Outpost Read online

  I once sat for an hour in a shelter resembling an upturned coracle built by land artist David Nash in the four woodland acres where his magical Ash Dome lives. The day was clear and a brisk wind mussed the trees so the dappled light shimmied around me. It became so brilliantly obvious that here was a space to clear one’s mind and think, invent, imagine – ‘the still point of the turning world . . . at the still point, there the dance is’.9

  —

  This book considers the romantic, exploratory appeal of cabins and isolated stations; utilitarian constructions, pared-back buildings of essential first principles. Astringent architecture attracts me because it seems to represent a longed-for clarity, and in the pages that follow I will examine the importance of dens and eyries as creative spaces – cells containing just enough domestic comfort to allow a person to work, whilst eschewing the usual barriers to the outside world. But outposts are many and various, an idiosyncratic lot, so whilst some may be low-tech interzones made of just enough architecture to keep out the weather like Thoreau’s Walden cabin, others will be more robust. Old and new, restored, repurposed; the solid, the decrepit and the brilliantly bizarre. Some will not seem to conform to the outline I’ve laid out here at all – Shedboatshed and Nageire-dō might leave some scratching their heads – but I hope you’ll forgive and perhaps join me in celebrating any such apparently aberrant and eccentric detours along the way. I hope you’ll be delighted and seduced by such marvels as the belvederes atop Desolation Peak and Phare de Cordouan. This book is not designed to be a definitive tour but rather an odyssey inspired by the world of possibilities and wonder embodied by a polar bear pelvis brought home to South Wales one wet and blustery night.

  Every chapter will explore a particular situation or structure, each location a stop in an ongoing narrative, each examining a different facet, perspective and approach to the experience of wilderness. I contend that bothies, depots, silos and beacons form the foundation of many great endeavours; rungs on the ladder, even into outer space.

  If the question at the heart of my last book, Climbing Days, was ‘Why climb mountains?’, Outpost seeks answers to the question of what draws people to wilderness and the isolated human stations around and within them. What can such places tell us about the human condition? What compels us to go to the ends of the Earth, and what future do these places have?

  ______________

  i Prior to 1925 Svalbard was known by its Dutch name, Spitsbergen – still the name of its largest island.

  ii It is sobering to remember of polar bears that, as Peter Cook once observed, strictly speaking, they’re not vegetarians.

  iii Between 1979 and 1982 Ranulph Fiennes, Charles R. Burton and Oliver Shepard attempted to journey around the world on its polar axis using only surface transport – land, sea, ice – in a quest named the Transglobe Expedition. Part of the trip involved negotiating the Northwest Passage in an open boat, to which end they employed a spotter plane to look for clear water. In the periods between surveying the ice the plane crew seem to have taken great pleasure in making low-level passes over Tim’s expedition, North by Northwest-style.

  iv As a chastening case in point, the Bivouac of the Dent Blanche is an actual hut which sits below the north ridge, a stone-built beehive cell that can sleep fifteen and ‘contains blankets, mattresses, pillows, utensils and basic cutlery’.

  v Port-Étienne is now called Nouadhibou, Islamic Republic of Mauritania, North Africa.

  II

  SÆLUHÚS, ICELAND

  I have come to the borders of sleep,

  The unfathomable deep

  Forest where all must lose

  Their way

  – Edward Thomas1

  In late 2016 I read Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland, Lavinia Greenlaw’s selection from Morris’s 1871 Iceland Journal, a book in which the author weaves Morris’s descriptions of the Icelandic wilderness – ‘most romantic of all deserts’ – with her own shadow travelogue of journeys in his footsteps.

  In the book’s introduction Greenlaw writes that she didn’t originally go to Iceland because of Morris but was rather drawn by a dreamlike sense of how the Iceland landscape might be:

  I had seen it at the corner of the map and envisaged darkness and emptiness that would help me feel off the map altogether. My sense of what to expect was entirely abstract: a surface of calm and a depth of wildness, a combination of the vague and the absolute.2

  I too had long been captivated by Iceland’s otherworldly charisma. At school, inspired by landscapes of lava, tundra and glacier, I dreamt of visiting. I would search through old copies of National Geographic for pictures of the islands, and hunt through the library for atlases and books about it, together with its wingmen, Greenland and Svalbard. I found the high North’s raw enormity compelling and would stare transfixed at any accounts and photographs I found, transported, always hoping for more. The idea of volcanos in a cold realm thrilled me – the impossible clash of ice and fire.

  Later, my Icelandic enthusiasm was further kindled by the music of Múm, Björk and Sigur Rós, whose records came to embody aspects of the Icelandic landscape. Múm’s tender glitchy organic music was synonymous with the recoveries from crushing university hangovers – muzzy, communal, celebratory and warm. Björk’s world, on the other hand, was emotional and elemental, childlike, inquisitive and questing, each album oscillating between sensual intimacy and uncanny feral wildness. I found and continue to find her work euphoric, cinematic and sensationally other.

  But perhaps Sigur Rós, most of all, opened up and revealed the landscape, people and sheer size of Iceland to me in their film Heima. The film documents a tour the band made around the island in June 2006, playing in ghost towns, outsider art shrines, national parks, cabins, small community halls, and an abandoned herring factory in Djúpavík, before reconvening in Reykjavik to play the largest gig in Icelandic history. The project was about connection and ideas of belonging, home and homeland. I was very taken with the archive footage of the steaming, teeming herring port in the far west of the country, now mouldering rusted and abandoned, reanimated and filled with people and music for a single day in celebration and remembrance.i

  With all this in mind, Iceland seemed the absolute place to begin my search for outposts and bivouacs.

  As a first step, I emailed Dr Katrín Anna Lund, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Tourism at the University of Iceland, to ask about bothies unique and peculiar to the island. Katrín put me in touch with a couple of her colleagues who specialised in Icelandic geoscience and wilderness, and the question came back, was I aware of sæluhús?

  SÆLUHÚS

  Iceland is almost exclusively inhabited around the coast, the interior hardly at all. The original sæluhús (houses of joy) were refuge stations for travellers crossing the hinter/highlands. The remains of many structures dating back to Viking times can still be found whilst others, frequented, repaired and rebuilt over the centuries, have become Ships of Theseus, renewed beyond recognitionii – modern bunkhouses on ancient foundations.

  Sæluhús are opened up for the spring and summer hiking season and need to be booked in advance, but retain their original emergency shelter status in the closed season between October and May. The essential generosity of these structures, the ideas of renewal and sanctuary at their heart, appealed to me from the moment I learnt of their existence. I found the idea of cabins animated by joy delightful and immediately set out to find a sæluhús overseer.

  Within a fortnight of first contacting Katrín, I was talking to Stefán Jökull Jakobsson, Head Ranger of Ferðafélag Íslands (the Iceland Touring Association, FÍ). A month later I was on a plane to Reykjavik.

  —

  I met Stefán at his Ferðafélag Íslands HQ. A tall bear-like man with a heavy-duty handshake, he made me a coffee and then led the way upstairs to a large office containing a desk, a phone and a noticeboard on which were pinned maps and photographs.

  Such
was the spartan nature of the room that I wondered for a moment if it might be a front and I was about to be sent on a secret mission – for the Icelandic Navy Sæluhús perhaps – but no, the office was bare because Stefán was so rarely there. His early summer days usually consist of criss-crossing Iceland in his 4×4 digging isolated huts out of snowdrifts, restocking gas bottles and emergency supplies, fixing infrastructure, supporting wardens and generally troubleshooting the sæluhús network.iii

  Stefán showed me numbered pictures of the sæluhús in his care, a charming, rather motley collection built to the specifications and whims of whoever took the job. They ranged from big timber barns to pyramidal sheds of a single room, corrugated dens on legs jostling with cricket pavilion-esque gazebos. Some of the largest look like solid schoolhouses, the smallest, modest beach huts, but all in the middle of nowhere – eccentric havens on tundric seas.

  The mugshot of #34 showed a tiny shed akin to a boshed-together pigeon loft; the equivalent of a one-man tent in wood.

  Ferðafélag Íslands oversee thirty-seven sæluhús scattered around Iceland, but mainly sited in the east and centre. The organisation’s mandate remains the same as when it was formed in 1927, to help people travel out from the towns and city into the landscape to see the natural wonders of Iceland. From the 30s on, cabins were built or rebuilt to make particular journeys possible – sæluhús #5–#9 chart a curve around the belly of the Langjökull glacier, for example, whilst #29–#34 allow long-distance trekking beyond the Vatnajökull icecap. ‘And there is the Laugavegur Trail,’ he smiled ruefully. ‘The famous one.’

  A few months before my visit Bradt guides had released a new book raving about the Laugavegur Trail, enthusing about a ‘truly invigorating walk across primitive terrain’, and Stefán was bracing for the impact because such fame and gushing press bring people, more people than Iceland could ever have imagined twenty years ago. ‘My job is to make sure the things the people come to see aren’t damaged by the people coming to see them,’ he explained, equating it to sticking a line of tape to a gallery floor in front of a painting. ‘I say, “Here, look at this, isn’t it astonishing?” And they look and maybe they take a photograph and then they move on down a path and enjoy themselves and look at the next amazing thing.’

  His job is to be invisible, he says, to maintain cabins and build and repair paths that people don’t notice they’re walking; to guide people through a landscape so they have the best time possible and leave no trace. But it isn’t easy. In 2009, 464,000 tourists travelled to Iceland. At the time of my visit in 2016, that number had grown to almost 1.8 million and was accelerating. Interviewed in the Financial Times, Professor Edward Huijbens of the Icelandic Tourism Research Centre described the graph of tourist numbers as ‘currently almost vertical’. Visitors to Iceland for 2017 were expected to reach 2.4 million.3

  Not all of those people make a beeline for a bunkhouse, but the numbers have hit Ferðafélag Íslands hard.

  Once isolated, sæluhús often now sit amidst campsites catering for hundreds, such is the popularity and traffic of the trails strung between them. People’s expectations have changed since the mid-twentieth century when many of the cabins were built by local volunteers. Back then, the idea was to construct cheap utilitarian lodges to keep the elements at bay a few weekends a year for rambling Icelanders. Now the structures need constant upkeep because they’re frail and exhausted, and the delicate wilderness around them is likewise at risk from pollution and over-exposure.

  Listening to Stefán, I found myself wondering whether ‘destination wilderness’ can exist. Can a landscape truly be said to be wild when thousands tromp through it on a hiking superhighway?

  And with the clash of culture, people and nature comes a mismatch of expectation. Historically, few cabins had much in the way of amenities, insulation or sanitation, their primary purpose being short-stay shelters rather than destinations in themselves, as some have become. And modern hikers expect, if not chi-chi luxuries, at the least some possibility of heat and a toilet. But Stefán doesn’t want to build a shower block and latrine at every Icelandic beauty spot. For one thing it would visually destroy the thing people have come to see and, for another, he can’t; the landscape is protected. Which is good. ‘But people do not want to carry around bags of their own poo . . . some of them don’t even take home their KitKat wrappers.’

  I suspect the amount of joy inherent in the sæluhús is apt to fluctuate depending on the amount of excrement and KitKats in the immediate vicinity.

  Bad enough pitching up to discover one is not alone in a place, not an original thinker in one’s desire to visit and see a Bradt-hymned wonder, but to meet people just like yourself there, to flush hot and feel yourself a charlatan, a caricature, a tourist, and – worse! – to find the place strewn with trash . . . It’s like 1871 all over again, for these are not new problems as the following extract from William Morris’s Icelandic diary attests:

  Tuesday, 25 July 1871

  IN CAMP AT GEYSIR

  We can see the low crater of the big Geysir now quite clearly; some way back on the other side of Tungufljót I had taken it for a big tent, and had bewailed it for the possible Englishmen that I thought we would find there: however go we must, and presently after crossing a small bright river, come right on the beastly place, under the crater of the big Geysir, and ride off the turf on to the sulphurous accretion formed by the overflow, which is even now trickling over it, warm enough to make our horses snort and plunge in terror: so on to the place of turf about twenty yards from the lip of the crater: a nasty lumpy thin piece of turf, all scored with trenches cut by former tourists round their tents: here Eyvindr [Morris’s Icelandic guide] calls a halt, and Evans [a fellow English traveller] dismounts, but I am not in such a hurry: the evening is wretched and rainy now; a south wind is drifting the stinking stream of the south-ward lying hot springs full in our faces: the turf the only nasty bit of camping ground we have had yet, all bestrewn with feathers and wings of birds, polished mutton bones, and above all pieces of paper . . . So there I sat on my horse, while the guides began to bestir themselves about the unloading, feeling a very heroic disgust gaining on me: Evans seeing that a storm was brewing sang out genially to come help pitch the tents. ‘Let’s go to Hawkdale,’ quoth I, ‘we can’t camp in this beastly place.’

  ‘What’s he saying?’ said Eyvindr to Gisli.

  ‘Why, I am not going to camp here,’ said I.

  ‘You must,’ said Eyvindr, ‘All Englishmen do.’

  ‘Blast all Englishmen!’ said I in the Icelandic tongue.4

  Human nature may not have changed but things cannot remain as they are and Stefán has plans. He told me that, the following spring, he intended to substantially repair sæluhús #7 Hvítárnes, built in 1930 – the oldest house owned and operated by Ferðafélag Íslands – and completely rebuild one of their largest cabins, #15 Þórsmörk Skagfjörðsskáli, to bring it up to modern standards by the season’s end. His plan was to take the 50s structure apart – a big red tin tabernacle type-affair – then put it back together in such a way that it was still recognisably Þórsmörk Skagfjörðsskáli; ‘only insulated and fitted with proper plumbing and electrics’.

  ‘I’ll keep the main timbers and reuse all the elements I can,’ he told me. ‘I want to keep the soul of it. That’s very important to me.’

  Stefán was a hugely inspiring man, on the quiet. His dual roles as custodian and host conflict him sometimes, he admits, but he has a great belief that a balance can be struck which benefits both Iceland and the tourists who travel to see it. The sæluhús are key to this. No mere means to an end, they embody something of the Icelandic culture and history. The word soul jumped out at me when he said it because it seemed on the surface such an un-Stefán word – slightly mystical and woolly – but it’s the right word. The sæluhús are not uniform or interchangeable, they’re individuals with distinct personalities; monuments to the volunteers who built them. The cabins Stefán
oversees have changed the country around them, generous offerings beckoning people in, manifestations of the spirit and people behind them . . . and soul is the best word we have for that, whatever that emotive cluster of ideas amounts to.

  As we parted, I asked if I could return the following summer and help him rebuild #7 and #15. ‘Great!’ he said, smiling. ‘Bring a hammer and a decent pair of boots.’

  WHITE WORLD I

  A year later I was back. A couple of days after my return, Stefán rolled up outside Kex hostel in his 4×4 – a black beast with thumping great tyres, a matchbox on doughnuts. We were set to drive out to Landmannalaugar in the southern highlands to collect a couple of rangers but first we drove to the Ferðafélag Íslands base to consult a map, drink strong black coffee and eat enormous custard creams with REYKJAVIK embossed on the front – Icelanders have a great interest and liking for coffee and biscuits, an excellent enthusiasm I share. Then we drove east on Route One, the road climbing over the carbuncular lava of the Hellisheiði plateau, wire-wool moss foaming grey-green.

  Mountains started to appear. Some stood off in the blue distance, whilst others more immediate and dorsal fringed the road. We began to pass feathers of steam from hot springs, but after half an hour, when the plateau flattened out, I saw a domed complex half obscured by a billowing swoosh of cloud, a massive streaming safety valve. The Hellisheiði geothermal plant, the third largest in the world, sits on the active flank of the volcano Hengill, a mile from the road. The complex screamed super-villainy; futuristic, sci-fi military – a sky plume base amidst miles of zagging pipelines, source of a pylon army marching off to the horizon.

  But now we were past the power station and up to the plateau’s end where the road began a swift looping spiral down to the glasshouses of Hveragerði, the view opening inland and out to reveal mountains knuckling one side, shimmering silver sea and marshes the other.