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.