We lift off from JFK at 9 in the evening, headed toward Reykjavik, and by the time the bars back in New York
have closed, we are tucked in lava rock, submerged to the neck in a hot blue pool with sulfurous steam clouds bursting up around us. It's
the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and the sky
surrounding us never darkens.
The week ahead promises us 168 hours of uninterrupted daylight in
which to drive the Ring Road around Iceland. Though it's not a
particularly long distance, I already sense that seven days will be
about half as long as I would have hoped for. And so we have bolted
straight from the airport to the nearby Blue Lagoon.
Here, the phosphorescent saltwater, the bright and flat Atlantic sky
and the backdrop of industrial smokestacks give the place an
otherworldly feel, which is as it should be: The lagoon is entirely
man-made. Icelanders generate power geothermally, boring into the
ground for the steam that spins the turbines as it blasts toward the
surface; then they recapture that steam as water, pump it to a soaking
pond, and charge US$20 a head. We are the first to arrive, in the
early morning, and by noon the place is packed with Europeans,
Japanese and Americans. We crawl between steam cave and hot pot,
smeared in a gray silica mud bath.
On this trip last summer, I was traveling with my friends Mathew Gross
and Melony Gilles. We lived for many years in a remote nook of the
Utah desert where we developed a taste for isolated places and
geological oddities. So Iceland was the perfect place for us.
Speeding across the black rock desert in our rented Corolla, we would
occasionally pull to the shoulder, running fingers across the bulbous
lava figurines or testing the sponginess of the mossy tundra.
Iceland's Highway 1 - the roughly 1,335km Ring Road - is the only
route that circles the island, and it feels like someone put the
American West in a blender: California's poetic central coast, the
Nevada desert's barren expanses, Alaska's glaciers and
Yellowstone's geysers. They’re all crammed onto this island, and if
you don’t like one natural phenomenon you’re just a few hours from
the next.
After an afternoon of poking around dirt roads and sulfur pits and
making our way to a lonely lighthouse atop windy sea cliffs, we
checked into a guesthouse in Reykjavik and went straight to bed.
Two-thirds of the country’s nearly 300,000 people live in and around
this harbor city, and with its famous night life we figured we should
rest up before our first drinking binge.
I’d read somewhere - the in-flight
magazine perhaps - that during the solstice partying lasts all night.
After dinner we wound our way through the hilly cobblestone streets
and settled into a bar filled with velvet couches, where a DJ was
mixing a combination of old soul and hypnotic space music. But after a
few rounds of Viking - Iceland’s answer to Pabst Blue Ribbon, though
in this soberingly expensive country it sells for US$9 a pint - we
realized that, forget about daybreak, on our budget we’d barely make
it to sunset.
Around midnight, as the sun settled into the horizon, the streets were
still empty. The bar filled up, and cigarette smoke hung in the
daylight streaming through the windows, but it still was nothing like
the bacchanalia we were expecting. It felt like any other Monday
night. Later we learned that the natives do indeed celebrate the
solstice, but not until the nearest weekend.
Nothing, we discovered, cures a hangover like an afternoon in Viking
costume. Heading north from Reykjavik, the buildings fell away and we
found ourselves crossing green farmland backed by flat-topped
snow-covered mountains. After a few wrong turns through sheep-dotted
valleys, we bumped along a dirt road to Eriksstadir, home of Erik the
Red, founder of Greenland and father of Leif Eriksson, believed to be
the first European to set foot on America.
As we got out of the car, a woman in Viking-period regalia - a
coarsely woven tunic, hair in braids and a container like a powder
horn lashed to her waist - emerged from a canvas tent where she had
been sitting behind a laptop. She asked if we were there for the tour,
and Gilles could not contain herself: “Do we get to dress in Viking
clothes too?”
The woman considered the question, then smiled, inviting us to a
little hut where her daughter was tending a fox pup. After producing a
flowing yellow dress for Gilles, she led us up to a sod-roof hut, a
historically accurate re-creation of Erik’s home. Inside, a Viking
hunkered over a fire, whittling at a spear with a long, gleaming
knife. Draped around his shoulders was an entire wolf pelt, head and
legs included.
Speaking perfect English, the Viking delivered a brief biography of
Erik the Red while his mate fried a pancake on a cast-iron skillet.
Shortly she and Gilles coupled up and began cooking, weaving on the
loom, and doting over the fox pup. We men talked of warfare and
navigation, handled broadswords and donned battle helmets. “If
you’re fighting British or Scandinavian, headshots are not allowed,”
the Viking said, explaining the rules for mock battles. “But with the
Poles or Russians, anything goes.”
The Viking turned out to be an Englishman, who had lived for 15 years
in Norway, teaching lore and technique to school groups and organizing
Viking festivals. This summer he’d loaded his collapsible linen tent
into his EuroVan and taken the ferry to Iceland. He is a professional
Viking.
This time travel seemed oddly in keeping with the drive itself.
Driving in Iceland is not for the efficient. Highway 1 is a narrow
affair that doubles back into the fiords, like driving up and down
each tooth of a comb. Most bridges have just one lane, and many
stretches are unpaved.
We wound toward Lake Myvatn in the northeast, finally approaching a
landscape straight from Middle Earth: a volcanic crater ringed in
moss; outcroppings of lava dotted across the hills. Here we were even
closer to the Arctic Circle, and the sun shone an extra hour. At a
guesthouse in the tiny village of Vogar, we encountered the same sorts
of pilgrims I’ve met in the American Southwest, drawn to a bizarre
and inhospitable landscape.
“We’ve been here five days already,” a Dutch woman said. “We
can’t seem to leave.”
A gray-haired German woman in the guesthouse said she had relocated
full time to Iceland and spent much of her summers up in these
geothermal badlands.
A short walk from the house is Grotagia, a giant fissure splitting the
shelf of volcanic rock. I scrambled down into the chasm and found a
clear pool steaming at about 120 degrees Celsius, then followed a footpath for 1.6km
across a field of tundra and lava. The trail leads up one flank of a
symmetrical volcanic crater called Hverfell before dropping off the
other side into Dimmuborgir, a hobbit’s
paradise of towering lava castles, natural arches and countless
unexplored grottoes. Next we hurried to the gurgling purple and yellow
sulfur cauldrons at Namafjall and to the steaming lava heap at
Leirhnjukur, an active volcano itching to blow at any minute.
Across the highway from our guesthouse was Vogar’s single cafe, where
breakfasters were granted the odd privilege of
watching the proprietors milk the cows. Here on the rocky shores of
Lake Myvatn, Olof Hallgrimsdottir and her brother, Leifur
Hallgrimsson, run this dairy farm, settled by their family over a
century before. Hallgrimsdottir is blond and pretty with the high
cheekbones and upturned nose that are the norm in this country, and
when I met her at the cafe she was wearing a red-and-blue jumpsuit and
rubber boots.
While her teenage daughter poured coffee at the counter,
Hallgrimsdottir was on the other side of a window, amid four cows and
the hoses and tubes of a 16-udder milking contraption. Hanging on the
cafe walls was a row of award certificates from the dairy board.
Hallgrimsdottir invited me into the milking room and squirted a
half-pint of warm, sweet milk directly from a cow into a glass, and I
drank it down. Remarking that, “Cows can’t eat rocks,” she told me
that a few years back she converted the dairy shed into the cafe to
increase revenue on their boulder-strewn acres. An old German couple
took a seat by the window and, spooning up their yogurt, watched the
milking spectacle through the glass.
After a long stretch through gray, barren desert, we regained the
green hills on the approach to the western fjords. The road turned to
dirt, and topped out over a pass into a stunning valley of tundra,
yellow and purple wildflowers bursting from its flanks, waterfalls
pouring off the rim and a stream at the floor draining toward the sea.
At the coast, towering moss-covered cliffs crowded the sea, leaving
room only for the narrow road and an occasional red-roofed farmhouse
on a carpet of green grass where sheep grazed. Rain fell as a thick
mist
gathered over the Atlantic, and for many miles we snaked along between
a wall of rock and a wall of ocean.
I imagined this was how it felt to drive California’s coast 75 years ago, down-
shifting on the sharp bends in the gravel road, idling before a
one-lane bridge while an oncoming car made its crossing. Cold waves
lapped over black beaches, lonely crags jutted up from the water, and
with the sea fading from gray to green as the sun peeked through the
clouds, the landscape was sublime and melancholy.
And just when I thought I’d traveled to Edward Weston’s Big Sur, we
hit the glaciers. A big chunk of southeastern Iceland lies beneath the
vast ice field of Vatnajokull, which crept toward the ocean down a
series of fingerlike canyons. Off in the distance the cracked sheets
of ice were motionless and menacing. At Jokulsarlon a glacial snout
calved into an aquamarine lagoon, and the icebergs drifted almost
imperceptibly toward open water, penned in like zoo animals where the
busloads of tourists could gawk at their beauty.
Occasionally an iceberg floated beneath the highway bridge, was
carried to sea, then was dashed on the beach by the windswept waves.
We walked along the gray strand where the blocks of glacier rocked
gently in the tide, and we gathered in our hands the cocktail-size ice
cubes that had washed up on shore and flung them back to the sea.
On the final day around the Ring, we steered our rental car up the
steep switchbacks near the coastal town of Vik. We wanted to reach the
top of the seaside cliffs, overlooking a jumble of rock towers jutting
from the sea, and then find a trail down to a beach. But the little
car was scraping bottom before the first turn, so we left it on the
shoulder and continued on foot.
The rain clouds had passed, and as we topped out on the bluff, the sun
was dazzling and the wind was fierce. The grass spread out far beyond
a radio tower toward an abandoned building on the promontory. We
walked along the cliff, leaning away from the edge, feeling that the
wind could chuck you over. After an hour of forging against the
headwind, we realized that there was no trail to the beach. We were
treed, here on this towering bluff.
And that’s when we saw the birds. Dozens, hundreds of little white
gulls’ heads poked out of the rock wall below. We belly-crawled to
the edge and peer over.
The gulls danced in the wind. They banked off a howling gust, almost
bowled over backward, then straightened their wings and dived forward.
They surfed back and forth, now and then catching an updraft and
careening a hundred yards over the sea. The sun glistened on the
whitecaps and waves surged in slow motion around the rock towers. A
pair of puffins emerged from the rookery and braved the winds, looking
a bit unsure of their skills, their goofy legs dangling below like
parts of a puppet. We clutched the grass where we lay. The wind was
going to blow like this all day long. I could have stayed there
forever.
ICE AND STEAM
* At Reykjavik airport, an economy car rents for about US$530 a week,
and a small SUV is about US$1,005 a week (www.geysir.is).
* Reykjavik has plenty of guesthouses that are less expensive and more
charming than the hotels. Alfholl Guesthouse, the Friendly Elves
House, is centrally located; a double room with a shared bathroom is
9,000 Icelandic kronur, about US$127 (www.islandia.is/alf).
* The Vogar Guesthouse in the village of Vogar has rooms for US$183
(354-464-4344).
* The Blue Lagoon is 777km from the airport, and admission is US$17.3
(www.bluelagoon.com).
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