October 13 (Day Thirty-One)
Birgir heads out of Reykjavik and turns north. Retracing our route of yesterday, we pull off the highway at Mosfellsbaer, as he wants to show us his craniosacral clinic.
It is on a suburban street, a small duplex house, nondescript on the outside. Downstairs is a waiting cubicle, treatment rooms with patient tables, a few offices, the entire set-up decorated so that it would fit into Berkeley or Boston with its blend of surrealistic and New Age art, Native American shields, assorted crystals, a small running fountain, and a dash of Viking and Norse mythological imagery.
While looking down the list of therapists, I realize something that has been obvious all along but missed by me: everyone’s last name in Iceland ends in “son” or “dottir,” so this must indicate an actual system. Birgir confirms: Icelanders’ surnames are all built out of their father’s first name with a suffix of “son” or “dottir” (depending on gender). He, for instance, is Birgir Hilmarsson because Hilmar was his father. His son will be Olaf Birgirson, not Hilmarsson. His daughter will be Victoria Birgirsdottir. His son’s son will have the last name of Olafson. As I am grasping the rule and its application, I am testing it and finding that it is true of everyone I have talked to or heard about, from Steingrimur Steinthorsson, Ivar Gissurarson, Leif Eiriksson, and Volundar Volundarson to Sigrithur Tomasdottir, Helga Bjornsdottir, and Hildur Hermothsdottir. Kinship is patrilineal, but lineage is traced nonexclusively for only one generation. In effect, there are no surnames.
I begin playing with this concept in my mind. Since I have three fathers—a legal one, a genetic one, and a stepfather who raised me—I could be Paulson (like Gisli), Bernardson, or Robertson. Richard Robertson sounds quite normal! Then I realize that my son would be Robin Richardson, and his son would be Leo Robinson: ordinary American names. We are carrying the remnants of an old Germanic kinship system, and its vestiges have been converted as permanently affixed stems into family surnames, in the process losing their active rule of formation, e.g. Dickson, Stevenson, Samson, Seligson (from my middle name), Johnson, Markson, Aaronson, Williamson, and Davidson. There is no equivalent Anglo or European system, however, for daughters; thus, I would guess either we have lost it or our ancestors arose from a different Germanic kinship branch with “harder” patriarchal (as well as patrilocal) lineages.
I share the gist of these insights with Lindy and Birgir as we head upstairs: “It’s interesting. We each just take our own method for granted and never really think about how our mutual last names are not congruent with each other and carry quite different historical legacies.”
I don’t think either of them are as taken with it as me, but neither of them were graduate students in anthropology. While my insights are fanciful and somewhat inaccurate, kinship is the algebra of anthropology.
Other than the pristine clinic rooms, the house is under repair. A small backyard is littered with cans, bottles, and papers, as if it were a shoulder by a highway rather than a fenced-in plot of grass. Upstairs floors have been removed, and large packages of new flooring are stacked along a wall. This allows us to see the intricate patterning of pipes in the infrastructure for the geothermal fluid to circulate. Icelanders have made a science of heating from underground, and the grid looks at the same time complex and matter-of-fact, modern and old.
As we continue driving north, layers of clouds are mushrooming like cities across a vast open sky: lenticular metropolises, cumulus villages, altocumulus and cirrus forming their sky. Nimbi and stratus scud gradually gather over hilltops to our right, while bright cloud cities parade in sunshine to our left. The landscape like the sky is dynamic and shifting. On the right are rugged black hills, their tops often in rolling scud and fog. Like other small mountain chains we have seen in Iceland, these gradually turn green as their bases spread pyramidally across vast plains to the highway. There are constant winding rivers and little waterfalls threading down rocky faces.
Suddenly the sky will clear; these buttelike hills will sit in sunlight. Rainbows are ubiquitous enough to seem almost commonplace, sometimes a single blue and yellow prism between sky and earth, every so often a full arch in which I can pick out red and orange and a thin bar of violet. The backdrop for these is tundra or bare hills.
After a half hour or so, a fjord occupies the landscape to our left, one of a continuous series of fjords all the way around the intricately fractal Icelandic coast. The shape of Iceland is like that of a squid with hundreds of tiny tentacles, so there is always a next fjord of unpredictable shape and depth, then smaller ones within each of these, and so on. The contour of this one, Hvallfjorthur (bent “d”), cuts far inland by American standards but is less than average by Icelandic ones. As we circle much of it over the next hour or so, the landscape changes more dramatically: long spread-out farms to the right with plentiful sheep, before rugged hills, water everywhere, running across the road at times; to the left, dramatic fjord vistas of broken coastline, islands, and small bays. Occasionally, as lagoons of the fjord intrude inland, we cross the water on short bridges.
This is going to be mostly a six-hour driving tour, and Birgir is, as before, a confident, cavalier pilot, his hand grazing the wheel (or not), zipping along at 120 to 140 kilometers an hour, occasionally passing a slow-moving truck blind while Lindy and I slip a glance at each other (but there is always space to squeeze through if a car happens to be coming the other way). He is a constabulary on holiday.
The plan is to leave the coastline and head due north/northeast and then angle back and complete the circle of the fjord. To do that, we rumble onto a dirt road that lasts for a half hour. Jagged hills continue, and vegetation becomes scrubbier, though there is an occasional forest of luminous saplings. “There is a joke about the trees in Iceland,” Birgir relates. “If you get lost in an Icelandic forest, just look around.”
On a long finger lake called Skorradalsvatn we pass expensive summer homes. Birgir says that this is only for the wealthiest people, most of them residents of Reykjavik. He points to a raging river and says that it would cost most people a month’s salary for one day’s fishing rights on a property here. Its anglers come mostly from Europe.
Birgir’s goal is the small township of Reykholt and the remains of a manor farm and the aristocratic estate of Snorri Sturlison (born 1178). The central building has been reconstructed into a modern museum of Norse settlement: clothing, tools, farm implements, weapons, and original pages from old texts, a few with English translation. From the history on the walls, I read that Snorri came to authority in 1200 and ruled the region from 1220 to 1240. In 1228 he had a force of 360 men who marched in flakkurs, units of battle. By 1237 his flakkur census had increased to 460. As Snorri was also a poet of Sagas, sections of the Edda of Snorri appear in original and blown-up photos. The book has a lot to say about customs and laws, how things were once arranged on the frontier. For instance, “below Ytra fell one-third of beached whales, one-half of dried wood, and one-half of all land” to the church. The document also discusses reciprocal rights to possession of cattle in summer and use of mountain pasturage, and it limits certain persons to “three horses, none more than fourteen ounces.”
An adjacent room deals with female matters during the same periods of which the most interesting item to me is a list of kennings, or metaphors permitted for the discussion of women. These include: female costumes, gold and gems; ale, wine, or any drinks served by a woman; a willow or log tree; a stone necklace; all goddesses, valkyries, norns, or disirs. I have no idea what the latter are, but their names sound like undines, nixies, or oreads. It is right out of Michel Foucault's Aldrovandi.
After a while I wander around aimlessly, munching the chocolate-covered raisins in the dish for visitors because we are well past lunchtime. I am starving, and there is no other food. Meanwhile Birgir and Lindy are busy discussing some detail on the wall. I briefly visit the religious section, which is more like a meeting house than a church: a large wooden cross beneath a single stained-glass mandala, a few much tinier crosses below it. Otherwise the walls are plain tan rouge with exposed wooden architecture and wood inlay. There are no benches or pews, just single wooden chairs in rows on either side of an aisle, a table instead of a pulpit and, hanging from the wooden beams of the ceiling, a black skeletal chandelier comprises a series of metal wheels housing blips of light.
Finding nothing else to look at in the museum and preferring the outdoors, I hike toward the nearby grove of saplings amid termless fields. What stands out to me is the sheer broadness of the panorama. Trees are the size of runes. Sheep on a field occupy maybe 2% of its total expanse. Distant farms are emblems on a vast unwritten morphology. I can barely see the black dots of crows above the hills, their cries considerably louder than their images. Dense, dynamic cumuli configuations contribute to making the sky more cultivated than the earth.
As we start driving back with an immediate goal of lunch, the landscape continues to show variations of what we have already seen: sculpted rock fortresses and pyramidal butte shapes sloping down into grasslands, their upper reaches swirling in clouds or fog or wisps of white, rectilinear and rhomboidal shapes textured in little stone matrices all up and down their irregular convex-concave faces; grassy knolls wedged into the loins of the rock like fancy seasonal kilts wrapped around eternally bare gods; partial feng shuis of tundra and pastureland, jagged rifts and gorges cutting through it, flocks of plump and fully-adorned sheep, fencing bent every which way like missing teeth, water running very low in channels, often a single rill; barren stretches of bumpy scrub grass with an occasional sheep or two; farmhouses and occasional other dwellings flattened into postage stamps by the sheer scale of both sky and earth forming the zipper of a horizon line bisecting emblems of men at work like the pristine work of a giant protractor; full rainbows arched over hills and valleys with shafts of light passing through mist rising as clouds travel just over or into the tops of the serrated mountains. At times, as the lowering sun backlights the stony hills, they look like artificial pyramids in some other place entirely.
Birgir talks about his interest in maybe trading houses with us, either in Maine or California, so that he and Erla can come to the States for an extended period. I suggest that they visit us and stay in one of our guestrooms so that we can do stuff with them in the States and then see them when we are next in Iceland. He thinks they will consider both ideas. Then we talk about his plans for extending craniosacral therapy in Scandinavia and, by implication, publishing in the various Scandinavian languages. But ideas are as small as people in this zone, blown to smithereens in a day or a week or two. None of this will happen.
We come down the lower edge of the next fjord, Borgarfjorthur, and head for the coastal town of Akranes, which sticks out on the immediate spit of land above Reykjavik. On farms along the fjord, fat wooly sheep are so abundant and close to the road that we stop for a closer look. Their docility and accessibility are illusions. They are already retreating as the car stops and, when I approach them with a camera, they bound further away.
Mid-afternoon. We are utterly famished by the time we pull into Akranes. Far from turning out to be the charming fishing village I pictured, it is an industrial town of prefab-looking structures, even the homes, some of which are tall and squat like sheds, or two-tone, and/or raised, as if on stilts, so that basement windows are ground level. Even the stone ones look metal, a familiar phenomenollogy here. The colors are especially bright—orange, blues, maroons, and purples—and that along with the clean-ness and sharpness with which lines are cut keeps the view aesthetically stark and oddly pleasant in what otherwise feels like a giant facility or company town. Later I read in the guidebook that Akranes, at the tip of the peninsula separating the Borgarfjorthur from the Hvalfjordur, was settled by Irish hermits in 880; it has been mainly a fishing community almost from the beginning and is now “basically a dormitory for the huge fish-processing plants and cement factory near the end of the peninsula.”
Birgir knows a few eateries, but everywhere we go, a door or window bears a sign indicating it is closed, three of them. Finally he takes out his cell. He tells us after the call that he rang the local police station, saying he was a policeman from Reykjavik looking for a place to eat, and they recommended one. After getting lost a couple of times and backtracking around the towering equipment and shipping facilities at the wharf, we pull into a little cafeteria in a shopping-center complex. Except for the abstract art on the walls (brownish blue oils of scantly filled in landscapes and people), it is a simulacrum of a café in the American West—its only other patrons a bunch of men sitting around a table, smoking and horseshitting very loudly, some of them actually standing, probably a lunch that has gone on an hour or two past the last delivery of food.
My own health-food standards have dropped to the level that bread is bread and fish is fish. I don’t butter the bread, and I ask for my main dish without sauce.
Afterwards Birgir remarks that there are good museums in the town if we want to go; we can see folk relics, crystals, fossils, nautical items, or sports memorabilia, including a bike bent into a round pretzel by an Icelandic weightlifter. He is being selflessly dutiful, but none of us have the heart or the attention span for it. I am very sleepy.
Birgir himself seems relieved as we head back to Reykjavik. While we pass coastal scenery—rocky streams entering the bay outside the fjord and large black pools of water in the tundra—he has one finger hand on the steering wheel, the other hand holding the cell to his ear, as he is having a jovial conversation with Erla.
Just outside Akaranes the peninsula is connected to the peninsula outside Reykjavik by a seven-kilometer tunnel that allows one to skip the entirety of Hvalforthur. It is somewhat disconcerting being in such a long underwater structure in a volcanic, geologically active landscape, but we are through it in a blink of geological time. It is one of the darker tunnels I have seen with one of the higher ratios of speed to width, but soon the white, mountain-chaperoned skyline of Reykjavik is visible across the water.
At the Fron we say goodbye, thanking Birgir profusely. He has about four hours now in which to nap before heading to all-night duty at the police station.
As planned two days earlier, we call Hildur to let her know we are back from our outing, and she confirms a meeting with her nephew Volundur and his wife at the cafeteria above the bookstore down Laugavegur.
Arriving ten minutes ahead of her, we wander about the books and then, as the cafeteria is filling up, nab a table. Hildur comes and is soon followed by the tall glamorous couple, both beautiful people in the full Hollywood sense, Volundur with a days’ fashionable beard. They provide a brief whirlwind event in we learn the details of their equally whirlwind life—back and forth to the States, the Bahamas; her television show in Reykjavik; his celebrity appearances, cooking a meal for Icelandair at a Los Angeles gala gathering, and so on. Even as we are sinking into this conversation, they are rising to leave, Generation X stars in a hurry, a local event that evening, then flying back to the Bahamas in the morning. I say that we will be heading ourselves for San Francisco tomorrow.
“Ummm,” says Volundur, “really not a bad flight. Long, but really not a bad flight at all.”
As they retreat down the stairs, Hildur is smiling. “I didn’t think we would do any business,” she concludes. “I just wanted to give you a sense of them.”
Then we talk with her about Reykjavik baths, as I want to try one of the in-town hot springs on our last night here. I mention Reykjavik Spa City, an obviously good-sized establishment from which I have a brochure but, instead of seconding that, she gives us meticulous directions on how to find a smaller bathing site, Sundhollin, very close to our hotel so that we do not have to go nearly that far.
We eat a late dinner (around 20:00) at Anaestu Grosum, then cross the street back to the Fron for towels and bathing suits, and set out for the closer spa. The journey involves walking a few blocks toward Snorrabraut, then heading up the hill on Baronstigur on the other side of Halgrim’s church.
Off Laugavegur the streets are dark and empty, and vestigial American paranoia is unavoidable for me, though the area is really mellow. However, we don’t see any spa where it is supposed to be—it is more of a residential neighborhood, mostly apartments, and Lindy is busy trying to discourage a cat that she petted from following us when a man hurrying along the street almost bumps into her twice. Once she gets out of the way, she asks about the missing baths. Unflapped and polite to a fault, he stops to point diagonally across the street and up a block. He looks at his watch and adds, “I think you have just enough time to get in and warm before they close.”
It is like an old gym inside, lots of steam exiting into the lobby, an old man at the desk, a small crowd milling around. It takes us a long time to grasp the situation, as the clerk does not speak English, but eventually it becomes clear that, because of a technical problem, the baths have just closed for the night and everyone is leaving.
We ask if there is another bathing spa near there, and a customer tells us that the closest is Spa City. I have already located that on the map, and it is middling far, perhaps the distance of Salka Publishing or a little more, but it is hard to know for sure. Lindy would prefer to go back to our room and pack, but I am for being intrepid on our last night. “What could it be, ten or twelve blocks? And it’s open till midnight. We can make it there on time.”
She is an unwilling participant and, at Laugavegur, almost inclined to split to the Fron and let me seek Spa City on my own but, seeing that I am committed, she finally decides she doesn’t want to go back alone. I have an almost desperate sense of wanting to hold onto the last adventure of our trip, not to give up the spirit of it yet. “The last night is the same as any other night,” I cheer-lead. “We are in Iceland. Our plane is not till tomorrow afternoon. We are in Reykjavik. It’s magical. We are really here. Just think how hard it will be to go to hot baths in Reykjavik once we are back in Berkeley!”
This kind of humor never amuses her.
On Hvertisgata we see that there is a bus line running, and I immediately seize on that as our salvation. Unfortunately we have not explored Icelandic buses yet and know nothing about routes, cost, exact change requirements, etc. There is no one else at the shelter to ask, so we just wait doggedly. I don’t even have to voice Lindy’s fear because it is my own: these buses are whipping along at high speed, and we are about to go plummeting off into unknown Reykjavik on our last evening, with no sense of where we are headed or how to get back if we get lost.
Now a young man arrives at the shelter across the street and stands there waiting for a bus going the other way. I run across to ask him my questions but discover he is on his cell, as he walks concertedly away from me. Turning to signal a dud to Lindy, I see a cab shooting past. I run out and wave; the driver stops. Of course the cabbie knows the baths and they’re open late; get in.
As we wind down streets toward the coastline, I have a fresh appreciation of what we were about to innocently undertake. It is probably a mile or more, with many turns. On foot we would have lost courage and bailed long before getting close. In fact, given the serpentine route, it is doubtful we could have even gotten there by bus. The cabbie makes one last turn and pulls right up to the door of what looks like a bowling alley, then runs inside for us to make sure it is open even though he knows it is. Then he refuses a tip. “We don’t do that here,” he informs me. “Have a good time.”
Reykjavik Spa City is much like the Blue Lagoon, only less upscale, a much larger lobby, kind of like a Y, lots of families and kids hanging around, hollow with an echo; according to a brochure: “If you want to meet Brits, you go to a pub; if you want to meet the French, you go to a coffee house. If you want to meet the people of Reykjavik, you go to one of the city’s thermal swimming pools and baths.”
After we pay a few hundred kronurs and are each given a key, we fork down separate hallways. Inside the changing room it feels like the 1950s. As I stand staring at the lockers in bafflement of how the system works, a husky old guy takes the key right out of my hand, sticks it in a panel, and shows how it releases a locker at a distance. This is reminiscent of my seventh-grade experience with my first locker when my alphabetical neighbor, Arnie Goldman, opened the padlock for me. I can still remember its combination—22-36-10—because I had it for six years afterward and eventually mastered its turns down to maybe three or four seconds. . . in time for class.
Once again, there are stringent showering requirements. After soaking naked in a hot stream of water among the other men and boys, I step out into the alley and climb upstairs to the pools. It is absolutely freezing, standing wet in the Reykjavik wind, until I can get myself into the nearest pool.
It is not very warm, though I hardly care at first. This particular pool is roped off into lanes and overlooked by a large grandstand, probably for competitions. People—mostly men in their sixties and seventies—are swimming laps. My sense is that the guy in the lane adjacent to mine has been going for maybe fifty years unstopped, one relentless identical stroke after another in the night. I start to emulate him, but after two laps I am bored and exhausted. I want to cross the pool without going into the night air, but ropes are in the way, heavy and taut, as I find out by testing one. The only way to navigate without leaving the pool is, first to make sure there’s no traffic, then duck underwater and come up on the other side. This process is vaguely anxiety-provoking, as I stay under extra long not to hit the heavy cord, but not too long to run into the next one or another swimmer in his lane. Also, swimming underwater in hot water is oddly disquieting. Three such dives and resurfacings get me to the edge of the pool where Lindy is just arriving, shivering from the shower.
We go to a second outdoor pool, which is more a family area, and we swim about it a bit and then head for a big communal hot tub filled with children and adults. This is where the real heat is, and we are much happier zoning out in the mineralized steam, listening to Icelandic words flow by.
After that siesta we return to the athletic pool, having realized that it has its own less crowded hot tubs along the side. These are sunk in the ground, so one descends into them. The first is marked 38 degrees centigrade, and then, tub by tub, they go steadily up: 40, 42, 44. People are leaving one and graduating to the next, I suppose as they acclimate to the heat, and then increase the dose. In the 44 degree tub two old men seem in hibernation, their eyes closed, breathing heavily.
We sink into the 38-degree vat, which is considerably hotter than either the roped pool or the communal tub, but obviously things can get much hotter. At first we are alone with two silent middle-aged men; then they leave for 40 degrees and, after a moment, we are joined by four Japanese men engaged in lively conversation as they descend and then sigh as they dully submerge. They are of ages from about seventy to thirty. I wish I could know what they are saying—Japanese banter in Iceland—as they are in heated and engaged contact. Then unexpectedly the oldest man begins drumming gently but rapidly with his fists on the youngest man’s back. I had pictured them as traveling businessmen, and maybe they are. Clearly this massage fits into their culture. After the drumming, the elder goes, “Poof,” then drums again. . .then poofs again. The younger man has a lot to say, exclaiming repeatedly and respectfully while the older one adds a few apparently instructive words.
After a while Lindy decides that she has had enough, so I depart for 40, which turns out to be notably hotter. The Japanese men are already there, quieter in the greater heat. Soon we are joined by four Japanese women associated with them, chattering and giggling, and the tub has become crowded enough that I go for 42. Way too hot for me. I am out of there in thirty seconds and headed for the locker so that Lindy doesn’t get too much of a head start.
Unapparent when I was getting undressed is a heavy-duty bearded attendant. He is busy dumping liquid soap on the stone floor and then spraying with a hose so that it bubbles up and washes around our feet. Reykjavik Spa City is a very old institution, and this janitor is probably performing the same ritual that another attendant did sixty years ago. Relentless and eagle-eyed, he is trying to make sure that everyone showers with their swimming suits off and that no one crosses an invisible line into the locker room while not thoroughly dried off.
When the Japanese men arrive, they enter the shower with their bathing suits, and he yells at them in Icelandic; they do not know of course what he is talking about. They finally settle on English as a common language, and the attendant says simply, “No bathing suit [pointing to the young man’s waist]. You must take it off.” I can see that Japanese are humiliated, perhaps by the insistence of nakedness, perhaps by being called out, perhaps both. But this is the global village: Toyota meet Thor.
As advised, we order a cab at the front desk. Wearing our Icelandic headbands against the cold, we stand outside, but not long. Cabs are frequent.
As the driver lets us off a block below the Fron to avoid traffic, I check my kronurs and am a couple short without breaking a 1000. He elects to take less money. People are so reasonable and affable here.
“Thank you for pushing it,” Lindy says, as we ascend the hill. “That was one of the best things on the trip, really local culture, and of course our last night should be special and count as part of the trip too.”
The previous night I had come up with a plan at least to follow the Mets’ game in real time on Yahoo’s MLB scoreboard. I rented the Fron laptop computer for the last hour of the day when it was available (22:00-23:00) and thus was able to keep it overnight without more than a one-hour charge. Setting it on the coffee table, I went to sleep at a normal hour with a suggestion to myself that I should probably wake up around 1:00. I awoke a little bit after that, and the Mets were leading 2-0 in the seventh. The game finished with the same score.
I was able to follow its unfolding without hanging over Yahoo pitch by pitch. I would watch a few pitches, then write some emails, then go to the Mets’ chatroom, then write some more emails, then check out the game, etc. Occasionally I would linger through a developing situation, hitting the “Refresh” button when I was impatient.
I had several substantial exchanges in the present, most of them involving finding someone to meet us at the San Francisco airport when our flight arrived at 7:00 the next evening. Various different people were checking their schedules and, by the time the matter got resolved, none of the folks I started out thinking were going to do it were able to, but an old friend I hadn’t been in touch with for a couple years (who just happened to email me about a different matter in the middle of my other exchanges), music critic Robert Phoenix, offered, “I can get you.” Then I was also carrying out another correspondence of three or four emails with our daughter Miranda.
The alternating rhythm was ideal; the game was kept in balance with other activities, and it ended happily and not too late.
I rented the computer again as soon as we got back from the baths. We had been out late and, with packing and all, I was up when the game began at midnight and so began to follow it from the beginning.
This time, nothing was in balance. The Mets, who had won four straight post-season games thus far and were on a roll, jumped to a 3-0 lead on a first-inning home run by Carlos Delgado. The way this information comes across the Internet on a site like Yahoo is reminiscent of board games of my youth. There is no real baseball game. You just draw a card or spin and spinner, and you see the results of the play—fly ball to right, double, strike three, etc. When the Mets had two men on in the first and Delgado was at the plate, I thought (of course) “three-run homer.” With no action to watch or situation to see develop, there was just a count logged in graphics, pitch by pitch, and then a result. So when it said, “home run,” I exclaimed out loud, as though I had hit the jackpot.
The lead didn’t last. The Cardinals came back, as the Mets first upped, then lost the lead, then went up 6-4. Around 3:00 in the morning, I was tired, frustrated, restless, stuck before the computer, going compulsively back and forth between Yahoo and the Mets’ chatroom on nj.com. Action tended to show up first in the chatroom, although you didn’t necessarily know exactly what it was. “Sh*t!” was generally not good, nor were lines like “Mota, you a**hole!” (people wrote with asterisks to avoid the site censors). “Yessss!” was always great, and that would send me right back to Yahoo where the result would register in a few moments, either a run by the Mets or, more often, getting the third out in a difficult Cardinals’ inning.
I thought the Mets were finally going to hold on with Mota on the mound in the seventh, but Yahoo froze for a really long time with Scott Spiezio at bat for St. Louis, usually a bad sign, though visits to nj.com showed fans still pulling for Mota to get out of the jam. Before anything showed on Yahoo, a big “Nooooo!” on nj.com was followed by a string of like comments (“they are one f*cking tenacious team”). I felt a chill, as I imagined that maybe he had hit a three-run homer. A quick jump to Yahoo showed it only to be a game-tying triple. Back at nj.com, fans were complaining that Shawn Green was the worst and slowest outfielder they had ever seen and were arguing back and forth whether to blame him for not catching the ball or Mota for the terrible pitch selection. One fan would commend Fewwn for preventing a home run, and another would rebut, “If you get to it, you should catch it.”
With the score tied 6-6 and Billy Wagner coming in to pitch the ninth (and the dawn fast approaching in Reykjavik), I figured I needed to get some sleep. An hour later, I was tossing restlessly in bed and figured I might as well get up and look because thinking about the game was one of my problems. The thing never even went to extra innings; it was over long ago: 9-6 Cardinals. Wagner gave up a homer to the first batter he faced—and that was just the beginning.
Tracking the game in real time was a bad mistake. I wished I had just gone to sleep and found out the score in the morning.
But this last evening in Iceland had an effect. With baseball turned into a series of internet items, its true meaninglessness became evident. I would never follow it as closely again. In a few years I would just look at list. The scale and distance of Iceland had turned the game into bits of pumice and my life-long interest into monkey mind. I won’t even see Endy Chavez’s epic catch two days later live, for naught anyway.