ICELAND IS REAL
In Iceland, there’s a spot where visitors can stand astride the North American and European continents all at once.
As the road peters out from the airport, past deep grey soil and purple lupines and plumes of steam from geothermal plants looming in the distance, a deep fissure suddenly appears. It is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a fracture on the earth’s crust where the two tectonic plates recycle back into the raw, hot stuff that makes up the heart of our planet. This tear runs through the country, literally tearing it between the old world and the new. Millions of years ago, this ridge crossed over a plume of magma deep in the earth’s mantle, over what geologists call a hot spot. This union created the young and raw-boned Island. The poet W.H. Auden called it a land of immature mountains with abnormal days, a place for those who want to reject the world.
In the year 874, rebel Vikings sailed with threshing oar to reject the Norwegian king Harald the Fairhaired, Led Zeppelin’s
Immigrant Song blazing as the soundtrack. Led by the chief Ingolfur Arnarson, they landed in the badlands in what today is the barren moonscape near Reykjavik. The site is surrounded by grey lava that undulates like waves stilled in time. Craggy rocks jut out of the hardened magma towards the dark firmament. Hostile and alien, it tends to diminish the passerby as it probably did the pioneers who were fools to inhabit this place. Imagine what they must have thought arriving in this desolate place, were there any regrets?
Well, they stayed. Today, it’s easy to see Iceland as the world as it once was, pure air, clean water, few humans, sustainable. But tell that to its first inhabitants. They thought its flora and fauna were bad spirits,
that it was covered in fire and ice and poisonous smoke; that the Mount Hekla volcano was the gate to hell, that this was hell. Early maps depicted it with monsters and huldufolk, or hidden people, the elves and trolls of Icelandic lore. The settlers were essentially indigenous, no one lived here before they got here, and so they probably made up
THE CITY OF VIK
huldufolk to claim conquer. Even today, activists protest road constructions believing that this will disturb elf habitat. It’s understandable. If the ground you walk on suddenly trembles or when the long winter night glows, you’d believe in phantoms too. This country, like all things wild, can attune you to hidden entities, things ephemeral and inexplicable. Or did you think Tolkien made it all up from scratch? Shakespeare alluded to it in The Tempest, in which Caliban confronts and questions man’s relationship to nature.
This hidden energy is revealed everywhere. It animates the glaciers, the geysers, the cascades, the angry sulfuric mud that seeps out from the soil. It sculpts the darting rock cathedrals that line the coasts. The glacial melt sustains what little arable land and pasture there is to cultivate. In no other country is one confronted by nature so monumental. The wise traveler is wiser when he sees through the surface symptoms of reality, and to visit this country is to realize that there is much more to the universe than what we see.
And so, here’s what I realized, along with old friends on a road trip around Iceland the past summer: that the sun is lazy. It can stay in one spot for hours. Also, no matter what your confession is, your philosophy, or your Weltanschauung, it’s hard to argue with the fact that we are made up of the same energy as the sun. We are Joni Mitchell’s stardust. The iron in our blood, the carbon in our bones, the phosphorus in our DNA, are the same stuff that makes up Iceland’s volcanoes, its frozen mountain tops, the aluminum it smelts, its geysers. It’s difficult to imagine that the same elements amount to the fossil fuel that we’ve selfishly burned; the gasoline with which we filled our fourwheel SUVs; our bombs. And all these can be traced to the dying of the stars. Then, when we die, the whole process, from stars to earth, to sliver in the Universe, will continue, oblivious to our fears, indifferent to our needs.