Longs ago, lava flowed off Snæfells Volcano. Then a glacier settled in and began to comb wind out of the sky and blow it across the land, just so. The result is dragons in the lee of the lava, where the snow, the very stuff of the glacier, collects along the sea.
Imagine what the mountain is doing to you!
When the winds blow in the winter gales, even statues get strapped in for the ride!
Hellissandur
That’s the way it is in Hellissandur! But when the storm lifts, ah, then the whole world dances.
Above Hellissandur
Every day, the world shifts between gold and blue.
Looking East from Buðir in a Strong Gale
This is it’s great message in the wind.
One way to look at Iceland is to visit a popular tourist site. Gerðuberg, for instance, a half-kilometre-long chain of basalt blocks.
The government sees to its popularity. The project is to keep tourists moving, and to give them a stop or two now and then to refresh. It’s a technique learned over a thousand years of sheep herding. Humans aren’t sheep, of course, but we do have physical needs. Air, for instance. Light. Spiritual purpose. That kind of thing. For that, some places are better than others. Gerðuberg is a great one: the first place you’ll stop, two hours out of Reykjavik on your one-day-long and way-too-quick way around the Snaefellsnes Peninsula. You’re going to want to stretch your legs by that time. But don’t be fooled. By the time you get to Gerðuberg’s natural wonders, you’ve already passed the second way of seeing. It was on the road in.
You see, every natural wonder in Iceland is framed by a long history of human struggle. These post-war North American metal sheds are used as barns everywhere. It’s no longer the fashion, but hundreds are still in use, just as they are (for instance) on the Canadian Prairies. You can see Gerðuberg and its crater in the background. You are getting closer to Iceland now. Crater? Yes.
The Third way of seeing. Well, you passed it, too, probably wondering where you could stop to take a photo.
This is Eldborg, or Fire Mountain. There are numerous Eldborgs in Iceland. This is a fine one.
The answer is: off a little side road, and then along a 2.5 km trail across private land. Other than that, no-one has made a spot for you to stop, except for Gerðuberg. But there’s a trick to this third way. You will probably be lulled by Gerðuberg. You might just miss Eldborg, because you’re looking the other way. And that’s the secret to the third way of seeing in Iceland: turn around.
Probably coming home with tonight’s Christmas Eve dinner.
Fish Boat Coming Home to Grundarfjördur Harbour
Just in time.
The surface is not Iceland.
It’s just weather.
There are too many!
Öldulón
Time is a tricky thing, even in Iceland. On the South Coast, for instance, where lava has taken many farms away since settlement over 1000 years ago, and where people with no better means to independence eked out a subsistence living between the moss and basalt, power poles walk across the landscape towards Reykjavik. It’s there, in “modernity”, that most Icelanders now live, yet the power that sustains them and guarantees them the wealth to maintain their independence in a global world, walks across their past to get there and turns it into nature.
In other words, to look at this landscape is to look at time, over a thousand years of social time included, through the lens of a great emptying. This sense of time is the price Icelanders must, perhaps, pay to belong to the world, but the cost is emptiness. It empties out the land, and empties out the past and empties out the soul. In short, one becomes dependent on the present and can no longer live in the fullness of time. This is not just an Icelandic issue. Today, as the Earth empties of life, we are all paying the price for this defense against each other. What a tricky balance!
Lagoons remind us that the “shore” is a zone made as much by the sea as by the earth.
And no place for humans. It is a dangerous place, where energies are not settled.
We can visit, but to live there? No, we’re too fragile. And yet, from them we draw life. No, not this one:
That’s the effluent of a geothermal power plant, sexed up. Don’t be fooled.
Sure, the sunset looking north to Djúpivogur at midnight, mid-July, as the perennial day of solstice starts to fade, are most splendid…
… but the real story here is the black land. It’s what gives the sky its light. It is here that you see it for the first time.
The view from Blábjörg.
You don’t see green lava everyday. It looks like it came from the bottom of the sea, but it came from deeper, flowed across the land…
Notice the Campers Rushing Past to See All of Iceland in Three Days
… and into the sea, which has been talking with it ever since.
The thing about land and sea is they don’t rush past.
A Farm in Iceland 