SES: Wakkanai

Note

Around the end of September, along the Saropet line.

Section 1

The coast or the shore, and darkness approaching

Last I looked at my watch, it was 16:00 just; several minutes (or maybe less than 'several'), so it's around 16:00. The skies are becoming slightly darker. I'm not exactly sure if it is really darker, because the cloud or the fog fuzzies the remaining sunlight. But judging from the time, it probably is getting darker.

I open the door and land my feet on the ground for a first time in several hours. It's not always good how human civilisation has retreated from sparsely populated corners like this, but it's good to be able to park wherever and whenever I want to.

There is no wind, almost. Which is curious. Nine times out of eight these coasts are terrifyingly windy, and it must have something to do with the air pressure difference and stuff. Maybe sometimes you just get the perfect balance between the sea and the less watery land, so the air stays mostly stationary.

The reeds along the coastline wave even to this slightest movement of air. I think they have been blown around for so long that their default state is not straight up no more. The reeds point towards various directions at various angles, or I should say, azimuths. The sun emits its electrons from behind the clouds and maybe also fog from an even lower place. It's about to go under the horizon. But before that eventually happens, the light does not change drastically. Especially when the light is being dispersed, diffracted, diffused by all the clouds and the fog. It's a very smooth and subtle light, with an almost mist-like texture. Well, part of the atmosphere is probably really mist. The rest is a more virtual, psychological, atmospheric kind of mist, I think.

Making stops like this will inevitably extend my trip. I have known that though numerous past experiences and now I account for these stops so I won't extend my trips beyond control. And I'm well under control now. There's less than 3 hours to go until I should arrive in Wakkanai. I don't know, though, the reason why I always feel I need to have control. I have always decided to overlook this ignorance, as thinking too deep into it will probably relieve me of any control. One thing I'm probably sure is that keeping my times managed gives me a slight satisfactory sensation.

I think I must have stopped for at least 10 minutes now. The skies have surely become even darker since I last commented on them becoming slightly darker. Darkness is something I don't intuitively like. It could constitute as one reason, analytically, why I am almost paranoid on maintaining control of my trips, timewise. It is simple, if it's dark, it's hard to see things, driving gets tiring, and when tired and driving humans have a higher chance of suffering serious or fatal injury.

I have a rather negative emotion towards my own death, but I can't find a precise word or simple phrase to describe that. Well, an imperfect approximate would be 'I don't want to die'. This is largely different from what I think I have in mind but is easy to utter, write, or for someone else to understand, so it is the go-to if I have to explain this mundane chain of thought to anyone else. Not that I've actually met a lot of people interested in seeking after such explanations. I think I've only said this to Emms and Sags, and I'm sure they were not especially fond of it.

But the emotion towards darkness is quite certain for me. I can say with much confidence that I hate darkness - when I'm driving. This hatred does not lend itself to other circumstances i.e. when I'm not driving. I think I enjoy darkness rather wholeheartedly, when I'm not driving.

I hate tunnels unconditionally, by the way. It's a relief that from where I am now until Wakkanai proper there shouldn't be any really long tunnels. One or two extremely short tunnels could have slipped my memories and ambush me up there, but these are more like extended gates rather than short tunnels.

The Bakkai

Having driven for yet another hour, I believe I am finally seeing the lights of Wakkanai. Behind me now is the Bakkai. Yes, The Bakkai. There probably is nothing significant about it bar the usual local history that every human settlement is cursed to bear. It's just the nearly symmetrical written form, the sound when pronounced in Richard Keys intonation, and the perfectly transliterated Cyrillic notations on the road signs, Баккаи, that fascinate me.

Contrary to popular belief, I never thought it immoral to like place only for its name, the phonological and typological properties, and not due to the (usually mediocre) history behind it. And what's even better, the Bakkai has now zero residents to issue me any sort of complaint about my potential disrespect to their history and culture, in adjecting with the adjective 'mediocre'.

Besides, I think I actually like the post-apocalyptic looks of the Bakkai, which had been there even before the apocalyptic - well, maybe not as apocalyptic - war came. Which could well be yet another insult to the residents if there were any. When I arrived there today it was simply too dark to see anything. Not like the Bakkai has any working illumination left.

Driving through the Bakkai in its current state should be legitimately classified as a kind of hard labour, and I do not wish to dwell on that further. The initial metropolitan lights finally enter my adjacency in the form of faintly lit hotel advertising boards. Then a fuelling station. The density and intensity of streetlamps increase gradually and stabilise at a level that is rather easy for the eye.

If I pick my standards adaptively, I am in Wakkanai now. Or maybe the moment when my cockpit reached the edge of the fuel station shed. In more practical standards, I think I'm still some tens of kilometres (and minutes, almost equally) away from where I believed I could spend the night. I stopped caring about my previous prediction of less than 3 hours, because I'm ahead of that by a good margin.

The cheeseburger, and regret

And thus, it's time for a break. Maybe not 'thus', a break doesn't depend on or require a good margin of time ahead of schedule. If a consequential construct must be present, I think I would rather nominate simply wanting to go to the northernmost Mac in 'Do as the reason for me to have a break. I don't think this works well as a reason, nor do I want to further elaborate on why I want to go to the northernmost Mac. It just happens to be the northernmost Mac and I just happen to be in close vicinity to it.

To some, there is an extra layer of significance that it's also the northernmost Mac that survived the war, but that is absolutely not anything significant especially if one takes into consideration that more Macs shut down due to a shortage of onion dip rather than the war. A persistent verbal combatant might argue that the onion dip shortage was also a direct or indirect consequence of the war, and thus that portion of closing downs should also be attributed to the war, and the significance is again proved significant. This is exactly why I have an intricate negative feeling towards statisticians, me myself included. It is this mindset that bothers me so much at times like when I want to go to the northernmost Mac for no apparent reason.

Gladly enough, I have learnt to come to terms with my problems. Gladly as well, when I arrived at the parking lot, the lights are on. Neither my inner professional orator nor the business hours are stopping me from having something at the northernmost Mac.

The not-so-jolly jester, which happens to be the northernmost instance among many of his clones, is sitting on the usual bench enjoying his final few weeks or maybe just days before getting obscured, covered, and finally buried in high quality snow. Then it could well be until next April that the happy face can be seen again. Cheers, mate.

Not another motor vehicle is in the parking lot, which probably means I will be the only customer at this moment. I get off my Crater and realise how I have now entered the effective range of the chilly Okhotsk sea winds, so I grabbed my coat which solves the potential hypothermia problem.

Turns out I am the only customer at this moment. I return to the truck with my cheeseburger and nuggets, ready to enjoy the marvels of post-modern humanity which is already not that modern literally.

There was only one female staffer in the shop. The self-service booths were all out of function. The girl looked like a high school student working part time here and would prefer anything but holding the line against thin air. I thought about chatting with her a bit or maybe even having my food inside of the building, but eventually I said nothing more than necessary to order and pay, and I took the food away.

At times like these - or more precisely, after times like these, people, I included, might tend to think that they've done something mean, improper, bad, immoral, ..., wrong. In this instance, a more 'appropriate' take might have been initiating a social conversation with the girl. Then I realise I'm just doing what I have always been doing and there is nothing inherently wrong. Not that she was craving so eagerly for any sort of social engagement, and nor was I.

And I don't blame myself for feeling that initial sense of guilty, even if I deem it irrational now. I think I have been living within a comfortably irrational mindset, so some of that way of thinking have contacted me. It's not ideal if I want to live completely logical, but it's acceptable given that I know I am not a relatively simple automaton.

Having cleared my needless thoughts, I finally start to consume the already half-cold cheeseburger. The nuggets are unexpectedly hot, I'm quite sure these have stayed in the fryer for more time than they should. Which is fine by me.

I am totally unsure why I opted for a cheeseburger rather than anything else now. It's not exactly good, and probably a chicken fillet would have been much better. Or probably not. That is yet another needless thought, and I believe I just successfully stopped it from growing into something that is usually considered 'regret'. I am not sure why I opted for the cheeseburger over all the other options (albeit not a lot, really, they've axed many of the old time favourites citing scarcity of everything as a reason.) but I don't regret it. I don't regret most of my decisions.

I am here even going the extra centimetre to try and dig from my memory one of those decisions that I fully regret. Nothing comes to mind immediately. Thus I hold my statement true: I don't regret most of my decisions. There eventually might be something if I dig deep enough, though, wouldn't rule that out too soon.

The metropolitan Wakkanai

Wakkanai is anything but a charm for those expecting activities after night falls. Sapporo still had that last bit of metropolitan madness left when I last went there. It was bad.

The lack of entertainment, psychological excitement, and physical illuminations is not as uncharming to me as to some. Surely at some point in history Wakkanai also had its trade port-type prosperity (alongside all of the bad aspects of being a prosperous trade port). That still would be a different brand of charm than that of central Sapporo, or the famed... whatever it is, one of those central areas of Tokyo which I've never been to. Supposedly always bright even at night unless electricity dies.

I did, for my sins, grow up in a very urban part of Helsinki. At an inappropriate age all things considered. There might have been a world where I enjoyed that lifestyle so much that I already killed myself when Helsinki was reduced to ashes. That is already way too unimaginable at this point. I distanced myself from it, or was distanced from it so much that I cannot even try to go into any kind of realistic detail.

Wakkanai is very quiet now. In many aspects. Where I am staying was a rather premium hotel. Now it is a place where people come and stay the night and little more than that. The room now is only half of the original room, and I wouldn't easily purchase that a premium hotel used collapsible pipe beds and apparently harshly used tatamis on the pipe beds. The building, in contrary, was sturdily built and is still holding together very impressively, while some of its contemporaries had already crumbled, partly collapsed, or already returned to an empty block of ground.

Kudos to whoever did the recycling, I'm quite sure the materials are fervorously sought after. The ancient horrors of asbestos are a somewhat obsolete topic nowadays, as those asbestos-insulated buildings are mostly dealt with (properly or not) until two decades ago. What construction and deconstruction tradies face now are walls that have everything integrated: water pipes, gas pipes, high voltage conduits, low voltage conduits, and all other cables or pipes that probably only became a de facto standard for buildings since the 1980s but have persisted ever since. These are not as lethal as the asbestos, but they do render recycling whole builidings way, way more of a hassle. Wasn't really a problem when building materials was abundantly produced and nobody really thought about recycling buildings, but now building materials are not abundant no more. Then there's the problem. But thankfully that's not my problem for today. I don't face work problems off work, never.

Then again, it really is quiet. No sounds of buildings being taken down, torn apart; no sounds of things being constructed, neither. Of course, wind blows all the time, from time to time a car passes by, and by good or rotten luck I even hear a drunkard producing drunkard noises around. I am doubtful if the guy could live to see the next sunrise but honestly that's not one of my biggest concerns.

I am tired after all the driving and sightseeing detours. I need to lie down and keep my body in that state for some consecutive hours so my legs can recover. From fatigue, mostly, but also from the injuries that simply refuses to completely check out. Or maybe at this point it's part of the fatigue already. I am not sure.

I'll just leave the radio stuff for tomorrow.

Section 2

The northern morning

Very early in the morning, I wake up. My legs are still kind of sore from yesterday's driving, but the mind feels fresh enough to convince me that I had a decent sleep. There is that vague yet assertive threshold for anyone that wakes up to judge whether they're really sober or still in a bootup sequence. To me it is mostly the dreams. If the dreams are totally gone, I'm awake.

I had only the slightest of dreams last night. Probably due to fatigue from more than yesterday. Sometimes, your body just keeps going without much trouble under high load and stress for extended periods. Then it breaks down completely or slightly better, you sleep really well without dreams and much longer than usual. The latter just happened to me. And it's better than the other option.

The morning air is cold, though arguably somewhat warmer than the latitudinal counterparts because this is an island and the climate is more oceanic and else. It's not a helpful concept when the open air is essentially way colder than the room air, and I just migrated from the latter to the former.

There is a refreshing aspect that I appreciate much in the coldness. I like a degree of cold that is not lethal but makes me a bit uncomfortable. Only the slightest bit. Or I should phrase it as the level of discomfort that just veers from the comfortable side of the comfort threshold to the opposite. This sort of really mild hypothermal pain is, in my honest opinion, one of the mild pains that keeps humans (or at least me myself) conscious of their state of living. Sometimes the pain goes beyond the definition of 'mild' and that's when it becomes a bit disturbing, annoying, devastating, you name it.

Standard is something that varies by perspective. I appreciate mildly painful colds, and others don't. Emy White is an example. It makes me wonder

And the perspective thing applies to more than human beings. The Crater, my truck, does not appreciate cold temperatures - by design, literally. Of course, there are specialised features that make sure it works in the cold. Which means that if it's not cold these features are not necessary and more dead weight than functional components.