Of Møns and Men
Or, a Day Trip to UNESCO World Heritage Site Møns Klint
Our trip to the cliffs of Møns Klint started with a bang on the door of our poor, poor, sleep deprived neighbors. They tumbled, very mussed, out of their room tying up shoes and zipping up jackets. It was 8:30 am and we had buses to catch, metros to ride, rental cars to retrieve. We had conceived this trip about 12 hours prior in our living room and corroborated it in the bar a few hours after that, and after a quick “cheap rental cars in Copenhagen" google followed by “am I even allowed to drive in this country” google, we were primed and excited for the famous Møns Klint day trip.
In most countries complete prefrontal cortex development is a condition of renting a car, but, for better or worse, in the sweet, sweet free lands of Denmark one only needs to be 19 and have a valid driver's license. I ran into a mild blip at the rental desk, as the young rental car agent quizzically eyed my Danish Resident Card and my California Drivers license fanned between his index and middle finger. I put down my name and reflexively my American address for the car my friend group was renting, which matters because, in classic Danish fashion, taxes. The problem, he said, was that since I also have Danish residency and a Danish address at the moment I was subject to these taxes, and if I got pulled over it would be a whole other dilemma. After contemplating the international relations issue between his fingers for a moment, the agent leaned over the desk and said conspiratorially, “If I let you rent this car as an American and you get pulled over, you can try and tell the police and say you’re visiting as a tourist. It’ll be cheaper, but if you get caught you’d have to pay something like 80% of the car’s value in a fine.”
We both sat back and marinated on the ethics of that proposition for a second, and after mentally running through my brief and inglorious history of lying to authority figures I slid my elbows forward on the melamine counter and said,
“...Or?”
“Or we can figure out how to rent it to you as a Danish citizen."
And we figured it out. We re-rented the car with my Danish address, and I could drive the car and run the risk of being pulled over without having to commit a felony. Both of us were relieved.
And just like that, our intrepid group of five was off. My blood pressure was slightly elevated for the first half hour of driving in a foreign country, and the Chinese-made BYD hybrid they gave us was an awfully confusing robot of a car. It had cameras that tracked your head movements and would start aggressively bleeping if you looked out the window or relaxed your white-knuckle grip on the wheel. It was like I was driving the Chinese surveillance state. Yet, before long we were flying at 120 km/h, tunes on, and it was like I’d never left the California freeway.
The trees lining the E47 freeway were alight with autumn, and it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Fall colors in San Luis Obispo happen, but are contextually different and sparse, like a burning gingko between two palms. Here the orange is ubiquitous and spread like a neon swath of fire retardant dropped from a plane. The closer we got to the island of Møn the wilder the scenes through the car window became. We stopped in Stege for lunch, and took our time eating sandwiches and playing hearts in an eclectic little bookshop/cafe.
We arrived to Møns Klint and gratefully burst out of Xi Jinping's nightmare mobile, our bodies now strangers to the feeling of being cooped in a car for hours. The hills were so, so orange, and I stood spinning in a circle with my chin up, thinking of my favorite bard Steinbeck’s description of fall foliage.
“To find not only that this bedlam of color was true but that the pictures were pale and inaccurate translations, was to me startling. I can't even imagine the forest colors when I am not seeing them. I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said that autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. 'It is a glory,' she said, 'and can't be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise…It isn't only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.” (Travels with Charley In Search of America)
We descended the 497 steps that lowered us gently onto a pasty chalk and limestone beach. The ocean was a pale color, a blue that told shallowness, and the white cliffs met the lapping sea in serene union. Sometimes I think that since our eyes are so inundated with media and information and capital c Content our brains have been tricked into thinking we've seen every color that exists out there. I don't think my brain has ever catalogued the color of the Møns Klint ocean. The whole scene was breathtakingly gentle, maybe due in part to the softness of the clay, weathered by wind and rain into claggy undulations on the cliff face. Up and down the beach we walked, taking it in.
The rest of the day was pleasantly simple. We romped through the fiery forest til we were tired, stopped at a roadside Christmas market and for ice cream on the way home, and I watched everyone doze off in the rearview mirror and forced my copilot to take as many unflattering sleeping photos of them as possible. Future blackmail. It was nice to get a breath of fresh air, and it felt right spending a Saturday sitting in trees and running amok on chalk cliffs. We had successfully transported five people from the "what if we did a trip" stage to a very beautiful place and back again. My prefrontal cortex, whatever its stage of development, had earned the evening off.
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