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.

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.

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.

Committing to the highlands

It was an exciting morning. On today’s route I would reach an intersection, and if I turned left, I would be heading up towards the highlands. Or I could chicken out, and follow the coast. I still had a few hours to think it over. In the meantime: Breakfast!

Just beyond the bakery I found what looked like a great bike path right next to the road. After about 15 meters it dissolved. What a dirty trick!

I put on my headphones and turned the cranks, enjoying the fresh air and the greenery. The traffic was heavier than usual, but the road was decently wide.

I suppose it’s the increased traffic that makes these signs necessary. (“Munið Bílbeltin” means “remember the seatbelt.”)

My first cycling friend of the day! This well-prepared fellow was heading back towards Selfoss. He passed me as I stood at the fateful intersection, deciding if I was crazy enough to try for the highlands.

Do I dare? Yes I do!

“If things get bad I’ll just turn around,” I told myself. Even though I’ve never done that before when things got bad. Hmmm.

I was suddenly reminded of a cartoon show where a little kid walks up to a door with a sign on it: “DANGER, DO NOT ENTER.” The kid stares at it, then proudly declares, “Hah! This sign can’t stop me, because I can’t read!” and flings the door open…

Perhaps danger lay ahead. For now, the road was easy and the landscape was delightful. Everything had that breezy “just rained on” feel.

It wasn’t long before I encountered more cyclists.

These folks could have told me about the route ahead, but there wasn’t quite enough room on the shoulder for an easy conversation.

I passed by a microscopic settlement – too small to be a town – and noticed a bunch of kids playing on a giant trampoline. I waved and they waved back.

For the next couple of hours I rolled along snapping photos of wildlife and listening to podcasts.

One of the more remarkable things I passed was a sheltered hillside with an actual forest growing on it:

Back home, I could get a shot like this in millions of places, especially if I went north towards Oregon. Here in Iceland, seeing this many trees in one spot is so rare it’s almost unsettling. It feels out of character for the country. That’s tragic of course, because a couple thousand years ago, forests like this were everywhere.

I imagined a whole menagerie of forest animals, enough to populate the island as it was, hemmed in together in this little patch of trees. Foxes, mice, and the occasional polar bear, all of them bouncing around like molecules in hot water, constantly finding an edge where the trees stop and turning around to run back into the darkness. Impatiently waiting for their territory to grow…

Still very much an open question whether that territory will ever grow, or just keep shrinking until the last tree falls over in the shallow soil…

I arrived at Árnes campground in the evening, and paid for two days. I had room in the schedule, and I wanted to make sure I was rested and ready for the ugly roads ahead.

The rain started again just as I stowed my gear. My phone said it would last most of the night. The internet was spotty, and I could only exchange a few delayed text messages with the folks back home. A sign of isolation to come?

Stopping in Selfoss

Today was one of those “rest and repair” days. I did get out for a little while, but mostly I stayed in the hotel doing a thorough tune-up of the bike, while the weird pale daylight spilled through the ground-level window of my sunken room.

I’d been at this high latitude for weeks now, but it still felt strange to see the numbers for sunrise and sunset, right there in my weather app. It looked like some kind of software glitch.

During my outing I passed by the bridge into town, and it was just as clogged with traffic as before. What a serious mixed blessing for the local residents.

The river under the bridge was one of the largest I’d seen in all of Iceland. Dig that tiny island! I wonder how many people have tried to anchor a boat there and climb up. Humans love being on little isolated chunks of land. There’s something cozy about it. Perhaps the whole of Iceland has that advantage, relative to other places…

I’ve seen sweaters shrink in the wash before, but this is ridiculous!

I poked around town a little more and eventually settled in another cafe. I had some research to do: Was it possible to take a detour up into the highlands, and see some of that amazing territory, without going too far out of my way or getting stuck on messy roads that my recumbent couldn’t handle?

Mapping things out carefully day-by-day, using Google Street View to inspect the roads when possible, and closely following the official Iceland bicycling map, I put together a plan:

Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 3:

Day 4:

Day 5:

Day 6:

I wasn’t very happy about the pricey hotel stay at the Highland Center, but it was obvious why they could charge so much: It’s the last facility with hot water, or rooms, or a restaurant before a long, rough road to the Landmannalaugar campground.

Beyond that hotel, I was also a bit worried about the roads. Gravel on hard-packed ground would be fine. Loose gravel with some depth to it, or patches of sand, or dirt softened by rainfall could force me to walk the bike for miles, and that would be annoying. Also the river crossings were an exciting unknown: Would I have to hold my bike up over my head and pick my way across loose stones in a fast current? Or would I just be shoving the bike across creek beds, with the water barely splashing halfway up the waterproof bags on my seat?

We shall see!

I made screenshots of my itinerary on the phone for easy reference, then rode back to the hotel. Time to start that bicycle tune-up.

As I worked on the bicycle I put the movie “Jungle Cruise” on in the background. A bit of brainless action to help the process along. Staring at the bike, I couldn’t help thinking about my relationship to it, and to travel in general.

Riding a bike doesn’t use the full range of movement that a human body can do. It’s actually pretty restrictive, especially on a recumbent. I could get the same exercise sitting at home on a stationary bike, and in that situation, whenever I stop pedaling I’d have my entire house around me, including a giant comfy bed and a pantry full of snacks. What else am I really getting, out here in the world, that’s worth the trouble and the expense?

Do I actually stop and touch the environment I’m pedaling through?  Yes, but sometimes not for hours. Is the air better out here than at home? Usually yes, but sometimes not, because of truck fumes and grit. The sun can be intense and the rain can be chilling, and indoors I’m safe from both. If my interaction with the world is primarily visual, couldn’t I get the same thing by planting the stationery bike in front of a television set? There are readymade products that do exactly this, complete with a fake 3D view of a fantasy world, or a processed recording of a real trail in some exotic place that crawls along at the same speed I pedal.

With that available, how does my desire to bike tour make any sense at all?

I guess there’s just something way down in my hind-brain that settles itself when I’m traveling, that doesn’t settle when the travel is simulated. Driving has this effect, but bicycling has it much more. I think it has to do with the idea of reducing my existence to a container – something smaller and more portable than everyday life allows – with my body at the center of it. It draws me back into my body.

The effect isn’t absolute. I still carry all my obsessions and interests, and I often feed them along the way with audiobooks. Also, I’ve been a computer programmer for so many years that you could pick me up and drop me in the middle of the Mongolian steppe, and I’d be standing there thinking CLC, REP #$30, LDA $00, ADC #$75, PLX, … “Oh, what a nice view.” … STA $2000,X, INX, BNE $2014 …. “Wow, the wind is amazing.”

That makes traveling for the memories a bit slippery.  Now that I’m middle-aged, a lot of the stuff that’s fixed in my brain is outdated engineering specs. Sometimes I have to knock my senses about pretty consistently to crowd the new memories in.

But that’s it, really: The idea of reducing my physical existence to something smaller, and then moving it. Call it a nomadic instinct. There’s something important about the movement itself; the fact that you’re never in the same place for too long. A feeling of safety or security in that.