I’ve been offline for two weeks, working out in the middle of nowhere.
Our bright orange waterproofs are made of thick rubber. They are only vaguely the shape of a man. I’d guess the seams were stitched by an industrial machine with a large needle. They smell like bouncy castles.
Someone wrote ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ in the ash that covers the back windshield of the truck. I like to think of it as our Bokonism.
We stumbled across a Viking Rennaisance fair. One viking was smoking a Marlboro, another adjusting his hearing aid. They played the Macarena over the sound system. A tourist wandered by snapping photos wearing a t-shirt that said “Reykjavik Fucking City.”
There are always those people who believe that being a leader is being the guy who walks the fastest, talks the loudest, or is the last to put on sunscreen.
I turned 29 last week. I usually forget about my birthday right until it happens. It’s an odd feeling, realising you’re another year older - like feeling a gear slip in a mechanism of which you were only vaguely aware.
I saw an old couple eating ice-cream cones in a gas-station restaurant near Borganes. They ate them delicately, discussing the ice-creams together. They reminded me of tortoises eating lettuce.
There are golf courses everywhere here. It’s a very popular sport. Where once farmers bit deep into the cold ground, hoping to grow something, anything, to survive, men in plaid um and ah over which stick to use to hit a ball. (The wooden one, man. Always use the wooden one.)
The soil is either rocky and volcanic - hard and small - or like clay - slick and brown and rich and fertile. Steam rises from odd cracks in the ground. The wind howls and runs screaming around the little huts we stayed in like some terrible creature that had been turned loose. This country feels like a place that God hasn’t quite finished making yet.
We spent the last week building stone steps on the side of a mountain. We’d drive stakes into the ground and hit frozen soil a few feet down. We’d hit the stakes harder then, pushing them through, and from 6 feet away you could feel the force of each blow through your boots - like the land was resisting, or perhaps as if with each blow you were brushing up against some terrible power held in it.
“Are you happy?” said the Ranger, talking about some work we’d just finished.
“No.”
“Is okay,” he said, looking down at our wooden steps before peering out into the distance. “Is okay to be happy.”
