The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [6]
Or…was it real? Could this have been the Frost Giant Ymir, a primordial character of the Norse mythos, up from Hell to inspect the ice cap? Ymir, the Icelanders say—and have said, and sung, and murmured in their warm sod huts for a thousand years—was formed early in the universe. He originated in a mist, he assembled within it and of it. When Ymir was killed by Odin, his body dissembled, forming the Earth. As a human being, the Sagas tell me, my relation to Ymir is intimate: humans are the maggots that squirm through Ymir’s flesh. So it is a sort of recursion; my own squirming thoughts have brought Ymir back to the ice, in the vision of enormous striding legs.
I find that the only way to repress such illusions is to force myself to fear nothing and to expect nothing; to simply exist. This reduces my universe to a small bubble of perception, a small bubble of consciousness. It is not unpleasant.
Behind, only vague memories; ahead, only the vaguest expectations. I need only think of here, now, this moment, the next step converted from the future to the present in an endless loop.
Only a few times do I see real phenomena.
It is cold and clear one night, an astronomer’s paradise. I tip my head back and look up into the stars feeling dizzy and light. I may as well be suspended in interstellar space. I feel far from the warmth of any star. In the black voids there is only distance, only emptiness. The punctuations of starlight are still. The void is not disheartening. It demonstrates the value of any spark of life. The enormity and improbability of consciousness appears like a terrifying mirage and I think I do not have the maturity for this before moving on.
Later, a fountain of amber light washes across the sky like spilled liquid, stopping me in my tracks. Aurora! I say out loud as a gout of flaming red bursts above me, then fades almost immediately. Then an amber swath wavers like an enormous tapestry fluttering slowly at an impossible distance. It, too, fades, replaced by dim green columns illuminated from within, their infinitely-distant tops tilting towards one another. I try to commit the fantastic images to memory. Eventually the cold nudges me; move along.
Another real phenomenon I see, only occasionally, is the expanse I am traveling across. For brief moments the mist parts and I am granted a view of the starlit snowscape leaping away in all directions. It is ruffled, like a windblown lake, but stopped in motion, and here and there diamond-like snow crystals seem to shine beams at my eyes. But cloud and mist always return, speeding in to blur and then obliterate. The mist is wet and it glazes my clothes with a cracking armor of ice.
I keep marching, heading uphill for the Grímsvötn Ice Cauldron. Around 3 A.M., just before Christmas, eight hours of uphill slogging bring me to the level ground of the ice cap plateau. I drop to my knees, sobbing with exhaustion.
I look east. The low clouds have retreated here, revealing an icy plain that falls away before me towards the three-mile wide volcanic crater.
The Ice Cauldron!
Tolkein himself could not have conjured such a diabolical scene!
Dense white vapor billows up from the center of the crater, and contacting the supercooled air it freezes into unbelievable glitter that roils and writhes—
Up!
Up!
A mile-high column of glass dust, winking in moonlight!
The vision breaks my heart. Everything I know or have done or have ever thought is shattered.
You try to create beautiful things in life, I think, but when you encounter a natural masterpiece you dissolve, and that is right.
Cameron M. Smith is an explorer and writer based in Portland, Oregon, where he is a member of the writing group The Guttery. He has written about his expeditions for many books and magazines. An active scuba diver and paraglider pilot, he is slowly retiring