“Hey, that’s just like in ‘The Terminal’!?” the young lady remarked, noting my creative arrangement of airport chairs into a functional bed. I flashed my best Tom Hanks smile and waved back, but it was half-hearted. The situation seemed much more comical in the movie.
I was reliving this Hollywood scene because the plane coming from Iceland to pick me up was delayed six hours. My night in the air had become a night at the airport. After a two-hour search through all the dusty, unused corners of the terminal, this makeshift bed was the best I could do. Unfortunately, once I discovered that my watch alarm had broken, I had to give up on the idea of sleep altogether. I was certain that I’d miss my 5 a.m. departure if I tried. I eventually made it to Iceland, quite exhausted, and was given a place to stay by a generous Latvian family who explained that their friend at the Keflavík airport had caused the delay by ramming the plane with a luggage conveyor belt. These things happen.
Iceland is a turbulent island. Massive icecaps hide the presence of sleeping volcanoes which come to life periodically, unleashing devastating rivers of lava or creating floods powerful enough to carry icebergs the size of skyscrapers. On the positive side, Icelanders have created one of the world’s most sustainable economies, piping geothermically-heated water into all the houses and using subterranean heat sources to generate cheap electricity. One power plant has created a major tourist attraction by channeling its condensed steam into an artificial pond called the Blue Lagoon. Guests apply white silica mudpacks to their faces and lounge about wearing sunglasses in the milky-blue waters. I joined them for a swim, but with all the black lava, steam swirling everywhere and white faces drifting in and out of view, I felt like I was being stalked by evil clowns in an apocalyptic Mad Max movie.
Another family shuttled me to “órsmörk” – “The Woods of Thor” – an anomaly in Iceland because of the presence of real trees, though most were shorter than I was. From there I ascended 3,000 feet to a mountain pass between the fourth and sixth-largest icecaps in Iceland. It was a strain on my poorly-conditioned leg muscles to carry my 50-pound backpack all that distance. One evening, an arctic fox loped over to my tent to see what all the commotion was about. From three feet away it eyeballed me curiously. It wore a sleek, black summer coat, but its white, fluffy tail had yet to make the transition out of winter. Satisfied with its inspection, it scampered on down the trail, leaving me to shake off my amazement and prepare another meal of ramen and potatoes.
The next day I descended past an endless series of waterfalls pouring over lava terraces on my journey down to the ocean. Thick, bulging growths of moss clung to every lava outcropping so that the place looked like it was being hugged to death by giant, pale green caterpillars. I slept next to a 200-foot waterfall, walked to the highway, and faster that you can say “ingvallavatnssiglingar” (which for me is about 3 hours) I hitchhiked all the way to the southeast corner of the island ? to Jökulsárlón, a lagoon filled with icebergs at the foot of a massive glacier.
I sat down for a while, seeking words to describe what I was seeing. Gravity was pushing snow down from the icecaps, forcing it to run in flat rivers of ice towards the coastline like a rolling pin pushing dough before it. At the leading edge of the glacier, great blocks of ice stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a long wall, silent as soldiers, toes dipped in the lagoon, waiting for their chance to break off with a thunderous crack and topple into the icy water to join their brethren. Arctic terns tucked in their wings and plunged into the spaces between icebergs, seeking fish, while seals poked their whiskered heads above the lagoon surface and snorted at all the tourists? cameras. But the grandest spectacle were the icebergs themselves - each one a sculpture in its own right, sweating in shades of crystal blue, sculpted by sun and seawater, spinning around the lagoon until small enough to escape into the greater ocean.
Following rumor and intuition, I discovered my own private iceberg-filled lagoon nearby, beneath the shadow of Hvannadalshnúkur, Iceland’s highest mountain. I pitched my tent on a promontory above the water and exulted in the sheer joy of being in the presence of such natural wonder. Or maybe I was just plain gloating. This was exactly what I came to Iceland for, I thought. A night in the San Francisco airport was a small price to pay for what surrounded me now. Glaciers creaked and groaned across the placid water, while strange birds meowed in the distance like lonely kittens stranded on icebergs. The sky at midnight was still the color of a sunset, so I donned a sleeping mask to fool my body into thinking that night had fallen, zipped up the sleeping bag, and reluctantly willed myself into sleep.
Bryan is a 1991 Norwich High School graduate and works as a naturalist at the Rancho Alegre Outdoor School in Santa Barbara, Calif. You may reach him mid-journey at foolsby@hotmail.com.