Faroe Islands | Camino Bay Books

2022 The Northern Route -Sudoroy Faroe Islands

Robin — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 13:30:55 +0000

26 August: Having been here four days and traveled from Klaksvik in the north to Sudoroy in the south I’m getting a better sense of what so attracts me to the Faroes, which seem at the moment to be two features: scale and setting. I have believed for several years that bigness and high population levels were contrary to establishing good societies. They seem to me to make self-government less feasible, human relations less personal, work and commercial involvement more impersonal—in essence to promote anonymity and with that a lost sense of counting as an individual while simultaneously losing strong connections to group and community, in short losing at both ends. Here in the Faroes the largest city is just over 20,000 and most villages count their residents in the hundreds. Here in Sudoroy, the island counts about 4,600 people and Tvoroyri, the town where I’m based, no more than 900, and it happens to be my favorite community, the one to which I’d seek to emigrate if I were able. The island is said to be about 30km long and no more than 5km wide. In short, it feels built to scale for humans. And, moving to my other point, built for beauty and occasional astonishment by Nature. Not a place where an inflated sense of self-importance would come readily and would be immediate evidence of greater than average self-deception when it did. I stood near the island’s southern terminus in the wind and drizzle this morning, clouds hovering and fog threatening, and watched a small flock of birds below me on a narrow rocky beach moving in tandem feeding and, I imagine, enjoying themselves. They belong and know it. Even the ubiquitous sheep appear to feel it. The stolidity of animals contributes to their appearance of belonging where they are and fitting with the elements that Nature has placed them among. Human awareness of similar circumstances must come easily in a land like the Faroes. Along with gratitude; every time I look up to the mountainous horizon or turn my head to the waters of a fjord or swaying ocean, I feel grateful for such an existence and time to enjoy it.

Photo by Craig Brestrup

2022 The Northern Route -Klaksvik Faroe Islands

Robin — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 13:30:37 +0000

24 August: I’ve moved on today to another island (town of Klaksvik on Bordoy Island); town has about 4,500 people, third largest city in the country. It’s an improvement over towns in the U.S. in the low presence, low visibility commercial establishments and the utter absence to my eyes of a police presence. Communities appear to be dominated by residential interests served by commerce rather than the American way of commercial interests always served by society. I started a list of distinctive, appealing features of the Faroes.
• Small scale
• Noncommercial
• Slowed pace
• Beautiful landscape
• Restrained people
• An undefinable, so far, feeling I have of a people at peace with themselves and enriched by the land on which they live and arrange their material survival.

It also occurred to me as I drove the mostly one-laned roads (as it did similarly in New Zealand when I came to cross the mostly one-laned bridges) where, when you see another car approaching in the distance, you have to anticipate where the pullouts will be and which of you is closer to one, and in any event you have to take account of the other person…compare to this the two-lane experience of just passing people by without a thought more than that they aren’t carelessly drifting into your lane. Having to take account of others, even in this rather small, mechanical way has the effect, I suspect, of raising their general salience in one’s consciousness. People need to have to count on one another, to look to others for help sometimes and for simply having the courtesy of not dominating the roads other times. I imagine it makes for better society.
I still wonder why houses everywhere are crowded upon one another when land is abundant. Different languages are one of the diversities of human communities that help to identify them, and contribute to their identity, and are probably a good bulwark against the homogenizing trends that capitalist societies foster, so I wouldn’t change them if I could. But at a time like this, when I have so much I want to know, it makes for a loss. Of course, given the reserve of Faroese people, even if we spoke a common language I don’t know how we’d meet. I still miss the campground spirit that worked so well for me in NZ and Australia.

2022 The Northern Route – Gjogv Faroe Islands

Robin — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 13:30:27 +0000

23 August: I’ve been in the Faroes for over 24 hours and am still having a difficult time putting into words my response to the place. As the airplane made its approach and I got my first views of the islands, I immediately sensed that this was a landscape I would love. Looking down it was all remnant basalt peaks and long narrow buttes that looked flat but tilted on top and everything not vertical was the deep green of well-watered grass. Streams were common and making their way by fall and cascade down mountainsides into the sea having cut channels into the rock; I assume the water’s source was rainfall percolated through the shallow soil with nothing more to do than return to the Atlantic. Everything I could see as we descended seemed to fit variations on this pattern. Then I rented a car and drove for an hour to the village I would stay in for two nights, Gjogv. Road numbers were uncommon and most signs being exclusively in Faroese, which like Greenlandic and Icelandic I find totally unpronounceable, not to mention uninterpretable, were useless to me. But these are small islands with few roads and I have a good map so I made it without any wrong turns, which in this small place wouldn’t much matter anyway.

In Greenland, I admired deeply what geology, land, and climate have put together but it intimidated, was forbidding, a place for me to respect without quite loving. Here in the Faroes I feel quite different, as if I’d found a kind of home, almost as I felt on encountering the Sierra Nevada 34 years ago. But the Sierra is a relationship I’ve been able to cultivate for all the intervening years whereas here it will be brief, except in memory, a long-distance care that will survive the diminution of love at first sight. It will take some reflecting over the coming days on what exactly it is that drew me out so.

Header Photo by Jessica Pamp on Unsplash