Light tells its own stories in Þingvellir. We are here to witness. It’s no surprise the Icelanders first called Christ “White Christ.” He was the north, that place from beyond the world. Who nonetheless came, physically, as this Earth, in a harsh and beautiful mercy.
Oxarárfoss
Do you think your local water pipes, delivering water to your house, would last a 1000 years, too?
Oxarárfoss
The falls that were moved to provide water for parliament. Good job, everyone.
Sure, in some other country it would be a waterfall, but on Snæfellsnes it’s just a babbling brook. Without a name.
Un-named Stream on the Kerling, Grundarfjörður
It’s like a rope anchoring the sky!
In winter, they don’t!
Stekkalækur
How crazy fun is that!
It is the horizon that marks the way across Iceland. It is there, where soft rock broken apart by fast-moving glaciers shows itself against the low, high-latitude snow, that one sees the difference between the impossible jumble of the near and the impossible formlessness of the distant.
It is the most basic cultural act to set up a human marker in that spot, in the most recognizable shape: a human guide. The jumble and the white-out become intimately more human, as a deep, psychological break between darkness and light. It clears the mind …
… and you find the way, exactly at the point, the ridges, where the wind blows the snow away. For most of Iceland’s history, these cairns were the difference between life and death as one travelled across country. Here at Litlafoss, it guides herdsmen out of the canyon pastures and away from the cliff where the raven nests and waits for you to slip and break your head. You can see some of these cairns on the left of the image below, although the one above was on the right and out of the image.
For Icelanders, these cairns are some of the deepest history in the land, and one of the historical markers of the creation of Icelandic culture.
They are to be approached with the reverence with which one approaches the caves at Lascaux or the Sphinx, and so are the glacial rubble fields that inspired them. Walk lightly in Iceland. Nature here is historical space.
You pass through history to get to the falls.
Litlafoss
To find the falls, you must go deep into the earth.
Worried about ash blowing around in the wind? It’s beautiful and mysterious isn’t, and makes your photographs, well, blur.
Seljaland
But if you go closer anyway, look who you will find dancing in the wind.
Bog Cotton!
So, blurriness, you see, is something to walk out into in the wind. When I did, it made me think I was a child of the wind myself. Oh, wait. I am.
