beyond the beyond

Ultima Thule. Far out. Far-er out. Nameless. Ultimate unknown. Beyond the known known. Planetary Snowman. Past the silence. Beyond the pale. Pale moon. The dark side of the moon. Dark to whom. Lunar loss. Tidal wave. Glad tidings. Inner. Borderless. Outer. Vergeless. Limit less. Beyond the beyond. 
 

Lost and Found in Iceland

You can buy it right here.

last day in Iceland

[This is old news, but I felt obliged to finish the chronicle of my journey, in some form, fact or fiction.]

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Just before going through security at Keflavik, I asked two guards if I could go through with the Icelandic Glacial water that Icelandair had given me upon entering the plane in Newark. I was told I would have to empty it or drink it. “Will I be getting another one for my flight home?”

“Yes, you will. Once you pass security, you can fill up your empty container from tap water and take that with you. It’s just as good.”

”I believe that. I just may.” (I did not but carried the empty homeward.)

At the Icelandair check-in counter, I could not resist one farewell flirtation with the native Nordic beauties. But I added a twist.

“Where’s all the women my age? Where’s your moms?” I asked the two associates checking my bag and issuing a boarding pass.

They looked a bit puzzled and annoyed. (Tiredness must be a factor in my social tone-deafness.) After a pause, one of them replied, “They’re all taken.” She added a shrewd marketing promotion, “Come back this summer”  — which evoked my unspoken rejoinder, “Because they’ll be divorced by then? Their husbands are hunting or fishing?”

As we flew into the sun (“running blind...running into the sun,” as the Jackson Browne song goes,) I was neither blind nor running on empty. Flying above crenellated clouds that looked like a sea or a sky under sky, I wondered if we would beat the sunset and land in brightness (we would not). To bookend my landing on Tuesday, which seemed ages ago, I listened to Of Monsters and Men (OMAM) again. The title of their “Beneath the Skin” LP suited me. I went to Iceland seeking skin and what lay beneath. I received one, the latter. “Hunger” was one of the tracks of this journey, and of this album. Did I satiate my hungers? It turns out to be the wrong question. I looked at my hungers and my self and the wider beyond. Did I need to go anywhere to accomplish that? Perhaps not. But I sorely needed a retreat. Caregiving and grieving were taking a toll on me. I paid that toll and walked through the gate. And Iceland was the perfect choice: a glacial oasis of gray and blaze, geysers and lagoons, new tongues and ancient sagas. As I noted in my book Seeing the Signs, the world is adorned with signs for us to decipher. On a construction plywood fence on Hafnerstraeti in Reykjavik, I saw this graffito sprinkled with symbols that looked like ancient runes and the word “Berlin,” where my older daughter once lived and where I have journeyed:

you have to be who you are now . . .

you can’t wait until later

Iceland, day 2.4: Geysir, onward upward

The sun was setting and dusk falling as we approached Geysir, just before 1700 hours. The area is a bubbling cauldron of fire and ice, just what Iceland is known for and marketed as. As one first approaches, there is a small steaming hole atop a small rise, surrounded by ice. Little signs throughout warn that the water is hot: 100 degrees Celsius or more. That means: boiling hot. Still, I wanted to reach in and just touch the water quickly, the way a WET PAINT sign counterintuitively beckons one to touch. But I did not. Some of these hot springs, which abound in Iceland, are always percolating and are not active as geysers. Our word in English borrows from the Icelandic place name of Geysir and the Icelandic word, which borrows from Old Norse: to gush, gusher, to pour. As a wordsmith, I had reverence for the place for this reason alone. How often does one experience such etymological originalism, or word-birtherism? Icelanders bake bread in the hot ground near here and other places, for 24 hours, but I neither saw nor bought any. I saw one or two other bubbling craters before seeing the large, active one, Strokkur, as in "churn," which had people shrieking and jostling some twenty yards away. The experience is oddly lunar, here and elsewhere, though how would I know, never having traversed the lunar landscape. (And there's no water shooting into the air there.) I walked up to THE geyser. It had just "gone off." some little kids were laughing; perhaps they were a tad too close and got doused with mist. Up on a slight incline, I was not worried about that. From the prior bursts, you could see which way the wind was carrying the steamy plumes. A low, chained fence kept people at a safe distance. We were told this active geysir goes off approximately, but unpredictably, every 2 to 8 minutes. A pool of water, perhaps 20 to 30 feet in diameter, percolated and rippled. Then it would start to heave, as if it were breathing, or as if it were a creature getting ready to cough. without exact warning, BOOM it bursts upward vigorously like a rocket launch with an iridescent blue at the bottom hurling skyward and turning steam white and exploding into the air. It pauses as a column, some 75 feet high, and starts dispersing downwind. I stayed to witness two or three eruptions close at hand. Having been warned about the difficulty of timing, I did not attempt to photograph or video record it. My battery was low anyway. More than that, I knew it'd be a futile attempt and I wanted to take this in and let it surprise me. Of course, that was in line with the explicit purpose of the whole trip: to reset my true north bearings by taking in new surprises, to see what would be revealed -- around me, in front of me, in me. The eruption was cleansing. And innocent fun. Erupt, release, spray, spout off, churn, release pressure, recharge: it was all there as the perfect natural metaphor machine. And onward and upward, too. As is said of the wind itself (as well as spiritual matters), one never knows exactly where it comes from or where it goes, or when. Same here. This seemingly endless geyser gives the appearance of everlastingness, though it merely happens to be "alive" now. It has not always been active and, like Geysir itself, can become dormant or more quiet.

We headed into the sunset, darkness enveloping us. Trond played some Icelandic music. It was a long and wondrous day in the Golden Circle. I drifted off to half-sleep on the way back to Reykjavik. We stopped in the cold dark to view the Northern Lights, off the highway, taking advantage of the absence of light pollution. If it were not for Trond pointing out the subtle greenish-blue wave above the horizon, which became two fairly distinct waves, I would not have discerned it as aurora borealis. I would not known where to look and would have expected (there's that word again) shimmering, Technicolor flamboyance. So, it was not postcard-dramatic, but observable and a fitting cap to the day. 

Iceland, day 2.0

Ten minutes out of Reykjavik, I knew this trip was right for me, the right thing to do, my self-conjugation of verb and declension of noun, guided by personal pronoun. Despite the quiet, cozy small-town feel of this "bay of smokes," and the grayness I had encountered on the day of arrival, I yearned for more, if for no other reason than to be in slight accord with the lights and shadows and escarpments I had pre-visioned. So, now the sun was rising and blazing shortly after Gateway to Iceland's Hot Golden Circle Tour had begun. Well before 1100, our little bus was basking in unequivocal northern daylight. With snow-bedecked mountains and glaciers to the left and right (mostly left), the scenic vistas of postcard-riddled imagination became incarnate. The trip now felt right because it presented on a silver metaphysical platter the natural wonders so dearly hoped for. My tired and tiresome joke from back home, which barely yielded a chuckle if I were lucky, that I'd return with two Nordic goddesses, twins, Helga and Inga, blond and raven, was now officially irrelevant. I had threatened myself with not taking a camera, and the view from the bus endorsed that notion. No camera captures the majesty of the everlasting hills, the eternal expanse. But I snapped away all day, until the battery ran down. Nevertheless, these majestic and rugged views of grandeur lifted me, though I was tired from the day before. Just this, just this: was this one of the "meanings" for which I had traveled and arrived? Remember, I came alone. I doubt anyone else on the bus had done the same. I suppose I entertained slight pangs of envy or self-pity, but not for long and not deeply. Solo was the way to go. (Yesterday, no traveling companion would have put up with my endless traipsing and trudging onward and onward, ploughing forth. Today, by the way, I discovered the FREE shuttle to the Kringlan mall from around the corner of Ice Apartments! I resisted the slap to the forehead. It wasn't meant to be. Plus, I would have missed the intimate step-by-step experiential first-hand knowledge of the village-like [mostly] streets of the world's northernmost capital.) So traveling as one's own companion frees one of conflict, at least outer conflict, and liberates one from negotiation with respect to plans and their execution. 

Iceland, day 1 (catching up)

Today is day 3 but I am still chronicling day 1. Like all memory, it is now filtered by experience, colored by perception, stained by mental re-vision.

The shower.

Futuristic, to me -- perhaps not to Icelanders, Scandinavians, Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans. (I later learned the owner of the building, who also owns the Black Pearl, employs Dutch design.)

In the bathroom, the shower is not a separate entity. It is a portion of the room, partitioned by one glass door that bends to open wider or fold into the watery flow. The room, on the fourth floor, has several windows, less than a foot square, that sit in a vertical column looking onto the street. I am across from Volcano House (a museum with a restaurant, shop, offices), a construction site, the library. I doubt that anyone can see in from the street below and it does not bother me anyway. Back to the shower. Trying to turn the right metal dial, I was like the Woody Allen character in Sleeper. Water poured from five overhead metal "flutes" with holes. By mistake I first launched a wand next to the dials, splashing me and that side of the room. Finally, I got the water to warm up, and luxuriated in the cleansing warmth. A squeegee on the floor allows one to coax water, if needed (needed), down the drain, a slit in the floor, near the wall. 

Light switches. More sci-fi. Find out which white switch on a white background does what, if anything. I am in a Haruki Murakami novel, except the labels are in Icelandic, as they should be. White switches for room (ceiling) lights are demarcated by "loftljos." The room thermostat does not go above 21 degrees C. (69.8F). Sounds about right, in accord with home, even warmer, given my costs. Press to the right or left. (After two days, I learned a quick press on the left is off, to the right is on; pressing slowly or without a quick release is to dim. Or vice fecking versa.)

A great feature near the shower, discovered accidentally, is an S-like metal tubing on the wall. It is heated! It warms towels, or the foot mat. I used it yesterday to dry my swimsuit after the Secret Lagoon experience.

I took a nap, not more than an hour.

I ventured out again.

I met friends, by the lake.

I did not know the names of these friends, whom I was confident of meeting. But I did learn their names.

They saved the day.

And me.

Iceland, day 1: future forward

What was that about things never being as you expect them to be (The First Spiritual Axiom of Travel and Life)? As we "deplane" at KEF just before 0630, we are greeted by gusts of snowy wind almost throwing us off the outdoor stairway. (True, I can't speak for the rest of the arriving guests.) The pilot had noted the presence of "snow showers." Nope, this had the feel of a good, ol' fashioned Syracuse snow squall. Fine. I held onto the railing as I descended. It was dark outside. Dark like the night. We walked to a shuttle bus, which transported us no more than a few hundred yards to an arrival building. Exiting the shuttle bus, several inches of swirling and drifted snow which belied all the pamphlet hype of "temperate" conditions. I joked with a kid from Wisconsin about it. We all took it in stride. 

The arrivals building (it may be the only building at the airport) is Icelandic slick and pristine: wooden floors, lean lines, bathrooms of white featuring waterless urinals and private closets for other discharges; quiet. I turned in US$150 and got back 18,834 ISK, or Icelandic Krona. don't fight me on this. Maybe I got back 18,500. Who knows? The window said no commission is charged, so I'd say this was a wise move instead of doing the transaction at EWR. I Joe Island (so says the receipt, though I think the sign says Joe + Juice), I bought an Earl Grey tea and a so-called blueberry muffin that looked Martin pink, stawberry-ish, for 798 ISK. Seemed like a lot, but amounted to a total of $6 when I figured it out afterward. Two young guys ran it, zippy, awake, affable, playing pop music (was that Rihanna?). I sat at a round table. They tried to have the feel of a coffee shop (though no bagels or anything; avocado smoothies and health stuff).

At a convenience 7 Eleven-type shop at KEF, I bought a Siminn Prepaid Mobile Service sim card for my phone because AT&T was not working. At all. "Emergency Calls Only." It cost around $25. seemed to make sense. I went over at a table and fumbled with my phone. I see the clerk who sold me the chip walking into the joint with something that looks an awful lot like my Ogio laptop bag, because it is my laptop bag, which I had leaned against the counter. A nearly disastrous close call. Chalk it up to not having slept a wink on the five-hour flight. I scratched off the number on the sim card package and inserted it in the space on my phone screen. (I do not have a smartphone. I did this seven or eight times. No dice, not even with the help of the folks who sold it to me. They told me to talk to the folks at the Kringlan mall and told me roughly where it was. The Siminn folks were not open yet and not answering calls. 

It was time to get out of the airport. I bought a round-trip ticket for the Flybus into Reykjavik. 5000 ISK. I scrounged around  in my pocket and could only find one coupon for the bus. Is it tiredness or nervousness that is spawning these slip-ups? I cut ahead of those waiting in line and asked the gal who sold me the ticket. She said just give your receipt to the driver and use the ticket/coupon on Friday (as if I was supposed to know that). I exit the terminal to make for the bus. Blustery snow. In the dark. At 0830. I had to laugh.

I sat on the bus next to Eddie from south of Boston (but not "Southie" per se, he said), recently retired from the military as a helicopter pilot. A perfect companion for the trip in. We groused good-naturedly about the weather and the dark. "The sun comes up at 11 and goes down at 4," he said. He too was traveling alone. He thought he had read Baseball's Starry Night. He had great Ted Williams stories. Stayed at a condo next door to The Kid, who answered his door in boxers. They knocked down drinks together, in the morning. Jim Craig, the goalie for the U.S. hockey team that beat the Russians at Lake placid, was his neighbor; his brother was Eddie's accountant. Eddie traded away his tickets for that game, figuring our team was going nowhere. As for this morning, Eddie was going to go to a spa for a few hours because he was too early for his room at the Hilton.

Our bus sailed into Reykjavik in the dark. The snow let up. At 0930 it was still dark as we got got in a traffic jam. I saw one plow. do people go to work late? Or was it the snowstorm, which began the day before. No, it was not on par with a Syracuse lake-effect blast, predicted back home for this very day. But I pictured dramatic escarpments, geysers, ocean views, and Bjork on the way in. (More later on music on the flight.) 

At one point, Eddie, sitting on my left, slumped over, bent in half, immobile. Was he dead? We are of similar age. Should I try to rouse him? Listen for snoring? After ten minutes he popped back up. A valuable practice he had matered in the military: sleeping on a dime. 

On the trip in, a young fellow walked up to the driver. Five times we all could hear the driver say, in English, "I can't hear you. You're mumbling. What? I don't understand a word you are saying." Then: "I can't get your luggage while I am driving," with a dose of sarcasm. "You can't wait? Now?" Finally, the riddle was made clear when the driver stopped the bus, let the guy out, who ran behind some pines and took a leak. The bus crept along. Then the bus stopped, holding up traffic briefly, and let the fellow pop back onto the bus, relieved.

Our bus stopped at the BSI bus terminal and let most of us off to transfer to smaller buses. Eddie and I shook hands, mutually declaring we had a good chance of meeting here again.

My small bus dropped me off at the Black Pearl Hotel, in the old Harbor. Ice Apartments, where I'd stay, were said to be adjacent. It was past 1000. Still dark.

[more to come]

-lands' end

So, of all the -land countries to visit, I have chosen Iceland. Not Ireland, Greenland, England, New Zealand, Swaziland, Switzerland, Thailand, or the Netherlands, with its additional s. (I am deliberately not including the names of countries ending in Islands or Island; it's my list, my rules). (Am I missing anyone?) Having blurted out this suffix-laden list, I am no closer to revealing my raison de voyager except to say north is my magnet, attracting me like iron filings, flung seaward and landward, arching toward the Arctic Circle, aching to see what shall be revealed and to hear what shall be sung (by Icelandic poets and bards and artists of all provenances).

my Iceland persona

Who will I be in Iceland less than two weeks from now? It is a question less pompous than it appears to be (I hope). I know I don't want to be the Ugly American: boorish, brash, impatient, arrogant, incurious. Though how avoidable will that be? Surely I will cart along with me all the cultural trappings that have conditioned my personality thus far. Nothing wrong with that. I can't help it anyway. It would be impossible to decondition myself in less than two weeks, stripping myself of prior personal shaping and sculpting, making myself as bare and barren as an Icelandic wintry landscape. And what would I be? Who would I have become? I can picture myself in a Reykjavik coffee shop, blabbling mercilessly about my books and my spiritual journey, affecting an urbane and witty pose, handing out my cleverly designed Moo cards, flirting with locals; in short, a hungry and not very accidental tourist. But what if the denizens of the place prefer solitude, silence, and taciturn unengagement? What if nothing is as I anticipate in scale or flavor or atmosphere? Naturally, nothing will be exactly as I envision beforehand. It is never exactly as envisioned.

And that's why we go.

Iceland itinerary

This is already kind of crazy, as in cuh-razy. I am slated to fly out of Newark on a Monday night and land in Keflavik on Tuesday morning. Stay three nights in Reykjavik. I've booked an apartment through VRBO for three nights. Leave Friday evening but land in JFK. Smart, eh? That would be one major reason for the good price on the flight. 

While in Iceland, what to do? I tend to be a take-it-as-it-comes traveler, open to serendipity. I've been exploring the excellent I Heart Reykjavik blog and website, including its tour offerings. Very appealing. I have never taken a tour as a traveler -- not in Ireland or Germany, for example. I felt a tour would have restricted me, limited my possibilities. But I am not thinking that way now. I am thinking that some guidance and direction will actually open possibilities, relieve stress, and enhance the whole experience.

So, as it stands now, I am thinking:

• Tuesday: wander around Reykjavik in a self-directed get-acquainted way, eat, blog, tea or coffee, nap at apartment, meet "never-met-before friends with like interests" [that's code; can't say more without compromising principles and traditions]
• Wednesday: a tour that includes some awesome nature things outside the city
• Thursday: a mix of Tuesday and Wednesday's agenda
• Friday: another tour

That is pretty vague.

Gotta think about this a little more, but not too much!

French Foreign Legion, Iceland Division

I don't know how the legend started, the one about heartbroken or unlucky-in-love men joining the French Foreign Legion. Ah, the dark romance of it all, made for film noir. I mention this for a reason. Is this the sort of reason I am embarking on a journey to Iceland? Could I be that type of man, hurling himself into danger, mystery, or adventure in order to cure himself of failures of the heart?

Only my hairdresser knows for sure, to paraphrase the old award-winning ad for Miss Clairol hair coloring. 

(My mom worked on the assembly line at Clairol for many years; her chronic cough is likely a result of the chemicals she breathed in those many years working there.)

questions for Iceland and me

Questions about my pending Iceland trip (answers pending; or not):

1. Am I trying to escape duty, pain, or quotidian routine? If so, is that right or wrong? (Are "right" and "wrong" notions of culture and custom more than morality?)
2. If Iceland is a personal metaphor, what is it a metaphor for? If not a metaphor, can Iceland be a simile, a song, an icon, a template, a slate, a temple, or a geothermal self-reflecting pool?
3. Upon landing at Keflavik, will I say to myself, "What have you done now?" though it will not be possible, or practical, to scoot back home?"
4. Can one conjure or force to happen a satori or epiphany? And can a new-found-land be the locus of such enlightenment?
5. Will I be able to resist the urge to sleep upon landing?
6. Which course of tourism will be most beneficial and rewarding: wringing everything out of Iceland and tapping all its wellsprings insofar as this human and his endurance and budget can withstand it, or a more passive, let-it-me-revealed onto to me approach?
7. What if I love Iceland so much I want to stay, I mean really stay? (And would Iceland even want me to stay if I could?)
8. Will I encounter a San Francisco Giants fan in Iceland? (I would not be shocked at such an eventuality.)
9.  Do Icelanders believe in the existence of elves (National Geographic says 54% of Icelanders do)? Better yet, quite simply, do elves inhabit Iceland, spiritually or physically?
10. If this journey proves transformative, how so?

Iceland terrain

Already the terrain of Iceland is craggy, windswept, cold, barren, and biting. And I have not even set foot there yet, so that is a biased viewpoint. It is not a depiction of the terrain of Iceland. Not really. Not in actuality. As I said, I have yet to journey there. No, it is a description of the concept of my taking a journey to "Iceland" as a concept, a notion. There those who are aghast at my proposal to do so. How dare I? How dare I spend the money or take the time, me the frugal one, living on two meals a day, abstemious and sober, thrifty yet supposedly incapable of certain monetary "equalities," shall we say? The nerve. The boldness. Who will take care of Mom, 99? Who will do this or that? How can such roles be abdicated so cavalierly? These are the craggy, windswept, cold, barren, and biting questions. Iceland, what say you now?

Icelandic ponderings

"Do not travel to other dusty lands, forsaking your own sitting place; if you cannot find the Truth where you are now, you will never find it." Dogen

That is today's quotation on my Zen Calendar.

Point taken.

But I am nevertheless inching closer in my plans for a trip to Reykjavik, Iceland.

1. It's not that "dusty" a land, is it? (Maybe it is, volcanic ash and all.)

2. Hey, if I don't find Truth, at least I can find a Good Time.

previsions of Reykjavik, v. 1.1

And what if I chicken out, just another example of verbal bluster? I hope I go to Reykjavik. I want to go to Iceland. What is stopping me? Nothing should stop me, not even that my mom is here, a few miles away, in her 100th year, on her own, more or less, mostly less, these days. People ask me, "Why Iceland?" My glib reply is "why not?" though there must be more to it, stretching north, digging deeper, the geothermal bubbles, new languages, rugged terrain, foreign sands, fresh air.

visions of Reykjavik

Reykjavik. Once you learn how to spell it, you're halfway there, right? Iceland. The thought of journeying to Iceland beckons to me on an unseasonably uncold Tuesday night in Syracuse, New York. Go north, and then north of there. Go to the planet's true north, its northernmost capital. While others go to the Cayman Islands (as I once did) or Belize or Puerto Rico or Mexico, you name it, to a warmer clime, I am fantasizing doing deeper, going into the cold, mine and Nature's. Solo. And why not. Just the name of the country invites stoic challenge, though geothermal springs dispel those notions, as do stories of all-night revellers and Nordic, guilt-free abandon. Why not. Having flown to Ireland and Germany and seen the in-flight map of Transatlantic flight progress displayed on the screen on the back of the seat in front of me, and in those instances flying over Iceland, and thinking, wow, we are almost there, in Europe (though not quite; is Iceland in Europe?), I am thinking, Let's skip the continental Europe part and see what Iceland offers, even if no ice is there, literally or metaphorically.