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 white mist; a place where the ground leaks steam and little geysers burst out of the ground to make pools of steaming sulfur smelling water; a show with two of the famous Icelandic horses in an indoor arena; and the place where the tectonic plates between North American and Europe do not meet, in fact they meet 2 centimeters less every year, slowly increasing the overall land area of Iceland but creating deep crevices where the land falls in. In addition to these stops we made several food and pit stops in places which were showcasing and selling Icelandic arts – more versions on the wool sweater than you can imagine.
On the bus we drove for hours between these sites, through the strangest and weirdest countryside I have ever seen, all black and white with moss green overtones, the black, crystal sharp cliffs rising out of black sand, or an undulating bumpy land of green moss-covered rocks and uncertain stability. The mountains looked unclimbable, the edges sharp and steep like the angles of a pyramid, though often flat topped, and planed like black glass, but streaked with lines of snow in immense zebra patterns, and on this day, rising into gray skies.
After about an hour of driving we arrived at the parliament site and my expectations for Iceland were fulfilled. The wind was blowing a gale and spitting hail or sleet at intervals. We all piled on coats and hats and were disgorged into a wind so strong you had to push against it to move forward, or were propelled forward if it was behind you. There was still ice on the paths, or the fine black gravel which crunches under foot. I was afraid to get too close to the edge of a cliff lest the wind knock me over, but at each of the five stops we all piled valiantly out of the bus and fought our way, often some distance, up to the edge of a cliff to look over, or down to the bottom of an endless ravine to see the waterfall edged with ice, or to walk over the place where the tectonic plates from North America and Europe do not meet. We peered at these wonders while the wind howled around us and I, at least, struggled to stay upright. I like adventures and there was no question about it – I was having one.
The next day, when Oliver’s conference was over, we flew to the eastern side of Iceland and hired a car for a few days to travel from one potential Fourth Door article to another: a controversial aluminum smelter, a controversial Icelandic design center in the middle of nowhere – there is a lot of nowhere in Iceland – a small fishing village which is featured in the new and apparently very popular TV drama series called Track, and more.
The fishing villages were on the edge of fiords, little settlements of brightly painted buildings reminiscent of Newfoundland or parts of Nova Scotia, perched between the black high rises and the sapphire waters in the narrow fiords. We drove for hours, passing another car every ten minutes or so, and a small homestead with a barn or a small cluster of buildings every twenty minutes or so, on new black roads looping between black mountains or traveling along a river bed supporting a small plain of green moss on black rock or hillocks or, in the wider valleys, fields of winter straw or hay. From the car we could see the black ribbon of road curling around the mountains in an endless loop and small clumps of shaggy horses standing in fields of straw with their rumps to the wind. Once we also saw a herd of reindeer grazing.
In some places the thawing weather precipitated large and small waterfalls plunging down the slopes or out of a crevice in the black rock mountains. In one place there were so many small waterfalls, glistening in the welcome sunlight, some hundreds of feet above me, falling straight down it was as though the mountain was leaking.
What Iceland does not have is trees. Oliver said that originally Iceland was forested, as was most of the world, but the people who came, or were blown on to the island in the middle ages required fuel and for lack of anything else they cut the trees, until there were none left nor the habitat for them, in that unforgiving climate. We did see trees, long rows of larch planted side by side to demark plots of land, homesteads or fields, and small clusters of evergreens tucked into a curve in the hills. What Iceland does have is wind, ranging from windy to very windy, like a gale, and on to hurricane strength. In our five days it was never less than windy.
On the first sunny day we drove up, down, over and around until, descending a steep hill we saw blue water gleaming in the distance and soon found ourselves at the head of a fiord, a flat emerald strip of land widening as the water came in and withdrew toward the sea, framed by the ubiquitous snow-streaked black mountains. It was also a very windy day. We walked along the edge of the fiord for almost an hour as it widened out to the sea and Oliver gave me a quick history on the environmental politics of Iceland. In our country environmental issues are one of many. In Iceland, it seems, the environmental issues dominate the political scene as prominently as they do the natural world. Until 2000 more or less, Iceland was a small icy island in the middle of the north Atlantic where a handful of hardy people farmed or fished. The cheap fares of Icelandic air and the slogan:”Never more than 400 miles from land”, sums up what we knew about Iceland before the turn of this century. Iceland does not have trees or oil or mineral resources but it does have water and in the year 2000 the ruling party made a pact with the devil: a deal to provide very cheap power to Alcoa and other aluminum companies for 15 years. Alcoa built a large smelting plant on the edge of a fiord in Eg. The aluminum is mined in Brazil – I have seen a video of the area which is like a fracking field, miles and miles of land roiling and ruined, a modern day Mordor. It is then shipped to Egilsstaoir where it is processed – with cheap and guaranteed electric power and then shipped out as tin foil, I presume.
In our walk back along the fiord to the car the sun began to descend slowly into the sea, and the sky to change from blue blue to midnight blue. Across the water the lights of the smelter came in sight, a long string of low, bright points of light, reminiscent of Christmas, stretched low and welcoming along the water’s edge, like fallen stars from a crowded milky way.
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