The Insulin Express Read online

  Unfortunately, the HBA1C is not an instant test, at least not in my doctor’s office. A nurse draws blood, sends off the sample, and the results come back two or three days later.

  When I call in to find out the results, I am nervous. Very nervous. More so than any one individual blood sugar test, the HBA1C is a scorecard to see if you’re winning or losing. There are degrees of success here, but anything above 7 is some degree of failure.

  “Hi, I’m calling to find out my hemoglobin.”

  “Your name?”

  We go through the rigamarole of them confirming that I am who I say I am and that they are really, truly, honestly allowed to give me medical information about myself.

  “You wanted your hemoglobin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me see. Your hemoglobin is 12.5.”

  I am in absolute shock. For weeks, I had no idea what I was doing to my body and my HBA1C was a 12.1. Now, after learning about diabetes and doing everything I could to protect myself, my HBA1C has only gone up.

  “That’s my A1C? My A1C is 12.5?”

  “Oh no, that’s your hemoglobin. Let me check your A1C.” Relief washes over me. I have just learned in a way that ensures I will never forget that there is a difference between hemoglobin and A1C.

  “Your HBA1C is 5.6.”

  I am beyond elated. Words like thrilled and excited and ecstatic don’t quite cover it.

  Above all else, I am healthy.

  It may seem an insignificant number, especially over the course of the rest of my life with diabetes. But it marks a healthy new beginning for me, and it sets the bar high. We go out to my favorite steak restaurant to celebrate. Cassie gives us one more reason to rejoice. The charter school where she interviewed offered her the job after she gave a demo lesson. It’s great news, even if the public relations firm doesn’t offer me a job.

  The good news is enough to blunt the disappointment of us calling off the last bit of our trip. But it’s still lingering there. I don’t need to ask Cassie to know that she feels the same. We’ll have to visit Argentina again one day to see all that we haven’t seen.

  One day.

  I head into New York City to hang out with some friends and share the news that we’ll be hanging out a lot more in the near future. It feels great to sit with friends whom I haven’t seen in so long, and I am able to forget for now that our trip ended unexpectedly, earlier than it was supposed to.

  As I’m sitting with my friends, my phone starts beeping. Cassie has sent me a few messages.

  Her school wants her to start on the following Monday. She tells them that’s not quite possible because we aren’t set up in any way to start working yet. She promises we will have all that set up in a week, and she would start the following Monday.

  The last message makes me smile.

  “I booked tickets to Iceland. We leave on Monday.”

  Chapter 25

  August 6, 2014

  64°08’50.0”N 21°57’01.6”W

  Reykjavik, Iceland

  Iceland is a land of indescribable beauty, and it’s not because I don’t know the words to describe it. It’s because you can’t pronounce anything in this entire country. Reykjavik is the capital, Eyjafjallajökull is their famous volcano, and hafragrautur is their word for something as simple as oatmeal. They apparently harbor a disdain bordering on outright hatred for vowels. With names that sound like an angry Viking threw a Scrabble board against the wall and picked the highest scoring words, asking someone for directions is tantamount to vehicular suicide.

  “How do I get to kwfkkwakak?”

  “Go four kilometers down the road to kakwelllbd. Turn left when you see the kwellewakwk. Slow down at the bnndnnwielll. When you see the fifth vttvvwaaw, you have arrived.” Now I understand why Moses wandered forty years in the desert. He asked an Icelander for directions.

  Thankfully, we have a very simple plan that basically guarantees that we won’t get lost: stick to one road and don’t stray. Of course, that doesn’t stop me from putting us on the right road in the wrong direction, but that mistake becomes apparent quickly enough, and after a few sincere apologies to Cassie, we’re headed the right way. Once again, we are heading east, this time along Iceland’s Ring Road, a two-lane road that follows the circumference of the entire island.

  We tossed together a plan for Iceland in a couple of days, scouring a few websites, jotting down a few notes, and heading for the airport. I have never been so excited for a flight. I could barely sit still during boarding, which annoyed Cassie to no end. In the airport, I held out my arm repeatedly to escort her to the gate as if we were both going to the junior prom, except I wasn’t nearly this excited for the prom. This is bigger than a night of angst-filled dancing to modern pop music that transitions to overmodulated oldies halfway through the evening. This marks the end of our year abroad, and we are thrilled to finish it here, on our terms.

  I am caught up in the excitement of traveling again, of experiencing the world, of meeting people. Less than a week ago, it looked like our trip was over. Cassie had to start her job, and I had to find my own. For a moment—a quick blip of a few days—we put that all on hold. The five-to-nine determined the nine-to-five, not the other way around as it had been for so many years. We will soon be busy making a living, but we will never again forget to make a life.

  There is no bittersweet ending here. We have nothing to be upset about. When we got back on the road for this last week, many of our friends—I would even go so far as to say most of our friends—thought we were crazy. They were more than happy to voice their opinions that we had the rest of our lives to travel and that we should now stay home and focus on what they consider to be real life. They failed to realize that, for us, this is real life. We live for travel. All of the other daily tedium—work, taxes, bills, insurance—are simply a means to an end. We go through those motions so we can travel. Isn’t that what’s real?

  We land in Reykjavik early in the morning and head straight for the thermal pools, as tired as we were on our first day in Rome. The time change doesn’t favor our schedule, but we are veterans at overcoming jet lag now. We soak in the impossibly blue water, melting in the natural heat. When we step out, the cold air bites our skin and reminds us that we are far closer to the Arctic Circle than the equator. It is summer in the States, with temperatures creeping toward ninety degrees. They haven’t discovered summer here. A warm day is sixty degrees. A cold day would send my nuts into my throat looking for warmth.

  The following morning, we set out from Reykjavik under gray skies and intermittent rain, which changes to blue skies and a light wind, which becomes steady showers, all in five minutes. What doesn’t change is the breathtaking landscape. The island looks like a different planet, more akin to the frozen surface of Saturn’s moon Titan than anything terrestrial. The dips and hills resemble thousands of craters, and the volcanic surface reminds me of the moon (which I haven’t visited yet, but it’s on the list). We marvel at this fantastic display of nature, often stopping by the side of the road for pictures or simply to stare in silence at yet another incredible phenomenon crafted by the relentless forces of wind and ice and tectonic turbulence.

  This windswept slab of volcanic rock, stuck way up near the North Pole, isn’t exactly overflowing with flora—most of the plants here look like stunted shrubs—but the views are incredible as we venture into the land of Thor and Leif Erikson. We stare at the violent north Atlantic on one side, and the country’s famous volcanoes, glaciers, and waterfalls on the other. In many ways, Iceland reminds me of Hawaii. I’ve never been to Hawaii, but one is a hot volcanic island and the other is a cold volcanic island, so the analogy is probably apt.

  Near a Viking museum with a replica longship, a giant Viking sword, at least twenty feet tall, sticks out of the ground in the middle of a traffic circle. Most cultures would shy away from an ancestral history of raping and pillaging. Not Icelanders. They celebrate their Viking heritage by eating small bits
of rotten shark and washing them down with Brennivin, a potato liquor flavored with caraway. I am upset when I miss a chance to try this liquor, even as my liver celebrates its pardon from this potable punishment.

  We make our way along the southern coast of Iceland, never more than a few miles from the ocean. Signs for natural phenomena pop up every couple of minutes along the road. We see markers for the countless waterfalls—for Seljalandsfoss and Skogarfoss and Gullfoss and all sorts of other fosses. Or the thermal geysers at a place cleverly called Geysir. There is no end to the natural beauty here, and we drive long stretches quietly as we admire the world around us. We find no need to talk here, no need to interject the white noise of our voices. I know Cassie is marveling at what she sees, and she knows I’m doing the same.

  The beauty of Iceland speaks to us in ways that do not require a response. We hear nature’s words and stories in silence, listening to the ambient noise for the marvelous symphony it is. We dare not disrupt the natural music with anything as simplistic and unworthy as the waveform static of our vocal cords, just as we dare not interrupt Bach’s Fugue in D Minor with Kesha’s “We R Who We R.”

  We let the natural wonder sweep over us, often holding hands to add a physical connection to the emotional and spiritual bond we already share. This journey has brought Cassie and me closer than ever before, and we don’t need words to express that when our mutual silence during some of the most amazing and impressive moments of our trip says it so much better.

  Instead, we save our breath for venting about Iceland’s ridiculous prices. A burger that should cost eight dollars sets us back twenty-four. A cup of coffee is upward of nine dollars, and a beer is about twelve dollars. We had traded three weeks of Argentina for five days of Iceland, but the former is so cheap and the latter so expensive that the price works out to be the same. The only inexpensive meal we can find is a three-dollar hot dog in downtown Reykjavik at the country’s most popular restaurant. In true Icelandic fashion, the hot dog stand is called Baejarins Beztu Pylsur.

  I get that they have to import just about everything they eat, but nearly all of the electricity here comes from renewable thermal energy, so the cost of overhead should theoretically be low. Yet a single bunk in a dorm room still goes for seventy dollars a night, which makes Iceland the most expensive place we’ve been to by far. I’m glad we’re here at the end of the trip and not the beginning. Iceland would’ve bankrupted us in a week.

  Once again, we are heading east, away from home. Away from our family and friends toward another unknown. In our circumnavigation of the globe, we have passed our starting point, and we have started another circle. The end of one journey is the beginning of another.

  In five days, we make it as far as Vik, about 110 miles from the capital, where we explore the volcanic black sand beaches at the southernmost point in Iceland. Most people would consider this weather absolutely awful. The wind never stops howling, the precipitation in its various forms never stops spitting, and it’s always some degree of cold. We love it. We bundle up in our waterproof jackets that are no longer waterproof, our weather-resistant pants that let through every drop of rain, and our hiking shoes with the long-forgotten treads, and walk straight onto the frigid Iceland beaches, happy to be here.

  In this sublime moment.

  This perfect ending.

  Flocks of puffins—birds resembling parrots with colorful faces and beaks—fill the air around us, diving down into the ocean to grab a mouthful of fish, and we stare at these birds and their great, lazy circles for as long as we can hold out against the cold. Then we warm up with hot coffee that burns our mouths and our wallets while the car heater runs at full blast to thaw out our frozen feet. When we’re ready, we step out again.

  We explore little caves and grottoes between the volcanic boulders that litter the beaches and oceanside cliffs. I take so many pictures that I drain one camera battery after another. In a sense, we feel unstoppable. We set out to explore the world for a year—to learn about places and people and food and cultures—and we have succeeded, despite setbacks and challenges. Travel tested us in ways we could never have anticipated, and I’d like to think we passed these real life exams. The demands of life on the road either push a couple together or drive them apart—there is no middle ground. We have been brought together.

  In so many ways, Iceland is an explorer’s paradise (except for the aforementioned outrageous prices). Mother Nature concentrated some of her best offerings on one tiny island, and we try to see as much as possible. In summer—and it is summer here, at least in terms of time of year if not in temperature—the sun barely sets. We enjoy twenty hours of sunlight a day. Because we go to bed at 10:00 p.m. and wake up at 7:00 a.m., we never see darkness. Although it throws off our internal clocks, the constant light gives us as much time to drive and walk and see as we want. Our days, and our lives, are brighter than they were one year ago. If we came back in six months, we would experience the opposite—twenty hours of darkness.

  While riding small Icelandic horses one afternoon—don’t you dare call them ponies or you will piss off the entire country, regardless of how much these quadrupedal mammals look like miniature versions of equus ferus caballus—we ask our guide how they deal with the winters here.

  “In winter, we sleep all the time. In summer, we never sleep,” he says. I didn’t know you could trade six months of sleep for six months of awake, but apparently they’ve figured out a way.

  We go to bed each night tired but fulfilled, exhausted but overjoyed. For all we have seen on our trip, we have the privilege of sneaking in a bit more right at the end.

  There have been so many endings on this trip. The end of Europe. The end of Africa. The end of my life without diabetes. But for each ending, there is a new beginning. The beginning of Southeast Asia. The beginning of the Inca Trail.

  The cycle never ends.

  It keeps going.

  As long as you want it to keep going.

  On the flight home—Icelandair 615 from Kelflavik to JFK—I put on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It seems appropriate; it is about a daydreamer who travels the world when things get bad at work. Although my professional life was going exceedingly well when we left forty-seven weeks ago, the first part of the description seems incredibly fitting. I have been guilty of daydreaming my whole life, as evidenced by twelve years of lackluster report cards in grade school and only slightly less lackluster grades in college. Now I am guilty of traveling too.

  I thought I would spend most of the flight catching up on cinema, but I find myself staring out the window at the world passing by below us. We are mostly above water, but ninety minutes in we fly over what I’m pretty sure is Greenland, mostly because it isn’t at all green. The mountains and icebergs of a country far more remote and desolate than any place we have ever been—except maybe West Virginia—remind us that we have so much left to explore and so many places left to see. I snap a few pictures of the landscape thirty thousand feet below, knowing full well they will be some of the last pictures of this trip.

  As I stare out at a distant layer of stratus clouds (and the Icelandair logo on the wingtip of the 757 invading the sanctity of my window view), I have to hold back a few tears. Not tears of sadness that the journey is over. Tears of joy, as full of happiness as the tears I cried on February 19 when my blood sugar finally came back normal and I knew I was on my way home. I feel joy for everything we have seen and done. Everyone we have met. Everywhere we have been. And, perhaps most importantly, everywhere we will go.

  Cassie and I sit in the last row—her in the aisle, me by the window. Our preferred seats. The lone seat between us is empty. Only my camera, with my 55–250 mm zoom lens, sits on the pillow that neither of us is using. The tray table is open, the cup that held the official last glass of wine of the trip already removed.

  On the thirty-third and final flight of our trip, I am thankful to have the window seat in the last row. I will be the last one off this plane, the l
ast one to step foot on American soil. I will be the last one home, which means I will be the last one still traveling.

  My flight—my journey—will last just a few seconds longer than every-one else’s. In that brief time, I will be on the road a little bit longer. An extra moment to call myself a nomad, a wanderer, and to think of this trip in the present tense.

  Home is both ahead of us and behind us. Our family, our friends, are in front of us. The physical place that we both refer to when we use the term home is a short drive from JFK airport, where we will arrive in about three hours as I write this from seat 41A. We have already talked about possible places to live and renting a car and finding work. We will fall back into a normal routine faster than we’d like to admit, I suspect. We will find a one-bedroom apartment, argue over what we can afford, and then we will move in. We will, by most accounts, be home.

  But home is also behind us. The stimulus of movement. The excitement of a different city. The trains and buses that became our bedrooms and living rooms. The people we met who turned into our friends and family. We are accustomed to life on the road, used to eating rice and eggs or ordering what passes for pizza or tacos in many parts of the world. That is where we are most comfortable. That is where we are home. For us, home is a verb.

  We have left too many lands undiscovered and too many oceans unexplored. For everything we have seen and all the cultures we have learned about, we know there are many more to discover in the world’s great vastness that we simply know as being “out there.” We will go “there” one day. That I know.

  We touch down at JFK early in the evening and taxi to our gate. In a few moments, I will trade the interior of an airplane for the interior of John F. Kennedy International Airport’s International Arrivals Terminal. Our year abroad will come to an end. I don’t know that I’m ready to make that transition, reversing the change we made last September. But, at least for now, I have no choice.