Iceland: Day 5

05 January 2016

At the crack of dawn – which wasn’t until a well-rested 09:00 – three phones simultaneously began buzzing, and the three of us clambered out of warm sleeping bags and stretched with toes curled against a cold wooden floor. One-by-one, we slid from the room, down a narrow stairwell, and into the hostel’s retro kitchen. Ryan grinded the coffee beans, Joey boiled the water, and I set out three mismatching bowls and three differently-sized spoons. The hodgepodge of Welcome Puffin was quite a delight, but it wasn’t until we had finished our morning coffee that we could fully appreciate its particularity. We took our time sipping steaming cuppas and going over the day’s route before re-stuffing our packs and shuffling into the car for another drive between mountain and sea.

But rather than continue counter-clockwise down Highway 1, our first stop was about 5 kilometres back up the road. Jumping off of H1 and across a delta ravaged by the Arctic, we made our way closer and closer to the ocean. Winds grew stronger with every metre nearer the coast we went, and the car began to shake and swerve across the road. We parked, pulled the emergency break, and climbed into a field where the grass bent sideways against the cold, hard air with gusts so strong that snow and ice had been blown away from the earth. Empty puffin nests and broken egg shells crunched under our feet as we neared a cliff—far below, waves crashed against the black sand shores of Hvammsá. This was a summertime getaway for thousands of puffins; but in the dead of winter, it felt quite the opposite of a pleasant day at the beach.

We continued up a one lane gravel road to the top of Dyrhólaey, a peninsula known as “Door-Hole” for its archway that juts into the cold and barren sea. We were welcomed by a creaking lighthouse and a rusting chain-link fence. The scene was bleak and beset feelings of loneliness. But beyond the lonesome lodestar, the view was celestial: to the north, the glowing blue glass of a distant glacier; to the west, a straight and narrow beach and Highway 1 stretching into the darkness of early morn; to the east, obsidian monoliths of volcanic rock dashing into the deep; and to the south, the subtle curve of earth ominously cast against a lead sky and a lead sea. We waited until the sun awoke the landscape and brilliant light flooded from atop Eyjafjallajökull to turn silver into gold.

With the sunset soon to follow the sunrise, we turned easterly to continue our trek towards the fjords. Besides quick stops between the small towns of Brekkur and Giljur for a quick look at the very active and relentlessly destructive volcano, Katla, and in Vík to photograph a red-rooved church, we drove continuously until the wind-torn grasses of the southern coastline were recovered in snow and ice and we had crossed the threshold of the frozen lava fields of Vatnajökull. Referred to by locals as the Eldhraun, which means “Fire Lava,” the lava fields are the result of one of the largest volcanic eruption in history, one so powerful that a fourth of all Icelanders died, along with half their cattle, horses, and sheep; thousands died across Europe due to the millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide that coated the continent; and North America was sent into a brief ice age, causing the longest winter in United States’ history and preventing the country’s Congressmen from arriving in Annapolis to finalize the Treaty of Paris, thus prolonging the American Revolutionary War. Presently, as the largest of its kind, the 565 square kilometre lava field remains a reminder of Iceland’s aggressive temper.

Feeling relatively meaningless, we made our way across the forsaken wasteland. Although the air was full of the sound of fury, the interior of our little white Hyundai mirrored its insignificance in silence. We were presented fear both near and far: while the car slid back and forth across a road covered in so much ice that there was no longer a dotted line to divide us and those oncoming, smoke issued from the silhouettes of volcanos and the earth trembled as glaciers creaked towards the ocean, surely narrowing the gap between cliffs and depths. The desolation lasted for what felt like hours, but—as was usual with the environments of Iceland—was soon replaced by curious two-foot-tall stacks of rocks.

Like bubbling towers of dried lava, the towers were known collectively as Laufskálavarða, and it was believed that travelers seeking good fortune should add a stone to the top of one of the tower in hopes that the gods would watch over their journey. Naturally, the three of us added our own stones to three separate cairns, taking the thousand-year-old tradition and extending it just a bit further into the present. The story goes that the land used to be a great farm, but when Katla erupted in 894, it took away the rich soil and replaced it with rock; the farmer and his entire flock of sleep perished in the magma. And now, any traveler that passes through without erecting a cairn runs the risk of following the old farmer to a similar grave. The somber ritual was only broken as we turned to make our way back to the car and noticed that we were standing on a picnic bench that had been totally submerged in ice. I guess you’d only stop here for lunch during warmer months.

About a kilometre of road was shouldered in Laufskálavarða cairns, and the oddity quickly vanished into the horizon as the Eldhraun returned. However, rather than run along the coast, the road bent inwards and towards Vatnajökull. We met foothills in the “town” of Foss, and with a whopping five homes, you could say that it was booming for Iceland. But we didn’t stop here in search of a party; rather, the clouds had cleared and the sun had shone rich auburn against a singular, pencil-thin waterfall that fell gracefully from the fringes of the mountains and to the ocean. After having spent so much of the day in a blanket of white, even a pinch of color would have been a delight. But the saturation of a setting sun against a glimmering waterfall was just the cherry on top to this picturesque little village. Complete with tiny wooden shed and rickety old bridge, the five homes of Foss lived on quaintly in the shadow of a terrible and angry beast.

We quietly crept along H1 through blankets of snow and watched as sheets of blue grew to divide the earth and the sky. Although we had been passing glaciers all along the journey, this was the closest we had gotten to one of these heaviest objects on earth. We pulled over as the road bent back towards the ocean, thinking that it was the nearest we would come. Just off the highway in The Middle of Nowhere, Iceland, we met two men from Texas on the clockwise version of our trip. We briefly chatted about American gobbledygook before they continued on their way, and we watched until their Jeep rounded the curve and was forever gone before brushing the snow off of a picnic bench and proceeding to inhale peanut butter sandwiches despite the frozen, lifeless landscape. We snapped some pictures of the blues before doubling our distance between “Dallas and Houston,” as they were now known.

The road did curve towards the ocean, but only for a moment. It doglegged back for the blues, and we soon found ourselves looking up towards glaciers rather than across the Eldhraun. After passing a visitor centre, we did a U-turn just beyond a one-lane bridge and parked the Hyundai. It was one of just a handful of cars parked at Skaftafell, the largest glacial ice cap outside of the North and South Pole. The centre taught us how the climate is drastically changing the environment, how the ice cap is melting at a rate unmatched in history, and how the nearest two glaciers (the blues mentioned above) have been protected for their frozen lagoons and ice caves since Vatnojökull National Park’s establishment in 2008. Unfortunately, Skaftafellsjökull and Svínafellsjökull might melt by your trip to Iceland. With the earth heating up like a backyard stone oven, there’s no telling what will be left year-to-year as the island—along with the rest of the Arctic—melts. The fact of the matter is this: even though these sheets of ice can flatten mountains, their kryptonite is the human element. Our unbelievable destruction of earth cannot be reversed, no matter how much we try. We cannot regrow glaciers; our only hope is to slow the process to as close a halt as possible. If not, I’m afraid, we will see Mother Earth’s grave before we see our own.

Sobered in light of this direct expression of our lasting effect on these beautiful giants, we left the Skaftafell Visitor Centre and continued back across that one-lane bridge and around the rest of Vatnajökull. Surprisingly, as soon as we passed the southernmost point of the volcano, the snow vanished as it did at Dyrhólaey and grass danced in a cool but delightful setting sun. Patches of ice remained only against the sheer cliffs of the mountains, and the roads were clear and concrete. We took off, celebrating our improved safety conditions with a reckless bit of speed. As though we were in a car commercial, the Hyundai zoomed over crags with the most beautiful backdrop one could describe: shimmering coastlines, swaying grasses, and smoldering volcanoes. From the village of Þjóðvegur, we captured the contrast between the newfound vivacity of the coast and the deathly snow peak of Hvannadalshnúkur, the tallest mountain in Iceland (2119m), just beyond the veil.

While in Þjóðvegur, I noticed how peculiarly quiet it was. Beyond the constant hum of distance waves crashing against black sand beaches and the occasional crackle from our cooling engine, not a sound could be heard; the wind had stopped blowing, the waterfalls seemed to all be behind us; not even the setting sun could make any noise in this moment. A sigh of relieve quickly turned into a yawn and the thought of a warm bed soon filled every fiber of my thought.

Albeit the reminiscence of sleep, we felt refreshed—all thanks to the reminder of what green grass looks like—and began the final portion of the drive with our next hostel just a bit further down the road. But just before the sky became Icelandic winter-black, we crossed the narrow bridge of Jökulsárlón, a glacial lagoon just off of H1. After pulling the car off of the main road, down a dirt path, and to a beach, we walked to the water’s edge to watch as the last hair of sun disappeared below the great curve of Mother Earth. Jökulsárlón is quite atypical, because the smooth, black sand along the coast is not covered in volleyball nets, sandcastles, and beach towels; rather, it is decorated with impeccably clear masses of ice. Because Breiðamerkurjökull, the Jökulsárlón glacier, breaks into the lagoon, those masses drift out to sea, where the current pushes them back onto the beach. Thus, we declared Jökulsárlón the Iceberg Beach.

Some were the size of couches, and Joey quickly found himself the most comfortable ice-chunk to kick back and relax; some were the size of soccer balls but significantly heavier when booted; some were hollow in the middle and others were solid cubes. The plethora in both ice and design provided us ample opportunity to experiment with the camera’s shutter speed, especially with the sun below the earth. Our favorite photo—maybe from the whole trip—looks both ghostly and Nashville-Indie-band-album-cover-esque. Here it is:

We then crossed from the beach to the lagoon, which had become a dark and ominous emptiness against the night sky. Here, too, icebergs floated through the water, queued up to float out to sea. Across the ice bay, the dark blue Breiðamerkurjökull was inching its way deeper and deeper into the water.

For some reason, Jökulsárlón left me with an emotion similar to what I would feel after a funeral or at a cemetery. The air hung heavy with death—the death of the ice caps and the natural world as we knew it.

We departed from Jökulsárlón with no light left in the sky, and for three-quarters of an hour, we drove through a quiet night to the coastal fishing village of Höfn. At a Hostelling International (HI), we piled our bags onto our beds and warmed our hands and feet before exploring Höfn, a town much larger that Vík yet home to no more than two thousand. The H99 loop was the only road in town, which circled around from houses to docks, with a few small shops and a soccer field scattered in between. Most men in town found their livelihood at the harbour, so long days and late nights were probably more frequent than nights out. The only fast-food joint was a family owned one-and-done that sold Icelandic hotdogs, hamburgers, and pizza. We ordered dogs and ate them back at HI with a fresh pot of coffee.

With our stomachs full and our minds re-caffeinated, we reviewed the schedule and journaled until 22:30, at which time we left Höfn and drove about three kilometres into the darkness. We pulled off of the road and onto the driveway of an abandoned farm, where we set up the camera and waited. One frigid hour and thirty frozen fingers later, the pitch-black sky began to change. But rather than green snakes slithering across the sky as they had in Reykjavík, the Northern Lights from the southern coast on the fifth night of January swelled like spilt wine. An array of reds from pinot noir to syrah soaked up the atmosphere over the distance peaks of snow-covered mountains, and earth filled with life, and we were painted into it like an undiscovered version of van Gogh’s Starry Night. The longer we stood in awe and mouth-agaped, the more saturated the colour became; the subtle blue glow of a billion stars shined through the red wine sky, and we silently and individually celebrated the stimulus of visual beauty and blessing. Unfortunately, as the lights began to move towards our quiet, abandoned driveway and the snakes began coming out of their holes, clouds washed away the tie-dye welkin and we were again back in a world of cinereal darkness.

We returned to HI and collapsed into sleep at 12:30, alarms set for 07:00, too tired to dream, too content to care.