Heidi Watts

We did our kagels by riding on an elephant. The elephant, her name was Pavan, put her right foot down, and we swayed to the right. Then, ponderously, she lifted her right foot and put down the left. We shifted to the left. Then she lifted her left foot and put down her right foot. And so it went, slide to the right, slide to the left, slide to the right again, swing and sway with Annie May.…. Meanwhile I was sitting upright, clutching back pack, binoculars, dark glasses and phone-camera squashed between two iron rails, one for me to hang onto, one for Miriam behind me. I sat just behind the mahout who worked the elephant like a sled, one foot behind each ear. He had an iron prod but he used the blunt end to scratch Pavan’s head from time and she twitched her big fringed ears in appreciation. Pavan had no sense of propriety. She paused from time to time to break off a branch and devour it, chomp, chomp, chomp, and once to poop. Pavan, I just learned, is the name of a slow dance.

I met my nephew, Oliver, at a hotel by the port in Reykjavik. Oliver publishes an idiosyncratic magazine called Fourth Door and he was here at the invitation of The Icelandic Design Center to cover a conference. I was just along for the ride. We explored the city streets for a while before I went off to “an extremely nice room” in a nearby Airbnb. The “extremely nice room” had an extremely nice window looking out into the neighbor’s yard. I could hear the cars passing outside as they crunched on the fine black sand spread against the accumulating night ice. During the night the extremely nice window rattled enthusiastically as the wind raged outside. Oliver was mostly busy at his conference so we had signed me up for “The Golden Globe Tour” a day long bus trip to some of the more dramatic sites outside the city: the site of the first parliament in 1200, a great plain between sheer black cliffs, streaked with melting snow; a magnificent waterfall, rival to Niagara, dressed in

Please, dear God, I prayed, get me out of this safely.  The fog lay on the water, gray and palpable. Just below and a paddle length’s out from the canoe the water was a warm flat black.  Everything else was pea soup fog, damp foam rubber, something you could cut with a knife. This was what the fishermen meant when they said it was “black t’ick a’ fog.” The compass between my knees supposed to be showing southeast was moving steadily with a mind of it’s own toward west.  Which direction should one paddle in to make it swing back toward south.  No, not that way. Well, halfway around? Could the compass possibly be right? There - all the way around again.  Now to keep it steadily on south. Home was Middle Island and I knew the prevailing wind was south east, so south would be the way to go from Bell to Middle. It was after eight.  Could I make the shore of Middle Island before dark? What was that low slow sloughing?  The big rock? Cabbage head? Please God, the shore of Middl