Outpost Page 3

  Over and off Hellisheiði everything was incredibly green. Looking back, it seemed like we’d spun down an immense emerald cliff with the sun now flaring across us and the road rebalanced. Then we reached Selfoss – a town of early suspension bridge enthusiasts, final resting place of Bobby Fischer, childhood home of Björk – a place which continued the kaleidoscopic mix of concrete prefabs and corrugated self-built homes I’d experienced in Reykjavik. At Selfoss we stopped for food and I added ice cream, wafer-based chocolate bars and hotdogs to my list of ‘popular Icelandic things apparently available everywhere’.

  Selfoss was the last town. Once we’d swung off the main road villages and red farms thinned. The loss of the domestic coincided with the landscape hardening and the highlands ramping up. The road was a thick line in soft pencil, glossy and black; a smooth path for heavy hydro plant. The ice blue river to our right raced whiter. The pylons returned, strobing, wires swooping, nodding, keeping time. Here was the hard fix out in the wilds to power everything elsewhere. The river now ran in a deep cut, a trench smashed clean and straight through the rock. Giant workings massed – canals and dam walls holding back glacial lakes, funnels for turbines buried in brutalist Thunderbird boxes.

  Every bluff brought new monoliths until we topped out and sped alongside a series of pale reservoirs silvered blind by silt and milky sky. But no people. In the next hour we passed no cars and then the road ran out, ceding to gravel which we bumped along a while until we reached a gate, a chain between two posts, and a sign: Ófært – IMPASSABLE. We crunched around and beyond it, up to the top of a hill where black clinker ceded to snow. ‘A good time to piss,’ announced Stefán. So I walked away from the truck to piss, buffeted by a cold wind. Looking back over our path I saw a black denim world smeared with white and turquoise, an anodised sky fluorescing frosted light. All life and colour seemed beaten back by the wind and the cold but, no, there were lichens and mosses hanging on in the rocks at my feet. It was still a winter world, hardly yet spring. I was early.

  Below, a small car stopped at the gate. A couple of miles behind it was another, set to meet it at the end of the road. Meanwhile Stefán had been round the 4×4 and lowered the tyre pressures ready for the next part of our trip, which would be over deep snow. Then we drove up and over the lip of the hill and disappeared out of sight.

  For the next couple of hours we bounced and churned in snow holes, edged round hidden hazards and slushed in streams, enveloped in freezing mist. We were totally reliant on a boxy dash sat-nav, our vehicle a dot on its Game Boy screen, ghosting the line of a road buried metres beneath us. I spent a lot of the next hour staring fixedly into the opaque white world wondering what was through and beneath it. Visibility was only a few metres and when a feature did loom out of the haar it often took a moment for it to resolve a clear shape and character – cliffs steepling up, seeming to crest and overhang as moss green breakers; snow slopes shooting away, boulders the size of houses. It was like we were rolling on a frozen sea, almost impossible to know if we were driving along the top of a wave or at the bottom of a trough; although Stefán had a good idea having driven this route a hundred times. ‘Most of these are me,’ he smiled, pointing at the puffy infilled tracks winding around us, ‘or rescue trucks. People shouldn’t be out here alone.’ After an hour we passed a memorial to a snowmobiler, a pile of rocks poking out of the snow. He was a crazy guy, Stefán told me, known for travelling great distances and going out on his own, but he crashed his ski in a blizzard, was hurt, tried to walk out, fell in icy water and died of cold. ‘That’s it,’ he finished, opening his hand on the wheel slightly, as if to add, It happens. But you come out here alone, I ventured. ‘Yes, but I’ve got a truck and I know what I’m doing,’ he replied, eyes on the snow sea. ‘But you’re right, I probably shouldn’t . . . but I need to get things done.’

  BLACK LAKE I

  On my first trip to Iceland Haraldur Jónsson had suggested that I should go and see Kleifarvatn, a black lake in the middle of the Reykjanes Ridge.

  Haraldur is an artist who lives in Reykjavik. We were introduced over email by the Icelandic writer Sjón, who said that Haraldur was the absolute best man to show me around. So we arranged to meet the night of my arrival once I’d unpacked and found my feet.

  Waiting for my flight to take off, I’d begun to read The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art by Eileen Myles – discovered in a secondhand bookshop the day before and bought on the strength of the title alone. ‘Haraldur’ appeared on page 22. It must be my Haraldur, I thought, and remembered my childhood bafflement with the amount of crime Bergerac encountered on Jersey. ‘But how many banks can there be on Jersey!?’ I used to shout at the television. As crime on Jersey, so art on Iceland: this is a place with two degrees of separation rather than six; everything rapidly triangulated.

  Haraldur was described in the book as looking like Christopher Isherwood – another singularly well connected man.

  ‘He’s my best friend’ says Björk a few lines later.

  Sjón himself appears just a few pages on.

  Bingo! Full house.

  When I met Haraldur, he did look Isherwood-esque, hair parted and swept over to one side. Like most Icelanders I encountered, he was dressed impeccably in natural fibres – wool suit, brogues, a good thick cotton shirt. We sat in the bar at the Kex hostel and had a beer. Icelandic beer is excellent, which is lucky because a pint costs as much as a meal back home. As we talked he waved and nodded to several people in passing, at one point introducing me to his friend Kristín, former singer of a local band: Múm.iv Ecstatic, beaming, I shook her hand, wondering who else might be in the room – Magnus Magnusson and Erik the Red, perhaps.

  Later, over a meal of steak tartare and salted cod, I explained to Haraldur how I’d like to find bothies and sheds, and asked if there was anywhere slightly off the beaten track that such things could be found.

  He drew me a map of Kleifarvatn, telling me about the black lake as he did so; how it sat on a fissure of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; how, after an earthquake in 2000, a great deal of it disappeared; how, in some spots, the Earth was liquid and molten, boiling beneath one’s feet. There were sheds around there, he said, and he would have driven us out there and shown me himself, but he was leaving for the Atlas Mountains of Morocco next morning. That said, however, in the time we had, would I like a tour of Reykjavik?

  For the next hour we criss-crossed the city in Haraldur’s battered red car whilst he pointed out landmarks and joined the dots of the city – the parliament, the prime minister’s residence, the Opera House, the theatre school, the rocketship sweep of the Hallgrímskirkja Lutheran church, the different embassies, the Masonic Hall, the Grótta lighthouse. ‘And this,’ he said, slowing on a stretch of coastal road to the west of the city, ‘is Björk’s house. It’s a good one, isn’t it?’ I agreed it was a nice one. ‘Right!’ he said, pleased, and then began an elaborate eight-point turn in the street outside, by the end of which I’d shrunk down in my seat, ears burning.

  WHITE WORLD II

  On the flat we drove at a reasonable pace, twenty miles an hour or so, chuffing up ice and chunks of snow, but where the buried road rose or fell sharply, or boulder fields needed to be negotiated, we inched at odd angles. Several areas were clear of snow, dark lava formations to scrape along, orangedun dunes to churn across, a steaming Christmas pudding tump the size of Silbury Hill to skirt. ‘The hills and rocks here are hot,’ explained Stefán, ‘the snow never settles. The colours you can see are plants and algae enjoying the heat.’

  I looked out at the hot rocks and enthusiastic algae all shouting, ‘Come on in, the water’s lovely!’ But were I to open my door, I knew I would not encounter a balmy day.

  The road now consisted of two blue grooves. Lava snarls and valleys had merged the many spectral routes into one, so when we nosed and slid down the last incline, dropping out of the mist into a clear day, and drove on to the shingly beach of a wide river system, we knew
that we were arrowed right and F208, the one true road, was here, somewhere, buried . . . which was reassuring.

  The next part of the journey was across and in the river. The 4×4 may have had a snorkel and tyres the size of Greenland but it was still a very skilful business to negotiate the waterways, find the underwater beds to take our weight and know where to plough into drifts and have a hope of climbing out. Sometimes we drove with the flow and sometimes we forged across to land on one of the many snowy islands in the main stream. Some of the water was deep. It was hard to read it. The sat-nav was no use here and from above it must have looked like we were taking a drunken spidery path, but Stefán clearly knew the stretch of river so well that never once whilst jiving and bucking about did I feel that we’d get stuck. When we pulled up outside a half-buried ranger house, four hours after leaving the great wen of Reykjavik, it felt like a real adventure had come to an end. But this is a normal day for Stefán. ‘Okay,’ he said, as we unbuckled and climbed out, ‘let’s get a coffee, collect the women and go back home.’

  The women were the wardens who’d been stationed at Landmannalaugar for the last couple of months. Many sæluhús are shut down for the winter but Landmannalaugar opens and closes later due to its position at the start of the Laugavegur Trail, a thirty-five-mile trek down to the towering icecaps and volcanoes of Þórsmörk – Valley of Thor. But even in winter people visit and scoot fresh tangles of snowmobile tracks.

  This outpost was formed of three buildings – the warden’s house, a dormitory and a barn-like washhouse – situated near a hot spring at the head of a valley of multicoloured peaks. In May, these were mostly still covered with snow but the melt was under way and a few flanks were visible, rising rust, rose and amber, luxuriant bright in the sun. Our 4×4 stood level with the roof of the warden’s house, atop three metres of snow. A rippling wall ran around the house on two sides – perhaps the building’s heat had defrosted the bank about it – but, house hollow aside, the hard-pack filled the valley in every direction. How much water? A boggling amount and it would all be gone in a couple of weeks, I was told, thawed and run away by the time the first hikers arrived . . . which astonished me then and boggles me now as I write it down, as it would have astonished me as a child. The idea of all that pent-up power let loose, that water – and even though I knew it wouldn’t thaw and ‘go’ all at once, still, these things always make me feel so small. Which I am, of course.

  A few hundred yards to one side was what looked like a large Anderson shelter, half buried – a corrugated stables, I discovered once I’d tromped over, sinking up to my knees in the powder. ‘Iceland Horse’ said a weather-thumped sign above a smashed window grille. I peered inside to see what could be seen. Very little, as it turned out: a dim floor of earth and tramped straw and what looked vaguely like a small drinks bar. One end of the long shed sported a stubby chimney.

  So a hangar-like stable with a hearth and bar. Quite an avant-garde get-up, all told, which, set amidst the sweeping snow-flats, suggested that the horses might be running a small aerodrome.

  On the hill behind the main site buildings sat a greentopped shed-like structure – a sheep pen. Sheep were the reason the trail exists, since it was originally a drovers’ way, Stefán had told me in the 4×4, a route from the grass of the highlands to the coast, ‘because all this will spring green when the snow melts and the world gets moving’; the green and blues breaking out as soon as the sun shouts ‘Go!’ and the landscape warms.

  Visceral, ancient, deep and alive.

  ‘If anything is endemic to Wyoming, it is the wind. The big room of space is swept out daily,’ Gretel Ehrlich writes at the start of The Solace of Open Spaces,5 a record of her time and travels in the 44th state. If anything is endemic to Iceland’s weather it’s force and speed of change. A brief search online for Landmannalaugar turns up several videos of intense sun, rain, wind and thunderstorms; one film of the latter shows it battering, breaking and flooding the campsite until almost everyone has run for cover in the barn. The few tents remaining, weighted down with large rocks, are mere sheets of sopping fabric plastered over the figures of those still huddled inside – slicked in utero campers backlit by lightning.

  It looks cold and ferocious, stair-rod rain strafing the ground, the sky flaring purple, the wind threatening to blow our intrepid YouTuber over. It looks wild, in a word, but the wrong type of wild for most of the people present. ‘This isn’t what we came for’ is writ large on the faces of the barn crowd. ‘This is meant to be summer,’ someone is heard to say off camera.

  But, to return to Gretel Ehrlich, as well as paying tribute to the vast scapes and solitude she experienced whilst immersed in Wyoming’s plains and ranges, much of the book deals with hard nature’s indifference and the essential fact that even where wilderness is gone, great wildness still remains. ‘True wilderness has been gone on this continent since the time of Lewis and Clark’s overland journey’6, she remarks early on, which is to say that we have maps – maps, roads, telephones and satellites – but not to say that humans are now in universal control. We are not. Disorientation and hypothermia can’t be eradicated like smallpox. Just because you can physically get somewhere, it does not follow that the place will behave itself once you are there. The Earth may be pegged but the heavens are wild as ever.

  To look into a wild place is to stand on a border, to visit wild places is to have crossed their threshold. Sightseers to Iceland’s interior are too often unprepared for the untamed reality. There may be snowmobile tracks or a gravel road but these are not guarantees of safety or control, they’re just marks left by previous humans. The sort of summer storm recorded at Landmannalaugar is the sort of weather best appreciated indoors, the sort of cloudburst best heard bouncing off a corrugated iron roof above one’s head – which is how everyone would have heard it thirty years ago because everyone, both of them at most, would have been snug in a sæluhús after a long walk. But now tourists unfamiliar with Icelandic summers bus out here with unfamiliar tents and find themselves maelstromed in a Vango condom.

  BLACK LAKE II

  I could hear the trucks coming from a long way off, the low hum behind me rising to a roar as they closed, then burst past. The trucks did not stop, would not stop, weren’t for me. This had quickly become apparent. So I put away my thumb and stopped trying with the trucks. I dubbed this resigned non-hitching ‘saving my energy’, as if the act of holding out a thumb was arduous. But, then, it was hot, and any economy was welcome.

  There were very few cars.

  The wind in the wake of the trucks felt cool, the pooled air stirring then settling back. The whole scape simmered. The hot road cooked its way across the mercury plain, rippling liquid as it arrowed to an infinite point.

  An hour and a half into my hitch into Haraldur’s sketch map, the mountains still seemed no closer.

  Shellac black horses hammered away to the horizon – a fissured moor topped by sage froth the texture of scouring pads. A dismantled industrial landscape, coagulated some 100,000 years ago to form a lunar slag plateau.

  Dust clouds ahead told of trucks approaching. Seen from the front, head-on, they looked mirrored and implacable as brushed steel trains – the heat haze gave them comet tails.

  —

  The car that did eventually stop was small and gold. It appeared as an amazing bronze bug in my peripheries, a drone which crunched to a stop. It had three young men inside, two Israelis in the front, an American in the back.

  I scrambled in, all thanks and relief, wedging myself to make four. As we pulled away, the car, a small Fiat, seemed to whimper and totter a tad; but it was absolutely faster and cooler than walking, and for that I was thrilled.

  The car got up a little speed and the yellow posts at the side of the road began to click past. The mountains grew nearer.

  It quickly emerged that the Israelis liked to argue. That was their favourite thing. If a point of conversation could be picked at, questioned and niggled to death, tha
t was what they would do. I was English, yes, of course, but where? London? They had been to London. I wasn’t originally from London? They had only been to London. They would prefer that I spoke only of London unless I was going to relate everything back specifically to London, where they had been. Actually, I was from London, I decided cheerfully. It seemed the easiest place to be from in the circumstances.

  I began talking to the American, originally from Massachusetts, who suddenly revealed, apropos of very little, that his parents, not liking the direction he’d been taking as a youth, had paid two ex-Navy Seals to kidnap him and forcibly change his ways. The Seals had dragged him out of bed one night without warning, driven him into the wilds, and there, over a couple of months of hard living in the woods, they’d broken him down and rebuilt him. A change for the better – he was categorical on that point. ‘Fuck yeah, I’m a far better guy for that.’

  ‘You are a liar,’ said the driver, fixing the Massachusettsan with his eyes in the mirror – a statement which made the little gold Fiat feel suddenly much smaller. ‘You’re a liar, my friend. Tell the story again.’

  The Massachusettsan repeated the main points of his tale.

  ‘Ha!’ said the Israeli man, apparently satisfied. ‘Ha! Americans!’

  ‘Well . . .’ I said, for something to say. ‘Blimey . . . I don’t think that happens much in London . . .’ at which point, luckily, the tarmac stopped, we hit a hill, the road turned to chippings and the car gave up.

  We all got out. The Israelis argued, then the driver got back in and drove the empty Fiat up the gravel hill. Then we got back in. I now saw that Route 42 was more literally a truck road than I’d imagined, since the shiny asphalt stopped at the gates of a quarry beyond which the highway was stoney and potholed. Another hire car passed in the opposite direction, peppering us with gravel. Our driver gunned the engine, which groaned, the wheels flailed and we were off again, over the first of the blue hills and down into a green glen. The grit road wound ahead. The Israelis argued about the state of the road and which one was most to blame for hiring this piece-of-shit Fiat. I thought about the Massachusettsan’s arranged abduction and wondered how the three had met, but didn’t ask.