“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” -G. K. Chesterfield
Dear Readers,
I’m writing from a hotel in Rejkyavik, Iceland, on the tail end of a three-week creativity retreat in Italy and Iceland. I should have been home yesterday, but after checking in for my flight, boarding, getting seated and settled, we heard a loud pop and all the lights in the plane went dark. Passengers groaned and looked about in dismay. After a few moments the pilot came on and said a bunch of words in Icelandic I couldn’t understand, though we could infer from his tone couldn’t be positive. At the end he suddenly switched to English and said, “and therefore, I inform you that it is not possible for our departure. I am very sorry.”
Unclear about why, we gathered our things, were shepherded back to a shuttle bus, and returned to the airport where the flight was delayed three more times then finally canceled. Three weeks ago, I would have been fighting anxiety and likely might have gotten a bit testy with the agent who informed me that I wouldn’t be going anywhere for 24 hours as the newly enlisted plane couldn’t fit us all. Now, after consuming ridiculous amounts of pasta, gelato, and after receiving so many acts of kindness from strangers who helped me navigate these beautiful countries for the past three weeks, I had the emotional reserves to say: “Okay, it’s alright, just tell me where to go.”
So, with 20 other passengers also bumped from the flight, I waited for my bag, then dragged my luggage back through customs and passport control. The passport agent in the empty airport looked at my exhausted defeated face and said, “Make the most of it.” I laughed, so charmed that the stoic official would give me this advice I decided to take it. “An extra day in Iceland,” I texted my husband. “I guess I’ve heard of worse things.”
We rallied round a bus where we waited for an additional hour for lost bags, then drove through the night to a hotel in a small town in Iceland called Hveragerði. I managed to brush my teeth before falling into bed and passing out in a deep, dreamless sleep. I woke at 7 am and made my way to the dining room for a breakfast of fruit, pastries, cheese, bread, and Skyr, the Icelandic yogurt I’ve been consuming in massive quantities the past few days. I felt infinitely better as I savored each bite and found myself thinking about how I wasn’t in a hurry to return to the preservative-laden foods of the U.S.
Searching around Hveragerði on google maps, I found a waterfall within walking distance and set off in that direction. The small town had a large proliferation of flower shops and greenhouses, some sort of center for plant production. Every pot was full of blossoms, even as the short Icelandic summer drew to a close. Ten minutes’ walk took me to a park where a clear mountain river cut its way along the blanched muted colors of Icelandic hills, wind-blown and moody as a medieval film scene. The water’s swift descent left it white and frothing, stark against the crags and dun grasses.
On the far side of a bridge, I noticed plumes of steam billowing from crevices of rock across the hillside, then noticed dozens of other steam plumes beyond, giving the impression of a newly formed land recently emerged from the sea, which Iceland is relatively.
I stopped to read a sign along the river’s edge and learned that Hveragerði lies over the tectonic rift that created Iceland, so the geothermal heat powers all the greenhouses. It is a town of horticulturalists and poets and has been for centuries. Flowers and poetry really do belong together the longer you think about it—
The sign told the story of a few local artists, including Valdísar Halldórsdóttur, (1908-2002) a female poet who edited Embla, one of Iceland’s earliest feminist newspapers in the 1940s.
Rainy summer
The land is swept in a whirlwind.
Many people ask about the sun.
The summer at the garden passed,
but forgot to knock on the door.
Her words evoked the landscape around me, rising like steam from the essence of the land. From the highest point of the hill, I could see the distant mountains unfolding beyond, with their many plumes and natural hot springs.
I turned from the wildness of the mountains and rivers back toward Hveragerði and realized that steam even rose from the manhole covers in the center of the street. When I stepped on them, the heat penetrated my shoes as if the ground itself were trembling and fragile, in danger of breaking open at any moment.
I passed bold colored cottages and more greenhouses and came to a thermal park where a small cafe offered hot springs cooked offerings reminding me that I’d not yet tried the local specialty rye bread cooked in caldera steam. I stepped inside and a man greeted me. “I’m just the gardener,” he told me. “But this is rúgbrauð—lavabread. Traditional to eat with salted fish or capers.” He found me a fresh slice and placed it on a plate with butter. “You can eat it in the greenhouse if you wish,” so I carried it back there and ate it in the sweet exhale of banana plants.
The bread was sweet, soft, and delicious, and on the door to the greenhouse, I found a beautiful art installation of a concrete poem by Freyja Þórsdóttir:
The language of the poem reminded me of journeys and how, like writing, they are so often circular, ending where they once began, and yet there is change as we never come home the same person and the same spot is always altered too, in small ways or large.
The last three weeks have been filled with glorious moments, but my favorite memories, as usual, are simple and small—watching a father on a bus in Italy lean over and kiss his son’s forehead; the smallest garden spaces made bright with a clay pot and a potted flower; delicious food made by hand from the simplest local ingredients; a discovered poem; a plume of steam rising from the earth. These are the small moments that make up the days which make up a life, and the only thing that is sure and certain is that none of this will last forever. So many of the best adventures are the ones we weren’t expecting to take. I’m returning home determined to take whatever small space is mine and make it beautiful; to gather the people that are mine and feed and love them well; to take whatever time is mine and fill it with joy.
Love,
Marianne
Icelandic Lavabread recipe: hot springs oven optional.