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
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