I wore my rain pants just for the insulation, even though it wasn’t raining. This had a useful side-effect: No one could see just how alarmingly stained my sweatpants were. Highway tar does not look good on anything.
The view in the campground was glorious, and as I struck camp I paused for a while to take a video of the tumbling clouds.
Daylight revealed big splats of mud on my walk-around jeans, so I rinsed them in the restaurant bathroom and roped them to the bike. The dry wind would do the job the weak sunlight couldn’t.
Across the bay from the viking settlement — a radar station!
Across the bay from the viking settlement — a radar station!
Before joining the main highway, I rambled back down to the end of the road I’d been walking last night, and saw a cool radar station that had only been a row of blinking lights before.
The road back to the road.
That's a whole lotta erosion!
There's a very similar formation on the inside of Crater Lake over in Oregon.
I'm glad I wasn't here when this rolled down the mountain.
The landscape was even weirder during the day. I could see why it was popular with photographers.
Just before the highway, the rockslide got so dramatic that I had to pause and take this brain-bending photo with the camera tilted:
Hmm something odd about this landscape but I can’t quite figure it out…
Hmm something odd about this landscape but I can’t quite figure it out…
The late morning mist was really working today, adding dramatic layers to rock and sea.
Strange coastline near Höfn
Pretty shpooky!
Lighthouse near Höfn in the morning.
When I reached the highway, the tunnel was visible again. The first one of this trip. (I’d been through a few on the northern side a few years ago.) This would be fun!
Further in I saw a few spots that were already in need of repair. I wonder if volcanic eruptions cause the ground to quake enough for this? Or is it just the ordinary freeze-thaw destruction of harsh winters?
Okay well there’s a little wear and tear, but still pretty modern lookin’.
To amuse myself and contrast with the serene landscape, I cued up an ancient radio show by The Firesign Theatre, The Big Internet Broadcast Of 1996. I wondered if the Icelanders around me would go for such absurdist humor? I might be making the day’s experience less Icelandic, but, … a geek’s gotta geek.
“We’ve got a lot of everything out here. And a lot of places to … put it in.”
The Firesign Theatre describing America
I think this sign is saying something about city versus country speed limits, but it’s way too complicated.
I think this sign is saying something about city versus country speed limits, but it’s way too complicated.
So, you should have headlights if there’s no road, or a road but no city, unless you’re a bus, in which case go various speeds. But if there’s mixed company, then … go the same speeds? Thank goodness I can ignore this, since there aren’t any bicycles.
Around the corner I found a nice place to sit:
Tired of traveling? Take a rest, in the big red random chair.
Hay wrapped up for later chomping. Gotta have that when the weather gets as bad as it does in Iceland.
Then my afternoon changed. I was biking along an S-curve, and ahead I noticed a car hurtling along, approaching the other end of the curve. I was a bit concerned that it was going to take the corner pretty fast. Then it didn’t take the corner at all.
Instead, the car went down the embankment on the outside of the curve, then up another embankment from a perpendicular road. It flew almost 15 feet into the air, tilting downward from the rotational force of the front wheels being first to leave the ground, then it came down with a heavy thud just on the other side of a fence, see-sawing back up into the air and throwing a large dark object out behind it. It landed again, the airbags deployed, and finally it ground to a stop in the grass.
Witnessing all this, I pedaled faster to get around the S-curve to where the vehicle had landed, certain someone was seriously hurt. Less than a minute later, a young woman opened the driver-side door and got out, standing unsteadily. By the time I drew close with my bike, on the other side of the wire fence, she had walked a circle around the car, apparently inspecting it for damage, and then sat down heavily on the grass by the open door.
I looked ahead towards the first impact, where I’d seen a giant object come flying out. There was a large rectangle of bare earth, and a long blanket of sod the same size beyond it. The impact of the vehicle had ripped it out of the ground all at once. I was quite relieved it wasn’t a mangled body, human or otherwise, and that I didn’t have to try and triage some horrifying injury while waiting for assistance, since I wouldn’t be very good at it.
The first impact dug up a big chunk of turf and flung it to one side.
The rear wheels came down in the same place just after the front ones bounced up.
I asked the woman if she was alright, and said I would call emergency services. I had a feeling she wasn’t confident enough in her English to answer back. I took my phone off the handlebars and realized I had no idea what the number for emergency service in Iceland was, or even if my phone would connect to it.
Before I could start puzzling this out, another car came along. It slowed for me, then slowed dramatically when the driver saw down the embankment and noticed a car sitting on the wrong side of a cattle fence.
The car parked, and the man who emerged was a local farmer, fluent in Icelandic. I told him what I’d seen and he immediately began attending to the young woman, who looked no more than 17 years old, and was clearly in shock. He called for the highway patrol, and with a few minutes to wait he turned to me and gave the woman’s side of the story, as she remained shell-shocked in the grass.
“She was up really late, trying to drive home from the other side of the island,” he said. “She fell asleep at the wheel. When she woke up, the car was in the grass. She doesn’t remember anything about the accident, just waking up with her face in the airbag.”
A few minutes later an SUV marked as law enforcement pulled up. Two officers talked to the woman, and a third came up to me and asked for a retelling of the incident, since I was the only one who’d seen it. I walked him over to where the car left the road, and to the embankment where it vaulted into the air. The car had missed hitting a metal sign embedded in a concrete footing by only a few inches, then had flown just far enough to avoid having the rear end come down on top of a fencepost. That would have turned the car sideways and possibly thrown her from it. Or, if she’d been going slower and come down in front of the fence, the steep angle would have plowed the post upward and sent it through the windshield.
I was gobsmacked at how absurdly fortunate she had been — and how incredibly well the airbags had done their job. Holy crap do those things save lives. The extent of her injuries was a bruised ankle and some PTSD.
I stood around texting for a bit. The young woman got moved to the back of the SUV. The farmer sat next to her, providing company for the ride home. It turns out he knew her father, a fellow farmer. I leaned in the window and told her: “You’ve very lucky. Think of all the time after this as bonus time.”
She nodded and gave a weak smile.
There was nothing more I could contribute, so I rode on. By evening I’d found a campground, and set up my shelter.
The place had a cute little common area, making a pleasant island of light. I sat around for a while listening to a few other campers chatting about their hike.
Had to use one guyline here, on account of the high wind. Still a pretty good site!
It was an indirect problem: To open my airway, I have to sleep on my side. But to do that without my ribs hurting, I need a body pillow. So on bike tours I take all my laundry and stuff it into the sack my sleeping bag is usually kept in, and put that against my chest. Last night I didn’t stuff in enough laundry and I was too lazy and cold to go digging around for more. I was also too lazy to locate my jaw insert, which was an even dumber mistake.
All night I kept rearranging my pillow to try and open my airway enough that it would stay open when my body went completely limp from entering REM sleep… And instead, I kept choking and waking myself up. Classic sleep apnea. What a stupid lesson to keep learning!
Well, the cars starting up and slamming doors only about ten feet away didn’t help, and the headlights of the late arrivals bothered my eyes until I deployed my sleep mask, so it really was a group effort to make me tired in the morning. But the sleep apnea was most of the problem.
I rinsed my face in the restaurant bathroom. It lacked a mirror which was probably a blessing for my self-esteem, since I always look ghastly when I’m underslept. Then I shuffled over to the cafe side of the building, bought snacks, and set up the laptop to get more work done.
I also took some time to plan my route ahead. If I rode every day, I could get to Seyðisfjörður and the ferry boat in less than a week. I didn’t need to lock my schedule down because there were plenty of campsites ahead on the route I could just roll into. Assuming I could buy a ticket for the boat to leave the next day, I’d have about four weeks to explore the Faroe Islands and Denmark, as well as Norway and Sweden, before my visa hit the 90-day limit and I was forced to fly out. It would be nice to have more time.
I decided to apply for a “work-stay” extension, like I’d been pondering in Reykjavik. The final document I needed was a letter of permission from my boss, so I put together a draft of that. There was a place to submit all the paperwork in Egilsstaðir, the county seat of Norður-Múlasýsla, one day out from the ferry terminal. If I still wanted to apply, that would be the place. No need to bother my boss about a letter until then.
Several hours passed in a montage of code, email, and design documents. The snacks disappeared. On the wall I noticed a panoramic photo of the mountains I passed coming in, and realized rather late that I was in one of the most photographed areas of the country. The range includes a mountain called Vestrahorn. Tourists use that name for the whole range.
You know your cafe is in a beautiful place when you can look at the photographs adorning the walls and find the cafe itself at the base of the mountain.
You know your cafe is in a beautiful place when you can look at the photographs adorning the walls and find the cafe itself at the base of the mountain.
There were a lot of photo shoots and films taken here. I guess that helped to explain the presence of the Viking movie set.
I wrapped up my work and exchanged the laptop for some warmer clothes, then went strolling around on the beach.
I get the impression that most of this is leftover material from back when the viking movie set was constructed.
By the time I spotted the movie set, it was pretty late in the day, and the cloud cover made the light weaker than usual, providing a sense of actual “evening”, which is rare for Iceland. Still plenty of visibility though.
Pretty majestic spot for a settlement. Well chosen, location scout!
Pretty majestic spot for a settlement. Well chosen, location scout!
I was strolling across the blasted heath, towards a place built for the purpose of staging a drama about the crafty and warlike Vikings. Suddenly I had a weird idea: How about I complement this by listening to an audio production of … MacBeth?
I had a copy of it on my phone, and started it up. Thunder rolled, and the Weyward Sisters gathered around me and began to whisper about battles, and betrayal, and blood.
Hard to tell how accurate any of this is. What would a building of this shape be for?
Hard to tell how accurate any of this is. What would a building of this shape be for?
The movie set had been built and abandoned years ago, but retained a presence in tourist culture. Eventually it came to the attention of another movie company, and now there are plans afoot to retrofit the buildings for use in another Viking epic. Like Hobbiton in New Zealand, this place may find a second life, and then a third life as a more permanent attraction.
I wonder how many raiders were spotted from these gates? (Answer: Zero.)
I can imagine an actor being crammed in there with the bars shut, screaming about an imminent invasion. "Wait 'till my brother Hrölf finds out I'm here!"
The main longhouse building of the set.
I can imagine a small herd of animals crammed in here.
I wonder if this semi-enclosed side hallway is part of the traditional layout?
Set designers and engineers must have been crawling through these windows constantly.
At this point, not a pleasant place for a bed and nightstand.
Absurdly shallow stairs must have made daily life here a bit treacherous.
Evening darkened very, very slowly as I went poking around the abandoned, half-modern half-ancient structures, listening to a 400-year-old play delivered by exceptional actors, with eerie sound effects and music.
Yep, there's a house in there.
It would take some serious cleanup to make this building livable again.
I wonder what they were using this giant curtain to conceal?
The walls of the roundhouse looked very unstable, but the door was surrounded by delightful carvings and I was very tempted to try pushing it open.
As I stared at the door, Scene 3 of Act 2 began in my headphones. A drunken porter woke up to the sound of furious knocking on a giant door, and began shouting as he made his way through the castle to answer it. To my disbelief and then delight, I recognized the porter as David Tennant. I was only familiar with his work in Dr Who.
What fun! I had my folding chair and footstool with me, which I’d been carrying in a sack along with a few remaining bits of food from the cafe. I assembled the chair in front of the lodge, put my feet up, and listened to MacBeth slowly go insane.
Me
Good afternoon! I’m listening to an audio production of MacBeth, and just heard the phrase “one fell swoop.” Is this play the origin of that phrase?
Mom
Shakespeare often used images from nature. “One fell swoop” sounds like the sudden, obliterating attack of a bird of prey.
Me
Very dramatic!
Mom
… I just looked it up. Yep, he was the originator. He refers to a kite – a hunting bird – and to his family as chickens.
Me
Ah hah! That definition of “kite” makes this passage clearer to me:
(Macbeth is seeing a ghost) “If charnel houses and our graves must send those that we bury back, our monuments shall be the maws of kites.”
I thought he was referring to kites like the ones we fly on a string. Some sort of metaphor like, our monuments will be empty of bodies, so the wind will whistle through them like it whistles through a box kite.
But now I see it could be something else: Our monuments will accumulate bodies only to vomit them up again like birds feeding their young.
Mom
Kites not only eat live things, they eat carrion too.
Me
Oh dear. So the metaphor is, with the dead walking, birds will pick them clean, so we might as well declare the birds themselves to be grave markers…
Mom
Yeah, i think so.
Me
How delightfully gruesome! … It’s … Murder most fowl!
When the play concluded I went back to music, picking some nice electronic stuff by Biosphere. Then I wandered over to the fence at the edge of the movie set and took a few pictures with the fancy camera, trying to capture the strange light I was seeing.
Three superimposed 30 second shots from the iPhone. Not bad considering it was quite dark out.
When I pulled them off the camera later, the photos were pretty good.
With bits of Shakespearean dialogue floating through my mind, I picked my way back across the swampy grass to the seashore, and then along to the road that led me back to camp. At one point I put a foot wrong and got a wet shoe, which I left outside my tent flap.
The scenery, the music, the Scottish Play, the blustery wind and the glowing sky, had all combined to make one amazing day that I would remember for a long time.
