Two Big Hours in Iceland

On a flight to Iceland, feeling a bit deflated, and uninspired to do much at all, I read a few of the materials Icelandair offers its passengers about their small island nation in the North Atlantic. It turns out, there is a lot to Iceland: its series of impossible-to-pronounce volcanos and its ancient Sagas about family feuds and tough-as-nails survival and its glaciers and geysers and naturally heated steam pools and that beautiful blonde haired airport bartender named Olivia with a sleeve tattoo that was the present-day manifestation of old lines of Viking blood. I had never thought about Iceland before, but I was thinking about Iceland very much after I finished my trek across the ocean and arrived back in the United States.

It is puzzling in a way because I did not see any of the country, apart from photos and an awkward documentary on Reykjavik. Even from the plane, the fog was so thick that I was actually startled by our landing, thinking I was still in the clouds. I certainly have heard good things, and digitally saw good things, but the rest was left up to what we infer and the hard-to-define intuition we have about places.

Lost in thought over a Viking (the name of Iceland's national beer), I asked that same airport bartender, a bit naively, what it was like being from Iceland. She smiled and looked off at nothing in particular and said that it was very good in a way that said it was not just her but all Icelandic folk that felt that way about their country. Playfully, I also asked her how to pronounce the volcano that exploded and grounded all European air traffic last year and she told me (Eyjafjallajökull, pronounced [ˈeːɪjaˌfjatl̥aˌjœːkʏtl̥]) and I felt like a tourist or a volunteer in Guatemala who asks astonishingly what animal that is off in the fields and it is just a flock of sheep. She was good with it, or perhaps just not jaded to it all yet.

But life does seem good there, and presumably simple, with its fishing and other things Iceland does I am unaware of. The World Economic Forum ranked its citizens the "friendliest on Earth," however that is defined and measured. People are happy, and the travelers like myself come and go feeling curiously tied to a place they have only spent a few hours behind the glass walls of an airport, lulled to sleep by the effective strategy of Iceland's tourism authority.

After being randomly selected for extra security examination, a jolly officer questioned me briefly on traces of ash found in my bag. He suggested fireworks, or anything explosive, but I had absolutely no idea which corner of the world that ash could have come from. When I unconvincingly offered "campfires," I am sure it sounded a bit fishy given a few colorful passport stamps from the Middle East. In the end, I suppose he did not perceive me as too big a threat, saying he believed me, me saying I was glad, and us getting sidetracked by my Norwegian surname and other casual trivialities. Before being rushed off to the airplane, I told him that I need to come back to Iceland one day and stay awhile. He laughed and told me that is what everyone says. 

The Beach in Chipiona

The first bus to the airport of Seville leaves from the Plaza de Armas at 4:30 every morning, 365 days a year. At this hour it is still so early that there is no sign yet of the sun, or the dimming of the stars. It is dark and quiet and all the passengers look tired and lost in their own world, stopping a various stops, passing Santa Justa, before making the journey outside of town. On Saturday morning, I was one of these people, alone on a bus, not having slept, head resting against a dirty window, thinking about my ongoing relationship with Spain and wondering how it always leaves me feeling completely hollow and empty but also so full at the same time.

It is a peculiar country in this way; one that sometimes I hate, and other times I love. Sometimes I give it a middle finger and vow to leave tomorrow, and other times I want to stay forever. Sometimes I feel like I have done more than any American since Hemingway to adapt and convert, and other times I feel like I have not done anything at all. It is a paradox Hemingway noted often in his writing, calling it the best and the worst country in the world, and that is about as good a way to describe it as there is if you have spent any time there longer than a vacation. It is a country that gets me thinking about the ten thousand ways one can choose to spend their life, at least one or two ways I could spend perfectly content there, marrying someone Spanish and having Spanish children that speak better than me and writing something like Washington Irving wrote about something old and meaningful and timeless.

But back in real life - apart from the pending lives we imagine - I spent a week on the beach in Chipiona, surrounded by family more family than many are by blood, after having been gone for a year. There I made a number of real life choices that will affect everything, greatest of which the decision that a return to the United States for family will preside over a return to the Middle East for work. Sometimes you need the clarity of a little sun and sand, and a few helpful words from people who matter. In Chipiona, probably thirty miles from the nearest native English speaker, I had that, did that, made a plan, and said my goodbyes in a way that was intuitive more than it was difficult.

In this strange vagabond life I have been living, I am sometimes startled to find out things have been going on in places I was before like I had never been there at all. People now have boyfriends they did not have. People still go and drink at the same bars even though I am not with them. Two people I know from different places meet each other and I had nothing to do with the introduction. People go on living as one would expect them to, and meanwhile I have been doing other things and no matter how natural that is, it is still hard to get used to even after all these years. I want to be drinking a Tiger in Singapore and looking for work in New York and giving something a shot in Los Angeles and doing something with English in Seville and trekking a volcano in Guatemala and riding a bike in the Texas Hill Country outside Austin and learning to scuba dive in Queensland but all those things require your entire person and you cannot be everywhere at once for all your life, so in the end you start feeling a little left behind because you still try to do everything and be with everyone and it is impossible and people move on.

These are scrambled thoughts for the beach in Chipiona, colored by umbrellas and games of palas and groups of young boys kicking a soccer ball around and the rising tides and jellyfish alerts and memories of taking Pepe down to the water and various family members passing him around, holding his head above the surface, floating with the waves. Then long walks down the beach to the lighthouse, and back to the other end where it gets rocky before leading to Costa Bellena, looking at the pretty people who get pretty very young, with often three generations walking hand in hand at the waters edge. Then at night having cold small beers that are finished before they get warm and small plates of tapas that lead to other small plates. Then back to Seville for a few days and having a beer with that girl that is so damn beautiful down by the water, the Puente de Triana in the background, speaking Spanish with an occasional English word or phrase when the phrases get too important to mess up and hoping to God she understands it right, and holding hands while that singer from Sudan sings the same two love songs by Bob Marley every night, and then saying goodbye and having no idea when the next hello will be. 

These are scrambled thoughts and memories from Spain this time around and all makes me think for a moment I am leaving the greatest thing there ever was, and however irrational and silly and incorrect and unfeasible that may seem, how does one leave the greatest thing there ever was?

Dachau, and Other Things

The first rain I had seen in many months came in Germany. I was on a bus, pulled over at a stop in some small village off the highway. The wind picked up, blowing leaves around in tiny funnels, and then it came down quick, forcing those outside in to a frantic sprint for cover. The girl that would eventually sit next to me was one of these poor people. A few minutes after it began, she got on soaked from head to toe, cradling a bag that contained a laptop. She said she liked the rain and did not mind it much.

Ten hours later I arrived in Munich and the clouds were still threatening, with occasional reminders it could unleash anything it wanted at any moment. I tucked away in one of the beer capitals of the world with one big beer that turned into many, making my way through some Hemingway and watching people come and go. This was one of my favorite evenings in a while -- something peaceful and so rare in my current situation -- and I did not have to take a photo or walk outside or do anything at all to have it.

There were not many things that would take me from my blissful corner seat, tucked away by the window in the presence of rain, but the next day I decided Dachau was one of those things because it is one of the simple things every human being should do in their life. A German concentration camp in operation between 1933 and 1945, it held some 200,000 people over the course of its operation while bringing about the deaths of over 43,000 Jews, homosexuals, prisoners of war, etc. The camp here served as a model for most others that would sprout up across Europe. As a close friend put it, who had been there before, "it's like being punched in the gut."

It is a very peculiar sensation being in a place where such atrocity happened on a beautiful day. You cannot really see it, or sense it, or understand how human beings are capable of doing such things to one another when the weather is so fine and the birds are happy in the trees and all the pleasant noises that would have been present back then are there still. But there were certainly other sights and sounds 75 years ago that would have changed the picture into something more haunting.

One question commonly asked in places like this is, "how could they have done it," which I always find peculiar because it assumes they were different than us and that we might have had the fortitude to do something else. The Milgram Experiment on obedience, done in the 1960s, I have always found to be a fascinating answer in this regard. Essentially, it shows that normal people are capable of doing terrible things as long as the person giving the command is perceived to be credible and in charge. Watching old videos of these experimental trials, where average subjects continually send potentially fatal electrical shocks to a acting patient, is truly a frightening display of human weakness. It seems that conscience means very little, as much as we would like to think otherwise, and I do not know what that says about us and what could be coming next if we do not remember what we have done before.

One place where Dachau becomes particularly heavy is through a small patch of woods, just over a calm little stream. It is there you find this sign which leads to a building with a chimney that holds this brick oven. There are not really words to convey how cold and plain this building is. Around Dachau, there aren't many words spoken at all.

My brief stint in Germany continued soon after on a eight hour bus to the North. The Black Forest of Bavaria gave way to lush green farmland leading up to Berlin, and I sat back, diving further into my book, occasionally looking up at the scenery and occasionally eavesdropping on the Spanish conversation behind me. In Berlin, as in most places in Germany, the holocaust is never too far away. To the credit of this country, they do everything they can to educate the next generation while embracing the past in an honest and straightforward way.

In the middle of downtown, close to shops and parks and a lovely little bookstore, lies the holocaust memorial. There is no explanation given, but most interpret the rectangular prisms at various heights to signify tombstones. I sat on one of them for awhile with my young German friend, looking around at the people wandering in between and along the edges. "There are some people who say we learn about it too much," she told me. "But I think it is very important, the education we get on it all, so people don't forget." I told her that one thing is certain: that her and I, a German girl and an American guy, would not be having this conversation, or any conversation at all, a few short decades ago, and that means we have all done something right.

Soon we moved on someplace else, and from that place I continued moving and by the time it was all done I had spent more than a day of my life on buses and completed one big triangle across the country. I arrived back where I began the week before, and things had not changed much.

Planes and Trains and Cars

I have watched planes take off since I first arrived in Doha many months ago. Their path goes directly out over the water above the skyline before veering off into the Gulf. For a while this was all perfectly visable from my waterfront view. Later I lived next to the runway, hearing planes and an occasional military jet let off steam at all hours of the night. There are some things in life you never get tired of seeing and tons of welded metal flying through the air at high speeds in a way all rationale says should not be possible is one of those things to me.

I confess that more than once I wished I was on one of those planes. Part of that is a natural human grass-is-greener inclination to imagine other places as better: other people off galavanting somewhere having more fun or doing something more efficient in the long-term plan for their lives. Part of that is simply Qatar as Qatar. But given so many highs and lows scattered across the past few months, I forgive myself for a little bit of harmless longing. These feelings are complicated and grey and do not have an easy solution.

The night before Turkish Airlines Flight 783 was not extravagant, like many of my final nights of nationalistic fervor have been. I did nothing in particular, perhaps something symbolic of my time in Qatar. The night itself was long only due to the unpopular hour of my flight. At 3am I sat in a McDonald's drivethrough watching Ramadan fasters of all nationalities load up on all the sugar and fat missed during the day. When my turn came, I asked for a cheeseburger, fries, and a drink. The Philipino attendant informed me that to do a meal, I needed to get two cheeseburgers. Out of apparent convenience, my pre-flight calorie intake doubled and I thought about how America is killing the world over and it has nothing to do with wars or foreign policy.

When Turkish Airlines Flight 783 took off at 5:45am, I suddenly realized I was on it. I felt good about that, and it put me comfortably to sleep nestled up against the window. Hours later a breath of cool air in Brussels, coupled with a blonde haired girl in short shorts, signaled I had returned to my old self in a free place: the self not suppressed by the miles and miles of flowing desert, the self excited by the prospect of ten hour bus rides alone, and the self able to become immersed in a good Hemingway that touches on bullfights, true love, and hard drinking. You don't lose those things about yourself I discovered; they are just put on hold awhile. So it is very much with pleasure that I go into the next three weeks, doing the sorts of vagabond things I think I was born to do.