Names for the Sea, page 16
Later, it will seem funny to me that Route 1 ever seemed alarming, after I’ve learnt to drive on gravel tracks, to coax the car up hills so steep that you think you must have driven onto a hiking trail by mistake, not to look down as we follow pot-holed single track roads along the sides of hills so vertiginous that the car probably wouldn’t even roll if you went a few inches that way, but plummet into the sea like a dive-bombing skua. But this is my first time driving outside the city. The road climbs across a snow-covered lava field towards jagged mountains and it feels too different, too strange, as if we’re driving into the kind of landscape that tells you it’s a fantasy film. The lava field’s stone waves are like a frozen sea, each crest white on one side, where the snow has drifted, and black on the other. Down in the city, bright green is beginning to spread like mould across the dead grass of the empty spaces between roads and car parks, empty spaces that no longer seem odd, but here there’s no sign of spring, or indeed of seasons. It’s monochrome, the shapes of the land nonsensical to the European gaze. There is dark cloud twining around the mountains above us, and no cars in the rear-view mirror or on the road ahead.
Your fingers have gone white, says Anthony. I try to relax my wrists. We’ve just had the car serviced. We have two mobile phones, a packed lunch (not really a picnic because there is no question of eating it outside) and lots of winter clothes and we are, for goodness’ sake, barely ten kilometres from home, not five from the edges of suburbia. Even Tobias could walk to the nearest bus stop. We drive on. The road is well made. We begin to descend the hairpin bends into what must be Hveragerði, where a grid of flat roofs folds out from the bottom of a creviced mountain. There are trees in the crevices, massed pines, and plumes of steam rising from among them and from the black scree paused on the hillside above, and from the bare red ground above, waving in watercolour lines and pastel scribbles into the sky.
The town is empty, the way Icelandic towns seem to be. There is a row of shops bordering a large car park: a branch of Bonus, a bank, a video rental place. I pull up in front of Tourist Information, which appears to be closed. Why are we here? asks Tobias. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to get out. I want to go home. Anthony opens the door to investigate, and a block of cold air takes his place in the car, much colder than in Reykjavík. Max slides down in his seat, reading about the Romans, and I stare out of the window, wondering what it would be like to live here. Anthony returns with a map of the Hot Springs Trail and we set off again, past commercial greenhouses where they grow flowers but no fruit or vegetables, to park in front of a garden centre which is somewhere between closed and abandoned. There are no other cars moving, no-one on the pavements or in the gardens. The houses are large by British standards but visibly dilapidated in a way that I haven’t seen in Reykjavík, the paint peeling off corrugated iron walls and gates hanging off their hinges. We get out of the car like people lowering themselves into cold water, force Tobias into his snowsuit and set off, carrying him as he kicks and screams that he hates the snowsuit and wants to be cold. His tantrum is the only sound in town, maybe the only sound this side of Reykjavík. Max scampers ahead. There are more of those bungalows that would look equally at home – or equally out of place – in New Jersey or Wilmslow or Barcelona. But there are also the trees, pine trees that tower over us, breaking up the sky and murmuring at us, and we realise how much we have acclimatised to a world in which there is nothing between us and the sky, where trees, if any, are sociable things of human stature, rowans and dwarf willows. Consulting the map, we climb up past the church, a modern church with angled white walls and bright windows, and come out above the river. It must be the river that’s meant to be warm, but the thermometer in town was showing an air temperature of minus five and it’s not steaming. Can I swim, asks Max, who has seen the pictures. Try taking your gloves off, I tell him. Oh, he says. OK.
There’s a narrow, arched wooden bridge over the river, vaguely willow-pattern. Tobias wriggles out of my arms and trots across, with me scurrying after him because it’s high and narrow and there’s room for him to fall under the rail. Halfway up the hill at the other side, we turn to look back at the town. Village, by English standards. There are wooden houses lining the river, and they all have jacuzzis hanging on to the rocks over the water, all covered with blue tarpaulins. There’s no-one moving, not in the gardens or on the streets or in the fields between the river and the mountainside, although there are a few horses mooching around a red corrugated-iron farmhouse with white wooden lace under its eaves. Horses, says Tobias, look, horses in a field, eating grass! The ones in the zoo are still inside, eating hay, and I think he’s stopped believing us when we tell him that spring will come and they will run in their field again.
There are clouds of steam drifting from the top of the hill, which is made of shale and red mud. As we climb, the ground under our feet boils and seethes, sulphur steam blowing into our cold noses. There is a path that winds between the simmering puddles, but they are always shifting, spreading, contracting, and sometimes the quaking mud has invaded the track. I take Tobias’s hand, warn Max to keep back, as if hand-holding will stop the ground opening under their feet. There are boiled worms in the puddles, and earth the texture of baked custard. My hands are contracting painfully in the cold and I hold one over the steam, but of course what steams in an air temperature below zero is still far below blood heat. Iceland’s geothermal Sturm und Drang, I realise, is exaggerated by cold. In a warmer climate, you’d see less steam. When Tobias stops talking about the horses we can hear the ground rumbling, as if there are stones being rolled around a cauldron at an angry boil. (This is probably exactly what is happening, somewhere below our feet where the trolls cook in their underground cave.) Steam hisses from under a rock. We follow the path, Tobias unusually docile about holding hands. The children poke their feet into puddles the colour of oranges, of fresh, sun-ripened oranges that you can’t get here, and around us steam rises from the streams that skitter through rocks and shrubs down to the river, and from soft red patches where it looks as if the ground has been rubbed raw, as if the Earth’s innards are poking indecently through. The heat has incubated spring, and there are patches of grass the colour of English lawns in May, and trees with bright new leaves and even buds on their low branches. The boiling and steaming is almost menacing, but I find myself reassured. Because there’s something moving in this landscape that isn’t me, because there’s a precedent, a geological endorsement, for warmth and movement in an otherwise bleak and silent land. Tobias is getting tired and my feet are numb. We pick our way back to the car, passing – at last – some locals coming out of a house, who laugh at Anthony because he’s carrying my handbag because I’m carrying Tobias. Icelandic men don’t carry handbags. Icelandic women don’t carry toddlers, who seem to move around only in cars. As we close the boot and the car doors, the sound echoes over the low roofs of Hveragerði, and we drive away like thieves in the night.
9
Eyjafjallajökull
On the 22nd of March, the Icelandic papers report a small eruption in the south. The farms in the valley below the volcano have been evacuated, and then the police close the roads in the area, not because there is immediate danger to travellers but to stop the tracks being choked by gawkers. Even Route 1 is only dual track for most of the way round Iceland, and the smaller roads aren’t built to handle more than a few dozen cars a day. I phone Matthew, whose partner Hjölli is a seismologist working at the meteorological institute. Journalists are getting close to the volcano; could I? No, he says. It’s between two glaciers and anyway there isn’t much to see, just a little glow and some steam which could very well be cloud to most of us. The worry, he adds, is that it’s near a glacier and could trigger a flood, and the real worry is that every time this one blows, Katla follows. And Katla offers ash plumes into international airspace, ash over most of the country and a lot of toxic gas. You’d be able to see that all right.
But four days later, the roads are reopened and the tour companies begin to advertise ‘volcano trips’ on the internet. It’s still being called ‘a tourist eruption’, as if Icelanders themselves are so used to molten lava bursting over the horizon that they don’t bother to glance up and it’s only foreigners who feel the need to go and watch. I book a ticket. Max wants to come too. We won’t be back until after midnight, but a live volcano seems worth a late night.
The bus will collect us from the Hilton. It’s a useful landmark, on the corner of a big intersection, but I’ve never been inside before. We sit on a leather sofa and wait, watching the expressions of people coming in from their first taste of Iceland. Suitcases hurry like dogs at the heels of their well-heeled owners. People in dark clothes and sunglasses queue for the attention of two young women, blonde and made up like air-hostesses, behind a hardwood counter. The faces coming and going in the revolving door are uncertain, as if they’re coming to apply for citizenship rather than check in. The lobby is built on the scale of a parliament or national museum, diminishing guests to insect-size.
The bus comes. I’d been hoping for one of the mini-buses we see sometimes heading out of the city with foreigners craning through tinted windows at Esja and the unused pavements and concrete apartment blocks of Reykjavík, but it’s a full-sized coach, emblazoned with the tour company’s logo. All year, I’ve been seeing these buses with envy for people who can look at Iceland and go home, uncompromised, pity for those who don’t learn the changing moods of light and water, and, latterly, a little superiority to those who take home a tour-guide’s narrative of Icelandic life. We climb the stairs and choose seats, and then sit there for an hour while the bus circles the city, picking up further passengers from hotels by a route that makes a maze of the ring roads, only to return to the main drag where everyone is instructed to leave the bus and exchange one kind of ticket for another. An hour and a half after Max and I boarded, we leave the city via Route 1, passing the Hilton on the way. Max and I open our books and lean back, but the tour guide starts to talk, over a PA system too loud for reading. Max puts his fingers in his ears and holds the book with his elbows. The tour guide tells us that the sagas are historically accurate, that all modern Icelanders descend from those who came from Norway in the ninth century and that Iceland has been a full democracy since the settlement era. No mention of the settlers’ Irish and Scottish slaves, much less more recent immigrants. It’s a clear day, the sun moving into the west over rush hour on Route 1. We pass the industrial parks and retail zones surging east from the suburbs, bits of heath and lava still asserting themselves between the car parks and warehouses. There are two British women behind me; after nine months in Iceland I want to turn and introduce myself but instead I hold my book open and eavesdrop, one of the pleasures I’ve missed most here. They’ve spent the last three days taking coach tours out of Reykjavík and have heard the same spiel on each one. The fat blonde repeats phrases after the tour guide, making fun of her accent and mispronunciations. I watch the reflection of the thin brunette staring out of the window, jeeps flickering past her face, until she turns to her companion and tells her to stop being so fucking miserable all the time. I wonder how long she’s been wanting to say that. The fat blonde’s indifferent response suggests this isn’t the first time, and after the traffic lights change she starts up again. The tour guide is explaining that Iceland was actually responsible for the French Revolution. (I’ve heard this argument before, though only in Iceland; the poor harvests that exacerbated European hardship in 1796 may have been affected by an ash cloud from Katla.) One of the couple opposite us is reading a novel in Polish with American place names, the other the Lonely Planet Guide to Iceland in English. The guide begins to list the dates of every volcanic eruption in Icelandic history and Max, who likes that kind of thing, lets his book close. We come down the hill into Hveragerði, where steam is still rising from the places where steam rises. The guide tells us that before the earthquake in 2007, there was no steam here. If that’s true, I think, they worked damn fast to set up a tourist trail as soon as the earth stopped moving. Which is entirely plausible.
Through Selfoss, and out, south now of our known world. It’s the first time I see that some of the land outside Reykjavík, which is often described as more or less empty by city-dwellers, has a scattering of farms at least as dense as in Kent. This isn’t wilderness. The fields are bigger and flatter than at home, and the mountains looming over them and the colours in the winter grass and the tilted sky don’t look like anywhere else I’ve been, but the houses and barns, the horses and ditches, could be in Belgium or northern France. I wanted the strangeness I’ve seen in the films and that I remember from my summer with Kathy, I wanted flame rolling from a lunar landscape, not red-roofed barns and a flow of traffic suggestive of a bank holiday in Cornwall. There are cars ahead and behind, too fast and too close together, all going south as if we were fleeing rather than visiting a natural disaster. The tour guide points out a small white cloud apparently caught on one of the more distant and flatter mountains. That’s it, she says, that’s the eruption. It looks a long way away.
The sun is low now, the bus’s shadow wavering half-way up the hillside where the winter grass glows yellow. We’re going to stop in ten minutes, the guide says, for a technical stop. Max looks up. She doesn’t sound as if she’s just told us that the bus is breaking down. There will be no further, er, facilities for a technical stop, she adds, so you should make your technical stop now. And if you want to eat this evening, you should buy some food too. I meet Max’s puzzled gaze and explain that I think this technical stop has nothing to do with technology. The women behind have worked it out too and are mocking, but I can, sort of, see the problem. Icelandic is a language with no sensitivities about biological function, no rude words or taboos around body fluids. There is one word for peeing, weeing, making water, spending a penny, using the bathroom, urinating, doing a number one. Pissa. Icelanders speaking English, in my experience, use the word ‘piss’, even when excusing themselves from the dinner table or a seminar. If this is your tradition and you’re talking to an audience likely to include Americans, I see the cause of wariness. But it’s a very Icelandic solution. Rather than admit uncertainty and ask a native speaker for the appropriate term, you co-opt something you heard once and use it with scorn. Don’t show weakness, don’t admit ignorance, don’t give anyone a chance to laugh at you.
The ‘technical stop’ lasts half an hour. It’s eight o’clock and the sun is beginning to set, a process which takes several hours even in spring. A north wind slices across the plain. Max and I stand in the car park and try to eat the skyr I’ve brought, but it’s too cold; with gloves on, the spoons slip out of our hands, without them, our hands are too cold to steer spoons. We’ve been told not to eat on the bus, where all the doors are open and the British blonde huddles in her seat, shaking and whining with cold. At last the guide comes back and walks the bus, counting and eating a sandwich. Two people are missing. The doors stay open. Max’s teeth are chattering and his face looks blue. Across the aisle, an Englishman tells his Irish seat-mate that it’s really good to be here because now he knows what it’s like for the natives, the Eskimos, the Inuit and what-have-you. Someone else is beginning to devise public humiliations for the latecomers. They come at last, Italian, unapologetic.
The doors close and we set off again, through a different landscape. Streams glimmer down the sides of valleys lined with brighter grass. The farmhouses here are wooden, with painted lace under the eaves, and sometimes there is a white church on a knoll, with a bell shining in the low sun. I understand for the first time why this could have seemed like a promised land to settlers from the wilder bits of Norway: fertile green land with fresh water running off the hills, the land itself heated and sheltered fishing grounds close at hand. The light is dusty now, the sun resting on the edge of the glacial plain. The cloud we’ve come to see is nearer, pointing like a cartoon speech-bubble into one of the snow-covered hills. We leave the metalled road and begin to judder down a track, not the kind of track on which anyone would drive a bus in England. There are a couple of those wooden farmhouses on the hillside above the road, and their lights come on as we pass. I try to imagine how much I would resent all these cars tearing up my track and shining their headlights into my quiet sky and ogling the volcano that threatened my home and livelihood, but I don’t think I can. And then the road is lokað, closed, and we turn off into what I take for a makeshift car park, complete with Portaloos for any technical needs, but it’s just the stony floor of a glacial valley. There are perhaps a hundred cars here, and a throng of Icelandic jeeps and SUVs nosing at the river like goldfish waiting to be fed and then lumbering across the water and up the mountain. Right, says the guide, here we are, and there’s the volcano. We’ll be leaving in an hour and a half. The fat blonde whimpers. There’s nothing to do here, she moans. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be looking at. What the hell is she supposed to do for an hour and a half?
