by Tory Bilski
Eve slows down to almost a stop. “Folks, we’ve been on a dirt road for miles. There’s no highway in sight.”
This alarms Sylvie, who with that exaggerated intake of air, says dramatically, “We’re lost. Pull over.” She covers her face with her hands.
I didn’t know what all of Sylvie’s anxieties were at this early stage of our travels, but I know the signs when people fear being lost. My husband has this fear. There are no palliative words to calm these people down.
Eve pulls off the road at a juncture with a gravel lot and below us is the watery landscape of a mesmerizing blue fjord. It is not just blue, but a royal cobalt blue that shimmers in metallic pointillism and leaves golden spots on the backs of my eyelids. It’s a blue I’ve only ever seen in Iceland. A northern-sea blue. A color so rich it makes you contemplate the meaning of color, and the physics of light in creating color.
Eve is unperturbed over losing our way, as am I. I don’t mind being lost as long as I have time on my hands and I know I’m not in danger. And June in Iceland is all daylight. It might dim a little from clouds, but night won’t get dark. And even in a worst-case scenario, we have enough junk food in our car to last us a few days. I can’t see us picking each other off for the last package of McVitie’s anytime soon. I do worry, though, about Sylvie’s fear of being lost, and also that my navigational credentials will be forever ruined with this group. (As it turns out, this is a legitimate fear: every year we come to the tunnel’s crossroad and every year we wind up discussing how we got lost the first year and who was at fault. Since Maggie never came with us again, the blame defaults to her.)
Meanwhile, the hitherto mute teenagers unplug from their earbuds. “What’s going on?” they ask.
“I think we missed the turnoff to the tunnel,” Eve says, full of bewilderment though masking it in good cheer.
“We’re completely lost,” Sylvie bleats. “Who was supposed to be navigating?”
The evidence, the map, is still on my lap. But many miles back at the crossroads, Maggie was the one who said to go right where I thought we should go left.
“We’re fine,” Eve says, looking at the shores of the fjord. A family of about ten—what looks like grandparents, parents, and children—are digging for mussels. “Maybe they can help us.”
Sylvie grabs the map from me and gets out of the car. She hitches her jeans up before strutting down to the shoreline.
“Look at her go,” Eve says.
She walks like a cowboy with her skinny, slightly bowed legs. Her curly red hair is only partially tamped down with a multicolored Peruvian wool beanie. She wears red round-rimmed Harry Potter glasses and, around her neck, a dash of more color from a Bali-made scarf. On her feet, Australian Blundstone paddock boots. Somehow this international fashion panoply works well on Sylvie; she swaggers with sartorial confidence.
Approaching the natives, she waves the map over her head, and gives them her signature greeting, “Yoohoo, yoohoo.”
At first they look as if they will ignore her. It is a truism that the older a woman is the more she is ignored. But it is hard to ignore Sylvie. She tramps down the hill closer to them. We hear her ask, “Hello, does anyone speak English?”
Out of earshot, we watch the gesticulating communication from the safe distance of our van, until Eve says, “I have to pee.” Which starts many murmurings of “oh, yeah, me, too, I’m dying.” Eve says, “There’s some rocks over there.”
The teenage girls express their disdain by saying, “I would rather die than pee outside.” To which I voice the wisdom that is earned from many decades of full bladders: “I’d rather pee outside than pee in my pants. There’s not a toilet around for hours.”
Eve, Maggie, and I tumble out of the car and surreptitiously look for a suitable rock to duck behind. Practically in sync, we each find our own private boulder to crouch down behind, pee, and pull up our pants as quickly as possible. But that, for some reason, gets the Icelanders attention, at least their steely stares. Did we offend? Did we act like a pack of territorial dogs, sending out a scout to divert attention while the rest of us mark our territory?
Sylvie makes her way up the hill looking discouraged, leaving the foraging family behind her, looking slightly relieved. “We’re way off track. We missed the tunnel.”
For the first time, I take a serious look at the map and see our mistake. “When we missed the tunnel we must have gone all the way around this fjord, Hvalfjörður. This bump in the land where we are now, must be this bump in the map here.”
Eve is listening to me and following along, but Sylvie is lost in her thoughts. She looks down to the beach and the mussel-digging family. “I don’t think they liked me very much.” We assure her that they just didn’t understand her.
Eve toots the horn and waves to the family on the beach, yelling out, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” before driving away.
Eve says, “See? The universe provides. I’ll call Helga at our next stop and tell her we’ll be a bit late.” Eve is the only one with a cell phone and it’s impressive. A Blackberry, and it works, though reception is temperamental. She has to hold it halfway out the window or stand in a meadow or lean against a wall.
The mere mention of Helga and the farm revive Sylvie with a renewed giddiness. She squeals, “And she’ll have horses for us!”
The grownup women in the car are much more excited than the teenagers. And Sylvie, the most “grown,” is the most excited of all.
Oh, and then there is the woman in the back seat, Dora.
I’ve ignored her in the story thus far, because I believe she wanted to be left alone.
She doesn’t take part in any conversation, even when, on occasion, she opens her eyes. The rest of the time she feigns sleep, or for all I know, is asleep. It’s like a homeless person who camps out next to an outdoor cafe; you’re eating and drinking and having fun, but she’s there, minding her own business but serving as a reminder that everyone, even in your cloistered van, is not having a good day.
Not that Dora looks impoverished in any way. But she doesn’t look like the rest of us, either. She doesn’t dress for Iceland by wearing Polartec or a parka, heavy sweaters, and paddock boots. She wears expensive jeans, a silk blouse, a dressy white jacket with fur trim, and Tory Burch flats. A heavy dose of perfume permeates the car—another thing the rest of us wouldn’t think of wearing on our way to a horse farm. The only thing that seems to be amiss is that her hair is dirty, stiff, and unkempt, and an overly golden-dyed blonde. Generally speaking, her whole hue is gold. Her wrists are covered in gold bangle bracelets, and so are her fingers, neck, and pierced ears. She has tanning-bed colored skin with an overlay of bronzer, and very Cleopatra made-up eyes, lined in black with metallic gold eyelids. I know it’s often said that women dress for other women, but I don’t get that from her. She is dressing for someone who’s not there.
Eve looks in the rearview mirror every so often at her. When she does, Sylvie rolls her eyes indicating her displeasure with this passenger accompanying us. Maggie pretends Dora isn’t there, and I’m waiting to hear the story of why she is on this trip.
In Search of the Perfect Pylsur (Hot Dog)
Back on the Ring Road and heading in the right direction, Eve talks about being on a dairy-free diet and feeling better than ever. “Jack and I have given it up. It’s so toxic, lactose. Humans are not meant to consume dairy.”
Sylvie sort of agrees. She works at a macrobiotic health store part-time and says it took her a long time to accept rice milk in her coffee every morning. “But I’m not completely miserable. Not completely.”
I ask them, “Are you lactose intolerant?”
They both answer no, but Eve expounds. “All humans are lactose intolerant to a degree. Lactose is making us sick. Our bodies can’t break it down and it leads to disease.”
Cheese and anything creamy and dairy-based are the mainstay of my diet; they never make me sick. In fact, consuming fatty dairy products makes me fee
l good. I’d go as far as to say that they make me feel loved. But I am susceptible to dietary pressures, and I briefly reconsider my love of cheese and ice cream, though Iceland doesn’t seem the right place to give it up.
“I’m getting hungry,” Sylvie says, the discussion of dangerous lactose clearly firing up her appetite.
“Me, too,” Eve says.
Despite the steady car diet of cookies, pretzels, and licorice, it is at long last lunchtime.
Eve begins innocently enough with the idea of getting a hot dog. “The last time I was in Iceland . . .”
This is not Eve’s first trip to Iceland. She has been twice before with her husband, Jack, to buy horses to stock their Icelandic farm in the Berkshires.
“I had this hot dog at one of these gas stations. It was somewhere around here, at one of these N1 stops. Oh, it was so good,” she says mistily, like a hot dog at a gas station was the best thing in her life.
“I remember it just had this certain snap to it, and these crunchy onions and the bun was perfect.” Eve takes one hand off the steering wheel and her fingers give that little kiss sign at the end of the sentence.
As I said, I am susceptible to food fads and diets. So, I don’t necessarily hold it against Eve for doing this to me; she doesn’t know how food obsessive I can be. But that day she starts me on the long circuitous path to finding the perfect Icelandic hot dog.
She repeats that dead-on detail—the snap of the hot dog as your teeth break the skin. She describes the kind of day it was: cold and rainy, the fog forcing them to stop at the gas station and wait out the weather. They were on their way to purchase a horse.
That is the happiness trifecta in my view: a journey with purpose—horse buying; a physical challenge—stormy weather; and unexpected great eats—a hot dog.
“Are they boiled or pan fried, these hot dogs?”
“They’re in one of those hot dog rollers. You know, it warms and crisps them.”
“What kind of roll?”
“Just a regular white bun, the soft and mushy ones.”
“Ketchup or mustard?”
“Neither, they have these two rémoulade sauces: a white one and a yellow one.”
Every answer to my questions sets my urges loose. “Are they beef, pork?”
“Supposedly they’re lamb and pork. And they come with a topping of potato salad.”
Potato salad?! I am about to die from hot dog desire. And I’m not usually a big hot dog lover. In fact, it’s one of my least favorite foods. I think of it as composite garbage meat, what gets done with the entrails and offal and ground up ear bones of poor old dairy cows. It’s one of those meat concoctions that could turn me into a vegetarian. But I know that in Iceland the meat is organic. The lamb and cows are free-range out of tradition, out of necessity, and out of practicality.
“We have to find this place,” I tell her.
We cross a narrow isthmus surrounded by a tidal bay where the sand and water are gray. No sun now to speak of, but there is a thin light coming from behind a cloud, giving the brackish water a hint of glitter.
We have entered Borgarnes. “Is it in this town?”
Eve looks carefully at the cheery red symbol of the gas station and pulls in to a parking space.
“Is this the place?” I ask her.
She hesitates, “I think so.”
I bustle her out of the car and into the N1. Since so much of Iceland is rural, gas stations are where people often meet and eat. They serve as a quick mart where you can buy everything: woolen hats, maps, milk, yogurt. But they also provide a bakery, an expansive penny variety candy counter, a soft serve ice cream stand, and a café that serves up meat soup, fried fish, or hamburgers with fries. And then near the register are the hot dog rollers and condiments.
I jump in line and wait not so patiently. When my turn comes, the fresh-faced young girl speaks to me in Icelandic. At a quick glance, I’m white enough and blonde enough to pass as a local. And there is always a moment when you want so badly to pass, to pretend you’re someone who can speak the language, that you persuade yourself you can pull it off. I knew the word for hot dog, had seen it in downtown Reykjavík and had invested a few days on Icelandic language tapes, which left me with a shaky grasp of counting to five.
“Einn pylsur?” I ask, questioning my own request. And then comes the long list of Icelandic questions and my moment of shame. I am forced to give up my fake identity. “Ummm, can I have a hot dog with onions and the two sauces and potato salad?”
There was a time, way back in the early 2000s, when once out of Reykjavík, people’s English skills were limited, so language misunderstandings were common, but always calm and unemotional. After all, this is the country that hosted the Reagan-Gorbachev summit; this is a country where people can make peace and disarm nuclear escalations.
The girl at the counter decides it’s too much for her and asks a coworker for help with English. Another fresh-faced young person steps in and bails her out. I explain to him, and point. “I want a hot dog with that and that and that. The works.”
And then we go through the pointing game. “This? No that. This? Yes, that.” His English is no better than hers, but he’s stuck with me now. My hot dog is half-constructed and he can’t pass me off to someone else.
It seems to take forever. The local people behind me, if they can speak English, don’t offer up help. Icelanders at that time were not used to tourists and didn’t seem particularly interested in them, so if anyone knows English, no one is helping us out, but neither are they getting impatient. Good thing, too, because Eve’s behind me and they have to wait as she goes through the same order again.
Finally, the precious, lusted for, linguistically fought for hot dog with all the trimmings is in my hands. A paroxysm of joy. I can’t decide whether to stand at one of the plastic tables to eat it or take it outside to a picnic table. But outside is cold with the lashing wind and rain of late June. I eat it standing up in three bites. The crunch of the onions and the soft roll are perfect. The meat itself is not as garlicky as American hot dogs, probably because they don’t have so much offal to cover up.
Eve is just starting hers. “What do you think? Is this the place?” I have loved my three bites, but I need her assent.
She chews thoughtfully before saying, “It’s great, isn’t it?” Eve’s first impulse is always to be positive. But then on reflection she says, “But it doesn’t quite have the right snap. I don’t think this is the place. That place must be farther down the road.”
Oddly, I’m happy about that. For there it is, that mythical destination “down the road.” The only thing better than finding the perfect pylsur is having to keep looking for it and knowing that any gas station in Iceland could be my Rosslyn Chapel. It’s the perfect quest. And I will eat many hot dogs in pursuit of it.
The Land of Oz
Sylvie, Eve, and I are back in the car, but everyone else is still in the gas station buying yogurt, ice cream, coffee, and kleinur (donuts), stocking up in fear of another wrong turn, another delay before we get to Helga’s.
Outside, Dora is smoking a cigarette, hunched on the side of the building, avoiding the wind, avoiding us. She stubs it out, looks around, reaches into her pocket, pulls out a box, and shakes out a Tic Tac, or maybe a pill.
Eve explains Dora. “Her husband died about a year ago. He came in from a run and dropped on the kitchen floor from a massive heart attack at thirty-eight. After that, she wound up spending a lot of time at Guild Acres. She was in such a rut. I told her, ‘You need to come to Iceland with us.’”
“Funny, you didn’t tell me she was at Guild Acres,” Sylvie says.
“It wasn’t that much time. I was hoping she’d join in more with us. We need to bring her out a little.”
Sylvie clucks. “Well, if she was in Guild Acres she has addiction issues and most likely depression issues. And, just a wild guess, but I’d say she probably has socialization issues. That’s a lot for us to work on.
And this is my first trip to Iceland. I’m on vacation.”
“She’ll figure it out. Oh, Sylvie, we’re all on our own journey.”
Sylvie mutters something about how Dora is “actually on our journey.”
“I think Iceland will heal her. It’s good for your soul, this place. Look how beautiful everything is here. It’s magical!”
At the moment, dark clouds have moved in and the rain has turned briefly into snow. The wind blows hard on the van, rattling the doors. Dora turns her back against the wind to light another cigarette.
In years to come, there will always be “a Dora” on our trips, someone Eve decides needs her help. Eve’s modus operandi is trying to save people, always thinking that taking them down the Yellow Brick Road to Iceland will heal what hurts them, give them back their hearts, their minds, their courage.
Sylvie mentions how Dora slipped on the floor in the airport bathroom, how there was a kerplunk and she looked over to see Dora sprawled out under the stall, with her legs sticking out from underneath the door.
“See, she’s manifesting grief and depression. It’s the law of attraction, she’s attracting falls and accidents. She is bringing herself down, literally. She needs to manifest health and life.
“This trip will be good for her, you’ll see. She needs this. And the horses. They will heal her. Horses have a way of healing,” Eve says.
Sylvie agrees on this point only. “It’s true. Horses can save you. They can.”
No doubt I was in the company of a couple of new age spiritualists. Most of my friends at home are professionals like lawyers who want rational arguments, or doctors who want evidence-based findings, or social workers who believe we have childhood issues to work out. And I have spent the last eight years working at Yale for political economists who are devoted to data crunching. I spend my days listening to them talk about hot deck imputations, weighted variances, and smoothing random effects. I edit their academic journal, assiduously checking citations, grammar, and the Chicago Manual of Style’s arcane hyphenation rules on papers with titles such as, “The Indirect Effects of Downstream Experimental Analysis: Cost-Effectiveness of Randomized Field Experiments.”