Around noon I was at the Arctic Circle Trail start, preparing to enjoy Greenland and myself.
The surroundings were very serene – total windstill. Perfectly blue sky, sun shining from above.
Total silence beyond the sounds of oneself.
Crazy carousel of thoughts in my head, chasing each other, never stopping. One idiotic, out-of-place, uncompleted thought replaced by another even more so. Stale emotions, fears, social missteps, hopes, women, men, wins and past pleasures – all this was running through like a mad video clip.
A part of me was looking at this from aside and sighing: Its happening again. CHAOS PRESERVATION LAW. The quieter it is outside, the crazier inside.
Multiverse
The environment looked like the wood between the worlds from The Magician’s Nephew: you walk through this landscape of tranquil, unperturbed lakes, each very similar but yet somehow different, and there’s no end to it. You pass may be 20 or 30 lakes on the first day – I lost count.
I jumped into one lake to cool off, but there was no another world.
In one lake I found these creepy guys:
After walking in a military (MILITARY, CARL!) style for about 5 hours – 50min walking, 10 min pause – totally exhausted and dragging my feet, I was startled by a loud “Hello!” from behind.
I almost jumped, because its been complete silence so far.
It was the guy from the magazine.
A story from the crazy guy, condensed
Majaq landed in Kangerlussuaq returning from his vacation in Austria. Since his transfer plane to Sisimiut was cancelled, around 16:00 he decided to jog home. About half way a friend would pick him up with a boat, so its just 80km over hilly tundra, right? Pragmatic decision. I think he also had a bag of potato chips, so clearly well equipped too.
Its all in the head, said Majaq, disappearing ahead of me.
I repeated this mantra, gathered my dwindling powers and moved on.
The last kilometer I was shouting 100m intervals left (“Good boy Paul, only 500m left! Good boy!“) and entrusting it all to my head.
At 20.00 km mark I dropped the rucksack in complete exhaustion and put up the tent.
My legs and toes were hurting as never before. I was rolling left and right and stretching them out for better part of the night, with running Majaq appearing sporadically in what otherwise had been a circular dreamy nightmare of running, and running, and running… and running..
My prior hopes of seeing a clear, pristine starry sky were not to materialize: it never went dark enough. And in general it was the last thing on my mind. Mostly I just wanted to just lie down and rest.