The Commonwealth

I awoke feeling refreshed. Perhaps it was the silence around me, perhaps the feeling of clarity from yesterday’s decision. Either way I was glad.

The light rain had continued all through the night, and the corners of my sleeping bag were damp again. I had about half an hour of relative sunlight with a constant wind, so I stood around eating a lettuce-forward breakfast, and the bag was mostly dry when I rolled it up. I had an actual room booked for tonight, so I could unroll everything in there to let the drying finish.

The few patrons around me had vanished in the early morning. With no other campers here, the site felt less like a campground and more like a tangle of animal paths and tiny clearings that I’d just wandered into. There were no markers to delineate spaces, and tall bushes crowded the sides of the road, which curved around continuously as if to avoid them. Perhaps that was true: Perhaps trees are so rare in Iceland that the locals would rather redirect a road than cut one down. If so, I liked it — even though I almost got lost on my way out.

The road squiggled on. When my phone caught a signal, I got an email update from my new okCupid friend. We were sharing meta-thoughts about dating. The rain had paused for the moment so I stopped on the shoulder and typed a response:

Later in the day I got an equally thoughtful response:

She proposed that we try a video chat when I got to the hotel, assuming there was coverage. I said that was a fine idea. We were both curious to see how we’d react to each other in “real time”.

Also I had to look up “proxemics.” What an interesting word!

I stowed the laptop again and kept pedaling. Around the next corner I saw a delightful sign:

There’s a replica Viking farm here? I AM SO INTO THIS.

It’s called Þjórsárdal. It’s a reconstruction of a Viking farm based on the layout of an archeological site in  the Þjórsárdalur Valley, which was buried under a thick blanket of volcanic ash when Hekla erupted in 1104. The eruption was not so sudden that people were buried – they had time to flee – but it was continuous enough that the entire area was rendered uninhabitable. Archeologists dream of this sort of thing!

The parking lot in Þjórsárdal was nearly empty. I just rolled the bike up and set the kickstand. Admission was cheap, but the lack of people also meant that most of the events and activities were cancelled.

I cued up the soundtrack to Skyrim – because I’m an incorrigible nerd – and walked slowly around, enraptured by the artifacts, the equipment, and the little informative placards.

The exterior turf construction was historically accurate, as well as the peg-and-hole interior construction, with the exception of the ticket booth and other modern areas used for running the business.

I was in the lodge house for at least an hour, reading everything and thinking deep thoughts about human lifespans and cultural transmission. What a cool place!

Eventually I ran out of stuff to stare at, and I knew I had a big hill to tackle and many more miles to ride, so I took a few photos in the parking lot and then got back in the saddle.

After the hill I rode out across a plateau. The terrain around me felt a little more volcanic; less grassy. Rain started and stopped half a dozen times. Even if there was time to set my gear out to dry, the sun never broke the clouds for longer than a few minutes at a time.

In the distance I spotted huge power lines, and eventually rolled past a hydroelectric power station. Another (relatively) free modern resource for Icelanders, to go along with geothermal heat and clean water, though I imagine the up-front investment was huge.

It fit the larger pattern, really: Iceland has amazing potential for renewable resources but the up-front cost could not be met without a massive influx of cash, technology, and material from elsewhere. The picture of the country as self-sufficient is very carefully framed.

Mostly I didn’t think about modern Icelanders, and just gazed at the weird and rugged terrain sliding past the bicycle.

In any other part of the world, I’d see a slender, chunky rock formation like this, and think “someone must have built a house here long ago…”

No wonder this terrain has been a substitute for alien planets in dozens of sci-fi films, of budgets high and low.

Eventually I reached the hotel. It was raining heavily when I propped the bike outside. The place was crowded, which was disorienting after my long solitary ride. Everyone indoors was walking around in slippers, or bare socks, or wearing shoe covers. Apparently there was a serious problem with tracking in the volcanic soil.

You know you’re back in civilization when you can get Kokteilsósa!

I turned both heaters on full blast and cracked the window, then laid my tent out on the bed. Like a gross-ass bike tourist I did my laundry in the shower, then shuffled things around to dry that as well.

Then it was time for my video chat with my new friend. Feeling weirdly nervous, I joined the hotel wifi and clicked the link.

As soon as my face appeared on the screen, she said, “Oh thank goodness, this isn’t some elaborate catfishing thing. You actually look like you!” I laughed.

She had been serious-looking in the photos. In real time, she smiled and laughed and took equal parts in sharing and asking questions. The give-and-take felt natural.  I knew I was being a bit over-enthusiastic but I couldn’t help it; I was nervous.  We’d only recently started talking, but she actually knew far more about me than anyone I’d been talking to in Iceland for weeks.

I only realized later that she seemed to be much more used to video meetings than I was.  Her setup was composed so that she sat way back from the camera, showing her whole upper body, and she was reclined comfortably.  The arrangement allowed her to express with their hands, and not worry so much about whether eye contact was constantly happening. Also, had she chosen that arrangement so I could confirm that she was the shape she claimed to be? My little hotel room was so small there was no way I could reciprocate.

We talked about the history of London, and the schedule of my road ahead in Iceland.  She talked about the “times of antiquity” and how Europe had plundered other parts of the world to gather artifacts.  She mentioned a book sitting over on her shelf, and recommended it to me.  She’d only gotten partway into it because she’d been reading it during her dissertation time.  She talked about Stephen Fry and some of his writing, and how her sister had accidentally run into him twice, and I mentioned his interview on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.  She didn’t care much for that podcast – the format was too boring – but she always liked Paula Poundstone.  Turns out we’d both seen her live in our youth.  She recommended another podcast called “Behind The Bastards”.

We talked for almost an hour and there wasn’t a second of dead air, which was nice. I had to sign off though, because there was some business to deal with involving my father. We agreed to chat again soon, though I cautioned that I would be entering the highlands and video would probably not work for the next week. The whole thing was delightful; so much so that I instantly began asking myself: “Why are you so far away from this person? Why did you want to go on this trip anyway?” And that, after a pretty amazing day of riding that included a surprise tour of a Viking farm. I had a bit of whiplash.

Then it was time to switch gears again: I had multiple phone appointments with caregivers and healthcare workers. My father and his wife were both struggling with dementia and had multiple people providing different kinds of assistance, and they all needed to be coordinated, and they all needed to be paid through a recalcitrant insurance system, and at the same time I was trying to get my father evaluated so he could potentially move into an “assisted living” home and share an apartment there with his wife.

The process was seriously hampered by the fact that I couldn’t make outgoing calls on my phone from Iceland. I had to contact my sister, who would call the person I needed, then call me up, and merge us into a conference call. Then she stayed on the line making notes, which we sent back and forth in the chat. She couldn’t do the talking for me, because I was the only person who had “power of attorney” and could make decisions about my Dad’s life.

It was a whole lot of stuff about doctor reports, and paperwork filings, and therapy approvals, and lots of arguing over who was qualified to evaluate my father and what it would mean. It dragged out for hours. I was grateful for the time difference at least, since it meant I was catching all these people early in the workday before ennui set in.

When that was done, all I could do was drop onto the sheets in a dead faint, with my laundry arrayed around me. What a weird life I’m leading.

Sesar and Skuggi

I was up and packing well after dawn, which was alright, because dawn had technically begun at 3:30am. I knew there would be trouble as soon as I looked at the side of the tent: The outside of the mesh window was a fluffy constellation of mosquitoes, dozens of them, perched and waiting as close as they could to the smell of fresh human inside.

I stared at them groggily. I’d managed a little less than six hours of sleep. Now on top of sleep deprivation I was going to be deprived of blood! I shook my first at them, which did nothing. I smacked the mesh and a few of them moved, then quickly landed again. Oh well, nothing for it. At least the day’s riding would be relatively easy.

As soon as I stepped out of the tent my head was encased in a furiously buzzing cloud, and I instantly began scrabbling at my face. I ducked back inside and grabbed my wool hat and rain hood, plus my sunglasses. The buzzing cloud reformed a few inches in front of my nose and laid siege.

The little jerks were plentiful but not as sneaky as the ones I’d met in Alaska. Around me I noticed adults were stepping out of tents and cars and immediately breaking into a run as they went for the bathrooms. Nearby I saw a woman pick up her child and jog him over to a washing station. It took her just a few seconds to wash his face but before she finished he was crying in terror and waving his arms ineffectually at the bugs. I realized that I was one of probably two or three other people in this whole crowded campground who would think “Oh, these aren’t as bad as that other place I’ve been…” and that almost made me laugh.

I secretly hoped the guy who harassed me the other night was itching all over. I also gave thanks to my pee bottle, which saved me at least one trip outside into this madness in the early morning.

I disassembled and packed the tent with extra speed. On my way out of the campground I looked around again for a place where I might pay someone for the space, but saw no signage anywhere, and none of the buildings looked prominent enough. Had I wandered into the middle of some other event, for which people had purchased tickets elsewhere? I noticed that all the inflatable rides and toys I’d seen on the way in were now deflated. Was the event over, or would they start back up again?

I shrugged and turned the bike onto the main road. The bugs were still harassing me, but as I got up to speed, the cloud swapped out for progressively smaller clouds and then dispersed entirely. Always good to be back in the saddle.

I descended some short hills, stepping down into a valley. The cloud cover stayed with me but there was no rain. Each mountain pushed up through the clouds, leaving a narrow gap along the slope, which illuminated the hillsides in the distance even as the valley stayed in perpetual shadow. It was strange light.

I passed fields of grass, with occasional horses roaming around. A few stared curiously at me from behind wire fences as I sailed by. I always hoped they would start running along the fence and follow me for a while, because it’s quite enchanting when that happens, but none of them were inspired today.

As I turned south and headed closer to the coast, the air grew colder, so I stopped to add some layers. I strolled around a bit to help my circulation.

That’s when I noticed the bridge. It crossed a small ditch and then pointed directly into a tangle of weeds. There was no path I could see. What was this all about?

I walked across and waded into the grass. Was this some kind of overgrown campground? Wait, there are pieces of wood here, with labels on them…

Well now. This was not something I expected to see today.

I had a lot of thoughts about this. One was, my cat Mira is getting old, and it would be nice to lay her to rest in a place like this when the time came, where the site could be marked and remembered. It couldn’t be Iceland of course. It would have to be closer to home.

Another thought was, a place like this couldn’t really exist back in the city I called home, because any use of space would be subject to an encyclopedia of regulations, some of which would require money. One possible exception might be the weird wasteland of the Albany Bulb, but even that would be a tenuous negotiation with artists and traveling campers.

The redwood forest where I spent my childhood might be able to conceal a pet cemetery. In fact it might conceal one already. I could bury Mira there, but it wouldn’t be appropriate: Mira never lived in the redwoods. She was born in Santa Cruz, in the crawlspace underneath a house. I suppose the best place for her would be the back garden of her current residence in Oakland. She loves that garden.

I felt lucky to have seen this little memorial to beloved pets. I took my photos and then pedaled on, carefully storing the memory so that it didn’t grow too heavy and make me homesick for my little fuzzy cat and the sunbeams under the avocado tree. I could see that later. She’ll be on the Earth for a while yet.

The traffic began to increase. I was nearing a section of the Ring Road again. The clouds descended into mist for a while.

Soon I passed a roundabout, and the traffic got crowded. By the time I crossed the Ölfusá river on a two-lane bridge, the cars were actually wedged bumper-to-bumper, stacked up across the bridge and down to another roundabout just inside the city of Selfoss. I suspected a lot of the drivers were tourists who didn’t quite trust their instincts on a roundabout.

I rolled past all that, and up to a local cat, who was perched on the sidewalk and staring at the tangle of cars with a bored expression. I imagined it was employed as a town greeter and paid every evening in fish.

There were a number of sights to see here but my main interest was a place to sit and some snacks to chomp.

I got a late breakfast and coffee in a cafe next to the roundabout, tucked into a small table among a crowd of tourists, mostly fellow Americans. Then I rolled down the road to my hotel room and checked in, and stowed my gear. I decided to spend an extra day in Selfoss because my rear brakes were giving me trouble, and I didn’t want to over-use my front brakes and end up with none.

With the bike safe behind a locked door, I set out on foot to a second cafe.

Then I walked uptown and bought soap and milk and KFC sandwiches. Depending on how the repairs went, I might spend all the next day squirreled away in the room.

From country to city

I packed up early in the morning. There was plenty of daylight to see by of course, since this time of year “night” is mostly of a state of mind.

I headed out on the coastal road instead of returning to the highway. A few days ago I’d scanned ahead using satellite view on my phone, and confirmed it was paved. It was a nice discovery and a lovely road; far more interesting than the main one.

I was on it for about two hours, and that entire time I was not passed by a single car in either direction. Delightful!

A bird posed for me on a ruined house, so I lingered for a while, lining up a shot and chomping a handful of peanuts — the very last of my food.

I took some video of the tundra-like volcanic landscape and the modest farmsteads, feeling glad for my layers of clothing.

“This is what it’s like to cross the interior,” I thought. “Except the interior is more barren, colder, and has far worse roads, including river crossings. So, hmm. Maybe it’s not really like this at all.” An idea was percolating in my head to diverge from the coast somewhere along my tour, but I didn’t have details yet.

There were some gravel patches but the ground was hard beneath, so the bike handled them well.  I was tempted to think it would do well on the gravel roads farther upland, but experience told me there would be deep gravel and even mud up there. My skinny tires would have trouble.

Eventually the coastal road crossed under the main highway and turned into gravel beyond it, so I switched to the highway.

I rolled onto the wide shoulder and started the audiobook “Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed”, and skipped to the chapter about the Vikings and the colonization of Iceland, Greenland, and other areas. The cars that shot past me were a strong reminder of the forces at play here.

Iceland is the most ecologically damaged country in Europe.  It’s generally the fault of the Vikings.  During the relatively brief time they were here trying all their traditional survival methods, they deforested the island by over 80 percent.  Today, Iceland is 94 percent deforested.  Almost all the trees that remain have been behind fences that shield them from grazing animals.

The other major disaster has been soil erosion.  Relative to other places the vikings were familiar with, soil in Iceland dries up and blows away very quickly.  Large areas of it are accumulated volcanic ash, built up over thousands of years and then held down by plants.  The vikings ripped up the plants or burned them to make space for crops, and the soil disappeared almost before their eyes.

I think of this, and then I think of being a kid back home in the politically left-leaning town of Santa Cruz, and the history I was taught where colonizers from Europe displaced and murdered the indigenous people of North America and began changing the face of the continent. I’d been told the continent was essentially a static place before Europeans arrived, and that the people before them had lived in a state of harmony with their surroundings, and their societies were egalitarian and peaceful, and they were generally disease and hardship free until colonizers came along with infections and guns and horses and corrupted and ruined everything for them.

It was a well-meaning mixture of history and mythology, designed to be an antidote – a corrective – to the patriotic nonsense that existed around me, about America somehow being destined to occupy the lands it claimed. It was meant to counter the cultural imperialism that lingers even now, driven originally by an intense racism, where the colonizers believed it was their duty to “civilize” lands being held by “primitive” people, and confine or exterminate them if they resisted. The early American story is basically naked opportunism justified by religious dogma and buttressed by ignorance, and this needs to be acknowledged. A larger part of the culture wants to pretend this history never happened, and my teachers and peers in Santa Cruz felt (and I still strongly feel) that letting America forget it is the first decisive step in letting it repeat.

But the tribes of America had not been perfect back then. They were an astonishingly diverse collection of peoples spread across a giant area of land and they were as different as they were alike, each struggling with warfare, slavery, subsistence, disease, and ecological damage on their own terms. They also did change the face of the continent long before Europeans arrived, primarily through deforestation in the east, by using fire for various purposes over a span of about 2000 years. These aspects of their history were left out of my early education, because it was trying to correct for a larger, more dangerous misconception, and to counter the absurd assumption that the indigenous Americans were “primitive.” Their ecological destruction through attempts at land management was not relevant to the case.

But I have to wonder: How much mythologizing is healthy here? If you smooth the wrinkles out of a portrait too well, it seems to me you run the risk of turning the subject into something unreal. Something that exists apart from contemporary life. You drive a wedge between the history, and the flesh-and-blood people who are the living embodiment of it today, who have practical needs and problems and need to be considered part of your own world, rather than an abstraction or an irretrievable myth. Perhaps too much mythologizing becomes an “othering” — a sort of reinforcement of a separation that in turn preserves a power imbalance.

Undoubtedly, the larger struggle has been in simply getting American culture to recognize that the native tribes have a history, full stop. That American history didn’t just start with Columbus blundering his plunder-boats across the ocean, and you can’t understand the foundations of the country without knowing what the native tribes contributed to it. But beyond that, and possibly more important for the sake of those living now, is the need to get Americans to notice that the native tribes are still here. The history – but also the exploitation, and the exclusion, and the bigotry, and the disenfranchisement – has marched on this entire time, and viewing these people through the lens of the past tends to defocus them in the present. It’s worth knowing who they are now, what they’re talking about now, what they need now.

This was all rolling around, back and forth, in my mind as I pedaled along, in the pauses between sentences as Jared Diamond outlined the grim history of Iceland. At its most abstract, what I was thinking about was a collision of mythologies, and also the use of mythology as an instrument, to humanize or dehumanize people, as the tellers felt necessary.

I began to consider the Vikings through the same lens. The modern people of Iceland have embraced even the apocryphal operatic horned helmet in honor of the Vikings. It’s on their walls, clothing, even their roadsigns. The mythology seems harmless and fun; a source of entertainment if not of a very mixed sense of pride for a population that can still trace itself almost entirely back to Viking ancestors — or at least, to the women and children the Vikings abducted from elsewhere. But, what are we celebrating here? Certainly not their stewardship of the land.

Short summary: The Vikings showed up, and knowing very little about ecology and having no free time to study it, they chopped down almost every damn tree in a dozen generations. They pillaged, kidnapped, and enslaved people to drive their civilization for 300 years, then succumbed to their own mismanagement and infighting, leaving behind ruins, tiny sheep, and beleaguered fishermen, who converted to Christianity and kept on keepin’ on for hundreds of years through famine and volcanic mayhem as they were absorbed into a Nordic trading bureaucracy and mostly exploited by it.

Finally around World War I, Iceland regained independence, and so-called modern civilization quickly arrived on the heels of wartime activity. Now the island is ringed by a paved road, multiple international shipping routes, and a giant airport. In less than a hundred years, life has gotten far easier and safer for everyone, but the ecological pressure has also gotten far worse. Determined ecologists are running experiments to restore trees, and farmers are a lot more conscious of soil conditions, but the trend is still downward, and the tourism dollar is a seriously mixed blessing.

I wonder how much of the Icelandic people’s embrace of the Vikings is myth-making for tourists. Is there a similar pressure in their culture, like in modern Americans, to forget the atrocities of their ancestors? And how much more selective does all of this look, when we consider that there’s about six hundred years of history separating the end of the Vikings and the beginning of modern Icelandic society that is not factored in? Is it too boring? Too sparse to comment upon? Perhaps it’s just not currently useful in our current battles over tourism and ecology?

There is, I suppose, one inevitable outcome, if you take the long view. In time, Iceland will experience another catastrophic volcanic eruption, intense enough to drive out and blast away the humans and everything they have wrought, leaving behind a cooling hunk of re-fertilized land. The best we can do with that is detect it far enough in advance to get out of the way.

Anyway, I poked some thoughts into my phone and pedaled along, and a bunch of hours passed. The area urbanized around me. I arrived at the hotel I’d booked online.

It was 7:00am, and there was a crowd of people with luggage standing around outside. I assumed they were either waiting for a shuttle or waiting for breakfast.  Taking a closer look, I saw all of them were rough-looking men, some smoking cigarettes one after the other.  To their credit, they scrupulously collected and disposed of each butt they stamped out on the pavement.

The lobby opened and everyone crowded inside for the free breakfast.  I talked to the clerk and he said the hotel had been full the previous night so I would have to wait for a room to be cleaned, which would probably take three hours.  “Sorry,” he said, “but maybe have some coffee or something while you wait?”  He gestured to the breakfast area.

So I filled up a plate and ate six slices of bread with a heap of tuna and a slice of cheese on each one, plus two hard-boiled eggs. It was touring metabolism, back in force.

Around me I counted heads and observed that there were almost 30 men, all dressed either for work or for hiking.  Some had fancy gore-tex jackets and hiking shoes, some had overalls and toolbelts.  One table had six electricians at it – at least, judging by the tools – all glowering at their plates and chowing down.  Almost no one spoke.

I was one of them.  I ate until I felt full, then took the bike a few blocks over to the Bónus food store, which I can’t help thinking of as the “Piggly Wiggly of Iceland.”

The bakery attached to the store was already open, so I wandered inside and got some additional snacks.

I spent about an hour organizing photos since my brain was too fried to work, then packed up again and went to the hotel.  The clerk walked over and handed me a key card.  “Room 433, fourth floor,” he said.

I thanked him sincerely.  Several elevator trips later, with my gear and the bike, I was safe in room 433, burrowing under the covers at 10:00 in the morning.

I woke up after almost 7 hours of sleep.  Took a shower, drank some water, went right back to sleep.

Two hours later I woke up again.  Finally I felt rested enough to use my brain and get some work done.