Iceland 2021 Page 5

Chilling in Árnes campground

This late in the season, campgrounds are often underpopulated. I awoke to find I was one of just three people. Everyone else had moved on.

The tent did not appear to be leaking, but the air was so humid and cold that my sleeping bag and some of my clothing was damp, presumably from condensation due to my body heat and breath. The stuff I had under the alcove next to my bike was dry.

The changing weather gave me an hour of sunlight in the late morning, so I stacked everything on the roof. The meager heat and the air worked their magic.

The place was deserted for most of the day. Later on a busload of tourists would stop and most of them would order food from the restaurant. For now it was just me.

I managed to synchronize my email and work materials, using the wifi in the store. Most of the day passed with my head down over the laptop, writing code and updating tickets and documentation.

Eventually the bus arrived and a crowd of other adventurers temporarily surrounded me. The company was welcome. Everyone was in good spirits regardless of the weather, and happy to get a warm meal.

People ordered food and clustered at the little tables, chatting about their lives back home. Some of them were actually Icelanders, taking the shuttle to reach friends elsewhere in the country. I overheard a trio of women talking in mixed English and Icelandic about e-bikes and scooters, and how disorienting it was to see them flooding the streets in the capital city over the last few years. “One of them almost clobbered me today!”

A little girl walked past my table into the bathroom area.  Her mother followed shortly after, and said, “Dear, you went into the gents bathroom” in a strong Indian accent.

The girl was mortified.  “Oh no,” she said, her voice echoing from behind the door.  She was already inside a stall. “Oh no! Oh nooooooooo!!”

“It’s okay; stay there,” said the mom, with the faintest hint of exasperation in her voice. She waited outside the room while her daughter finished up.

The most gregarious person there was the bus driver. I complemented him on his hat, and he told me the story of how he ended up driving a tourbus in Iceland. We would have chatted for hours except he had a schedule to keep, and soon he raised his voice and said “fifteen minutes, everyone!”

I got an ice cream cone and followed the crowd out to the bus, and waved at the driver.

I lingered in the common area for as long as I could, continuing my work. Eventually they locked up for the night.

Thoughtful Ride To Þjórsárdalur Camp

I had a meta-dream last night.  I was wandering around in a hotel, and I ran into a guy I knew in college named Kenny.  He was wearing pajamas and brushing his teeth.  I said: “Wow, I haven’t seen you in a while.  What have you been up to?”  He said nothing, just kept brushing his teeth.

I said, “Ah of course you can’t answer, this is a dream.”

He took out his toothbrush long enough to say: “You can’t tell me what to do in a dream!”

I said, “No, no, this is my dream.  And I don’t know what you’ve been up to, so I can’t dream you telling me!”

“Agree to disagree,” he said, and shook his head and kept brushing his teeth as he wandered away.

Packing went well. Everything was dry, thanks to the wind and sun.

Fast-moving canyons of cloud cut the sunlight into miniature days, fading the landscape around me from gray and somber to green and dazzling and back to gray, over and over.

I the distance I could see the side of the first real mountain on my route, often showing sunlight when the terrain closer at hand was buried.

As I went up, the clouds came down, mingling with the terrain. Sometimes they would condense a bit too much and coat my bicycle and the road. There were almost no cars to break the silence.

The open space gave me time to think.

In the back of my head, I’d been wrestling for the past few days with the state of my romantic life. The last time I was in Iceland two years ago I was at a curious inflection point where I was newly single and considering the idea of staying that way, while I continued riding, somehow extending my three month visa into a journey much longer. Work, then the pandemic, altered my plans. This time, I didn’t feel like there was an inflection point. I knew I was on a trip with a limited timespan and I was fine with that. I also knew I had some romantic trauma to recover from but it was different in nature.

Probably the strongest evidence that things were different this time was that I felt like I knew who I was, rather than a stranger trying to rediscover himself. But there was still work to do.

My obsessive filing-clerk soul wants to nail everything down and remember it. So I’d been writing, for the last week or so in bits and pieces, about my last relationship and the way it ended. I was convinced that some useful insight would eventually appear. At the same time, I knew I was going through my own version of a process that everyone does, when things go wrong and pain happens and they need to get somewhere past it. You sift, and you think, and you talk, partly just to pass the time while the pain shrinks to something small enough to fit on a shelf where it won’t be underfoot. Maybe you pick something out that feels like a big insight, and that becomes the label you stick beneath it on the shelf. And maybe the insight you chose was just what was in front of you when you got tired of looking. Maybe it’s nothing more than a flourish, announcing that you can move on.

It’s a jaded interpretation, I know, but it’s useful for me: Obsession and documenting can unmoor my brain from the immediacy of life in a living body. Sometimes it helps to let some hot air out of that self-important balloon, and drift back to Earth.

I arranged the flight to Iceland just after I got vaccinated, when the country was still making tourism top priority and flights were dirt cheap. It seemed like the best idea, since I’d already tried dating for six months and my heart wasn’t in it. I even walked away from two promising starts, in favor of this long-term travel. Then in Reykjavik I had a vague feeling like I missed romance even though I was probably still bad at it. So I turned my dating profile back on and browsed around a bit, distracting myself from work and enjoying the diversity of people and their stories. Then I forgot it was there.

A week passed, and a couple “intros” appeared in my email, but they were inane one-liners like “hey how r you.” Easy to ignore. Then two days ago I got a message that caught my attention. The sender actually acknowledged I was in Iceland, which I’d written at the top of my profile, and asked some good questions!

I started a conversation with her over email that quickly snowballed into an avalanche of words. So at the same time I was trying to wrestle the story of my previous romance down onto the page, I was eagerly sharing brain-dump emails with this interesting new person, and there was so much more to talk about that I didn’t really feel like pondering my ex or what happened any more. I didn’t even care about searching for a nice label to put on the shelf. It felt like a waste of time.

Thinking back, I shouldn’t have turned the profile back on, in case something like this happened, because there is currently no way I can tell if I’m actually attracted to this person, and there won’t be a way for months. Today in the latest email we both acknowledged that, which put me in this thoughtful mood, and led me to a particular thought:

My ability to make records has outpaced my need for them. This trip needs to be less about processing, and more about letting go of the past, to make room.

So I decided to close the file on my ex, and made no commitment to return. Maybe what happened with her could just be something that faded from memory without a lesson learned … or at least without a lesson identified. Maybe going back over it was just forcing me to relive the trauma. Maybe I would feel better, faster, if I just talked about all the rest of my life with this fun new person, and the rest of my family and friends.

More looking around and forward, less looking back.

I arrived at the campsite early, and wandered around until I found a spot that looked safe from the rain. I didn’t want pools forming under my tent. For the heck of it I decided to make a video while setting up camp:

That inflatable tent makes it so easy!

The soft patter of rain faded in and out as the clouds continued their march overhead. I ate snacks, listened to a few podcasts, made some notes, and generally drifted until sleep overtook me. It was still light outside of course.

The Commonwealth

I awoke feeling refreshed. Perhaps it was the silence around me, perhaps the feeling of clarity from yesterday’s thinking. 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 sleeping 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 who were around me had vanished in the early morning. There were no markers to delineate the spaces, and large bushes crowded the sides of the road, which curved around repeatedly 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. With no other campers here, the whole site felt less like an official campground and more like a tangle of animal paths and tiny clearings that I’d just wandered into. I almost got lost on my way back out to the main road.

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

Into the Highlands

Exploring On Foot For A Change