All That's Waiting For You Is A Front Yard Full Of Thistles
2a. The Short Guy next to me frenches his girlfriend and their mouths make a sound. Then the Short Guy says, "Hi?" to his girlfriend really softly because he has All These Feelings and he frenches her and then he stops and then he frenches her and then he says, "I can't wait to get back for the Ocarina party." The girl says softly, "What's that?" because she Wants To Know Everything About Him, and he says, "It's a thing where a bunch of people download the Ocarina of Time app[1] and we jam." There's an awful lot of back-rubbing going on in this situation; we're all sitting pretty close to each other; I brace myself to become collateral damage.
1a. Maniitsoq harbor looks out into the Davis Strait[2]; at the dock seven or eight local boys in wetsuits leap into the cold water fifteen feet below then climb the dock ladder back up and do it again. Brandon and I and two old women with plastic trash-bags stuffed tight with ice and big fish are here waiting for the RAL Sarfaq Ittuq to take us back to Nuuk. The boys jump from the dock, then they jump from a bridge near the dock, then they race off on their Mongooses and come back ten minutes later with another ten or so friends on BMX bikes and they all jump off a silver electrical box into the harbor. The boys are eleven, maybe twelve – there's close to twenty of them and the only thing any of them wants to do is leap off that electrical box into the water. Four or five girls show up and one of the boys does a perfect backflip. I think about the boys and I think about what the next sixty or so years looks like for them here in Maniitsoq and try not to romanticize those sixty or so years but I am who I am and I can't help myself.
And then I sort of sigh and think, "This is the end of the trip," and then: "It's going to take 3 days to get back home" and I wish it was three days from now already.
1b. At seven-thirty the next morning we're back in Nuuk. We unpack our bags and re-set our tent exactly where it was four days ago and I say, "Can you believe we'll be back in Iceland tomorrow?". Brandon makes a noise and I say "It feels like Iceland was so long ago!" and Brandon makes a noise. We try to talk ourselves into one final night at the Kristinemut saloon[3]; instead we stay at camp and tell each other stories about Things That Happened Three Days Ago. Brandon takes more pictures of icebergs and I try to finish Last Places. We don't have to be at the airport until eleven tomorrow morning; we both fall asleep by 9:30.
1c. At Nuuk International Airport there's one café and it's run by a sixteen year old girl who chases a golden retriever and a dachshund around the waiting room when she isn't working in the café. Brandon tries to order a hamburger from the café because: there's a picture of a hamburger, and the sixteen year old girl stops chasing the dogs and says they don't sell hamburgers. The picture of the hamburger is +/- 12"x12" and the three of us are standing directly underneath it. In my head I begin to write a version of Wings that takes place here and as I do it occurs to me that Tom Nevers Aiport is only slightly larger than Nuuk International (BGGH).
1d. On our final night in Iceland we eat dinner at the Úrilla Górillan Bar and try a shot of brennivin[4] and walk back to the Lebowski Bar for a final beer. In twelve hours we'll return to Keflavik airport; in eighteen or so we'll land at JFK. A short, bald Swedish guy sits down with us and tells us he's here for soccer and for street-fights and he shows us his fists and he grins the way that men who like to get in street-fights grin. He points to his friend – his friend who is the largest person I have ever seen – and says he'll fight anyone in the world except his friend and he shows us his fist again and grabs us by the backs of our necks so he can pull our heads together. We knock our heads and he says something that neither Brandon nor I understand and we both laugh really loudly and Brandon says, "Exactly!" and I say, "I know, right!".
2b. In the last ten days or so we've seen +/-16 Americans and as such Gate 32 at Keflavik Airport feels like a decompression chamber. The Young Couple makes out and rubs my back, a group of Ladies wheel their bags in and sit down in sort of a huff because: they are who they are. A Really Huge Woman[5] shouts at another Smaller Woman and breaks out in tears and just stands there crying and shouting. There's the Sticky Children, Those Guys Who Are Really Into Geology And Won't Stop Talking About It Already, The Tri-Athlete, The Guy With The Indiana Jones Hat, The (omitted)-Off Cute Girl From New York, Brandon and me. I drop an eagle putt from 65 feet out – in the last three days I've developed A Thing for Tiger Woods on my iPhone -- and pump my fist and stand up and say "(omitted)(omitted) you (omitted)(omitted)" and point at my phone like I've really shown it something and nobody pays any attention whatsoever.
2c. The customs line at JFK is 400 or so deep: it snakes its way back and forth and I end up with The Couple to my left and the Ladies to my right. The Short Guy[6] says, "I watched Hunger Games again – it's so good[7]." One of the ladies looks at a boy four up from her and says, "I think it's funny how I got off the plane before he did and I ended up behind him in the line?" but she says it in the loud way that Ladies say things. He turns and she says, "He cheats. He. Cheated." and she points a crooked finger at him – I can smell Guerlain Shalimar[8], her necklaces rattle like bones. It's standing here in the middle of all this noise and heat that I recognize my only operative mode for the last three days: to kill time. That I had another opportunity to be present, to be quiet – and instead I turned on my phone and wished more than anything that time would hurry the hell up. That once again I've been given the world and learned nothing from it; that I may be too old to learn anything ever.
In five hours Brandon will drop me off at my house and we'll hug weirdly and say, "Hey – good trip!" to each other; when he leaves I'll stand outside and consider all the thistles in my front yard. Tomorrow morning we'll mow our lawns, walk our dogs, clean our houses, run our errands and it will be driving down the Fruitville Pike that I'll tell myself that if I could be lucky enough to go somewhere like Greenland just one more time – well, next time: I promise I won't waste it.
[1] Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7sxH_TkiNk&feature=fvwrel
[2] This is a little inaccurate – it looks "out" on a narrowish channel cut between two granite islands which in turn looks "out" onto either the Davis Straight or Baffin Bay. I've asked a few people which is which; I've spent some time here looking at Google Maps. I honestly can't tell which it is, so.
[3] A detail about the Kristinemut saloon I've been unable to work in thus far. The house band at the Kristinemut saloon is These Two Cute Girls Plus This Heavy Guy and six nights a week they play three sets of cover songs with more enthusiasm than can be aptly described in this footnote. All three are clearly locals, all three are flat-out terrific singers, all songs performed are sung live over what sounds like karaoke backing tracks. It's an easy thing to laugh at at first, but I found myself strangely moved by The Heavy Guy's cover of Billy Joel's, "She's Always a Woman To Me" and then completely entranced by the three of them dancing together and their tinny, boom-box backing instrumentals. At the end of one of their sets The Cute Girl On The Left said, "We're going to try this hip-hop song we've never done before?" and I sort of thought, "Oh, Inuits and hip-hop..." and then the three of them really launched into the song and the fourteen or so people in the Kristinemut Saloon bobbed their heads and that was it: I was in love.
[4] Yes, because we read about it in Last Places. No, we haven't had a single original thought of our own.
[5] I want to clarify that I don't mean, "overweight" here, but A Certified, Rock Tossing Colossus of a woman
[6] From the TSO Blog cutting room floor: The Young Guy has a small tattoo on the back of his neck; in my head I set the over/under at .5 for "Number of Words In Elvish In the Tattoo".
[7] I watched Act of Valor on the ride home and at one point in time found myself strangely moved by it. Totally ironically, I'm sure?(a)
(a) It's here that I want to acknowledge something else. The day after we got home I found myself with a few minutes on my hands and instead of reading or something awful like that I ended up watching the second half of Big Fish for about the twentieth time and – like the nineteen or so times before hand – crying like a four year old by the end. I mean, shaking like a leaf; the whole thing. What I want to say is: when does that stop happening?
[8] This never happened.