I cross the Arctic Circle once again. And once again, it’s marked at the wrong place—in the landscape, in people’s heads. Wrong again, and again, I’m bewildered. But most folks don’t stop here anyway, so it’s of little consequence.

This time around, I’m pondering other matters. It seems wholly absurd to me that it can get dark at night. I’ve now spent over three weeks to the north of said circle. And I’ve gotten used to a lot of things. What’s it like, when it gets dark at night? What’s darkness like, anyway? An experience that I’d had every day of my entire previous life has now been denied me for weeks, and I’m already having trouble comprehending it!

I’ve now long since left the E75, Continue reading →

With a heavy heart. That’s my answer, and it actually surprises me a bit.

Asbjørn is someone whom I got to know in Vardø during my residency there. Continue reading →

I’ve finally seen it, the midnight sun. In good weather, you can spot it right between the two port walls of Vardø at the stroke of midnight!

A tribute to Nature and Stephen Shore

But first things first. Somewhere on the E75, much farther south, I’d contacted the municipality of Vardø, telling them about my project and the destination of my drive, the northeastern-most point.

And a couple days later, I received an invitation from Vardø to exhibit there. That changed something in me. Now I had a goal, a destination, and the knowledge that I’d be welcome there.

And they greeted me most warmly, indeed, and then … they stuck me right in the museum. Which is where I’m living, now. But am I already a museum piece? For an artist, of course, that’s as nice a compliment as there can be … but all jokes aside, it’s wonderful, living in this empty museum; I feel good all over, and I’m in good company. And of course, I’d learned the following beforehand:

Two days after my arrival, Vardø was going to open its new library at the town hall. And they ended up making the E75 exhibition’s opening a part of it, with all due honors.

My pictures now hang in the Glashuset, a modern addition opened three years ago. I’m also impressed by how a community of just 2,000 people can make a cultural statement. This community was hit hard by the decline of the fishing industry over ten years ago—a fact to which vacant buildings bear witness. So they decided to invite in street artists. There are interventions all over the port facility. And just like that, an entire street that could have been depressing was turned exciting. So they set right to dealing with things, discussing their most recent history. Is my hometown doing this, too?

I return home—to the museum—and ponder that for a bit.

Photo: Asbjørn Nilsen

Opening of the exhibition E75 – Europastrasse

Venue: Glasshuset – Vardø Rådhus (NO)
Monday, 6 June, starting at 12:30 p.m.

The deed is done!!! I’ve arrived in Vardø. It lies farther east than Cairo or Istanbul, but more importantly: farther north than practically everything else, even Murmansk. I’ve driven the entire length of the E75, incidentally setting a world record in the process!

To me, this was originally a drive from one end of the world to the other. But at some point, that started seeming pretentious. And the following thought stayed with me for the duration of the trip: Why should Linz, of all places, represent the center of the world? Is the world a disc or a sphere? I’ve already pondered that a bit in this blog.

And I ultimately arrived at a great insight: the Earth is, in fact, round. So there is no end of the world! We’re all equally central! But Europe has an end. Europe is a disc!

If one were to take two pieces of string and directly connect the E75’s two endpoints of Vardø and Sitia—doing so once in Europe as it’s actually shaped, and then in a Europe cut out of the globe and pounded flat—the difference between the two strings (that of the curved Europe and that of the flat one) would be just 60 km! Though I’ve taken more than 60 kilometers of detours simply due to construction sites and the like. In any case: Europe is flat, but the world is round. For which reason Europe has several ends, Vardø being one of them and Sitia another. The world has no end!

So finally, I have a good explanation. This thought had to ripen over the entire drive before it fully coalesced. And now, satisfied, I proceed to drive toward this end of Europe.

They’re already waiting for me in Vardø, and they welcome me cordially, greeting me warmly by saying: “Welcome to the End of Europe”—and I’ve arrived.

I’ll soon have been traveling for two months and several thousand kilometers. To spend such a long time with oneself in an enclosed space, you have to get along pretty well with yourself. Otherwise, it’s too long to survive it unscathed. Tackling such a project in constant conflict wouldn’t be for me. Up to now, it’s gone quite well. Sure, I reproach myself now and then. You make your own argument against something, and before you know it, you’re fighting with yourself. Couples and groups have it easier—they can separate. But me?

For this reason, it’s important to keep the team’s morale up. You develop strategies and gather experience. I want to note the most important things here:

1. Keeping things neat
(Or: making sure to put things back where they belong)

The drive up the E75 in all its facets is complex enough to begin with. Your equipment always has to work, and batteries need to be charged—including your own. Every evening, you need a new place to spend the night. And so on. So keep things neat. It doesn’t always work, and particularly this point is an extremely touchy one for lone travelers. Whose fault is it when something’s not where it’s supposed to be?

2. Good food

Good food lifts morale in a way that’s positively uncanny. That’s sometimes not so easy. The main problem is monotony. Burgers, pizza, and wings as the only things available for hundreds of kilometers is the natural enemy of anyone’s morale. In this respect, it helps to change countries—then you get steak, pork knuckle, and—for people for prefer to eat vegetarian—chicken. So cooking for yourself can often be a good escape. ’Cause those “fitness salads” with their chicken strips can really get you down.

3. Consumption

Consuming things is very important, of course. Consumption is satisfying. I realized that even as a preschooler. But it’s tricky. What to do with all that stuff when you’re on the road for so long? So the cycle shortens—the latency between purchase and disposal becomes short and obvious. And that, in turn, leads you to severely limit your consumption. Apart from a couple of snow globes (and food), I haven’t bought much. At home, you can pack your apartment or house to the rafters. But here? That’s one of the nice lessons of this trip: you don’t need much to be happy. Except, of course, for a good camera…

4. Good photos

This is morale booster number one—the most important thing. If the crew’s morale is good, the pictures get better, too. The opposite could become a vicious circle, but the spiral is swirling happily upwards!

Recommended reading:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
To Have or to Be? Erich Fromm

Now I’m already so far up that I’ll soon be above the tree line.

I admit, the thing I’ve been looking forward to most over the past few days has been the Arctic Circle. Not the national parks, not the beautiful lakes, no—the Arctic Circle. All the other sites are secondary.

Signs announce the Arctic Circle many kilometers in advance. Just a few km north of Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland, it supposedly crosses the E75. We’ll see.

It doesn’t last long before I come across a sculpture towering over the road—as a symbol of this phenomenon, I suppose. Two hundred meters farther on, an identical sculpture reaches over the opposite lane. That strikes me as strange, because the Arctic Circle can’t be quite that wide. I’ve already been to the Equator, which is relatively thin. The Arctic Circle can’t possibly be thicker.

Directly beside the sculpture and the road, there’s a souvenir outlet. Its length corresponds conspicuously well to the distance between the sculptures. At any rate, it’s quite some outlet. One that need fear no comparison. They even make a thing of St. Nicholas living here, and so on… I find it all a bit much.

But now I have to get to the bottom of this whole thing. And to my great dismay, I ascertain that the Arctic Circle isn’t actually here at all!!! On my Arctic Circle journeys (of which this is my first), I always take along a GPS receiver. This device boasts a precision of 3 meters. And the point where the Arctic Circle crosses the E75 is over four kilometers away from here!

At the souvenir outlet, you can buy certificates stating that you’ve crossed the Arctic Circle, T-shirts that read “I crossed the arctic circle”, and so on, but none of it’s true. Folks who turn back here haven’t even come close to crossing it! How many hundreds or even thousands must there be who possess invalid certificates, so expensively bought! I really don’t want to think about it.

But the issue of the Arctic Circle’s location preoccupies me, and I can only really find one convincing explanation:
just like there’s a geographic North Pole and a magnetic North Pole (the Earth’s axis runs through the geographic one), there’s a geographic Arctic Circle and a touristic Arctic Circle.

The touristic Arctic Circle isn’t a physical phenomenon; it’s an economic one. And you can easily fall for it if you don’t watch out.

The geographic Arctic Circle, on the other hand, virtually can’t be found without technical assistance. I set out to find it anyway. And right behind an Elk-sign, I arrived there. First I thought that the sign must be a sort of marker for those in the know—subtle Finnish humor. But it then turned out to still be another 300 meters up the point where the Circle actually crosses the road. My photo of the Arctic Circle is dedicated to all those who fell prey to deception four kilometers short of here.

The point at which the Arctic Circle crosses the E75

P.S.: The Arctic Circle is moving, by the way! Currently at around 14 m per year and away from the tourist center—which is to say: to the north. That’s because the Earth’s axis isn’t stationary in relation to the level of its orbit, but rather—to put it in physics terms—wobbles. This wobbling is associated with the gravitational pull of the moon, with the Earth and the Moon together forming a system with its own center of gravity. But this wobbling of the Earth’s axis doesn’t explain the discrepancy that I’ve discovered today.