Bill Murray's Blog, page 95
February 18, 2017
February 16, 2017
New Ancient Continent
If you’re geographically inclined you’ll enjoy this eight page pdf claiming to have discovered a new continent, titled Zealandia: Earth’s Hidden Continent from the Geological Society of America, from which this map comes:
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Interesting in its own right, but also it’s not often you get to read about Kerguelen.
Out in the Cold: Book Excerpt
[image error]My new book is just about ready to share. It’s called Out in the Cold (cover, left), and as we run up to publication I’m sharing some photos and excerpts here on the blog. In Out in the Cold we explore up north: Svalbard, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and maritime eastern Canada, including a curious artifact, the last remaining French colony in North America, a tiny pair of islands off Newfoundland called Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Today it’s winter in East Iceland. Hope you enjoy it.
NAKED AND FREEZING ON VATNAJOKULL
Reindeer break at once across the hill above the road – a herd of forty – and kicked-up snow gathers speed rolling our way. No apparent reason for their stampede. These beasts, magnitudes more hearty than the dispirited troika that pleaded for handouts in Russian Barentsberg, appear to run for pure joy.
In the world of Icelandic reindeer, the ladies are both the fairer sex and the tougher. Females and males alike shed their antlers annually, but bulls shed right after the rut, in autumn (and it must be a relief, because reindeer antlers represent the fastest tissue growth known in mammals, up to two and a half centimeters every day. They can weigh ten kilograms).
Cows fight, physically, for the best feeding spots in the winter when they are pregnant, so they keep their antlers through winter. Collectors fan out across these hills as soon as the snow melts searching for shed antlers that soon after appear carved into every kind of bauble in the boutiques of Reykjavik.
The day of the eclipse Agnar was guiding a group. “We were standing on that hill there,” he says, pointing, and for a few minutes at maximum eclipse “the reindeer all got into a group,” as they do at night. “For the reindeer it was a very short night.”
The Arctic fox (that they reckon has been around for 10,000 years, turning brown in summer and white in winter) is Iceland’s only native terrestrial mammal. Reindeer, Iceland’s entire cadre, were introduced from Norway. Unlike the Lapps of northern Scandinavia, Icelanders never took to domesticating reindeer, so they live up here in the eastern highlands in winter and come down toward the shore for better grazing in summer.
•••••
Agnar parks the Super Jeep in front of a completely improbable guest house built for twenty or thirty, perched at glacier’s edge and across a road marked only by reflective yellow poles along one side. Truth is, the glacier looks the same as the mountains it lies between this time of year, undifferentiated, everything bathed in white.
Agnar sets about digging places to make footfall in the snow, a spadeful per step, from the vehicle to the door. Just several meters away but over the snow horizon, he claims heat glows beneath the snow and that we should shed our clothes and jump into a hot pool.
At minus eight degrees it sounds like an act of dubious wisdom, especially since we can’t even see that such a thing exists.
“Most people,” he smiles, take their clothes off and run with their coat and boots on, maybe a towel.”
He points to the changing rooms, leaves us towels and sets off with his spade digging a path.
No one within twenty miles. We do as he says.
We imagine that once we commit we will see the tail lights of the Super Jeep driving away down the hill, Agnar cackling with evil, the two of us locked outside and naked.
Shedding my clothes, I read a sign on the wall that explains the water in the pool stays at a constant 48 – 53 celsius degrees. Stand at the edge and the snowy rim reaches above your private parts, not that there’s anybody around. You jump in – quickly – and find a place not too near the hot vents, and your feet float up like in the Dead Sea except it’s not salty.
Whoever made the pool rimmed the water with stones and today nature has laid fresh snow around the pool so that when you get down low in it to expose only your head to the cold, you can’t see above the snow rim. It’s quiet as a scared kitten, so quiet I imagine hearing individual snowflakes land on the glacier. This tiny mote of space is all that exists in the world. It’s snug in the water and morsels of ice tickle your face.
Refreshing, renewing. And like so many other things around here, utterly incongruent. Elsewhere on this island, with heat so near the surface Icelanders bake Rúgbrauð, or Geysir Bread, buried in a pot two feet underground to cook overnight.
•••••
Guides the world over fix on their favorite landmarks. For our Burmese guide it was factories. “That is milk factory,” “That is rice factory,” “Do you want to see brick factory? Take photo?” Kemm on Streymoy Island liked churches.
For Agnar it is power stations. He shows us all of them (and there are many) big and small, and tells the tale of a farmer and his own personal power station. Power shed, really. It seems that one summer, when there was no snow, the electricity went out and the farmer went to investigate.
He found the door blown off and snow tumbling out of his shed. Failed electricity led to a burst pipe, turning the shed into the farmer’s own personal snow machine. His neighbors snickered that he could hire himself out to ski slopes.
•••••
Agnar’s tires are straight-from-America and too big for him to carry a spare. Only America, where bigger is always better, he says, would make these tires. He scoffs at an Icelandic company that has 38 inch tires made in China and imported. They won’t do in EAST Iceland.
And since they are too big to carry a spare, what do you do if you have a flat?
“You have to fix it.”
He glued his tires right to the rims and the mechanic who helped him told him he was crazy. But he didn’t mean for them to come off. Ever.
I was wrong about Agnar at first. All this derring-do makes Agnar’s fine company on the side of a glacier beat that of any neurotic city boy, or gentrified psuedo-farmer like me.
•••••
Back to Egilsstaðir, one of Iceland’s few inland towns and the transport hub for the east. It is the first proper town if you arrive on the Norrona ferry and home to an airport with multiple daily flights to Reykjavik. Population, about 2,750.
There is a cafe in the red house (they just call it the red house) in the middle of town. Tonight maybe thirty people socialize in a light, Egilsstaðir way, gathered in groups around laminated diner-style tables like the Hvonn brasserie in Torshavn.
(Most people on the island are related at least at the 8th or 9th remove. To avoid striking up a relationship with your cousin when out at the pub, there is an “incest prevention” app based on genealogical data that allows people to bump phones and determine how closely they may be related. Just in case.)
An Indian fellow in the kitchen serves up tandoori chicken dishes, Gull Icelandic beer in big mugs and ‘wood fired’ pizza, surely exotic in a place with no wood. People come for the food and the free wifi, or to play chess.
Icelanders play a lot of chess. It is one of the ways to pass the long winter. In the off season fishermen carve chess pieces from whale bones (wood being more scarce) and people knit. There is a fine selection of yarn in the store. Families, friends, the community, everybody nods closer in the winter.
And Icelanders read. In the 1960s there were a dozen daily newspapers and forty bookshops in Reykjavik. There are more books published and more books read per head here than anywhere else. Every tenth Icelander is an author.
Meanwhile, in the Icelandair Hotel Herad across the way, mod furniture that may have found exile here from the rest of Europe after the 80’s swivels in place beside the overbearing silence of its restaurant. The Hotel Herad’s most notable feature may be ahead of its time. Its default TV news channel is not the advertising wasteland of CNN, but France 24 TV news.
•••••
UP IN THE AIR
I throw open the blinds the day of our flight from Egilsstaðir and flop back down on the bed, self-satisfied because I’ve built an extra day into our itinerary and this will be it, the day we are socked in with a full blizzard. The street is scarcely visible and the flags outside stand straight, towel-snapping in the wind. No plane will fly here today.
Snow-whipping wind bends the trees sideways while I imagine a day of amniotic calm in which I needn’t be kempt nor ept nor sheveled. I imagine ordering modest room service fare in the modest Icelandair hotel, never progressing beyond my underwear and soaking in the state of the world as France Vingt Quatre sees it, nibbling the admittedly graying grapes on the Herad’s fruit platter. Until the next time I look and blue sky and calm reign, and the occasional car makes wary time down the highway.
All flights lead to Reykjavik, four of them, at 8:55, 12:15, 12:55 and 16:10. They ask that you arrive thirty minutes before your flight but still you have to ring the bell on the counter for service. It’s a little whacky. There’s a video monitor on which Saevar the Reindeer Whisperer offers tours of East Iceland.
Americans have tried to convince ourselves since 9/11 that a more prominent display of intolerance, flags and belligerence by Homeland Security will take care of the security threat. Back home we have made the dour airport experience the new normal.
In Egilsstaðir, the old normal never left. There is no security and there are no security personnel. You are hard pressed to find any personnel at all except the lady behind the counter at the coffee shop. And there are no bag scanners or x-ray machines. Just jump on and ride.
By this time we have had any number of alternating gales and lulls since that first look out the window. Three Caterpillar tractors with big blades race up and down the airstrip. In winter, I guess clearing that bit of land is a full time job. The 8:30 arrival, a Fokker 50, roars in ten minutes late and we are southbound within a half hour.
A pilot on the Savusavu air strip in Fiji once lauded the entire Fokker line to me, saying these little worker bees demand the air, and you have to hold them on the ground. So it was with today’s flight in a Fokker 50, as we roared down the air strip and out of east Iceland like lightnin’.
When I was a teenager my friend Jim and I found some of his dad’s money, paper bills that said “Landsbanki Islands,” and we scoured maps to find these islands. We couldn’t, and came to realize the translation would be something like the “National Bank of Iceland.” In fact, the failure of Landsbanki, alongside Iceland’s other two big banks Kaupthing (“marketplace”) and Glitnir (as we learned in the Faroes, Norse heaven), precipitated Iceland’s bankruptcy in 2008.
The word “Islands” works the same way here. The airline is Air Iceland when you book your tickets in English on the web; here it’s Flugfelag Islands in its livery, and in-flight magazine.
They keep Reykjavik city airfield busy with domestic flights to Isafjordur, Akureyri and then on to Grimsey in the Arctic, Þhorshofn, Vopnafjordur and Egilsstaðir, to Tórshavnin the Faroe Islands and to Illulisat, Nuuk, Narsarsuaq, Kulusuk (where we are bound soon) and Ittoqqortoormiit in Greenland.
From my seat 2A I lean forward and guess that if that propeller comes loose so will my head, because before they start it up and it spins too fast to see, I reckon it is maybe just a touch more than a meter from where I sit. Which might be just as well if the prop flies off, anyway.
•••••
Here is a previous excerpt, from the Faroe Islands.
February 15, 2017
February 12, 2017
Populist Tide, Incoming
Not an endorsement but a prediction: Macron can’t hold up down the stretch and Le Pen takes the French Presidency on 7 May. For the record.
February 9, 2017
Out in the Cold: Book Excerpt
[image error] I’m excited to say that at long last I have the product of a couple years of really enjoyable work just about ready to share. It’s my new book, called Out in the Cold (cover, left), and over the next few weeks I’ll share some photos and excerpts here on the blog. Out in the Cold is an exploration of points north: Svalbard, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and maritime eastern Canada, including a curious artifact, the last remaining French colony in North America, a tiny pair of islands off Newfoundland called Saint Pierre and Miquelon.
Today I’d like to share an excerpt, about a tiny village on a tiny island in the tiny group of islands called the Faroes. Hope you enjoy it.
GÁSADALUR
They built a tunnel to Gásadalur to keep the village from dying. They blasted it right through the rock and under the Atlantic Ocean in 2004. Up to then, Dagfinnur confessed, he had never seen Gásadalur’s famous waterfall to the sea.
And Gásadalur is beguiling, a captivating wind carved plateau of ten houses beside the waterfall overlooking the Mykinesfjøröur, with views to five basalt peaks, watchmen in the sea off Mykines, the westernmost Faroe island.
Walk to the viewpoint. Slosh down the ruts in front of Dagfinnur’s taxi. Breath air that slices like daggers. Sleet stings your cheeks. Biting whips of wind, nettles against your chest. The sun shines at the same time.
Like phonetics and Gaelic, weather and the Faroes don’t play by everybody else’s rules.
Stand at the viewpoint. Wind stirs the waterfall to a broad gauze, an aurora dancing between the peaks dusted white and the roiling seacaps. Past Mykines out there on the sea, it’s next stop, Iceland. Stand right here and you can just grasp that you are – almost – still in Europe.
It’s just beyond reach, Mykines is, and you can sail over to see the puffins and the kittiwakes and the king of all the Faroese birds, the gannett, on the ferry that runs from May through August as long as the weather cooperates, but lots of times it doesn’t. You should never sail to Mykines the day before you leave the Faroes because you may not be able to sail back.
Only a scattered few live over there now. Between the world wars 170 people lived on Mykines but now it’s the same as Gásadalur. Young people won’t stay. Houses and a couple dozen turf-roof sheds make like a village but only a few people stay year round. There is just no way to earn a living.
Mountains fend off the world from Gásadalur, each with its own snow chapeau. Before the tunnel you had to climb the postman’s walk over them, and they are some of the tallest in the Faroes (Behind Gásadalur, Árnafjall reaches up 722 meters), or arrive by sea, and peering down at the landing brings a jolt like jarring awake from the edge of sleep. Way down where sea smashes rocks, a handrail, rusted and twisting, leads up water-slick stones, a forlorn legacy of British occupation.
Gásadalur had a population of 18 the last Dagfinnur knew. The tunnel was meant to save it, or at least stall its dying.
The postman died three years ago. Before the tunnel he walked over the mountain three times a week, winter and summer. A man who knew him told me the postman had no neck. The postman was short and compact and carried the mail in a sack strapped around his head that over his career made his neck disappear.
The Waterfall at Gásadalur
Dagfinnur leads us to the viewpoint and no one is there because it hasn’t occurred to anyone to go there on a day like today and on the way, in grass slick as whale oil, the three of us make a mess of our shoes. When the sun isn’t shining, sleet gouges our faces.
Dagfinnur points down at the old British stairs over the edge (careful there!), hovers a moment in his city shoes, petitions for retreat and I can see him there now in his proper taxi vest, pushing hair back from his face, shirtsleeves flapping, doing a little keep-warm dance, just not flouncy enough to squish mud on his shoes. He waits using the taxi as a windbreak, smoking.
It is worth musing on the economics of a tunnel through rock to serve eighteen, but what are they going to do? You simply can’t have every single person up and move to Torshavn.
There are three new houses since that they built that tunnel.
The waterfall to the sea is magnificent.
•••••
Click the photo for a larger version on EarthPhotos.com. Out in the Cold will be ready for purchase this spring. My previous books are Common Sense and Whiskey, Modest Adventures Far from Home, and Visiting Chernobyl, A Considered Guide.
February 8, 2017
KNEW That Sounded Familiar
Something in President Trump’s inaugural “American carnage” speech, set off alarms in my memory, and I’ve just realized what it was. Mr. Trump instructed “all Americans,” with rhetorical flourishes about “every city near and far, small and large” and so forth, to hear his words:
“You will never be ignored again.”
My gratitude to Peter Maass, writing on intercept.com. Mr. Maass reported from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and his article reminded me that a young and entirely colorless Serbian fonctionnaire named Solbodan Milošević was assigned to speak at a rally in Yugoslavia just as the Soviet Union’s unsteadiness began to infect its near abroad, in 1987.
The rally was held at Kosovo Polje, the “Field of Blackbirds” outside Pristina in Kosovo, the site of a battle between Serb in Turk in 1389 that ended in the utter defeat and collapse of Serbia. Milošević, a Belgrade politician, drew a crowd of Serbs in majority Albanian Kosovo. Predictably, the crowd grew restless and hurled stones. Police applied force. These two events may have happened in either order.
Milošević responded to the crowd, “You will not be beaten.” His words were heard by the minority Serbs, variously translated, as generally “No one will ever dare beat you (Serbs) again!” Serbian nationalism was off and running and President Ivan Stambolić, whom the gray apparatchik Milošević replaced in short order, called that day “the end of Yugoslavia.”
Perhaps Milošević was as surprised as anyone at his newfound power. Not to suggest any present day parallel.
For the record, the Milošević regime didn’t work out all that well. Many died, war swept the land and Milošević himself died in prison.
Here’s a little something I brought back from a visit to Slobodan Milošević’s Belgrade in 1997, before he decided to surrender instead of shoot himself dead, but after he’d had time to enact his economic policies:
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A 500 billion dinar note.
February 2, 2017
Out in the Cold: New Book Almost Ready
[image error] I’m excited to tell you that at long last I have the product of a couple years of really enjoyable work just about ready to share. It’s my new book, called Out in the Cold (cover, left), and over the next few weeks I’ll share some photos and excerpts here on the blog. Out in the Cold is an exploration of points north: Svalbard, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and maritime eastern Canada, including a curious artifact, the last remaining French colony in North America, a tiny pair of islands off Newfoundland called Saint Pierre and Miquelon.
Over the course of the book we have the opportunity to meet some real characters, and to explore a little history, including Viking exploration and colonization, how faraway wars affected the people of the North Atlantic, and matters relating to how the outposts got along with their colonial masters Norway and Denmark.
The book opens with the 2015 total solar eclipse in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago about 800 miles from the North Pole. To start us off, here’s a look at Main Street in the only town up there, Longyearbyen:
As usual, you can always click the photos for larger versions on EarthPhotos.com. Out in the Cold will be ready for purchase this spring. Between now and publication I’ll have either a photo or an excerpt from the book once or twice a week here on CS&W. Out in the Cold is my third book, alongside the previous Common Sense and Whiskey, Modest Adventures Far from Home, and Visiting Chernobyl, A Considered Guide.
President Trump Honors Black History
CS&W is normally a pretty apolitical place, but hey, we live in unusual times. This is a transcript of President Trump’s Black History Month remarks yesterday, in which he opines, among other things, that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I noticed.” This is not a parody.
Well, the election, it came out really well. Next time we’ll triple the number or quadruple it. We want to get it over 51, right? At least 51.
Well this is Black History Month, so this is our little breakfast, our little get-together. Hi Lynn, how are you? Just a few notes. During this month, we honor the tremendous history of African-Americans throughout our country. Throughout the world, if you really think about it, right? And their story is one of unimaginable sacrifice, hard work, and faith in America. I’ve gotten a real glimpse—during the campaign, I’d go around with Ben to a lot of different places I wasn’t so familiar with. They’re incredible people. And I want to thank Ben Carson, who’s gonna be heading up HUD. That’s a big job. That’s a job that’s not only housing, but it’s mind and spirit. Right, Ben? And you understand, nobody’s gonna be better than Ben.
Last month, we celebrated the life of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whose incredible example is unique in American history. You read all about Dr. Martin Luther King a week ago when somebody said I took the statue out of my office. It turned out that that was fake news. Fake news. The statue is cherished, it’s one of the favorite things in the—and we have some good ones. We have Lincoln, and we have Jefferson, and we have Dr. Martin Luther King. But they said the statue, the bust of Martin Luther King, was taken out of the office. And it was never even touched. So I think it was a disgrace, but that’s the way the press is. Very unfortunate.
I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I noticed. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.
I’m proud to honor this heritage and will be honoring it more and more. The folks at the table in almost all cases have been great friends and supporters. Darrell—I met Darrell when he was defending me on television. And the people that were on the other side of the argument didn’t have a chance, right? And Paris has done an amazing job in a very hostile CNN community. He’s all by himself. You’ll have seven people, and Paris. And I’ll take Paris over the seven. But I don’t watch CNN, so I don’t get to see you as much as I used to. I don’t like watching fake news. But Fox has treated me very nice. Wherever Fox is, thank you.
We’re gonna need better schools and we need them soon. We need more jobs, we need better wages, a lot better wages. We’re gonna work very hard on the inner city. Ben is gonna be doing that, big league. That’s one of the big things that you’re gonna be looking at. We need safer communities and we’re going to do that with law enforcement. We’re gonna make it safe. We’re gonna make it much better than it is right now. Right now it’s terrible, and I saw you talking about it the other night, Paris, on something else that was really—you did a fantastic job the other night on a very unrelated show.
I’m ready to do my part, and I will say this: We’re gonna work together. This is a great group, this is a group that’s been so special to me. You really helped me a lot. If you remember I wasn’t going to do well with the African-American community, and after they heard me speaking and talking about the inner city and lots of other things, we ended up getting—and I won’t go into details—but we ended up getting substantially more than other candidates who had run in the past years. And now we’re gonna take that to new levels. I want to thank my television star over here—Omarosa’s actually a very nice person, nobody knows that. I don’t want to destroy her reputation but she’s a very good person, and she’s been helpful right from the beginning of the campaign, and I appreciate it. I really do. Very special.
So I want to thank everybody for being here.
Transcript from The Concourse.
January 27, 2017
Friday Photo – Cheetah Up Close
Cheetah resting at midday, Mara North Conservancy, Kenya, December, 2016. Click the photo to enlarge, and see more from Kenya in the Kenya Gallery, and more animals in the Animals and Wildlife Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
