Once Upon a Snowy Night

It’s almost midnight: the point at which I must definitely turn off the lights and sleep. Yet, my feelings and thoughts are still quite disturbed by what happened last night. It felt like entire ages passed by in one evening, a night which in its decadence and sheer extremities made a fitting goodbye to Iceland, for now at least. To try and set it all down now, coherently, seems like an almost impossible task. Every moment contained so many subtexts and an audience, for once, capable of understanding all of them.

The setting as he pointed out to me was like a ‘fairy story’, a ‘fairy story of Iceland’. B had driven across along four by four tracks through the central highlands, to a small mountain refuge hut beside Europe’s largest glacier. It wasn’t an easy journey, but it was vigorous, brisk, active. I’ve never been in car that swooped and lurched like that, more like an animal than a machine, swimming through rivers – with water creeping half-way up the car chasse – diving around sculptural lava fields, outcroppings and ridges of rock. However, B made it look easy and setting his brows into a frown he ferried us – like a demented Sharon – across these rivers of rock.

Somehow the elements conspired to do something very strange that day, something almost alarming for this advanced a date in July. It snowed. It snowed, ‘hounds dogs feet’, large swollen snowflakes, that were large and flat enough to sit on the palms of the hand like leaves. The mountain refuge was built in the crook of a small double-ridged mountain near Vatnajökull glacier. We could see the enormous shattered semi-translucency of the glacier gleaming nearby – a sheet of ice stretching off as far as the eye could see. Then, if you looked closely enough, far out in the distance you could make out a band of black. It was fresh lava field forming according to B, or ‘God’ as I jokingly referred to him the whole weekend, owing to his omniscience.

So we had snow, ice and also fire, I thought as I peeked at the small spindles of smoke threading into the air far away. The ground was on fire here. Snow rolled out of large grey clouds, iron blue mountains were striped in snow. Roseates of red rock bloomed on coarse black lava field. There are no polarities or sets of paradoxes that can compass the contradictions of the landscape in Iceland’s central Highlands, its air of playfully disturbed reality, the juxtaposition of colours, textures, elements. Anyway, to this blasted desolate lava desert B the bold had driven us, with a grim determination that seemed at moments almost hysterical, certainly a little strange. As he drove, I sat beside him in the front passenger seat and spun David Brubeck records. I suppose I was flirting with him. I couldn’t help it. He is the kind of man that I think almost every woman would be attracted to, though three quarters of them would hate to admit it.

Then the night. He was already drunk before we had finished the French onion soup starter. After the volunteers went to bed we went to join a travelling couple who were eating behind us. The ‘Welsh couple’ seemed unassuming at first, but it turned out that they weren’t Welsh, not even really English. At first I thought she liked B, her eyes were doing the whole shiny thing whenever she looked at him. Heck, maybe she did, I’ll never know. Was I jealous? Honestly, a little.

What happened next? I think I better write a poem about it, but I will do what I can to create an impression now. Imagine how good wine tasted to my lips – because of the heavy import duties and my own poverty I hadn’t drunk wine for months. We had bottles of wine that evening, a glut of wine, that glowed from the table top to my eyes like lusty jewels to a thief. One green bottle, then several later, it turns out that the company was very articulate: 2 PhDs, one soon-to-be doctor and one IT professional. It wasn’t just about education, it was language itself, the exhilaration of trading ideas, letting them ping about the empty wooden-panelled canteen and thud dully against the snowy glass of the windows. I hadn’t spoken English like this for months. I was in heaven and rushed upstairs to get my copy of Bernard Scudder’s translated edition of Skaldic Verse in English. So we had poetry, B insisted on reading it in Iceland and English, saga verse that stole moments in time, transporting us back via a wormhole in the snowy sky to ancient battlefields and the reception halls of kings. I remember the head ransom poem, Iceland’s equivalent of A Thousand and One Nights – a very beautiful testament to the power of verse. In this case it saved the writer’s life, and in unmanning him of his pride (he sung praises to his enemy’s battlefield prowess), also cemented it. Poetry segway-ed towards that all important discussion of Iceland itself; its strangeness, its beauty, its ‘wildness’. I think that in a wine-jumbled way I told them everything I had learnt in the past four months about this fabulous country and the sweet wine-candy made me feel like a queen of words.

Then a strong hand pouring glasses of Chivas Regal, more secret and sad conversations about the passing of time and marriage. Cigarettes, first one in ages. That old sweet familiar sensation of poison. Crunch of snow beneath feet. Every kind of truth was uttered. It was like a dream.

What next?

Quite childish actually, but touching too. The childish sensation of touching hands, oddly solemnly.

Things were traded and bartered that night. It was more than just words. Worlds and loves were made and lost in the snow.

Letters from Iceland

Icelandic Landscape, South Shore

So I left with his blessing, that’s what happened. He had been to Iceland before. If I was a writer I would want to see that he told me. Sometimes it is easier to leave the choices to others.

A vacuum seal moved in between me and the rest of the world. The airplane was the supreme metaphor of that. I decided I was no longer afraid of flying. As we landed, smoothly and gracefully as a great bird despite the machine’s weight, dozens of heads craned about the windows desperate to examine one of the strangest and most beautiful sights in the world: Iceland seen from the air. I looked down and my eyes widened: a vast volcanic landscape had opened up beneath me; dark, marauding and unreal as the surface of another planet. Beyond this strange island, bereft of all signs of vegetation were enormous icebergs slinking into the sea and the snow-capped mountains swelling and peaking like sugar meringues. I was astonished. It was a landscape the likes of which I had never seen before: it was desolate, unreal and most of all, polar. I was now on one of the most extreme habituated latitudes of the earth, 66 degrees north, a hair’s breadth from the Arctic Circle. I was in Iceland.

The strangeness and the beauty of it all was so arresting that I could look at nothing else but the view from the moment I disembarked the plane safely at Keflavik airport to the moment I was dropped off at my guesthouse in Reykjavik. It was also a very fine day considering the season, and the brightness of the sun and clearness of the air seemed to make everything more enhanced and defined that it usually is.

At the time of landing I wrote a highly excitable diary entry recording my first impressions of Iceland. How I wish that I could find it now. I thought I had written it in the opening pages of The Living Mountain, but I was wrong, perhaps it was on another bit of paper that fell out by now. However, I wish to recall the spirit of that entry, even in recollection, in order to give you a sense of the new life that fizzed and popped through my veins at that moment:

Landing in Iceland, 2^nd April 2015

The Reykjaness Peninsula

From the moment of looking out of my window as we swooped down to the airstrip at Keflavik, I forgot all of my fear. I have never been anywhere in the world that looks like this. The sense of space is exhilarating but also highly alien to me: there is no common reference point between these sledgehammer-thick blocks of ice and snowy mountaintops and the narrow, cobbled streets of Ghent. Nowhere has the hand of man seemed so absent. As I stare out of my coach window zipping by on the road bound for the capital, my attention is seized only by naturally occurring features – there is not a house, farm or shop as far as the eye can see. There is no advertising. My view is bald, naked and real. Everything I see requires an effort of mental research: do, I wonder, have even the words to describe such strange phenomena? I read my guide book and am quickly supplied with missing terms. To my left and right, the strange black deserts of rock and debris are called lava fields or ash deserts. They are formed by hardened tephra and are volcanic in origin. I read on eagerly in my guide, trying to match up the most descriptive passages with what is unfolding about me. I note the almost empty motor route, the late snow, the very cold temperatures. The day before I left Ghent it was twenty five degrees, now I was in zero. The seasonal clock has been wound back. A sense of space and freedom echoes in every part of me. I feel I have started one of the greatest adventures of my life.