I had enough time to wander around the boat and admire the misty sea, eat a few snacks by the window, and then retreat to my tiny room for a nap. In the late evening I woke up and spent some time reading a fanciful local description of the islands I would soon be visiting, and chatting with friends. It was late afternoon back in California.
Amber and I started talking about romantic adventures, and my current situation. The months of riding had worked their physiological magic and I was feeling optimistic about the future, but the realization back in Iceland that I was too obsessed with past baggage was still knocking around my inner landscape, and sometimes crashing into unexpected feelings of betrayal from the sudden end of my relationship last year. I’d known those feelings were in me, but I never thought they were strong enough to linger this way.
I described all this to Amber, and asked her if I was doing the right thing by traveling so much.
Amber
I think it takes a great deal of courage to go out on your own. Most of us are programmed to always seek companionship, for better or worse, and I think one of the things adults can do – if they want to – is undo some of that programming.
Me
Agreed! I’m glad for that programming though. I mean, if we didn’t want to be with others generally we’d make pretty bad communities. And with people who like being alone, they still need someone to love, even if it’s just a cat.
Amber
Well in your case, you have this current of wanderlust that runs through you, and I think you need someone who can be your home base, but will encourage you in your travels. Maybe go with you when she can, and support you from afar when she can’t.
I don’t think it needs to be mutually exclusive — all home, or all wandering. I think you can have both, and that person is out there for you.
Me
Yeah. I don’t know what came first — the de-programming or the wanderlust. I think I was just unlucky enough to meet several people in a row that I didn’t work with long-term, in some way that was subtle and took time to uncover. That kind of wore me out.
So I felt compelled to “take a break” from romance, and that’s when the de-programming started. It was honestly kind of a surprise. I didn’t think there was anything to gain from being single any longer than I absolutely had to be.
Amber
I remember thinking that way. It took me a while to cross that line.
If there’s one thing you have to learn from long trips – either before, or during them – it’s that being alone isn’t scary.
But in romance, it’s very hard to make that discovery, or to really believe in it, because it’s too easy to equate “being wrecked over the last breakup” with “what it’s like being single”.
It takes time to feel the difference. And then there’s the whole “waiting for Mr/Mrs Right” thing… The belief that being happily single is really only desirable because it’s a stepping stone to starting the next relationship. If you run your single life that way – like a journey with an “exit” sign over the destination – there’s a lot you miss.
I spent quite a while telling Amber the details of last year’s breakup, and muttering about it, which surprised me. It had been nine months ago, and I’d been dating other people for six of those nine months. Wasn’t I supposed to be letting go of baggage? It was probably an ego thing. It usually is… Maybe some insight would come to me as I rode around the islands.
Amber signed off to start a work meeting. I said hello to a few nephews and sent a photo of the misty sea to my parents. Then, slowly, the mist began to clear and the television on the cafeteria wall showed a blob approaching from the south. The Faroe islands were near.
Ultima 9 used to take a 300-watt tower PC to run. Now I can play it on a laptop in an emulator and it looks just as good. That’s wild.
For the second time in two years, I am at the final day of a bike ride across Iceland. This happened much sooner than I expected: With so many other places in the world to see, I figured I wouldn’t see this country again for a decade or more.
When I reached this point during the first trip, I felt a mixture of satisfaction and regret. The regret was mostly that the journey couldn’t continue indefinitely, since I was so used to being on the bike. Once I boarded the ferry and left the country I had just two weeks to make a whirlwind tour of Europe, which I spent mostly in London and the German city of Lübeck. My mind was a tangle of work obligations and family concerns, and I was struggling with the logistics of getting back to Oakland on a schedule.
I had the same tangle of obligations and concerns in my head this time, but there’s also something very different about my mental state: Even though I am two years older and moving on from my mid-40s, I am bizarrely less concerned about “wasting“ time on the road and missing romantic opportunities at home.
It’s been difficult to avoid the feeling like the last two years have been somehow wasted, in the combination of COVID-19 and the formation and instant destruction of what I thought was a solid romantic relationship. When I arrived in Iceland this time, there was a real risk that I might feel as though I was starting over again. But this time, there was far less doubt and trauma to work through. My journey was more ambitious, more focused, and contained more logistical surprises as well, and I would not have handled those with such grace if I was feeling my way through an emotional disaster. There was no “on Icelandic plains“ moment during this trip.
The closest I got was a far more positive moment, when I found myself riding at night and looked up and was awestruck to see The Milky Way spread across the horizon, underlit by a very dim but unmistakable line of fire from the northern lights, which I was convinced I would never see on this journey. I am grateful that I came back this way during a time in my life when there was less to distract me from its unique beauty. I can now confidently say that I am more familiar with this country than practically all of the other tourists who pass through it, and I feel that has added something to my life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 was 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!
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.”
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.
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.
With lots of downtime in Höfn, one of the things I did was try to settle the romantic dilemma I’d blundered into a few weeks back. I was out of the highlands and there was no barrier to talking with my new friend, but I struggled with whether I should.
Eventually I wrote her a series of messages:
“So, I’ve been thinking. Lots of space and time to think, out on this weird island. It was fun doing that Zoom meeting with you. Intriguing to connect the face and movement with the thoughts and dialogue before. But I it’s no substitute for a face-to-face meeting.”
“Our physical distance is probably not going to change any time soon. If I was back home, I’d be putting together some kind of invitation for a picnic with you in a sunny park, because you’re very worth exploring. Someone as nifty as you deserves full attention. But I’m not there, I’m here, enacting a travel plan whose wheels I set in motion well before I knew you existed.”
“So, a real chemistry-testing date would be a long time coming. And if you’re newly dating, like I’ve been before, you might be feeling what I often do, which is a sense of overwhelming choice. There are so many different kinds of people! Personalities to bounce off, fun activities to try that your ex didn’t like, and so on! I imagine you could fill your dance card from 9:00am to midnight every day and still never get the whole variety. And given that … it doesn’t make sense to focus on someone so far away. One only has so much energy for these things.”
“I’m not saying I don’t enjoy corresponding with you – I very much do – but being limited to correspondence for such a long time might eventually get more frustrating than fun, and create weird expectations. I don’t want our connection to suffer that fate, but there aren’t any good choices. I think the only choice I have is to suggest that we pause things until I get back. I’m not declaring it quite yet, but the idea has been rolling around in my head for a few days.”
“How do you feel about all this?”
Ten minutes later I got a reply:
“That sounds right to me. I really like messaging with you but I am also actually trying to explore new possibilities right now. And we can’t progress beyond messaging so it makes sense to step back while that’s the case. I’m open to being pen pals in the meantime. I’m interested in your ongoing travels!”
And that’s the way it settled. I knew that stepping back meant drifting away from her, but it was the healthier choice. And better to make it deliberately than just let things fade into nervous silence on one end or the other.
