I packed up my stuff relatively quickly, though I had to unroll the tent again because I accidentally wrapped my headphones and GPS tracker inside it. Nick had commandeered one of my folding chairs and was browsing memes while slowly waking up. He looked so comfortable I decided I would leave him be and go take a shower.
Oh boy, shower time… Looks a bit grody… Here we go.
I wheeled the bike over to the restaurant just in case, but it was closed. The shower was alarmingly grody, so I changed out of my clothes while standing in my biking sandals and showered with them on. Still way better than no shower at all!
Not bad for an all-you-can-eat ten dollar breakfast.
Just as we were starting to chomp, Nick realized he’d forgotten his battery back at the campsite, so I spent some time at looking at train schedules and moving photos around.
After that we rode along the riverbank, absorbing the pleasant air and sun.
A few hours later we stopped for drinks at a roadside restaurant, just because we could. I got hot chocolate and he got a coffee drink.
We talked a lot about urban planning, about the paranoia his parents had about strangers and getting lost that was imposed on them by the suburban life, about how different it was when I was a kid. We tried to think of ways we could adapt urban environments, so they were better for families, and turned people away from the madness of car-based environments.
We pedaled on, drifting apart and then back again. Soon we threaded into Koblenz, large town sitting at the juncture of the Moselle and Rhine rivers, and stopped in a plaza. There we found a tall monument depicting the history of the region.
Contemplating such a massive span of time, and scraps of earlier conversations, Nick sat down to work through some things in his head. I walked around and gazed at the people and ate a snack.
From there we squiggled a bit farther north and found some other interesting sculpture, eventually reaching a park right at the confluence of the rivers, with an enormous statue of Kaiser Wilhelm overlooking the slowly churning water.
It was a nice day for lingering, but we did have more ground to cover. We rode west, following the Moselle. Going was very, very slightly tougher because now we were headed upriver instead of down.
We stopped at a greek cafe up a hill, next to a train station. I got gyros and wolfed them down, and Nick got some tortellini which he ate at a more sensible pace. I planned a train ride for tomorrow to make up for lost time.
How do you make amends, as a government or a nation, for an act of murder that was so complete that there is no family, even extended family, left to return stolen property to? When they’re dead, and the people who killed them are dead, and the officials and the lawmakers who were “just following orders” are dead by firing squad or rotting in prison, and your bombed-out, ruined country is now one enormous crime scene, how do you set it right?
I don’t know. These little bricks are obviously no compensation. I’ve done a fair amount of reading about what happened on the path to World War II and how it played out, but not much on what the Germans did afterward…
I made a note to do that, then dragged my mind back to the present, and the fine weather. The steep vineyards along the river were ridiculously pretty.
As I passed through a quiet intersection I hears a kid’s voice coming from a side yard. He said “Alahoo Akbar, reep reep, Alahoo Ahhkbarr,” and made a bunch of snorting noises like a pig. I was confused, then suddenly realized he was saying this at me, because he saw I was wearing a bandana, and decided that it must be some kind of keffiyeh under my bike helmet, and was mocking me with a religious phrase he connected to them.
I felt quite incredibly offended on behalf of everyone in the Middle East, and turned the bike around slowly, and rolled back by the yard. The kid who’d made the noises was still muttering nonsense to himself and kicking a soccer ball against the gate. I didn’t say anything, but grinned rather intensely at him, and when he saw me he jerked back, then stiffly gathered his ball and about-faced to walk to his friend at the far end of the yard. If I’d had more forethought I would have said something sarcastic to him in English. Hopefully I at least surprised some caution into the little shithead.
The incident was unsettling, and made me very thoughtful about the degree to which I was able to assume that the people around me in this foreign country meant me no harm. I mean, I’d known going in that I already looked very German, so as long as I didn’t open my mouth I could blend in; to the degree that a dude riding a recumbent festooned with too many bags could blend in anywhere. It honestly never occurred to me that they might also assume I was Middle Eastern because of my freaking bandana, which is, okay, an exceptionally thick white cotton cloth with an elaborate pattern on it in bright red ink, but generally smaller than any keffiyeh. Were Germans looking at me with some suspicion because of that? Was the shitty rambling of this little kid just an overt sign of an internal bigotry churning below the surface of the adult minds all around me?
I passed out of the town and down a steep hill, then zig-zagged to the campsite. The woman at the booth spoke broken English and was very friendly, though I also detected a strange note of nervousness in her demeanor, and I couldn’t help thinking it was the bandana again. It probably wasn’t. But the sense of discontent lingered with me.
I looked for Nick on my map and saw that he’d blown past the campsite. I called him and told him to read his texts, which he did. He turned right around. “Dang, I was just cruising along, feeling good. I could have gone a bunch more miles today I think.”
I ordered a giant glass of ice with tapwater in it, and they brought it to me, plus a refill. For that I was charged six dollars. Nick hemmed and hawed over the menu and eventually chose a rhubarb soda, which tasted a bit like a carbonated sports drink but came in a very nice tall glass.
We chatted about cultural differences, and the presence of so much designer label clothing around us. Nick pointed out that it was very expensive to get a drivers license in Germany. I opined that it was typical of Europe to make rules designed specifically to shut out the lower classes, as if they weren’t allowed to exist. I came to Germany expecting to find everything either the same as or better than the United States. Better land, better customs, better laws… Instead I’m finding that it’s a mixed bag, and some of the stuff they do seems outright crazy. I thought crazy was a mode that belonged only to Americans.
We found an open patch and set up our tents, then I bought more laundry tokens in the restaurant.
Two 7-minute showers and two washing machine runs.
We loaded laundry into two machines. Then we sat around organizing the campsite for a bit, then just reading our devices. One of the dryers ate two of my coins, so we consolidated.
By the time our laundry was done it was fully night, and we snuggled in, listening to the occasional bird calls from the swampy inlet on the far side of our little peninsula. It felt a bit like summer camp. Tomorrow we would wake up and go climbing around on ropes, and decorate pinecones to look like Mr. Potato Head, then have a sing-along around the fire.
This was not my first bike. I don’t remember anything about my first bike, except that I rode it around the vast weedy parking lot of an abandoned amusement park. My father would haul us kids out there every now and then to give us riding lessons in a place safe from cars. He would pull each bike from the back of the truck, hold it steady while one of us clamored aboard, and then give us a gentle push so we could pedal up to balancing speed without falling over.
I don’t remember how many times he did this, but I do remember one of the last times, when I clamored over my bike, put my foot on the pedal, and pressed down. I thought my Dad had his hands on the back of the bike and was steadying me, but he was actually turned around and hauling out another bike. He saw me take off and let out a whoop of happy encouragement. “Look at you, you started all by yourself!” Astonished, I turned my head and smiled, wobbled slightly, and then kept riding.
I don’t remember what happened to that bike but a while later it was replaced with that beast you see above. A single-speed BMX with kid-friendly upright handlebars. To brake, you pushed the pedals in reverse. I was delighted to have my own bike, but what really lit up my eyes was how shiny it was, like a gleaming metal space robot, big enough for me to ride around and pretend I was a rocket.
I remember that it seemed to weigh a ton. I remember not caring. I remember crashing it dozens of times, mostly while trying to do jumps. Plenty of holes in my pants and skinned knees. I remember riding it up and down the patchy gravel road near my house endlessly, standing up in the pedals to grind slowly up the biggest hill. It gave me a sense of personal freedom and mobility that encouraged my already developing habit of quiet, semi-random exploration, inside and out. It was easy to get around on a bike, and easy for me to think about things while riding.
I rode it for years. I don’t remember what happened to it, but it was probably stolen one day after I rode it to elementary school and didn’t bother to lock it up, one too many times. After that I got a larger bike with gears and handbrakes, but it was awkward and I didn’t know how to maintain or adjust it properly. It got covered in rust and it too was eventually stolen. For a while – years perhaps – I didn’t have a bicycle at all.
Then in my last year of high school, one of my sister’s boyfriends sold me his old bike. He’d assembled it from mail-order parts, using a Bridgestone mountain bike frame as the foundation. The components were all excellent, and his price was extremely low.
With that bike, I finally started paying attention to basic maintenance. I learned how to change a tire, how to adjust brakes, and so on. I rode it sporadically for about ten years, but for big chunks of time it just sat in the weeds of the back yard, leaning against the side of the house.
Then things got serious. I began to spend a lot of time working behind a desk, which starved me for exercise, and the thought of sweating on weight machines in a gym felt depressing. I hauled out the bike and started commuting to work, once or twice a week. It was ten miles through dense urban sprawl. I stayed late at work so the return trip could happen at night, when the air didn’t stink so much.
That got me familiar with long rides, in a way I’d never been before. And then, one day at my workplace, a man walked on stage and unveiled a device that would rearrange the world: The iPhone. I got one for free. In just few months I found a way to attach it to my bike.
Now I had a way to stay connected and socialize, while pedaling far afield. On the weekends I took trips way up into the San Jose hills, and sometimes over them and down into Santa Cruz. I stuck bags on the bike to hold sandwiches and extra clothing. I installed different pedals and gears. I got a generator so I could go for hours in the dark. It was exercise and adventure, with music and audiobooks and texting and phone calls. It was glorious.
Somewhere in there it moved from a hobby to an obsession. The idea of a multi-day tour, with a tent and sleeping bag, snuck into my mind and began quietly rearranging the furniture.
Just before I was set to embark on my first tour, I got a recumbent. It was a total impulse buy. A co-worker was selling his, and gave me a test ride, and in two minutes I was hooked. It was the bike for me. In a few weeks of frantic adjustment, the recumbent was kitted out for my first major tour, and off I went, starting at Crater Lake and zig-zagging into the middle of Idaho.
There’s a wilderness of land and people out there. More than anyone could know. And then there’s this other wilderness, almost entirely decoupled from the first one, that exists in people’s heads. It’s made of shorthand summaries and untested assumptions about the first wilderness, and it’s cramped and twisted like a funhouse ride and teeming with deranged fictional characters.
People who have done some traveling across the first wilderness – especially if it’s for fun – just love to creep into conversations and point out features of the second wilderness, all the time believing they are saying something meaningful, accurate, and wise about the first. They sorely want it to be true. Sometimes, sounding knowledgeable in the power play of the conversation at hand is what matters. We all love to play the wise mentor role.
This is how you get twenty-something know-it-alls at parties who say stuff like:
“Seattle is just a worse version of San Francisco.”
“People from Missouri are bigots.”
“New York is gross.”
“Everyone in Paris is so rude!”
“There’s more to do in Los Angeles than anywhere else.”
“All these new people moving to Austin are ruining the place.”
“People in Italy really know how to live.”
“Watsonville is full of Mexican illegals and if you go there you’ll get stabbed.”
(That last example may seem especially upsetting, but unfortunately, the inner wilderness is a place that can foster opinions that are not just pointless, but vicious as well.)
I know about this because I’ve caught myself doing it many times. It’s very tempting to point out some very personal, very subjective chunk of my own second wilderness and declare that everyone else will see exactly the same thing if they just go where I did. I keep trying to rein myself in, and talk about statistics instead, or give purely logistical advice.
But, paving the world around us with generalities and wishful thinking is a very human behavior. We do it to stave off madness in the face of an ultimately unknowable universe, because we are all far less capable of dealing with uncertainty than we want to admit. And sometimes our confidence needs the boost we can get by talking out loud, and we say something at a party like, “Oh I would never enjoy living in Canada.” … Conveniently forgetting the fact that 37 million people live there, and if they have a pretty good time of it, we probably could too. It would be no less honest – but far less flattering – to rephrase that confident statement as, “I’m mostly ignorant of how to enjoy life in a place like Canada and I want to remain that way, because I need to narrow down my choices for the sake of sanity.” After all, learning is work, and sometimes we prioritize.
I have to be okay with this, and so does everyone else, because we’re all only human. I really only bring it up because sometimes it’s very useful to recognize that we’re wandering around in the second wilderness – in the funhouse of our own assumptions – and if we just wake up a little and look around in more detail, we can find really useful connections, and gain new confidence. Every new place I go I’m astonished at how poorly I actually see things, and how much I lean on previous knowledge and trust that things will be predictable. I have to stop and go back, sometimes more than once, and ask “What did I just see? What did I just ignore?” and most important of all, “What’s being hidden from me because I’m a stranger?”
If you’re traveling, take a page of advice from a slow-ass bicycle tourist, and slow way down for a bit. Ask yourself a couple of those questions and give yourself time to seek an answer. Chances are, it will lead you somewhere way more interesting than the next picturesque monument on the madcap package bus tour you were offered by the tourist bureau. It was hard enough getting to that new place — so don’t forget to be there when you get there.
I sat around for quite a while in the morning, trying to decide if I should leave the AirBnB a day early to save time. Eventually I realized that if the decision was this difficult, I should probably be resting. It was raining pretty hard out there anyway.
They fried me up a pizza, and a burger, and an order of fish and chips. I strapped it all to the bike and rode back through the intensifying rain, using the promise of a meal to motivate my legs.
The food was still warm when I unboxed it: A decent burger. Really sad looking fish and chips. Frankly awful pizza. But it was food, and I had a raging furnace in me labeled “bike tour metabolism,” so I devoured about half of it, then reluctantly set aside the rest for breakfast. As I ate I watched terrible Marvel superhero movies. Vacuous entertainment for my overdriven brain.
Tyler
Hey uncle, my grandpa says the dried fish tastes like seasoned cardboard. Or a real bad pork rind.
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.
