"When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all."
-Herman Hesse
It was nearly two o'clock in the morning, and the sun had refused to set. My first night in Iceland was shrouded in fog and mist, but this third night was clear to the horizon's end. The Westman Islands, a small archipelago off the southern coast of Iceland, felt like one of the remotest places I had ever experienced if for no other reason than the lack of darkness. It was beyond the reach of night, a frontier in the summer sun. We had pitched our tents in an eerie wasteland of black sand and rusted metal, overlooking a glassy seascape with grass covered islets in the distance. I went to sleep with a hat pulled down over my eyes, to fool myself into thinking it was nighttime. The constant sunlight was a source of infinite energy, as the atmosphere was always that of a pleasant afternoon or a long-stretched moment of sunrise.
Further north, on the Snaefellsness Peninsula, the experience continued. I had hitchhiked with my haphazard travel companion, Gerrit, from the end-of-the-earth road where the ferry from the Westman Islands reached the mainland for the better part of a day to make camp once more on a serene shore. Hellnar was a small fishing village nearby, recommended to Gerrit by an old Icelandic man in a pub, that had a ghostly sort of charm. We were dropped on the highway and had descended into the village around midnight. Finding only a sleepy yet idyllic scene, we marched on through dew-soaked grass until we reached a secluded bank of the sea, rife with driftwood and the smell of those stringy plants that wash up in the tide. Looking back toward the village, the mighty snow-capped volcano called Snaefell loomed over the quiet landscape. The sky was rosy and vast.
A day later, we hitched several more rides to the north side of the peninsula, stopping in Stykkisholmur to restock on wine and select a few items for dinner--Icelandic salmon and lamb, to be cooked on the fire. As the hour grew late once more, we passed by breathtaking fjords with their ridges mirrored on the water. We hiked up from the road and into a bleak field, something like high plain though just a few meters above sea level where cracked mud and parched shrubs made up the windswept scene with mountains in the distance. We roasted the meat on a fire made from gathered scraps of long fallen fences and washed up debris, and stayed up chatting until the sun had outlasted us once again.
The long days and nights, the lost sense of time, and the brilliant pastels of Iceland that summer are what stay with me the most. The people were cheerful, the food nourishing, and the road itself kindly led strangers like me to places set in dreams. There is much more to Iceland than a few scenic locales, there is a greater story of the society that inhabits its modest expanse, and there is more to explore and understand than can possibly be realized in a brief few weeks. In the end, however, I sat on a snowfield high above the port village of Seyðisfjörður knowing that this little island had imbued a calm satisfaction into me.
Iceland is seen best through whatever perspective suits you--for me it was the shoulder of a highway and the half-zipped aperture of a tent. It could be said to be a place like those in dreams, perhaps due in part to the calm and in part to the bizarre qualities of some of its landscapes. I had set out with a list of Icelandic destinations I wanted to see, but ultimately I came away with an experience far different from what I imagined. It was more spontaneous thanks to my sudden taking to hitchhiking over buses, more serene thanks to the fortune of good weather, and more inspired thanks to the edifying content of both the culture and endless panoramas.
The day after I returned from Iceland, I wrote an introduction to what would become a novel. I was sitting in the backyard of my parents' house, in what I call my mother's garden. I wrote a simple description of the plants all around me, many of which I couldn't name, before relating it to a much larger garden which I had just visited. It was a garden, or perhaps a wilderness--something I often debated in the over sixty thousand words that comprised the entire novel. In the process of writing it, I refined my views of the world and came to suggest that one of the most challenging parts of life is confronting a fear of truly walking away from your past with no umbilical cord to keep you tethered. I mused that we are all raised in a garden of sorts, and that many of us later set out beyond the pale and into the wilderness. The wilderness can be stressful, terrifying, and discouraging. But like any wilderness I have seen, there is a certain rugged beauty and excitement that comes with all of that, and it is a place where curiosity thrives.
I've finished writing all of the words, and now I am undergoing the equally arduous process of editing the entire feature into something worth reading. I expect to be finished by summer, a full year after I took my trip. The cover is below--it is titled "No Man's Land: Under the Icelandic Sky", and features one of my photos as the backdrop. The specific scene is from Hellnar, just near the campsite of the shores of Snaefellsness where an old boat that had weathered many years dominated a magnificent scene before the sea and the mountains.
If you're interested in following the progress of the book, would like to be informed as I ready it for release, or have any comments or questions, please leave a comment below or contact me here. It's a piece of writing that has been very important for me, and that I hope may be memorable for others some day, too.
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