Viking country
In Iceland, the weather is a flirt, and like all good flirts, it knows that the hot is nothing without a little cold.
Driving across flat lunar plains, black moss and blonde brush studded with muscular Shetlands, you will be struck dumb by how charming indecision looks on a place when it’s the opposite on a person. On a whim, with a sigh of wind, that impossible wedge of sky may shatter into drifts of snow, your path an undrivable ghost. Tired old volcanoes in the distance will be carpeted in what feels like seconds and likely is.
In Iceland, you can think you’re having one kind of day but it’s soon decided for you that you’re having another. There’s a freedom in this if you’ll allow it. Acceptance is the national state of mind and the people who live here are enjoyably fatalistic, with an inclination towards humour that would be bleak if it wasn’t so good-natured. It’s a personality forged from inevitability, from fast adapting and knowing that there’s really never been another option anyway. Surrender like this is not easily cultivated as a way of living, but more and more it seems the only one worth all the effort.
The quicksilver weather is partly responsible, but so is geography. When you’re brought up alongside hard proof of earth’s relentless demand and capitulation, adopting its perspective must come naturally. Somewhere along the line, you must assimilate something of those indecent gaping waterfalls, pouting and spit-flecked like the bottom lip of an angry child; the great yawning craters, like someone took a bite out of the earth and left broken teeth behind. The inexhaustible menu of ruptured volcanoes, chapped mouths screaming nothing at nobody.
It’s hard not to anthropomorphise the whole experience, so don’t try. Give into it. When things are arresting here, which mostly they are, they’re not pretty, but gruesomely human and brilliantly destructive; beauty delivered by force. All cliches are correct and present: you are the beetle, this world the boot, and it’s clear that this country is giving no-one and least of all itself an easy ride.
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Led Zeppelin wrote a very famous song about this land of ice and snow, and it’s easy to see how a place like Iceland might compel a rock star (or any person who ordinarily has the good life served up to them five ways daily). Beneath the uncontaminated charisma, all that healthful air and openness and light, there’s a sweet weight and a serene toughness, the imprint of a mythological legacy inaccessible to outsiders and lurking just out of eyesight. There’s something here you don’t get to fully have unless you’re from around here, and it doesn’t matter how famous or gorgeous you are. That’s a good thing for most people to experience, and especially the Robert Plants of this world.
It’s easy to see this, but it’s harder to be fine with it, especially if you’re a tourist with shameful delusions of grandeur. For a start, the volume of foreign visitors feels colonising and invasive, even though (or perhaps because) you’re one of them. Emerging from enormous tour buses, yawning, dusting packed lunches off, we’re padded against the wind’s bite by bright waterproof jackets and squeaky hiking boots fresh out of the box. You look at the rest of them and think: garish. You look at them and think: what are you doing here in my fantasy. And even though you knew it would be this way, everybody said it would be this way, you still feel short-changed somehow, because for some puzzling reason you believed you were owed something by your time here. Transcendence, maybe; escape, definitely. Certainly an experience untouched by Gore-Tex and biscuits in Tupperware.
That’s how places like this work. Like an emotionally unavailable lover, they imply special access to something not everybody is able to have while making it clear in practice that you’ll never get to have it. Like that distant lover, they may map out entire universes of intimate connection long before you’ve ever actually experienced them in any real way, ultimately unable to deliver, or at least not the way you designed it in your fantasy (and let’s face it, you are far from the only one who wants a slice of the action).
Their slippery dazzle is such that, in the end, you no longer feel that this is just a place, just a lover, but a conduit to a more profound experience of your personal selfhood. And you feel very strongly that you don’t want a waterproofed Californian taking selfies on top of your profound experience of personal selfhood.
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If you have lived in a major city for any good amount of time, you probably think you know all about toughness. You might be a proudly jaded New Yorker, or maybe ten years in London has whittled you down into a scrappy little city pig. One of the luxuries of our comfortably gentrified lives is getting to craft our own preferred personal narrative, so if that’s part of yours, it’s more than understandable.
But urban toughness is textured differently to the rough crunch of Icelandic grit. In a city, whatever hard edges we’ve acquired were likely built around us brick-by-brick by the aggressive neon metropolis we chose as a home. We didn’t start out that way; we were complicit, sure, but we can’t take full credit, because big cities do this to all of us eventually. It’s the only way to survive.
The source of it all feels different for people who were born and live in Iceland, who seem hardwired with a mechanism for endurance and a natural fortitude in the face of adverse conditions. It feels congenital and intuitive; there, you could be objectively feeble as a person, but you’d still be kind of tough in some unnamable way. It’s what happens when you’re challenged from birth to submit to things you can’t change.
Most of us aren’t, of course. Most of us cringe away from the light of how we actually feel, and besides, our immediate surroundings are rarely in the business of teaching us the only true lesson: that everything does and will eventually pass.
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Experiencing Iceland’s mercurial nature firsthand can feel like somebody is finally being honest about the way living can feel. Particularly if you’re a person whose mind works hard to balance at the edge of things, at times it will seem to mirror how it feels to exist at the mercy of discordant higher powers, the awful turbulence they wreak. One moment participating in logic, understanding the concepts of shape and colour — the next, suddenly less fine than any person has ever been, like all the lights have been turned out, the weather immediately inconvenient and deadly, your tongue a dead weight in your mouth.
Of course, before you leave the house, you can ask yourself: how bad is this really going to get? You can dress in whatever you believe will protect you, but you should know that it will not necessarily be the right thing. There’s no way you can really know for sure, so the best you can do is plan for the possibility of rain and keep one eye on hope. Sleet may become sunshine, sunshine will suddenly become rain: that’s the way it’s always been and always will be.
When change is drastic, it feels instant. But you should know, and you do know, that this weather was always there; it was just a little further away, waiting its turn.
Eventually, it was always going to snow.
