The Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need
Icelandic delicacies include whale blubber, smoked puffin, sour lamb testicles, and hakral, rotten shark buried for six months, exhumed, and eaten. For a special treat, Icelanders boil fresh eggs directly in the steaming spray of geysers.
Spewing sulfur from hot springs, lava-reflux from volcanos, Iceland is a fragile skin growing and separating over roiling insides. Like the white worm I cut up in biology class, it generates its own new parts. Icebergs break off from Greenland and drift across the sea to attach to it, while inland glaciers freeze into taller peaks. In 1963 a volcanic eruption forced three new small islands up from the ocean floor. Two crashed back in but the third withstood, annexed without contest under the flag of Iceland. Surface area exponentially increasing, a mutant organism. Still, you can't live on most of the lifeless crust, where nothing grows and a house would sink straight through.
It was 894 A.D. when Norse Vikings, accustomed to rough conditions, rowed on over to settle the more habitable parts of the island. Called the landnamsmadur, "the land-takers," they brought only a few pack animals and some Irish slaves they'd stopped to pick up along the way. The animals were a good idea; Iceland has no native mammals.
The volcano Mount Hekla must be the entrance to the underworld, reasoned the land-takers, encountering the foul vapors emitted from the black rock. The word "heck" comes from Hekla. It's not short for hell; it's short for Iceland.
Little wonder, then, that by 1000 A.D. most of the Vikings had already cleared out for the comparatively verdant shores of Greenland. Fast forward: it took a thousand years and a crack board of tourism to bring any visitors back. Their slick catalog offers up vacation packages whose titles unabashedly grope for a reason you might want to go there: See the Strokes Rock Iceland! The Northern Lights for New Year's! And, shamefully without alliteration: Hook Up in the New Party Capital of the World! What makes a party capital? Being a four-hour flight from New York and possessing a government-subsidized airline and hotel system, which enables whole extended weekends of foreign debauchery for less than the price of a train ticket home from college.
If I know one thing about Darren (a questionable assumption), it's that this phenomenon would have really, really pissed him off. He wasn't looking for a playground, I don't think.
When Darren finally flew away he left the two fat books of Norse legends, one volume of the Sagas, something called Icelandic Glaciology, and five shelves of travel guides: Let's Go Iceland 1989, Scandinavia-on-a-Shoestring 1994, Work Abroad Iceland 1997. He'd been buying the books for fifteen years, but he took only the new editions with him. Mom forbade me to enter his room, which looked exactly like it did before he left--empty--so when I did go in I stole the books one at a time and hid them under my bed. Thumbed through, wondering if the things to see in Iceland in 1987 were the same things Darren was seeing now.
I memorized important facts. What's the capital of Iceland? Reykjavik, which is Icelandic for "Smoky Bay." How many people live in Reykjavik? 100,000. Well, now one less.
Icelanders are all related, so they all look the same--blue-eyed and blonde but with a greenish tinge to their hair and skin that comes from years of inbreeding. Except for Darren, they have never had many immigrants. Genetic disesases are common, like multiple sclerosis, heredity hand tremors, and pseudoexfoliation eye syndrome, in which the lens of the eye disintegrates and white flakes float around the pupil. It's true; scientists come from around the world to study them. I learned that on the Internet, not from the travel books. I also learned on a news show that, though Iceland's full employment and free health care may sound like good things, they can have a dangerous effect on morality. For example, the anchorman said that in the winter, when it's light for only four hours a day, twelve-year-olds hang out in the street all night drinking homemade vodka from soda bottles. Dangerous effect on morality, those were his exact words.
Things to do in Iceland if you have three days:
- Dog-sled across Langjökull glacier. Several reputable companies offer daily tours, led by experienced guides using only authentic Greenlandic sled dogs.
- Tour Althingi, the parliament house. History note: before Danish rule, Iceland had no king for four hundred years, and the island was governed a national assembly of Viking landowners. You could call it the first parliamentary democracy in existence, if you didn't count the Irish slaves.
- Experience the night life. Despite state-controlled alcohol prices (500 kronur, or $6, for a beer is cheap), Reykjavik has the most thriving club scene in all of Europe. (They think if they say this enough it will really be true.)
- Go shopping in Reykjavik's old town. Lower overhead for store owners means the latest designer fashions are available at a third of what they would cost in the U.S. And purchases of luxury goods are tax-free for tourists.
"And the culture," Mom said, "so European. We saw Carmen at the Reykjavik Opera House. It was almost like when we took the bus tour of France, right Bill? We had escargot and everything." She passed me a photo of her and Dad wearing sun visors and matching fanny packs, in front of a building that looked just like the First Lutheran church up the street. "Bill and Sally at the National Museum" was written across the back with a felt-tip pen. They must have trusted their camera to one of those deformed, drunk children; I was surprised he didn't run off and sell it for more vodka money.
"If something is spilled, a drunken man will soon visit," Icelanders are fond of saying. They also say, "If somebody throws away a dead mouse, the wind will soon start to blow from that direction."
That whole summer Mom was on the telephone, trying to convince the women in her yoga class to go to Iceland.
"I understand that, Ruth," she said, "but if you fly IcelandAir you can still go to Paris, and plus you can stop over in Iceland for up to three days free." She might have made a good travel agent. I heard her say, "if you go in summer you can sit in the cafes, but of course in the winter there are the northern lights."
Mom hadn't been there in July, when the sun doesn't set, not once, for the whole month. I wondered if it burned Darren's almost albino eyes.
Things to do in Iceland if you have two days:
- Attend services at Hallgrímskirkja, a church built to embody the spirit of Iceland by resembling a towering pile of hardened lava.
- See pickled penises of all of the country's resident mammals at the Icelandic Phallological Muesum in Reykjavik. Horse penises were once eaten as snacks. Bull phalluses were dried and used to whip the horses.
- Find a wife. Icelandic women are considered by leading American mens' magazines to be the most beautiful in the word, theoretically because Vikings didn't bother to ask the consent of women they brought home from their voyages. Many women now want to leave Iceland, presumably to avoid marrying a close relative.
- In any weather, do as Icelanders do and go swimming in the geothermically heated outdoor pools. First you must shower thoroughly, paying careful attention to those body parts highlighted on the poster in the stall. A shower attendant will be on duty to monitor compliance.
- Visit Geysir, the town from which all geysers get their name. For the love of God, do not dump rocks or dirt into the Great Geyser. It's still recovering from the last time tourists stopped it up.
Dear Angela:The third year he was dead. Mom and Dad were planning their cruise of the Nordic fjords, looking at icebergs in brochures and discussing shipboard midnight buffets, when we found out. He'd slipped and hit his head on the railing of his balcony in his apartment. It was several days before he was found, by his neighbor Astridur Hauksdottir, whose last name means the "daughter of Hauk." Darren's Icelandic last name would have been "Billsson," the son of Bill. He must have been frozen by the time she showed up.
You probably think it's cold here, but it's not. It's just never really warm. There are wild horses outside the city. Do you still like horses? I live on the 30th floor, and from my window I can see the Snaefellsglacier across the bay. "The glacier delivers back what it takes," they say here. That's because if you fall in the cracks in the winter they'll find your body in the melt on the outside in the summer time. I still don't have a job. Big surprise. Talk to you soon. Darren.
Only nine babies are born in Iceland every 24 hours.
Things to do in Iceland if you have one day:
- Hop over the arctic circle. Hop back again. Stand with one foot inside the arctic circle and one foot outside.
- Play a xylophone of rocks from the Húsafell mountains, where trolls who had the misfortune of being seen by the sun were entombed. The trolls inside the rocks sing in pure tones when struck with soft mallets.
- Make a secret wish on the traditional lucky charm, a wishing stone in a bag of sheepskin tied with string.
At the funeral home the photo of him blending into snow was enlarged and propped up on an easel next to the casket. In his box he looked older than I ever remembered; I realized he'd lived in the room next to mine for a long time. He was a grownup already when he used to read me bedtime stories from the big book of sagas: The Saga of Burnt Njal, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, and the oldest, a thousand years old, The Saga of the Heath-Slayings. Leif Eriksson, the Viking hero, was the strongest and, they always made a point to say, the happiest of all men.
Leif put to sea as soon as he was ready, was storm-tossed a long time, and lighted on those lands whose existence he had not so much as dreamt of before. There were wheat fields growing wild there and vines too. There were also those trees which are called maple (mösurr), and some trees so big that they were used in housebuilding. Ever afterwards he was called Leif the Lucky.At his funeral, it was Darren's voice I heard when the priest's lips moved in eulogy. Darren who read, sitting on the end of my bed, who said "Angela, are you awake?," after I had closed my eyes, pretending, badly, to snore. Darren who never kissed me on the forehead like Mom or Dad, but just stood up and took the book with him, finger still in the page where he'd stopped.
On the fourth day Karlsefni and Bjarni found Thorhall the Hunter on the peak of a crag, staring up at the sky, with both his eyes and mouth and nostrils agape, scratching and pinching himself, and reciting something. They asked him why he had come to such a place. It was none of their business, he retorted, and told them not to look so dumbstruck; he had lived long enough, he said, not to need them troubling their heads over him. They urged him to return home with them, which he did.After the service I used my private time at the casket to check for evidence of foul play. Unlike the others, I knew about the sacrifices required by Odin, the one-eyed god of Viking warriors. In the "blood eagle," Odin's favorite, an eagle was carved on a victim's back. The ribcage was cracked open, the lungs yanked out from behind to represent the bird's wings. But Darren looked whole, as far as I could tell, his lips barely even blue.
A photograph rested on his chest, above his folded hands, of Mom and Dad in front of a lake. They wore their visors, so it must have been a lake in Iceland. I opened the big pocketbook I'd filled with confetti made from graying pages torn from each of Darren's books. I scattered handfuls of shredded paper over his hands and face, the dark suit, the ice-blue silk lining the casket. The scraps covered him like volcanic ash.
SUSAN LANTZ lives in Baltimore, MD.
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