Unnamed Road: Notes from Denmark

Part I 

Waiting for the ferry to Aarhus from Odden.

On August 31, I began my extended European travels and made my way to Denmark. I’ve gotten used to succinctly explaining my connection to the country, so here goes: my late dad was Danish and Dutch by heritage. He and my late mom fell in love with Danish culture as a young couple when they had the opportunity to live in the suburbs of Copenhagen in the early eighties. Throughout my life, my mom always reflected with reverie on aspects of Danish culture, but especially on the fact that after giving birth to my oldest brother at Gentofte Hospital, she was given a dark Tuborg beer to revive her from the labor. Can you imagine? Though my parents lived for over twenty years in Italy, Belgium, and the U.K. as well, my brothers, sister and I grew up with their especially warm associations with Denmark looming large. I had previously traveled to the country twice as a kid, and now, this trip marks my fifth visit. 

I rented a car at Kastrup Airport, and first planned to stop off at my cousin and godfather’s apartment for a short stay before making my way across the country to the northern tip of Jutland, the peninsula of Denmark that is contiguous with Germany. My destination would be the town of Aalbaeck, close to the northernmost point where the Baltic and North Seas meet. I understood this little berg to be the place from where my last name and family comes from, long, long ago. 

I didn’t know much about the place, except that it was a tiny fishing village, and that there was a long-running hotel near the sea and not much more for local business and infrastructure. I’d made a reservation at the Aalbeack Badehotel for two nights– just enough time, I thought, to explore the area and to get a taste– before needing to return to Sealand and the Copenhagen area for my godfather’s 75th birthday party in Charlottenlund (at one of the local palaces, no less. This is how you do in Denmark). 

My dad was enamored with Albeck family history. In fact, he would often regale me and my siblings (or, really anyone he was in conversation with), about our lineage and what he considered to be points of pride and interest, like decorated Navy Sea Captains or marriages with Danish nobility.

The door to my cousin and godfather's apartment.

At some point growing up, I’d researched the name "Albeck" and had found somewhere the translation of “tree by the water.” When picturing the place in my mind’s eye, I imagined a stately deep evergreen tree next to a river emblazoned on a banner. Like a wild version of the pine trees from my grandparents’ New Jersey Christmas Tree Farm: fragrant, strong and tall, surrounded by the magic of forest and glen, and drawing water from a vital, flowing stream. My mind loves to make such associations and to design imaginary posters. 

My mind also loves a good drive. Something about the combination of speed, control, the bodily engagement and rushing through space with efficiency really gets me going. Being in motion, but especially driving, helps me to write songs, narratives, poems. It also helps me think. I also adore listening to the radio. I find the roulette of musical accompaniment from local stations to be uniquely spiritually-fulfilling. Is there anything more synchronistic and satisfying than hearing the exact right song to match your mood or circumstance? It makes you know you're in the right place.

But, as it happens, operating a car in a different country with a foreign language is a bit of a brain teaser. I’d familiarized myself with a few relevant Danish words and advice from the Danish government about driving as a foreigner. I came prepared to be on the lookout for the flow of bicyclists that I knew would likely be coming from all directions on city streets and country roads. The rental car company upgraded me to an SUV, though I’d specified a reservation for a compact car. In a sleepy daze of post-transatlantic travel (consisting of two flights, with a stopover and quick plane change in Iceland), I didn’t challenge the change. 

Right off the bat I struggled to pull out of the tight parking spot within the garage. It ended up being an eight point turn, with another star-shaped correction needed moments later after I zoomed off towards the entrance rather than the exit. Already things were different– the scale of parking spaces and one-way roads being only a tiny indication of the contrasts between Denmark and the U.S.  

Happily, the weather that welcomed me as I set off through Copenhagen was unseasonably sunny and warm. Soft sea breezes, bright blue skies, painterly clouds. Danes were out in throngs on the street enjoying life, soaking up the sun after a summer with only intermittent warm and rain-free days. 

After spending a few sunny days catching up with family in Hellerup (and dipping in the nearby sea every chance I got) I hit the road. I first made my way to Odden, and from there, took the ferry across to Aarhus. Once out of the city, things were peaceful and straightforward. I passed through golden green countryside peppered with relaxed-looking brown and white cows. The scene reminded me of Wisconsin, my home of the last fifteen years. Some major differences between the landscapes: rather than clear cut expanse, the farmlands of Denmark are dotted with many more thickets. And the homes and farms standing in view of the highway are classic in their Danish charm– the colors drawn from a select palette of mostly cheddar yellow, or white, red, and black, and outfitted with umber tile roofs, or sometimes even hay. 

The Kwik Trip of Denmark is called K-Circle. This gas station, along with 7-Eleven and other similar chains, is a commodious treat (though I am unsure about their Instagram viral marketing game). There you can use a clean toilet, have a decent machine-brewed latte, or purchase a freshly grilled hot dog, suited up in a flaky crusted bun. My go-to lunch on the road became frikkedella, the flavorful and delicious Danish meatball that is a mixture of pork and beef. My mom used to make them for extra special dinners growing up– the kind of dinners she’d also pull out my parents’ Royal Copenhagen collection for. There’s something oddly satisfying about eating one big fancy meatball out of a little paper bag. 

The ferry to Jutland was easy and comfortable. And fast. It took only about an hour once we were in motion to cross the sea and arrive in Aarhus. Just enough time to get settled and enjoy a small Americano from the nice little coffee shop and bakery on board. My fellow travelers were a mixture of elderly couples in hand knit nubby sweaters and young families with babies. All the young moms were understatedly beautiful and all seemed to be wearing long skirts and clogs. I didn’t notice many other single young or middle aged folks. 

The Baltic Sea from my seat on the ferry.

While on the ferry, the reality of my trip being underway set in. In the clean, comfortable space inside the humming ferry, I could feel myself softening physically, mentally, and emotionally into the experience: simple choices and mundane daily rituals had already transformed into discovery processes, layered with pleasurable newness. For example, purchasing a cup of coffee was no longer just a habitual morning routine, but an experience of exploration and negotiation. Do they have “black kaffe” here? Dear god...the pastries. All of them so texturally tempting with names that are hard to pronounce with confidence. 

“Sorry, I only speak English,” I’d said, with a small lump in my throat a few days prior, after a cherry-cheeked baker at Taffelebay offered some information to me in Danish. I asked her for her recommendation of pastry. She selected the cinnamon struedally-looking one with roasted almond slices all over it. On first bite, I discovered that it was gooeier than expected. I savored it as it melted on my tongue.

On the edge of revelation, and within the unknown is where I am most happy. Or at least, I am the version of myself that I most like to be. Perhaps more than I’d realized previously… I am at home because of this within the experience of traveling. 

Another thing that I love about travel: to be prepared with just what I might need on my person, the way an expert camper heading out into the wilderness packs lightly and precisely. Only, my personal packing precision provides for colorful accessories like watercolors, a journal, a truth-telling tarot card deck. And always an extra napkin and shout wipe. The pastries are even more buttery than you’d expect.

Waiting for my dinner reservation time on the terrace with a Tuborg and some watercolors.

In traveling, you decide every day what you need and what you don’t. You must make constant decisions about what you value most. To move through foreign spaces intuitively, self-directed and defined feels incredibly fresh. And having an abundance of time burns away the strain that I’d often felt in past travels. For the first time, the nagging, pressurized container of “a vacation” is gone. What remains is pure possibility and improvisation. 

I’d wanted to try something like this when I was only nineteen. My family traveled for a glorious vacation to St. Petersburg, Copenhagen and Stockholm at the end of summer. On the sunny harbor streets of Stockholm in August, I remember talking to a jewelry smith who ran a small independent school for artists. He was selling simple hammered silver shapes on thin leather necklace bands made my his students. I selected a spiral one, and felt electrified as I put it on. The man was middle aged, an immigrant himself from South America. Sensing my exuberance, he suggested that I should move to Stockholm and explore the scene, perhaps apprentice in the school. 

Feeling a flicker of bravery rising up in me, moments later I meekly proposed to my parents that I should perhaps take a gap year before returning to college and travel and work in Scandinavia. My timing and delivery was terrible. They almost laughed out loud. I was their youngest daughter and at that time they saw the worst in me. My teen years had not been gentle or kind, and I was left desperate to be accepted. They loved me, but they thought I was ill-prepared for the challenges of such an excursion. And, to be fair, I was. I was a coddled kid. This was before it was cool to claim bratitude.

With good intent, my parents were in a practice of enabling my helplessness– facilitating barriers and scaffolding around me with their privilege. Exerting control “for my own protection.” To be loosed on Scandinavia would mean they’d have to release me. I think they assumed that, given the opportunity, living on my own in a foreign place, I would be impetuous, end up doing something irresponsible, naughty. They openly expressed their concern that I’d get kidnapped– or worse. 

What they couldn’t see was that I was, at that time, ravenous for an opportunity to learn how to be a better version of myself. And I could feel somehow that travel would afford that to me, through the small, compounding moments of self-sufficiency. Getting on a train to a new place. Navigating foreign signage. Budgeting my days' time and coinage. Making friends with good souls who’d lived lives outside of my experiences. A practice of learning to trust and follow my gut. In this desire to travel, I see now that I didn’t just crave adventure and freedom: I wanted to take good care of myself.

I ended up doing a great many things as a young person that were against my parents’ hopes and wishes, but traveling solo in Scandinavia was not one of them. In a way, I am glad I didn’t go then. I couldn’t drive, for one thing, which, looking back, was more than a metaphorical issue. And my anxiety and depression were flaring badly at that time due to the fallout of a very damaging first serious romantic relationship. But now, here I am, almost twenty years later, brimming with the kind of comfort you can’t fake: bravery that comes from living boldly and knowing you will manage. Ease with all kinds of people, resourcefulness in any kind of situation. And, to top it all off, a keen ability to access joy and pleasure that comes from surviving and evolving through devastation.

I’ve lived circumstances my parents could have never predicted and couldn’t protect me from– including their own untimely, ravaging declines and deaths. From the life I’ve lived, I have my own special admixture of tools, tricks, and strengths that my late parents never could have envisioned. They gave me the taste for an international life, for which I am so grateful. I’m filled with peace and joy now to get to live out my own version, and to discover moments when I feel their encouraging presence. 

As I set out from the ferry, I felt like the me that I’d glimpsed all those years before when I suggested the gap year: a brave, happy woman, no longer a careless, rattled, and hungry-for-any-kind-of love teenager. Today, I am content, self-sufficient (and have extra napkins and shout wipes to go around), jetting across Denmark with watercolors in my purse and the wind in my hair. Getting just what I need from this life, and, when it feels right, eating a meatball out of a bag.

A reading from the truth-telling Slow Holler Tarot deck from Aalbaeck. The first card represents the past, and the second the future. In a traditional Tarot Deck, these cards are the Five of Cups and the Three of Wands.

Initiation at Joshua Tree

July 19, 2024

I am sitting on the daybed couch in Joshua Tree at the High Desert Test Sites guest cabin. It is 107 degrees outside at last read. Today started for me around 2 a.m.. Too excited at the prospect of going to the park for the first time, I was unable to rest fully and so woke at 2:30 and rose from bed at 3 a.m.. I made my first coffee of the day in a French press. In my sleepiness, I forgot to add the sieve component to the mesh and plastic part of the inner workings of the press and thus I had to scoop bean fragments out of my warm coffee cup. I ate some granola and yogurt and packed water and snacks. I felt more than prepared as I drove to the western entrance of the park sun-screened and with an extra three liters of water in a plastic pitcher perched on the passenger side floor, tucked among bags. 

Once inside the bounds of the park, I slid around the rock pile hills in the darkness in my white rental sedan. The sky was dark and bright with stars. The road, crossed every so often by speeding mice or chipmunks, tails trailing or folded back against their haunches. Their fur, the same color as the desert sand in the headlights. I stopped off two times at dusty shoulders, twice daring to turn my car lights off and to step out of the car to take in the sky in all its glory. But I had trepidations. I imagined the snakes, scorpions, and tarantula having a kind of rave in the dust by the roadside next to my car. I beamed my phone light at the ground. No critters were noted, but the shadows around me were suddenly undeniably dark, tall, and probably handsome if you wandered in the desert long enough. With a strong sense of animal fear risen in me, I swiftly took my place back behind the wheel of the car and proceeded towards Arch Rock. 

I never quite got there. I parked close by at the White Tank parking lot and set out down the path, initially with my I-phone light for guidance. Remember, my mind has some propensity to look at this desert as a place possibly teeming with snakes and other things I have naturally feared. I didn’t see any of these fearsome creatures, but I did see many ant colonies. Ants will, no doubt, outlive us all. I’m not mad, I wish them luck for the end of the world. I said so quietly as I passed by the fifth or so mound.

The atmosphere there in the darkness was unearthly. It was windless. It smelled like paper and dust as the sun began to tint the sky behind the mountains of the Mojave desert. A melding appeared to be happening, of light and darkness. The mixed light poured over the mountain into the visible sky, and I could suddenly make out arresting rock formations and unreal plants all around me. Days full of many new delights would await me on this trip. But, I'll never forget the moment when some of the plant greens were revealed by the sun to be a surprisingly tender aqua blue, and the gold halo of the pencil cacti at dawn. 

As I walked there were times where the path was extremely clear, marked with brown metal posts and arrows. Other times the gravel I tread on would taper off and I’d have to seek out another rivulet of pebbles to assure myself that I was indeed headed in the right direction. I followed sign markers and then the path became an undulating plane of white granite.

Before me, a set of monumental rocks was cobbled together and arranged vertically by the hands of time, and the work of water and erosion. The sky was changing with richly pigmented bands of blueish pink and gold. The colors of the rocks shifted all around me, as if blushing as I laid eyes on them with the dawn. As I scrambled up and down the face of the rocks, I felt doubtful that I was still on the ordained path.

I wondered if I would have the stamina to proceed without signage and general clear “pathiness” to bolster me. Already at the very outer limits of my bravery, my mind began to reel. I watched it wheeling. I questioned if people ever got lost in this section of the park, so close to the road. What would their un-panicking minds have chosen that might have saved them? Another anxiety competed to fill my mind: the temperature was climbing as the unabated sun blasted over the sand. Would I end up with the same fate of people who miscalculated their desert hikes? Die slowly from a scorching sunburn and thirst? Could I be one of the unfortunate ones?

I’m fairly sure that the sign at the outset had said it was a .2 mile hike, but nonetheless the worries escalated. I heard distant voices bouncing off the rock faces and assured myself that I wasn’t alone. Or, was this a trick of the desert? 

After a particularly steep expanse came into view as the next section of possible trail, I decided it wasn’t all that important to me to see the Arch Rock. After all, the unnamed rocks I’d seen already had me in awe. I wasn’t about to prioritize pride over uncertainty. There was precious time before the heat of the day. And turning around would mean doors left open for other wonders. 

Walking back towards my car where the clay granite trail forked, I spontaneously turned towards the path for heart rock instead. I’d heard someone in an emotional intelligence workshop in 29 Palms the day before mention that they couldn’t find the rock, but that they’d discovered their own “heart rock” in the process. The wonderment of the people living near Joshua Tree is a palpable thing. I imagined what it would be like to be one of them. To recognize features of this alien terrain as though they are home.

As I walked, a pair of coyote pups jogged silently across the rocks in front of me. Add this to the list of tiny animals I’d already encountered: desert rabbits with ears impossibly long and soft looking despite living in the crust. Outback mice. Desert quail broods. It was comforting to see these young, peeping creatures making their way within the environment. Surely I could hack this short hike if they could live there day in and day out. 

Heart rock. Makes me think of "Heart Love" by Albert Ayler. Don’t get pencil cactus in your eye, they say. Like an arrow from cupid’s bow, it will sting. Gram Parsons wandered here long ago with his heart stung in the night and the early morning. I feel myself in some kind of distant conversation with him. Like he’s at the Tiny Pony, talking softly to me over his shoulder at the bar. I can smell licorice and tobacco on his breath, inhale the worn sweat and sun streaked smell of his felted hat. We both know enough now to sense through our heartache, and laugh together easily at our shared secret: that having a muse is and isn't love itself. It’s the green and the greening, life flowing from a real stream-- and artists who come and find they live in the oasis that grows out of that springing? Well, blessed are those artists. Wandering blind on faith across scorched terrain, we choose to see it, to be there for love as it appears to us with all its life-giving qualities. We bask in the flowers of our own tender feelings and how in talking about love itself we can’t help but to be quenched. We sing to express this satisfaction, and to keep the flowers of love and hope alive.

“You and you alone are love, I am just your loving.”

-Anna Albeck, my paternal great-grandmother in a journal from her time in Yokohoma, Japan. 1940.  

Later that morning, I found a bone fragment, perhaps the long leg of coyote by the door of my cabin. I spent the day after sunrise feeling a bit queasy and needing to be still and contained, tangling with a restlessness of gut and mind. In the evening, trying to rest only found me asleep for a few short minutes. I’d wake again in my white tee shirt hot but not unsatisfied or sweaty, or even tired.

“If you get hit by a meteorite, can I keep the stone?”

Am I walking the line of some mania? I wondered. There’s not a negative or destructive emotion that I can see in the swirl. I turn over the facts. Though I’m somewhat demure at this moment in my intake of every substance including caffeine, it's impossible to ignore how something about Joshua Tree draws out a wakefulness in me. 

I am leaving Milwaukee after a long time and as much as I’m staying on a mountain overlooking the Morongo Basin, I’m also living on the edge of that transition. That place hasn’t felt like a home to me for quite some time. I’m a fan of Milwaukee, despite my own estrangement to aspects of it and its culture. But mostly, I dream of a multitude of places. At the same time, I appreciate and soak up Milwaukee's wonders when I think to-- both in-person and in memory. I champion it in and with my soul. It’s so easy even now to call to mind the generous mystic beauty of the place, the beaches and expanses. The forests and trails. It is a gateway to the great lakes. Once you've arrived on that promise, all the ways that water and trees have shaped the space will astound you still.

I think of Milwaukee, and of how the aquamarine January lake hit me the first time I laid eyes on it. I was on I-43, from the back of a taxi on my way to Shorewood from General Mitchell Airport. It was 2010. Beyond the towering billboards to the east of the highway, the lake shimmered like a Caribbean sea against a purple and sunny storm-threatened sky.

At a distance, I can treasure the contrasts of Milwaukee. Its coolness and its joviality; the surreally lush and watery micro-environments of the city that change form completely through the seasons; the brick factories and old corner shops turned over into slick coffee roasteries and homey restaurants. The songs and the smiling eyes of my friends. But there’s been a lot changing under my feet there, like sod eroded. The landscape itself is moved, is moving, from flows of water through it and upon in. But, beyond this place and its changes, there is a wide world that calls to me.

I'm writing now from that wide world.

An intuition being shaped shapes itself. A puddle formation, drying and reformed at its edges with the air's suggestion. A notion that comes on like a warm wind, exciting curiosity and a smile: more art teacher vibes for me and for the planet, yes please please please. Thoughts of places known about but not yet seen and places only experienced in name. Questions of names, and of histories, which are also the questions surrounding who we feel we are, who we are becoming.

A premonition and a reflection

negate each other.

The moon disappears and sky becomes dawn.

We move to hold on to what feels true,

and we hold it up,

we find it can hold itself up,

keeps holding us up,

but what can be held by us

across all environments?

Whatever it is is waiting in shadow

while the light is at work already changing everything.

-

Thank you for reading.

Feel free to reach out to have conversation about anything brought up in or brought to mind from these entries. Especially if you enjoy postcards or you're excited to share about great parks you know about in Europe.

P.S. Please enjoy an accidental selfie, captured while scanning for bug ravers.