Always be yourself unless you can become a Viking. Then, be a Viking
Thingvellir 2017
Thick, springy moss in all directions. Though it felt good on my two bare feet, like sinking into cool, wet grass there was a problem: the dense clumps of these ancient lichen, undulating for miles in every direction revealed no pathways.
“Jesus, did I come here to get lost on the very first day?”
The exhilaration of finally getting on the road at last! That sudden joy and tears feeling the asphalt under my feet several hours earlier. Leaving the road for this wilderness had felt even better but there were no longer any signposts. The growing sense of being lost was still outweighed by the sheer high of being totally alone out here. I had done it! And surely these tweeting birds would show me the way. Appearing regularly in my line of sight now the single, repeated tweet had to be a signal. The first lesson of the road gets oft forgotten: you see what you want to see.
The fact was the crafty Icelandic plover was doing what it knows best. It was distracting me away from its nest.
“This way you idiot, this way!”
In retrospect it was quite remarkable that I made it through that first, sunny day. Sun was a rare commodity here. Solar output rivalled my own home town in Scotland, Aberdeen. The 'dour Scot' image surely comes from solar deprivation. That is why I left. Maybe that is the real reason we all left. Grey, leaden skies day after day would drive any man, or woman to the booze. And it did.
It is highly unlikely that anybody saw me out there. They would have seen an old fella appearing to glide over the moss shoeless. Just that alone would be cause for concern. Any local asylums? A hospital maybe? He had a Reykjavik kitchen towel wrapped around his head and a dirty old poncho slung over the beat up leather jacket. The Peruvian poncho had deeply ingrained stains from the severe vomiting of Amazonian ayahuasca. Ah, even worse..maybe he is on drugs! A backpack that had seen better times and that oblong thing hanging from his neck. Could it have been a medical device he forgot to take off before his escape?
Any way the observer had looked at it there simply was no logical reason a sixty five year old would be doing such a thing with any kind of sensible plan in mind. Walking barefoot in the park is one thing. But here? Icelandic moss grows on top of diamond hard, jagged lava. That delightful springiness could instantly turn into shrieking pain. The second lesson: one careful step at a time.
The church at Thingvellir marked the departure point
I had left the old church, Iceland's first rather reluctant nod to foreign gods, a few hours earlier. Being from the old school, and being an Irish Scot, I had no reluctance at all in making the sign of the cross in front of that huge painting inside. The Lord stood blessing a kneeling man. Funny thing is, he was barefoot. Naturally I took that as a sign..
My cameraman would record segments of the journey we had agreed. I would symbolically leave my denim shoes, specially designed to ground the body of static, outside the church. Weeks later I was to return after having crossed Iceland twice, from South to North and back through the space between those glaciers that sit in the middle. Then I would retrieve the shoes and we would all clap our hands. The conquering hero would return to spread the gospel of earthing! The third lesson on the road that first day was this: the map is not the territory..
Steingrimmur had followed me as I weaved between tourists, almost all with hiking boots on. The looks spoke volumes. Fear, disbelief, chagrin, pity and never a smile. Then the nice looking park ranger, blonde and busty, came up to me with a look of understanding only slightly masking her obvious pity and concern.
“They told me you will go into the highlands. Is that true?”
She was my daughter's age, had a badge on and obviously took her important job very seriously. The national parks in Iceland, including this one at Pingvellir, rivalled none in their dedication to conscious preservation of nature.
“Oh yes, all the way up through the glaciers to the North.”
A frown and more concerned words..
“You do know it is a very rocky road up there in the highlands don't you?”
Wanting to allay her worries I eagerly told here that I had already checked the road out the month before. As I would soon discover checking it out and walking it are as different as looking the attractive young park ranger up and down and well, you know..
On that trip we had pulled up in front of a roadblock on route F38 with a yellow and red sign that said in somewhat hilarious Icelandic OFAERT. The letter O had a symbol above it and the A was stuck to the back of the E. To its right came the English translation: IMPASSABLE. Gunnar, Steini and I could not suppress a giggle and drove past it towards the huge pylons ahead. Behind them we could clearly make out the still heavily snow covered peaks of the highlands. Gunnar and Steini both had an excellent sense of irony and dark humour so typical of the Icelandic people as a whole.
To say impassable to anyone here was like saying, “well are you coming?”
We had needed to scout the route as film makers and I needed to prepare myself more mentally. Knowing this my two wise friends had brought me back to Thingvellir with a specific aim in mind. So we stopped at the famous viewpoint of the lake below. A few brave tourists could be seen in heavy dress trying to stand up straight. Opening a car door here meant possibly losing it or very easily wrecking it. It just howled. An angry black sky completed the picture.
“Holy shit” I mused, “This is May!” Flakes of snow bit at my face. Steini pointed his huge video camera at me, aimed from the shoulder and quipped, “Look over there Echan, that's where you're going.” Moving my gaze to the left from the lake I suddenly realized why he had done this.
My hair almost sandblasted away from my skull by the howling wind it all came into view with stark clarity. “Mordor, Jesus I'm going into Mordor!” That epic scenery from the Lord of the Rings had been etched in memory from literally years of reading it to my young children. The film brilliantly captured its menace, darkness and dread. Now I was looking at it. Under the thick black clouds I could clearly see snow capped peaks. I got it. That was not a place people go to. Especially barefoot. My Icelandic partners had wanted me to get a step closer to this reality, maybe to give me one more chance to scrap the whole project before I made a complete fool of myself. After all I was no Spring chicken any more. In any society I was clearly an old man already..
“How do you feel about that Echan?”
I do believe he caught my expression of concern, though only fleeting. I knew what he was up to though. Another test. “Cheeky bugger” I thought.
The winds and rain in Iceland can actually hurt
“I'll show you Vikings what the Celts can do!” This brazen thought was later to play an important part in my mental defences against the swarm of reasons for quitting that would soon assail me. Dna tests reveal almost half of Icelandic genes comes from the Irish and Scots slaves the Vikings dragged over there with them to prevent their seed dying out. The women got lifted off one island and taken to another. It was their forefathers, literally the 'fathers' the Papar priests who had landed there first. Their singular aim was to get as far away as possible from the 'world'. The Icelandic Book of Settlements clearly states on page one that Irish monks had been living on Iceland before the arrival of Norse settlers who later arrived in the ninth century. The Papar wanted a place so sparse of the temptations of the world that they could focus only on God. Well, sparse you say, here it was. As we saw driving up that gravel road, past the impassable, this was about as close to the lunar surface as you could get. Not one growing thing in sight. Solid lava in every direction. Hard.
Steini was arguably the best documentary film maker in the country. The long and winding road to standing there with him had of course not been easy. Iceland, until recently was not on anybody's map. The name works wonders in the imagination. Why go there? Visions of ice and snow blasted Antarctica come to most. Now we know much more thanks to tourism and social media. My first contact had been as a young boy watching incredible images on TV. News reports soon flooded the world:
November 14, 1963
On this date, a cook aboard a trawler called Ísleifur II sailing south of Iceland spotted a column of dark smoke rising from the surface of the sea. The ship’s captain thought it could be a boat on fire and turned his vessel to investigate. What they found was an island in the process of being born: explosive volcanic eruptions originating from below the sea surface, belching black columns of ash.
The new island was later named Surtsey, for Surtur, a fire jötunn , a mythological race of Norse giants. So at eleven years old the first contact had begun. Later as a rebellious young father I had considered moving my fledgling family there. Anywhere but the rotten West or the now depraved East. Japan had become an American colony I thought. McDonald-land. Iceland seemed the only place really different on my world map. But so dark..such long winters..
Canada 2012, 49 years later. I sit in a garden in Nelson B.C. My writing career has gone blah blah. I need new material. I call myself a free lance journalist but it really means I just write stuff and put it on the net. Soon I will turn sixty. In Canada, my second home after Japan, that is code for, 'scrap heap and retirement from active life.' Get your Winnebego and go South in the Winter. Take it easy.
Enjoy the fruits, blah blah. Do I look like retirement is an option? I still have no fixed income! I have never paid unemployment insurance my whole life. Hospitals may as well be zoos as far as I know. I have had to continually reinvent myself for four decades by this time. So why not capitalize on the fact that in 2012 everybody knows that the Lehman shock happened because they felt it. In their pockets. Iceland got shocked more than most. They call it the kreppa, the crisis.
“A book about how the Icelanders stepped up to the plate, had a revolution, sacked their government and put the banksters behind bars? How much do you need to get the scoop?” My Japanese editor had bitten the bullet not three hours from the inception of a wild idea. This might not fail!
Funds soon became available and I landed in Rekjavik. The problem was I had zero contacts and was literally banking on something 'turning up' long before I knew that this 'turning up' is the basis of Icelandic philosophy. Three days later I met Gunnar and of all the people I could have met by chance introduction, of all the leads that might have led nowhere he was precisely the best person to tell me what the Pots and Pans revolution had really been all about. He had been squarely situated right in the thick of it. Jesus he helped make it happen!
That trip took me on to Thingvellir on my sixtieth birthday about as far away from home in Japan as I could be. Laying on a gravestone at the church I looked at my dwindling life options. Not much time or money left. No government program that will assist me. No life insurance. Meanwhile I feel that this place has something I cannot put my finger on. Maybe that dream of the snow capped mountain had some clues? Three trips followed in 2016 and 2017. Gunnar now listened patiently as we stood over a map in his office.
“You will get killed walking around Iceland's ring road. Barefoot or not. Too many tourists and the road is very narrow. You will have nowhere to walk.” There went the first idea that had brought me to him-to walk about 1300 kilos around the entire country on bare feet. That length would put it on par with the Buddhist pilgrimage I had done around a different island in Japan-Shikoku. But there I had worn sneakers made of leather. If only I had known then what I know now about grounding the body to earth..
“You should go this way.”
Gunnar might have been the pugilistic American actor James Cagney in a previous life. Short and tough he was definitely a no nonsense man. I knew with him on my side I could do this and was deeply relieved the first time hearing him use his famous Icelandic phrase: “We can do this.” It was followed by another classic of his to keep things in sharp perspective,
“But bear in mind..”
That was Gunnar-speak for, “I can help you put this ridiculous idea into practise but there will be a whole load of things need put in place first.”
“The old settlers used to travel from the North down to the South using these routes through the Highlands.”
His finger traced a course between glaciers as he continued,
“It was the only way they could get down to the Althing.”
I knew this word meant the oldest parliament in the world, Iceland's. Dating back to the year 930 it drew leaders and common folks alike to Thingvellir yearly to hammer out agreements, dispute old laws and share information. A massive camp site housed them all before they would disperse back to far flung rural communities. The routes he was showing me to follow started at Thingvellir and went up through the highlands before turning back down on the other side of a glacier called Langjokull.
“Bear in mind the roads there get closed for nine months of the year.”
“When do they open?”
“May or June.”
“Until when?” … “September maybe.”
Testing the road a month before (from the film)
On that day in October 2016 the route was decided. And the time. June and July 2017 would work best. And now I was lost, on day one, June 24th, 2017. After all this! I decided to calm down. What about all that map training I had done for the Nelson Search and Rescue team I had joined? Right. Look at the printed map I have. East West North South. Yeah. The sun, still high is obviously going that way, namely West. So I am going..SOUTH!! I could not believe the level of my own stupidity. This is what giddy happiness does to old men. Turning round I could see the glacial top of a low volcano called Skjaldbreidur that had blown its top nine thousand years earlier. And by checking the GPS I had heard the explanation about but not understood it was clear what had happened. Meanwhile I had lost my spectacles in the moss. First I got lost and then I lost my 'vision'. The poetry of it was not without its own sardonic humour.
“No wonder they put people my age in homes.”
By now I had been walking about six hours. It must have been about eight at night but there was no night. I was confused, no doubt about it. I was alone. I did have a walkie talkie to connect to my support jeep which had gone on ahead a long time before. But you need a clear area with ten kilometre maximum range to get through. Still he had not answered which could mean that I was still more than ten K's away from him. Three hours minimum, probably more. Shit!
My GPS map had a destination point indicated on its screen, a jeep road that I should head towards. Ok. Press on laddie. The moss thinned out exponentially as I approached the shield volcano. Its sharp, lava underbelly now exposed I had to really slow down. Look, step. Step lightly, move the other leg. Repeat.
Reality bites the feet on day 2
Even after finally contacting Hiroki neither of us could figure out from our Japanese descriptions of surrounding terrain where the hell I was. I told him not to worry even as I scanned the area for protected moss I could sleep on. I had spotted some overhangs that had just enough space to crawl into. My pack had no extra clothes. The sleeping bag was in the jeep. I guessed it would drop to about five degrees during the 'night'. That would not allow much sleep but it certainly would not kill me. The midnight sun meant I could still see easily well enough but already I was catching my bare feet on sharp edges. Yes, I was getting tired.
That's when the mental bogey men start to rub their hands together and get ready for, showtime!