The Wild Silence

by Raynor Winn

  ‘Do you remember – we were so hungry each night we didn’t care what we ate.’

  ‘We were so hungry it hurt.’

  ‘Let’s just eat them then.’ I put my fork into the bowl of slime, part reluctant, part in anticipation.

  ‘Not so bad …’

  ‘Actually, so much better than I remember. Maybe it’s the dried figs.’

  The biggest hurdle of the trip was crossed and we could focus on the room while the water boiled for tea. Dave seemed to notice the same thing that I did.

  ‘They’re all kids, like, twenty-somethings. Where’re the grown-ups?’

  As we all scanned the tent we couldn’t see anyone over thirty, and as the room began to empty they gravitated away from us and clustered around the tables on the farthest side of the tent.

  ‘What do you think it is? Do we smell already, like?’

  ‘No, it’s simple.’ Julie, always quick to pick up on the mood in the air. ‘We remind them of their parents. They’re gap-year kids, or away from home on an adventure; we represent repression, control and conformity. Like the teachers on a school trip.’

  ‘Well, by the sound of it a lot of these will be trekking the same route we are – we’ll break through it, I’m sure.’ I could see the confusion on Moth’s face. I haven’t met many people, old or young, with a lower conformity threshold than him. He’d spent his life turning left when he’d been told to go right. ‘Anyway, fancy a bath?’

  ‘A bath?’

  ‘In the river. It’s a hot spring – that’s where everyone’s going.’

  Taking your clothes off in the darkness of a subarctic night doesn’t feel like the most natural thing to do. But after the cold we’d felt since arriving on Iceland, to slip into the warm, shallow water of the river was an unexpected relief. People gathered in a line where a hot stream fed into the cooler river water, forming a pool the temperature of a hot bath. The group milled around, a line of fish waiting for an invisible barrier to be lifted before they could rush upstream. A rising chatter of unknown languages bubbled with the water. Beyond the line the water was too hot, but in the spot where the hot met the cold it was perfect. It felt faintly ridiculous to be sitting in chest-high water on an open valley bottom, the lava flow rising high above us and the mountains outlined beyond, black against a cloudy sky, in what was really just a hot puddle. But as the night became darker and the warmth eased away all the aches of the long journey, the other swimmers began to drift away and the river became a wild place again. Dark, syrupy, sulphurous water pushed hot steam through the sparse, spiky grasses of the riverbank. We floated in two feet of water, silently moving like water skater insects on the surface of a spring pond, as the dense cloud cover became a little brighter, fingers of faint light from somewhere way above highlighting the boiling, massing movement of heavy cloud over serrated mountains.

  ‘So we set off tomorrow?’

  ‘What if it’s still raining as much as this?’

  ‘We could stay here for another day, we have time.’

  ‘We could just stay in the river.’

  I should have said no. No, Iceland in the seasonal cusp between summer and winter is not the place for someone with a terminal neurodegenerative disease. If we wanted to walk a long path in the hope that we could replicate some of the physical benefits we’d found on the South West Coast Path, then maybe we should have looked at the Pennine Way or one of the many other long-distance paths in the UK. Paths that you can easily get off and catch a train back to a house with a bed and warmth and ordinary comforts. Not take him to a foreign country, to an alien landscape with wildly unpredictable weather systems and a path with relatively few points of escape. Or had that been the point? Had that been the draw for Moth, that sense of forcing himself into something without a safety net always close by? I helped him out of the tent into raindrops that rebounded from the flysheet with the force of ping-pong balls and watched him walk awkwardly to the toilet block, shouting as he went.

  ‘Meet you in the kitchen tent. Get the porridge on.’

  I knew him too well; he didn’t have to explain it. There were days when he would answer a question I’d barely formulated in my head and certainly hadn’t spoken out loud. He would sing a song that I was humming internally, or pass me something I needed before I asked for it. A silent enmeshing of lives lived in unison. ‘Get the porridge on’ carried so much more than an instruction to start breakfast. It meant ‘I feel like shit, but don’t even suggest that we don’t do this. I’m doing it regardless. Just give me the support I need. And don’t, under any circumstances, let Dave and Julie think I won’t make it.’

  ‘Okay, see you there.’

  Rain poured from the food-tent doorway in a curtain of water. Inside a throng of twenty-somethings huddled, stoves lit, cereals being eaten, last-minute adjustments being made to full, heavy packs. I unpacked porridge on a table in the corner and watched the melee of action. A group of young Finnish people poured a last round of coffee from a communal pot before packing it away, along with wooden hand-carved mugs and the reindeer pelts that they sat on. I quite envied the pelts. Even dressed in most of my clothing, with waterproof trousers between me and the bench, the seat was still cold. I boiled water as two men squabbled over who would carry the frying pan and a woman walked past in a yellow bikini. Dave and Julie fought their way through the crowd and sat at the table.

  ‘More rain then. She’s either got no dry clothes, like, or she’s off to the river before breakfast. Preferred it in the dark, me, can’t see all that flesh.’

  ‘Yep, must be an age thing.’

  Moth ducked through the curtain of water, took his hat off and looked around the tent.

  ‘So are you all heading off this morning then?’

  A bedraggled scattering of responses came back in a wide selection of languages. Clearly they were all leaving to start the trail, pulling on waterproofs and tightening rain-covers around their packs. Moth sat heavily down on the bench at the end of the table, bouncing the water on the stoves.

  ‘Most of the tents are packed and they’re all off in the rain. Don’t know about the rest of you but I’m happy to hold on here for another day and see if it’s any better tomorrow.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Without hesitation Julie was in agreement, which meant Dave would have no argument; his larger-than-life character was always modulated by her reasoning.

  ‘Porridge then?’

  Iceland sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge: an underwater mountain range that runs through the Atlantic for thousands of kilometres. In the north it rises where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet; on Iceland they come to the surface in an open fissure that moves a measurable amount each year. Where these plates meet the pressure and power forces the plates to the surface, creating an eruptive land, where the old is pushed outward and a raw uncontainable energy creates a new earth.

  As the day wore on, the rain eased and we were drawn up into the lava field. One of the points where the earth had boiled out from below the surface to begin its cycle anew. Black crusts of rock shattered into millions of jagged, crystalline shapes and then re-fused, caught in a matrix of molten magma. But now, only a few thousand years after the earth spewed out its devastating contents, the torn landscape is changing, slowly calming. Stone and ash breaking down in the rain and sun. At a speed so slow it can hardly be recorded, the land is being recreated. Ash and mudstone almost imperceptibly becoming the building blocks of a black, slimy, peat-like soil. And in that soil, tough short grasses and moss grow from spores and seeds carried on the wind. Moss draped over rocks, a bright green cushion of growth, a basic starter pack of life. We picked our way through on a path that wound around, over, up and down until it flattened into a riverbed where a central rush of water forced itself into a narrow gorge. This deep gash of land had been formed by the edge of the lava flow on one side of the water and a confused up-swell of rocks on the other, where over time layers had lifted and mixed in an amalgamatio
n of ages that jangled the senses and confused the eye. Black, polished, smooth obsidian lay over mudstone and shale and beneath jumbled outcrops of basaltic and rhyolitic magma. Over it all, smooth and slipping, a dense cloak of ash dust. The remnants of a land in transition. And rising above it in a contrast of ochre, cream, blue and green, the exposed hills colouring the horizon like unpolished gems against the grey sky.

  The backpackers were all gone; only a few tents remained alongside ours. The bus trips had been, their passengers had used the toilets, walked around for a while in plastic ponchos, taken photographs and left. We stood in the wide-open glacial valley with a herd of horses. The sun lowered on its axis, blending their chestnut coats and long blond manes to the same colour as the rhyolitic hills. These hills were formed beneath glaciers millions of years ago, but now sit open and exposed to the light. The brilliant, undulating colours of the mountains changed with the sun as it emerged weakly, brightening as it found breaks in the clouds, then deepening and darkening with the coming evening. Plumes of sulphur cloud emitted from vent holes rose into the air, steam from a boiling land. A sense of the earth breathing. We breathed with it, inhaling sulphur and dust, four people alone in an alien landscape. A place where the earth is born and life begins.

  It seems not all noodles are the same. Some aren’t just yellow mush, but are practically edible. I emptied some nuts into a bowl of teriyaki noodles and they almost smelt appetizing. Moth sat guiltily at the end of the table waiting to use the pan, his tin of baked beans waiting to be opened. I glanced up the table, unsure whether to laugh or be annoyed. He was finding it impossible to convert the value of the Icelandic krona into pounds sterling and had unwittingly paid five pounds for the tin in the tiny shop in the school bus. Next to us two young Germans had the contents of their rucksacks hung from the roof of the food tent and draped across their table.

  ‘Just drying out?’

  ‘We went to Hrafntinnusker, but the weather was so bad we turned around and came straight back.’

  ‘You walked all the way there and back in a day? Why didn’t you just stay there?’ The next huts were at Hrafntinnusker, eight miles away across the mountains and mainly uphill. I couldn’t imagine why they would go all the way, then just come back again.

  ‘The path from there looks really hard and this weather is so bad. We’re going back to Reykjavík to hire a jeep for a week. No more hiking for us.’

  ‘Crikey, that’s a long way in a day. Well, have a good time in the jeep.’

  ‘Thank you, we will. We’re very happy not to be hiking.’

  Moth rolled the bean tin between his hands. If it was too tough for young, fit, well-equipped hikers, what chance did we have?

  ‘You shouldn’t go up. It’s not safe for people like you up there.’

  The bean tin was gently placed on the table.

  ‘Like us?’ He pushed it slightly away.

  ‘Yes, old people: it’s not safe for you.’

  I passed Moth the pan so he could empty his beans. Obviously we’d be starting the trail tomorrow, whatever the weather.

  The few remaining campers gathered in the river as the evening became colder, a multi-lingual shoal in the steaming warmth. The rain had stopped and two curious sheep grazed close to the water, sitting down to chew and watch the odd behaviour of the humans. Hours passed, our skin shrivelled and slowly all the others left. I sat back to back with Moth, propped together at the extreme of our heat tolerance. Dave and Julie headed to the tent and we were alone in the water, just us and the sheep, watching the clouds change colour as if backlit by volcanoes. Drifting in and out of sleep, warmer in the river than in the tent. Even with down-filled three-season sleeping bags the nights were already proving to be too cold to sleep through. I had no idea how we’d stay warm in the mountains, or if we would make it up there at all. No need to discuss it; we’d find a way, or not. Just a few years earlier the possibility of us sitting in a hot river in Iceland had been as unlikely as us walking the South West Coast Path, or living in an orchard. But we’d learnt so many things on that long, long walk. Things that we’d carried with us like precious jewels into the life that came after. So there seemed little point in worrying about whether or not we were capable of climbing the Eyjafjallajökull volcano or passing through the Fimmvörðuháls mountain range. We knew that time would answer most of our questions, so didn’t bother asking them, but sat in the river instead. Shrivelled but warm, breathing sulphur fumes until we fell into a deep sleep and woke underwater.

  Hrafntinnusker

  A morning wind rippled the flysheet in early green light, but as I lay in the down sleeping bag, swaddled in three layers of clothing and a woolly hat, I couldn’t hear any rain. I took the hat off. No, definitely no rain. I crawled out of the tent flaps through a tangle of boots and the gas stove on to the stony campsite. The new tent had a different opening construction to the old one. One zip to either side of a central fixed panel, leaving two small triangles to get out of, one either side. Impossible for rapid early-morning exits. It’s hard to run to a toilet block when your legs are still so stiff that they won’t move in the right directions. But I waddled in an arched-back, thigh-clenched scurry, crashing through the doorway and straight into the first open cubicle. Breathing finally, I came back out into a shed lined with cubicles and showers with a central row of sinks and mirrors. Dripping bathers and towels hung from washing lines through the shed and looking into virtually every mirror was a clear-skinned, smooth-haired twenty-something, perfecting her appearance. I caught a glimpse of myself, already looking as if I’d spent a month at the North Pole. Hair in a random, frizzy knot on the top of my head and my skin beginning to pinch into unfamiliar lines across my cheeks. I’d only been there for two days and hadn’t even walked anywhere; I clearly wasn’t going to wear well aesthetically on this trip. I cleaned my teeth with my back to the mirror as the girls adjusted their clothing and brushed their immaculate hair. Then I left the shed as quickly as possible, before the complex had time to develop.

  Moth was awake, but still muffled under layers and talking to me through his sleeping bag.

  ‘I can’t hear the rain.’

  ‘No, it’s dry. Broken cloud, blue sky. I think we’ve had our last night in the river.’

  ‘Drag me out then.’

  I leant into the tent and hauled him upright so he could wriggle out of his bag. Dave stepped out of his tent in one smooth action. A much smaller tent than ours and a much larger man. How did he do that?

  ‘Looks like this is it then. Are we up for it?’

  ‘That’s why we’re here, I suppose.’

  ‘Aw, c’mon, a bit more enthusiasm please.’

  ‘Where’s Julie? Has she gone to make porridge?’

  ‘No, I’m in here. I’m not getting out – I’m too cosy.’

  ‘Not just me then?’

  We ate our breakfast slowly, watching the few young people that remained in the camp as they packed their cooking equipment and headed off. Then, hesitantly, we took the tent down, reluctant to give up the relative comfort of the site and head into the unknown difficulties in the hills. Moth was collapsing the tent poles, absentmindedly folding each section before packing them away, but his eyes were on the horizon. His look held all the forgetfulness, painful mornings and stiff awkward walking of the last few years. A look of self-doubt and hesitation. I took the poles from him and caught his eye. And hope: there was hope in his face too. The faint, barely breathable possibility that this wasn’t just a trip to a place he’d always wanted to visit. That this was so much more than a bucket-list expedition. He was here in the hope that he could kick all the fear and pain aside and push his body as he had before. Force himself through the invisible barrier that CBD had encased around his thoughts and movements, shrink-wrapping his life like a fish sealed in a package on a supermarket shelf, viewing normality but unable to touch it. As we passed the huts a voice called to us from the small shed that took payments for the campsite.


  ‘If you’re heading to Þórsmörk you need to hurry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The buses stop running on Saturday evening.’

  ‘Why would they stop?’

  ‘Because winter’s coming.’

  ‘When, on Sunday?’

  ‘Yes, it will be winter on Sunday.’

  I lifted Moth’s rucksack as he put his arm through the strap, took a photograph of the starting post and a deep breath of hope. There was no going back now. We left the river behind and headed into the sulphurous heart of the southern highlands of Iceland.

  I looked ahead and traced the path through the lava flow and the streaking colours of the mountain ahead, trying to keep my focus on the strangeness of the landscape and away from the bite of the rucksack on my shoulders. We’d never needed to carry so much food before and it added weight to the pack that wasn’t familiar, creating a sagging, stretching feeling in my neck and a sharp tingling sensation between my shoulders. If I was feeling this, Moth must be too, even though the only extra weight he was carrying was breakfast. I vowed to take some of the things from his pack, just as soon as we’d eaten some of the food in mine.

  Rising out of the hazy mist of the valley floor, the sun cleared the last of the clouds and the mountains were illuminated in catwalk colours. Behind us, across the wide expanse, rivers of bright water separated and rejoined in a confluence of dazzling threads. And ahead, white, blue and green patches of slimy chalk-like molten earth steamed and hissed with plumes of gas and water vapour. A bus parked at the campsite below ejected a group of people in long, waterproof, brightly coloured ponchos, who wound their way up the hillside, stopping after every few steps to take photos, then rushing past. Hurrying uphill to reach a vantage point and take more pictures, before running back down to catch the bus before it left. A group of volunteers in orange coats bent over picks and shovels, digging chunks from the hillside, creating stone steps to cater for the footfall from the bus trips. A man in orange filled a net with three cans of soup and dropped it into a pool of boiling sulphur water, trapping the net with a rock before returning to the stones. Nearly lunchtime.