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From Away.com
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A Whole Lotta Lava (Cont.)

Fire and Ice: Hot Springs and Glaciers
It's another bright morning and we travel down through a noisy nursery of Arctic terns, to the black beach of Dyrholaey. Puffins and gulls peer from the cliffs, and the black stones sear my feet. Then, adding layers of clothing, we ram the unstoppable Corolla up a boulder-paved track far into the mountains, chasing a glacier. We get out when the path rollicks to a stop, and run, exhilarated in the clear, stony air, up through snowfields and ridges of black rock, where boulders are disintegrating like fractured onions in the solitude. But when the glacier's turquoise face looks no closer after an hour of pursuit, we turn and run back to the car, boot-skiing on the snow.

Far below, the vast plain is buried in the black evidence of a sub glacial eruption that blanketed everything for miles around with ash. A small, green diamond in the wasteland testifies to the determination with which Iceland's farmers dig out from under such insults.

We lurch back down, smelling brake pads, then bash the car up to the melting tongue of another glacier, the tough, chunky ice black from its own landscaping. I climb carefully inside the blue caverns and over the filthy, melting cathedrals, my heart thudding as my boots skid, ice crumbles, and water mutters invisibly beneath me.

The Corolla is becoming repugnant. Its interior has been steeping for days in “hard-fish,” my moldering boots, and clothing that has soaked up sulfur, sheep-dung smoke, and the odd road cigarette. The temptation to open the windows is countered by the hammering flies. The radio leaks Joan Baez, then Garth Brooks, then long, Icelandic poetry.

It's time to go home. Home home, and I don't want to.

"We haven't found a hot spring yet," I wheedle. And so we walk along a wide rip in the earth until we find aluminum stairs into its throat. Twenty feet down, there's a small opening into a cave. We peel off everything and slip in.

It's not hot, like the whirling tubs we'd stewed in at the municipal pool. It's perfectly warm. And still. Tall rock pillars lean over us, leaving blue chinks of sky. We find three candles on a shelf, and they shed a sandy light. There aren't words. We just float, looking.

Although it's definitely Heaven material, it's not completely relaxing. Drifting in the faint steam, I am tinglingly aware of the molten belly of the planet, roiling giant and deadly, so near me that it has turned this water to tea.

I recall a recent sunset evening, when I saw a man riding one horse and trailing four others in a wild, multi colored V of horseflesh and flying Viking-blond hair. The animals jockeyed crazily against each other, changing gaits as they charged up hills and down. The image had caught in my throat, and I was speechless as they flowed past.

Here in the innards of the planet, I think I reach an understanding of Iceland: The whole, giant little island is boiling and jumpy and head-tossing wild, and its people have only the most precarious grip on it.

And they love it that way.



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