A Few Days Earlier: Iceland

A few days earlier in Iceland the phone was ringing in my room. I picked it up, hung up the receiver in the darkened room that still let in hardly any light—even at ten o’clock in the morning. It rang again---the off-road expedition truck had come to pick me up, and it turns out I’d ignored my earlier wake-up call, had simply rolled over and gone back to sleep at seven o’clock.
“Huh? What is it? Oh, okay…the trip. I’ll be right down.”
I showered, got my photo gear together, and headed out into the dark morning, with light just now beginning to show in the east.
“Don’t you think it’s a little early for this kind of thing?” I asked, as I hopped up into the enormous truck. Then added: “Do you have a toothbrush?” Thus the tone was set for our outing. Eggert spoke excellent English, made it clear that he was the head chef at some local establishment, did this only because he liked it—and besides he had the big truck, so he may as well make it pay.
“Head chef, huh?” I yawned; “Well, I guess people have to eat.”

We stopped out in the midst of that area of Iceland that is never very far from where people actually live. It was a waystation for tourists, but—as usual—I was not there during the tourist season. As a result, the place was deserted on this Sunday morning, save for the woman who ran it and who offered me some traditional Icelandic soup while I was waiting for Eggert to get the truck in order outside. He actually needed to let air out of the tires for the next leg of the trip, which would take us onto a rough and nearly impassable road up to the glacier.

“Traditional Icelandic soup? What’s in it?” I asked, almost holding my nose with disdain. She mentioned all the good and wholesome ingredients, including tender lamb, and I said I would take a bowl, extra large, please. While I waited for the soup and the fresh rolls and Icelandic butter, I told the woman that I was American, and that we didn’t have soup like that back home because we hardly had any buffalo left. She explained that she and her husband had sold their business in the capital to escape the hectic life of the big city, were happier out here where they’d built this little restaurant and catered to the tourists who came and sat at the little tables with red-checkered tablecloths on their way to the glacier. I told her that—if she thought Reykjavik was a big city, maybe she’d best not visit the east coast of the United States—and definitely stay away from New York.

Eggert came in as I was devouring the hearty and delicious soup and rolls. He’d finished with the truck, now looked at me.
“We’re burning daylight,” he said. This was almost too much for him: First I’d wandered down to meet him after oversleeping, and now it appeared that I just wanted to sit and eat traditional Icelandic soup. The weather conditions were perfect at the moment—something that was likely to change in an instant. It was obvious he’d never encountered a client like me.

“I had no breakfast this morning,” I made the words through mouthfuls of bread and soup. “The people at the hotel wouldn’t give me any food on account of it was too late and the ringer wouldn’t work in my room, and when it finally did, it was you—but I thought it was something else—or maybe the phone was ringing for no reason.” I paused for a moment. “Do you have the newspaper?”
Eggert threw his hands up in despair, “Okay, you’re the boss,” he said. “Spend the whole day here with your soup if you like, but we’re not going up on the glacier after dark.” I waved him away, couldn’t respond because I’d stuffed two of the little dinner rolls into my mouth at once, and was having difficulty chewing, much less having a discourse with the driver. After things had cleared up a bit, I asked once again if he had a toothbrush.

After the enormous bowl of soup and rolls, I staggered out to the truck with my bottle of Coca-Cola and some more rolls wrapped in a paper napkin. I took my place in the passenger seat, unwrapped the buttered bread and silently munched as we made our way up the rutted and rock-strewn road in the Icelandic wilderness. A little barricade at the start of the glacier road, propped up by some rocks but mostly just broken down and put out there to offer the essential information with as few words as possible, said this: IMPASSABLE.

I soon found out why. The truck, with its huge balloon tires, floated over the jagged ruts and uneven road with its large rocks washed into the mix from storms and ice and the extreme weather that took its toll on the landscape. I’d bragged to Eggert that I’d once driven out into the Icelandic wilderness in my rental car, had even gotten up close to a glacier. To attempt such a thing on this road would have been insanity: The dips and climbs and uneven terrain with large rocks would have quickly broken a regular sedan, would have left it crippled out there in a place it shouldn’t have been to begin with. Eggert made it clear that he and his comrades often came across hapless and stupid individuals like this, and gave them a hard time before rescuing them and bringing them back to civilization. They probably also affixed a hefty price for these people to pay.

We continued into an area where the road evened out, became more of a regular dirt path through the rocky landscape. Up ahead was a silent Caterpillar bulldozer, a relic from the nineteen-seventies, parked with its enclosed cab sealed off against the winters. It was a piece of equipment used by the state, started usually once or twice a year to do an annual smoothing out of the road, a general cleanup of boulders and other large imperfections that might impede traffic way out there. The road we were on—as awful as it was—was still a state-maintained highway. It might be maintained only one time per year, by the reliable and now-silent machine parked improbably out there in the wilderness, but it still got a going-over.

While I ate my buttered rolls and drank Coca-Cola, Eggert stopped periodically to decrease the tire pressures. We were now driving on snow, and the climb was making the truck work harder. We would finally get the pressure down to just one psi. My tires back home, when fully inflated, took about thirty psi or so.
“One psi?” I said. “That’s not very much; you sure you know what you’re doing?” I took another bite of buttered dinner roll, delicately wiped at the corner of my mouth. I wasn’t so interested in his reply, because now it was cold outside. I rolled up the window, allowed him to go about his business out there in the bitter cold of the snowy Icelandic no-man’s land.

With the tires down to the minimum pressure we could get away with, we now climbed up onto the deep snow of the glacier, the truck making tracks on top of the snowpack, as if it were wearing snowshoes. Now it was very cold outside; the temperature was only just around the freezing mark, but it felt much colder. The glacier makes its own weather, and right now it was a brilliant and low sun and a blue sky beyond the expanse of white—with only more white beyond that.

We stayed up there, enjoyed the solitude of the experience, with no other passengers on this tour, but a group from another company that also was parked there—had arrived at the same time. I didn’t like their truck, didn’t like the looks of the tourists, either, so kept close to our vehicle and relished having the truck and driver to myself. I took some video footage of Eggert putting the big Nissan through its paces up there, got good shots of the truck floating over the white blanket atop the glacier, against a uniform field of white. When we’d done that for a while, and I’d also captured his exploits on his cell phone video camera, we got back in the truck to head down. That’s when—in the blink of an eye—the weather hit.

There was no visibility now, only a smoky and all-encompassing envelope of grey. It had blown in suddenly, but now I see it in the photographs, overtaking the landscape with stealth. The photos I’d taken just a few minutes prior were clear with sunshine; now the clouds had descended onto the white plain, had made our world a fog of grey soup that couldn’t be penetrated more than a foot or two beyond the windshield. To start driving now would mean driving randomly into the void, with no sense of direction or any feeling for where we might be in the vast glacial landscape.

I panicked, began whimpering—then crying outright. I clawed at the truck’s windows: “Let me out! Let me out!” I wailed, ineffectually trying to exit the truck. In my general thrashing about, I upset the driver’s air freshener, which landed on the floor between us. It had an electronic chip in it, and now said this: “For best results, change air freshener now.” This had a calming effect on me, and I now fell silent. We both looked at the thing that had fallen on the floor, and I picked it up, heard it utter its message once again, then it went dead for good. I shook it, still upset about our plight, shook it some more. “Talk, you! Say something! Say the thing you did before! Talk! Talk!” Eggert looked at me; this wasn’t going to be such an easy trip after all.

I was pushing buttons at random on the truck’s elaborate dashboard—with many knobs and controls, still trying to effect some change in our situation. One of the controls opened a DVD screen—which then began playing the movie “The Little Mermaid,” something that the driver’s young son enjoyed watching. I asked if I could watch Muriel the mermaid for a while, since I’d never seen the movie.
“Sure, go ahead!” said Eggert, glad that I now had something to occupy myself. I took out another buttered roll, watched the fishes and their friends cavort on the off-road truck’s video screen, and washed down my last bread with another swig of Coke.

Meanwhile, Eggert had gotten the truck in motion, was steering in fact by using the onboard navigational system, or what is commonly referred to as GPS. This system had tracked our route exactly up the glacier—where there was no road—and now it remained to just follow the line on the screen. He needed only to align two markers—one representing the truck, and the other representing the path we needed to take. He would do this by steering over to the thin little pencil line on the screen, until the truck marker was in sync with it. On my video screen, the Little Mermaid splashed about and the fishes all adored her. I didn’t think she was too bad, either.

We tracked back down off the glacier, descended below the cloud cover to where it was clear but overcast. We could see now. I cried great torrents of tears, bawled and bawled, while trying to catch some of the action on the movie that was playing still. My rolls were gone, and I had only a little warm Coke left. I blubbered that I wanted more traditional Icelandic soup. We pulled into the lonely outpost restaurant, which had no name. On the front, it said—in simple Icelandic style: RESTAURANT. I went back inside, while Eggert inflated the tires back to normal pressure using the truck’s air compressor and hoses. I asked for more of the soup, and plenty of rolls, please.

After a few minutes the driver came in, pointed to me at the table with my soup, said to the owner, “This one’s had a bad day.” He and the restaurant owner knew each other, and I could hear—in their incomprehensible Icelandic conversation, references to the Little Mermaid.

Eggert dropped me off at the hotel. Inside, my luxurious room awaited, with hot water straight from the bowels of Iceland itself. The water smelled more than a little of sulphur, but I didn’t mind so much. I thought it pleasant that the people were able to tap into this resource, bring gurgling hot water up to the surface and—in many cases—pipe it directly to the faucets of Icelanders. As we parted, the driver handed me a brochure, said to call that number in case I ever needed a tour in the future. I looked at the company’s booklet, didn’t recognize the name. He’d given me the name of another off-road tour company.