2006 Europe Trip Journal: 6

October 10 (Day Twenty-eight)

In the morning I realize that my CD player is nowhere in my backpack, so I start the hopeless process of trying to track it down. The odds are that the maid didn’t take it, so it is either in Frankfurt Airport security or lost on the Icelandair jet. I will have to write to the Frankfurt Airport online later, but I can look up Icelandair in the Reykjavik phonebook and call them. The woman there, after being prompted for English, says that Icelandair turns over any items found on planes to the Keflavik police, and she gives me their Lost and Found number.

Prompted also for English, the policeman on the other end of the phone says that he will check.  I tell him it was last Sunday’s flight from Frankfurt.  He finds nothing checked in; then he realizes he is looking on October 1.  “You see how it is in Iceland. We don’t even know what day it is. October 8^th was it? A wallet?”

“No.”

“A computer?”

“No.”

“See, you’re fortunate you only lost a CD player.  Other people were not so fortunate.  Another computer, no. A video game, no I’m sure. Why don’t you buy an iPod?  CD players are old technology anyhow.”

“I haven’t gotten onto the iPod technology, and I mainly just play CDs.”

“You can play CDs on an iPod too.  My kids taught me. You just load the CDs on your computer and drag to the iPod.”

“I guess this is now my chance to buy one.”

“It is, because I don’t see it. But send me an email and we’ll keep it on file.  It’s lostandfound@dc.is.  That’s dogcat dot ‘i’ ‘ess,’”

After a breakfast dominated by the Philadelphia ladies’ raucous chatter and the wall video, we borrow an umbrella from the front desk and begin our hike to meet Hildur Hermothsdottir at Salka, the address being Armuli, number 20.  She had said it was a healthy walk from the hotel but very manageable, and that turned out to be true. We marked it first on our map and then set out on the route in a light on-and-off rain. Most of the stretch was along Laugavegur away from the center of town, so we got to see a whole different array of shops and restaurants. We crossed all the streets that we had landmarked, and it was pleasurable to trade map name for street sign and reality seamlessly for once. Snorrabraut and Noatun were roads. Then the area became less urban and more like a series of suburban malls under construction, the expansion of Reykjavik onto the lava tundra, vaguely like a Leggo city going up.  “There was nothing here when I was a child,” Birgir had said when we passed through this district on our drive from the airport.

At a certain point in the walk, Lindy and I came to a joint revelation. The name “Iceland” in Icelandic is “Island.”  That is why that word is everywhere.

After we got ourselves across a major highway-like avenue called Kringlumyrabraut, we picked up Suthurlandsbraut (bent “d” for “th”) on the other side, as planned. Now we were out among hotels and office buildings. Vegmuli led to Armuli and, after a loss of orientation, we finally got going the right way and found number 20. Salka’s office was up a flight of stairs in a new motel-like office building.

The interlude doing business was a break from tourism.  We talked about three Icelandic female novelists that we might publish in English, Hildur elucidating the differences in their styles and themes. She promised to get us a translation of a chapter from each of the three books.  Then we looked at her nephew’s book, Delicious Iceland. Now a gourmet chef in the Bahamas who had apprenticed with Charlie Trotter in Chicago, Volundar Snaer Volundarson had done a vintage Icelandic hybrid cookbook in English. Recipes included Smoked Eel with Edamame Mousse and Wasabi Oil; Creamed Sea Urchin Soup with Braised Fennel; Fried Tern Eggs in Tempura with Aioli, Micro Basil, and Garlic Roots; Singed Head of Sheep; Skyr Topped with Blueberries; Dandelion Wine; Rot-Cured Shark; and Gratinated Iceland Cyprine with White Beans, Tomatoes, and Champagne Sabayon, among which were stunning photographs of cooking over lava, baking overnight in bore holes, collecting eggs from bird nests by rope along cliffsides, and serving a banquet on glacial ice. Because of the lavishness of the book, there were only a few economically practical options for us as an American partner, so we explored those, and Hildur offered to set up a meeting with her nephew while we were still in town so that we could get a sense of who he was.

On the hike back we walked more slowly by the shops, no longer on a timetable. We had not bought any presents for family so far on our trip, as we had not seen very good options (beyond tourist knickknacks) and we had also not wanted to lug stuff for weeks. However, the many tax-free woolen shops seemed attractive and, after brief visits, we decided to come back to a few of them another time.

Anaestu Grosum was in the midst of “live food” day, so we had a lunch that included marinated shredded parsnips and carrot and spinach soups, all cold of course. With all imported fruits and virtually all imported vegetables (cauliflower and broccoli were the main two traditionally grown locally—facts enumerated by the young woman behind the counter), Reykjavik would be right on the cutting edge of the “live food” movement.

Our afternoon plan was to go to one of the Reykjavik art museums with its curator, Fee Quay. Our connection to her was through our long-time friend George Quasha. A poet and multimedia artist, George had for the last several years innovated his own version of the sculpture of “balanced rocks.”  In collaboration with George and his wife Susan, we had published a lush color book of these constructions. George had met Fee Quay in New York, and there was some thought then that she might bring a selection of George’s assemblages to her Icelandic museum. Thus, George not only gave me her contact information but asked if I could bring her a copy of his book. It was just shipping from the printer in Asia, and we got one advance copy for display at Frankfurt, so I collected that after the show and had it in hand.

As it drifted past 13:00, we wondered if we had gotten the time wrong. In fact, Lindy had to back out of an awkward introduction to a “wrong” middle-aged Chinese lady who didn’t speak English. Arriving moments later, Fee was much younger, more like in her thirties. We had imagined a car, but the museum was close enough that she came on foot, bearing an umbrella. We walked back with her in what was now a steady rain. On the way we learned that she had come from Singapore to New York where she met her husband, an Icelandic sculptor who eventually wanted to move back to Iceland. “They always want to return,” she said.  “Something about the place.  It’s isolated.  It’s cold.  It’s expensive.  But if they’re from here, they come back.”

We talked about the Iceland genome studies, much heralded because of the homogeneous population going back for so long in one place.  Fee smirked at that. “We have two children, so I am very happy to mess up their racial purity.”

While we were walking down Laugavegur, we came upon a startling synchronicity. When we told Fee about our daughter (who years ago renamed herself Miranda July), she stopped dead in her tracks and stared at us. She was ten minutes late for our appointed time because she was reading Miranda’s materials online in the context of considering her work for a show. “I was so mesmerized by her words that I lost track of the time.”

The museum was by Tryggvagata where we had made our brief foray to look at the harbor a couple of nights earlier.  A giant refurbished warehouse, it still had a spare, wide-open feeling, as though there was mainly space, with the art dwarfed a bit by the vast dimensions of the building. In certain spots, as we walked between exhibit areas, it seemed almost jail-like in its vistas and long enclosed corridors.

The work was almost all conceptual or assemblages of various sorts, including sculptural sets for performance pieces. Fee told us that everything was by artists born since 1968.

We began with a nest hanging from the ceiling in the center of a large darkened space, floodlit.  An amorphous heap of random stuff lay on the floor underneath it. Next came a theatrical space for performance. The objects collected there included actual cracked eggs with the yolk hardened around their shells on the floor.

Then we saw the ruins of Hitler’s old box in Berlin; that is, the balcony from which he once delivered speeches. Fee told us that the plan had been to reconstruct it here in Reykjavik on site, but the artist finally decided that was more trouble than it was worth, and it made more of a statement just to heave the parts on the floor and let them lie there in disarray. Thus it was a lot of old wood and metal with a huge red curtain in tangles across it.  The title was “Hitler’s Grandstand.”

Next was “Tribal TV,” a room full of old fifties and sixties TVs blasting away. An adjoining room resembled an old antique shop. It was filled with an array of different objects, including a paper maché statue of an E.T.-looking dwarf wearing the costume of a Christmas-tree ornament; a cooking display with woks and chopsticks; a cowboy-like plaster bust; various stools and tables; and a synthesizer decorated like a Christmas tree that people were supposed to play—and Lindy did. The walls of the room were painted with bright-colored art that varied in one giant mural from Polynesian and Australian Aborigine stylized snakes, alligators, and other unnameable creatures, to a colors-out-of-order rainbow (including black and white lines) dwindling to a perspective dot, to trompe l’oeils creating imaginary boxes and concavities in the wall—all zany and clashing and childlike.

In the next room we saw hair and artificial-fabric sculptures, and then we came to a room in which only one piece of art appeared: a giant dropcloth suspended from the ceiling, floodlit; on it was printed a hyper-enlarged old photograph of men working in this building when it was a factory.  “The most literal piece in the show,” Fee acknowledged off-handedly.

As we were crossing between galleries, my eye caught some amazing paintings on the wall of a museum room that really drew my attention. “Oh, that,” Fee said.  “That’s our permanent exhibit of Erró.” The images and their diversity were astonishing. The giant canvass that first snagged my attention showed a blimp-like octopus with a humanoid face resembling Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar; it was floating over a landscape of blurred and twisted figures, all in various shades of purple, magenta, and red with a bit of yellow. Another blimplike Chinese figure floated behind it in such a fashion that its stomach opened or its dress flew up (indistinguishable) to release hordes of people in the landscape from within it. The painting was somewhat impressionistic and, while the figures looked Finnish-Oriental, its crowds were out of an odd combination of Picasso’s Guernica and Hieronymus Bosch.

Another painting was a mixed landscape of Wonder Woman vignettes and Viking warriors on Hell’s Angels motorcycles, using both bows and arrows and ray guns, involved in some sort of battle with invisible foes while the Wonder Woman oversaw it in another dimension, all like goddesses on Valhalla.  This canvass was much less impressionistic and was done along classic comic-book lines. It was as though a comic had been drawn but was not yet completely inked in spots, though where it was, the yellows and reds were bright and pure.

There were many such mixed comics around the room, filled with various cartoon characters and pop art icons; for instance, what looked like Marilyn Monroe next to what looked like Yosemite Sam. There were many Icelandic god and goddess figures done in pop art and also huge canvasses of science-fiction battles with characters and creatures from very different genres.

Then another whole set of paintings were perfect renditions of parts of classic paintings mixed with other elements, the latter sometimes in black and white; for instance Vermeer’s “Woman with Earring” interrupted by a wide-eyed black-and-white Raggedy Anne doll.

Yet another series involved variations on Maoist Chinese political art: scenes of cheerful Chinese peasants in from the fields, but interspersed with dancing figures from Degas or Goya and photographic movie characters. In another painting, Maoist progressive themes mixed at different levels with Russian Orthodox panoramas.  These were like different paintings imposed on one another, all gathered as if within discontinuous scales of the same canvas. Mao also appeared in unusual and unlikely settings, as leading Red Guards through New York City, the UN, Empire State and Chrysler Buildings behind his march. Young Red Guard peasants also appeared in other landscapes in a number of unlikely situations and countries. In another set of canvases Hitler and his colleagues were used in a similar manner.

In addition, there were canvases defying description, wild collages of manga, traditional comics, classic paintings, Picasso-like cubism, and Andy Warhol style pop art, and Bruce Connor style clip art.

After the tour three of us sat in the museum coffee shop, a big picture window overlooking the working harbor: a neat spacious parking lot filled with cars, ships pulled up into berths, derrick equipment at work.  Fee got us cakes and tea, and we sat talking about the possibility of making Erró’s art more available in the U.S.  This was his home museum, and they had many publications of his work, including two in English. Seventy years old, Erró himself lived in Paris where he was very popular, in fact was popular throughout Europe but virtually unknown in North America.

Our Icelandic publishing possibilities now ranged over novels by women, a high-end cookbook, photo landscapes, and one iconic Icelandic artist.

Hours later we walked back this way in darkness, looking for a restaurant.  At night one could be anywhere; it felt like America of the fifties, but I thought, “This is Iceland. There is ocean on all sides of us.  There is no city or town in the center.  The echoes of the Vikings and ice are here.”

We gradually got more and more drenched and finally settled on the publicized Enrico’s on Laugavegur. Good Icelandic cooking in Reykjavik pretty much meant Italian—pizza and a mussels/shrimp dish—not Chef Volundarson.  He belonged to Chi-town.

October 11 (Day Twenty-nine)

The weather, which has been rainy and windy and only briefly intermittently clear since we arrived in Iceland, has taken a turn for the worse.  I know this in my first waking moment from the sound of heavy rain in the courtyard outside and the gusts against our window.  We don’t have to say it—the trip to Akureryi for which we readied overnight packs the day before is in doubt.  It was going to be a lot of driving on back-country highways under the best of conditions; it will be totally harrowing for five and a half hours in wind and rain.  Yet we don’t have any other options.  We have been focusing on this journey with Birgir and Erla to return Victoria as our single opportunity to see a large stretch of Iceland.  The curiosity is balanced by fear of the unknown, including worry about driving—high speed, narrow roads, blind curves, total wilderness outside.

The clerk at the front desk is used to citing a homily that I have heard often in Maine: “If you don’t like the weather in Iceland, just wait a few minutes.”  So no one really knows what this day will be like yet, she tells me, using her own words.

True enough.  By the end of breakfast the rain has all but stopped and the sun is even visible for moment, as I walk down Laugavegur to the tourist office to get their daily weather report.  The moment I enter, I know that we will not make the trip.  In big letters on the board are words like “snow” and “gale-force winds”; closer inspection confirms that they apply to Akureyi as well as just about all the regions we must pass through to get there.  I wait on line anyway and ask the woman’s opinion.  “Today is not a good day to travel north.  Tomorrow should be much, much better.  The sun is going to come out.”

“How about those tours?” I ask, pointing to the brochures stacked along the desk.  We were going to spend two whole days with Birgir and Erla so, if we aren’t going to Akureryi today, we must makes plans for tomorrow too.  Our time in Iceland is growing short.  This will be the fourth of six days, and we still hadn’t gotten out of Reykjavik except for the lava fields en route to Keflavik and the Blue Lagoon.

“I have been on Reykjavik Excursions,” she tells me, “and they are very good, very informative.  I can’t speak for the others.”

“Do you think they will go on their tours today?”

“Yes, they go everyday, but it is too late for today already.  They leave first thing in the morning.”

“If my wife and I want to go tomorrow, how would we get reservations?”

“You buy them right here from the tourist office.”

“Okay, I’ll be back if we don’t go to Akureryi.”

It is not raining at all now, and a brief shot of sun comes through the clouds, so my mind is moving in two directions at once.  But almost as soon as I return to the room, ambivalence ends.  The phone is ringing, and Birgir in on the other end, “There is snow up north and it is very windy.  I think maybe it is better if you don’t go.  It will not be comfortable.”

“Are you going?”

“Of course.  And you are welcome, but I am thinking you will not like it so much.  The roads will be slick.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“We’ll be back tomorrow.  Maybe we can do something on Saturday.  I could take you on a tour out of town.”

“Okay.  Let’s plan on getting together then.”

“Yes, that is good.”

“Have a safe trip.  Give our best to Victoria.”

“I was just thinking,” Birgir says, “Erla and I will get back on time tomorrow to take you to dinner.  Will that be good.”

“For sure.  Let’s do it.  Good luck with the wind and ice.  Don’t rush on our account tomorrow.  Get back whenever you can.”

“I’ve driven it many times in worse weather.  We’ll be fine.  We’ll be back by the middle of the afternoon.”

Relieved that the issue is no longer in doubt, we can now give the next two days a fresh look and consider our options.  We definitely should sign up for a tour.  Yes, it would have been better to travel the countryside with Birgir and not a busload of tourists, but we have two days left after today and, if we are not going to miss Iceland altogether, we need to get out of Reykjavik one way or the other.

First there is today, and we go downstairs to discuss possibilities with the concierge.  There is an older tour guide hanging the lobby, bitching about the snow and wind outside of town and having to work today, so Lindy inquires as to whether he is leading a group somewhere.  He is—the ladies from Philadelphia have signed him up for a private tour.  I want no part of that, but Lindy brazenly asks if we can come along.

“I would need to ask their permission.”  “

“That’s okay,” I say.  “I think we have things to do.”

But Lindy wants him to ask anyway until she hears where he is going: the tour he leading them on is to suburban town of Hafnarfjordur, about the best that he can muster on this inclement day—nothing we need to see, especially amid their small talk and at the mercy of their generosity.

Upstairs I ask Lindy her thoughts about calling Helga, the anthropologist I met the other morning on the campus.  She thinks that is a great idea.  I dial Helga’s cell and get her on the first ring.  She is immediately receptive, graciously so.  For the morning she is working on her thesis but she can spend the afternoon with us.  She offers to take us around the city.  “Maybe you would like to meet some anthropologists afterward?” she asks.

“Sure.  That would be nice.”

“We can plan our walk so that we end up at the anthropology department.  I know that my advisor Dr. Palsson will be there.  He is chairman.  I have told him about you, and he is very interested in meeting you.”

We agree to meet for lunch at 12:30 at Anaestu Grosum, her favorite restaurant.

After the phone call, I propose to Lindy that we sign up now for a tour tomorrow.  She agrees, so I offer to go back to the tourist office myself.  It is pouring again, and she would like to check out nearby second-hand clothing stores.

This time I remember my bag of old crackers and stale bread from Italy.  Borrowing a second umbrella at the desk, I set off down Laugavegur. By the time I get to the tourist office, the rain has stopped.

A brief discussion with the same attendant convinces me to select the Golden Circle tour over the Saga one.  These are the two that make the most sense, as we would not seek a tour of Reykjavik and we do not plan to sit on a bus for a whole day just to see one glacier, volcano, or ruins.  The Golden Circle hits the major sites near Reykjavik, going essentially south, southwest, and west, including waterfalls, geysers, volcanic ponds, and the National Park.  The competing Saga excursion goes north and northwest of town and is more historic, focusing on early settlements and Viking sites, with a museum or two thrown in.  We want to see the varied outdoor landscapes of wild Iceland and, while any itinerary means missing certain things, the Golden Circle provides the most big-ticket items.

The cost is almost $100 per person, which seems reasonable for nine hours of docented touring of the countryside.  I provide my credit card and get two tickets and a receipt.  Then I head out toward the Tjorn.

The sky is now cloudy bright, so I stick the umbrella in my pocket and cross Laekjargata.  The street is a complete wind tunnel again.  I find that I can barely move against a stiff gale.  Signs are rattling noisily, and at least one metal board on a pole outside a shop is being bent to the ground and then snapping back up, so that it drums erratically within the white noise of the air.  People, if slowed, seem undeterred, as men and women proceed to work, hunched against the elements, clutching articles.  At moments I feel as though I will be lifted off the ground, but there is a theme of normality. Everything is okay in Reykjavik; it is just windy.

The weather is calmer at the Tjorn where the birds are in full attendance—maybe a hundred ducks and a dozen or more swans plus the a requisite band of gulls and a few geese.  As I begin tossing crackers, everyone is drawn to the spot.  Even the pigeons and other land birds gather around me and try to get catch the crumbs in midair.  I aim to different spots for a variety of clienteles, but it is a melée.  Wings flap, and birds peck at each other, tossing the bigger scraps into the air, occasionally many times. When I am out of rations, I stand by the bench and watch the arras settle, the fowl finally drifting away so that, for a moment, it is a scenic landscape—serene swans, gulls taking off, ducks in flotillas, sky and water both vibrant and shifting shades of violet, an old-fashioned church with a high thin pointed steeple on the near shore, a small bird-covered island in the center, and prop planes ignoring the gale and taking off and landing in the distance, probably to and from Akureryi and other such places.

Shades of amethyst and violet in the water mixed in its chop with the brightness of the sky make a carpet so lush and textured it is almost museum-quality, with an imaginary grape taste to it; the church completes the cameo as the frontispiece of a novel about Scandinavia.

Anaestu Grosum prepared enough shredded parsnips and carrot soup yesterday that they are still offering it a day after and, delighted to see it, Helga orders exactly what we had.  We get different soup and vegetable dishes.  She is a studious-looking woman, wire-rim glasses, light brown hair parted down the middle, a broad gnomic face.  During the meal she talks about her work—a thesis on male gender issues in the Icelandic equivalent of the Peace Corps; then her previous career, time living in Denmark studying pottery, her grown children, and the walk we can take through Reykjavik during the afternoon.

We start out by meandering around the streets of the district she refers to as “101 Reykjavik,” the center of town.  As we walk a few blocks from the Fron, she points out styles of architecture and spots where this or that event happened in her life such as an exhibition or the home of a friend.  We head down Klapparstigur to Grettisgata, then over to Skolavorthustigur.

I am noticing now how so many of the graffiti, ads, and posters reflect qualities of Erro: a kind of cartoon sensibility of things, blimplike figures, a blobbish floating quality to shapes, creatures with distorted body-parts, collages blending photography with painted icons, posters merging into graffiti.  As I point this out, Helga has a sudden inspiration.  A gallery just down the next block is owned by a friend of hers.

Most street galleries are mediocre or mildly captivating affairs; every so often one invites a second look.  Listagalleri is one of those for me. We have been in Iceland only three-plus days and seen but a few kinds of landscapes; yet they possess a unique light and energy, and their surface features and topography arouse another landscape in the unconscious, a kind of subliminal after-image. These have been imprinting on my imagination without my realizing it: the subdued brilliance and phosphorescent blue-gray on a black, jagged, featureless topography that in a smaller, fractal dimension is so intricately and tortuously carved that it is beyond inventory. Multiple contrasts of bright skies, active clouds, black lava fields, twisted rocks, and sparse but glowing foliage comprise a secret phenomenology that is mostly invisible like ultraviolet light.  And that is precisely what I see in the work at Listagalleri.

We are surrounded by subliminal renditions of the native landscape, canvasses portraying complementary colors, hues seen in a different radiation; these have replaced those that our eyes discern. Big oils show rocks and mountains as blue-black blobs and mounds set in fiery orange and yellow to yellow-red landscapes, everything that surface Iceland is not. The black with green and white fuzz has been transformed into something implying the intensity of its formation, i.e., when the lava was hot, swirling rivers and ingots. It could be that the painter is working subliminally, creating an appearance of luminosity that is absorbed and withheld when only black rays are reflected for sight.

Topographies in yellow and orange are minimalist and spectral rather than realistic portrayals of even volcanic eruptions; they are an imaginal tundra from a children’s book, bright and primal; they suggest bands of light on the surface of the Sun. Other canvases show brownish-black islets and lagoons.  The edges of the islets are streaked with dirty orange.  A cobalt blue mountain shading to absolute black along its top overlooks a bright landscape.  The water filling its pools and lagoons is a sharply clashing Van Gogh white with currents of blue and purple, some like threads, others puffy.  These works all evoke hidden Iceland, the astral core of an otherwise bleak northern land.

The owner of the gallery is a man of our age, Guthmundur Kjartansson (a bent “d” rendering “th” on his card), someone Helga knows from her pottery days.  I ask his permission to photograph some of the paintings, as I imagine that they might make great covers if we end up publishing one of Salka’s Icelandic novelists or find some other Icelandic writing—and he is pleased by the request. He identifies the main artist here as Hafdis Huld Hakansson and shows us some new works he has just received and not yet hung.  Then he points out other painters who he thinks we might find engaging.  Almost all of these are landscapes and most of them are minimalist in some way—blocks of “false” color and simplified, Euclidean and non-Euclidean renderings of complex spaces.  A number are little cameos in golden frames and show childlike or doll-like interiors and faces turned slightly oddly, wrong in some way that also makes them “right.”

“These ones are pure jazz,” Guthmundur says, pointing to a group of miniatures in fields of color.  “On the other hand, this one is more like a chess game.”  He points to an abstract scrabbled design.

“I just remembered,” I say, “doesn’t Bobby Fischer live in Iceland?  Isn’t it that no other country would take him?”

“Yes, he does.  You see, we are a bit mad.  You spot him occasionally, walking the streets, looking distracted.  He has a Japanese girlfriend in Japan.  Sometimes she’s with him.”

“I think the United States is after him,” I continue to recall, “because he played a chess match in Serbia during the Balkan War when there was an embargo against Americans going there or doing business.”

“That’s right.  Iceland offered him asylum and they won’t extradite him.  Why?  Because we are crazy about chess, that’s the only reason. We make him a national hero.  But, if the truth be told—and everyone knows this—he’s a little ‘not right,’” he concludes, pointing to his head.

“Any game at which a machine can beat a human is dangerous to try to master because its algorithm is deep enough to get lost in but not deep enough to get you out.”   say that, but I don’t know where it comes from, and I am not sure that I haven’t committed the very fallacy I am trying to describe.  I guess I have considered for a while that chess may not be quite as deep as it seemed once seemed to me before computers were able to find it had a limited number of algorithms and moves.

Next we talk about Erro and his influence on Icelandic painting.  “I have known him and I like him, “Guthmundur says.  “He is appreciated in Iceland, but we don’t revere him the way they do in Paris. I guess we save that for a stranger like Bobby Fischer. You know, Erro is Guthmundur too.  His real name is Guthmundur Guthmundsson.”

The visit gradually over, we say goodbye and head back out into the wind.

We continue up Skolavorthustigur to the Hallgrimskirjka church at its summit.  I passed it at close range two mornings ago but didn’t get a good look at it because I was running back to the Fron.  It is a massive structure, more tall than broad and more odd than majestic. The white concrete with its modern stepped design gives the appearance of a giant organ, rising by degrees to a summit and steeple with simple Cross.  It also looks like a giant stone bar graph.  One tall, extremely narrow arch-shaped window in the Icelandic style is set over the entrance, no stain on the glass, no color at all, in fact black.  Six extremely tiny, vertically oriented windows follow it like little peepholes to the top, also in the spare national style.

The Lonely Planet guide describes what I call metaphorically organ pipes as “concrete representations of volcanic basalt columns…flank[ing] the 75m-high steeple.”

“What denomination?” Lindy asks.

“Lutheran,” says Helga.  “This is Iceland.  Everything is Lutheran.  Look at this church.  Construction was begun in 1940 and it took thirty-four years to build. Lutherans build churches because they believe in nothing.”

She points out the statue of Leif Eiriksson on a giant ascending slab in front.

“Hardly a religious figure,” I say.  The slab is actually an abstract rendering of a Viking longboat, with its marine shape gently hinted as the stone block rises to where Leif is planted grandly at its prow, looking outward, no doubt to the West.

“The statue is older than the church,” Helga explains.  “On the one thousandth anniversary of Iceland’s first parliament in 1930 the United States presented it to Iceland.  I imagine they chose Leif Eiriksson because he discovered Vinland and was the first American.”

“Vinland is America,” I add, “at the end of that sequence from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Baffinland.”

“And of course Irish monks were there ahead of Leif Eiriksson,” Helga adds.

She wants us to be able to go into the church and take its fabled elevator to the top for the view of the city, but there is a funeral going on, somber music flowing out, quite loud and melancholy when we poke our heads in.  A guard informs her that the public cannot be admitted for viewing now.  “Too bad,” Helga says.  “It is worth the ride just to hear the choral music in the elevator.  They think of it as an ascension to heaven.”

When we leave the area of the church and cross the crest of the hill, the wind is so strong that for a moment we are walking without moving.  Deep purple cloud masses parade across the sky. Lindy pulls the blue woolen cap she bought at the used-clothing store tight over her head, and Helga snaps the knot in her thick layers of scarfing tighter. “This is typical weather for us,” she says.

The route she chooses takes us from Hallgrimskirjka down Skolavorthustigur along Laufasvegur, Skothusvegur, and around Njardarsgata and Freyjugata, with a peek at the sculpture garden of Einar Jonsson, an early twentieth-century Icelandic artist who left behind a menagerie of icons and ghosts (“and far too many Leif Eirikssons,” Helga sighs, “all over town”).  We pass residential homes with ambitious gardens, stone walls, towering trees with swings as if this were the American Midwest.  A row of nearly identical two-story, three skylight houses runs down to the Tjorn, each of them a different bright color with a different-colored two-tone roof so that the appearance is like a gameboard: coffee, blue-gray, light lemon, white, the roofs red, silver, orange, etc.  A so-named Nordic House on the corner is bright purple blue on top and yellow underneath.

As we come down to the Tjorn, Helga tells us that there are not yet quite 300,000 people living in Iceland, eighty percent of those right around Reykjavik.  By American population standards it is a county, but by the standards of a culture, it is as much a nation as Russia or Denmark or Navaholand.

We circle the pond to its far side, creationary clouds opening and closing like curtains in an insistent wind.  A rainbow forms in the distant sky.  Small, low-flying planes come down right over us to their landings.

We repeat my experience of entering the grounds of the University of Iceland and head straight to the library.  Helga shows us around the stacks and then leads us into a room with old Icelandic books. A large Eskimo-type boat occupies an alcove. A furry, leathery object (at least for an intrepid water-going vehicle), it is set there for close examination and touching, complete with a suit of fur clothing and thick water-bearing sacks which, I imagine, are versions of the seal bladders that the natives used as weapons against the Vikings, hurling them full of liquid against advancing invaders so they exploded in their midst.

“A Skraeling craft,” I declare with playful superciliousness, showing that I know the Sagas to some degree.

“Yes,” smiles Helga, “this is Skraeling indeed.”

She leads us downstairs to the anthropology offices where her advisor is waiting in his faculty office, a large desk, a floor-to-ceiling library encircling the room.  Gisli Palsson is a tall, handsome distinguished-looking professor in the “Charlton Heston” tradition (remember The Vikings with Tony Curtis), a little bit younger than Lindy and me.  He stands and shakes my hand and then signals us to chairs.  In the ensuing twenty minutes, we discover a number of different points of connection:

• He has done a study of Icelandic fishing villages, whereas I wrote my thesis on fishing villages in Eastern Maine, and Jim Acheson, a professor at the University of Maine who got interested in my work and did a real study several years later (by comparison to my half-assed job), is a colleague of his in the area of fishing ethnographies.  Gisli asks right away if I know him, and I tell him the story.
• We have each written, albeit it very different, anthropological books on the meanings and metaphors of DNA when viewed as a cultural rather than a scientific object, e.g. the social and symbolic implications of biotechnology, its attempt at redefinition of our bodies and humanity through genetic science.  He has focused on the social and sociopolitical aspects, with some emphasis on the famous Icelandic genome study, and I have focused on the epistemological and psychospiritual aspects.
• He is presently writing a book about wetlands in Iceland and the general meaning of “water,” and our son Robin is a wetlands biologist working for San Francisco Estuary Institute and developing ideas about the morphology of landscape and particularly relations between bodies of water and land.
• We were each good friends with Roy “Skip” Rappaport, ecological anthropologist, one-time president of the American Anthropological Association, one-time chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Michigan.  Skip was my adviser at Michigan, head of my thesis committee, and a founding board member of our nonprofit and publishing company and a member till his death in 1999.  We also published his book Ecology, Meaning, and Religion because, as I tell Gisli, “Skip thought it was easier to give me rather than Yale the next book of his to help me earn a living than to keep writing recommendations to get me a job.”  Gisli knew him mostly in his later years and had invited him at one point to Reykjavik to give a talk.
• We each have a connection to Donna Haraway, the feminist historian of science and academician living in Santa Cruz.  I know her as an author I discovered while writing my first embryology book in the early ’80s and then as a faculty member that both our kids had at UC/Santa Cruz in the ’90s.  We also have a more recent connection, as we republished her out-of-print history of twentieth-century embryology, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, the very book by which I discovered her. We recently had dinner with her and her husband.  Gisli has that book on his shelf, and he points to it.
• We each have an adult child living in Los Angeles.
• As the annual Anthropology Association meetings are in San José this year, Gisli will be in Berkeley, the town where we live, to visit in about a month, and he knows our turf well because recently he and his family spent the better part of a year there.

Everyone is amazed at so many less than “six degrees of separation” events across remote cultures, and Helga offers to leave us for a while to chat, as she can take Lindy around for an additional academic tour.

Gisli and I try to get a better understanding of each other’s work. He hands me the manuscript of his “at press” DNA/genomics book, and I sort through its pages, reading here and there, looking for the central themes.  I then explain my own work as an outsider, concluding “It’s too academic to be popular, and too metaphysical to be academic.”

He asks if I know Paul Rabinow, a renowned, somewhat cutting-edge anthropologist at Berkeley, dealing in structural and Foucaultian matters. I did know him more like twenty-five years ago when he lived a block away from us on Parker Street and we occasionally got together then and talked ideas though with meager concordance. I haven’t seen him since then, so Gisli brings me up to date:  He has gotten married, had a child, the child has grown up and gone to college; Paul has had some health issues, but he’s recovered.

I mention the only thing I know about—Rabinow’s attack on Peter Duesberg, the so-called AIDS contrarian and radical by and about whom we published books, and my distaste for the smugness and know-nothing tone of his attitude.  “In this case,” I say, “he is in over his head because he doesn’t know the biology and, even if Duesberg turns out to be wrong, Rabinow is criticizing him solely for political reasons and without understanding the real epidemiological issues.”

Gisli tries to cast Paul in a more sympathetic light, so I back off a bit.  “What it finally comes down to,” I say, “is that he is ambitious and academic, while I am anti-ambitious and anti-academic.”

Perhaps by now I am getting a little pompous and full of myself in my excitement at all the connections, switching gears within this high-end show-and-tell.  When Helga and Lindy return, we say our goodbyes and exchange information for reconnecting in Berkeley.  Then Helga and we continue the informal tour or, more to the point, bring it to a conclusion, as she is going to the Iceland-Sweden football match at 16:00.  This surprises me, not only for her strong interest in the game but the bad weather.  “That hardly would stop a match,” she says.  “It would only make it more interesting.”

We come back by a different route, as Helga leads us past the oldest house in Reykjavik, which is just a small apartment building presently under renovation; the Salvation Army hotel; a well-known innovative-music pub of the sort that modern Iceland is famous for; and then around the harbor back to the Reykjavik Art Museum where she leaves us off and we wave farewells.

Our location gives us a chance to revisit Fee Quay to discuss the prospects for an Erro project in more detail.  Fortunately, she is in her office and able to come downstairs to meet us.  We bat around concepts for about twenty minutes.

From there we head back toward the Fron but stop spontaneously ub one of the tax-free shops downtown.  The entire inside of the place is like a big fluffy sheep with blue, yellow, pink, and brown wool in a variety of shapes and forms. We spend an hour there, picking out presents, as we sort through myriad items on shelves, weighing aesthetics, practicality, and cost in the matter of hats, shirts, towels, and the like.  Scarves are woven in a variety of odd forms and shapes, other headgear likewise.   We acquire a fair amount of stuff.  I am particularly charmed by the ubiquitous woolen head bands which cover the ears but not the head, and Lindy and I both get those for ourselves; in fact, I select two. I wear one of mine out of the store.

The way the tax refund works is that the clerk gives you a form, and you take it over to the closest tourist office, a block or two away; then they give you cash in your own currency as well as a form that you have to fill out and put in a mailbox at the Reykjavik Airport after you have passed customs and are officially “out of the country,” this obviously to keep locals from getting tax refunds.  At the tourist office a woman takes our credit-card numbers, and the amount of the refund will be debited if we don’t mail the forms properly.

A side benefit of this process is that the lady handling the refund is willing to take all my small euro coins and turn them into nickels and dimes as well as two whole quarters because she needs all the change she can get for refunds.

That night we hike up and down Laugavegur looking for a new place for dinner.  We actually take a table at an Italian place a block above the Fron, but everything on the menu is so expensive and synthetic, kind of like a fancy KFC, that we spur-of-the-moment bail for the second time on this trip (or third if you count the villa).

“After all can’t we just change our minds?” we rationalize as we manage to get to our feet and stride out…though Lindy worries she left her scarf on the chair and has to go back while I wait outside—she didn’t.  It was probably compulsive guilt. We return to the Italian restaurant of our first evening, the Caruso, which at least has a good feel to it, kind of dark and crowded in a bustling romantic way, with an interesting fish of the day.

Afterward we return to our hotel, dodging cars pulled onto the sidewalk.  The Habrystipvotur is out again with its serving crew, steam-cleaning the cement and cobblestone.

Excited at the prospect of the upcoming tour into the countryside, I fall asleep picturing geysers and glaciers and have a dream somewhere between the archetypal and the lucid.  I am walking to the area where we are going to meet a bus for our tour but, in an indiscernible switch, instead of being about to travel by land, we are being directed toward the dock.  Once we are walking down long blocks, we realize that it is much too far to go for the limited time we have and we are going to miss the tour. I am frustrated and complaining about the changed logistics to Lindy when a car suddenly pulls up alongside us.  A friendly man, apparently associated with the Reykjavik Excursions company, offers to drive us there. I get in the front seat, and Lindy gets in the back.  He cuts through a giant park reminiscent of those in Berlin and then along a much enhanced version of the Trieste wharves.  As he leaves us at the dock beside a giant liner, he calls out us his cell number to us so that we can phone him for a return to our hotel after we get back.

The ship is full of kids running around; it reminds me of ballrooms of my childhood.  The liner pulls out slowly into the ocean with us aboard.  Where we are going is a much longer trip than we realized.  We are supposed to go to sleep in a berth. However, there are no beds, so we wander around, waiting for daylight.

I wake up but find myself still in the dream. I am lying on a cot next to a porthole.  We are drifting by lava fields visible in moonlight.  Since I am awake, this cannot be a dream, but it is. The landscape is like ones we have seen outside Keflavik but much steeper: a cindery mountainous shoreline filled with perfect crystals the size of basketballs, all different sorts of these, most of them balls of perfect white luminous quartz, shining as though from within. The kids are reaching out somehow through the glass portholes to touch them, and they even snag a few diamond shards off them. It seems too dangerous, however, for me to stick a hand out—the passage is narrow, and the ship is moving very fast.

Down a flight of stairs is a large room where a class is transpiring, and I head there.  Someone is teaching a method of massage that I immediately judge fraudulent and inflated.  I think it is a form I rejected years ago.  He is wanting everyone to touch each other, in fact encouraging people to touch their partners’ genitals (this replicates a scene from an American sitcom with Icelandic subtitles on the TV the previous day).  The request seems indulgent and wrong to me, yet still titillating, and some people are doing it.  Most are just standing there.  The teacher then says, “Everyone is being too polite.  If you follow my instructions, you will understand the method.”

I interrupt him to boast, “I have written hundreds of pages on somatics, so I know what I am talking about, and this is not a legitimate system.”

Even as I finish saying this, a powerful-looking Indian man appears out of nowhere, sort of like a swami, and he addresses his words pointedly at me, “It is all in the tron.  You don’t understand the tron.  It has a quantum, holographic nature.  It transcends all your childish arguments.”

He is larger than life, exploding with charisma, threatening the very dimensionality and fabric of the dream. I am afraid of him. I awake trembling.

October 12 (Day Thirty)

This is the real day of our Golden Circle tour, and the sun is shining in a blue sky for the first time since we arrived in Iceland. After breakfast we get ready quickly and stand in front of the Fron with our backpacks, awaiting the 8:30 pickup. Lots of vans and small buses arrive, gathering folks from the lobby and curb for other tours and dispatches, but not ours.  Just as I am getting worried that we are jinxed to miss interior Iceland like in my dream, a Reykjavik Excursions van arrives and we climb in, show our tickets, and claim two seats.

There are six or so other people in this conveyance and, from brief conversations with our neighbors, it becomes clear that this is not yet the tour bus; it is one of many pickup vans for the company’s diverse excursions, fetching customers along a designated route. We will be delivered like FexEx packages to a main dispatch area from where we will fan out to our actual buses.

Our driver is a surly old guy, totally stressed by his job. He hates the traffic, the parking (or lack thereof), the list of pickups on his clipboard, the ambiguity of having to ask people if they are waiting for Reykjavik Excursions, as they never are if he has to ask. At A Room with a View, just down Laugavegur from us, he cannot find his clients so, ostensibly according to protocol, he keeps driving to the next—and then the next—on his list, continually circling back through traffic and checking Room with a View again, but no one ever appears. As the streets are jammed with cars, our progress is intermittent.  Anger/frustration transfers itself into the guy’s driving in the form of lurching stops and starts, sudden swings and lane crosses, hard hits of curbs. This brings on incipient motion sickness for me, so I stop chatting and breathe because, otherwise, it will be a long day on the bus.

When we arrive at the dispatch point, a warehouse area on the edge of town, we are the last van.  Some seven or eight buses are lined up ready to depart, waiting for our cargo.  After we are let out, we are each supposed to find the correct one for our tour. Luckily today’s Golden Circle bus is not completely full, so we find two seats in the fifth row.

A few minutes later, our tour guide appears deep in a well next to the driver’s seat.  A professorial middle-aged woman, she narrates the rules:  She will say everything in English and then in French, as these are the twin languages of today’s tour. At spots where we are permitted to get out and sight-see, we will be given a time for return and the times must be precisely adhered to, as the consequence of getting behind schedule is that we will miss some sites on the tour and everyone will suffer for one person’s indulgence.  We must behave appropriately at all times—and she elucidates with a list of standard misconduct that includes drinking, smoking pot, leaving designated areas, and talking while others are trying to listen.

If the latter is supposed to be enforced, we are off to a bad start because some English football-hooligan types in the middle of the bus are talking so loud to each other that I can’t always hear her. Yet she does not call them out as an example—in fact she is much like a stewardess on a plane who does her spiel while paying no attention to what is happening around her. Over the next couple of hours I discover the hooligans are from New Zealand, the last English-speaking country I would have guessed.

As the guide is repeating her introduction in French, the driver takes his place and the bus begins to roll.  I feel a twinge of excitement.  I am not a fan of guided tours but, from the brochure pictures of waterfalls and geysers, I know we have to see at least a bit of wild Iceland.  All things being equal (as they are not in this case) I prefer our own improvised exploration, for that has a living reality to it.  On a tour, reality is scripted and packaged. It is not that the tour isn’t real, that real things don’t happen; it is just a particular commoditization of reality.  Once you are defined as a tourist seeking to score basic, high-value sites, you are more or less protected from raw experience and given spoon-fed images and information. You don’t get to be part of the native landscape with its mistakes and risks and surprises like a windstorm in a tiny car driven by a craniosacral policeman; you don’t get to participate in local rhythms; you are by definition an outsider, being transported through a zooed-in environment in an enclosed bubble on a track.

Almost at once we are heading in a different direction from the airport and Blue Lagoon, so the landscape is fresh.  There are large prairie-like plains on either side of the road, with bare, intricately sculpted butte-like hills.  Without vegetation, their rivuleted skeletons show every rib and vein.  Some of these hills are quite massive and mountainous, others little mesas, but their overall corridor is pretty much unbroken.  They are generally black or very dark, and their steepness is uncompromising; the drop-off from the land table at their top is usually ninety degrees or close to it and, even at best, never gentle or scalable.  These are giant palisades with no particular human use, practical or recreational—a row of galactic sculptures on the Earth. Their alternating sphinxlike convexity and concavity looks lunar or Egyptian, at least to my imagination.

These slopes are bare for a long ways coming down, and then begin to pick up, below their waistlines, a little green fuzz that expands onto the tundra. Lava fields are not so evident here— but the vegetation is sparse, a kind of uneven yellow-green grass, leading up to the hills and mountains. In my mind it plays off the look of the American West.

Off in the distance, above the hills and prairie, are little white puffs of steam everywhere—pristine and cottony—spoors of geothermal energy.  This feature clashes with any ambiance of Texas or New Mexico unless there happen to be a lot of Native Americans sending Sherman Alexie smoke signals. Bad joke!

Our guide stands and gives another speech, this one historical, geological, and ecological.  Iceland, she begins, once had plentiful forests.  It was over twenty-five percent wooded as compared to less than two percent today.  The original settlers cut down just about all the native trees for a variety of uses.  They needed wood to build houses, repair boats, light forges, heat homes, and fence sheep.  In recent decades, however, the government has begun replanting and, on this trip, we will see some of the brave attempts to create new forests.  They remain, at this time, small young groves, but the long-term policy is to return Iceland to its original state with birches and willows and some conifers.  This process is tenuous and difficult, as most introduced trees don’t like the climate here: the temperature fluctuating around zero C. and going back and forth between freezing and thawing— this interferes with healthy arboreal growth and survival. Constant high winds also stunt their growth.  Trees are being imported experimentally from around the world, mostly Siberia but now many from Canada too.

Iceland itself lies across two geological plates on the mid Atlantic rift, its body in contention between submarine Atlantic and Eurasian continents that are pulling apart by one or two centimeters a year.  Since magma pours in at once to fill the gap, Iceland is actually growing; someday, millennia from now, the island will be much bigger. The effect of all this geological upheaval is volcanic and geothermal activity across the island; e.g. ten percent of Iceland is covered with lava, and ninety-five percent of all houses are heated and receive electricity from geothermal sources. Conduits from the underground go everywhere, as natural steam and boiling water are transported in coils to pipes, pools, an increasing number of greenhouses, and the very paved streets of towns and cities.  You can see that every house out here in the countryside has a little drill hole next to it giving off steam (this part of her narration is well timed with our passage along a series of domiciles with individual spools of white rising alongside each).

Because of the short growing season Iceland has traditionally imported most of its vegetables and fruits but, as greenhouse technology continues to be refined and expands, more and more crops will be grown locally indoors.  It is still not to the point yet where it is cheaper to harvest in greenhouses during the winter than to import, but Iceland will soon be there.  Once upon a time greenhouses were limited to growing tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers, but now they produce mangos, papayas, bananas, all from geothermal and solar energy.

A few minutes later she clarifies a point: Iceland, for all intent and purposes, has no water heaters.  All hot water in the country not intended for drinking, say, coffee or tea, comes straight from the ground into pipes and out faucets.  Water is not heated indoors; it enters houses and apartment buildings already hot. That is why the cold water in the Fron is odor-free while the hot is very sulphury; they represent two entirely different systems of delivery. To heat water for showers, baths, and washing dishes would be a total waste of energy.

Out on the plains the landscape is an orchestra of geothermal activity.  White puffs float up here and there, some of them thin and wispy, others fat and dense like a squid discharging creamy juice into a blue sky where it expands and dissipates, rolling down hills and evaporating up into the cumulus.

This is an alternative-energy paradise: water dropping down ubiquitously from barren hills, windmills scattered here and there.  The city-bound pipelines look exactly like Chevron conveying black gold through Alaska, but they are actually carrying water and steam. Giant power plants in the distance are steam—not coal, not nuclear.

A difference from most of the American West is the amount of water here associated with the sparsity of plant life.  From underground the kettle is always boiling and overflowing.  Faraway, glaciers are melting. Thus water is loose and must manifest across rock and lava: in hot springs, geysers, rivulets, and small slow-moving rivers, many of which lay down signature “s’s” that double-back over their own courses.  All of these features are scribbled on a vast, flat panorama that dwarfs them. The few small farms and their barns and huts against the scale of the immense tundra are insect-like, occasional fencing and ancient stone walls skimming the roadside.

Our first stop, after something over an hour, is a small settlement called Hveragerthi (a bent “d” for the “th).  Really more a cluster of shops and sheds than a town—at least as much as we see of it—this is an area for extraction of geothermal energy and indoor horticultural experimentation.  The visit is apparently intended as a dual pit stop for us and financial opportunity for the Garden of Eden greenhouse, which provides bathrooms, sprawling souvenir stands, and a snack bar. On the building’s outside, stock images of Adam and Eve are both carved in wood and represented in stained glass. A circumambulation of the greenhouse reveals it to be like others I have known, a savory rain-forest aroma and humidity with clumps of bananas on trees, palms, cactuses, bougainvilleas, and cages of rabbits—the only oddity being that this is Iceland.

The gift shop is pricey, selling (among every imaginable tacky souvenir of Iceland) little round lava balls for 300 kronurs or about $4.50 per stone. I want to get outside anyway, so I wander away from the Garden’s yard to where the land is instantly barren.  Lava stones are strewn everywhere, and I pick and sort through them for the roundest ones with the most distinctive pocking. After filling my pocket, I stand there, soaking up the sun and staring in the distance at the talus slopes.  Close to me are coal-black slag heaps alongside long, low sheds.  Isolated mounds leading up to the mountains have an Easter Island look. They and the immediate hillocks and buttes are covered with moss or spare grass; even large rocks have a chlorophyll cover. Myth or fact, the guide later tells us that this is because so much birdshit falls, even on the lava fields.

Around the corner of the Garden of Eden is a thermal hole with sputtering steam. I see that the entry into the ground is an irregular tunnel surrounded by piled-up lava chunks crusted with precipitate from the exusion.  I kneel down close to it and hold my hand in the gas; it is hot but not too hot, and my fingers are instantly dripping wet.  I bend low and put my nose in it, as if to smell the innards of the earth.  It is a rich, sulphury aroma, textured and subtle, hard to classify.  The longer I stay and sniff, the more variations of scent I detect.

“Where did you go?” Lindy asks, a bit irritated, as the group straggles back to the bus.  She says that she can count on me for at least one anti-social gambit per trip. I hadn’t thought about it that way; after all, there were a few other renegades outdoors, though most people were in truth making purchases or window-shopping in the Garden.

We pull out and zoom along this countryside.  There are more farms now, lots of small Icelandic ponies and very fat woolly sheep. The horses look Neolithic with their squat builds and thick manes, like escapees from the Ice Age in Spain. The guide says that these ponies have an extra gait between canter and trot, which makes them highly desirable and expensive, hence many colts are bred. Lindy is relieved by that news, as she was worried that such extensive ranches portended horsemeat.  When she asks the guide about the matter to make sure, the woman is appalled that such a thing would be thought of Icelanders—that they would eat these magnificent, sweet beasts.  “Maybe in China they would,” she sniffs, “but not here.”

The effects of reforestation become evident along the road, as there are brief tiny forests and collections of saplings, almost like museum dioramas against the giant bare mountains. These soft yellow groves create a pastoral phenomenology, as though forests bring with them an autochthonous spirit of woods, even though these spectral trees are recent and minimal. In context they look less like forestation plots than myths arising instantly into meanings of a lost and ancient landscape, filling the spiritual space of old ghosts they are recalling.  With their wistful texture and depth, they establish a kind of mysterious hyperspace in the distance.

Our next stop is less than an hour further, an imploded volcano of 6500 years age named Kerith (bent “d”).  “Imploded” means, in essence, a crater lake.  Where the volcano once was, its dead cone remains—a hole into the earth filled partway with water.  As with craters from meteorites, the forces shaping volcanic lakes were powerful and evenly distributed, hence produced deep round holes.

The bus pulls up a little ways down the road from the site, and the guide reminds us that if we go down into the crater, we must be sure not to dally, as we have a tight schedule.

A brief stroll takes the bus’ human contents to the rim. Deep in the giant crater sits a pool of water, approximately the size of a pond, neither small nor large, maybe something under a thousand feet at its greatest diameter. What is striking about it are: 1. its rich purple color, reflecting but enriching the sky, e.g. the enhancement of blue from its own minerals and the occultation of its depth; 2. its roundness, like that of a perfect pancake, such that at the distance of the overlook, its situation seems almost precision-machined; and 3. its depth in the crater, rugged stone walls rising several hundred feet above the waterline to give the appearance of an excavation pit.

Initially our group of about a hundred circles the outer edge wandering in both directions, with many people angling for the impossible photograph (you can shoot into the water or you can capture the rim, but you can’t get both in one shot, though you can try by lying on your belly). Then suddenly our New Zealand hooligans lead the equivalent of a kamikaze charge down into the pit and, for lack of anything else to do with a half hour, the rest of the group begins straggling down behind them.

Inside the protection of the cone, the grass is thicker, a tousled grain, golden at the angle of the light, a North American abundance of weeds on the bumpy, moraine-strewn slope where relatively lush vegetation is spared the surface wind.  Though the descent looks steep (and is about seventy-five degrees on the far side), this entry path to pondside is gradual, nothing worse than a meadow hillside with little grass-covered ridges and hillocks rippling the path.

The New Zealand guys, of course first to the bottom, are celebrating their arrival with hoots and catcalls, an inappropriate and squeaky hubris against the solemnity of the great empty quiet. By the time most of us get to the pond’s edge, there aren’t too many minutes left for exploration. A negligible, rock-strewn shoreline leads immediately into water and then deepens to an unknown abyss after only inches of gravelly bottom. Looking up at the jagged sides and perimeter provides a scale that puts the pool into perspective, a myth-time body of secret water in a Beowulf pit. Mere moving silhouettes against the brightness of the sky are the few tour members who chose to circle the rim rather than descend.

The phenomenology of this spot is actually quite complex.  The rich yarn of the pond, textured in a million crisscrossing rills and goosebumps, is a shade of purple blue that suggests a rich sky; yet the sky from here is almost pale.  The sense of the water at eye level is of a country pond but, with the peripheral perspective of the pit, it looks more like an industrial pond where mining was once done. I put my fingers in—icy, icy.  In fact, I don’t remember feeling any bone colder water, at least relative to expectation. I see no evidence of fish or any other life, though I imagine this is a habitat for some sorts of northern creatures.

Back up at crater’s edge, I watch an enormous crow pull in its wings and give its body to a stiff breeze. It is blown quickly off like a kite. Saga material.

On the way to our next site the guide spews out a long rap.  It begins as she stands and points to a church in the distance, which she acclaims as one of the most important historically in Iceland, a bishopric as well as the site of the first school in the country.  Skalholt was occupied from the Middle Ages until the earthquake chased the bishop to Reykjavik in, I believe she said, 1801.  She is going on about Catholic Iceland before Danish invaders began executing clergy, but my mind was wandering and I am not clear whether this church is a Catholic or Lutheran site and, if Catholic, why it was spared.  When I ask, she explains that it was Catholic until 1550 when the Danish king took it upon himself to execute the bishops. Thereafter it was Lutheran, and it was Lutherans who hied to Reykjavik.  (On this tour, there is a general tendency to present Icelanders as peaceful, just people, most of the local violence having been imported and imposed from Denmark.)

As we pass grazing sheep, she explains how the flocks of all different farmers are allowed to run free and mingle during the spring and summer, and then in the fall, there is a great party express for the sorting of the sheep with much drinking and singing of songs. “It is the happiest of times and best of celebrations,” she drones on, “often going through the whole night.  I suppose the necessity of sorting the sheep makes the occasion for a party, which is something that Icelanders always like to do, with or without an occasion.” The New Zealand hooligans whistle and hoot.

In the distance now, she points out bleak cloud-ringed Mount Hekla, almost 1500 meters high, an active volcano, she says, that last erupted in 2000. Hekla ordinarily spews lava about once a decade.  As befitting her Norse designation as the gates to Hell, Hekla is given a wide berth, but that was not always the case—the Vikings who plowed their farms in the fertile volcanic earth did not have the benefit of an early warning when Hekla erupted in 1104, so it wiped out their crops and homes, scorching everything within 50 kilometers. That was the first of sixteen historically recorded eruptions, some covering as much as 83,000 square kilometers with ash. Hekla, the guide continues, is known for its black skies frequented by ravens, crows, and vultures—and the moans of the condemned coming from inside.

The next stop is presented as an extra because, supposedly, we are making good time.  “It is not usually on the Golden Circle tour, but you have earned it,” the guide commends. I am suspicious of this compliment because I feel as though we actually took more time than allotted at each of the first two stops.  In any case our bonus is the waterfall Faxi, a cataract feeding the Tungna River. It is a relatively modest falls, a rocky slope receiving a rippled stream and dividing the water like a black stone pinball machine, spreading it into the white tresses of Tungna, which meanders off in high-sloped “s’s” across sparse meadows.

What is most distinctive about this site is, again, the lushness of the waterfall and river against relatively barren tundra and a foreboding ring of mountains beyond.  The overall landscape here is bright oyster-shell clouds, almost on fire, black hills and turf in the background, white-noise water in the foreground.

Running water in such a rocky primordial setting slightly suggests the methane rivers of Titan, which have no known vegetation.  This, on the other hand, is a mere hint in the direction of the old basic Solar System, which had mostly toxic hydrocarbons and was lifeless.

In reaching our next stop, we overshoot by six kilometers the briefly postponed highlight of our tour, the Geysir fields, in order to view the Gullfoss waterfall. This cataract is sustained by the Hvita River, bearing the flow that rolls off the Langjokull and smaller glaciers and streams across the plains.

As we approach the site, our guide tells us that this is not the largest waterfall in Iceland by any means, but it is probably the most beautiful. It was almost lost for good in the 1920s when it was condemned to be turned into a hydroelectric dam—but, she explains, a heroine, Sigrithur Tomasdottir, battled both her father who owned the property and then the government to preserve the natural wonder. Even though officials eventually granted permission for a dam to be built, Sigrithur so stirred public sentiment against it, at one point even threatening to throw herself into the waterfall if a certain tribunal decided against her, that construction was never even begun, despite the multiple rulings on its behalf.  Almost supernatural forces intervened, with the investors mysteriously missing a deadline to pay for their lease. The land was finally donated by its last owner, Enar Guthmundsson, to the Icelandic Nature Conservancy in 1976 (both protectors’ “ths” are bent “d’s”).

This stop calls for extensive instructions.  We are told that the bus will leave us off above, and we should meet it down below in forty-five minutes, thus must descend the steps, proceed along the ramp to view Gullfoss, and continue to the parking area.  At closest approach, there is a platform, but common sense and normal precautions must be exercised because it has no guard rail.  “You don’t go there,” Lindy whispers at once.  We are told not to get confused with other tours and their buses and (three times) not to forget the time.  Then we are given a repeated warning about safety on the ramp, as several tourists have misstepped fatally here.

From our first vista Gullfoss is a picture-postcard Niagara. Water crashes over one edge ten meters down; then it caroms in a brief foaming river before hitting a wall at ninety degrees and dropping off another, greater slope twenty meters down into a steep gorge, the remains flowing off in a deep-cut river.

This is also old, old water with new freedom, most of it having been locked in the glacier for tens of thousands of years and, potentized once or twice here, gives off separate fine sprays from each thundering crash.  The mist travels across the valley like an accelerated ghost, leaving its puddles all about, more of them the closer you get to the twin cataracts—and these reflect the lavender blue of the sky.

In the greater distance across the road, one can see the advance of the huge glacier stuffed into jagged skyline of bluish mountaintops such that the profile of silhouetted peaks forms a ragged graph of an up-and-down marker against the primordial white of the snow.  Separated from us by fenced-in tundra, this representation of the advance (or retreat) of the primal Icelandic glacier is a perfect Japanese silkscreen of the dynamics of eternity in time.

As we negotiate perspectives of Gullfoss and gradually descend the stairs, the two tiers present many different angles of the enormous displacement of water.

From far away and above, there is only foam, as white as milk, swirling, exploding, and swirling anew.  Each fall contains its jutting and rocky outcropping, as the contents are twisted and braided into complex patterns, stampeding wildly in the brief staging area before the second falls with its own irregular sculpture.

Closer up, it is impossible to see beyond the immediate rocks and spray falling into the gorge, for droplets in the air make a thick fog, wetting one’s face and hair.

From further back again, though at ground level this time, the recoil of one fall throwing a river against a wall to feed a second is riveting to watch for all the complications and variations of movement.  It is safe to presume, despite the fixity of the overall image, that no pattern of dispersal ever recurs.  As we approach where we are to meet the bus, the intervening river and wall, for being on a flat plane, are taken out of sight, so I have the sudden optical effect of one fall stacked atop the other, like two prisms of talc crystal, their axes arranged so that they face diagonally away from each other.  At this angle, spray rainbows are continually visible, so that blue and yellow gems hang over the moving crystals of the water.

Despite the warning, the New Zealanders and two other young guys are missing at departure time. The guide sends the bus drive back up the hill while she charges off like a police dog into the crowds of many tours. We last see her trying to keep her momentum up the hill with long strides.  Five minutes later, as we emerge at the top, she is coming out of the melée with the missing hombres in tow. I would not call it either a major rescue or apprehension, but it provides an interlude of comic relief.

Now we reverse our direction back to the Geysir area.  We are about to go, as Iceland routinely invites habitants, from the very cold to the very hot. The guide announces that Geysir itself is the world’s most famous geyser, all others being named after it, but (alas) it has been been dormant since the 1960s, possibly because tourists tossed in rocks and other debris in attempts to set it off. There used to be forced eruptions from tons of soapflakes dumped in on Icelandic Independence Day, but environmentalists halted that practice, and now Geysir is inactive except for a belch after an earthquake, as in 2000.  We will have to satisfy ourselves with Geysir’s hammish neighbor, Strokkur, which spouts approximately every ten minutes and sometimes more often, going as high as thirty-five meters.  Geysir is “the gusher,” and Strokkur is “the churn.”

We are given two hours and fifteen minutes here to view everything, have lunch, and patronize the gift shop. There are two restaurants, she tells us: a cafeteria in the gas station and a much more lavish buffet in the Hotel Geysir.  As we debark, Lindy tells me she wants to check out the gift shop and compare restaurants first, and I say I want to cross the road to the geyser field, so we part at the curb.

A roped-off grassy hillside, Bjarnfell is populated with numerous circular pools of bubbling-hot water surrounded by mineral-stained stone. The actual hot springs are roped off because the water is at the boiling point and can burp unexpectedly outward, scalding bystanders.  One gets to view these trapped “animals” only at a distance as creatures in a field at a zoo.

Bjarnfell looks like a factory without buildings, as steam issuing from all parts of the ground suggests that the manufacturing is being carried out underground or, alternately, that there has been a big fire and hot spots are still cooling off. The steam spits and pops like a council of cross frogs, issuing continuously and also in occasional little bursts.  Beyond this realm of smoke signals is a small replanted grove, some dark conifers providing a backdrop to the yellow-green foliage.  Steam dispersing is as gentle as powdered loess, smudging the crispness of trees like signification drifting across an almost unsignified morphology.

The puddles formed across this field are very flat, smooth, and shiny like little fairy mirrors with steam divining across them, clear blued glass surfaces and the dispersing gas obscuring, then polishing images in them.  It is a real dreamtime zone of reflections mixed with obfuscations.

I cannot gauge why these pools are so broad and flat and have such a brightness—we were told the psychedelic coloring is a mixture of algae and mineral deposits—but the steam makes them quite magical.

While the big geysers are further up Bjarnfell, the larger of these little guys, the milky pools and vents, have names. Smidur. reads one tombstone-like marker—I didn’t record whether it was a “d” or a bent “d,” and I can’t explain the period. Water restlessly churns in its crater with an occasional burst and plop, bubbling up as though a large fish were about to rise into the pool.

Litli is sloshing away, lots of toil and trouble to no notable result, like a pot of overdone spaghetti someone forgot to turn off or, more imaginatively, like stagecraft over centuries for the emergence of a transdimensional sylph. Bubbles rise through bubbles, the open pot capped with steam. Neighboring spouts also have names; these are Blesi and Fata.

I am one of the few in our tour who lingers in this smoky area. Just about everyone else who crossed the road has gone straight to the top where crowds are gathered around Strakkur. I have heard its outbursts and the cheers and yells of onlookers and seen its steam, and now I join the spectators surrounding it. The geyser’s blowhole is sucking in bubbles as we wait for the inevitable denouement.  Nothing, nothing, nothing…then it explodes, sending particles in the air.  The sense is of a whale breaching, a great gusher towering into the sky like a classic photograph of the same. People can’t help exclaiming collectively.  Its mists move as fast as a herd of buffalo or squadron of jets, columns of steam twisting as they dance upward.

`Then the bladder begins filling again, as bubbles are sucked into the vent.  At some point it will be full and burst.

Now it erupts, surprisingly soon, only a minute or so after the last one, and spray descends over the landscape.

There is a geyser music, first the light drums of gathering water, then the droplets falling like cymbals, then the steam sweeping it away in a sizzle of resolution.  Then the soft drummer begins quietly again.

I stay for only ten minutes, as Strakkur is a one-trick pony; then I join the crowds at the buffet, and Lindy and I sit at a table with an English working girl who came on holiday alone because her boyfriend got sick at the last moment and they had paid for unrefundable tickets. She can talk of little else except Willard’s illness and how he almost came anyway and she almost didn’t come.  She is clearly uncomfortable without him and glad of our company. It is somewhat of a mirage banquet because, despite all the fishes and salads and vegetables and stews; cakes, cookies, and flams, none of it is particularly wholesome or good. It is an old fifties cafeteria with a modern touch.

Afterward Lindy and I hike back to Strakkur.  The stray smell of gas on my first visit was so tantalizing that this time I place myself directly in its path. Then, after the eruption, I try to characterize its smell to myself, scrawling a series of metaphors on my increasingly wetter paper: irresistibly sweet like an old laundry; the smoke of some primitive delicacy mostly made of stone; a very dry sulphur egg roll; a rich thick aroma as if the earth were baking bread, only it’s rocks; an old radiator filled with lobster soup.

The stony creviced ground leading away from Strakkur is reminiscent of the Blue Lagoon.  rom a few yards away and backlit, it is a miniaturized alluvial plain, suggesting again old Solar System complicated river systems on Titan (again) as seen from satellite, complete with bays, lagoons, and islands.  None of the water is of more than puddle depth, so the sense of geographic relief is provided as much by light and micro-topography as hydraulics.  A pearly blue stone has coated the rock, a marly underbelly formed by the constant mineralized water.  It resembles bones or pottery, deeply kneaded and striped with a kind of incipient runic alphabet.  The torrents from Stakkur’s outbursts pass over this marled rock such that, at spots, it looks quite delicate, like membranes of a frog’s belly, or breccia and shell.

I wander toward another vent called Oberrishola; it is forming its own marl downstream of its neighbor. I keep going out of the geyser field all the way to the edge of the reforestation. No one else is anywhere near me now. I am alone in the field.

From a distance the virgin forest looked ethereal but, within its closure, it is like trees in someone’s backyard—pines and yellowed saplings.  Its signature on the vastness of the landscape is what was most striking, not the foliage as such.  I stand in this grove and watch Strakkur’s upheavals at a distance, then walk back and join three teenagers standing directly in the path of the water, which is different from the windblown steam tunnel by about two hours on the face of a clock.  Across the clock, Lindy is signaling for me to get out of the way, but I want to feel the burst.  Then Strakkur pops, and the immediate sense is of walking over a manhole issuing steam.  A second later I feel droplets, no worse than a hot shower and just a few of them. This is possibly because the water in surface pool has cooled quite a bit, and then, as it is lifted by superheated water trapped in the fissures beneath, the two mix.  Strakkur’s effluvium is mainly steam anyway, not water, and only when it distills in the alembic of the air does it settle in rivulets and pools.

I do not get up to Geysir itself, though if I did, there would be little to see.  I do visit Haetta, the vent immediately above Strakkur.  It is neither seriously spouting nor bubbling. Instead it is a lens of water over a cave into the underworld, a concrete representation of chthonian mysteries.  Steam shifts over its face, now covering, now revealing the constantly shifting sky in its mirror.  As I change my angle and the steam rises and settles and blows about, the color changes from lavender to opaque blue to almost magenta to silvery white and then translucent and transparent.  This mask on the earth is the closest I get on this trip to a sense of the interdimensional Icelandic landscape.  Hints of it are everywhere, but this is the most palpable clue.  I never experience anything close to troll and fairy populations, though I imagine they would favor this spot if the tourists would vamoose.

On the bus toward Thingvalla, the National Park and historical site of the founding of the Icelandic Parliament, the Althing (the combination “b”/“p” for the soft “th” sound in both names), the guide reiterates her earlier geological etiology, for we are headed toward the actual rift between geological plates and will see its tear in the earth and walk right on it.  Iceland, she repeats, is fluid, volcanic, being torn apart, and growing: “It is usually just one or two centimeters a year, and the valley floor sinks a few millimeters, but in 1789, it dropped half a meter in just ten days after an earthquake.”

Here the Earth is most like the Jovian moon Io.  Gravitational pressure builds up and then is distributed into rock and magma, shaping a very young landscape.  On Io, scissored everywhere internally by Jupiter’s gravity, a fluid, molten geography recomposes itself every moment. Iceland is sedate by those standards.

As we roll along in the middle of nowhere, we see a glacial volcanic plain, water running off its table everywhere, in the near distance in small unexpected rivers, afar in threads of waterfalls.  On the tundra, soaking and semi-barren, the main visible inhabitants are fat woolen sheep munching on the ground cover. In the distance a black mountain resembles the foot of a giant with six or seven toes.

The bus goes barreling between young forests like meadows with trees, turning yellow and red in autumn. There are long clusters of them in parts of the plains amid thick grass and classic heathland: rivers running through pastures with weeds and flowers. We stop right at the rift plane and depart the bus, which will meet us quite a distance from here after we tour the spread-out site

Where the earth has separated between geological plates, water runs along the bottom of a gorge.  The meadow ceases just before this rift, at least along most of its length, and the gorge’s edge is formed of jagged nougats of uplifted ground, light brown and lichen-covered in spots. The gorge’s irregularity makes it more like a coastline than a river, with little pockets and coves bending obliquely behind the flowline and a continual widening and thinning as necks of stone jut out into the flow.  I believe this is Flosagja, not a river but a deep fissure that has been inundated by underground springs.

Even though the gorge lies on a more or less flat table, on one side the ground is much higher than the other because the land has been displaced into two planes that do not meet.  The semblance of a river harmonizes them into a landscape rather than a discrepancy between geological plates.  Actually less a river than a long, thin, still pool, the gorge has a stony modular look and is quite riveting to the view because it doesn’t quite fit any convention of landscape.

Further along it both sides tower above the fissure, maybe twenty feet or more of lichen-mottled rock impregnated by veins of mineral, mossy pads forming over the stone closer to the water level.  Extraterrestrial images continue to come to my mind—in contour and topography this resembles photographs of one of the long gorges on Mars, Vallis Marineris or Ma’adim Vallis. The water resting in it and thin lens of vegetative cover on either side make it Icelandic rather than Martian.

We cross over the gorge on a bridge and look down into the Peningagja (the Chasm of Coins), an oddly clear pool of water (one of the most pellucid on Earth, we are told).  Because of its clarity Peningagja is far deeper than dead reckoning makes it seem, for the coins at its bottom that have been tossed into it for decades, perhaps centuries, are like faraway silver and electric blue sequins, dots of light.  New ones flutter and drop erratically for quite a duration as their images distort and then fade.  Our guide guesses that there is a fortune in this wishing well, including some historically valuable coins, “but don’t think of diving in,” she adds.  “It is much deeper than it looks and very, very cold.”

We continue across the plains to another site, in fact the most significant sociohistorical spot in Iceland despite its lack of buildings or major landmarks.  The fields here are known as Thingvellir, the Assembly Plains (again, a “b/p” for the “th”), and it is here that the Althing, the General assembly met in 930, right on the rift between continental plates, to form and then implement the polity of Iceland.  This was well before there was a nation, back when “Iceland” was little more than a controversy of clans. The Thingvellir remained the actual and symbolic seat of power for another eight centuries, and it is still the symbolic seat of the nation.

A large jagged formation of basalt, the Almannagja, rises maybe sixty or seventy feet above the plain, encompassing the area along the edge of the North American continental plate.  It so rocky, wall-like, and modular that it almost looks like something that has been assembled, though it is a natural feature. Its topline is ragged, going up and down by two or three feet to ten feet across spans of twenty feet, and the ridge line looks very narrow, with balancing rocks, as well as rocks placed precipitously between others, e.g. gigantic boulders held like pebbles between two toes.

The gentle river Oxara—or the Axe—comes from what seems like a vanishing point with the ridge, tumbling down rock terraces in little waterfalls and combing its whitewater between rocks.

The Althing was held on this plain for two weeks each summer, as everyone in the country who was able was supposed to pilgrimage here and set themselves up in buths (bent “d”), tented camps, to attend the sessions.  These comprised a reading of the laws, new legislation, and court sessions to punish crimes and decide disputes.  A new lawspeaker (logsogumathur—hard “th”) was elected every three years.  He memorized the law and recited one-third of it each summer.  Samples of laws are presented alongside the Oxara in Icelandic and English: “Af maddur hoggur till manns eda leggur…,” translation: “If a man cuts at a man or thrusts at him. . . .”  A variety of different laws cited on the display deal with assault, weapons, violence at close range, and general outlawry and lawlessness.

Snorrabud, or Snorri’s Booth, is what remains of the original Althing meeting-place.  In its general vicinity on a hill accessed by wooden steps an Icelandic flag has been raised on a lofty pole, and Lindy poses beside it for a photo op—white-outlined red cross on a clean blue field whipping in the breeze.  From up here, one can see the whole valley ringed by mountains and dominated by Thingvalavatn, a huge lake (fourteen kilometers long and eighty-four square, Iceland’s largest).  This body of water formed nine thousand years ago when fresh lava dammed up the outpouring of streams, backfilling a basin to produce, over time, a small sea on the Thingvallahraun lavafield.  It stretches out in the distance to mountains and thick cumulus cover in the sky, a simple wooden church set before the delta where the Oxara enters it in an arbor of conifers, dwarf birches, and other trees. This is the single true grove in the entire landscape.

The panorama is dramatic, the Oxara winding around the church and grove, spilling into the vast Thingvalavatn sea with its volcanic islands and distant mountains.

Four smaller waterfalls siphoning down the Almannagja wall form a pool, the Drekkingarhylur, dammed up against the rock appendage—this was the court seat of later, post-Catholic Law Council (Logretta), where judgments were rendered and punishments carried out.  The judges seated themselves before the cliffs on three long benches, 48 males each, the middle bench reserved for voting members and bishops, the outer ones for their advisers.  Apparently the ridge formed a natural amphitheater and loudspeaker for magisterial voices.

Though the meeting of the river and the wall at a pool makes for a pastoral scene, this area turned violent in the mid-sixteenth century under Danish rule and stayed that way for the better part of a century, as the pool was used for drowning of women charged with sexual misconduct, witchcraft, abandonment of children, and the like, while men were beheaded or drowned there for other sorts of criminal activity.  A historical placard indicates that on one afternoon eighteen women were drowned together in the Drekkingarhylur. Looking at it now, I see the deceptively calm picture of nature masking what was once a Gash upon the face of nature.  All reverberations of the violence have been eroded and washed away by the landscape.

Our time at this monument expired, we hike wearily up the hill to the Educational Center.  There we see a model of the whole region, the Sog River flowing out from the Thingvalavatn Lake, the Armansfell overlooking it, the Lungjokull glacier all but abutting the water, so that it would seem some of the lake’s source might be glacier-melt.  At a nearby interactive video, one can press serial buttons and see brief movies of celebrations held at this site when it was full of people—bands and parades and the like: 2004, 1994, 1974, and (in black and white) the formation of modern Iceland in 1944.

On the bus ride headed back to Reykjavik, we pass through farmland that looks like Carl Dreyer sets or something out of Nói the Albino, bleak spread-out buildings, farms remote from one another or anything.  Then, after an empty stretch, we pass through suburban Mosfellsbaer, an American-looking town with colorful Icelandic stone houses and small groves of trees.

The Fron and Room with a View are at the very end of the list of deliveries by the bus, as the tour leaves us off near our Iceland domiciles.  Thus we get an unwanted bonus excursion of most of the other hotels and boarding houses of Reykjavik before we are let out on Hvertisgata, a block below, so that the bus does not have to contend with Laugavegur.

We dress for dinner and come downstairs at 19:00, half expecting to see Birgir and Erla, half dreading that they won’t have made it back for reasons of accident. They arrive cheerfully at the lobby door just as we open it to look onto the street.  As we follow them to their car, they are in a high-spirited mood, almost goofy, and, once in motion, Birgir tries to ascertain quickly what restaurant we should go to.  He says he knows a really good Italian one.  We tell him where we have been, and he is pleased because, he now knows, we haven’t been where he wants to take us.

We certainly haven’t. Vin og Skel (Wine and Shell) is up Laugavegur in the opposite direction and recessed from the street. The place is a notch or more up from those we have tried, elegant and expensive—the menu is in the 3000-kronur range. An Edif Piaf track is playing, and the mood is operatic and mellow. As Lindy hesitates over prices, Birgir urges her to order what she wants, saying this meal is a gift from him and Erla.

Joining Birgir, I reluctantly order a morally disquieting (and politically incorrect) dish: minke whale.  I am o.d.ed on variations of Italian dishes, and it is the only other non-beef item on the chalkboard.  “How can they have whale?” I ask.  “Isn’t it illegal?”

“It is supposedly experimental,” Birgir says.  “Iceland is allowed to catch a certain number of minke whales for experimental use and, rather than waste them, they are sold as food.”

His and my entrées are brought in a common bowl from which we share slices, making the sin feel a little less private.  I haven’t had whale since I used to buy it forty years ago from the local fish store in Ann Arbor.  It is an Eskimo delicacy like a combination of steak and ahi tuna, indisputably delicious, sad to say.

Dressed in pure black, Erla has an almost Eskimo moon-shaped face and a slightly punk look and stance. She is delicate and affable, and a good part of the meal is spent discussing her career, her three children (aged fourteen to five: Petra, Arna Run, and Einar Logi), her developing practice of craniosacral therapy, and the novel and humorous aspects of our last two days in Iceland. She and Birgir met at their maiden class in 1999 and have been inseparable since. In the course of this discussion we learn that Birgir also has a ten-year-old son Olaf in Reykjavik who forms part of an on-again, off-again household with him, Victoria, and Erla and her kids.

At one point, Lindy asks Birgir for the correct pronunciation of his name and he offers her a device he found useful in Daytona Beach: the “burger” of “hamburger” with an “i” instead of the “u.”

Since we have just been to the Golden Circle, Birgir announces that tomorrow he will take us on a version of the Saga tour.  Lindy assures him that, now that Victoria has been returned, he shouldn’t feel obligated to take more time off work for us, but he says that he has already traded hours with some other police officers and, starting tomorrow evening, he will work nights to make up the time.

Since we are happy to have another tour—this, a personal one—we accept the generosity of his time.  We then discuss what overnight duty amounts to at the Reykjavik police station—there is virtually no serious crime, he says; it is mostly drunkenness and parties gotten out of hand.

They drop us off at the Fron at 21:00; Birgir will be back at 10:00 in the morning.  We have only one more full day left on our trip.

October 13 (Day Thirty-One)

Birgir heads out of Reykjavik and turns north.  Retracing our route of yesterday, we pull off the highway at Mosfellsbaer, as he wants to show us his craniosacral clinic.

It is on a suburban street, a small duplex house, nondescript on the outside. Downstairs is a waiting cubicle, treatment rooms with patient tables, a few offices, the entire set-up decorated so that it would fit into Berkeley or Boston with its blend of surrealistic and New Age art, Native American shields, assorted crystals, a small running fountain, and a dash of Viking and Norse mythological imagery.

While looking down the list of therapists, I realize something that has been obvious all along but missed by me: everyone’s last name in Iceland ends in “son” or “dottir,” so this must indicate an actual system.  Birgir confirms: Icelanders’ surnames are all built out of their father’s first name with a suffix of “son” or “dottir” (depending on gender).  He, for instance, is Birgir Hilmarsson because Hilmar was his father. His son will be Olaf Birgirson, not Hilmarsson. His daughter will be Victoria Birgirsdottir.  His son’s son will have the last name of Olafson.  As I am grasping the rule and its application, I am testing it and finding that it is true of everyone I have talked to or heard about, from Steingrimur Steinthorsson, Ivar Gissurarson, Leif Eiriksson, and Volundar Volundarson to Sigrithur Tomasdottir, Helga Bjornsdottir, and Hildur Hermothsdottir.  Kinship is patrilineal, but lineage is traced nonexclusively for only one generation. In effect, there are no surnames.

I begin playing with this concept in my mind.  Since I have three fathers—a legal one, a genetic one, and a stepfather who raised me—I could be Paulson (like Gisli), Bernardson, or Robertson. Richard Robertson sounds quite normal!  Then I realize that my son would be Robin Richardson, and his son would be Leo Robinson: ordinary American names. We are carrying the remnants of an old Germanic kinship system, and its vestiges have been converted as permanently affixed stems into family surnames, in the process losing their active rule of formation, e.g. Dickson, Stevenson, Samson, Seligson (from my middle name), Johnson, Markson, Aaronson, Williamson, and Davidson. There is no equivalent Anglo or European system, however, for daughters; thus, I would guess either we have lost it or our ancestors arose from a different Germanic kinship branch with “harder” patriarchal (as well as patrilocal) lineages.

I share the gist of these insights with Lindy and Birgir as we head upstairs: “It’s interesting.  We each just take our own method for granted and never really think about how our mutual last names are not congruent with each other and carry quite different historical legacies.”

I don’t think either of them are as taken with it as me, but neither of them were graduate students in anthropology.  While my insights are fanciful and somewhat inaccurate, kinship is the algebra of anthropology.

Other than the pristine clinic rooms, the house is under repair.  A small backyard is littered with cans, bottles, and papers, as if it were a shoulder by a highway rather than a fenced-in plot of grass.  Upstairs floors have been removed, and large packages of new flooring are stacked along a wall.  This allows us to see the intricate patterning of pipes in the infrastructure for the geothermal fluid to circulate. Icelanders have made a science of heating from underground, and the grid looks at the same time complex and matter-of-fact, modern and old.

As we continue driving north, layers of clouds are mushrooming like cities across a vast open sky: lenticular metropolises, cumulus villages, altocumulus and cirrus forming their sky.  Nimbi and stratus scud gradually gather over hilltops to our right, while bright cloud cities parade in sunshine to our left.  The landscape like the sky is dynamic and shifting.  On the right are rugged black hills, their tops often in rolling scud and fog.  Like other small mountain chains we have seen in Iceland, these gradually turn green as their bases spread pyramidally across vast plains to the highway. There are constant winding rivers and little waterfalls threading down rocky faces.

Suddenly the sky will clear; these buttelike hills will sit in sunlight. Rainbows are ubiquitous enough to seem almost commonplace, sometimes a single blue and yellow prism between sky and earth, every so often a full arch in which I can pick out red and orange and a thin bar of violet. The backdrop for these is tundra or bare hills.

After a half hour or so, a fjord occupies the landscape to our left, one of a continuous series of fjords all the way around the intricately fractal Icelandic coast. The shape of Iceland is like that of a squid with hundreds of tiny tentacles, so there is always a next fjord of unpredictable shape and depth, then smaller ones within each of these, and so on. The contour of this one, Hvallfjorthur (bent “d”), cuts far inland by American standards but is less than average by Icelandic ones. As we circle much of it over the next hour or so, the landscape changes more dramatically: long spread-out farms to the right with plentiful sheep, before rugged hills, water everywhere, running across the road at times; to the left, dramatic fjord vistas of broken coastline, islands, and small bays.  Occasionally, as lagoons of the fjord intrude inland, we cross the water on short bridges.

This is going to be mostly a six-hour driving tour, and Birgir is, as before, a confident, cavalier pilot, his hand grazing the wheel (or not), zipping along at 120 to 140 kilometers an hour, occasionally passing a slow-moving truck blind while Lindy and I slip a glance at each other (but there is always space to squeeze through if a car happens to be coming the other way).  He is a constabulary on holiday.

The plan is to leave the coastline and head due north/northeast and then angle back and complete the circle of the fjord.  To do that, we rumble onto a dirt road that lasts for a half hour. Jagged hills continue, and vegetation becomes scrubbier, though there is an occasional forest of luminous saplings.  “There is a joke about the trees in Iceland,” Birgir relates. “If you get lost in an Icelandic forest, just look around.”

On a long finger lake called Skorradalsvatn we pass expensive summer homes.  Birgir says that this is only for the wealthiest people, most of them residents of Reykjavik.  He points to a raging river and says that it would cost most people a month’s salary for one day’s fishing rights on a property here. Its anglers come mostly from Europe.

Birgir’s goal is the small township of Reykholt and the remains of a manor farm and the aristocratic estate of Snorri Sturlison (born 1178).  The central building has been reconstructed into a modern museum of Norse settlement: clothing, tools, farm implements, weapons, and original pages from old texts, a few with English translation. From the history on the walls, I read that Snorri came to authority in 1200 and ruled the region from 1220 to 1240.  In 1228 he had a force of 360 men who marched in flakkurs, units of battle.  By 1237 his flakkur census had increased to 460.  As Snorri was also a poet of Sagas, sections of the Edda of Snorri appear in original and blown-up photos.  The book has a lot to say about customs and laws, how things were once arranged on the frontier.  For instance, “below Ytra fell one-third of beached whales, one-half of dried wood, and one-half of all land” to the church. The document also discusses reciprocal rights to possession of cattle in summer and use of mountain pasturage, and it limits certain persons to “three horses, none more than fourteen ounces.”

An adjacent room deals with female matters during the same periods of which the most interesting item to me is a list of kennings, or metaphors permitted for the discussion of women. These include: female costumes, gold and gems; ale, wine, or any drinks served by a woman; a willow or log tree; a stone necklace; all goddesses, valkyries, norns, or disirs.  I have no idea what the latter are, but their names sound like undines, nixies, or oreads.  It is right out of Michel Foucault’s Aldrovandi.

After a while I wander around aimlessly, munching the chocolate-covered raisins in the dish for visitors because we are well past lunchtime. I am starving, and there is no other food.  Meanwhile Birgir and Lindy are busy discussing some detail on the wall.  I briefly visit the religious section, which is more like a meeting house than a church: a large wooden cross beneath a single stained-glass mandala, a few much tinier crosses below it. Otherwise the walls are plain tan rouge with exposed wooden architecture and wood inlay. There are no benches or pews, just single wooden chairs in rows on either side of an aisle, a table instead of a pulpit and, hanging from the wooden beams of the ceiling, a black skeletal chandelier comprises a series of metal wheels housing blips of light.

Finding nothing else to look at in the museum and preferring the outdoors, I hike toward the nearby grove of saplings amid termless fields. What stands out to me is the sheer broadness of the panorama. Trees are the size of runes. Sheep on a field occupy maybe 2% of its total expanse.  Distant farms are emblems on a vast unwritten morphology. I can barely see the black dots of crows above the hills, their cries considerably louder than their images. Dense, dynamic cumuli configuations contribute to making the sky more cultivated than the earth.

As we start driving back with an immediate goal of lunch, the landscape continues to show variations of what we have already seen: sculpted rock fortresses and pyramidal butte shapes sloping down into grasslands, their upper reaches swirling in clouds or fog or wisps of white, rectilinear and rhomboidal shapes textured in little stone matrices all up and down their irregular convex-concave faces; grassy knolls wedged into the loins of the rock like fancy seasonal kilts wrapped around eternally bare gods; partial feng shuis of tundra and pastureland, jagged rifts and gorges cutting through it, flocks of plump and fully-adorned sheep, fencing bent every which way like missing teeth, water running very low in channels, often a single rill; barren stretches of bumpy scrub grass with an occasional sheep or two; farmhouses and occasional other dwellings flattened into postage stamps by the sheer scale of both sky and earth forming the zipper of a horizon line bisecting emblems of men at work like the pristine work of a giant protractor; full rainbows arched over hills and valleys with shafts of light passing through mist rising as clouds travel just over or into the tops of the serrated mountains. At times, as the lowering sun backlights the stony hills, they look like artificial pyramids in some other place entirely.

Birgir talks about his interest in maybe trading houses with us, either in Maine or California, so that he and Erla can come to the States for an extended period. I suggest that they visit us and stay in one of our guestrooms so that we can do stuff with them in the States and then see them when we are next in Iceland. He thinks they will consider both ideas. Then we talk about his plans for extending craniosacral therapy in Scandinavia and, by implication, publishing in the various Scandinavian languages. But ideas are as small as people in this zone, blown to smithereens in a day or a week or two. None of this will happen.

We come down the lower edge of the next fjord, Borgarfjorthur, and head for the coastal town of Akranes, which sticks out on the immediate spit of land above Reykjavik.  On farms along the fjord, fat wooly sheep are so abundant and close to the road that we stop for a closer look.  Their docility and accessibility are illusions. They are already retreating as the car stops and, when I approach them with a camera, they bound further away.

Mid-afternoon.  We are utterly famished by the time we pull into Akranes.  Far from turning out to be the charming fishing village I pictured, it is an industrial town of prefab-looking structures, even the homes, some of which are tall and squat like sheds, or two-tone, and/or raised, as if on stilts, so that basement windows are ground level.  Even the stone ones look metal, a familiar phenomenollogy here.  The colors are especially bright—orange, blues, maroons, and purples—and that along with the clean-ness and sharpness with which lines are cut keeps the view aesthetically stark and oddly pleasant in what otherwise feels like a giant facility or company town. Later I read in the guidebook that Akranes, at the tip of the peninsula separating the Borgarfjorthur from the Hvalfjordur, was settled by Irish hermits in 880; it has been mainly a fishing community almost from the beginning and is now “basically a dormitory for the huge fish-processing plants and cement factory near the end of the peninsula.”

Birgir knows a few eateries, but everywhere we go, a door or window bears a sign indicating it is closed, three of them.  Finally he takes out his cell.  He tells us after the call that he rang the local police station, saying he was a policeman from Reykjavik looking for a place to eat, and they recommended one.  After getting lost a couple of times and backtracking around the towering equipment and shipping facilities at the wharf, we pull into a little cafeteria in a shopping-center complex.  Except for the abstract art on the walls (brownish blue oils of scantly filled in landscapes and people), it is a simulacrum of a café in the American West—its only other patrons a bunch of men sitting around a table, smoking and horseshitting very loudly, some of them actually standing, probably a lunch that has gone on an hour or two past the last delivery of food.

My own health-food standards have dropped to the level that bread is bread and fish is fish. I don’t butter the bread, and I ask for my main dish without sauce.

Afterwards Birgir remarks that there are good museums in the town if we want to go; we can see folk relics, crystals, fossils, nautical items, or sports memorabilia, including a bike bent into a round pretzel by an Icelandic weightlifter. He is being selflessly dutiful, but none of us have the heart or the attention span for it. I am very sleepy.

Birgir himself seems relieved as we head back to Reykjavik.  While we pass coastal scenery—rocky streams entering the bay outside the fjord and large black pools of water in the tundra—he has one finger hand on the steering wheel, the other hand holding the cell to his ear, as he is having a jovial conversation with Erla.

Just outside Akaranes the peninsula is connected to the peninsula outside Reykjavik by a seven-kilometer tunnel that allows one to skip the entirety of Hvalforthur. It is somewhat disconcerting being in such a long underwater structure in a volcanic, geologically active landscape, but we are through it in a blink of geological time. It is one of the darker tunnels I have seen with one of the higher ratios of speed to width, but soon the white, mountain-chaperoned skyline of Reykjavik is visible across the water.

At the Fron we say goodbye, thanking Birgir profusely.  He has about four hours now in which to nap before heading to all-night duty at the police station.

As planned two days earlier, we call Hildur to let her know we are back from our outing, and she confirms a meeting with her nephew Volundur and his wife at the cafeteria above the bookstore down Laugavegur.

Arriving ten minutes ahead of her, we wander about the books and then, as the cafeteria is filling up, nab a table.  Hildur comes and is soon followed by the tall glamorous couple, both beautiful people in the full Hollywood sense, Volundur with a days’ fashionable beard.  They provide a brief whirlwind event in we learn the details of their equally whirlwind life—back and forth to the States, the Bahamas; her television show in Reykjavik; his celebrity appearances, cooking a meal for Icelandair at a Los Angeles gala gathering, and so on.  Even as we are sinking into this conversation, they are rising to leave, Generation X stars in a hurry, a local event that evening, then flying back to the Bahamas in the morning.  I say that we will be heading ourselves for San Francisco tomorrow.

“Ummm,” says Volundur, “really not a bad flight.  Long, but really not a bad flight at all.”

As they retreat down the stairs, Hildur is smiling. “I didn’t think we would do any business,” she concludes. “I just wanted to give you a sense of them.”

Then we talk with her about Reykjavik baths, as I want to try one of the in-town hot springs on our last night here. I mention Reykjavik Spa City, an obviously good-sized establishment from which I have a brochure but, instead of seconding that, she gives us meticulous directions on how to find a smaller bathing site, Sundhollin, very close to our hotel so that we do not have to go nearly that far.

We eat a late dinner (around 20:00) at Anaestu Grosum, then cross the street back to the Fron for towels and bathing suits, and set out for the closer spa. The journey involves walking a few blocks toward Snorrabraut, then heading up the hill on Baronstigur on the other side of Halgrim’s church.

Off Laugavegur the streets are dark and empty, and vestigial American paranoia is unavoidable for me, though the area is really mellow. However, we don’t see any spa where it is supposed to be—it is more of a residential neighborhood, mostly apartments, and Lindy is busy trying to discourage a cat that she petted from following us when a man hurrying along the street almost bumps into her twice. Once she gets out of the way, she asks about the missing baths.  Unflapped and polite to a fault, he stops to point diagonally across the street and up a block.  He looks at his watch and adds, “I think you have just enough time to get in and warm before they close.”

It is like an old gym inside, lots of steam exiting into the lobby, an old man at the desk, a small crowd milling around.  It takes us a long time to grasp the situation, as the clerk does not speak English, but eventually it becomes clear that, because of a technical problem, the baths have just closed for the night and everyone is leaving.

We ask if there is another bathing spa near there, and a customer tells us that the closest is Spa City. I have already located that on the map, and it is middling far, perhaps the distance of Salka Publishing or a little more, but it is hard to know for sure. Lindy would prefer to go back to our room and pack, but I am for being intrepid on our last night.  “What could it be, ten or twelve blocks?  And it’s open till midnight.  We can make it there on time.”

She is an unwilling participant and, at Laugavegur, almost inclined to split to the Fron and let me seek Spa City on my own but, seeing that I am committed, she finally decides she doesn’t want to go back alone. I have an almost desperate sense of wanting to hold onto the last adventure of our trip, not to give up the spirit of it yet.  “The last night is the same as any other night,” I cheer-lead.  “We are in Iceland.  Our plane is not till tomorrow afternoon.  We are in Reykjavik.  It’s magical. We are really here.  Just think how hard it will be to go to hot baths in Reykjavik once we are back in Berkeley!”

This kind of humor never amuses her.

On Hvertisgata we see that there is a bus line running, and I immediately seize on that as our salvation. Unfortunately we have not explored Icelandic buses yet and know nothing about routes, cost, exact change requirements, etc.  There is no one else at the shelter to ask, so we just wait doggedly.  I don’t even have to voice Lindy’s fear because it is my own: these buses are whipping along at high speed, and we are about to go plummeting off into unknown Reykjavik on our last evening, with no sense of where we are headed or how to get back if we get lost.

Now a young man arrives at the shelter across the street and stands there waiting for a bus going the other way.  I run across to ask him my questions but discover he is on his cell, as he walks concertedly away from me. Turning to signal a dud to Lindy, I see a cab shooting past.  I run out and wave; the driver stops. Of course the cabbie knows the baths and they’re open late; get in.

As we wind down streets toward the coastline, I have a fresh appreciation of what we were about to innocently undertake.  It is probably a mile or more, with many turns. On foot we would have lost courage and bailed long before getting close.  In fact, given the serpentine route, it is doubtful we could have even gotten there by bus. The cabbie makes one last turn and pulls right up to the door of what looks like a bowling alley, then runs inside for us to make sure it is open even though he knows it is. Then he refuses a tip. “We don’t do that here,” he informs me. “Have a good time.”

Reykjavik Spa City is much like the Blue Lagoon, only less upscale, a much larger lobby, kind of like a Y, lots of families and kids hanging around, hollow with an echo; according to a brochure: “If you want to meet Brits, you go to a pub; if you want to meet the French, you go to a coffee house.  If you want to meet the people of Reykjavik, you go to one of the city’s thermal swimming pools and baths.”

After we pay a few hundred kronurs and are each given a key, we fork down separate hallways. Inside the changing room it feels like the 1950s.  As I stand staring at the lockers in bafflement of how the system works, a husky old guy takes the key right out of my hand, sticks it in a panel, and shows how it releases a locker at a distance. This is reminiscent of my seventh-grade experience with my first locker when my alphabetical neighbor, Arnie Goldman, opened the padlock for me. I can still remember its combination—22-36-10—because I had it for six years afterward and eventually mastered its turns down to maybe three or four seconds. . . in time for class.

Once again, there are stringent showering requirements.  After soaking naked in a hot stream of water among the other men and boys, I step out into the alley and climb upstairs to the pools.  It is absolutely freezing, standing wet in the Reykjavik wind, until I can get myself into the nearest pool.

It is not very warm, though I hardly care at first.  This particular pool is roped off into lanes and overlooked by a large grandstand, probably for competitions.  People—mostly men in their sixties and seventies—are swimming laps.  My sense is that the guy in the lane adjacent to mine has been going for maybe fifty years unstopped, one relentless identical stroke after another in the night.  I start to emulate him, but after two laps I am bored and exhausted.  I want to cross the pool without going into the night air, but ropes are in the way, heavy and taut, as I find out by testing one. The only way to navigate without leaving the pool is, first to make sure there’s no traffic, then duck underwater and come up on the other side.  This process is vaguely anxiety-provoking, as I stay under extra long not to hit the heavy cord, but not too long to run into the next one or another swimmer in his lane. Also, swimming underwater in hot water is oddly disquieting.  Three such dives and resurfacings get me to the edge of the pool where Lindy is just arriving, shivering from the shower.

We go to a second outdoor pool, which is more a family area, and we swim about it a bit and then head for a big communal hot tub filled with children and adults. This is where the real heat is, and we are much happier zoning out in the mineralized steam, listening to Icelandic words flow by.

After that siesta we return to the athletic pool, having realized that it has its own less crowded hot tubs along the side.  These are sunk in the ground, so one descends into them. The first is marked 38 degrees centigrade, and then, tub by tub, they go steadily up: 40, 42, 44.  People are leaving one and graduating to the next, I suppose as they acclimate to the heat, and then increase the dose.  In the 44 degree tub two old men seem in hibernation, their eyes closed, breathing heavily.

We sink into the 38-degree vat, which is considerably hotter than either the roped pool or the communal tub, but obviously things can get much hotter. At first we are alone with two silent middle-aged men; then they leave for 40 degrees and, after a moment, we are joined by four Japanese men engaged in lively conversation as they descend and then sigh as they dully submerge.  They are of ages from about seventy to thirty.  I wish I could know what they are saying—Japanese banter in Iceland—as they are in heated and engaged contact. Then unexpectedly the oldest man begins drumming gently but rapidly with his fists on the youngest man’s back.  I had pictured them as traveling businessmen, and maybe they are.  Clearly this massage fits into their culture.  After the drumming, the elder goes, “Poof,” then drums again. . .then poofs again.  The younger man has a lot to say, exclaiming repeatedly and respectfully while the older one adds a few apparently instructive words.

After a while Lindy decides that she has had enough, so I depart for 40, which turns out to be notably hotter.  The Japanese men are already there, quieter in the greater heat. Soon we are joined by four Japanese women associated with them, chattering and giggling, and the tub has become crowded enough that I go for 42.  Way too hot for me. I am out of there in thirty seconds and headed for the locker so that Lindy doesn’t get too much of a head start.

Unapparent when I was getting undressed is a heavy-duty bearded attendant.  He is busy dumping liquid soap on the stone floor and then spraying with a hose so that it bubbles up and washes around our feet.  Reykjavik Spa City is a very old institution, and this janitor is probably performing the same ritual that another attendant did sixty years ago. Relentless and eagle-eyed, he is trying to make sure that everyone showers with their swimming suits off and that no one crosses an invisible line into the locker room while not thoroughly dried off.

When the Japanese men arrive, they enter the shower with their bathing suits, and he yells at them in Icelandic; they do not know of course what he is talking about. They finally settle on English as a common language, and the attendant says simply, “No bathing suit [pointing to the young man’s waist]. You must take it off.”  I can see that Japanese are humiliated, perhaps by the insistence of nakedness, perhaps by being called out, perhaps both.  But this is the global village: Toyota meet Thor.

As advised, we order a cab at the front desk.  Wearing our Icelandic headbands against the cold, we stand outside, but not long. Cabs are frequent.

As the driver lets us off a block below the Fron to avoid traffic, I check my kronurs and am a couple short without breaking a 1000.  He elects to take less money.  People are so reasonable and affable here.

“Thank you for pushing it,” Lindy says, as we ascend the hill.  “That was one of the best things on the trip, really local culture, and of course our last night should be special and count as part of the trip too.”

The previous night I had come up with a plan at least to follow the Mets’ game in real time on Yahoo’s MLB scoreboard.  I rented the Fron laptop computer for the last hour of the day when it was available (22:00-23:00) and thus was able to keep it overnight without more than a one-hour charge.  Setting it on the coffee table, I went to sleep at a normal hour with a suggestion to myself that I should probably wake up around 1:00.  I awoke a little bit after that, and the Mets were leading 2-0 in the seventh. The game finished with the same score.

I was able to follow its unfolding without hanging over Yahoo pitch by pitch.  I would watch a few pitches, then write some emails, then go to the Mets’ chatroom, then write some more emails, then check out the game, etc.  Occasionally I would linger through a developing situation, hitting the “Refresh” button when I was impatient.

I had several substantial exchanges in the present, most of them involving finding someone to meet us at the San Francisco airport when our flight arrived at 7:00 the next evening.  Various different people were checking their schedules and, by the time the matter got resolved, none of the folks I started out thinking were going to do it were able to, but an old friend I hadn’t been in touch with for a couple years (who just happened to email me about a different matter in the middle of my other exchanges), music critic Robert Phoenix, offered, “I can get you.” Then I was also carrying out another correspondence of three or four emails with our daughter Miranda.

The alternating rhythm was ideal; the game was kept in balance with other activities, and it ended happily and not too late.

I rented the computer again as soon as we got back from the baths.   We had been out late and, with packing and all, I was up when the game began at midnight and so began to follow it from the beginning.

This time, nothing was in balance.  The Mets, who had won four straight post-season games thus far and were on a roll, jumped to a 3-0 lead on a first-inning home run by Carlos Delgado. The way this information comes across the Internet on a site like Yahoo is reminiscent of board games of my youth. There is no real baseball game.  You just draw a card or spin and spinner, and you see the results of the play—fly ball to right, double, strike three, etc. When the Mets had two men on in the first and Delgado was at the plate, I thought (of course) “three-run homer.”  With no action to watch or situation to see develop, there was just a count logged in graphics, pitch by pitch, and then a result.  So when it said, “home run,” I exclaimed out loud, as though I had hit the jackpot.

The lead didn’t last.  The Cardinals came back, as the Mets first upped, then lost the lead, then went up 6-4.  Around 3:00 in the morning, I was tired, frustrated, restless, stuck before the computer, going compulsively back and forth between Yahoo and the Mets’ chatroom on nj.com.  Action tended to show up first in the chatroom, although you didn’t necessarily know exactly what it was.  “Sh*t!” was generally not good, nor were lines like “Mota, you a**hole!” (people wrote with asterisks to avoid the site censors).  “Yessss!” was always great, and that would send me right back to Yahoo where the result would register in a few moments, either a run by the Mets or, more often, getting the third out in a difficult Cardinals’ inning.

I thought the Mets were finally going to hold on with Mota on the mound in the seventh, but Yahoo froze for a really long time with Scott Spiezio at bat for St. Louis, usually a bad sign, though visits to nj.com showed fans still pulling for Mota to get out of the jam.  Before anything showed on Yahoo, a big “Nooooo!” on nj.com was followed by a string of like comments (“they are one f*cking tenacious team”).  I felt a chill, as I imagined that maybe he had hit a three-run homer. A quick jump to Yahoo showed it only to be a game-tying triple.  Back at nj.com, fans were complaining that Shawn Green was the worst and slowest outfielder they had ever seen and were arguing back and forth whether to blame him for not catching the ball or Mota for the terrible pitch selection. One fan would commend Fewwn for preventing a home run, and another would rebut, “If you get to it, you should catch it.”

With the score tied 6-6 and Billy Wagner coming in to pitch the ninth (and the dawn fast approaching in Reykjavik), I figured I needed to get some sleep.  An hour later, I was tossing restlessly in bed and figured I might as well get up and look because thinking about the game was one of my problems.  The thing never even went to extra innings; it was over long ago: 9-6 Cardinals.  Wagner gave up a homer to the first batter he faced—and that was just the beginning.

Tracking the game in real time was a bad mistake.  I wished I had just gone to sleep and found out the score in the morning.

But this last evening in Iceland had an effect. With baseball turned into a series of internet items, its true meaninglessness became evident. I would never follow it as closely again. In a few years I would just look at list. The scale and distance of Iceland had turned the game into bits of pumice and my life-long interest into monkey mind. I won’t even see Endy Chavez’s epic catch two days later live, for naught anyway.

October 14 (Day Thirty-Two)

A cold, gusty morning with spurts of heavy rain, it is hard to believe that we will leave today and arrive, by the physics of mass, motion, and steel, back in the Bay Area. In less than twenty-four hours we should be at our house that we haven’t seen since May 24.  Lindy is particularly excited about Poppy and Queequeg, the cats.  Yet, on the streets of Reykjavik, Berkeley seems far, almost supernaturally far.  And rain and wind are a bad omen for a nervous flier.

We do have an agenda this morning.  The guys from Skrudda, Ivar and Steingrimur, are going to meet with us at their office to discuss book ideas, possible collaborative projects.  First Lindy and I check out and bring our things downstairs and put them into storage.  Then we make a reservation at the front desk for 13:00 pickup by Reykjavik Excursions to the airport (yes, they are in the airline-passenger business too, as they would have to be to cash in on the lucrative Keflavik-Blue Lagoon trade).  Then, as planned, we stand downstairs at 10:00, as Ivar drives up to the door and we hop in his van. His route leads down Laugavegur, then past the art museum, out into the harbor, scenically around the harbor to a set of warehouses. Along the way he is explaining how these large buildings were just recently made available for purchase and he and Steingrimur have barely moved in. “Expect chaos.”

Skrudda’s space is a classic publishing office with ceiling-to-floor shelves bearing multiple copies of press books, galleys lying out on tables, assorted boxes, both opened and sealed, scattered about. We sit in a meeting room, eating rye crackers, drinking herbal tea, exchanging stories ideas.  Skrudda, like a number of independent American presses, arose from two friends developing a book company together; I can think of three “two guy” operations without even trying—Four Walls, Eight Windows in New York City (John Oakes and Dan Simon), Berkeley Hills Books (Rob Dobbins and John Strohmeir), and New Harbinger in Oakland (Pat Fanning and Matt McKay)—though the former two subsequently “mitosisized” through divorces, leading to Seven Stories Press and North Bay Books, respectively.

Given its small market of potential readers, Skrudda specializes in Icelandiana: nature photographs with text, histories, folklore, fisheries, industries, crafts, professional guides, plus a few translations of foreign titles of Icelandic interest.  In addition to Iceland: Magic and Mystery, the book I saw in Frankfurt, Ivar thinks that a number of their luxurious color projects on the Icelandic landscape have possibilities, though Magic and Mystery has a leg up on the rest for already being in English, plus the other books are enormous and expensive. We also look at Steeds of Heaven, a high-end photo-essay on Icelandic ponies, also translated into English but so text-light that I doubt all its words fill three pages.

While we are looking at books, we are also branching off into each other’s histories and perspectives. Outside, the harbor is busy, even in the wind and rain.

At one point, Ivar remarks on the widespread provincial sense that isolated, rational Iceland is somehow protected from the rest of the planet and its madnesses, a fantasy I share to some degree—there is a feeling of safety and immunity here.  It is probably why so many Icelanders return home.  “It’s crazy, but I feel as though, if there’s a bird-flu epidemic,” he says, “the birds will somehow hit an invisible wall in the air above Iceland and die before they get here, but of course that’s not true.”

“Too bad,” I agree.  “Even Iceland can’t be outside of history.”

After Ivar drops us back at the Fron, we walk in rain with a pair of umbrellas, using the final hours till pick-up to see the city one more time—stop at a few shops, view the colorful graffiti on new sidestreets.  On the van we sit next to a wide-eyed young defendant’s-rights lawyer from Chicago, on vacation here and headed home.  A goofy girl, she gives us a wonderfully loopy conversation about the oddities of Iceland.

As with our tour a couple of days ago, we are taken by the van to the dispatch area where I get on line to buy our tickets before the Keflavik bus gets there. I am five kronurs short of exact change for two seats, a near miss of less than a hundredth of a percent.  All my assorted Icelandic coins, fives, tens, fifties, etc., each worth less than a penny, plus my kronur notes miss the combined total by less than a tenth of a mill.  Either they will let me pay in kronurs and absorb the fractional hit, or I will have to use my credit card and take forty dollars in Icelandic currency with me. It is the former: the lady graciously and without fuss accepts my bills and pawful of coins.

Our Chicago friend now hastens to get a ticket too and join us on line for the bus. In the rain we proceed to Keflavik along those magnificent dreary lava fields and lagoons. They are beyond redemption and are uniquely beautiful.  The sea persists, the primordial Earth Sea, sea of the Sagas, stretching to the horizon along most of the route.

As we get off the bus and collect our suitcases and packs, wind is driving rain almost horizontally, and we are soaked by this brief passage.  After that, it is slow lines through check-in and customs, then remembering to mail the tax-refund forms (they certainly do not make the site obvious—it takes twenty minutes and questions of five different people for me to find the box).  Meanwhile Lindy has gotten on line for food at the cafeteria, and our friend joins us at a table, though she is sticking to a small bottle of red wine.

I don’t want any part of airport cafeteria food, but unfortunately the outer sector of the airport at which I bought a pack of smoked salmon our first time through is under construction and closed, so I go around the perimeter of interior shops, concession by concession, hoping to find some salmon to put on an unopened package of crackers I still have in my backpack.  At the very last one, a tax-free Icelandic-products shop, I am delighted to find a small food section in the back with those same packs of salmon.  After I pay and am headed out, I discover a vitamins section and decide to replace my just-finished jar of cod-liver oil pills here rather than at my naturopath back home, as this is close to the source of hers (which is Norway). This particular brand is called Thorskalysi Perlur (with a capital combination “b/p” giving the bottle an exotic look).  The clerk seals it in a plastic bag, explaining that I am not allowed to open it, as I am past security now and fish oil is technically a gel.  This is not a reassuringly effective procedure to me—e.g. “promise you won’t open this bag.”

While I am making tapas of Icelandic salmon and Slovenian organic amaranth crackers, feeling rather pleased with myself, I suddenly register a repeated loudspeaker announcement.  “Hey,” I say to the lawyer, “I think they are paging you for your flight.”

“Omigod,” she yelps.  “Here!”  She hand Lindy her mostly-unpoured wine and dashes to the gate.

Step by step, this is happening.  Step by step, we are getting closer to Berkeley.  If we just keep moving and time keeps passing and the plane doesn’t crash, we will be there in less than twelve hours.  If en route to our house I can pick up the DirectTV receiver shipped from Maine to the office, I can watch the Jets-Dolphins tomorrow and then the fourth game of the Mets-Cardinals series. Maybe the Prius we ordered in May will have arrived. The cats will be in the house.  Unreal.

Our Icelandair jet, lifting into the longest route the airline runs, soars in the driving rain like a whisper, shooting upward without a bump until we are in sun above the clouds. Leif Eiriksson couldn’t have done it better.

Once we are aloft, I tell myself that, if I sit here, eventually we will get home.  Either that or we will die.  So I should just wait it out—me, my hyperactive mind, my too-shallow breath.  Other options are miniscule, at about the level of chance that DNA collected at the crime scene belongs to someone other than O. J. Simpson: we could be kidnapped by a UFO; we could have mechanical problems and be forced to land somewhere else; we could pass into a slot of vacated time like the plane in Stephen King’s The Langoliers. Otherwise, it is just a matter of sitting and waiting, administering to these insistent thoughts.

This is how I dialogue with myself because nine hours seems unendurably long time.  Yet people travel longer—much longer—to get places.  They manage.

Because we are crossing so many time zones, we will lose only three hours during the nine of flight and arrive in San Francisco at around seven in the evening.  We are chasing the motion of the Earth, hence the apparent motion of the Sun, slowing but not preventing the onset of night.

I start the flight’s diversions by taking out my bound notebook and pulling together various jottings into one trip journal, something I had postponed for the flight. So many of my entries since the computer died in Piran have been on scraps of paper and pages torn out of the spiral notebook from Lindy’s purse. These need to be coordinated chronologically in my binder.

As I am scribbling away, struggling to decipher my various scrawls, the view in the window is suddenly startling and breathtaking.

I saw Greenland once before, on a flight from England.  There it is again as advertised: white as the Ice Ages, an eternal winter, down below. This is really major snow because those mountains look like massive Rockies or Sierras, and they are covered almost to their tops. They rise above a snowpack that fills the valleys between them to their necks.

These are the renowned glaciers, batteries of the Earth’s climate, occupying the landscape between land and sky, in place of rivers and seas.  Much of the world was once covered by them and their siblings.

On a jet-black canvass, broken-off chunks of ice are floating like hard white plastic chips.  If you saw these out of context, you would be hard-put to say what they were: white cushions on bottomless night.

As we pass across Greenland, I see many variations of this same glacial scenery—mountains and bays and icebergs in different arrangements.  Unlike my flight from London which just got the thin lower Julianaehaab/Ivigtut tip of Greenland, Icelandair cuts across the girth of the clandestine continent at a diagonal, so that it lies there in full view for at least an hour.  At some moments it looks like white mountains rising up in the ocean itself. At others, distinct black bays open between ridges, ice afloat in them.  Glaciers come right down to the waterline where the division is between cream white and India-ink black. In the distance always is a landscape of pure snow as far as I can see in every direction, as white as confectioner’s glaze.  Mountain peaks cast sun-dial-like markings over the pristine white.

In spots, newly-broken-off ice is clotting the sea, as long glaciers are disintegrating into icebergs—dotted lines leading into the absolute inky firmament. In other spots, where ice enters water, the water is clouded white.

Whether this is global warming or not, in principle it is. I am watching a process, the breaking up of ice, though there is an incredible amount of snow yet to go  It gives you a sense of how much water would be unleashed if Greenland melted.  I remember the poet Ed Dorn commenting, as we were flying over northern Canada into Alaska in 1976, “That’s the future of the world down there—either it’s all going to come down and cover everything again, or it’s all going to melt.” By now the direction is clear.

A late sun is backlighting the landscape, giving the snow edges and rills and the chunks of ice a sense of thick three-dimensionality.  All of these objects flattened together by distance and perspective involve huge drops and rises, valleys and peaks. The sun hints at disclosure of the deep relief and ruggedness below.

This scenery has been going on so long that I suspect we may no longer be over Greenland.  So what is this?  Is it far northern Greenland, Melville Bay, Baffin Bay, the Queen Elizabeth Islands, Baffinland, the Ross Gulf, some other Arctic bay or island?  Don’t they all run together up here where seas and bays are covered with ice?

The transparency of the view is now altered by thin clouds or high fog through which we zip at such speed that it is alternately absolutely clear, partly obscured, and covered by clouds, these views in rapid succession.  I cannot tell, at certain moments, whether I am looking at thin clouds or snow blowing across snow. I have the sense that humanity has exceeded its allotment since the Sagas, and there will be a steep price someday.

We are passing over huge, deeply rilled tongues of glaciers entering a long black frozen river alongside a giant milky glacier. The snow has a delicate duned look in the gold-tinted light.  These glaciers cover the land entirely except for a long ragged mountain edge sticking out intermittently like black vertebrae.

Now we pass over a sequence of exposed rock, wind-swept snow over it, then more glaciers.  A humungous glacier is splitting as it crashes into a river, and one can almost hear the force of the white noise it is creating, this high, a delivery of mass dwarfing most terrestrial waterfalls. The zone where ice meets water is dirty and spotty compared to the mountains covered with clean white snow.

Now it is a landscape of massive snowy Everests and black lakes. swift clouds blowing over them, again indistinguishable from blown snow.

Now we are over sheer clouds and I stop looking.  We are three hours into our flight so, I tell myself, the trip is just a normal Oakland to Boston run. The interlude and entertainment of the glaciers has occupied almost three hours.

I find myself thinking we may actually get back, and I engage in my second planned activity: making a list of things to do after we return. I divide it to columns of “home” and “work,” then lists purchases (such as an iPod to replace the CD player), activities (such as getting the computer to our tech person), people to contact, follow-ups to Frankfurt, etc.

Time passes. I look out the window, but there isn’t much to see except snow occasionally through the cloud cover.

More time passes.  It just does.  I look out the window. I read a bit.  I wonder if that is Victoria Island or Amundsen Gulf yet below.  I talk to Lindy.  If it were a train, I’d just zone out, but I can’t get off red alert on a plane.

After a great while I see the skimpy settlement signs of the north, a logging road, a house, smoke, parallel lines.  It is like what the Alpha Centaurian satellite dispatches across light years on its search for life on that blue-white ball in the next solar system.  Habitation markers in the tundra indicate we are well into Canada.

It is a case of many false springs, as snow and uninhabited badlands return, then stronger signs of modern culture: a tiny village, a pattern of roads, a circle, some inexplicable geometry.  There are also enormous rivers and forests, occasional mountains. This is Yukon/Northwest Territories sort of scenery.

Lindy, along with other passengers, has discovered that our plane is half empty, and one can go to the back and lie down across a whole aisle of seats.  I don’t explore this region initially, preferring to hunker down in my space.  Now I get up and walk around.  There is hardly anyone in the rear of the plane, and various people are standing around talking, lying across seats asleep.  That is where I learn that this is the last Icelandair flight to SFO; they are discontinuing the route. A woman explains this to me as a footnote to the fact that her group is on an Icelandair promotional tour. Too bad.  I was considering Reykjavik to SFO a real possibility for another trip.

I try lying down across three seats in the aisle below where Lindy is napping, and I doze very briefly, perhaps only a minute or two before turbulence wakes me.  That turbulence will last pretty much continuously for the next two hours, as we are over mountain ranges.  In fact, we seem to be going down the spine of North America, never leaving what is probably the Rockies, so there is no break in the chop.  After a while I get used to it and, though it escalates almost to the level that I think, any second the Seat Belt sign will turn on, it never actually gets there.

The last few hours are kind of numb.  This is no more than a flight from Chicago. . . now Denver. . . now L.A.  This Icelandair jet is actually going to land at SFO.