The cat’s human arrived home while I was there, and grinned at me as he went inside.
I swung around towards the harbor and the downtown, and the first thing I spotted were these massive chunks of rubber and steel. There’s also a convenient take-out box on the ground for scale. What do you suppose these are for?
Hammershaimb studied Old Norse for years in Denmark, and was influential in the formation of the Faroese written language. The language itself is very old of course, but there had never been formal agreement on how it should be written down for modern purposes. During his time, there was some debate over whether it should be written phonetically to resemble the modern spoken language, or whether it should be derived from the old Nordic language. Hammershaimb argued for the latter.
When Janus Kamban constructed the monument in 1948 there was still lively debate between linguists in Iceland, Denmark, and Norway over the fate of the Faroese language, but the prevailing opinion was that Hammershaimb had been right, and without his advocacy the Nordic language would have faded into irrelevance.
(Hey, want a convenient map and inventory of all the statues and stuff around this city? Here’s an official one!)
I got coffee down by the harbor, and said hello to a few locals who were drawn to my bike. My final task in town was to buy a giant platter of sushi from the local restaurant and pin it to my backpack. This would be breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Then I was off, to the north. I had some hills to cover before the highway met the sea again. Along the way I saw another of those off-kilter road signs:
For a while it was just me, and the road, and the sea… And sheep. The shoulder of the road was wide enough to ignore the cars, and they all passed me at a respectful speed. “A bicyclist? Give that lunatic a wide berth; the lunacy might be contagious!”
As the road went upward to match the high side of the Kollafjarðartunnilin, a tunnel through the mountain to the village of Oyrareingir and beyond, I heard a faint whistling noise. It reminded me of a referee at a soccer game, blowing a whistle to stop the action, but in this case it was a constant rhythm of tweets, sounding out across the floor of the valley to my right.
I paused for a while, confused, and then finally realized that there was a rancher standing down there, blowing a whistle to direct the actions of a sheepdog.
It looked like the sheepdog was learning tricks for a competition. I used my zoom lens to grab some video.
Oh, to be a sheepdog! To have a body made for running, and senses keen for it, and enough brains to do some joyful task your human rancher sets for you, so a warm hearth and good food and praise are guaranteed. …And not too much brains, so you don’t care to question the arrangement.
Apparently there is a breed of dog called the Faroese Sheepdog, with some distinction from the more general Border Collie category. These dogs have a tougher job than usual: The sheep here don’t have much instinct for flocking and are kept “free range,” so they wander all over the place. The dogs are trained mainly to chase down a sheep, catch it by the wool at the shoulder or by the foreleg, and bring it to the ground to hold it so a rancher can close the distance and do whatever they need. Moving sheep around in flocks is something they do, but it’s not their career.
I stood there watching the dog move sheep around for half an hour at least, before I remembered that daylight isn’t infinite and there was still ground to cover. Onward, into the tunnel!
There was some kind of street faire in progress with lots of kids making noise, and tables set out with various home-baked goods. A woman was standing around with a horse offering free rides to brave youngsters.
I asked one of the locals if I could buy a slice of cake with my Icelandic or American money, but she only accepted Faroese or Danish money. A man standing close by overheard the exchange, and pulled a coin out of his pocket and handed it to me. “For you,” he said. “Have some!”
Now that’s just plain delightful. It was pretty good cake, too.
I rounded a corner and began going up a different fjord. The wind was with me for a change, so I felt like I could stop more often. I found a couple of derelict structures close to the water that looked interesting, and clamored down to touch them.
The colors of the Icelandic flag could be interpreted as “water around ice around lava”, but these colors… Hmm. Mist around fjords around wildflowers maybe?
The day turned to evening. When I rolled down the last hill and came to the town of Hósvík, I took a little video:
The owner of my AirBnB helped me stow the bike in the garage. He reported that there was no food in town, though there was a pizza place “up the road at Hvalvík.” Later I consulted a map and saw it was called “Joe Pizza”, and was half an hour away by bike. It would close before I got there.
As I unpacked my gear and settled in, I felt very thoughtful. Before I could crawl into the bed I had to type for a while and dig this out of my brain:
If you’re a person who likes solo activities, the first era of your life is an endless war against people and institutions that demand your attention. “Ugh, why won’t all these people go away so I can read?”
If you manage some victory against them, you enter a second era, full of ongoing satisfaction from all the progress you make on your solo activities. “I’ve read so many great books. It’s incredible. I’ve set up the perfect reading lounge. I love running my hands across the stacks, while I decide what to read next.”
But then you enter a third era. One you didn’t expect. You begin to suffer from being alone too often. Tragically, the only activities you’ve learned how to enjoy are solo activities. “I feel lonely. But people are so annoying. Let me browse the shelves and find a book to cheer me up…”
A difficult struggle begins. You need to play catch-up with all the skills you didn’t use when you were fighting to be alone. You can’t just avoid eye contact and fail to return calls any more. But the trouble is, every minute of the struggle, a part of you is terribly uncomfortable and screaming that your alone time is under threat, just like in the old days, and the only way to feel better is to stop this foolish socializing at once and go be alone. Half of your soul will bravely start a conversation with a stranger, and the other half will instantly start scrambling for a way to end the conversation and get this man out of your face.
After this struggle, scattered with small victories, you might see a fourth era: You like people, and can genuinely connect with them, and you also like time alone, and you have a collection of means to enjoy both.
Of course, this isn’t a perfect metaphor because these “eras” are really all happening at once, and we often leap around between them depending on life circumstances. But I do think that there is some kind of progression: I think introverts like me can only live in the fourth era long-term after we spend enough time in the earlier ones.
One of the astonishing facts about the world, that hits me in the face over and over again when I’m traveling like this, is just how many people are living in it. The sheer number of lives happening all at once around us is utterly, absolutely, incomprehensible; and the ways in which we can reach out, the connections we can make, the perspectives we can learn … there is no end to their variety and power.
And yet, even when we travel, so few of us actually reach out and connect. We go to a place to learn some history, see a building, feel some different weather, and the people around us are mostly just vendors of services. Why is that? Well, mostly because we already know more people than we can handle back home.
As much as I enjoyed my “second era” of being an introvert, my struggle in the “third era” is what truly gave me a shot at well-being; and that little toolkit I slowly put together – the one I use to build up a conversation with a stranger from nothing and dig for a connection, when I’m out here traveling on two wheels – gets just a little bit better with each use. Nevertheless, I feel an almost tragic sense of loss, when I think about how many more connections I could be making every single day, but don’t — because I’m too tired, or too busy working, or would just rather be enjoying the landscape.
Just today: The homeowner who waved hello when I stopped to pet his cat. The manager of the bike shop who gave me advice about the under-water tunnels. The conversation I could have started with the couple next to me at the cafe. The fishmonger who chatted me up in the harbor, as he stood hosing off the catch strung across the deck of his boat. The craggy old man with the flatcap and the pipe who looked like he’d just stepped out of a 300-year-old painting, who regarded my bike curiously. The questions I could have returned when an old woman stopped me to ask where I was riding to. The crowd of onlookers at the town festival I blundered across. The guy who gave me a Danish coin from his wallet when I tried to buy some cake. The woman next to him who asked about California. The kids who fired excited questions at me from their bikes. I could have taken all of these farther. I could have learned new names and made friends.
7,800,000,000 people, all living at once…
Assuming I live to be 85 years old, if I started shaking hands with a new person every single second for the rest of my waking life, I would still only meet one tenth of them. Meanwhile, during every one-second handshake … two people would die somewhere on the planet, and four more would be born. I could go on shaking hands forever … and just fall farther behind.
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.
Just by the docks is a chunk of land with a preserved “old town”, with turf-roof houses, occupied mostly by government and tourism organizations. The passengers – me included – busily took photos of it as the ferry churned the water and rotated around to anchor at the terminal on the opposite side of the harbor.
Unlike loading in Iceland, this time the bicyclists were last to roll off the ship. We had to wait for the trucks to unhook from the floor and slowly creep out ahead of us. The good news was, the ship had been loaded so all the vehicles bound for Denmark could just stay on the upper decks, and relatively few of us were disembarking here.
The first thing I did was swing around the north side of the harbor and check out all those turf houses. I wasn’t surprised at all to see that they had been rebuilt with modern materials and then altered to support turf. At first I thought it was a bit anachronistic but, considering that houses looking very similar had stood on this same land for centuries and the form they were emulating originated from around here, was it really?
Locals know the old town area as “Reyn and Undir Ryggi”. The area at the end of the peninsula is “Tinganes”, a.k.a. Parliament Point. The reason there are so many government buildings here is that the area has been a seat of government for over a thousand years: Around the year 900 the Viking parliament first began meeting on this spot every summer.
I eventually emerged from the twisty maze of old town and found the coffee shop I’d spent a few hours at the last time I was here. Their “swiss mocha” was just as great as I remembered, and I took a selfie to boast about it with the family back home.
I lounged around there for a while catching up on work, then located the AirBnB I’d booked on the south side of town. I was a bit wired from the mocha so I got back on the bike and went creeping around town with the camera.
When it started getting dark I figured it was because of a change in latitude from the ferry ride, but I glanced at a map and reminded myself that the Faroes are about as far north as the southern coast of Iceland. The darkness was just the advancing seasons.
Some time in the depths of the evening, snacks in hand, Skyrim soundtrack back on the headphones, I blundered across the Gamli Kirkjugarður (old cemetery) right down by the harbor. I had no idea this was here, and it’s awesome.
Pretty sure this is the scariest picture of me I’ve ever taken.
When I finally got back to the AirBnB, I sat down with the remains of my caffeine energy and tried to plan a bike tour that would show me some of the islands but also get me back to the harbor in time. The first thing I learned was that the amazing three-way underground tunnel that just opened is off limits to bicyclists. Drat!
It makes sense, really. The thing goes 190 meters (620 feet) down under the ocean. The ventilation isn’t great, and can you imagine a cyclist huffing and puffing their way back up from there, breathing car exhaust the whole time?
It was quite hard narrowing down the route. I had to sit in the living room staring at tunnel and ferry maps and scrolling over elevation charts, weighing the annoyance of covering the same ground twice – which was inevitable on these islands – with the majesty of the views at the far corners of the country.
There was definitely a part of me saying “Why not just skip this? It’s like Iceland except less hospitable for biking, with more aggressive drivers and wetter weather. Aren’t you done with this Nordic stuff yet? Don’t you want to be some place where it’s warm, at least some of the time?” I could use the sunshine, yes. But because of the ferry, I had six days to see the islands. I couldn’t do any less, and I didn’t have time for more.
I already had an AirBnB booked for the next two days in a town called Hósvík. When I made that booking (back on the boat) I thought I would need a day to recover from the ride, but after staring at maps all evening I realized scales were different here relative to the country I just left. Hósvík is just 32km (20 miles) outside of Tórshavn, and probably less than 150m (500 feet) of climb. I had to guess because my mapping applications refused to give cycling directions, and the walking directions don’t go through tunnels that are passable to cyclists. I’ve also learned that the locals stare at you like a lunatic if you ask about biking anywhere. They’ll give you an estimate of time, but a good estimate of distance or altitude is beyond them.
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.
I really hoped that this truck would have a man in underwear on the other side. Nope!
I also purchased some snacks from the local market, and found some strong glue that I could use to repair my busted over-ear headphones. They hold my fancy microphone when I’m teleconferencing, and I didn’t want to spend any more time bugging my co-workers by leaning on the mute key and shouting into the laptop.
Last order of business: Repair these poor headphones.
In the afternoon it was time to cruise over to the staging area and line up. Having done this exactly once before, I was suddenly an expert. A few people strolled over to chat like they always do, and I answered their questions with a grin.
A last, lingering view of these fine Icelandic hills.
Eventually the road opened, and the boat started slurping up cars. I was among the first to go, so I could get my gear tied down in the far back of the hold.
As I busied myself with ropes and bags, a long line of cars filled up the decks, followed in the end by some enormous trucks and buses that packed in close and were then chained to the floor by the loading crew.
The reduced tourism from the lingering pandemic had made bookings much easier on the ferry, so this time I had a room for myself instead of a communal bunk. I hauled my bags into it and flopped down for a nap.
