I thought I’d look up from the Glacial Lagoon …
… show of humans being beautiful for themselves and for each other by posing (warmly) within luxurious images of humanly-initiated global climate change…
… to see what the glacier thought of all this. Ah, well, look, I’m glad it did. The cheeky thing…
… was sticking its tongue out at us! Just a tiny bit. Between compressed lips.
Earth and eye conspire to put light at a distance, where you need it most.
And darkness up close to remind you of the path.
~
Grundarfjörður
Iceland sits in water, lots of water, and storm races across it, but that’s not the same as saying that the snows of an Icelandic winter are a curse from the sea. It’s the mountains that make them, and the latitude, at the top of the world.
They even channel and intensify the wind! Iceland is not, you see, exactly shelter.
A tough choice, I know. Just a few kilometres apart, way out there on Snæfellsnes (so likely of the same species) there are the Ogres of Djúpalónsandur …
So sweet!
…wading together out into the storm…
…and just a few kilometres west, out at Dritvik… splashing in the waves …
…the Ogres of Dritvik, the now-abandoned Second City of Iceland, staring out into the open Atlantic.
But, hey, no problem. It’s always a good day to sit back and enjoy the sights.
But watch out!
We are not kidding about the magic. Or the storm.
The Deep Pools at Nautastigur are fresh on their surface and salt beneath.
If you follow the Nautastigur trail down to the beach (Djúpalónsandur), you will encounter a couple ogres…
….and around the corner an elvish church, but wait, not so fast. This mountain is alive as well.
Look at it facing you from across the water. A lake that is both salt water and fresh is surely a passage between worlds. And here’s the great thing: if you come on a tour bus, the mountain will hide its secrets.
Iceland is a society of cairns. Cairns are artificial humans made out of stacked-up skulls, which allow the living to find their way in the footsteps of those who came before. Here’s one in the Berserker Lava Fields.
Here’s one in Borg.
And an artful one in Reykjavik.
And back to the Berserker Lava Field, where a modern cairn, a 4×4, moves as the driver anticipates where you are going to be, but you have to show up there to find it. Unlike the others, it isn’t a visual cairn. It’s more like one or the whole body.
Skull training starts young. Here’s a pretty standard kid’s playground, with a build-it-yourself dragon.
The dragon you make yourself is not the one that’s going to hurt you.
If you head East from Þingvellir and reach the height of land, and the turn off to Laugarvatn, why not stop and wait for the sun? This is elf country. They just might show. What you are looking for are rainbows almost invisible as the sun disperses the mist like a breath.
And if they don’t show, waiting is also arrival. It all depends upon which country you arrive in. Care to try? You’ve got nothing to lose!
In Langadalur, you can find a country where humans can only exist as the companions of elemental powers. To walk here is to be utterly naked in the universe. To do so with a community of people is no help. You must enter with a community of things, and live within them until you have crossed. What the Icelanders have learned in 1100 years is that when the boat doesn’t come, you had better be good at making a new community of things.
You must halter yourself to the Earth, lest you are blown away. You could say that Gunnar returned to Iceland in 1939 because he loved his land, which is true, that he was romantic, which is also true, that he was afraid, which was reasonable in 1939, and you could say that this fold east of Bifrost is an instance of creativity, which is also true, but those are just words. You pick up the Earth one stone at a time, and move them to create a body that shelters you. It is your companion. It is yourself. From their to haunting is not far.
Over in Lágkotstangi, iron age ruins are not hard to spot.
Because of recent tree-planting initiatives in the North and East, it is slowly being replaced by a rudimentary Wooden Age.
Because Iceland has been isolated so long, history is coming very quickly now. Even as we speak, both iron and wood are giving way to the Age of Plastic. They’re not going down without a fight, though.
Look at Iron and Wood trying to be useful (and sneaky) still!
If you stay in Reykjavik, vodka’s the thing. Drink that stuff and you might forget where you are.
But if you go halfway to the complete opposite end of the country, the water speaks at last, not with a bottle but with the words that grow still on the very bottom edge of the sky:
Lagarfljót, April
Your choice, between a bar full of travellers and the voices of trolls. Flights to Egilstaðir are cheap. Just $120 return. You could drop three times that much, just having dinner and drinks with a friend in town. Off you go.
A Farm in Iceland 