Iceland 2021 Page 5

Chilling in Árnes campground

This late in the season, campgrounds are often underpopulated. I awoke to find I was one of just three people. Everyone else had moved on.

The tent did not appear to be leaking, but the air was so humid and cold that my sleeping bag and some of my clothing was damp, presumably from condensation due to my body heat and breath. The stuff I had under the alcove next to my bike was dry.

The changing weather gave me an hour of sunlight in the late morning, so I stacked everything on the roof. The meager heat and the air worked their magic.

The place was deserted for most of the day. Later on a busload of tourists would stop and most of them would order food from the restaurant. For now it was just me.

I managed to synchronize my email and work materials, using the wifi in the store. Most of the day passed with my head down over the laptop, writing code and updating tickets and documentation.

Eventually the bus arrived and a crowd of other adventurers temporarily surrounded me. The company was welcome. Everyone was in good spirits regardless of the weather, and happy to get a warm meal.

People ordered food and clustered at the little tables, chatting about their lives back home. Some of them were actually Icelanders, taking the shuttle to reach friends elsewhere in the country. I overheard a trio of women talking in mixed English and Icelandic about e-bikes and scooters, and how disorienting it was to see them flooding the streets in the capital city over the last few years. “One of them almost clobbered me today!”

A little girl walked past my table into the bathroom area.  Her mother followed shortly after, and said, “Dear, you went into the gents bathroom” in a strong Indian accent.

The girl was mortified.  “Oh no,” she said, her voice echoing from behind the door.  She was already inside a stall. “Oh no! Oh nooooooooo!!”

“It’s okay; stay there,” said the mom, with the faintest hint of exasperation in her voice. She waited outside the room while her daughter finished up.

The most gregarious person there was the bus driver. I complemented him on his hat, and he told me the story of how he ended up driving a tourbus in Iceland. We would have chatted for hours except he had a schedule to keep, and soon he raised his voice and said “fifteen minutes, everyone!”

I got an ice cream cone and followed the crowd out to the bus, and waved at the driver.

I lingered in the common area for as long as I could, continuing my work. Eventually they locked up for the night.

Thoughtful Ride To Þjórsárdalur Camp

I had a meta-dream last night.  I was wandering around in a hotel, and I ran into a guy I knew in college named Kenny.  He was wearing pajamas and brushing his teeth.  I said: “Wow, I haven’t seen you in a while.  What have you been up to?”  He said nothing, just kept brushing his teeth.

I said, “Ah of course you can’t answer, this is a dream.”

He took out his toothbrush long enough to say: “You can’t tell me what to do in a dream!”

I said, “No, no, this is my dream.  And I don’t know what you’ve been up to, so I can’t dream you telling me!”

“Agree to disagree,” he said, and shook his head and kept brushing his teeth as he wandered away.

Packing went well. Everything was dry, thanks to the wind and sun.

Fast-moving canyons of cloud cut the sunlight into miniature days, fading the landscape around me from gray and somber to green and dazzling and back to gray, over and over.

I the distance I could see the side of the first real mountain on my route, often showing sunlight when the terrain closer at hand was buried.

As I went up, the clouds came down, mingling with the terrain. Sometimes they would condense a bit too much and coat my bicycle and the road. There were almost no cars to break the silence.

The open space gave me time to think.

In the back of my head, I’d been wrestling for the past few days with the state of my romantic life. The last time I was in Iceland two years ago I was at a curious inflection point where I was newly single and considering the idea of staying that way, while I continued riding, somehow extending my three month visa into a journey much longer. Work, then the pandemic, altered my plans. This time, I didn’t feel like there was an inflection point. I knew I was on a trip with a limited timespan and I was fine with that. I also knew I had some romantic trauma to recover from but it was different in nature.

Probably the strongest evidence that things were different this time was that I felt like I knew who I was, rather than a stranger trying to rediscover himself. But there was still work to do.

My obsessive filing-clerk soul wants to nail everything down and remember it. So I’d been writing, for the last week or so in bits and pieces, about my last relationship and the way it ended. I was convinced that some useful insight would eventually appear. At the same time, I knew I was going through my own version of a process that everyone does, when things go wrong and pain happens and they need to get somewhere past it. You sift, and you think, and you talk, partly just to pass the time while the pain shrinks to something small enough to fit on a shelf where it won’t be underfoot. Maybe you pick something out that feels like a big insight, and that becomes the label you stick beneath it on the shelf. And maybe the insight you chose was just what was in front of you when you got tired of looking. Maybe it’s nothing more than a flourish, announcing that you can move on.

It’s a jaded interpretation, I know, but it’s useful for me: Obsession and documenting can unmoor my brain from the immediacy of life in a living body. Sometimes it helps to let some hot air out of that self-important balloon, and drift back to Earth.

I arranged the flight to Iceland just after I got vaccinated, when the country was still making tourism top priority and flights were dirt cheap. It seemed like the best idea, since I’d already tried dating for six months and my heart wasn’t in it. I even walked away from two promising starts, in favor of this long-term travel. Then in Reykjavik I had a vague feeling like I missed romance even though I was probably still bad at it. So I turned my dating profile back on and browsed around a bit, distracting myself from work and enjoying the diversity of people and their stories. Then I forgot it was there.

A week passed, and a couple “intros” appeared in my email, but they were inane one-liners like “hey how r you.” Easy to ignore. Then two days ago I got a message that caught my attention. The sender actually acknowledged I was in Iceland, which I’d written at the top of my profile, and asked some good questions!

I started a conversation with her over email that quickly snowballed into an avalanche of words. So at the same time I was trying to wrestle the story of my previous romance down onto the page, I was eagerly sharing brain-dump emails with this interesting new person, and there was so much more to talk about that I didn’t really feel like pondering my ex or what happened any more. I didn’t even care about searching for a nice label to put on the shelf. It felt like a waste of time.

Thinking back, I shouldn’t have turned the profile back on, in case something like this happened, because there is currently no way I can tell if I’m actually attracted to this person, and there won’t be a way for months. Today in the latest email we both acknowledged that, which put me in this thoughtful mood, and led me to a particular thought:

My ability to make records has outpaced my need for them. This trip needs to be less about processing, and more about letting go of the past, to make room.

So I decided to close the file on my ex, and made no commitment to return. Maybe what happened with her could just be something that faded from memory without a lesson learned … or at least without a lesson identified. Maybe going back over it was just forcing me to relive the trauma. Maybe I would feel better, faster, if I just talked about all the rest of my life with this fun new person, and the rest of my family and friends.

More looking around and forward, less looking back.

I arrived at the campsite early, and wandered around until I found a spot that looked safe from the rain. I didn’t want pools forming under my tent. For the heck of it I decided to make a video while setting up camp:

That inflatable tent makes it so easy!

The soft patter of rain faded in and out as the clouds continued their march overhead. I ate snacks, listened to a few podcasts, made some notes, and generally drifted until sleep overtook me. It was still light outside of course.

The Commonwealth

I awoke feeling refreshed. Perhaps it was the silence around me, perhaps the feeling of clarity from yesterday’s decision. Either way I was glad.

The light rain had continued all through the night, and the corners of my sleeping bag were damp again. I had about half an hour of relative sunlight with a constant wind, so I stood around eating a lettuce-forward breakfast, and the bag was mostly dry when I rolled it up. I had an actual room booked for tonight, so I could unroll everything in there to let the drying finish.

The few patrons around me had vanished in the early morning. With no other campers here, the site felt less like a campground and more like a tangle of animal paths and tiny clearings that I’d just wandered into. There were no markers to delineate spaces, and tall bushes crowded the sides of the road, which curved around continuously as if to avoid them. Perhaps that was true: Perhaps trees are so rare in Iceland that the locals would rather redirect a road than cut one down. If so, I liked it — even though I almost got lost on my way out.

The road squiggled on. When my phone caught a signal, I got an email update from my new okCupid friend. We were sharing meta-thoughts about dating. The rain had paused for the moment so I stopped on the shoulder and typed a response:

Later in the day I got an equally thoughtful response:

She proposed that we try a video chat when I got to the hotel, assuming there was coverage. I said that was a fine idea. We were both curious to see how we’d react to each other in “real time”.

Also I had to look up “proxemics.” What an interesting word!

I stowed the laptop again and kept pedaling. Around the next corner I saw a delightful sign:

There’s a replica Viking farm here? I AM SO INTO THIS.

It’s called Þjórsárdal. It’s a reconstruction of a Viking farm based on the layout of an archeological site in  the Þjórsárdalur Valley, which was buried under a thick blanket of volcanic ash when Hekla erupted in 1104. The eruption was not so sudden that people were buried – they had time to flee – but it was continuous enough that the entire area was rendered uninhabitable. Archeologists dream of this sort of thing!

The parking lot in Þjórsárdal was nearly empty. I just rolled the bike up and set the kickstand. Admission was cheap, but the lack of people also meant that most of the events and activities were cancelled.

I cued up the soundtrack to Skyrim – because I’m an incorrigible nerd – and walked slowly around, enraptured by the artifacts, the equipment, and the little informative placards.

The exterior turf construction was historically accurate, as well as the peg-and-hole interior construction, with the exception of the ticket booth and other modern areas used for running the business.

I was in the lodge house for at least an hour, reading everything and thinking deep thoughts about human lifespans and cultural transmission. What a cool place!

Eventually I ran out of stuff to stare at, and I knew I had a big hill to tackle and many more miles to ride, so I took a few photos in the parking lot and then got back in the saddle.

After the hill I rode out across a plateau. The terrain around me felt a little more volcanic; less grassy. Rain started and stopped half a dozen times. Even if there was time to set my gear out to dry, the sun never broke the clouds for longer than a few minutes at a time.

In the distance I spotted huge power lines, and eventually rolled past a hydroelectric power station. Another (relatively) free modern resource for Icelanders, to go along with geothermal heat and clean water, though I imagine the up-front investment was huge.

It fit the larger pattern, really: Iceland has amazing potential for renewable resources but the up-front cost could not be met without a massive influx of cash, technology, and material from elsewhere. The picture of the country as self-sufficient is very carefully framed.

Mostly I didn’t think about modern Icelanders, and just gazed at the weird and rugged terrain sliding past the bicycle.

In any other part of the world, I’d see a slender, chunky rock formation like this, and think “someone must have built a house here long ago…”

No wonder this terrain has been a substitute for alien planets in dozens of sci-fi films, of budgets high and low.

Eventually I reached the hotel. It was raining heavily when I propped the bike outside. The place was crowded, which was disorienting after my long solitary ride. Everyone indoors was walking around in slippers, or bare socks, or wearing shoe covers. Apparently there was a serious problem with tracking in the volcanic soil.

You know you’re back in civilization when you can get Kokteilsósa!

I turned both heaters on full blast and cracked the window, then laid my tent out on the bed. Like a gross-ass bike tourist I did my laundry in the shower, then shuffled things around to dry that as well.

Then it was time for my video chat with my new friend. Feeling weirdly nervous, I joined the hotel wifi and clicked the link.

As soon as my face appeared on the screen, she said, “Oh thank goodness, this isn’t some elaborate catfishing thing. You actually look like you!” I laughed.

She had been serious-looking in the photos. In real time, she smiled and laughed and took equal parts in sharing and asking questions. The give-and-take felt natural.  I knew I was being a bit over-enthusiastic but I couldn’t help it; I was nervous.  We’d only recently started talking, but she actually knew far more about me than anyone I’d been talking to in Iceland for weeks.

I only realized later that she seemed to be much more used to video meetings than I was.  Her setup was composed so that she sat way back from the camera, showing her whole upper body, and she was reclined comfortably.  The arrangement allowed her to express with their hands, and not worry so much about whether eye contact was constantly happening. Also, had she chosen that arrangement so I could confirm that she was the shape she claimed to be? My little hotel room was so small there was no way I could reciprocate.

We talked about the history of London, and the schedule of my road ahead in Iceland.  She talked about the “times of antiquity” and how Europe had plundered other parts of the world to gather artifacts.  She mentioned a book sitting over on her shelf, and recommended it to me.  She’d only gotten partway into it because she’d been reading it during her dissertation time.  She talked about Stephen Fry and some of his writing, and how her sister had accidentally run into him twice, and I mentioned his interview on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.  She didn’t care much for that podcast – the format was too boring – but she always liked Paula Poundstone.  Turns out we’d both seen her live in our youth.  She recommended another podcast called “Behind The Bastards”.

We talked for almost an hour and there wasn’t a second of dead air, which was nice. I had to sign off though, because there was some business to deal with involving my father. We agreed to chat again soon, though I cautioned that I would be entering the highlands and video would probably not work for the next week. The whole thing was delightful; so much so that I instantly began asking myself: “Why are you so far away from this person? Why did you want to go on this trip anyway?” And that, after a pretty amazing day of riding that included a surprise tour of a Viking farm. I had a bit of whiplash.

Then it was time to switch gears again: I had multiple phone appointments with caregivers and healthcare workers. My father and his wife were both struggling with dementia and had multiple people providing different kinds of assistance, and they all needed to be coordinated, and they all needed to be paid through a recalcitrant insurance system, and at the same time I was trying to get my father evaluated so he could potentially move into an “assisted living” home and share an apartment there with his wife.

The process was seriously hampered by the fact that I couldn’t make outgoing calls on my phone from Iceland. I had to contact my sister, who would call the person I needed, then call me up, and merge us into a conference call. Then she stayed on the line making notes, which we sent back and forth in the chat. She couldn’t do the talking for me, because I was the only person who had “power of attorney” and could make decisions about my Dad’s life.

It was a whole lot of stuff about doctor reports, and paperwork filings, and therapy approvals, and lots of arguing over who was qualified to evaluate my father and what it would mean. It dragged out for hours. I was grateful for the time difference at least, since it meant I was catching all these people early in the workday before ennui set in.

When that was done, all I could do was drop onto the sheets in a dead faint, with my laundry arrayed around me. What a weird life I’m leading.

Into the Highlands

As I re-packed my dry tent and clothing, I did my best to compartmentalize the previous day. Between this trip, thoughts of new romance, and my Dad’s care needs, I was being pulled in three directions to three different spots on the planet.

Outside I discovered I wasn’t the only bicyclist launching a serious expedition from this place:

It’s cool how we have similar adventures over similar terrain but create these absurdly customized vehicles. Between that bike and mine, every single component and piece of gear is different.

This sign was one of many, trying to warn away the casual tourists. Gasoline wouldn’t be a problem for me, but food might.

A brief downhill ride gave me a nice panorama of this odd treeless land. How much longer would the road be smooth enough to coast like this? The digital map was showing a sinister dotted line ahead.

Just after the road tilted upward, I met a cyclist going the other way:

He said he was just finishing up the “Iceland Divide“, a route that crosses the interior of the country on mostly unpaved roads and rough trails. There are different versions of the route depending on who you ask, but the one my friend was doing went north-to-south and covered about 350 miles.

“I wanted to do it a year ago with friends,” he said, grinning. “We were planning it forever. But, you know… Pandemic. Now I’m doing it solo. It was easier than I thought. The weather was mild. You’re just doing this road? You’ll be fine! No worries.”

After our conversation, he took off and I decided to walk down the edge of the road and check out another of those amazing moss-covered streams I’ve been seeing all around Iceland:

The carpet-like feel of the moss is amazing. And the sheer volume of it!

I kept thinking of the green shag rug that used to be in the living room of my childhood home.

The road curved away from the lake, and the land on either side became what I can only call “more Icelandic.” Any vegetation taller than a hand faded away, leaving only moss and scattered blades of grass on the rounded hillsides. Every now and then the lumpy hills would gather up into a peak, with a fuzzy streak of green crowning the windward side like the hair of a balding giant. Elsewhere in deep folds where streams cut the hills, thick beds of fresh moss glowed with a green so intense it seemed unnatural, even dangerous, like the water feeding them was too powerfully enchanted and would melt down your body if you were foolish enough to be seduced by it.

Beware, traveler! You are in the realm of the Gods now…

In a couple of hours, I crossed a bridge and the high-quality pavement turned into hard earth coated with gravel. It was bad for my narrow tires, but I decided to push ahead. At least the gravel wasn’t thick, which would force me to dismount and walk.

I was rewarded for my persistence with a weird sight: Two rivers carrying different kinds of dissolved rock were slowly mixing together in a lake.

I paused to walk around, and discovered some kind of busted-up footing right on the edge of a cliff, as though years ago some extremely Nordic locals had installed a diving board.

It was lovely and I took plenty of pictures. I also picked up lots of rocks, and I swear, every dang time I turned one over there was a spider attached.

Just after this spot, the road pitched upward and the gravel became loose. I pushed the pedals to give my rear tire more traction, but I still lost control of the bike multiple times and had to put my feet down in a hurry.

I had to dismount the bike and push awkwardly through the carpet of gravel, as the road switchbacked up away from the lake. This was bad. If the road stayed like this and I had to push the bike for the rest of the day, it would be well after midnight before I got to the Landmannalaugar campground and I would be brutally tired. Making things worse, the cloud cover would combine with the dark shade of the land to obscure the road, and I would be pushing the bike too slowly to operate the generator in the wheel. I would have to find my way by putting my USB flashlight on my helmet and swiveling it all around.

To my great relief, I only had to push for another half an hour. The road went over a hill and the gravel thinned out on the other side as the ground became more rocky.

It also got even more ruggedly beautiful.

I could ride – slowly – for the rest of the day, but there were still patches where the mud or the gravel would suddenly thicken and I would have to flail wildly and stop. Falling over on a loaded bike is always dangerous, even at just a few miles per hour. Your limbs could tangle up in just the wrong way and you could sprain something terribly, or something small might fling itself out of your bags and you won’t notice until five hours later. Or worst of all, you could fall over while a car is trying to pass you, and get crushed by a driver with no time to react.

Bike touring! I’m doing a great job selling it, yeah?

Seriously, though. I grumbled a bit whenever the bike lurched, but the landscape was just magical. I paired it with the soundtrack to “The Black Cauldron” in my headphones and had a marvelous time.

Soon I passed into the official nature reserve lands.

Just beyond the sign was a rushing river, moving alongside the road. In my head I worried: “Is this the sort of thing I’m going to have to cross with the bike?”

The day moved on, and got darker, but never fully dark of course. The road was rough but intact. If I was back home and saw a road with this texture under this much rain, I would never attempt it on a bike, but the soil here was different. What looked like thick mud was actually more like hard-packed volcanic sand.

When I reached the turnoff to the Landmannalaugar campground in the center of the preserve, I’d been on the bike for over 8 hours, and my GPS needed charging.

The terrain was so neat – and the road so hilariously rutted – that I had to make a short video.

The final approach to the campground involved fjording a sizable puddle, fed by a small river. It would have swamped my saddlebags, so I diverted to the pedestrian path and crossed a cute little bridge instead.

When I rolled into the camping area I beheld a long row of parked vans and trucks, and a flat valley scattered randomly with tents of all kinds. There were no marked spaces. Some areas were turf suitable for anchoring a tent; others were washes of gravel. Campers had obviously tried to find a balance between usable ground and isolation from neighbors.

On the far side of the valley I found a cluster of buildings, next to a few trailheads that wandered away into the hills. It was the facilities of an RV park: Stall showers, sinks for washing dinnerware, a few tables sheltered from the weather, and a small shop with some basic hiking gear. This would do nicely, except so far I couldn’t see any sources of food.

I also noted that one could embark on several milti-day hikes from this spot. I wondered how many people in a typical season took a shuttle up here and then walked back down to the coast. Sounds like a cool adventure!

I finished my survey, and got busy with the tent. It wasn’t very hard to find a decent spot of open ground. As soon as I crawled inside I felt the wind pick up dramatically, and it was pushing one wall down against my head, so I had to get up and rotate everything.

While I was doing that, a guy crawled into a tent near mine and started playing an audiobook in German, loudly enough to disturb other campers. A few minutes later a guy crawled out of a different tent, trudged over, and asked him to turn off his book, speaking English with a thick Polish accent. Interesting to hear it used as a common language.

I went back inside, snug in my long johns and sleeping bag, and listened to a very mild rain pattering on the skin of the tent, sounding like pitched-down radio static.

Half an hour later, just as I was falling asleep, I heard a man yelling in the distance. He sounded drunk and overtired: Somewhere between happy, furious, and insane. His voice echoed all over the valley. He would gibber for a few seconds and then go quiet for a minute or so, then start up again. A few other people yelled at him but it had no effect.

“Glad I brought earplugs,” I thought, and stuffed them in. A while after that the temperature dropped and I dug out my wool hat.

I dreamed there was a kitten sleeping on my head.

Exploring On Foot For A Change

When I stepped out of the tent I could see so much more around me it was like being in a different place.

I checked in with the campsite manager and paid for my previous night. I wasn’t sure if I could stay here another day, since I was low on food. Riding all day on sketchy terrain with zero calories can get dangerous!

I did some sink laundry and hung it up, then went exploring again. There was another cluster of buildings farther down the valley I hadn’t seen.

There was a lot of activity. People in vans and trucks were arriving on a regular basis, pushing their way carefully through the giant puddle at the entrance.

Eventually I found the most useful building in the area:

A cluster of buses turned into a provisions shop!

Boy was I glad to see this. Now I could stay another day!

The best protein supply I could find was tinned fish, so I bought lots of that plus some crackers, and a few cups of instant noodles.

Now I could afford a more casual walk around.

I’ve deployed the folding chair and footstool to get some remote work done in all kinds of weird places, but this spot beats them all!

I programmed for a few good hours. Sometimes I’d look up and see another crazy tourist enjoying the landscape around me, and snap a photo:

On my way back to camp I passed one of the notorious hot springs.

I had a swimsuit, but the spring looked crowded and uncomfortable to me. I decided to skip it.

The prominent warning about itchy parasites reinforced my decision.

The water feeding into the spring was lovely, though. A big chunk of the valley was threaded with tiny streams, some of which were clearly way above ambient temperature and hosting some interesting life forms. I wandered among fluffy sheep and other quiet hikers, enjoying the heat of the sun and water mixing with the cool air and the shadows from the peaks.

Tourists arrived and departed constantly, all day. Every time, spectators would pause and turn their heads to watch the minor drama of a vehicle fording the stream.

I’d done enough wandering around on flat land. Time to climb some hills!

Just look at those hills! Gotta get up in them thar hills! Let’s do some footwork that isn’t pedaling!

The local maps showed a network of major hiking trails, taking off in different directions and promising multiple days of rough cabin camping, plus a few looping paths that went out into the lava field to the west and up along the ridge line.

I lingered by the ranger station and listened to people ask questions about the weather, the terrain, the daylight, the landmarks, and so on. The variety of broken forms of English was fascinating.

Eventually I decided it would be more fun just following the bank of the river on the north side of the valley for a while, rather than doing a loop trail. All of them felt longer than I wanted, since I tend to walk very slowly and inspect the ground and wave the camera everywhere.

I swapped some kit out back at the tent, and started some Skyrim music on my headphones because I’m hopelessly metropolitan. The shoreline was easy to follow. True to form, I spent half the time with my head bent down staring delightedly at tiny weird plants and textures of rock that were familiar in context but alien in detail.

Eventually I climbed up the hillside and walked out along the top of the lava field. Actually, “top” is the wrong word: It was a massive tangle of ridges, like a stormy sea frozen in place, coated with rock, and then squished together.

These were absolutely stunning rock formations. More than the whimsical terrain of Skyrim I was reminded of the crumpled life-on-top-of-life set design in The Dark Crystal. Picking my way carefully, I had to concentrate intensely on keeping my sense of direction, because If I took more than two steps in a straight line I would tumble into one of countless steep fissures obscured by pillows of moss and lined with jagged rocks like broken glass.

As I drew closer to an established path, backtracking and jumping over gaps, it became very clear that this landscape was both too dangerous and too fragile for people to go hiking across like I was trying to do. The risk of cutting my leg open and falling into a hole just deep enough to stop my voice from projecting anywhere but straight up felt so great, it almost felt inevitable; as if the lava field was actually a labyrinth designed by some spiteful artist to keep misbehaving explorers trapped and confused … until it extracted a price in blood.

IN BLOOD! BOOHAHAH HAA HAA HA HAAA!!!

If I’d been a good tourist and read all the signs beforehand I would have known that being here was frowned upon. Every footprint compacts the soil and makes it harder for the meager plant cover to persist. I only realized my error afterward when I came back down along a sanctioned trail and saw the sign. Oops…

Thank goodness I got back safely. I’d been foolish. If I went missing, no one would wonder about me for weeks, and no one would go looking for me for months.

The trip back to the campground was trivial. Just walk along the trail, and grab the guide rope if you want. I did have one frightening moment: I came around the corner and saw the wooly butts of some sheep standing together and mistook them for a black bear. Finding a black bear in Iceland was completely impossible, regardless of the era, but my instincts were tuned for wandering in the California mountains. I laughed it off but it took a while for my heart to stop pounding.

Close to the ranger station I got a good look at one of the built-up water spigots feeding the pools. Years of mineral build-up and clouds of steam gave a clear signal that this water was very, very hot.

In the evening I re-packed my stuff for a smooth morning departure, and organized my photos. These ritualistic movements gave me time to revisit some earlier thoughts about communication and ecological change.

As recently as my father’s generation, the main problem with humanity on a global scale was that most people just had no idea what was happening out there.  Humans have been gobsmackingly ignorant of their impact for 99% of human history, and our ability to really make change on a global scale, and adjust to keep changes from backfiring, is a recent development.  Recent enough that we still don’t even know the scope of our problems or what we’re capable of. We’re discovering it as we go; as I live and write this.

This situation only exists because communications technology has improved at a pace comparable to our environmental impact. We have global-scale economies now, relying on fast global communication. We have “breaking news” available all the way around the planet. A producer of grain on one side of the world can get compensated for it by customers on the other side. But economics on this scale has also made us vulnerable to disruption by human conflict — especially conflict over land, and especially when that becomes open warfare.

The environment can bounce back from war.  Some of the worst battles of World War II happened on sites that reverted to farmland in a few decades. But humans, on the other hand, are fragile: Deprive us of food for a couple months and we’re goners. Block a couple of massive grain shipments from a few crucial ports on one side of the globe, and suddenly ten million people are in danger of starving on the other side. Any number of us could be held ransom at any time by a sufficiently armed warlord. The flexibility of our communications might allow us to adapt, but it might not. If that grain is held up too long and rots, some people, somewhere, are going to starve, and the commerce over the wires is just going to be about who specifically.

So, the same miraculous technology that might have rescued me if I fell down a ravine today drives a global economy that – like my own body – has enormous reach, and is also terribly vulnerable.

And, somewhere in the middle of this micro- and macroscopic view, our communications technology is responsible for making me – and tens of thousands of tourists around me – aware that Iceland exists as a tourist destination. I like to think of myself as an environmentally conscious person, but if I truly prioritized sustainability and the environmental sanctity of Iceland… I would not be here at all, right? If I truly worried about the fragility of a globally wired economy, why would I be feeding the demand for food and tchotchkes in Iceland — a place that would starve terribly if the shipping lanes were cut off? Is the point of coming here to realize that I shouldn’t?

It seems an obvious case of hypocrisy. And it would be, if we left the lid closed on our ideas about economy and conservation. But: If the overriding goal is to preserve, for example, this lava field from all human interference, a crucial stepping stone towards that goal is making humans give a crap about the lava field in the first place. And given that if you take the long view, the planet could shake us off like a case of fleas and keep trucking along for another 600 million years (at which point the sun will be bright enough to interfere with the carbon cycle of the planet, and all plant and animal life as we know it will be permanently extinguished regardless of what we do) … then the question of whether humans should give a crap about a lava field is very much open for debate when there are mouths to feed and lives to live here in the present.

So, putting pictures of a lava field all over the internet, busing people up to it, and then threading rope-guided tails across it so humans can admire it and feel humbled and refreshed by it and get attached to it … doesn’t seem like a bad move.

Because, frankly, it worked. This is an amazing valley and I’m glad I came here. And I’m grateful for the struggle Icelanders are waging to balance global interest and investment against the soiling of their own back yard by millions of curious feet. And all this has made me think about a bigger picture, just as it will do for others. Not everyone, sure. And maybe not immediately, or directly.

But it does work.