Á ÍSLANDI

All wooden walls, all wooden floors. Slightly chipped red paint on a wooden exterior, jarring against a sea of black lava rock, pillows and blankets of light green moss covering every surface, and rumbling, ever-changing clouds rolling in with a new storm. The howling, singing voice of the wind carries you to peaceful dreams and wakes you in the morning for your eggs and toast and coffee.

As soon as it gets even slightly darker outside, bathing suits are out and it’s time for a swim. Your toes are so cold they feel as if they might fall off at any point, and you don’t want to look down. We only lift half of the hot tub lid, squeezing together under the stars and the aurora dancing before our very eyes. There is almost nothing to say. You talk about life, and you talk about what you want out of it, and every once in a while you remark simply ‘wow.’ As if that could even come close to describing it. The water slowly grows colder and you dread the run back to the cabin, covering yourself tightly with a towel that is even colder than you are. 

Every morning you move onto the next place. The next adventure. You pull over on the side of the road and cuddle close under a blanket, sitting at a picnic table at the edge of the world. The ocean looks out at you. You hastily make a sandwich with nothing other than cheese, and the wind bites your ears as you bite the bread. On the road, every turn is a twist, and the word ‘foss!’ is shouted every thirty minutes. One sheep, two sheep, three sheep, and endless vicious arctic terns. 

You sprint through a field of grass tall enough to reach your knees, and once again, your friend the wind pushes you forward. It’s not as if it’s fighting you. Rather, you are running alongside it. You are both at home, not at odds with one another. You run towards the foss, and the rush of everything is so loud you can’t even hear your friends behind you. You arrive at a famous location of basalt rock columns, and hundreds of tourists scramble to make their way down metal stairs to see the view they have come from across the world to see. You try to control your breathing as you climb what feels like stair number ten thousand. The view is always worth it at the end. And nothing makes you feel more alive.

You pour the filter coffee in a small paper cup with some oat milk, and put on your bathing suit while completely exposed next to the highway. Wearing your best winter coat and a bikini, you head down from the highway and to the edge of the fjord, the waves gently rolling in and stopping just before the hot pool you want to bathe in. Dark blue and black and grey and white sea foam. You keep your beanie on, and dip into the warmth, leaving your towel and coffee outside but safe from the waves.

You sit on black sand, cradling your knees to your chest, watching the ocean before you. Ginormous blocks of ice, chipped off from the glacier, pass under the bridge and out into the sea in front of your eyes. Deep blue, white, even slight tinges of purple. They turn over themselves, splashing loudly. You’re seal watching, noticing as their heads pop up out of the water and look at you. They might be people watching. You think of how many tales of sea creatures make sense, and the way that the seal heads look kind of human when they look at you like that. Chunks of blue ice wash up onshore beside you, capturing the sun and reflecting it back towards you. For once you cannot feel the wind, but you know that it is always there.

It’s three in the morning and the sun rises. Your tent transforms into an oven, and you struggle to unzip your sleeping bag. You scramble outside as quietly as possible, the sound of the zipper the only noise as the world still manages to sleep, even with the light. The moss and grass underneath you is covered in the humidity, dew holding on gently to its surfaces. The morning light reflects violently off the still lake you have pitched your tent next to. Soft coos and quacks and chirps. You breathe in, taking in as much of the world as you can.

The man warns you that it will be a long hike, and that you aren’t properly dressed for it. He offers that you pay a tourism company to drive you out to the site, rather than complete the two hour hike through the mud. You choose to ignore his warning, and set out to indulge in two hours of stomping through mud and updating each other on workplace gossip. Every few minutes you yell ‘cano!’ as the site of it gets closer and closer. You angrily notice the burnt soles of shoes along the path, knowing that someone has gotten cocky and ignored all the warnings. The scent hits your nose before you get close enough to see it, something indescribable. Like herbs that you’ve never tasted before. And then of course, the sulphur. 

As you approach it, it’s different from what you had imagined. Everyone always described them as being extremely violent occurrences. Ones that ripped up the ground beneath them, chaotically spewing out materials coming all the way from the core of the Earth. Ones that shook and roared and made their presence known. This one though, was quiet. The wind was there as always. But otherwise, no other sound breaks the silence of all those who observe it. It erupts, a constant flow of liquid orange and red, but nothing shakes. Nothing yells. It warmly spreads, a soft clicking as the partially dried lava inches forward and a slight hiss as it swallows the moss underneath it.

You walk eagerly across the small wooden bridge, covering a gently running stream and leading to the greatest and most comforting place on Earth. Everything inside smells like apples, cinnamon, vanilla, and the smokey warmth of a fire. Candies, candles, trees, decorations, sparkles, lights, and a troll mother hiding inside of the rocks. You say the sentence “I love the Christmas House” for probably the fiftieth time since you crossed the stream. You pour the filter coffee into a small ceramic mug, taken from a wooden basket with hundreds like it all stacked on top of each other, alongside a sign displayed with the instructions to serve yourself. You eat a slice of lemon cake and a whole cucumber. You smell fresh flatkaka, and you share it with cheese dug out from the cooler in the back of the car. You take home twenty different flavours of taffy.

Waterproof shoes, waterproof pants, waterproof jacket. Layers upon layers of warmth and hopefully, dryness. Your foot makes a thud as it finally pops into your boot, and you turn to face the path before you. A short, rocky path up to a breathtaking waterfall. You make your way up the rocks, grabbing gently onto the rope fence that lines the path upwards. You step over rocks, and you laugh at each other as you clumsily push on. You are behind the waterfall, the rush of it fills your ears and you are already drenched. On the way back down the foss says goodbye with a final enormous splash, and now your hair drips and clings to your face. You hear the sheep before you notice them so close to you. You ask for some water, and the man tells you there is a stream nearby. You follow instructions.  

Getting up to the attic space requires a quick climb on a narrow ladder, and a generous push of the heavy wooden slab covering its entrance. A heavy piece of wood that you wouldn’t call a door, but it does its job of entering and exiting the space, as well as it needs to. The attic space is open to the rest of the cabin, separated barely by a blue-braided rope, woven through pieces of wood to form a sort-of barrier. 

There is food on the grill. Lamb steaks marinated with orange. Whole potatoes. Corn. Bread. Bananas with chocolate. Endless board games and card games and notes from all those who have been there before you cover every shelf. The sun is hidden from view. It peeks through gray clouds. We can see the river, hear it flowing gently when we open the windows a crack. 

Although it’s rainy, and cold, and the wind moves the moss covering the ground; you feel its coziness in every pore of your body. You’re calm. And although the rain outside seems chaotic, a part of you truly understands that it is not. It is just as calm as you are. Nature, running its course of another storm, and not flinching for a moment. You close the window. You hear no birds, no faint cows, no train cars, no church bells in the distance. There is just the sound of the wind. Dancing between the few trees that lie at the river bank. No other sound, but that of our soft breaths, in and out as we flip the pages of our beloved books.