Eat Pray Herman Iceland

This is the entry that really took me the longest to come up with a good narrative to wrap around. Strange given my affection for the part of the world I am going to talk about. The Nordic countries were dear to Herman, as they are to me.

Recently Denmark got a king. I don’t know why but this kinda brought a tear to my eye. The Queen stepped aside and gave her son the big job. I follow the Danish royal family on the social media and there’s a little video of the new King Frederik stepping forward on the balcony at Amalienborg palace in Copenhagen. I teared up a little bit. When I lived in Denmark, almost 30 years ago, Frederik was a big deal. Denmark is a small country and everyone knows everybody. A lot of people seemed to have direct connections to the royal family, and this was true of the group of people I met in Denmark. This is one of the qualities I like about Denmark. No one is really far from the people in power in the country. People have a lot of different connections to the royal family. This might have something to do with the fact that people don’t really drag the royal family. They aren’t perfect people and there are anti-monarchists in the country, but they object to the royal family in their semi-sarcastic but respectful way.

I told some of my friends about this, how exciting this is. But then I realized that most of the people I know don’t have the same connection to the place that I have. It sounds really strange, but I actually feel Danish, but I am obviously not. I think about it how crazy it is that I spent four months in the country in 1997and my entire life changed. There was a period of time before I went to Denmark and after and those times don’t resemble each other in any way.

Maybe all of these things coming together for me recently have gotten me thinking, with taking this trip, Denmark getting a king and me starting to make connections between my past and my present. I really considered why Denmark meant so much to me and what made this such a seminal time in my life. I realized that it was as if life had been reset in some way and it was this flash of normalcy in a sea of just utter confusion.

Growing up, everything sorta made sense until I turned 12. We lived in New York. We would walk through the city all the time. Our house is across from my parents job and my school is across from their job. It all sorta made sense. We went to the park on Saturdays and maybe to a museum. I went to gymnastics classes at Sokol on 71st street between York and First avenue. I would go to one of those famous high schools in New York.

And then one day that was all just gone. We moved to the suburbs and seemingly it all disappeared, overnight. I got to that school I went to and all of the sudden I just disappeared as a person. I didn’t have a history. I wasn’t a human being. I was this receptacle for all of these people’s racism and xenophobia. I remember one incident where a group of girls I went to school with cornered me in the library and said “were you popular in your old school? Because you aren’t popular here.” Before I had a chance to say anything to these obviously stellar human beings, they were gone from where we were standing. I remember standing there thinking — we had moved 27 miles. Twenty-seven miles. One spot on earth, I was ok, things were normal. Just 27 miles north, and the world had changed, not for the better.

My old school, my old life. Where had that gone??? And what button can I press to just make this nightmare be over?

After that, I went into long term shock. Now as an adult, I realize that my fight or flight response was activated and never really got shut off. I was a shocked kid, surrounded by negligent and uncaring adults. All I could think about was leaving.

Really the shock didn’t wear off until I was about 30 or 31 years old, around the time I moved to Boston. Of late I’ve really been able to put a lot of those terrible memories behind me, but that has been an evolving process.

When I went to Denmark as a junior in college, it really felt like someone pressed the reset button and everything was normal again. At first of course I was culture shocked. My classmates were wealthy, some very wealthy. We were solidly middle class, but not swimming in cash. Life was modest for us, not lavish.

Our program even featured a 1990s American television star from a show called Full House. Being the sarcastic weirdo I was at that age, I told her that I hated her show growing up. I cringe at doing this now but at that age, it was me against the world. And the world, well, it needed to watch out because I hated you. I was one of the students that was on the poorer end. When it came to the travel break we got, the TV star was going to Western Europe, as she informed me during our second and last conversation. Me, I was going to EASTERN Europe to hang out with my Uncle Waldek and his menagerie of animals.

I didn’t really click or bond with my classmates in the program. In a way, I always see myself as a poor person, even if my activities and my life don’t indicate that, but I always see myself as a person who doesn’t have a lot of money. My classmates were from a different social class than me and weren’t shy about letting me know that. I really bonded with the people I lived with in the dorm, as I have talked about up here many times. It just all felt so normal. And again, one day it was over. I had to go back.

One of the things about the wilderness years was trying to figure out what to do with my feelings about Denmark. It wasn’t so much about being happy. Rather it was about getting to a place where I felt normal again. NORMAL. That’s what I wanted to feel again. When I talk about this time in my life, people tell me that I wanted to be happy and not everyone gets to be happy. Excellent advice, whoever you were. That’s the mistake people made. I didn’t think I deserved happiness. I just wanted to feel NORMAL.

I always say that the wilderness years lasted about three or four years, but in a way, they lasted a lot longer. There was a lot of wandering around looking for answers, drifting, not knowing where I belonged. Part of the reason I settled in Boston was because it reminded me of Copenhagen. Maybe I could have my Denmark experience without being in Denmark.

I guess this brings us back around to Iceland. For the past few years, I’ve been part of this wonderful church community. I am quite close to the married couple who run the church, Steven and Amy. During one of the initial conversations I had with Steven, he told me that he’s been to Iceland quite a few times. I asked why and he said that the church here in Boston has a relationship with a church in Iceland. In fact, they were thinking of sending a team from our church to Iceland to do mission work over there.

When Steven said Iceland, I nearly fell out of my chair. It was so random and just insane. I had lived in a Nordic country, felt at home there and had always wanted to go to Iceland. I transferred flights through the country in 2007 and 2008 and always regretted not going out to explore the country.

I started planning Eat Pray Herman very early. I don’t remember what prompted the idea. I think it was just the need to do something. Maybe that’s part of grief. You have to do something. This past summer was really tough on me and somehow planning the trip made me feel a bit better.

Early in the summer, Steven said a trip was being planned to Iceland. As soon as it was announced, I was going. I was GOING.

I put myself on a severe budget last summer to get the money for Iceland. No cute clothes, no makeup and no take out. I installed an app on my phone that tracks my spending. I mean more like sends me little passive aggressive messages to remind me to stop spending money.

If I’m honest, it was the first summer here that wasn’t magical in some way. Most summers here have featured some kind of event, good or bad, that was cataclysmic in some way. People seemingly dropping from clouds into Downtown Crossing. Magical sunsets. Something happening in front of me that I NEVER thought I would see. Opportunities presenting themselves that I never thought I would ever get. Horrible things. A time of shadows and a time of light.

Summer 2023 was a time of pure shadows. It rained almost every weekend. I was exhausted from teaching the hardest class they offer at my job. I wouldn’t say I was depressed per se. It just wasn’t a colorful, magical summer. Until I left for my trip, of course.

The prelude to the trip to Iceland was kind of hilarious. Maybe unintentionally hilarious and a good preview of what we saw on the trip. Yeah, we’re this far and we haven’t even gotten on the plane yet. Hang tight. We’re getting there.

I didn’t grow up in church so I had absolutely no idea what mission work is or what you even did on those types of trips. Would we be working in the church? I had absolutely no idea. Every summer at church, there are a bunch of kids that come from the south to serve a mission at our church. They are very well spoken and they know everything about the neighborhood before they get here. And they are shiny. We always joke about how shiny they are.

So I’m expecting meeting after meeting about cultural sensitivity and exactly how to speak to people in the country and what challenges we were facing. I kept texting and texting and texting everyone and hearing that there was a meeting scheduled. I would JOKE occasionally — so we’re going to Iceland, yeah??? Because if we’re not, I’m ordering a metric ton of take out right now.

A couple of days before we left, I got an email with my plane tickets. I would be going with a group of dear friends who live about a five minute drive from my house and another couple who live about fifteen minutes from me. And me with my four cameras. I’m not kidding. Four cameras made the trip.

I am so immensely grateful to these people, more than I can ever say, so I arranged for us to be driven to the airport by Roslindale crime historian, cab driver and fashion icon Fred, my driving teacher/chauffeur. It was really the least I could do.

The flight was…interesting. I am not a good sleeper. Some people told me about how their head hits the pillow and they fall asleep immediately and they sleep eight angel kissed blissful hours of sleep. What is that like??? Tell me about that, because I can fall asleep on a bed. Sometimes. SOMETIMES.

So the good part was that I had two empty seats next to me. The bad part was that the seats were about as comfortable as sleeping on your average floor. Oh well. We were going to Iceland and it was going to be beautiful.

The other part was that we got to hear these funny announcements on the plane. One of the flight attendants kept announcing that we had to put our belongings under the seat in front of us. But the twist, the funny Northern European twist was that the announcement was delivered in this sing song kind of Scandinavian accent. It was so adorable. I couldn’t help feeling like I am home.

As I mentioned earlier in the entry, going to Denmark as a college junior felt like someone had pressed a reset button and things were back to normal for a split second. In my mind, Scandinavia was normal and it was a normal I kept trying to get back to for years. It wasn’t until I got to Boston, that I found my normal again.

When we landed in Iceland, I truly felt like I was back at home. We got off the plane at 5am and there was a helpful sign in the airport that said “this way to Iceland.” I went and got a cup of coffee and a pastry. I love you so much Boston but that pastry was better than 95% of the pastries I’ve eaten in Boston. Hilarious.

We drove to our accommodations in central Reykjavik. I hadn’t been to a small European city for a long time and had forgotten what they were like. We got to “downtown” Reykjavik. I felt like I was in a gated community. We were really close to the famous church in Reykjavik. But the first mission was a short nap I needed to take. A “short” four hour nap. I kept telling myself “you are in Iceland” but also “you are extremely tired.” We were only going to be there for a couple of days. I needed to drink this in as much as I could.

Around noon, our other guests joined us and I was roused from my deep sleep. We gathered ourselves and started driving around the country. All I did was stare out the window the entire time. My brain was completely overwhelmed by what I was seeing. America can bend into ugly sameness but Iceland, that was something I had never experienced. Most of the places you visit in your life are man made creations, old and new. Iceland seemed like something conjured out of someone’s strange dreams. I was transfixed.

As I mentioned before, we got absolutely zero information about what we would actually do there, and this remained until we arrived. One of my trip mates got a phone call from the pastor at the church we would be helping at. He said we could go and enjoy the country and then meet him the next evening.

The next day was probably one of the best days of my entire life. By then my fellow travelers realized that it would be good to have me sit in the front, given that I take a metric ton of photos on the regular. Two of our trip mates had been to Iceland five times and knew the place really well. We were taking a road trip around the country. My dream.

Now going back to Herman, he had his own fleeting European experience as a young person. He had also been to Iceland and loved it and also had great memories from a visit to Norway. I brought a picture of him to the island to photograph myself with while I was there.

That day we drove around the island all day, where the places we went to kept getting more and more and more beautiful. Again I was transfixed by what I was seeing. These piles of volcanic hills and these expanses of lush green opening up in front of me.

I had this feeling of absolute singularity. These were places I would probably never see again. I remember getting choked up in front of one of the waterfalls we visited. We saw the famous black sand beach that looked like some kind of surreal landscape that no production designer could ever create. The waterfalls were overwhelming and beautiful. In one particular place, we saw an American school bus that had been repurposed into a cafe. I stood there and said to my dear friend — the chances of me standing here again in my life are incredibly remote. My friend said — I also thought that a few years ago.

I slowly realized that Iceland is a country that absolutely has a sense of humor about itself. I don’t know why people see the Icelandic people as some kind of cold people, because they are warm and incredibly humorous. We passed a sign that said “is James Bond Icelandic?” I regret not having my camera at the ready when we saw this. It’s a slow moving place that somehow runs efficiently.

My reference point for that part of the world is Denmark. Denmark. Where everything is organized. Partying is organized. I will never forget when I first arrived in Denmark and going into a kitchen in one of the other blocks in the Albertslund dorm complex I lived in and seeing a guy with the dark Danish bread, a block of cheese and a cucumber sitting at a kitchen table. Methodically he sat there and cut a piece of cucumber, smeared some cheese on the dark bread and cut off a piece of the cucumber. I remember standing there, transfixed while he did this. From my experience, sandwich making is a messy undertaking and yet this young man made it into a precise, neat experience. As I got to know the Danes, I learned that they were all like this. Neat, but goofy. Straight-laced, but yet vulnerable. Unvarnished and at times almost achingly blunt.

Even that day we spent in Iceland, I realized that Iceland was like Denmark, but life moving extremely slowly. I remember thinking — these are the Italians of the North. But in the best way. I have never met a group of people who absolutely have a sense of humor about themselves. I don’t understand why Iceland and northern Europe has such a reputation for being so cold, when in fact, they are really warm.

As always, these blog entries take me quite a bit of time to write and this one is no exception. This entry has been on my computer for a while and I amend it and re-write it when I can. I stopped writing it because I didn’t know how to weave Herman into the entry. Again I was at church on Sunday and Steven started talking about spiritual hunger and how hungry we all are in our lives for meaning, for satisfaction, for fulfillment. Christianity teaches that you find satisfaction in Jesus and after wrestling with this for a long time, this has become a comfort for me.

I’ve always been this ball of contradictions and big and small experiences, I guess how we all are. I’ve gone to the White House to cover the news and I’ve worked retail jobs at various points in my life. Mostly though, I have always sought out what I had thought would be the most meaningful experiences. I felt empty and alone for a very long time and I tried to fill this emptiness with experiences. I thought I could get rid of this feeling if I just achieved. And achieved and achieved and achieved.

What ended up happening though was that no matter what I did, it wasn’t enough to get rid of the emptiness. I remember when Herman sent me to the White House for the first time. Heady stuff, for sure, especially for a person who had been walking across a stage getting a high school diploma six years earlier. I don’t care what people say. That is a once in a lifetime experience that only a select few in the world get to do. I thought it couldn’t get any better than that, that experience and for sure, this will knock out any other bad experiences still lingering in my brain, but that didn’t happen. That day when I went to the White House for the first time, I left to go back home, literally crossing out of the building on the White House lawn and I thought — I was a loser in high school. To have a thought like that is pretty preposterous when you actually write it out, but that’s how I felt. The emptiness never really filled. In my mind, I was speeding a hundred miles an hour, trying to fit in every possible experience I could to fill the emptiness. But nothing ever worked. I was still empty.

A big part of the emptiness was how I felt about my whole experience in Denmark. The fact that I had to leave so abruptly, made me feel like I was just eternally cursed. I had to leave a place I liked to go back to a place that I really didn’t like. One day it was all just abruptly over and there was no explanation as to why. In my mind for so many years, again, it played into the idea that I was utterly cursed. The thing about that whole experience is that it did fill the emptiness a little bit. I wasn’t weird there. I was normal to those people. But then it ended as abruptly as it had began. And I was extremely bitter about that for many years afterwards.

It really wasn’t until I started going to church that I felt whole. I felt like I was finally satisfied with things. I have so much to be grateful for now, with the community and the friendships.

The day I found out that Herman had passed away, the grief was unbelievable, almost unfathomable. I remember looking around to try to find some relief from it, but there was none. The day after though, people started contacting me on Facebook, who knew him as well, who were in his circle of friends. A dear friend of his, who has since become a dear friend of mine, said that he was always looking for the next big thing, the thing that would make his life better. The thing that would fulfill him.

Herman owned a bookstore in Fells Point in Baltimore right before I met him. It had gone out of business a couple of months before I started working for him. By the time I knew him, the bookstore had become one of those “Herman stories.” Oh the Barnes and Noble in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, I mean the Inner Horrible as Herman always called it had put him out of business. His friend though that night during our conversation that lasted deep into the night said that despite turning the whole thing into a bonkers Herman story, that the bookstore going out of business hurt Herman tremendously and was something that I don’t think he ever really got over.

Painful moments in Herman’s life were usually turned into funny stories. He never really said that the bookstore failing broke his heart and upset him. He focused on how he was living in the room where we made the magazine we were working on together and how incredibly ridiculous this was. Funnier yet still was that he moved out of the office into what he referred to as “the shotgun shack” which was something that was a step above a double wide trailer. One day Herman calls me and joyously says — my landlord committed suicide, so I have to move. The landlord suicide meant the shotgun shack was to be demolished. A bit of time later, Herman sent me a picture of the shotgun shack split into two parts. He then moved into an actual apartment.

To weave this back to Scandinavia, Herman had his own entanglement with that part of the world. Years ago, he had visited Iceland and Norway and in Norway, he had made a lady friend. He spoke of this woman often and she meant a lot to him. In a story that might be of Herman invention, more wishful thinking than actual reality, he thought that he might have a child in Norway. I really didn’t think this was true, but he repeated this often and it seemed to comfort him. Maybe talking about this made him feel whole as well.

At church, we talk a lot about finding wholeness and satisfaction through church and God and Jesus and to sound a bit like one of those “God saved me” people, God did save me and extinguish my hunger and emptiness. The glories of being launched into the world of the super elite, the cream of the cream paled in comparison to being around a group of people who catch you when you fall, help you when you need it, don’t make fun of you and don’t turn your life into a spiral of shame and negativity. Herman and I were very similar obviously, knowing each other as long as we did, evolving together as we did and we both had that entanglement with Scandinavia that we hoped would finally fulfill us and make us feel whole. Neither of us truly found satisfaction in that. Herman never found satisfaction in his life with what he pursued. I found God and the church and my community and I am whole now. I live with the fact daily that Herman was never able to find this.

I guess the Herman part of the story and the Iceland part of the story unite in the fact that when we went to Iceland, we spent the day helping in a church. It was this fascinating place called Loftstofan Baptistakirkja, a multicultural church lead by the exact picture of a pastor you imagine running a church in some guy’s living room. I mean Loftstofan is not run in a living room, rather a music school but the pastor we met was a bearded man wearing the requisite square framed pastor hipster glasses.

Gunnar showed himself to be a warm hearted person with a huge sense of humor about himself and Iceland, just like the other Icelanders we encountered. I started telling Gunnar about how I had lived in Denmark and he found this extremely funny. I came to find out later that the Icelanders have an inferiority complex about the Danes, who they consider to be the mother ship, despite the fact that Denmark, land wise is five times smaller than Iceland. Gunnar said they make them learn Danish in school, which they all hate and he started saying “hi, my name is Gunnar,” in Danish. I started laughing immediately, but my non-Scandinavian language familiar friends were kinda astounded by my laughter.

We went to a morning service in the church and then helped out with a party Gunnar was throwing for the whole church for its tenth anniversary. The church itself was remarkable, drawing in people from around the world. Some of them were in Iceland for work opportunities and some were there coming from places were things weren’t going that well.

During the party, we served the people in the church. I discovered pretty quickly that Iceland does not believe in plastic plates or cutlery. They were serving drinks, so I was in charge of the continual washing and drying of dishes. In a way, this was a remarkable afternoon, in its quiet smallness.

My friends call me “the Rich White Lady.” I have a house cleaner and a chauffeur. Well, a cranky Boston man who helps me with rides whose fashion ranges from nylon athletic shorts “shahts” to gray sweatpants. As horrible as it sounds, I am served by people all the time. That afternoon, I served the people in that church. They were at their church, enjoying an afternoon party and they didn’t have to worry about anything. It was fulfilling in a way that travel hadn’t ever been for me. Not a thumbtack on a map. Something greater.

Herman never found that thing to fill him, really. In the past few years with him, since I started going to church, I talked to Herman about it. He was supportive, but referred quite a bit to the bad experiences he had had with religion. I tried not to push it all on him. It was obvious he was struggling, but I knew what it was like to have things like that pushed on you. Would you place your faith in Jesus? Would you trust God with your future? This is an uncomfortable conversation to have with someone.

In the end though, I feel like Herman never really found true fulfillment. And the fact that I couldn’t help him with this will haunt me for a very long time.

Here I’m sticking in a couple of my Herman pictures from the trip. Sweeping well composed landscapes come after it.