Sila

(Hyperborean Hopscotch 2017: Days Six and Seven)

Grabbed coffee and a Danish (appropriate in a constituent country of Denmark, right?), then started mapping the day. I considered a whale watching tour, but those are really expensive and I figured I could survive without it.

So instead I returned to the one thing I had been doing: walking the icefjord. As I’d already completed the two main trails, this time I opted for alternative routes. The first was simply climbing down the rocks until I was right at the water. Eye level with the icebergs. Seeing the arctic whites and glacial blues up close was worth the entire trip. 

Down to the water.

In The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold, Gretel Ehrlich describes her close experiences with glacial environments:

“I began to understand about being silanigtalersarput: a person who is wise about things and knows the ice, who comes to teach us how to see. The first word I learned in Greenlandic was sila, which means, simultaneously, weather, animal and human consciousness, and the power of nature.”

Weather, consciousness, the power of nature.

More at water-level.

I sat there by the ice for a while, then climbed back up, up, up, passed the Blue Trail, up onto an unmarked path into rocky hills that gave new views of the fjord. And as luck would have it, I spotted a few whales surfacing and spouting out in the bay. Perfect.

Whales in the distance (Above and to the left of that rock island).

It began raining harder than usual while I was up there, so I fled the World Heritage area and walked into town. My ticket from the Ilulissat Museum was also good for the Kunst Art Museum, so I ducked in there and looked around. I spent an hour or so in the company of paintings, sketches, photographs, and sculptures crafted mostly by local Greenlandic artists.

In the museum.

In the museum.

Somewhere that day, I’d heard that the hallen (hall, or in this case public gymnasium) had free showers, so I hit that up, more for the passengers on my flight the following morning than for myself. (I don’t want to get too much into the hygiene of this camping adventure, but the showers were few, far between, and always overdue.)

A brief overview of my campsite:

Between glaciers and a graveyard.

To end the day, I had a final meal at Café Iluliaq: A so-so musk-ox burger with an Aasiaq juniper beer (by Immiaq brewery). Full, happy, satisfied with my time in Greenland, I returned to my tent and fell asleep early again.

Goodnight Greenland.

It was a very cold night.

…

The next morning, I packed up my gear and walked the hour and a half to the airport. It was another peaceful flight.

Jakobshavn glacier and Ilulissat icefjord from above.

Landing back at Reykjavik’s domestic airport, I walked across the city to the hostel campground and set up my tent.

The guy at the hostel’s front desk told me that a restaurant I’d eaten at back in 2014 was still open. I had to go. Veitingahúsið Lauga-ás still served their seafood gratin: a fishy, shrimpy, cheesy, creamy, godly concoction that I described as “most probably the best thing I’ve ever eaten” when I first tried it. The description still holds.

Final meal before my big Icelandic hike.

Post-dinner, I drank green tea at the hostel campground, updating my travel journal and waiting for my phone to charge. The second third of the trip was over. As if to mark the occasion and welcome me back, Iceland provided another showing of the Northern Lights.

Sometimes I’m so lucky I don’t believe it.

The most adventurous part of the trip would start in the morning...

At the Edge of the Maps

(Hyperborean Hopscotch 2017: Day Five)

I thanked my neighbors for letting me crash in their scenic burial ground, but the ghosts were still asleep in their graves.

Instead of packing my gear up, I headed straight for the water. Leaving everything behind, I traversed rocks, tussock tundra, and streams, making my own way down (there was no path).

Dwarf birch in foreground.

Eventually I climbed down and hit the Yellow Trail, but simply crossed it and continued on my way. I had a meeting to attend. Close to the water and the icebergs on their near-motionless voyages, I sat down and stared. 

Communing with nature.

There were no thoughts in my head. I was still more asleep than awake. My mind was blank. Then I thought about where I was going and where I was.

Like Joannna Kavenna in her book The Ice Museum:

"In my mind there was a blank spot, a vast white patch, the most northerly island. I turned to the ice mountains of Greenland. Seeking to draw the strings together, I turned to a forbidding ice-plain, at the edge of the maps, spreading toward the frozen ocean."

I needed to walk the Blue Trail today. My plan was formulating. But first, coffee.

Back in town the first shop that had opened (early on a Saturday) and served coffee was the town’s gas station. I sat down at their bar table looking out the window, wrote some words in my travel journal, and drank first a coffee with sugar, then a cappuccino – both from a machine. Not the ideal café scenario, but I worked with what I had.

Slightly awake, slightly warmed, and slightly energized, I marched back to my tent and other possessions. I packed everything up and hit the Blue Trail.

Ilulissat icefjord.

That path is just under 7 kilometers (just over 4 miles), so nothing intense. But I expected ascents and descents, with all of my gear.

Back out along the fjord I walked with views of the huge icebergs. The planked walkway gave way to natural terrain, and there was quite a bit of rock hopping involved.

Ilulissat icefjord.

Ilulissat icefjord.

Ilulissat icefjord.

I did wander off path a couple times and had to climb my way back when I spotted the blue dots marking the trail. Nothing too strenuous at first, but rounding one rocky hill, the trail veers away from the water and begins to climb. This one long ascent is within a corridor called Qoororsuaq (the Cleft), which at its apex gives a great hilltop view of the icefjord, its rocks, and little Ilulissat town down on the other side. 

The Cleft.

The rocky descent through the other side of the Cleft ends in a large sled dog encampment, even larger than the alley of dogs at the entrance to the UNESCO site. A dozen or so little yipping pups made a great welcoming party for the end of my hike.

Victory.

Walking the whole trail with the weight I carried was actually fairly difficult – kind of scary because 7kms is much shorter than most days I would be hiking on the Laugavegur Trail in Iceland a few days from then. Luckily - and perhaps tellingly - I walked the trail in half the posted estimated time, including stops to breathe in the icefjord scenery and chat with people along the way. When I realized this, my fear of future fatigue faded.

My next mission was postcarding, so I picked up cards and stamps then grabbed more coffee at a place called Café Iluliaq. Much better than the gas station coffee. I wrote my postcards, sent them off, wandered around town for a couple hours, then wound up back at Café Iluliaq for dinner. Their halibut escabeche was the second hot meal I had on my trip, so it was incredible by default. Immiaq Brewery is also located in the same building, and their Qaqqaq lager was pretty great as well.

After another short hike along the icefjord, it began to rain. I haven’t mentioned it until now, but every day I spent in Greenland it rained periodically, on and off. This time, I decided to retreat to my tent and wait out the rain...

I did not wake up until the morning.

Dream of the Great Unknown

(Hyperborean Hopscotch 2017: Day Four)

First, a word from Knud Rasmussen, just before the First Thule Expedition of 1912:

“Hello comrades, happy men on the eve of cheerful discoveries. The morning brings alive the dream of the great unknown, and with the sun we rush to meet our destiny! Out of breath, full of zest for the dawning day...Can anyone be richer?"
(As quoted in Stephen Bown's White Eskimo.)


In Reykjavik City Hostel’s free/exchange racks I found another sweater and a big, light, strong stick – obviously it had been used previously as a walking stick, something I desperately needed for my upcoming hike. My two proper trekking poles were back home because of a problematic travel issue: even when collapsed they are too big for the little duffel bag I use for checked luggage and poles aren’t allowed as carry-on luggage. I put the sweater on and left the stick in the hostel’s storage room, with a bag of groceries I also needed for the hike.

After breaking down my tent and rearranging my bags for “travel mode,” I drove to the SADcars rental office in town. I dropped off the key, bid farewell to Tormund, and then took a half hour walk to the domestic airport. With the sun I rushed to meet my destiny.

The flight was great – a rare remark – with amazing aerial views of the Greenland Ice Sheet as we flew across the country from east to west. The ice cap is 660,000 square miles in total – the second largest body of ice in the world after the Antarctic sheet.

Crossing the cap.

In the Ilulissat airport I rearranged my bags again, this time for “hiking mode.” I set off for town.

The air was cool on the west coast of Greenland, with light scattered showers and scenic views of the icefjord as I walked an hour from the airport into Ilulissat. I walked along a road through dark, colorful, stark rocks and caught site of several small icebergs in the water.

The first building I came across was a the Hotel Arctic, where I purchased WIFI and charged my phone (the battery was dying). The girls in reception gave me good information on supermarkets, restaurants, distances between places I wanted to go, and so forth.

Another 15 minutes further into town I grabbed groceries and lunch then ate as I wandered down to the bay where the Zion Church looked out over the water and ice. Some Inuit kids were playing with wooden toy boats in a big puddle and greeted me in their native language Kalaallissat as I walked by.

Seaside church.

My next stop was just across the street from the church: The Ilulissat Museum. This old, red building was the childhood home of Knud Rasmussen, an explorer I had recently read much about. The museum had a whole floor dedicated to the “White Eskimo” (who was part Greenland Inuit and part Danish), with some of his expedition gear and clothes from the many journeys he undertook in the far north. He loved both sides of his heritage, and while his work did include mapping and discovery, his real contribution to the world was more anthropological. 

Rasmussen's house / The Ilulissat Museum.

Traveling around Greenland, Canada, and Scandanavian Lapland, he documented the stories, songs, religious beliefs, and rites of native arctic peoples. He learned to live among them, adapted to their ways of life, and was welcomed into their culture. He stood up for them and their rights in their homelands at the same time he was sharing their rich culture with the world. 

Inside the museum.

The museum also housed artifacts from the nearby site of Sermermiut, an archaeological site dating back to 600 BCE and used by Saqqaq, Early Dorset, and Thule cultures. Pieces included figurines, other artwork, spear and harpoon tips, and other stone tools. There were hundreds if not thousands of artifacts on display.

Sermermiut artifacts.

Moving on, I ventured to find the UNESCO World Heritage Site and the hiking trails around the icefjord. The road there is lined with sled dog housing. Puppies followed me along the way while the adults lazed around in the grass, on the rocks, or on top of their wooden dog houses. It was adorable. I missed my dog.

Sled dogs in the off season.

At the end of dog alley were the trails leading into the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) area. I knew the Blue Trail was the longest at about 7 kilometers, so I planned to tackle that on the following day. I opted for the Yellow Trail this time, which first leads passed a graveyard. Behind that I spied a field that looked like a possible camping spot for the night, but waited until later to investigate. 

The trail turns into a rock hopping and navigating game. Choosing which route to take from one yellow circle marker to the next is up to the hiker with no real path among the rocks. So I had a good time picking my way through the field of stones, slowly climbing until eventually I reached the top with grand views of the icefjord proper. One other man was there, and while I didn’t ask his nationality he spoke great English with a German-sounding accent. We talked of the stunning landscape and seascape, the massive icebergs out in the water. We estimated that many were as big as factories and a few of the ones farther out could have been wider and taller than whole city blocks.

That's me talking to a stranger along the Yellow Trail.

The stranger hiked on down the trail the way I’d come and I continued on my way. At the end of the hike I was back in Ilulissat and had to walk from a new side of town back to where the hike began. Re-arriving at the graveyard I’d seen hours earlier, I made my way around to the back of it. Out in a field with a great view of the icefjord I got my tent up and my belongings inside. 

Tent with graveyard in background.

Physically tired but mentally still too excited about where I was, I took an evening stroll down the first part of the Blue Trail to see the sunset light on the ice floating away from Jakobshavn Glacier. The complete Blue Trail would be my mission in the morning. 

Glacial sunset.

In "Leaving Winslow,” Jackson Browne sings:

"I keep on hearing 'bout the disappearing ozone layer.
I keep on hearing 'bout the disappearing Greenland Shelf.
I keep on hearing all about the disappearing middle class.
I figure I'll be doing some disappearing myself."

Luckily the shelf, the ozone, the planet, had not yet disappeared. But in a way I had. I’d disappeared into West Greenland and I was all the richer for it. In my little tent, between a glacial icefjord and a village burial ground, I bundled up and drifted to sleep among the ice and ghosts.

"Can anyone be richer?"
- Knud Rasmussen

Where You're Going and Where You Are

(Hyperborean Hopscotch 2017: Day Three)

The morning of August 17th I woke up surprised I wasn’t freezing. It was actually perfect, pretty cool but no numb toes. I bounced my mighty car Tormund back down the long Látrabjarg gravel road, up into the mountains, along the fjord coastline and out of the Westfjords region of Iceland.

Crossing a bridge southward across Gilsfjörður I caught a glimpse of two seals hauled out on some rocks in the water. Unlike the one at the cliffs, these were not too far away for photos. Unfortunately the bridge was very long, there were no pull-outs to stop, and I had other cars behind me. Too bad. I will just have to remember them.

I turned west onto Route 54 and the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. More dirt roads, but by then Tormund and I were veterans of these and took them on without worry. These were not nearly as bad as some we’d traveled thus far anyway.

Into Snæfellsnes

Our first stop was at an expansive, wicked lava field called Berserkjahraun. The story is that a pair of Berserkers were tricked and murdered here by a sly farmer, and from what I’ve read an archaeological excavation essentially proved the story true when it uncovered the bodies of two large men where they were supposedly buried. The rocks in the area are dark and mossy and ghoulish, a quality inherent in Iceland’s lava fields that makes obvious the fact that they’re haunted. On a map I was using, this field has two symbols indicating the presence of ghosts and trolls. I’m not sure if either exist, but I’m sure this is where they belong.

The Berserker's lava field.

Driving on by the town of Grundarfjörður I spotted “Church Mountain” and soon the falls nearby. This pair – Kirkjufell and Kirkjufellsfoss in Icelandic – is said to be one of the most photographed places in the country. I knew it primarily as the “mountain that looks like an arrowhead” in Game of Thrones.

Kirkjufellsfoss.

Onward from there into Snæfellsjökull National Park, the third of Iceland’s three formal National Parks I have visited. High, winding, oceanside roads led down to neat little towns, the largest of which is Ólafsvík (I think). 

As I rounded the end of the Peninsula and started south, the clouds around the giant mountain nearby began to breakup. On maps, this peninsula looks kind of like an arm outstretched with a fist at the end. The center of the fist is Snæfell, and draped overtop of that is Snæfellsjökull (literally, “snow-mountain-glacier”). It is here that Jules Verne chose as the point of entry for his Journey to the Center of the Earth. Some people believe aliens have made contact with Earth here. Ghosts, trolls, and fairies roam the mountainside. And the modern artist Eames Demetrios used it as a crossover point for his stories detailing the parallel universe Kcymaerxthaere. (He installs large stone sculptures with pieces of the story all over the planet, each place acting as a chapter in an “Interdimensional Hopscotch.” I meant to stop and see this one, but my handwritten directions were inadequate and I couldn’t find it.)

The stories abound.

After a stop at Arnarstapi to hike the rocky cliffs and marvel a natural bridge off the coast, I set off further south in the direction of Reykjavik.

The bridge.

About halfway between Snæfellsjökull and my destination, I came to Borgarnes. Remembering the promise I had made to myself two days prior, and realizing I had plenty of time, I pulled into the town and parked in front of the hostel where I’d stayed two years ago. Out on my feet again, I walked across the town (about 5 minutes) and crossed a bridge to a tiny island and the little pier there. Sitting on rocks and looking out into the water, I recalled how great it had felt to be here the first time, doing this very same thing three years ago, and how much better it felt now.

Ah, Borgarnes.

Iceland is the first country I’ve intentionally visited twice.*

On my last trip around the southern coast of the country, I knew there was a lot more I wanted to see, but didn’t really intend to return. However, the impulse slowly grew, first subconsciously then in the forefront of my mind, slowly, slowly, until almost spontaneously, suddenly, surprisingly, I purchased airfare and started mapping this journey.

It was a great choice, and as if to make that point as clear as possible, Iceland sent a message:

I arrived back in Reykjavik and found the City Hostel, where I also stayed a couple nights in 2014. It has a big campground on its property, and I quickly set up my tent in a village of seemingly hundreds of others. The guy at the front desk let me store food and other stuff I wouldn’t need over the next few days in their short term luggage storage room. 

Then I took a much needed hot shower. Relaxed, happy, but with wet hair on a cold night, I sat in the hostel’s kitchen and drank tea until I was drier and more prepared for another night in my tent. Conversation sparked between a couple from Wisconsin, a girl from Missouri, and I. We discussed our hiking plans for Iceland. The couple were leaving the following morning for the trek that I was to begin a few days later, and the Missourian had just returned from it. I lost track of time, but it got dark outside, and around midnight a short Scottish girl burst into the room with an announcement: “The northern lights are out!”  **

So it was that on the last day of the first chapter of this adventure, I stood with a group of ghostly fellow travelers from all over the world, staring up at the aurora borealis. The display wasn’t as bright or big as those I’d seen in Alaska, but it had a green hue and danced around a bit before fading away. One girl with an East Asian accent said, “God has answered my prayers.” I said, “He’s answered all of ours.” Then we dispersed. Everyone had places to be in the morning.

A pertinent thought from Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

"You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes any sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something."

This was my second time in Iceland. I was leaving in the morning, but returning in a few days. After that, would I be back? A pattern was emerging.

And everyone always has somewhere to be in the morning.

*  The other two countries I've visited twice are Argentina and France:
1. The first time I went to Argentina was just because I had to catch a ship from Tierra del Fuego to Antarctica. The second time I intentionally went to Argentina and Chile to hike in Patagonia.
2. The first time I went to France was intentionally to Paris, although I immediately regretted visiting that city. The second time I randomly took a day trip from Geneva, Switzerland over the border to hike France’s Mont Salève (the mountain where Frankenstein’s monster escaped). 

** I did not add any aurora images because my iPhone is incapable of taking decent photos of it.

Not Crushed But Inspired

(Hyperborean Hopscotch 2017: Day Two)

Woke up with frozen toes, but warmed up as I tore down my tent. With all my belongings back in the car – Tormund – I headed south along Mývatn, the way I’d come. One of the places I’d wanted to explore since the the early phases of planning this trip was Dimmuborgir, a lava field full of creepy, tall, volcanic rock spires and buttes. The Icelandic name translates to Dark Castles, and the area lives up to that name. I only ended up hiking around for 45 minutes or so, though one could easily spend several hours on the extensive trails around that part of the lake's realm.

Dark Castles.

Unfortunately for me, I had another very long driving day planned and needed to hit the road back west, passed Akureyri, passed the turn off for Hvítserkur, around another fjord called Hrútafjörður, and north into the easternmost portion of Iceland’s Westfjords region. This is a very remote, mountainous, gorgeous, and sparsely populated part of the country, and when I hit gravel roads much bumpier and rattlier (that is not a word) than the day before, I refused to turn back. Tormund, the questionable road warrior, endured a lot of torture up these roads. If he’d blown a tire or broken down, I’m not sure how I would have handled it. I was in the middle of nowhere.

Everybody knows this is nowhere.

I also was overwhelmed more than once on that drive by a sense of the sublime. Not like the rock band, but rather the concept in aesthetic philosophy of being in the presence of something so grand that it transcends comprehension and gives a paradoxical emotional response of inspiration, awe, fear and trembling. The scale of it all made my little life seem silly and unimportant - in a really positive, calming way. Those wild mountains and fjords reaching into the sea had me repeatedly uttering the dumb phrase “THIS IS SCARY” as I navigated the winding roads, shaking from both the condition of the path and my place in the world (the condition of my path, you might say).

Alain de Botton worded it much better in his book The Art of Travel:

“Sublime landscapes do not therefore introduce us to our inadequacy; rather, to touch on the crux of their appeal, they allow us to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities."

After a couple hours of that nonsense, I finally arrived at the village Hólmavík (population 375). I parked Tormund at a random building along the harbor there and walked into the first building I saw to ask for directions. I found a little Icelandic gift shop, a cozy restaurant, and a young woman with a kind smile. When I asked her how to get to Hólmavík’s Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, her response was incredible: “Uhhhh, maybe it’s here?” She pointed to the back of the restaurant, where there was a second gift shop and a hallway leading to another part of the building. On the wall was a sign for the museum I was looking for, and everything in that gift shop belonged to it. I’d wandered into exactly where I wanted to be.

In Hólmavík.

The museum itself was two medium-sized rooms, one upstairs and one downstairs. It contained lots of artifacts from the country’s history of early Viking settlers and sorcerers. This included “staves” – symbols carved onto objects or pieced together in order to summon spirits, cause natural events, or cast spells. There was one for bringing storms, one for resurrecting the dead, one for invisibility, and one for getting a girlfriend, among others. There was also a strand of skin inked with designs, crafted to heal the sick. Most bizarrely, there was a pair of “Necropants” – actual skin of the entire lower half of an adult male, genitals included. As the story goes, this skin must be taken from a person who in life agrees that the sorcerer may dig up his body after he is buried and carefully remove the hide. The witch must then wear the skin and steal a coin from a “poor widow” on either Christmas, Easter, or Whitsun and keep the coin in the scrotum of the necropants. This hilariously disturbing feat will bring the witch great wealth.

After the necropants, seeing a bowl used to make sacrifices to the old Viking gods seemed a little lackluster.

Spell books and staves.

Necropants.

My urge to witness a corpse’s skinned genitals satisfied, it was time for lunch. I grabbed a fishy, unspeakably delicious bowl of seafood soup with bread from the small restaurant connected to the museum, checked my maps and plans for the next part of the journey, then left Hólmavík and its dark magic behind.

A road southwest through mountains brought me to the southern reaches of the west side of the Westfjords. From there I went north and hugged the coast on route 60, around fjords and onto more distressing, pot-holed gravel roads. The towns were so far apart along this winding route that at one point I was actually afraid of running out of fuel before finding a gas station. Before it came to that, I lucked out and pulled up to Flókalundur’s little hotel and the single gas pump out front.

After a bit more mountain-fjord driving I steered Tormund onto the road out to Látrabjarg, the longest bird cliffs in Europe. The road was by far the worst I drove poor Tormund on, and with every percussive kilometer I feared having to do it all again on the way back. That one road felt like it took a lifetime, but by the clock it only added up to an hour or so.

At the 8.7 miles long and 1,443 feet high cliffs, the very first bird I spotted was a puffin, the #1 animal I was there to see. Soon I noticed other people looking at other puffins, and sure enough, everyone managed to see several of these “sea parrots” with their big bright orange beaks, webbed orange feet, and black-and-white bodies similar to penguins and some other sea birds. Puffins are a kind of auk, and the particular species at the cliffs – the Atlantic puffin – is by far the cutest (a scientific fact). They make weird little moan-grunt noises and hop-waddle around their underground, cliff-top dwellings, before taking flight to hunt fish in the sea. I saw some the last time I visited Iceland, but not nearly as close as this.

The cliffs.

Sea parrot.

Hopping around.

Before walking along the edge of the cliffs, I spied a single seal way down in the water, but on one of its dives I lost it in my binoculars and couldn’t find it again. I then roamed around the cliff until I was happily tired - a great end to a great day.

Back down at the base of the cliffs, I pitched my tent near the westernmost point of Iceland, with an ocean view (the Denmark or Greenland Strait to be exact) and the sound of waves washing up on shore.

Question Marks and Hypotheses

(Hyperborean Hopscotch 2017: Day One)

I waited in the lobby of Iceland’s small Keflavik International Airport for twenty minutes until a shuttle driver for the car rental company arrived. He drove five customers to an office/garage a few minutes away, where a Russian employee that spoke very little English and understood none of what I said almost double charged me for my rental. Luckily I caught the mistake and we figured everything out with the help of an Icelandic manager who wandered into the building.

I was only about 15 minutes behind “schedule” when I hit the road. Given the hassle of airports and car rental companies, that was pretty damn good. (In New Zealand this past February, I got my rental car about 3 hours later than I’d expected.) I was handed the keys to an abused Suburu Forester -  dented, scratched, weird rattling sound, broken rear windshield wiper, blown speakers, an all-around piece-of-junk machine – the pathetic specialty of SADcars. That’s the actual name of the company. I rented from them on my previous trip to this country, and while that car was also a beater, it got me everywhere I needed to go. Would my luck hold again? I didn’t know. But I was about to put this cheap junker through more of the suffering it was clearly familiar with.

From Keflavik, I caught route 41 towards the capital city Reykjavik, then jumped on route 1 - the “Ring Road” that circles the whole country. Northward, skipping Reykjavik entirely, I was hit with my first wave of stunning Icelandic scenery. The lava fields and mountains around Iceland border on supernatural, especially on the kind of misty morning I'd arrived. There's no way to be certain trolls and fairies don't live here. Lots of people think it’s possible. I do.

Driving by the town of Borgarnes, a place I’d wandered around on foot and stayed for a night three years earlier, I made myself promise that on my way back south I’d revisit the small pier there, if I had time. But one point of this trip was to see new things, so I set that idea aside and made my way farther north than I’d been on that previous journey.

My first stop this time was an entirely unplanned walk around Grábrókargigar, a place I just saw while driving and decided to explore. The area’s main attraction is a pair of volcanic craters with short hiking paths up to their rims, overlooking the valleys below and offering spectacular views of mountains to both the north and south.

Crater.

View from the rim.

Farther along the Ring Road, I located the secondary road turn-off I was after. It led along Vatnsnes Peninsula, skirted two lakes, and finally brought me to the bay along Húnafjörður. I was surprised when the road abruptly turned to rough gravel.  This made me a little skeptical about driving my trusty piece-of-junk rental (which I had named Tormund after a Game of Thrones character) on rougher terrain than expected. I decided to roll the dice and continue on, a good call because about half the roads I wound up on were as bad or worse than the one here.

What surprised me even more than the road out to Húnafjörður was the traffic: for half an hour or so I had to drive trot-speed behind thirty-some Icelandic horses. Five or six of them had riders, and the rest were being herded down the road. I slowly passed this confusing parade until eventually they were all behind me, with no damage to car, horse, or man.

Traffic.

Soon after that I pulled into a parking lot. A path led out to a viewpoint over the bay, where I spotted the natural off-shore landmark Hvítserkur. This giant rock formation is a basalt sea stack shaped like either a troll or a dragon, depending on one’s imagination. Whichever it is, clearly it had gotten so thirsty that it waded into the water and began to drink, despite the approaching sunlight that turns trolls into stone. Personally, I think the best explanation for its shape is that it’s actually a troll-dog. I don’t know if that’s a thing or not, but last Halloween my dog Hero dressed as one to help me guard a bridge (and hand out candy) in the park where I work. I think Hero would appreciate that I tracked down an Icelandic troll-dog, his long lost cousin.

Troll-dog

After photographing the beast - home to gulls, fulmars, and other seabirds - I climbed down the rocks of the overlook to get a new perspective from the beach. It was a fun little scramble, but once I climbed back up I thought I should probably move on.

Down to the shore.

Back down the gravel road, passed more trotting ponies, onto the Ring Road, and eastward.

I stopped half a dozen times on my way to Akureyri. These stops were not places I knew before I arrived, just mountains and rivers and gorges that caught my attention. I like this kind of road tripping: headed in a vague direction, but finding hidden gems along the way. Don’t get me wrong, everything appeared on the maps I kept on the passenger seat. But I only used those when I felt lost. Otherwise, I preferred to just find things. That’s how I stopped at Grábrókargigar earlier in the day. I just pretended to discover places, then learned the names and what they were afterwards.

In The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule Joanna Kavenna wrote of early northern explorers:

“They saw the world in a different way from us ‐ their maps were incomplete, furnished at their edges with question marks and hypotheses.”

I'm fine with question marks, hypotheses, trolls, dragons, and so forth.

During one of these stops, I noticed Tormund’s passenger side front tire was dangerously low, and I feared a flat. That could have caused some time and money problems. In Varmahlíð, the nearest village, I met a teenage gas station attendant named Freðrik who helped me air up all the tires on the car. This kid was really interested in my trip, and seemed happy that I was so enthralled by his country. He made a point of taking me out into the front parking area of the shop and pointing across a wide valley. At the base of a mountain was a small farm I could just barely spot without binoculars. “I live there,” he said. I told him it was beautiful, and he agreed: “It really is. It’s a good place to grow up.” When he heard about my camping plans for Iceland and Greenland, he asked me if I “really like the cold.” I replied that I was kind of drawn to it, and he understood.

The tire stayed aired up and never came back to haunt me. If it had continued to go flat, I don’t know what I would have done. But my luck held out.

Further east, I made it to Akureyri - “Capital of North Iceland” and secondmost populous place in the country after the capital region - where I stopped for groceries, WIFI, and to fix a banking fiasco: my debit card had been suspended on Fraud Watch, even though I alerted my bank of my travel plans on three separate occasions.

Leaving town, I stupidly took the road south for twenty minutes before realizing the sun wasn’t where it should be. Along the river Eyjafjarðará, which runs into the longest fjord in the country, I talked to a fisherman who corrected me: The sun was where it should be, but I was not. This was not the Ring Road and I was no longer going east.

Back in Akureyri, I chose the correct road – east – and drove up over a mountain with outstanding views of the world below. On the downslope, I entered a great rainstorm and glimpsed a couple vibrant rainbows. By the time the rain ceased, the sun was shining again and I had reached Goðafoss, the Waterfall of the Gods. Several huge, powerful walls of water cascade together here into a pool thundering with the roars  of splashing glacial runoff. It drops 39 feet down, with a width of 98 feet, from the river Skjálfandafljót and it is one of the most visually stunning falls I saw in the country. That’s significant considering I saw maybe a thousand falls between my two trips to Iceland. I could have stayed at Goðafoss for hours, staring, listening, trying to interpret whatever messages the Gods were sending through the waterfall, but it was getting late and I had to go.

Waterfall of the Gods.

The sky was casting magic, living light all over Mývatn when I drove around the lake counterclockwise from the southwest to the northeast. The sunset itself was brilliant, but what it did to the water, wetlands, and surrounding rocks was even better. Everything shimmered. I stopped at Grjótagjá cave for a bit, a place perhaps best known for a memorable love scene in Game of Thrones. I climbed inside and around its interior geothermal pools. Unfortunately, my head lamp battery died and I was extremely tired from a long day of road tripping. So instead of lingering in the cave, I found a campground nearby. Lots of people were busily setting up tents while ducks paced around and made noises suggesting their disapproval of our presence in their habitat. Mývatn and its wetlands are home to over a dozen species of ducks, due to nutrient-rich water that is ideal for aquatic insects. Another species, human campers, also flock here due to the lake’s natural beauty.

The lake.

Neither human nor bird noises mattered to me: I climbed into my sleeping bag and promptly fell asleep. 

The Way It Is

(Prelude to Hyperborean Hopscotch)

In the middle of an eight hour drive from Lawrence to Chicago, I crossed the Illinois River and looked up. Absent-mindedly steering across the bridge, my focus was not on the road ahead but rather the sky above, one of greys and pinks and beiges. Dirty cottonball clouds were strewn haphazardly about, like a careless child’s poorly executed art project. It was beautiful and gritty and I was excited to be where I was, going somewhere, somewhere I really wanted to go, unsure how it would all work out. I’d probably been driving in twilight for an hour. Yet in my brainless, autopilot drive-daze I had not realized the shift from total darkness to daylight until that moment. And now I was a little more alive.

It was August 14^th, 2017 and I had a plane to catch. 

In general, I despise city traffic, highway traffic, traffic of any kind, and other people around me altogether. So by the time I got to O’Hare International Airport I was already exhausted and deep into a fit of misanthropy.

If the world were a simpler place, I would have taken the train to Chicago. Unfortunately, Amtrak suffered a spontaneous construction project on the tracks of the only train running from Los Angeles, through my Kansas hometown, and ending in Chicago (a route called the “Southwest Chief”). Delays were setting the train behind schedule up to six hours on some days. Ridiculous. I called Amtrak several times when I learned of that potential trip-ruiner, because I had booked  a train to get into Chicago the same day I was flying out. After hours on hold and speaking with several unhelpful representatives, I decided to just email them. This attempt failed as well - I never received a response. Regardless, I couldn’t risk missing my flight. I had to drive myself. My roundtrip train ticket was not refunded and ultimately was chalked up as a sunk cost. Amtrak sure isn’t worried about it. None of the representatives I spoke with even acknowledged the inconvenience created by Amtrak's inability to provide the service I had already paid for. At this point Amtrak ranks up there (down there?) with Greyhound on my list of travel companies to avoid.

Which sucks, because I really like trains.

But enough complaining. Once my car was in O’Hare’s long-term parking lot and I was comfortably early for my flight, all was right in the world. The airport, by nature an alienating and distressing institution, was actually just an uneventful experience. The flight itself was quiet, easy, sleep-inducing. Given the journey ahead, I needed the rest.

I was jerked awake when the landing gears hit tarmac.
I looked out the window, and I was back.
Back in Iceland.
An adventure was starting.

A passage from Langston Hughes' travel-autobiography I Wonder As I Wander came to me, though I couldn't remember exactly how it went until I looked it up:

"I suppose she was like me - if she decided to get somewhere, or go someplace, she went. I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go. You might have to squeeze through a knothole, humble yourself, or drink muddy tea from consumptive bowls or eat camel sausage, pass for Mexican, or take a last chance, but - well, if you really want to get there, that's the way it is. If you want to see the world, or eat steaks in fine restaurants with white tablecloths, write honest books, or get in to see your sweetheart, you do such things by taking a chance. Of course, a boom may fall and break your neck at any moment, your books may be barred from libraries, or the camel sausage may lead to a prescription of arsenic. It's a chance you take."

I didn't know exactly what was going to happen.
I never do.
That's the way it is.