Notes from a month spent offline:
After days spent building steps and felling trees and hiking and digging, we eat huge meals. Our bodies become terribly efficient digesting-machines. So much so that one of us paused briefly at the end of his side of a particularly fierce debate to let forth with a long and vehement fart (as if to punctuate his argument.)
It was rich. Triumphant. Melodic.
It had a beginning, a middle, and an end.
It sounded like an old, old elephant that was
finally
finally
dying.
There is a volunteer who, instead of swearing, loudly exclaims “Monkeys!” when something bad happens to him. I like to believe he actually blames a specific group of monkeys for his problems.
“My first words were ‘bugger daddy’,” she tells me. “My family didn’t tell me until I was older. They’d always just told me it was ‘daddy.’”
While trying to get dressed in my small tent, I turn and squirm and, hulk-style, rip a pair of underwear clean in two.
The brief moment of incredible power is the highlight of my week.
There are names are Ingi and þyri, pronounced ‘Inky’ and ‘Theory.’ He is large, bald, and incredibly muscular. He teaches kindergarten. She is quiet and wears strange serapes. They treat us like their children, scolding us in thick Icelandic accents.
Inky and Theory.
I could listen to beautiful Icelandic girls tentatively pronounce ‘windows’ all day. (“We-ind-ohs.”) (I think it’s the ‘ohs’ I like the most.)
“He disappeared like birds die - no-one knew where he went.”
After months of sunshine, it finally starts to get dark at night, and I see a car with its headlights on again. It’s a jeep, and it growls and swerves over gravel, its eyes blazing like some terrible predator.
We spent time trying to prevent paths from becoming too wide or veering off where people have decided to wander off it.
Desire lines.
I spent a lot of my summer eliminating desire lines.
I woke up this morning when a baby wagtail tried to perch on my tent. It fell, sliding down the canvas. I spent today digging holes and had lunch by a large glacial lake. I’ll play some guitar in a little while and then I might cook some dinner. Something with fish, maybe, and rice, and a thick, white sauce.
I like my life.
“I pray for soft soil,” she says in her thick Italian accent.
“Huh?”
“Soft soil. At the camp site, for our tents. I pray for soft soil.”
That’s a nice prayer, I think.
Later she says that she says she has to go because she has places to be. She emphasises the ‘be’. I know it’s simply because the idiom’s not in her native language but I like the idea that there are places that require her to be there. Like she’s fufilling some kind of agreement with a place that requires simply her existence there.
