Names for the Sea, page 5
So the Westman Islanders increased their efforts as the lava approached the harbour. No-one had ever been able to stop or even direct molten lava, so vulcanologists and geologists from around the world peered over their shoulders as the men decided what to do. The US Army flew in pumps and hoses so that the islanders could pump seawater onto the lava as it edged across the mouth of the channel, having covered all the houses in its path. And it worked. (Or perhaps the volcano had always meant to stop there anyway). The entrance was left narrower but deeper than it had been, and angled so that when the sea outside is exploding white against the cliff-face and the waves are taller than boats and blowing back against the tide, the reflections of puffins’ nests are unbroken in the channel. There was a reason to come back.
We fly from the little airport, the one by the university whose runway will distract me when I’m teaching. The planes to Greenland go from there. We arrive in good time, having taken the bus before the logical one in case of delay, and go to check in. There doesn’t seem to be a queue, only a hall full of people milling and shoving, rucksacks bouncing into the people behind. Tobias gets knocked over and I pick him up, and then a rucksack hits his head so I put him down. A man stands on Max’s foot and Max pushes him off. Icelanders are tall, especially the kind of Icelander who flies across the country with hiking gear and fishing rods, and I can’t see over people’s heads to the departures board. We sidle around the edge of the crowd, Anthony in front and me herding the children. We can’t get to the check-in desk so we go to the outsize-baggage deposit. You’re too early, barks the woman. Come back in an hour.
We struggle back out. Are we not going, asks Max, and Tobias starts to cry. A bus that would take us back to the flat goes by, and I can see the windows of my office across the marsh. Of course we’re going, I say, but we’re going to have a little walk before we get on the plane. No, says Max, I’m not going. We’ll miss the flight. I go for a walk, says Tobias, setting off along the chain-link fence that separates the runway from the university. I follow him. We watch a cat flatten itself through a hole in the fence and scamper across the runway. We watch a plane land, count its six windows and wave to the twelve passengers, who don’t wave back. We watch another plane take off and turn back to fly past the disused water towers of Perlan. Max joins us, brandishing a fistful of leaflets. He wants to go whale watching and ride in a helicopter and take a day trip to Greenland and is it safe to let people take guns on planes because he thought it said at Gatwick that you weren’t allowed. What? He hands me the leaflet, Air Iceland offering friendly advice about what’s ‘Good to Know’:
You do not need to have a permit to carry firearms on domestic flights in Iceland. At check-in the firearm will be checked by an Air Iceland employee who will confirm that the firearm is not loaded. All ammunition must be separated from the firearm. The quantities of ammunition must not exceed 5 kilos.
I look up at Anthony. At Gatwick, I had to drink some of the water in Tobias’s beaker to demonstrate that it wasn’t whatever presumably toxic substance people have thought of using to blow up a plane (though surely anyone intent on blowing himself up wouldn’t jib at a little poison). We had to take our shoes off and disassemble the pushchair so it would fit through the X-ray machine, and even then I set off the alarm and had to confirm that I was indeed wearing a bra with metal under-wires. Five kilogrammes of ammunition? We discover when we return to the airport and, fifteen minutes before take-off, are allowed to check in, that you don’t need to show a passport, or even a driving licence, to board a domestic flight with your gun and your explosives. Anyone could do it, anyone who had an interest in combining passenger aircraft with firearms. They don’t, because this is Iceland and that’s not the sort of thing that happens here.
After twenty minutes’ flight, passing low over hills, farmland and a river carved deep into a plain, we land, and climb down the stairs onto the tarmac. It’s a bright day, and the sun is warm on our faces and on the grass as we wander towards the terminal building, where we watch from the doorway as the pilot jumps down from the cabin and unloads the baggage onto a handcart, which he wheels inside so people can help themselves. The internet offered a timetable for a bus service into town. There’s no bus stop. We wait. There are no taxis either. Beside the hill, the sea sparkles in the sun. There is birdsong, and the smell of warm grass. When’s the bus coming, Mummy, asks Tobias. I go in and ask. No, there’s no bus. Never has been. Taxis? Not here. It’s not Reykjavík, you know. No, it’s too far to walk into town. Especially with the children. Maybe two kilometres. Or three. I go back out and we set off. There are no pavements, which bothers the children, but there’s little traffic and you can hear it a long way off. The road leads down the mountainside, which is a brighter green than the open spaces in the city and smells quite different, of turf and sea and maybe heather, though I think the heather is imaginary, has wandered in from memories of Orkney where clear summer days can be just like this. And why not; it’s part of the same archipelago, some more small islands a couple of hundred miles south, part of the same Norse empire for about half of the last millennium. The town appears below us, houses in Smartie colours huddled around the harbour and the fish-processing plant, scattered up the lower reaches of the volcano, which is still bare, black shale and red rock, with only a fuzz of green on its dark shoulders. We go down the hill. There’s no-one else walking, even when we come to the main street. There’s a shop selling children’s clothes, a bakery and a branch of Bonus, the ubiquitous ‘cheap’ supermarket owned by one of the disgraced bankers. There are a couple of banks. But just as in Garðabær, everyone is somewhere else. I’ve booked us a hotel room, but when we find the hotel – the rucksack dragging on Anthony’s shoulders now, Tobias beginning to pull on my arm – there’s no-one there. The door is open, and we can go in and up the stairs, covered with the kind of kaleidoscopic carpet found in Blackpool hotels in the 1980s, and along halls that smell of air freshener and feet, and into a dining room with plastic flowers on the tables and something sticky on the floor, but there’s no sign of life. We call, and our voices are absorbed by the carpet and the flock wallpaper and the silence. Mummy, what if they’ve died, whispers Max. Please can we go now? I hungry, says Tobias, for the tenth time.
We leave. We have to find somewhere to stay. I find myself suddenly, unreasonably, anxious, as if the rift in our plan to be tourists has turned us back into new immigrants, people with little power, jeopardised by inexperience. What if we can’t find somewhere, what if there’s nowhere vacant or nothing we can afford? Is there a flight back tonight? We took the children away from everything they knew and now we can’t even provide a bed for the night and although it’s August it’s too cold to be out at night, too cold for the children, and probably even the airport closes after the last flight of the day. Calm down, says Anthony. Why don’t we try the youth hostel? So we do, and they have a family room with bunk beds and there’s a kitchen and a couple of more-or-less clean bathrooms and we could stay three nights for the cost of one in the hotel. Tobias asks which bed is his, climbs onto it and demands his toys. He doesn’t want to leave. Not now, not later. No. He will stay here until we go back to the airport. No, he doesn’t want to go to the bathroom, or the bakery, or to see the sea or the puffins or the boats. No, he doesn’t want to look for the swings or – we are becoming desperate – have an ice cream. No. He takes his rainforest jigsaw out of the box and begins to reassemble it.
We carry him, first to the supermarket, where we buy the basis of the kind of student cooking I haven’t done for fifteen years, and then down to the harbour. We can see the path going up the volcano from here, and another path leading across the hill to the other side of the island. The sky is still blue and the wind gentle. If we didn’t have children, or at least if we didn’t have Tobias, we could go up there, crunching over the lava to the empty heart of Eldfell, the fire mountain, and we could peer down into the crater and turn to see the sea crawling against the new coastline. Heimaey gained a third of its present landmass during the eruption. But we do have Tobias, and so we join a boat trip around the island, acting like the tourists we are.
The guide is an off-duty fisherman who has a blonde beard flowing down his smock – I can’t remember now if the smock was actual or metaphorical, but either way it was there – and speaks the idiomatic, placelessly American English of the Nordic countries. The boat slides out between the edge of the lava and the cliffs which make a steep wall on the other side of the channel. There are sheep strolling along the edge of the cliff, a hundred metres above the quiet water, and sea-birds patrolling the airspace on the way down. We begin to bounce on the waves outside the channel, and Tobias holds on to me, which is a relief because it means that falling off a boat must be one of the few dangers apparent to a two-year-old. We’re looking up at the new lava, the guide tells us, seeing a mountainside that wasn’t there when he was a boy. And here is the cliff where the coolest man in Iceland swam ashore. The coolest man in Iceland was one of four fisherman who survived when their boat sank offshore – he points out to sea, where clouds are gathering in the south-east and the waves are, I’m sure, bigger than they were ten minutes ago – in a winter storm. The men clung to their upturned hull, shouting encouragement to each other, for as long as they could, but the wind and waves strengthened until they were washed off the keel. The water temperature was six degrees and it was dark, but the coolest man knew his way and began to swim the six miles to land. (All the best stories have repeating numbers.) When he was close enough to hear the waves, the coolest man realised that he was coming in too far to the north, where the cliffs lean out sheer over the sea, so he swam back out and made a second approach, further south. He climbed out of the waves in the dark, and up those cliffs there, and made his way to the nearest house, there (not very near at all, really) and woke the inhabitants, but although he’d broken his leg climbing the cliff he refused to go to hospital until he was satisfied that a rescue operation was under way for his comrades. By the time he was ready to see the doctor, his blood temperature was less than twenty degrees, which is why they call him the coolest man in Iceland.
Anthony, who finds most swimming pools unpleasantly cold, looks rather despondent at this, and it’s only later, when we find a signboard above the cliff confirming the story, that he finds that I didn’t believe it and I find that he did. Any ordinary person, I assert, probably even most Icelandic men, would give up somewhere between the sinking bit and the getting washed off the keel bit and succumb regretfully to hypothermia, which is apparently not a bad way to go. It’s not normal to take yourself that seriously.
We bob on, the Americans and Spanish taking shelter in the cabin while we and the Danes lift our faces to the wind and wrap our scarves around our heads. We go round the bottom of cliffs that are shrieking tenements of sea-birds, gannets and fulmars, and we hear stories about how people (men) used to climb down the rock-face to take the eggs. There are thousands of puffins, blundering and tipping in flight but sleek as seals when seen underwater from above. The islanders used to kill them in great number, and there are still puffin breasts on the menus in the main street. Now there is the annual puffling rescue, for which we are too late. Sometime in August, the fledgling puffins (which really are called pufflings; when I first read about this I thought it was one of the more beguiling examples of Icelandic English) notice the bright lights of town and fly off to investigate. The island’s children collect them in cardboard boxes, take them down to the harbour and put them back in the sea, a moment which the tourist leaflet describes as ‘full of joy and delight’. On, round the far end of Eldfell, where no lava flowed, the land is bright and green as if nothing had happened and a couple of old farms sit undisturbed where they have always been. We are hugging the cliffs here, in a way that would make me nervous if something about being a tourist hadn’t made me suspend judgement. (Is this what happens to all those people who die doing foolhardy things in foreign places, is it something in the infantilising process of becoming a tourist and a stranger that makes you stop thinking like a grown-up, something that makes it OK to board a plane with people carrying ammunition and take a toddler round a North Atlantic island in a small boat?) There is a rock formation like a rose and one like an elephant, which disappoints Tobias who was expecting a real elephant, and then the guide turns off the engine and we glide into a cave, where the water lies black and still, and pale green stalagmites prod the surface. Drips fall, amplified, and then the fisherman takes out his clarinet and drops a few bars of slow jazz overboard, his body swaying with the boat while he plays. The boat is moving slowly towards the rock, but he finishes the melody before starting the engine. The echoes sing back, and back again.
The next morning, after a surprisingly refreshing night because the only way of getting the children to sleep is to lie in darkness ourselves, we go for a walk. Tobias sits, dressed, on his bed, playing with his puzzles, and doesn’t want to go anywhere but the airport. We bully him into his shoes and coat and set off. Max capers ahead. He’s been reading about Pompeii and is ready to be interested in a town drowned in lava.
The road ends in a wall of black rock. We follow the wall towards the sea, and find the end of a white house sticking out, its wooden wall buckled half-way down. There’s a path at the side, taking us up onto the new part of Heimaey, so we follow it. It’s colder than it was yesterday and the sky is full of grey cloud. There are outbreaks of white flowers in the lava, and a few rowan trees along the track. Birds sing. Every few metres, there are signs giving the names and sometimes floor-plans of the houses entombed below our feet. At first we are walking over the remains of wooden houses from the early twentieth century. A few like this survive in Reykjavík, painted Danish red and Swedish blue with white wooden lace under the eaves, and we’ve been inside the collection of old houses at Árbæjarsafn, the outdoor museum. Because these houses are recognisably part of Northern European heritage and pretty, I feel a proper sadness for their destruction. It’s harder to know how to respond to the 1970s pebble-dash poking out of the rock further up the hill; these were people’s homes, and yet I’m not acculturated to grieve for the loss of such buildings. There’s a grid system here, part of it laid out on the hillside, part drowned under black rock. In the surviving streets cars smaller than in Reykjavík are parked on crazy-paved drives, and there are net curtains in the windows and basketball hoops on the garages. Then, cutting across suburbia, there’s a river of stone, entombing the rest of the grid of houses and gardens. Max and I peer in through a window-frame sticking out of the lava and see twisted copper pipes, a bath-tub, the belly of a toilet. I point the torch on my phone into the darkness and we glimpse half a radiator and something that might be an electricity meter half-eaten by the volcano. There’s a photo of the house, which wouldn’t look out of place anywhere in European post-war suburbia, and a list of the people who lived there. Two parents and three children. Nobody died, not in the eruption itself, although one of the rescue workers inhaled a fatal quantity of poison gas during the cleaning operation in the following spring. It’s not a graveyard, but it’s not quite a museum either.
We skid down the edge of the lava flow to the half of the street that isn’t in the underworld, and find that there are plaques outside these houses too, showing what they looked like during the eruption or when the family returned in the summer of 1973 to find the windows gone, the rooms full to the ceiling with ash and the roofs bending under its weight. Some houses have gauges outside showing the peak height of the ash, like the signs outside fund-raising churches at home. Eldfell peers down over our shoulders, still there.
Later, Max and I go to watch The Volcano Show at the local cinema. This film is shown several times a day, with English, French or German subtitles, and the outside of the cinema building is covered with a mural of a spewing volcano. Inside, it reminds me of the cheap, local cinema where I saw most of the brat-pack films of the 1980s, a relic of the 1930s with red velvet seats from which the plush had been worn by two generations of Mancunian bottoms, where they still stopped films half-way through so that a girl could come out and sell Cornettos from a tray slung round her neck. There is a sweeping staircase up to the box office of Heimaey cinema, but the paint is peeling off the walls and the banister is sticky to the touch. We creep into the darkened auditorium, late, and see that it is empty. We are the audience. When we tip the creaking seats and fold our coats, the curtain rises, purple and gold as if revealing Gone With the Wind, and the film begins.
Among the emergency workers, apparently, was a cameraman. We watch the mountain explode, orange as an oil flare against the winter night, and a glacier of molten lava inches down to the town. Smoke and ash hang in the air, and bearded Icelandic men in wide-cut trousers wield shovels. Cigarettes hang from the corners of their mouths while they dig, as if there wasn’t enough glow and smoke on set, and occasionally, as the lava laps their shoes, they stand back and allow a slight ruefulness to flicker over their faces as their houses collapse and red flame leaps across the screen. Nobody runs or raises his voice. There are no women in this film. Snow falls. Lava slithers. At the harbour, in front of a fish-processing plant that isn’t there any more, men stand holding snaking hoses in both hands, as if engaged in a gargantuan pissing contest. A cat threads the burning ruins.
The music changes. The mountain is still steaming, but there is no more lava. People appear on the slopes, and in the graveyard and on the roof of the school and the medical centre. They have spades, and are shovelling ash. Where the ash is going is not apparent. Foreigners came to help, recalls the voiceover, not specifying which foreigners, and there they are, flower children in dungarees and floppy hats with daisies around the brims. I wonder how the men from the pissing contest regarded these volunteers. I cannot imagine Icelanders as willing objects of foreign charity, especially when it came wearing CND badges. Students with flowing hair strew seed across the new-born hill, to stabilise the bare ash and reduce the likelihood of a landslide, but some of the mountain is still too hot. On fast-forward now, houses emerge, the cemetery reappears, its population unchanged, though in nine months some of the old people must have died and been buried on the mainland. Birds sing. A dusting of green is seen on the ash above town, where the foreigners’ seeds have germinated.
