Bond Villain Lair

I wake up at 6:30 anxious and can’t get back to sleep, and I lie in bed for an hour and a half trying to take it slow.

That’s what being alone does to me. Nothing to do and nowhere to be, which is the entire point of a vacation, and my body will not accept the offer. I’m trying to chill. I just wish my body would come along.

Eventually I get up, go to breakfast, load half my stuff into the car, and go back to sleep. Which is great. I need more sleep.

I’m worried they’re going to kick me out of the room. I’m so worried I’ll oversleep the checkout.

Nobody has cared about checkout on this entire trip. Not the first Airbnb or the second. Not one person has said a single word about checkout.

I have dreams about it anyway. Dreams where I’m checking out, or going back into the hotel, or getting asked to leave.

The guys working at the hotel were hired because they are cool. One of them rides a 1971 fixed gear bicycle to work and lives an idyllic life in the middle of a forest and goes snowshoeing in the winter, and seems like a rich kid. The other one is named Jesse, and he went to New York specifically to taste cocktails, with his sophisticated, intentional, stylish palate. He tells me about the milkmaid cabins.

Sundal is a fjord and a mountain together and the water is glassy and blue, but it isn’t sunny today. The clouds are falling down into the mountains to create a cloud forest effect.

The Salmon Eye is a floating James Bond installation. That’s what it looks like. A giant steel fish eye floating in the fjord. They got a $10 million government grant for it and the owners put in another $20 million themselves. It belongs to a big salmon company and it exists to explain salmon fisheries to people.

I would like to have my bar mitzvah there.

They had a Michelin starred restaurant in it, Iris, with eighteen courses that all come from the ocean, but they shut it down. I’m curious why. Maybe it wasn’t making money. Kind of a bummer.

Next to the Salmon Eye there’s a fishery with a worker running the cameras with a PlayStation controller. People are required to show up to the fishery every day. Even on holidays. It seems like the fish would be fine by themselves for a day.

The salmon go deep, up to thirty meters, in these huge nets that hold more than 100,000 salmon each. They like the cold. They like the pressure. The problem with fisheries is the food and the waste running off into the fjord, and the salmon lice. To get rid of the lice they cook the salmon at sixty five degrees, which they did not put in the exhibits. This family is working on a membrane, like a balloon, so fewer fish get out and the food gets trapped at the bottom and recycled.

There’s a couple on the tour from Austin.

If you live in Austin right now it means you are a soulless tech worker who moved somewhere thinking it would be cool and is now excited to join a rec league for hockey because you’re trying to make friends. It’s the most rootless place you could possibly live. You live in a prefab apartment building with no history. And to get all of that, you let Dell ruin a genuinely cool city.

I have never been to Austin, so I don’t know why I give a fuck. But that’s my impression. Like if Gainesville got super corporate.

Afterward I go to the hotel down the road and have a fish soup and it’s delicious. And when the sun comes out from behind the clouds for just a few moments it’s very nice. I love when the sun is out.

The waiter is Greek and I think he’s gay and flirting with me. Or he’s just happy to talk to me. I think it’s about me, because I assume nobody goes to that restaurant. Turns out it’s busy and he just likes me.

Then I drive all the way into Folgefonna National Park, to the very end of the road, near the glacier.

I don’t realize I’m at the glacier. I can’t find a hiking trail. It has been genuinely difficult for me to find and stay on a trail in this country, much harder than it should be. So I go up a mountain off trail and summit it and get soggy as hell. Boots soaked, socks soaked, overalls soaked.

There’s also a lake along the road that’s shaped like a heart.

I get high and I hike all day and I make myself laugh like crazy. I’m having so much fun with myself.

I’m hungry, and there’s a middle aged German man starting up a grill, so I offer to trade him two beers for a hot dog. He already has beer. Then it turns out the charcoal isn’t ready anyway. He looks at what I’m carrying and asks if I have any food, and I tell him just fruit, and I tell him not to worry about it, because I’m not planning to sleep in the national park.

Back in the car, I turn the heat on, because I’m wet. My underwear is wet, which is a bummer.

This car is super tech. It knows when your eyes aren’t looking at the road. It drives itself. I thought the windshield wipers would come on automatically and they don’t, which is like, duh. If we’re going to make a car that talks to the future, wouldn’t you want it to wipe the windshield? Even figuring out where the wiper stalk is in a rental is confusing. I found the rear wiper before I found the front one.

But it drives itself.

I let it take a curve pretty hard and it does it. Then I let it take another curve and it misses, so I have to grab the wheel and drive the car.

We’re not calculators. We’re humans. We’re not calculators. We’re humans.

That will be my resistance to the robot uprising line. Give me fifteen years and put that on a bumper sticker.

Send that bumper sticker to the future.

That night I go to the bar.

I meet a Norwegian foreman whose mother had a cabin in the area from around 1850. She recently died, and now it’s his, and he took it apart and rebuilt it. That’s very popular here, inheriting a cabin and then fully rebuilding it, sometimes with the original materials, sometimes just in the old style. They don’t do a good job of keeping things old. Often the stone walls are original and all the wood paneling is new, so it just looks like a brand new cabin from the inside because there’s no age in the wood.

He’s been all over America. He drove from Boston to Seattle in four weeks. He has a hat from a bar in Montana with some Norwegian connection.

I ask him about the pennant flag, because they fly the pennant everywhere, way more than the actual flag. It’s called a vimpel, a long tapered version of the Norwegian flag without the cross, so it ends up looking a little like the flag of Thailand.

He says, too many people are coming to this country.

And then he gives me a whole anti immigrant speech that I did not ask for.

But I do get the flag answer, which is that the real flag has rules. It can only be up from sunrise to sunset, or nine to nine. You can’t leave it out overnight and you can’t leave it out in the rain. So they fly the vimpel instead, which has no rules.

Which means the flag has so much respect here that they mostly don’t fly it. In America anyone can raise a flag and leave it up.

Then I meet the young guys, who all work in explosives. One of them goes up the mountain by helicopter to reinforce a tunnel, but only in the winter when the ice is strong enough. Another one blows up the earth so they can lay pipe, because the pipes have to be six feet down for the freeze.

They all give me their American names. They all look American to me.

And then a cute Norwegian girl comes up and flirts with me a little bit.

That’s fun. It’s fun to flirt with her a little bit.

I wish I was better at flirting. I would have flirted more.

Maybe I could have pushed it.

Then I drive up a dirt road on the mountain next to the milkmaid farm and go to sleep. I bolt awake at some point because I’m thirsty, and then I realize the car lights are still on, so I turn them off, and then I sleep.