Sure, you can sneak up on a waterfall, but it can also sneak up on you.
Hey, it’s just as much fun as picking up cigarette butts in Reykjavik, eh.
Or fooling yourself into thinking you are sneaking up on a troll.
Or lying in wait for the sun, trying to look like a block of ice. Loads of fun, that.
And just try to sneak up on an Icelandic horse.
Wild!
All together now!
The smiths of Old Norway could never have pulled it off so well.
And drinking glasses, too. Skold!
Well, you can’t beat rain, snow, ice and muck, but you can be cleverer.
Note that in Reykjavik, if you park your car just right, at least one passenger (your sweetie, maybe?) can get in and out with dry feet. Now, that’s true love.
The sky cries tears in Iceland. Viennese waltzes warping in a banana box in a window, old hi-fi junk, and all the books of the world wash up on the shore otherwise called Hverfisgata.
Not much different than a knot of broken fishing nets and cast-off plastic knocking against the knees of kelp-eating sheep, really.
In case you wondered, Oðin is alive and well and living in Reykjavik.
Two Ravens in Reykjavik
On a pension, nothing fancy. He still has his wits about him though.
So, you start off with a sheep. Seems simple enough. 
But then you want it to be pink. And natural. What to do?
It is all about place, month and the time of day.
Late October, 7:40 a.m., at Skogar.
Simple as that.
Words teach us to see waterfall, cliff and light.
Alarlhryna
And shadow.
Alarlhryna
But they are one thing, together.
Gulfoss
Sjaelandafoss
Fossá
Even when they have no name!
Even with ice. Even in winter rain.
Svartifoss
Even with blood-red birches. Everything you add becomes the fall. It ceases to be separate.
Svartifoss
Even a river can become sky.
Bessastaðaá
Even sky can become a river.
Stekkalækur
Even underground rivers entering the sky from the mouth of the earth.
Hraunfossar
Even falls held within the Earth!
Dettifoss
They are all falls, not water, light, stone, air, water, grass or trees. They are always once thing together, all at once.
Systrafoss
This is a great mystery, not because it is unknown, but because it is vital.
Hengifoss
This teaching, and this view deep into human-earth relationships in Iceland, continually inspires me. The land is alive, as is the water, and any words that are hanging around start there first.
It’s beautiful on Snaefellsnes, isn’t it, when the gales blow in and the light pulls the mountains out of another world at year’s end.
And the glacier, Snaefellsjökull, is very fine when hurricane gusts lift off its fog and the sun shines from within the ice, lighting up the sea mist, and you have to brace yourself just to stand up.
Just imagine living there!
You can pick up lumps of the lava bed and make a fence, and there are ponds for your sheep and horses and the family cow, plus a little bit of Siberian driftwood.
Also pieces of shipwreck you can use to build a shelter for your cow.
And if you shift enough stones, you can even have a field out of the wind!
Even if you don’t shift any rocks, there’s grass for the sheep, and always the roar of the sea breaking against the lava bed.
And if you lived here, this would be your view. You don’t have a “front yard”, a street, a flower bed, nothing. You step out into the North Atlantic.
And this is the modern house, and it has been abandoned. You could only pull this off at a certain stage of technological development, when there was enough economy and technology to bring in supplies but not enough to kill off the need for people to live here and catch fish in small boats, plus not enough opportunity elsewhere to replace this fierce independence with a greater comfort. Notice how even this modern concrete house is built just like a turf house, with incredible amounts of hand labour, too: small rooms connected with odd passages, most of them through the outside air, as they were built one at a time according to time, energy and need.
And always the roar of the sea.
And then the children leave for the modern world that technology has made possible, and this particular modernity, brought to this fierce, remote land at the end of the Earth, is abandoned when the old people are gone.
But it is out of such stubborn independence that modernity was made in Iceland.
And always the roar of the sea eating the land.
The thing to remember as a traveller is that in Icelandic culture you only need to know what you need to know. It is also a proud culture, and if that means selling you an image of vikings donated by Americans, who really like this kind of thing …
… and pride, which is real enough, instead of one of 1100 years of terrible struggle…
… really terrible struggle in more than a human world …
… and what would now be called isolation (but which wasn’t), in which the land is also a sea…
… or selling an image of bold adventure …
…instead of one in which there is nowhere to go to get in from the cold, well, they’ll do that. They are very genial hosts, the Icelanders. Just remember that even if comfort comes from each other …
… and the images the city presents are of funkiness and crazy happiness …
… you are still on a volcano in the North Atlantic, and the sea is still eating the land from under you, the wind is still blowing … 
… all you have is a few sheep in an impossible place …
… and everyone around you knows this. With nothing else except each other you must begin.
Here at the head of the Hvalfjörður the old trails leap off across country. The old cairns remain, to still mark the way in bad weather, or good. As you can see, there’s a chasm between cairns. No amount of scrambling is going to make that worthwhile. You’re likely to break a fetlock, or worse.
Reading these cairns is not a matter of following straight lines. Obviously, the rock, the cleft and the sky are part of the trail, too, and the reading is a way of orienting oneself in multi-dimensional space, not map space. If you’ve ever read an Icelandic novel, you’ll recognize the pattern!
A Farm in Iceland 
