by Raynor Winn
‘A romantic light, so you can talk of love.’ One of the men raised his head and merely nodded at the German. As I looked away I noticed their feet, heavily padded in thick woollen socks, intertwined beneath the table. I was as guilty as the people whom we’d met on the South West Coast Path. Like them I’d jumped to conclusions about these men. I’d just seen two weather-worn, hardened mountaineers on an efficient expedition; I hadn’t seen the rest of their story, or even considered that there was one. No different to the people who had immediately assumed we had issues with substance abuse or mental health the moment we said we were homeless, I had assumed these were straight men with patient girlfriends waiting at home. Not two people in a loving relationship having the trip of a lifetime. And they had really great socks.
‘Excuse me, where did you get those amazing socks?’
‘In the Mountain Mall bus at Landmannalaugar, so nice, made from Icelandic wool.’
‘Damn, wish I’d bought some, my feet have been freezing at night.’
We reluctantly left the café hut, the wind feeling even colder after the extreme warmth inside. Despite that, at this much lower level the cold was almost tolerable, but I still longed for woollen socks.
Emstrur
The morning broke in a faint light as I tripped over the guy rope getting out of the tent and rolled towards the river, but stopped myself before my only dry socks got wet. The engineer was walking slowly along the path from the lake, her head down, hands in pockets.
‘Hi! You’re out early. Ready for another day with that big pack?’
‘I still have to carry that pack for two more days, then there’s talk of going further.’
‘Aren’t you enjoying it?’
‘Nothing is what I thought it would be.’ She walked slowly away, hunched and quietly crying. On the picnic bench Eric and the girl in red trousers sat side by side, heads close together, as others came to join them and he handed out the biscuits the engineer had carried.
The other backpackers had long gone by the time we’d eaten porridge and packed the tents. A cold wind blew off the lake from wild grey skies framed by black mountains, giving the morning a threatening edge, the damp air heralding turbulence to come. The path snaked away from the safety and warmth of the huts and café, climbing over a ridge and falling to a river crossing: fast iced water at knee height gripping my legs in tight bands of pain as rain began to fall. Black ash slowly replaced shale and lava as we reached a small hut that was rarely used so late in the season. The wind lifted over the ridges to fall on to the lower ground with force, driving rain against waterproofs until they flapped like wet, ash-covered sails. We made tea on a bench sheltered behind the hut and took it through an open doorway to drink it sitting on the floor of the drying room, dripping waterproofs hanging from racks overhead.
Moth leant against the wall, soaking up the heat. He’d been quiet all morning, barely speaking as we’d walked away from the lake. He’d been so hard on himself, suggesting we come to this place of subarctic weather systems in a desert of volcanic soot, where there was no choice but to keep walking, no other way out. In the hope of what? That we could recreate an effect that he’d experienced on the South West Coast Path, when we knew that was probably impossible? Then we had walked for months; there was no way we could get that same result in just a few days. I couldn’t shake the thought that maybe it was time to just let it be, to stop pushing and let him rest. Were the farm and the orchards enough to slow the decline and allow us time to acknowledge his illness fully and prepare to let go, as I’d thought I’d been able to once before? I watched the tremor in his hand as Julie passed him a cereal bar and started to move my aching body off the floor to cross the room. Opening wrappers takes far more dexterity than is available to hands that move unbidden and uncontrolled. But then I sat back down. Slowly, but firmly, he grasped the wrapper and opened it, the same dexterity that had put the spring back into the strimmer head. He ate the bar, carefully avoiding his broken teeth, and pushed the wrapper into his pocket, seemingly unaware of what he had just done.
The rain passed, leaving a grey air drying in the cold wind. Over a small lip away from the hut, a wide-open soot field stretched ahead for miles, all the way to the horizon. Either side of this flat, matt-black valley, near-vertical mountains rose to jagged crenellations. But before we could reach the soot field there was another river to cross. Wider, deeper, faster. Muddy brown icy water straight from a glacier.
Dave and Julie were looking for something in a rucksack and Moth had his boots off before anyone, hanging them around his neck and standing at the side of the water.
‘I’ll go over and see how deep it is.’
‘But wait for …’
He had gone, feeling his way across, finding gaps between the boulders of the riverbed to wedge his pole in and following confidently with his feet, the water above his knees.
‘Bugger, I didn’t realize he’d gone. Is he all right? I’ll catch him up then come back for you, Ju.’ Dave was on his feet, hurrying to get into the river, but I caught his arm.
‘No, let him go; he’ll be okay.’
We watched as he climbed out on the far bank, waving for us to cross. Dave and Julie waded in and were gone, but I stood on the bank. On the opposite shore Moth was drying his feet on the red bandana. I shoved my trousers in the pack and waded thigh deep to a metre-wide island of land in the middle of the river. Fiercely cold water rushed by on all sides, driven into the sky in jets of wind as it pounded against the boulders. I closed my eyes and felt my body swaying with the force of the elements. Here in a place where the land was reborn, where it stripped away its surface and found a new earth beneath, where mountains ended and began. Devoid of all but a fleeting microbial chance, in this raw upheaval was the start of life, the start of hope.
I watched Moth on the opposite bank, boots on, laces tied, beckoning me to him. For a moment, the rush of water seemed to slow and I thought I saw a young man push the long hair from his face and wait to catch me as he called me on into his world. A fleeting moment of connection. The earth, our lives, entwined, dependent. Stripped back to an earlier, raw state. Unfettered, reformed, renewed. And I could hear the voice for the first time in this alien land. Roaring in deep-throated tones from mountainsides streaked with green growth painted across the black. New life growing from the destruction. Fresh, clean; the same, but new. Here in the icy tumult of a world beginning was our connection to it all. A chance, a hope, a breath. I stepped into the raging water and picked my way across to a man who was surviving the upheaval in his body, a man returning to a raw state of being. Neurons refiring, new connections forming, a primeval simplicity being refound.
On, through soot so heavy the wind couldn’t move it. A feather-soft, yet solid, unmoving black blanket. Across a plain of dust that appeared flat and featureless, but hid deep gorges, blasted by ferocious meltwater, crossed by a bridge of flimsy wooden poles. Yet all around I could see it: more new life. Thrift, bladderwort and sharp silver grasses, species that would be at home on a British sea cliff, hung on in pockets of eroded, composted black mush. Soot evolving miraculously into the starting block of vegetative life. Roots somehow finding a purchase in the loose, inhospitable earth. A future meadow in the making, before the next eruption presses the reset button on evolution and the land returns to the beginning of its endless cycle. A cold wind came in blasts and eddies, skating over the half-pipe of the valley in an endless battering, plucking motion. We fell into a metronome of movement: four bodies moving slowly, steadily through the black landscape. As the land finally rose to an escarpment I looked back to Moth, but he wasn’t at my shoulder. Two hundred metres behind, a figure stood on a boulder; he wouldn’t have been visible if it hadn’t been for the blue cover on his rucksack. Green waterproof arms outstretched, wrapped by the wild air, in a moment of acceptance of the raw blankness of the landscape. I closed my eyes, feeling the same wind he did, imprinting the sight of him as he would always be to me
: free in the wide embrace of the natural world.
Dropping down from the small ridge and the Emstrur huts appeared at last. Tucked in a narrow ravine where scrubby bushes clung to the side of a fast-flowing stream, overhung with thick growths of angelica and Himalayan balsam. Unwilling to head down into the ravine, I stayed on the higher levels where the wind blew unfettered, sitting on a bench in the cooking tent, looking down into the deep, damp camping area below.
‘Don’t sit here and sulk, Ray. Just look at the way this tent’s moving – and it’s tied down with winch straps. We’ve got to move down out of the wind or we’ll just get battered. People are piling rocks round their tents for a reason; it’s not decoration.’ Moth refused to take his rucksack off, but stood in the cook-tent doorway. ‘Let’s just do it. I need to get this pack off and make some food.’
Familiar tents scattered across the flat areas along the stream. The girl with red trousers and a now familiar group of young people gathered around Eric’s tent, but the engineer was nowhere to be seen. We pitched the tent on a slope of shale and grit and headed back up to the communal space offered by the cook-tent, through rain that had come without warning. Exhausted and cold, we longed to cook food while sitting in our sleeping bags in the tent, but the slope made that impossible – the noodles would have poured out of the pan. The tunnel tent shook and leaked waterfalls of rain through rips in the plastic. Eric and his growing band of followers gathered around two tables pushed together. Bedraggled wet people gazed at him in awe as two American girls made him coffee. Moth lay on a bench among dripping waterproofs and steaming hikers while the water boiled on the stove, adding to the fog in the shelter.
‘So where are you all heading then?’ Moth sat up on the bench and moved closer to the young backpackers. Bored by the them-and-us barrier that seemed to have developed between the twenty-somethings and ourselves, he tried to break into the circle.
‘Þórsmörk,’ someone replied. The others barely acknowledged him.
‘Oh, right, yeah, us too. Any of you heading over the Fimmvörðuháls?’
They looked up at him then, slightly sneering, slightly amused.
‘Ha, no, weather’s looking too rough. We’re getting the bus out of here. If you’re heading over there you might need some more sticks.’ They closed ranks, sniggering among themselves, and Moth returned to the bench.
‘Don’t worry about it, mate, they’re probably scared of you with those teeth like, you look like a right bruiser.’
‘But I was just trying to have a chat.’
‘Forget it, mate, eat your food.’
We’d been walking long enough for a packet of dried pasta and a piece of chorizo that had survived in the rucksack since Reykjavík to taste like a plate of wonder from a Michelin-starred Italian restaurant. Water boiled for a third cup of tea and we shared some chocolate raisins in the hope that they would be soft enough to allow Moth to hold on to the last of his teeth.
The huddle on the other tables tightened around Eric, who was taking another food bag out of his rucksack. I put my waterproofs on as he handed out small sachets of herbs, obviously oregano, and the group slowly dispersed, heading away to their tents, leaving just Eric leaning against the scaffold pole that held the tent up and the girl with the red trousers lying on the bench next to him with her head on his lap. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? They were all following him for the quality of his seasonings. We completely understood how dull dried food can be after a while; it would definitely be improved by a pinch of oregano.
There was still no sign of the engineer.
Langidalur
I lay in a curled ball of pain near the tent doorway. When would I ever learn that camping on a slope always resulted in my sleeping bag sliding relentlessly towards the lower end of the tent? It was pitch black, not a scrap of light filtering through the flysheet, but Moth’s knees under my head and the pain in my hips said I’d done it again. Why didn’t Moth ever slide downhill? Was it his weight that held him down, or because he seemed to lie perfectly still all night, not constantly wriggling like I did? He was in a deep sleep, groaning lightly with each breath. Was he in pain and his brain registering it even as he slept, or was it the forerunner to a full-throated snore? I shuffled in a snake-like motion back uphill, joints pinging in agony as I uncurled. In the absolute blackness I imagined designs for sticky self-inflating mats that didn’t move on the nylon groundsheet and Velcro attachments that fixed the sleeping bag in place no matter how extreme the slope. The groan didn’t develop into a snore but continued as a low moan of pain. However hard he tried to convince me in the daytime that he was coping, in his sleep he couldn’t hide. Had I really seen a change in his movements yesterday, or was it no more than wishful thinking, hoping for the same miracle we’d had on the South West Coast Path, yet knowing it was impossible in such a short space of time? Rain began to beat on the flysheet, thunderous rain that fell from the tent with the sound of torrents from a gutter. I fumbled around in the darkness and pulled the waterproofs over him.
Leaving the Emstrur huts in warm sunshine, the pounding rain of just a few hours earlier already drying, we climbed away from the ravine into a fresh cool wind blowing from the higher mountains covered in heavy snow.
‘What the hell, what day is it?’
‘I’m not sure. Is it Sunday?’ Moth glanced at his watch to check the day of the week.
‘Winter came early then?’
‘What?’
‘It was supposed to come today, on Sunday – obviously came last night like, with all that snow.’
How could the Icelanders predict the season so accurately in a land where the weather systems seem to emanate from the very earth itself? Accurately enough to set the bus timetables by it? Maybe the 350,000 permanent inhabitants of the island still have an unacknowledged connection to the elements. Maybe even the inhabitants of Reykjavík can look across the ice-grey water and sense a cold front on the horizon. Possibly the ancestry which reaches back to Viking longboats that crossed those same seas still holds in its genes the ability to sense movement in the skies, or a change in the wind. Or perhaps the high level of volcanic activity here means it’s the most geologically and meteorologically scrutinized bit of rock on the planet and great weather forecasting comes from that.
I stopped, panting for breath on a path of loose stones, looking back across the black ash of a valley bottom and another river just crossed. Moth and Dave walked past, chatting easily about life in the boy scouts and the merits of Firestarter badges. Julie strode by in her relentless metronome of perseverance. All disappearing over the edge of the jagged lip of the flat-topped escarpment above. Alone on the windswept mountainside, I was as close to the others unpacking lunch on the flat top as I was to the glacier that moved through this valley millennia ago, carving it into a classic U shape. Or to the deer we’d heard sing on the hillside at Lochan Tuath a lifetime ago, or the green stones we’d picked from the beach at the Bay at the Back of the Ocean. All those moments felt huge and present in the air as it moved along the valley, pushed by the river. A background roar of the rushing elements of air and water, a sense of the earth moving without time. I’ve read arguments that say time doesn’t exist, that it’s only a human construct to measure change. If that’s true, then on that rocky slope I was in a place outside of time, where all things existed and nothing was lost, only re-formed.
What is it about boys and badges that fifty years after they pinned them on their green jumpers and straightened their woggles, they can still hold such relevance in their lives? As I left the timeless valley behind and stepped over the edge of the escarpment I could hear the conversation still going on, as if the badges had been handed out yesterday and the years between hadn’t happened. Moth sat on a flat rock, already holding a cup of soup. Chatting as if he’d just taken a stroll in the park, as if life had barely touched him and his hold on it was as permanent as the mountains. A world without time, or just a moment in life: is there a
difference?
The flat top of the escarpment was disconnected from the neighbouring mountain. A high cliff face of red chevrons of rock forced up by huge tectonic uplifts was separated from where we stood by a cavernous ravine where a river rolled and boiled far below. It was as if we stood on a column that had just risen from the earth. A white sea bird spread its wings and glided on the air currents above the river. As I watched it rise high on the wind across the cliff face, stark against the black and red rock, I realized it was the first bird I’d seen since passing a group of whimbrels near the coast while on the bus to the lava head in Landmannalaugar. I watched the fulmar glide into the distance, following the ravine and the river away to the south. All that was left was the roaring, wild silence of an empty land without vegetation or animal life. A heaving, crashing chasm of noise and movement, overlaid by a veneer of stillness.
The earth beneath our feet has no need of humanity. It exists in a state of fixed impermanence, a volcanic equilibrium of rock and ash in constant realignment. The only transition is in the changing state of molecules on its surface. The archaeological eras of Nordic, Neolithic, Roman and Plastic erupt and fold in chevrons of change, across an earth that will undoubtedly eject any presence of life that threatens it, as surely as a splinter from a human thumb. We packed the cups away and followed the fulmar south through a landscape of shrinking glaciers and warming skies.
The molecules on the surface were visibly changing. As the path progressed gradually south, so more and more patches of ash had evolved into soil that held low grasses and thrift. Dave and Julie walked on ahead, casually pointing walking poles at some distant peak. Moth meandered behind them, stopping repeatedly to take photographs or move the weight of his rucksack across his shoulders, but then disappeared from view. The ash thinned, replaced by stony shale, then dropped into a huge bowl in the land. The others were already over the rim on the opposite side, but in the bottom was a bush, just one bush, alone in a hollow, shining yellow. A yellow so bright that it reflected its colour on to the surrounding earth. Not a recognizable shrub to my eye, but something totally unknown, dazzling the dark earth with its brilliance. I walked around it, held by the wonder of it being able to grow in such a hostile landscape, as Moth walked back towards me and dropped his rucksack down.