by Kurt Caswell
I checked the map as we approached a complex of small houses, apparently a private inholding, likely an old farm that the family never gave up. The sun warmed through the misty clouds, and a worn sweep of path led us between the buildings. At the edge of an outbuilding, three young arctic foxes rolled and played in the northern sun breaking through the clouds. Little brown things, fuzzy and round with little pointed ears and black eyes. All three ran for the cover of the front porch to let us pass. “Nice,” I said. We walked on.
As we walked on we began to realize the great cirque out ahead was our path, the first of two mountain passes for the day. I could now see the trail switching back across what looked like an impossible climb. The great, scooped bowl covered in snow where only mountain goats—and maybe the foolish—might go. We rose up off the beach, up and up along the trail. Not so bad, really. The way was clear and easy to follow, narrow and exposed, with nothing to stop your fall, but easy walking if you paid attention. We climbed steadily, not talking at all. I was grateful then for my trekking poles: I had purchased them in Ísafjörður, and now they steadied me. And I was happier still for my Arborwear undershirt, black canopy jacket, and tech shorts, which I wore over a light pair of knee-length black wool tights. On colder days, like this one, I pulled my long black ski socks up, so they met my tights at the knee. So dashingly dressed, with my long locks having fallen from under my cap and waving about my face, and my eyes, surely, reflecting an “innocent good-fellowship,” I looked the spittin’ image of Little Lord Fauntleroy.
We came up over the top of the pass called Skalarkambur and down the other side. As we went, the way became lost to us through the boulder fields, and we found it again, then lost it once more. The cairn in the distance pointed the general direction, but we could not stay on the path. It was here now under our feet and then out over there as we walked beside it, so faint and light, it wandered through the landscape. Like the waves on the beach, always shifting, or like a photon of light, which according to Heisenberg is not in any one place at any one time but rather shows a probability to be here or over there. Judging by the faintness of the path, the impact we might have on this landscape was so minimal, so light, as to be nearly nothing. We were like ghosts, walking a ghost trail through the black fields of stony rocks. “O you and I who never have existed,” writes the Icelandic poet Steinn Steinarr, “One instant, like a shadow on a wall, / Appears the image we were destined for.”
A snowfield appeared before us, and we crossed it, following the dirty bootprints of other walkers. It was near impossible for me to keep from kicking snow into my low-top walking shoes. I paused again and again to finger it out, my socks growing ever wetter. I soon learned that if I walked more carefully, more slowly and deliberately, making a wide step like a bowlegged cowboy, I could keep my feet dry. We walked mostly in silence, Scott and I, as it was too difficult to talk and negotiate the snow and boulders, and the weather, which came in tight against us. It misted a good mist, and we pulled our hoods over to keep our heads dry.
Walking these treacherous paths, I came to think about the early Icelanders who traveled here, how they negotiated these passes in search of good ground to plant or a grassy swale where they could graze their sheep. Did they find the divine in these mountains and seas, or did they feel, as I do, that beauty arises from its absence? Perhaps such settlers did not cross this particular pass at all; perhaps it is a crossing for walkers who walk for no reason other than to walk.
Unlike so many modern nations, Iceland was uninhabited in the ninth century when settlement really took off, except for a few stray Irish monks, who (god bless ’em) found Europe too crowded for their taste. Thus, the nation has no dark history of supplanting a people already here, unless you consider the millions of birds and fish and marine mammals taken to feed a growing population. The Norse people who sailed out from mainland Europe in longboats, carrying their sheep, goats, cattle, and gods—especially Thor—must have thirsted deeply for something new, for someplace new where they might establish a civilization of their own. Theirs were largely economic pressures, as most of the good farmland on the continent was already occupied, and some few nobles fled the policies of the tyrannical king, Harald Fairhair (850–932). Yet to choose that option, to set sail on a dark and mysterious sea in a relatively small boat, must have required a measure of courage or desperation or even madness. The passage from Norway to eastern Iceland took about seven days, if the weather was good. A stop in the Faroes would extend the duration, as would an onward journey to western Iceland and present-day Reykjavik, where today nearly two-thirds of all Icelandic people live. Often the weather was not good and the crossing was treacherous. Imagine the number of boats and people gone down to a watery grave in the North Atlantic.
In 1000 CE, Iceland named Christianity its official religion, so the Norse gods went quietly underground. Such a choice, I think, offers a key insight into the way Icelanders came to regard this land, a land I heard Icelandic novelist Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir characterize as “this mysterious black island.” Perhaps Iceland was just too dark and cold for too much of the year, too bleak and too empty to go on for long without the comforting illusion of a loving god. To ward off that awful loneliness of winter, nature had to be animated, and conveniently, Christianity was franchising in the neighborhood. This is also the choice most of humanity has made, adopting the supposed comfort of religious doctrine, which promises some sort of everlasting life to stave off the cold, bleak bleakness of an indifferent universe.
To find a sentient creature that might have lived otherwise, we have to go back further, beyond the settlement of Iceland (and off Iceland altogether, into mainland Europe), as far back as forty thousand years ago, when Neanderthals lived alongside modern humans. Neanderthals were robust human beings with great barrel chests, stout bones, and an impressive musculature. They were able to withstand cold and were well suited to carrying heavy loads. One researcher estimates that Neanderthals would have been able to bench-press three hundred to five hundred pounds. And they were incomparable walkers, walkers of the most exquisite type, whose livelihood and daily life shaped their physical bodies. The average Neanderthal, a recent study finds, could keep pace with the best of our greatest athletes, with Pelé, Steve Prefontaine, and Jim Thorpe. Their heavy brow ridge, large and powerful lower jaw with retracted chin, and relatively large nose and nostrils gave them the appearance of that iconic apelike brute we associate with Stone Age humans.
Despite appearances, Neanderthals were little different from modern humans, little different from us. In fact, a number of researchers, especially Svante Pääbo, head of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at Leipzig’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, have begun to overturn the image of Neanderthals as mindless brutes. Like modern humans, Neanderthals likely did possess the power of language, or at least of communication; they developed complex tool-making processes and may have adorned their bodies with hematite, or red ochre pigment. And they buried their dead, suggesting belief in an afterlife. It was once thought that modern humans drove Neanderthals to extinction by outcompeting them and possibly killing them. But Pääbo’s work has shown that the two species were so similar that they interbred, and since modern humans outnumbered Neanderthals ten to one, we absorbed them. The evidence is in us, as Europeans carry Neanderthal genes today.
However, there is a key difference between modern humans and Neanderthals. Unlike us, Neanderthals did not make much art. For a long time, it was thought that they were not capable of art, but we now know that “Neanderthals were capable of symbolic expression,” evolutionary anthropologist Steven Churchill told me. “They were occasionally making items of personal adornment. Even though they weren’t making much art, it wasn’t because they weren’t capable of doing so.” Nor were they plagued by restlessness, or whatever it was that pushed modern humans onto the seas to colonize distant continents and islands, else Neanderthals might have peopled Iceland long ago. In Elizabe
th Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction, Pääbo says
It’s only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don’t see land. Part of that is technology, of course. . . . But there is also . . . some madness there. . . . How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop.
Neanderthals did not do that. They did not venture out onto the hostile seas, and they did not make art. Why? Or rather, why not? Perhaps one reason is that Neanderthals were nomadic, a hunting-gathering culture. The choice for such cultures, as Jacob Bronowski affirms in The Ascent of Man, is “starve or move.” So they moved, but they moved not out into the unknown, not into the vast seas of the North Atlantic, but during specific times of year along tested pathways where they knew food, plants, and animals were certain to be found. And such moving makes civilization impossible. What you can carry is limited, and you would not make things you could not carry, nor would you develop the ability to make them. Nomads, asserts Bronowski, do not even make memorials, for “nothing is memorable. Nomads have no memorials, even to the dead. . . . The only mounds that they build are to mark the way.” So what “happens to the old when they cannot cross the last river?” Bronowski asks. “Nothing. They stay behind to die. . . . The man accepts the nomad custom; he has come to the end of his journey, and there is no place at the end.” In this way, for nomads, “the adventure leads nowhere. The summer pastures themselves will only be a stopping place. . . . There is no promised land.”*
The story of the Promised Land, the seminal record of which is the Bible, is the story of a nomadic people transitioning to an agrarian economy, a transition modern humans would complete, but Neanderthals would not. Abel, the keeper of sheep, is murdered, leaving the world to his murderer, his brother, Cain, who is a tiller of the fields, a farmer. The Bible is a book about the birth of civilization through the development of agriculture and then the buying and selling of land. It is the myth that parallels the story of the meeting of modern humans and Neanderthals.
Without art, then, without a capacity or a need for metaphor, Neanderthals lived not by the gaiety of language but perhaps by the gaiety of light and warmth, food and sex and companionship, the physical and immediate comforts and pleasures of the body. I don’t mean they had these pleasures all the time—they did not—but they lived for them, as these might have been the chief goods of Neanderthal life. Without the capacity for metaphor, was it not easier for Neanderthals than it is for us to live in an indifferent universe? If you consult Gilgamesh, the oldest recorded story in the world, you find the selfish and narcissistic worship of individual power, which leads to such a fear of death that the protagonist, Gilgamesh, king of one of the world’s first cities, embarks on a journey of folly: a search for immortality. He fails in his quest, of course. Perhaps, unlike modern humans, who are still daily embarking on the journey of Gilgamesh, Neanderthals lived simply, without agitation or worry over life and death, simply in the torrent of the body’s pleasures, however brief. In an indifferent universe, perhaps it is easier to be mostly indifferent yourself.
Scott and I reached the bottom of Reykjavik fjord into Hornvik and pressed on around Einbui to Höfn camp. At one point we used fixed ropes to help us over a steep hump of rock along the beach and walked a little foot trail overlooking a sharp precipice falling away into the sea. Seabirds—puffins, black guillemots, and arctic terns—spun along the sea cliff below us.
Höfn was a busy place. The Icelandic ranger was in his cabin, and a few large groups of twelve to sixteen people were camped on the flat. We counted some twenty tents. We found services here too: a WC with flush toilets, a couple of pit toilets, and a sink tapping water from a spring.
We pitched our camp against inevitable rain, cooked again in the door of the tent, and drank off the edge of our sore muscles and aching joints. An arctic fox made a pass to test us for handouts. The sign near the spring reported that feeding foxes is all right, but please no sweets.
“I’m tired,” Scott said.
“Me too. But maybe we should walk around the horn to see the birds?”
“Birds?” Scott said. “All I’ve seen for days is birds.”
“Yeah, but this is supposed to be one of the greatest seabird cliffs in all the world.”
“Maybe so,” Scott said, “as dramatic as that is. But I can’t. I’m all broken.”
“Same here, but we should probably do it. I doubt we’ll make it back here again.”
“Probably not,” Scott said. “In fact, I’m surprised I made it here this time. I bet you were sitting around in your house wondering who would be stupid enough to think this was a good idea. Cold. Wind. Rain. Birds shitting on you from the sky. You were looking for someone stupid enough to say: Yeah, okay, Caswell. I’ll walk all over Iceland with you. You were asking that question, and the answer you came up with was me.”
“That’s right. And here you are.”
“Yeah, here I am, and now I’m all broken. I can hardly stand up I’m so sore. And my little toe is mangled and purple. How am I going to walk out on this?” he asked, inspecting the puffy little sausage.
“Yeah, that doesn’t look good, but that’s why we should make the walk out there to the horn,” I said. “It’ll loosen us up.”
“No, we shouldn’t. We should sit here and drink. And besides, I’m not as dumb as I used to be. I’m coming to understand, after thirty years of friendship, that you’re just a little bit fucking crazy.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah, just a little bit. Just enough.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s stay put. I’ve seen plenty of birds today. And yesterday. And the day before that. Why didn’t we grab that deck of cards from the ferry terminal? We could have another game of Dirty Oyster.”
“Shit,” Scott said. “Why didn’t you think of that? Dumb shit.”
“I don’t know. Probably nobody will ever use those cards again. They’ll just sit there in the terminal going to waste.”
“Yeah, cuz nobody else is dumb enough to read the ferry schedule the way we did and get stuck in that place for seven hours.”
“Here,” I said. “Let’s pour out a bit more,” and I emptied the vodka bottle into Scott’s cup. “That’s the end of that one.”
“Good thing we’re not staying on another week. We’re out of alcohol.”
“No,” I said. “We have a bit more rum.”
We sat up awhile longer, drinking off our sorrows, until the sky came down to squat on the flat, and the rain popped against the tent fly.
“Well,” Scott said after we’d crawled into the safety of the tent, “I’m going to sleep.”
“Sleep?” I said. “A bit early, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like 8:30.”
“Yeah, it is. But you know what? At 9:30 it will still be light. And at 10:30 and at 11:30, it’ll still be light. So what does it matter what time it is?”
“Good point.”
“Yeah, it is a good point,” Scott said. “And besides that, you know what?”
“What?”
“I’m going to sleep cuz there’s nothing to fucking do.”
It rained most of the night. I woke again and again to the rain, a light mist, a heavy thrumming, a break to an opening of sky. And by the morning hour, it lifted, and we crawled from the tent to a world soaked in cloud and mist. The mountains we would soon cross, there to our south, were occluded by cloud, and white runnels poured off the face and into the great wetland below. I felt sore and stiff from all the walking, from hauling my pack. And we had another hard day ahead of us.
“It’s all wet out here,” Scott said, because someone had to say it for us both. “And I’m all wrecked inside.”
I made coffee, and we cooked up the muesli, added our honey, and ate and talked about the day. As we packed our wet tent, the ranger
walked up. His name was Jon, he told us, Jon Bjornsson, and in these parts, we later came to know, he was legend. He might have been sixty-five, perhaps older, a toque on his head with a tassel, a light jacket, and cotton pants tucked into his knee-high rubber boots. His face was bright, open—this rain was nothing to him—and these dark clouds were pushing a mounting storm. He bore the countenance of a man who’d lived his life outdoors, an easy, wiry look, hard as nails.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. “You are heading out today?”
“We are,” I said.
“That is very good. It is best to get an early start. There will be heavy rain in the afternoon. It is best to be on the other side.”
“We’ll be on our way shortly,” I said.
“Very good,” he said. “You are taking the boat then, in the morning? I will be joining you on the boat.”
“Oh, great,” I said.
“Yes, I must go to a funeral in Reykjavik. It’s a sad story, you know. But Icelandic funerals, there is a lot of alcohol. So it won’t be too bad.”
“What time will you start up the trail today?”
“I will go in the morning.”
“In the morning?”
“Yes. You see, I am very fast.”
I nodded. “And you probably know the way.”
“Yes, I know the way. I could walk all of it backwards.” He smiled. “Well, you best be getting on. This here is the most direct trail. Easiest for you. I will see you in the morning.”
We loaded our packs and set out, walking the easiest route for us and ascending a high bench above the flat, crossed and cut by flowing waters. The mists hovering above us set down on the back of the mountain, and the higher we climbed, the closer we came to the clouds. That strange border between outside and inside the clouds drew near, and when we walked in, visibility collapsed to fifty meters, maybe less. Shambling along through the mists, we crossed several snowfields, which were so bright in the dark air we had to put on our sunglasses. In some places we did not know if we were on the route or not, and then a cairn came into view at the limit of our sight, so we went that way. Arriving at that cairn, we followed a dirty footpath through the snow, trusting that in time we’d see another cairn, which we did, just as we began to question where to go. It would be so easy, walking those paths, to become disoriented and wander lost in the misty boulder fields. The GPS would show us the general way, but if we were delayed and its batteries ran down with no sun to charge it, what then? Crawl into some deep hole in the rock for shelter and wait for a clearer day? These cairns, one after the other, appeared before us when we needed them most, like a sign or sentinel. Still, what separated me from a complete loss of bearings was not the wish or belief in a guide from another world but the permeable membrane of companionship, a friend who would put out a hand in the dark.