by Raynor Winn
‘I just went over the top to see if there were any other bushes like this on the other side.’
‘Are there?’
‘No. This is so unreal, like something totally new has been created and just put here.’
‘Thought you didn’t believe in stuff like that? That sounds almost creationist.’
‘No I don’t, but it’s as if the earth has made something that can only grow in this one spot where nothing else can thrive. As if the molecules have moved to allow life to exist in another form.’
A pale yellow light bathed him in the shrub’s reflected glory as he picked up his rucksack and swung it on to his shoulder, then lifted mine for me to put my arms through. A changing landscape, where molecules, life and time shifted and transformed.
As the land fell into a wide river valley the vegetation increased. Scrubby growth of bilberries, birch and tough grasses scattered the riverbank. An occasional insect lifted from the path. Sparse but forceful life was emerging. The final river crossing of the Laugavegur Trail lay ahead. Not one river to be crossed, but a valley of water that separated and diverged and rejoined. Veins of water across a body of rock and shale.
‘How the fuck are we going to cross that? It’s like ten rivers in one.’ Moth’s rucksack was down and his boots were already off by the time I reached the edge of the river.
‘Well, we’ll just pick our way over with the poles, like. I think we should go this way.’ Dave was pointing upstream through a maze of water.
‘Not sure about that. I think here, where it’s wider but shallower.’ Moth was already wading in the opposite direction.
‘What, are you telling me there’s no boy-scout badge for river crossings?’ Julie strapped her sandals on to her feet and headed into the river, delicately testing each step with her walking pole. I watched the three of them, nervous, excited, but sure enough of themselves to step out into the fast-flowing iced water, and then, checking that each step was secure, find their way to the opposite shore. Moth sat on his rucksack drying his feet as I stepped into the water, the noise of the river almost deafening as it pushed at my knees, sharp pain gripping my ankles. But I barely acknowledged either. Don’t tire yourself … and be careful on the stairs.
Refreshed feet warm in boots, we climbed away from the noise of the river into a thicket of birch and undergrowth. Iceland faded away and as we followed the narrow path through the branches we could have been in the foothills of Snowdonia, walking on peaty ground past tiny streams of clear water. But when we climbed a ridge Iceland was back in full view, the edge of a glacier filling the skyline. Then down, down among birch and sky to a tiny campsite by the Langidalur hut at Þórsmörk, the edge of a wide, stony, tree-lined river valley, surrounded by high-peaked mountains. The end of the Laugavegur, but the start of something bigger. Rising beyond, the Fimmvörðuháls loomed, barring the way to something hidden and foreboding.
Clusters of people sat on benches around the hut. We found a space at a picnic table where two men were sitting. Shorter than me with very similar, unusual gnome-like expressions. They stared at us, smiling and nodding. Moth caught their look.
‘Hi.’
‘Well, hello, are you staying in the hut?’
‘No, we’re camping.’
‘Of course, maybe that’s because you like camping?’ They were nudging each other and laughing. Possibly German.
‘It’s okay, getting a bit chilly though.’
‘Yes, but you’re used to it being cold, no?’
‘Well, we’re from the UK, so …’
‘’Ere, come and look down at the bottom, some good pitches down by the river.’ Dave had already explored the site.
We wandered down to the edge of a riverbed that in full spate would be a vast and terrifying expanse of angry muddy water nearly a quarter of a mile wide, but was now a scattering of streams, with just a narrow central river.
A small cooking tent looked out to the mountains. Eric, the girl in red trousers and a collection of others who had come and gone from their group sat inside, filling the tent with steam and food. But – again – no sign of the engineer. They shouted out from the tent.
‘Didn’t think you’d make it!’
‘Well, here we are. Are you all finishing here, or going over the Fimmvörðuháls?’
‘They’re all finishing here, but we’re going over. Just straight over in the day tomorrow. I don’t feel as if I’ve had a proper walk yet, so it will make a good stretch to finish on.’ The girl in the red trousers looked confident but Eric stirred his soup, looking down at the table. He’d probably need to add some more oregano to that, if he was to have any chance of walking the twenty-five kilometres over the mountains to Skógar near the main road to Reykjavík, in one day.
On the opposite side of the riverbed an off-road bus wound its way slowly through the boulders, lifting, jerking and twitching as it came towards a small group of people sitting on the riverbank. Among them was the engineer with her rucksack, straps tightened and looking half its original size.
‘Aren’t you going over with Eric?’
‘No. This hasn’t been a good holiday for me. I thought Eric was my friend, or something more. But I’m just his donkey, his packhorse carrying his frying pan. And I had a dream.’
‘A dream?’
‘Last night, I dreamt about my grandmother who died years ago. I never dream of her.’
‘Was it a bad dream?’
‘No, it was a beautiful dream. She was making kuchen in our family kitchen. She said, “Come home, the strudel is ready.” So I’m going home. Iceland is not for me.’
I waved as the huge wheels of the bus bounced back across the riverbed. Sad for her, but a sadness tinged with envy. No comforting arm reached through my dreams with plates of strudel.
We sat in the cooking tent with freeze-dried rice and the last six jelly babies.
Shivering in the darkness, there was no choice but get out of the tent. The cold had woken me, biting through the down sleeping bag and all my clothes. That and too many cups of tea the night before. Desperate for a pee, I shoved boots on and scrambled to get the zip open before it was too late, but the zip wouldn’t open. The flysheet was solid with ice and the dampness of the night before had frozen the zip closed. I ran my fingers up and down it until it thawed enough to unzip, folding the tent door back like the cover of a hardback book. Beyond the tent the night spread in an ice-still vastness of mountains and sky. The huts and campsite were unlit, as if they had melted back into the birch woods, leaving only a deep dark world of ridgelines, sky and stars. The bonfire of the evening before smoked with only the faintest glow at the edge of the riverbed. Silence. Switching off the head torch as I left the toilet block, a faint light spread and wavered around the eastern horizon. Maybe the first movement of dawn? No, too early. Or starlight refracted from the white glow of the glacier? But the light moved, lifting in brightness, a hesitant spreading mist of light, a fluctuating ripple of energy. Then without warning it broke into fingers of whiteness, then falling, hanging curtains of colour that blew in some wild polar wind from horizon to horizon. Pink, blue and the faintest green painted the sky in moving brushstrokes of charged particles.
‘Moth, Moth, get up, the aurora, it’s here.’
People were emerging from tents and huts, awestruck by the vast magnificent spectacle of the earth displaying its aura. A chance encounter with the atmosphere that’s always there, but so rarely seen. Fingers of the universe reaching down to include the earth in its constant motion. I thought of the engineer in her bed in Reykjavík, sleeping after packing her bags ready to fly away tomorrow, held safe by the call of home and family. There were no dreams of home or comforting arms holding me in some subconscious half-remembered childhood warmth, nothing calling me back through time to a table set and waiting for my return. But Moth’s hand was still in mine and as the light wrapped us in curtains of infinity I held it just a little less tightly. Whatever was lost or found in life he
would always be a part of this. A part of the charged movement of molecules from the earth to the universe. He would never leave.
Baldvinsskáli
Eric and the girl in the red trousers had already left the campsite by the time we got out of the tent. But even we made a much earlier start than normal, knowing that if we were to reach even halfway over the Fimmvörðduháls, we would have to set off before eleven thirty. The first half of this short trail was thirteen kilometres of uphill slog along a path that is renowned for weather changes and mist rising without warning. Paddy Dillon, the master of underestimation, describes this path as ‘steep and rugged climbing with narrow, exposed ridges. Snow and ice on the highest parts.’ But we weren’t ready to end the trail and catch the bus. The path had already started to strengthen its hold. Just one more hill; just one more valley. Moth adjusted the pack on his back and spied on the hills ahead with his monocular. Be careful on the stairs.
Above the birch line the path returned to the landscape we had come to recognize. Rough stony tracks followed narrow ridgelines and broad plateaus to a mountainside that we’d spotted from the tent. Even from there we were able to see the brown line of a path crossing the flank. What we hadn’t been able to make out was that the gently inclining thirty-degree track actually crossed a seventy-degree hillside of gravel, grit and mud. The Þórsmörk valley stretched away as snow-clad mountain tops began to reappear and finally another broad plateau. All sight of the vegetation in the valley bottom disappeared and we were back in the savage, rock-strewn landscape of ash, boulders and obsidian. And above us, the summit of one of the most disruptive volcanic explosions of recent years.
In 2010 Eyjafjallajökull erupted, spewing out an ash plume that rose five and a half miles into the air, shutting down most of the air traffic across Europe. But it wasn’t just the ash that caused the problems. The eruption was beneath a glacier and as the glacier melted, the water poured back into the crater causing the lava to cool really quickly, forming glass crystals in the ash cloud. Bad for jet engines and horrid to walk on. In the tourist shops of the capital, walls are lined with photographs of the eruption. Dramatic pictures capturing red-hot lava as it was ejected from the mountainside. Photographs of heat, ash and disruption. But the one picture that held me transfixed was of the ponies. The farmers had evacuated the area as the volcano began to erupt, escaping from the danger zones. But as they left, they remembered the horses trapped on the hillside, so turned back to find them. The picture is of a herd of ponies running down the road and behind them a dark and furious ash cloud chasing them at high speed.
What the picture doesn’t show are the farmers behind the ponies, guiding them down the road to safety as they ran to safety themselves. The dramatic crisis of a volcanic eruption, a blast of raw, instant power, bringing the human and animal worlds together to face the same threat, the same possibility of extinction. Seismic activity had begun in 2009, allowing the inhabitants of the area nearly a year to prepare, and yet it wasn’t until the lava was running down the hillside that people finally reacted. Mainly for economic reasons, they refused to acknowledge what they knew was coming. The much bigger volcano, Katla, is heating up. History says it usually erupts in the years following an Eyjafjallajökull eruption and information boards about it litter the hillsides. Plastic-coated signs that normally describe local birdlife now instruct people to get to high ground when they hear a warning siren, away from the predicted lava-flow channels. And yet undoubtedly people will still be walking on these hills as the ground is shaking and the water heating up, unable to admit that danger is imminent until it’s visible.
I watched my feet finding their way through the ash and rock and my thoughts drifted back to the farm in Cornwall, to the dust-dry fields and bare hedges of our first visit. No insect life other than the flies that hatched in the window frames, or birdlife other than the crows waiting for the sparse growth of apples to fall. A crisis unfolding, but invisible to most as they drove to the supermarket. The immense form of Katla looms unseen to the east. The horses will be running, the birds will have flown and the insects will lie dead on the ground, but the volcano will have erupted before humans look up and say, ‘Maybe the signs were there, but we walked on the hills anyway.’
A via ferrata awaited us. A precipitous path traversing a near-vertical hillside of loose, shifting rock: a scree run, in fact, at a few thousand feet, crossed by this narrow track with a chain attached to steel pegs hammered into the rock for the walker to hold on to. Moth’s head for heights disappeared one day in his forties when he fell through the barn roof. Especially exposed heights where he can see directly to the bottom of the valley. Dave and Julie inched their way across, keeping their eyes fixed on the chain. But Moth was looking the other way.
‘Just give me a minute.’
‘There’s no other way around, it’s too steep. We have to cross here.’
‘I know, I know, just give me a minute.’
We stood on a narrow ridge between the plateau and the scree run while he tried to breathe. Views of mountains stretched out to either side, but ahead only the sheer mountainside and a path that had to be crossed.
‘All right, mate, your turn, but don’t trust the chain, we’re just fixing it.’ Three men in high-vis jackets were looking in a bucket of long steel bolts. Talking to each other in broad north of England accents.
‘What are you doing up here? You’re clearly not Icelandic!’
‘No, obviously. I’m from Doncaster. I normally work in Scotland, the Lake District, Northumberland, you know, round the north. But this job came up and I thought, why not, can’t be that different to home. Didn’t think I’d be on the side of a volcano for a week though. Bloody cold up here. Right, get across then, but like I say, don’t rely on the chain; we’ve just taken some pegs out. Off you go.’
Moth took a deep breath; his pale waxy complexion had fear written across it in capital letters, but he knew he was going to cross anyway. He kept his back to the northerner, so the man didn’t see his hands shaking, and stepped out on to the loose ground. The same man who had stood at the bottom of the scree run in the Lake District, arms wide, laughing as I hurled myself down, began to reappear. His shoulders loosened and his back straightened as he stopped momentarily, one hand on the chain and, looking back, beckoned me over, the colour returning to his face. Don’t ‘be careful on the stairs’, run up them. Run up them two at a time if you can, while you can. I followed him, eyes fixed on his back and away from the valley bottom a thousand feet below.
Ash and rock crowned the volcano. An alien landscape of desolation. Sleety hail-filled rain began to fall, loud on waterproof clothing. In a confusing landscape of mounds, dips and soot, Dave and Julie’s red and blue jackets stood out in stark relief. Even the reliable Paddy seemed a little confusing here.
‘I think it’s left of the hill, following the yellow marker posts.’ Moth sat on a rock to examine the map more closely, but quickly got up again, surprised by how warm it was.
‘But we’ve been following the blue markers all the way, it wouldn’t suddenly change.’ The landscape made no sense to me. Maybe something about the magnetism was shifting the compass in my head. How could I possibly doubt Paddy?
‘And I saw some people go the other way round that hill. Maybe Paddy’s wrong, like,’ Dave was gathering his things, preparing to follow them.
Moth looked at us all in exasperation as Julie stayed out of the argument and sat quietly eating a cereal bar; but then she looked up slowly.
‘I thought that was a lake over there and it was just mist rising from it. But there’s no water. It must be the hot top of the volcano. It has to be if these are the two new cones that were formed in the eruption. Check in the book, Moth, these must be Móði and Magni.’ She casually finished eating the cereal bar.
We all looked in the direction she was pointing – to the two cones and the waterless lake of steaming rock beyond.
‘They are.’
‘W
ell, that’s solved it. I’m not walking across that; it’ll melt my boots, like. Let’s go left.’
We set off, Moth smiling smugly, heading to the left of the Miðsker hill ahead.
The wind picked up, blowing in strong cold gusts from the snowfields all around. Crossing a valley of packed ice, past metal cases housing instruments for measuring seismic activity and more warning signs to head away from the lava flows. I wondered where exactly we would head to. Where can you go when you’re standing on the top of a volcano and all the activity you’ve been warned of finally comes together into one catastrophic moment? Too late then to consider a change of route.
The ice took us into a precarious ravine of melting rivulets and the black bacterial growth. I peed behind a boulder; it froze instantly, leaving a trail of yellow ice. Dehydration. I needed to drink, but although I knew I needed to drink, something about the cold air, or the cold water, meant that again I hadn’t. Ahead was an A-shaped zinc hut, the tiny Baldvinsskáli hut that only sleeps twenty and is recommended for emergency stops only.
‘Paddy says there’s often no water at this hut.’
‘Well, I’ve carried this water filter all the way and haven’t used it, so let’s get it out and fill all our bottles now, then if I have to I’ll come back for more later.’ Dave unwrapped his new filter and slowly filled the four bottles. There wouldn’t be room at the hut for us to stay, but as the light was falling, reflecting pink rays across the ice, we were hoping to camp nearby. I thought about Eric and the girl in the red trousers. Would they be at the hut or, fuelled by oregano, already on the bus to Reykjavík?