Power from Underground

At the garage, a few blocks from my hotel, I realized I didn’t have my exit card. I couldn’t pay, couldn’t get out. There was no one in the little parking kiosk to ask for help, to compound matters.

“What are you going to do?” The woman there was fabulous, with blue sparkles adorning her long dress and diamonds that danced casually under her ears. Long hair, jet-black, that ended abruptly halfway down her back, appeared to have been cut by a laser. Her eyes, light blue like the glistening ice deep in the Icelandic glaciers, turned towards me. I uttered a sound that resembled possibly, “Gluurt,” but may have in fact been less intelligible. I cleared my throat, wiped away some spit at the corner of my mouth, then burbled out, “I don’t know.”

“Do you think we can use the same ticket?” She’d explained that hers was already paid, that the machine refused to accept any money when she entered it into that device. Use the same ticket…she was asking me if we could share a ticket. Sharing anything with her seemed beyond anything even remotely within the parameters of reality. My mind was working as fast as it could, which isn’t very fast, actually. I considered pushing her roughly aside, yelling, “Lady, give me that TICKET!” Then running as fast as I could to my car. Instead, I said this: “I’ll wait until you get your car, then we’ll see.”

I whistled a happy tune, then—as soon as she was out of sight—ran helter-skelter to the shiny Toyota parked just down the ramp. I fired it up, threw it into gear and raced up to the exit turnstile with tires screeching on the smooth garage floor. I knew her ticket wasn’t going to work for both cars, so I set my jaw resolutely, inched forward when I saw her blue sparkles come into view, with what surely must have been her husband at the wheel. Never mind all that, I said to myself; I just wanted out of there. I rode their rear bumper as the gate went up, eased out the clutch so as not to smash their car and made one long vehicle out of our exit—as the gate paused to let me through. I honked my thanks, turned left at the next light to take the coastal highway north. I was home free.

Up the road I pulled over into a gas station and convenience store. I’d earlier consulted with a tourist office girl just up the street from the hotel, who’d told me that you could visit the power plant in Iceland and that there was plenty of time to drive out there to take a look. “It’s a nice drive,” she said. Power plant. It was all I could have hoped for to cap an already perfect visit to Iceland. I would learn about how those fierce underground forces were tapped for heat and electricity. It was like free stuff, coming right out of the ground—and there may very well be a limitless supply of it.

The young and pleasant tourist-office girl in her brown suede jacket turned out to be a little sketchy on the details of getting to this particular power plant. She showed me the little map of Iceland, highlighted a town that was near the plant, and wished me luck. “It’s easy,” she said. “It will take you about forty-five minutes.” In retrospect, what I learned about her knowledge of power plants was this: That Iceland had some. That’s it. I was headed for the wrong town—a town that in fact DID have a power plant, but was not the one that you could take a tour of. I showed my map to the convenience store clerk, and he made some marks, sent me on my way. Not very reassured, I set out again.

I followed the snowy roads out of town, through the deserted and abandoned farms and villages, with ice crunching under the car’s tires. The grey day was getting darker now, with late afternoon approaching. Now there was snow all around, and I pulled into the parking lot of another lonely outpost—the lot full of slippery ice and more crunchy snow.
I parked and ran inside, wanting to know what the place was all about. I approached the solitary man overseeing the operations there.
“Where am I? What is all this?” I demanded wildly, gesturing at his room with rocks on the walls. I pointed, “And what is that overlook? What’s down there?”

The quiet man at the end of the wooden and rocky room answered my questions patiently, told me that I was at the site of the ancient parliaments. It was in this place that the Vikings and early settlers met in the tenth century A.D. to discuss matters of great importance. “You were asking about the overlook,” he said. “That is the place where the parliament was held.”

The sun was going down, and my power plant was looking more and more like an unachievable goal. I was getting frantic, with the hour edging closer to five o’clock and my information telling me that the power generating station closed at six o’clock promptly.

I edged closer to the man of science, with his displays and guest register opened in front of him. “Now listen here,” I said. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but I was told there was a power plant around somewhere, and I’ll be damned if I’m going home without seeing it.” By now I was close enough that he could see the crazy beads of sweat breaking out on my forehead. He moved slowly away, exited some maps from his small desk. He marked the route on each one, indicating a town many miles away. I’d gone to the town that the tourist girl had pointed me to, had ended up here. But this power plant was not open to visitors, he said.
“You must go to this other one,” he instructed me. “If you leave now you will have just enough time.”

I looked at the small lines on the maps, the squiggles that ran through the remote and unpopulated country—knew that he was sending me into more snow-infested territory. And the sun was going down.
“You’re crazy!” I yelled; “You’re trying to get me killed!” There were just the two of us. The tour buses and cars full of one or two tourists had by now crunched their way out of the iced-over parking lot. The ancient Vikings had only so much appeal on this cold and almost-finished day in November.
“Leave now and you can just make it,” he repeated, edging further away from me.
I grabbed frantically at the maps he’d marked for me, turned and ran wordlessly out the door.

There was a Jeep up ahead, inching along at a snail’s pace. I got around the slow-moving truck, soon putting its headlights far behind me in the dark. Pretty soon I couldn’t see them at all. I tested the brakes, found that I could not make the car’s wheels lock up due to the antilock feature, and also jerked the steering wheel from side to side. Everything seemed stable for the moment, the road’s layer of crunchy snow and ice providing just enough traction to keep me from sliding off. I kept my speed down, but pushed the car along as fast as I thought I could to make up for the huge detour to the out-of-the way town and the ancient parliament site.

Now it was raining at the lower elevations. On the road back to the capital, Route 378 branched off to the right. This led to the power plant, and I turned quickly into the darkened lane. Skidding the car into the parking lot, I parked haphazardly across the deserted spaces and ran inside the silent and gleaming power generating station. I had a half-hour to spare. The greeter there welcomed me to the bright and modernistic building, showed me around. He said he was not concerned about the time, heeded not my wild-eyed and fanatical quest to know about this intriguing source of power. He calmly led me to the huge turbines that were turned by the superheated forces from underground. These turbines then turned the generators, and made electricity that was transmitted through overhead lines across the desolate and volcanic Icelandic landscape. People in the warm homes, connected to these lines, were able to cook and watch television and enjoy any number of modern conveniences and luxuries. Not only that, but many of the homes benefited directly from the hot water that emanated directly from underground sources and was piped into their homes. Some water, too hot to be used as it came from the deep hot water wells, was used to heat cooler water, which was then pumped into service for residential use or wherever hot water was needed at the faucet.

With the hour nearing six o’clock, I gathered up some pamphlets and left the place. First, he demonstrated the simulation of earthquakes of different magnitudes. Owing to its position as one of the planet’s geologic hotspots, Iceland was no stranger to earthquakes. He pushed a button, and a thundering sound came across loudspeakers and the place seemed to shake a little. It was actually just the sound effect I was hearing. He pushed two more buttons, and I could hear earthquakes of increasing magnitude take place. I thanked him for the pamphlets and the earthquakes, and headed back to Reyjkavik.

In town, with the various roads and signs blurred against a steady rain, I took an exit off the main roadway. After a few blocks I recognized the area from a walk I’d taken earlier that day. I was only two blocks from the hotel. I found the parking garage where I’d encountered the fabulous woman with the blue sparkles, drove to the same deserted space, and closed up the car for the night. The next day I’d be leaving for Paris.