The Wild Silence

by Raynor Winn

  Out of the ravine, on the flat area where the hut sat, the wind ripped in, pushing us hard towards the path that led away and down the mountainside. But darkness was coming and we needed to stop: this wasn’t a landscape for a night-hike with a feeble head torch. The leeward side of the hut offered some shelter from the wind, so might be a spot where we could camp.

  We opened the door and walked in, instantly hit by a wall of hot, clammy, noodle-flavoured air. A woman with unwashed hair and layers of fleeces emerged from the heat. She was in her late thirties with an open welcoming face.

  ‘Get in, get in, shut the door.’ Lauri had a commanding presence that anyone would obey without question.

  ‘Hi, we just wondered if it would be okay to camp outside? There’s no other shelter from the wind.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘No, you can’t camp, the forecast’s too bad. Your tents will blow away. We’re full in the hut. Completely to the rafters.’

  ‘Well, thanks anyway.’ We opened the door and picked our rucksacks up to head out into the darkness and the iced rain blowing in gusts from the glacier.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘If we can’t camp here we’ll have to head down to find some shelter.’

  ‘No, no. I’m not turning anyone away tonight; it’s a death trap out there. Certainly not you four.’

  ‘Us four?’

  ‘Well, you’re not exactly a group of tough twenty-year-olds, are you?’ What exactly was she saying? ‘All the bunks and the spare mattresses are taken, but if you can find some floor you can use it. But close the door.’

  Lauri, it transpired, wasn’t a hermit, or a recluse living wild on the hillside, but a mother with a family of young children at school in Reykjavík. For four months every summer she left them with their father and moved on to the volcano to take care of her other children: the people stranded on the mountainside at night, who often only survived because of her diligent care and ethos of ‘no one left outside’.

  Beyond the porch in the main part of the hut the heat and noise was an intense assault on senses attuned to the wild landscape outside. Rows of tables, all crowded with people in trekking clothes. Heaps of rucksacks on every available metre of floor space. And a queue of people cooking, waiting to cook or fighting over pans by a small two-ring fixed gas hob.

  ‘Cook your food if you want to, but no camping gas stoves, on the cooker only – we don’t want to catch fire, we don’t have enough water to put it out.’

  ‘Where do we sleep? Is there another room?’ I’d never spent a night in a trekking hut and was already feeling myself withdraw. Too many people in such a small space and the familiar sense of panic was rising. I hung back by the door. I couldn’t do this; I’d rather risk the wind on the volcano summit than this. ‘Moth, please don’t make me do this. You sleep in here if you want, but help me put the tent up first. I can’t be in here.’

  ‘We can’t. The tent will just rip away out there.’

  ‘I can’t be in here.’ But there was no escape, his hand was on my arm, forcing me towards a chair by a table Dave had cleared.

  ‘You can, it’ll be fun. You’re not going out there.’

  What the fuck was I doing here? My head was pounding, breath catching in my chest as the noise and the room began to pulsate. How could these people think this was okay? It was not okay. I was in the street in Polruan, running to hide behind the chapel, while trapped in a chair unable to escape.

  These were a new set of people; we’d encountered very few of them before, most of them had started the trail at Skógar and were heading north to Þórsmörk where they would catch the bus back to Reykjavík. No sign of Eric; the girl in the red trousers must have forced him over the mountain to Skógar as she’d planned. But opposite us were two familiar faces, the obviously related Germans from the Langidalur campsite.

  ‘So why are you in the hut, why aren’t you camping?’ They were nudging each other again and staring. Why were they so keen that we should camp, were they concerned that there wasn’t enough floor space for four more bodies?

  ‘It’s blowing a gale out there, like.’

  As the water boiled for noodles Julie chatted easily with them in her fluent German, but all the time they were nudging and looking from Moth to myself with broad gnome smiles. I ate noodles that wouldn’t rehydrate because the water wasn’t hot enough and drank lukewarm tea, eyes fixed on the bowl, struggling in an attempt to exclude the wider room. I had to get outside and slipped Moth’s grip with the excuse of going to the toilet hut. Beyond the sleeping hut was a smaller replica A-shaped hut that housed a chemical toilet and a wooden seat. I went inside and bolted the door. The wind rattled the zinc and pushed through in icy draughts, but I was alone. The air was cold, not a voice to be heard, and I sat there until my head stopped spinning and someone was hammering on the door to come in.

  Outside the wind blew in strengthening gusts, parting the clouds that had engulfed the volcano. For a moment a deep, dark sky appeared through a tunnel of cloud, a black hole strewn with bright points of starlight. A stillness finally came with the wind blowing at my back and the cold as it puckered my face. I inhaled long slow breaths. This was outside the door; all I had to do was to walk out of the door whenever I needed to and I’d be able to make it through the night.

  ‘Where have you been? Your tea’s nearly cold.’ Julie handed me a mug. ‘You’ll have to drink it quickly, we’re supposed to move the tables and put the mattresses out before lights out.’

  ‘Oh wow, like school camp.’

  ‘Seems so.’

  A mad delirium followed of bodies, tables, chairs and rucksacks. A scene that could have been accompanied by the theme tune to a Benny Hill sketch show. I didn’t wait for my mat to inflate but threw it down in the corner and claimed my space at the edge. Moth squeezed in next to me with the last of the foam hut mattresses.

  ‘You’ll be okay; I’m between you and everyone else. Face the wall and it’ll be as if it’s just us.’

  But that was always going to be impossible in a room full of people, few of which spoke the other’s language, when one of them, a young man with dark hair, was frantically rushing round the room, throwing the rucksacks about and looking among the pans.

  ‘It’s lost, it’s lost.’

  ‘What’s lost?’

  ‘A black zip bag. It has my important night things in it.’

  More madness, as the whole room got out of their sleeping bags and began to search for the important bag, obviously containing his valuables and medication. I stayed in the corner, afraid of losing my spot. But the bag couldn’t be found. The two Germans didn’t get involved, but sat on their beds, occasionally looking to my corner and smiling their knowing smiles. I looked the other way.

  ‘What exactly is in it? Will you need a doctor?’ Lauri was in the doorway, hands on hips, and the room fell silent.

  ‘My important night things.’

  ‘Medicine?’

  ‘No, my things.’ The young man’s voice was rising to a quaver of panic, but Lauri was swelling with exasperation.

  ‘Just tell me what things.’

  The whole room turned to him in expectation of a life-threatening revelation.

  ‘My toothbrush.’

  The exasperated room got back into their sleeping bags as Lauri turned the lights out.

  ‘Goodnight, children, and no one gets up until six.’

  I got up. In the darkness of the early hours I crept over the bodies, picked up a coat and went outside. The wind had dropped to a whisper and on the far eastern horizon a slither of pink wove between the dark grey gaps in the clouds, lighting the glacier tops in hints of faintest blue. The silence was total. The complete silence of an earth at its beginning. Or its end. Even in the warmth of a stranger’s parka, I felt this was no place for human or animal and yet the world went on without either. The pink light spread through the grey, not time passing, just light changing.


  Skógar

  The Germans left the hut at first light, tiptoeing out before the chaos of breakfast and furniture-moving began. They waved as they passed my mattress, whispering, ‘Enjoy more camping.’

  An hour later Lauri stood on the raised wooden decking outside the hut, hugging each of us as we passed her.

  ‘Be careful today, it looks nice now but it’s going to rain later. Just follow the river downhill, you can’t go wrong.’

  We descended the mountain over a blank, featureless, rock-strewn land, falling into silence as the hillside folded ahead and the glacier retreated behind. We’d found our rhythm, an easy pace on the last day. Or was it because we were going downhill? We finally found the river as Lauri said we would. A frantic rush of muddy meltwater, racing downhill beneath a small wooden bridge, erected in memory of a man who had tried to cross the river here but didn’t make it and was washed away towards the valley, miles below. I hesitated on the wooden platform above the water as it burst into brown spume over the boulders. Nothing could have made me step into that wild river.

  Dave squatted behind a boulder and boiled water for tea as a fine drizzle began to fall. Before the stove was packed away the beat of rain on waterproofs began to drown out the sound of the river. Muffling the volume of millions of gallons of water as it fell through a cascade of waterfalls, increasing in drama, height and width as it went. Water from the sky, underfoot and in deep echoing ravines. Everything was water. Beyond the desolate fields of rock and ash crowning the volcano’s summit, pockets of bacterial mush became patches of peat, then a blanket of soil. Below the icy reach of the glaciers, protected by sheltering cliff walls, tentative fingers of green growth stretched away from the water. The earth underfoot transformed into the landscape of foothills, a familiar world where the green threads massed and spread into blankets of coarse grass and thrift.

  Moth walked on ahead through the cold, driving rain. Walking alone in his own world, on his own path. As the waterfalls grew in size the noise increased in volume until all we could hear was water. Water in a furious, pounding roar against rocks, clothes and earth. A maelstrom of noise and moisture, turning the peat soil into a moving conveyor of treacherous mud. But still Moth walked on, the distance between us growing.

  People began to file past in ones and twos, then in groups and columns of school trips. We were getting closer to Skógar, to the cafés and buses where day trips to the waterfalls start and end. Nearly running on the slimy pathway, I caught up with Moth.

  ‘What’s the rush? I can’t keep up with you!’

  ‘What? I can’t hear you – it’s so loud.’

  ‘What’s … the … rush?’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m not rushing. I was just walking, remembering bits of the path from the last few days.’

  ‘Maybe that’s how you should always walk then, without thinking about it. Maybe you need headphones, so your movements become more automatic; perhaps the problems are in the connections between thought and action.’

  ‘I can’t wear headphones in the wild, I’d rather listen to the silence.’

  ‘No chance of that here.’

  Two women walked uphill towards us, wiry women with bright-coloured clothing. Mustard-coloured waxed waterproofs jackets and red trousers, with wide brimmed hats tied on with beaded cord, which hadn’t come from the hangers in any outdoor shop I’d seen. They stopped on the path ahead, watching us walk towards them.

  ‘Hi, lovely day.’

  ‘Guten morgen.’ Germans. ‘It is not lovely, it is raining.’

  ‘You’re right, it is.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘So you’ve noticed. My friend and I, we think we know you.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Yes, this man, we’ve met, but we can’t remember … we know your face.’

  ‘No, I really don’t think so.’

  They continued to stare with puzzled expressions as we walked away.

  ‘So, Moth, secret life in Germany then?’

  ‘Don’t know what they’re talking about. Great coats though.’ We looked back and they were still standing on the brow of the hill watching us.

  The waves of land shallowed and the river broadened as I followed Moth, disappearing rapidly ahead of me down the hillside. Maybe there was something in what the women had said: a secret trip to Germany in the past, possibly. Or was he walking alone because he was bored with my trivial conversation, or lack of it? Tired of talking about boy-scout badges and food, he just wanted to be alone. I waited for Dave and Julie, who were walking carefully on the slippery grass.

  ‘What’s up with him, like, what’s the rush?’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t keep up with him. I think he’s bothered by the German women.’

  ‘What?’

  Moth was waiting for us on a viewing platform at the top of the final waterfall. The vast Skógafoss waterfall thundered down to a riverbed sixty metres below, where busloads of tourists stood, photographing themselves in the cloud of spray that formed as the water landed. Two Icelandic trails behind us, we had walked through ice, rain and sulphur to the end of a strange and unknown land. To a cliff edge that used to be the end of the land, before sea levels fell and took the coastline three miles further out to sea. Folk tales say this is the place where the Viking Prasi Porolfsson dragged his boat ashore for the first time and buried a chest of gold, obviously just travelling money, in a cave behind the roaring power of Skógafoss. A bus trip of Chinese girls clearly thought it was still there, but appeared from the spray empty-handed and dripping in their plastic ponchos.

  ‘Don’t you want to walk with us today, like, or do you fancy catching the bus back to Reykjavík this afternoon?’

  We all stood by the railings, squeezing together for a selfie at the falls.

  ‘Course not. It’s my legs, I had to just go with them.’

  I’d been too focused on the thought of the strange German women – I hadn’t considered that he might be having a problem going downhill. Struggling to put the brakes on.

  ‘Could hardly have left them behind, like.’

  ‘They felt real today, like my old legs, as if I was completely in control. I had to go with it, seize that sense of normality and go with it. Sorry, didn’t mean to ignore anyone.’

  ‘No, Moth, if you have a moment when life is in balance you seize it and forget us.’ Julie handed out the last of the chocolate raisins.

  At the bottom of the fall, feeling tiny against the backdrop of wild power, we asked one of the girls in ponchos to take our photo. We leapt into the air, all the wrong side of middle age, seizing a moment of life in defiance of infinity, or because of it. A moment of the wild, loud cacophony of life caught in flight. Two fulmars circled in the currents of the air above the waterfall as we breathed in the empty volcanic possibility. There, where the earth begins and ends and life goes on in another form.

  The daily bus had long gone as we pitched the tents by the river, sat in the warm dry café and ordered food. Logging in to Wi-Fi for the first time in Iceland, I scanned through an enormous list of unanswered emails. Among them was one from the literary agent. The Salt Path had reached the top ten in the German book charts and had been featured in a widely read magazine. A selfie that we had taken, homeless but laughing near Godrevy Lighthouse on the South West Coast Path, was all over the magazine racks of Germany.

  Only Change

  To pass through the cracked and splintered oak-wood doors of the cider barn was to pass through time. To another world, where dark stone walls, barely visible in the low light, still held the sweet smell of centuries of crushed fruit and fermentation. Through lofts where apples fresh from the orchards would stand in hessian sacks, past cobwebs hung low, cloaking every beam and corner, forming curtains across doorways, where generations of farmers had stacked the press with crushed apples and watched as the juice ran. Oak barrels lined the walls, racked in rows of deep, musky
anticipation. Waiting for the moment when the cloudy sharpness of fresh pressed juice refilled them and the cycle of production would begin again.

  But the sense of the past had been hidden in more farm waste and plastic bags, until Moth worked his way through the barn, slowly brushing, sweeping and bagging rubbish. Washing the walls with water until the smell of cider returned and with it a breath of the barn’s history. As he closed the door, the shadows in the darkest corners could almost have been of monks, tapping the barrels, tasting the pink fermenting liquid. It was nearly time.

  In the farmhouse, the rucksacks stood in the bedroom propped against the wall, exuding a faint smell of sulphur. It had been three weeks since we’d returned but neither of us were ready to unpack. We still carried something of the vast, wild turmoil of the volcanoes in our thoughts, a sense of uncontained horizons that we weren’t ready to put back in the cupboard. Outside, apples hung full and ripe on overladen branches, the warmth of the low autumn sun tracing patterns of light across their damp red skins. I cupped one in my hand to see if it would easily leave the branch and it came off with only the slightest twist. It was time; they were ready to pick. Soon they would be in the barn and the cider season would begin.

  I gathered the first few into a basket as the yellow leaves began to move on the tree, the wind slipped into the north and, almost without warning, the soft tones of autumn picked up a harder, sharper edge. Before darkness had fallen angry gales were ripping over the hill, battering rain and hail powering through in relentless waves.

  When it finally stopped, tonnes of apples lay on the ground, bruised and broken, the trees were stripped of leaves and the weak sunlight held the wateriness of early winter.

  ‘What a waste. These need to be off the ground and into the cider barn before they rot.’ Moth squatted under a tree picking a few undamaged apples from the ground and putting them in a bucket.