by Raynor Winn
‘Earlier, when I was on my Triumph, I couldn’t stop …’
Their two children wandered into the orchard. The younger, the boy, Jack, throwing the ball for the dog; Lottie, wandering behind, trailing her teenage hands through a purple haze of Yorkshire fog grass.
‘I know, you said. Have you got a battery charger?’ Moth put the teapot on the table, calm, unmoved, as if this was any day and of no importance at all. Was it just me, would the fear of imminent insecurity always haunt me, would I ever truly trust in anything again?
‘Yes, but it wasn’t that. I couldn’t take my helmet off, I felt like such an idiot for crying at the gate.’
‘What do you mean? Were you upset – did you hope for something else?’
‘No, it’s perfect, better than I could ever have hoped. As Rachel said, we were going to sell the farm, until I read your book. Asking you both to come here was like a leap of faith. But today … today, I’m so glad I took it. And I didn’t think the change would be so quick, I thought it could be years before we saw the land come back to life.’
The sunlight through the window caught the mirror on the opposite wall, highlighting the pile of letters heaped on the shelf in front of it. Letters full of individual stories all waiting for a reply. Each person’s story entirely their own, yet totally the same in their frailties and strengths.
‘Do you take milk in your tea, Sam?’
The moon rose, almost full above the creek. Hanging out of the bedroom window, I watched the pale light cloak the hillside in a silver blue haze. Total stillness; not a sound to break the silence. That croak again.
‘It’s not frogs, look.’ In the moonlight a huge fat brown toad walked among the plant pots in front of the house.
‘Toads! Who’d have thought?’
A faint mist began to lift from the creek, pulled almost magnetically up through the trees in the valley.
‘It would be great to be in the tent on a night like this. What you were saying about another walk? Shall we do it? We’ve got a window between events at the end of the summer – only two weeks but it might be enough time.’ I’d watched Moth as the weather improved and he spent more and more of his days outside, rhythmically, patiently working in the landscape. The land coming back to life as he began to move a little easier, remember a little more. I’d watched, speechless, as he’d replaced a tiny, tightly coiled spring in the strimmer head, a precise little job that took focus and dexterity to complete. Maybe if we walked again, if only for a couple of weeks, it might give him a resource to draw on as winter came and the darkness drove him inside.
‘Yes, let’s do it. You know that book you keep leaving lying around the house, Epic Hikes? There’s a great walk in there. It’s in Iceland.’
Part Four
* * *
TO A BEGINNING, IN THE END
If I breathed the word
that disappeared all people
in the world,
leaving the world
to the world, would you
say it? Would you
sing it out loud?
‘so the peloton passed’, Simon Armitage
Landmannalaugar
‘Hi, it’s Dave. You know, Dave and Julie. How’re you doing?’
‘Dave, fantastic to hear from you.’
‘We’ve been thinking, it’s about time we went for another walk. Do some camping and stuff like that, do you want to come?’
Dave and Julie were eating ice cream in a car park when we met them. Walking the South West Coast Path, we hadn’t come across many other backpackers who were wild camping, and even fewer middle-aged ones. So we’d been immediately attracted by the size of their packs as they lay on the ground; they were obviously camping. Dave, a brusque, Northern, no-nonsense man who worked hard long hours, but in his free time insulated bird boxes, walked alone on the Lakeland Fells, and adored Julie despite pretending he didn’t. Julie, externally calm, quiet, unassuming, was under that veneer a tough, remorseless campaigner for the underprivileged. A mirror image of each other. They’d appeared repeatedly as we walked along, our paths crossing and interweaving, until we’d given up trying to avoid each other and walked together along a hot, tranquil section of the south coast of Dorset.
‘How weird that you’ve said that; we’ve just been saying the same thing. Do you fancy going to Iceland?’
‘Iceland? I’ve always wanted to go to Iceland!’
We stood under the covered walkway outside Keflavík Airport as rain fell in curtains from its domed plastic roof. The lights from the building and car park blurred into an impressionist painting of night. Waterproofs on, we hoisted our rucksacks, Moth putting one arm through the shoulder strap while I took the pack’s weight and helped him manoeuvre the second strap over his second painful shoulder. We crossed the car park through the torrential downpour, dropping our rucksacks in the lobby of a hotel on the opposite side.
For weeks Moth had known he needed to do this. He was beginning to understand the needs of this new body, the one that didn’t always respond to his instruction, that tired without effort and agitated his thoughts. He was learning to sidestep it, to move when it told him to lie down, to shout when it said be quiet and give in. He willingly rewaxed his boots and bought the same model of Vango tent that we had used on the South West Coast Path, knowing that our old tent with its duct-taped poles wouldn’t survive the subarctic winds of Iceland. But this trip couldn’t have been more different from our Coast Path walk if we’d designed it to be so. The Salt Path had unexpectedly sold quite a few copies and we could afford to walk into the airport hotel at midnight and check into a room, rather than put the tent up in the torrential rain on some scrub grass under the flight path of the planes. We opened the blinds and watched the last plane of the night land on the small runway, lights smudged through the water running down the window.
‘So, we’re in Iceland. Top of the habitable world. Above us, only the Arctic, and below, the green earth curving away in an arc of increasing heat and dust, before cooling to the Antarctic. Weird thought.’ I had my face pressed against the window, trying to see beyond the rain on the glass.
‘Not as weird as getting on the plane in an August heatwave and getting off into early winter. I’ve read that there’s no autumn here, but that summer ends and winter begins. Have to say I thought we’d still be at the tail end of summer.’
‘How did your pack feel?’
‘Not too bad, but I have only walked across the car park.’
The same rucksacks that had walked the Coast Path were propped together against the wall of an Icelandic hotel: Moth’s looking quite full and mine straining at the seams. I’d packed it so tight that the fabric had split and was now displaying a bright green patch that I’d hastily sewn over the hole before rushing to the airport. Crammed with things we hadn’t needed on the Coast Path: a warm jacket and waterproofs that didn’t let the rain pour through, a water filter and ten days of dried-food rations. We had no idea if we would be able to access provisions where we were going, but knew that even if it was available the price would be excessive. The island imports the majority of its food supplies, making the cost of food far higher than in Britain, higher still when we reached the mountains. The three-kilogramme weight limit on foods brought into the country hadn’t left us too much choice about what we packed. We’d considered pre-packed hiking meals, but they were so expensive we might as well have bought them in Iceland. I opened the rucksack and looked for my toothbrush, moving the food pack aside and trying not to think about it. I knew it contained things I’d thought I would never eat again, but that was two days away, no need to dwell on it now. We made tea and ate the biscuits we’d bought in the airport.
‘This seemed like such a good idea when I was standing in the orchard in Cornwall, but I don’t know if I can do this. What if I get into the mountains and find I can’t?’
The orchards and fields of the farm were feeling suddenly distant. After Sam’s visit, we had finall
y begun to feel as if there was a chance of letting ourselves relax, a chance to consider the possibility that for a while at least we could simply be without the fear of our time there ending abruptly. But now we had snatched ourselves away to walk a trail in a wild, inhospitable land. A trail we might not even be able to complete.
‘We’ll just take our time; that’s why we’ve got so much food. If we need to stop we can and just wait until we feel able to go on. And Dave will be there, he’s like a man-mountain – we’ll just give him your pack. Anyway, we know who wrote the guidebook for the trek. We’ll probably have to cut the sections short; you know we can’t keep up with the pace he sets.’
Moth marked the page in the guidebook that illustrated the start of the Laugavegur Trail. A small book with a practical waterproof cover that fitted neatly in Moth’s jacket pocket. Paddy Dillon’s Walking and Trekking in Iceland. We could have found a lighter book, one that didn’t cover a whole group of trails, or just a map. But there was something reassuring about having a guidebook by the same author who had steered us through every cove and gorse thicket of the South West Coast Path. A sense of knowing there was someone we could rely on who absolutely without question would tighten his bootlaces and show us the way. The friend in our pocket.
‘Well, here we are then, in the rain in Reykjavík. Who’d have thought – from the Coast Path to Iceland. But we’re here, bloody brilliant.’ Dave, as large and loud as he had been the first time we met appeared out of a crowd in the main street of the island’s capital. As he enveloped Moth in his bear-like grasp there was a shocking change to the view I’d had of the two men hugging goodbye in West Bay on the Coast Path. The weight that Moth had lost became not just something that I could feel, but a large loss made visible by the mirror of our unchanged friend. Suddenly I could see him as Dave and Julie must too. Was his deterioration so gradual that I was taking it for granted? Forcing him into more and more physical challenges that he was fighting to achieve just for me, battling on because I couldn’t accept that one day he would have to give in to CBD, to give himself over to the wind and the dust?
‘Julie, you’re here, can you believe we’re doing this?’
‘Not at all. We said let’s meet in Iceland, but I didn’t really expect it to happen. Now look at us, in the rain with walking poles.’ A gentle-natured woman, not much bigger than her purple rucksack, she couldn’t have been in greater contrast to Dave, Northern England to the bone, filling the street with his seventy-litre pack and huge presence.
‘What on earth have you got in there, Dave?’
‘Twelve days of food and stuff we need, like.’
‘But we should only be out for six, eight at the most.’
‘Well, you never know what might happen. It might snow and we get trapped on the mountain, or someone could get hurt and we’d have to wait for help, or we find it too hard and stuff like that. If not I’ll just eat it anyway.’
Julie looked around the vast pack and raised her eyebrows. We were all laughing at Dave, but he had a point. It wasn’t just Moth who would find this hard; all four of us were well past our prime. Standing in the pouring rain just below the Arctic Circle about to start a trail that Paddy Dillon, who walks the South West Coast Path at superhuman speed, describes in part as ‘steep and rugged climbing, with some narrow, exposed ridges’. What were we thinking of?
A sense of nervousness dulled the excitement as we booked the bus tickets to take us to the trailhead at Landmannalaugar. Not really a place that should have a name, more a word on a map that people collect around. An encampment in the southern highlands of Iceland. We would follow the Laugavegur Trail from there to Þórsmörk, which Paddy said would only take four days. From there we would cross the Fimmvörðuháls, a high mountain pass that would take us across the Eyjafjallajökull volcano that erupted in 2010, shutting down airports across Europe and beyond. Two more days. If we’d understood Icelandic weather patterns a little more, we might have been even more nervous. The Iceland tourist offices would assure you that there are four seasons in Iceland, just like any of the more southern countries. But the old Norse calendar knew the truth. Iceland has only two seasons, summer and winter, and the locals know almost exactly when winter’s coming. On the first Sunday in September. We put our rucksacks in the hold of the bus with only five full days of August left. Five days of summer.
As the bus left the main road we began to understand why it had such immense tyres. Two hours into a four-hour journey and we were off the tarmac on to a stony track that headed towards mountain peaks unlike anything I’d seen before. No gentle hills here, but ripped earth pushing up in near vertical shards from flat, desolate river valleys. Boulders in a stationary landslide from long-dead eruptions and ash everywhere, flowing smooth and black over the hillsides like a sheet of fluid porcelain. The bus forded rivers where small jeeps stood with bonnets up, engines washed out by the cascading river. Small clusters of sheep clung to occasional green patches of subarctic vegetation, their thick fleeces making them look much bigger than their delicate legs said they were.
An arctic fox stood in the open landscape, its front paws propped on a boulder, his back fur brown in its summer colours but his chest and belly white, his coat already adapting to its winter camouflage. He obviously knew Sunday wasn’t far away. As Iceland’s only native mammal, he knows this land better than any meteorologist ever can. Even on the hot bus I felt a chill and wished my rucksack was as big as Dave’s, stuffed full of four-season sleeping bags and Icelandic jumpers and a lot more food than my forty-litre pack could ever hold.
We climbed over a pass between two mountains, where fingered combs of rock pointed skywards, on an ever-narrowing track that fell into a valley bottom. Carved by millennia of snow, ice and rain, the valley ran like a river of shale between mountains of mysterious colours. Sunlight catching the peaks of luminous peach, sand and green. And between them, abrupt and violent, the dark angry head of a lava flow. Thrown out of a volcano with unstoppable power, an outpouring of rock, flames and lava had cascaded down the shattered hillside, cooling as it came. Possibly hitting a vast river running over the shale bed, the lava had stopped moving, its energy spent. It now stood frozen in time, a snarling face looking out across the dried riverbed. The Laugahraun lava field came to a halt in 1477, but it feels much older, ancient beyond time. At its head, only metres away from the last fall of rock, was Landmannalaugar. A scattering of sheds and tents, people milling around in the rain between a toilet block and an information hut, or making their way to a collection of old green buses that stood together like a stockade of American school buses about to repel an attack of teenagers.
We got off the bus, stiff from two hours of jolting, and dragged the rucksacks from the hold. Faced with the immensity of the lava head, the four packs lay together on the ground like a row of hand luggage, far too small and feeble to provide a means of survival in this wild landscape. A scattering of tents were erected on the bare stony earth between the sheds and the buses, so we erected ours with them. We piled rocks around the edges, copying the other tents, unsure exactly what we were hoping to achieve. If the wind was so strong that it would rip the tent pegs from the ground, a few hastily placed rocks wouldn’t stop it.
And the rain continued to fall.
‘They’re still in a heatwave back home, you know.’ I was already feeling a longing to be somewhere safe, green and familiar.
‘We could have done the Corfu Trail, just packed shorts and eaten in a taverna every night, like.’
Not just me who was feeling intimidated then.
‘Shall we take the stoves and make food in the communal tent, rather than sit out here in the rain?’ Julie, as practical as ever.
A white canvas tent was secured to the ground behind the toilet block: a strange place to position the kitchen where most people cooked their food. But when we got inside it was obvious why it was there. Tucked in behind the main concrete building and secured to the ground with large iron pegs
and winching straps, it was clearly in the most sheltered spot on the site, protected from the winds that are funnelled up between mountains and pushed into valleys, ripping in from the sea and lifting cars from the road and hikers from the path. Winds with the force of a volcano that make British gales feel like a gentle breeze. If an Icelander tells you it’s going to be a bit windy, you really should listen.
Some wind that night might have been helpful; it might have ventilated the cooking tent. From the cold vertical rain, we passed through the plastic doorway into a hot sauna. Ten picnic tables filled the tent, most of them crowded to capacity with people cooking food on gas stoves. Waterproofs hung dripping from every possible point, water pouring from them and through the decking floor. We found a gap at the end of a table and squeezed on, setting up our gas stoves to add to the wet, steaming warmth. With a sinking feeling I put the food bag on the table. Moth got out a bowl and let out a deep sigh.
‘Okay, let’s do this.’
There had been weeks on the Coast Path when we had eaten nothing but dried noodles simply because we couldn’t afford to buy anything else. After the path, when there was enough money to make a choice, we had chosen never to put a fork into a slimy bowl of string noodles ever again. But in looking for really lightweight freeze-dried food that would rehydrate in just a few minutes of immersion in boiling water, there wasn’t much choice. In the week before we set off I’d bought sacks of freeze-dried rice, vegetables and soya mince in the hope of being able to create something that wouldn’t take a lot of fuss or gas to cook, but found that the rice was cold before it rehydrated and the mince had the texture and taste of a sea sponge. So we’d taken a deep breath and given in to the noodles. I’d unbagged them and added dried vegetables, fruit and nuts in the hope of making them a little more palatable. We emptied the Ziploc bag of dried shreds into the bowl, poured on the water, covered them and waited. The tent was full of people chattering and excited about the trek to come, comparing equipment, stirring food, drinking. But we sat in silence and stared at the noodle bowl. For a moment, we were back in another country on a windy headland as the sun set on another day of living in the wild landscape at the edge of the land.