The landscape outside the car window was as beautiful as I'd ever seen, but somehow all was tinted with a touch of the forlorn. A terrain of black and green, the green the darkest hue I could imagine. The blacks too were dull and unaccentuated, long ridges of rock that bisected the grassy plains in jagged cuts. Above all was dull grey, the clouds low and near omnipresent. I recalled as I drove beneath them that most of the photos I'd seen of Iceland seemed to share a similar grey. What one didn't get from these 2D images was just how low the sky hung, as if threatening to press you down into that rich green soil.
It is little wonder that Jules Verne opened his Journey to the Center of the Earth here, where a foreboding rocky portal serves as the entrance for that journey. In fact I was driving to that very feature, Mount Snæfellsjökull, at the end of the long peninsula which bears the same name. I recalled the film version of Verne's book well, recognized the bleak and harsh landscape from childhood memory. It also reminded me of another film I'd seen when I was young, "Island at the Top of the World," which Iceland most certainly was.
Part of my dark mood was the fact that I'd had had a low-grade rumbling fever for the past few days. The previous night hadn't gone so well. Being the height of the summer tourist season, it was tough to simply drop into a restaurant for dinner, and in the end we'd settled on a somewhat renowned hamburger place, a nice bit of irony considering beef was one thing that had been hard to find on any Icelandic menu, prior to the current tourist boom that is. The meat had the usual effect on me, raising my already high body temperature as I attempted to sleep. This being Iceland, the room had no air-con, and sleep was very hard to find.
Heat was the theme of the summer, with Kyoto having flirted with record highs day after miserable day. Even the UK where I'd spent the previous week was well above the norm. What a delight then to land earlier that day in temps in the mid-teens. As if under the influence of Stockholm Syndrome, my thoughts immediately turned to heat, the Blue Lagoon in particular. I read on the flight that being one of Iceland's top tourist attractions, reservations were an absolute must. So while I dealt with the luggage and rental car, LYL used her phone to make a booking. Or so we thought. Apparently it never went through, and despite my turning on the charm, I was unable to talk the manager into just squeezing into just two more. I found some consolation in the fact that the pools were only heated to 38 degrees C, tepid for me, as I tend to set my own bath to 45. (The admission price on the other hand was set far too high.) Before we drove up to Reykjavik, I went out to look at all those bodies bobbing outside, in water tinted like antifreeze. Still, it was the only color on the landscape, a blue so vivid it looked supernatural.
On the way to Snæfellsjökull, we had stopped at The Settlement Center in Bogarnes. My fever had sapped my enthusiasm, so we merely climbed the hill to the sculpture dedicated to Egil, the Viking/poet who was star of Iceland's best loved saga. I missed his father's rune-covered gravestone, but found another set of runes in the quiet churchyard of Borg á Mýrum nearby, the handful of graves facing out toward the marsh and the sea beyond, waters which had led some of these early residents from the lands where they'd been born.
The sea was a constant presence to our left, its color betraying waters dark and cold. The mountains and hills on our right strained upward as if to get a better glimpse. The clouds forced their heads down in places, though here and there bizarre features could still be seen. The most spectacular of course was the basalt cliffs at Gerðuberg, like a fistful of pencils rammed in the ground by an irate hero from the Sagas.
I've mention how I love the approach to geographic extremes, the rest of the world steadily dropping away like a pencil being shaved down to its nub. Mt.Snæfellsjökull and the entrance to Verne's underworld hovered just above us, out of sight due to the clouds. We rounded its flank and in doing so turned back upon ourselves, moving along the northern edge of the peninsula, the land building up once again. Beyond the sea out my window was little but a world of ice -- Greenland, and the North Pole. I imagined that if I squinted my eyes I could almost see the dotted line of the Arctic Circle.
The land here was jagged rock, covered in moss. It's beauty was hypnotic, though here and there highlights appeared. The 412 meter Hellissandur longwave radio mast, Europe's highest, was tethered by cables that spread nearly its height again. Not far beyond was the fishing village of Rif whose name was somehow un-Islandic. Berserkjahraun corrected that, its jagged lavascape as wild as the legends behind it. And of course the majestic Kirkjufell Mountain, it shape almost a towering pastry against the sea.
Maybe be it was the fever, maybe it was the weather, but I was somehow uninspired to stop and take photos. (Near sacrilege in this era of the selfie.) On the other hand, it could have been the consistency of the beauty around me. Each and every kilometer was simply breathtaking, so how to choose? Far more preferable to just roll through and be lost in it. I've been attempting a change in how I engage place, in not arriving at a destination and immediately blotting it out by placing the lens to my eye. Better to engage it first, before trying to subdue it.
And ironically as we were pulling into Stykkishólmur, the sky began to clear and all that beauty became even more vivid. By then little but my hotel bed interested me, and I allowed myself a few hours sleep before setting out again for dinner. Our hotel Franciskus (which unknown to us multitasked as a Franciscan nunnery, the chapel and resident sisters still in evidence) had booked a table for us at Sjávarpakkhúsið, a hundred year old bait shop converted into a restaurant (which I'd see again on the flight home, as a central location in 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'). Being Saturday night, the place was busy, the service slow. But the clientele helped pass the time. I eavesdropped at the older couple at an adjacent table, straining to place their accent. From Scando-wherever, the husband had an interesting habit of toasting his wife after every third or fourth sentence. And as the summer light faded, he began more and more resemble Max Von Sydow, and in my fevered mind, I began to find myself an extra in a Bergman film.
On the turntable: Josh Rouse, "The Smooth Sounds"
On the nighttable: Alan Booth, "A Journey through Japan"
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