I squiggled up, and up, and the wind increased with the altitude. Rainclouds pelted me and then scooted over the horizon, making space for the next batch of rainclouds in hour-long intervals.
Just before the plateau, the wind got especially bad, as I knew it would. I made a little video of my defiance:
If only the wind was blowing the other way, it would shove me right to the top of this range in less than half an hour. Instead it shoved rain directly into my eyes, making the sunglasses mandatory.
Who’s smug that he made it all the way up here in this insane wind? This guy!
The art installation has lost a bunch of portable TVs.
All those blocks used to have television sets perched on them. Now they’re gone, but there’s still an expository sign planted there. Perhaps the artist printed a different sign, inviting a different interpretation… But I didn’t get close enough to read it.
The wind relented somewhat at the plateau, and the rainclouds moved past so quickly they barely had time to drop rain. The ground was still soaked, of course.
Large patches of moss appeared on either side of me, some large enough that it was more accurate to call them fields of moss.
Right around here, I set down my rain cap and it blew off the back of the bike. I didn’t realize it was gone until I’d pedaled half a mile away and felt my head getting wet. Drat!
Around me the clouds drifted low, and did strange things to the light.
As if to complement this rugged weather, I got a random text message from my nephew Nick, asking about rugged ancestors:
“Didn’t you say that grandpa is part Mongolian at some point?”
I spent some time narrating an answer into my phone, and sent it in pieces.
“Well, there’s no recorded history for his family on his father’s side, before they left the Volga river settlements. No one knows whether they were there for 50 years, or 150 years. With marriage traditions what they were, that’s as much as seven generations. It looks like somewhere along the line, someone with epicanthal folds on the outside of their eyes must have gotten involved. There’s no documented evidence for it other than ‘your grandpa’s father was born of a group of people who collectively all lived in X place for somewhere around 100 years’, though. Which isn’t much to go on.”
“Even less information is available for your grandpa’s mother, who was part of a large family that moved down from Canada shortly before she was born.”
Garrett: “Does the ’51’ mean you’re five-foot-one at this point?”
Ben: “Hah! No I was six-foot-two. ’51’ is the year I graduated.”
“And her father, Hans, was born in Denmark and comes from a large Danish family that crossed the Atlantic more-or-less together when he was a little kid.”
“Companies like 23andme do their best to nail down certain genetic trends to certain regions by correlating documented evidence and family anecdote with sequenced genes, but when it comes to the last 200 years or so in Europe and Asia, things get vague quickly.”
“Besides, as I am fond of saying, ‘your genes are not special; the way you were raised is special.’ You and me and grandpa and grandma are all from families that place a high cultural value on education and graciousness as the route away from not-too-distant poverty. Which is why we all feel more comfortable around people who embrace the same, no matter what they look like or where they got their genes.”
That fun diversion, including looking up the various photos I used as illustration, carried me across the plateau and down the first run of dramatic, whooshing descents towards the town. When I came around the arm of the mountain and saw lights in the distance I paused for a snack and a photo.
Good ol’ Valoria, always ready to stop for a photo — and hold my snack while I’m taking it.
A night-time approach photo to match the one from two years ago.
One more whooshing descent, burning the brakes, and I arrived in Seydisfjordur. Only order of business: Check in and go to bed.
The hostel room was quite cozy. No one in the building was wearing a mask, even in the common lounge area, which I could only shrug at. The rules have always been loose at tourist-heavy spots.
Sjanni is a great fellow and I wish I’d had more time to spend with him!
I was looking forward to today’s ride because it included a tunnel – the Fáskrúðsfjarðargöng – 20,000 feet of road straight through a mountain and open to cyclists.
I stopped in town for some breakfast and email with nephews. One of them was feeling despair over the state of the world.
It’s difficult to pay attention to work when the world is slowly ending. I can’t stop seeking information about the collapse. I wonder if I’m crippling myself by going to college to get a degree that might not be worth all that much and it might not matter if the country has burned down yet or been flooded or both. Also corporations are buying all the houses here so I’m fairly certain I’ll be renting my whole life. I’m sure my 20-something endocrine system isn’t helping here either.
I thought for a while, then emailed back:
Civilization and the planet will survive while you to spend some time concentrating on your own development and diversification. It’s a process and you don’t need to tackle it all at once or figure out where it should go. Take it one step at a time, one day at a time.
What I didn’t say at the time, was that I could remember being his age many years ago, and overhearing my sister – his mother – expressing the same frustration and despair. And I remember our Dad replying with pretty much the same advice.
That gave me two interesting thoughts: First, that young people are always prone to think the world is ending, because they haven’t been around long enough to see otherwise. So conversations like this will happen forever, no matter how good or bad things get.
And second… How much worse was this, centuries ago, when the world seemed to be at the mercy of inscrutable gods, and people usually didn’t quite live long enough to learn that the world would carry on past their own hormone-addled youth?
That’s the morbid angle on this “wisdom”: It truly sets in when you witness people your age – or even younger than you – dying, and then observe years, then decades, of the world continuing without them. And perhaps not into a future they would have expected, but in some way that’s real enough, and teeming with other living people who still have to deal with it.
This global pandemic business. Great for the soul, yeah? Ugh. Interesting times — who needs them!!
Today’s route appears to go straight up over a mountain! No wait, that’s a tunnel.
And there it was… The portal down into darkness. I didn’t realize until I got this close that the tunnel slopes downwards from here, for the entire run. A good idea for drainage purposes, and also for dramatic effect. It feels a whole lot like descending deep into the earth.
10 whole minutes of coasting silently downhill into the mountain. Very trippy.
And then, off I went. The slope seemed to grab the bike, and the cool air being drawn through the tunnel by the turbines on the ceiling streamed over me, making it feel like I was going faster. I had a brainwave and put on some music from the Skyrim soundtrack: The chanting and drumming of Sovngarde. I had plenty of time to play through the entire track, because 20,000 feet of tunnel is nearly 3.8 miles (6km). At a breezy 15 miles an hour on a bike that’s fully 15 minutes of creeping downward through solid rock, imagining that I’m on my way to some eldritch ruined city abiding in total darkness, teeming with ghosts and adventure.
I love being a nerd!
If you look close you can see the tunnel I came out of.
If you look close you can see the tunnel I came out of.
Once I was out of the tunnel, I paused for a look back. The exit was clearly lower on the mountain than the entrance, making the mass above it even more impressive.
The town of Reyðarfjörður was on my right, sporting some nice waterfalls and snacking spots, but I was too interested in forging ahead over the hills to Egilsstaðir, where the next room was booked. The wind could turn against me any time, and I didn’t fancy another late night on the road.
I was tempted to walk over and put my feet in, but I figured the water would be far too cold, and my socks would take far too long to dry.
If I’m reading the sign correctly, the motorist was only 16 when she died here.
The rest of the journey was a slow pedal against mild headwind, through a narrow and relatively featureless valley. I say featureless, but it was still very pretty. I listened to a podcast about world economics and kept on cranking.
I arrived at an intersection, and suddenly realized that for the first time in many weeks, I’d crossed my own path from 2019. Once again I was in Egilsstaðir.
Time to find more snacks!
Here’s a place that looks like it can serve up a lot of calories.
Snack-laden, I found my hotel and wrestled all my gear up several floors to the room, including the bike. It was good to be indoors and warm again, and the food gave me enough energy to put in some work hours before falling over.
I now had less than two weeks remaining in Iceland, and I was about 60 miles (~100km) away from the port city of Seydisfjordur.
I could have potentially sailed out a week earlier, but I wanted to give myself time to file visa paperwork in Egilsstaðir. I could pedal hard and be there in one day, but then I’d just be hanging around waiting for the visa office to open. So why now slow my roll?
I went back down the street into Stöðvarfjörður and got breakfast, then marched around the little park next to the Fish Factory, soaking up sunshine and drinking a weird soda.
The good weather continued out on the road. I kinda missed my cat, so I listened to Cat Sense as I went along. It’s a book I like to revisit, since a little more of it sticks each time.
I came around a curve and saw an island that my cat would absolutely love:
I don’t know what this island is called. Can’t find a name for it on any map.
See all those dots? Every one of them is a bird nest.
My destination was a guest house in Fáskrúðsfjörður – not so far away – so I pedaled slowly and enjoyed my snacks, and watched the prolonged magic-hour light give way to a comfortable gloom.
Another fishing operation, with Fáskrúðsfjörður in the distance.
The traffic was sparse all day. It seems odd that a country filled with tourists, whose highway system is organized around one giant ring, would have less traffic in one place than another. Don’t all the tourists eventually drive all the way around the island?
Turns out they don’t. The northeast part of the island is much less popular, and most folks turn around in their rented cars and head back rather than doing a loop. I was now in the southeast, and beyond all the big attractions. The only traffic was from locals, and tourists who were using the ferry boat, or actually doing the loop.
The calm road let my eyes wander, and I saw many an informative sign.
Building a road is often something that happens in long intervals.
I finished the last of my Warlock Holmes, and switched over to a book about Norse mythology. It was a bit clinical. Too many names and undifferentiated battles, not enough context. It was more fun to switch back to the Skyrim playlist and imagine a gigantic Odin stomping around the fields, drop-kicking sheep and blasting holes in the mountains.
A view all the way up the valley to the start of the river, where the glacier originally came down and carved it.
In the late afternoon I passed into a town advertising Petra’s stone collection, a popular tourist spot. I’d already toured a similar collection though, so I gave it a pass.
I’m not enitrely sure how to interpret the drawing on this sign.
One of the locals told me about a campground on the east side of town. They said the bathrooms there weren’t working, so I could just stay there for free if I liked. I rolled over there and it was a great patch of flat ground with a stand of trees to cut the wind.
The bathrooms were closed at this tiny campground, so the manager of the local store said I could stay for free. Very Iceland.
I appreciate the intention here, but this map is actually really confusing.
I warned the waiter I would be there for a while, and he shrugged and said, “You might be our only customer for most of the day. It’s really slow right now.”
That was good. My video meetings wouldn’t bug anyone.
I adore any store that sells a carrot cake with four layers.
Once again I’m the only diner in the restaurant. The tourist season ends really abruptly here…
I finished with those, then wrote code and ate snacks for about five hours. Eventually I switched to email and texting with the folks back home.
As the daylight waned, my sense of isolation grew, and it brought along a rare feeling of homesickness. My digital connection to loved ones felt inadequate. Good enough for a while, but not long-term. I knew this feeling would grow with time, and as it did, perhaps I would reach a threshold where all online communication felt as insubstantial as it really was, and I’d have to return home or lose my sanity. Making friends along the way isn’t a near-term option when you’re constantly on the move.
As I rode back to the hotel, I started obsessing about social media, in the impotent way I often do. Most people in my home country get their news from social media feeds now. And without really understanding it, they’ve become vulnerable to bad actors working from far away, who can change or just rearrange their information for some economic or political purpose. The centralized nature of large-scale social media companies makes it easy to interfere in consistent and opaque ways.
An image formed in my head, of friends and family gathered in a living room having a lively conversation. In the center of the room is a chair, and in it sits a person wearing an expressionless mask. The person hears every word of the conversation. Occasionally they raise a hand, and whatever person is speaking is suddenly muted. Their mouth continues to move, but instead of the words they’re saying, a political opinion from a complete stranger, or an advertisement for a carefully chosen product, goes into the ears of everyone else. No one notices. The mind’s eye pans outward, and we see similar chairs in every room in the house, including bedrooms and bathrooms. Masked strangers are stationed outside as well, and at regular intervals up the street. No one sees them.
It sounds like the premise for an outlandish horror film — perhaps something directed by John Carpenter and starring a charismatic pro wrestler. A scenario that people would, upon discovering in the real world, feel immediate revulsion at, and begin fighting. The strangers in the chairs would be knocked down and shoved into the street. And yet, this is effectively the world we occupy, and we collectively embrace it because we can’t imagine these anonymous strangers doing something counter to our interests. Or perhaps, we feel like they’re so powerful already that there’s no alternative…
Back at the hotel I tried to push the vision out of my head and relax. Something big would have to be done, some kind of regulation or trust-busting, and my latest round of obsessing wasn’t going to conjure a solution. I packed my gear for an early start, and wandered deep into the ambient music in my little fold-up speakers.
