Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [41]
We soon discovered that going to the baths was about the most fun to be had in the city. Keeping clean seemed to be a national obsession. So we, too, wallowed in cleanliness; we scrubbed up like cherubs and came out of there pink and gleaming. During our stay in Iceland we would sometimes go there as often as three times a day, perhaps in the clearly erroneous belief that the cleaner we got, the longer it would last us on the next leg of our journey.
It seemed we would be remaining on dry land for at least a week—anything to put off the awful inevitability of our next stint at sea. So I decided to head off and see something of the island. I stuffed some dried cod and some bread and chocolate inside my sleeping bag … and of course a slab of the ubiquitous mutton … slung it over my shoulder and trudged off along the road that leads north out of Reykjavík. I didn’t know where I was going—I didn’t even have a map of Iceland—but I was young then, and full of confidence that one road or another would lead me back to my friends and the boat.
Iceland, it appeared, was an elemental sort of a place, warmed by fire and steam, but lashed ceaselessly by fierce winds, a part of the earth that had remained more or less the way things were before the fishes had crawled from the sea and started their long journey to becoming people.
I saw geysers, pools of evil-smelling sulfurous sludge that boiled and bubbled in a sinister way and then all of a sudden ejaculated a plume of hot smelly water into the sky. You don’t get more elemental than that, I mused. Then I found myself at Gullfoss, which is a waterfall, colossal beyond dreams, that filled the dark, treeless country around with drifting mists and fearful noise.
But most wonderful of all was Thingvellir, the site of the Althing, the first Norse parliament. Here was a deep quietness, and a mystery such as I have never experienced anywhere else. It was a curious landscape lying between a rocky fault line and a shallow lake; everywhere were still clear pools and utter silence. The only building was a little white wooden church down near the lake, the only sound the haunting cry of the arctic tern, which occasionally you would spot, hovering over the pools like a delicate white swallow. I sat for long hours as evening fell, completely bewitched by the sheer strangeness of the place.
Later, hitching back toward Reykjavík, I was driven along the shore of a fjord. Steep green fields ran down to the edge of the furious wind-lashed water.
“That’s my uncle’s place,” said Gudrun, my driver, a stocky young woman with widely spaced green eyes and straggly blond hair. “He’s been trying to set up a free-range chicken farm for years, but the chickens keep getting blown off the hill and into the fjord.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said, thinking about the curious, crabbed gait of the few chickens I had seen who were braving the elements. “Back there on the road there were times when I could hardly stand up against the wind myself; it must be hell for a hen. So how is your uncle dealing with the problem?”
“He ties them to rocks,” she replied. “The rocks are big enough so the wind can’t blow the chicken away, and yet small enough so that the chicken can drag them about. Look, there’s one over there.”
I turned to where she was pointing and watched, entranced, as a fine speckled-white hen dragged a rock laboriously up the hill through the grass, occasionally lifted bodily and tumbled back by the wind. Two others soon hobbled after her. These people are survivors, I thought to myself. Survivors and stickers and lateral thinkers.
Getting a lift in the back of a pickup