Iceland

It’s almost midnight on the last day of our sabbatical. Over the harbor outside our hotel room in Reykjavik, the sky is beginning to turn a dusty shade of pink and the sea is shimmering with the iridescent purple-green sheen that only seems to show up when the sun is almost but not quite touching the horizon. Exactly eight and a half months ago, I had just deleted Bloomberg off my phone and walked out onto the streets of New York City from Jesse’s apartment to buy us new laptops for our trip, thinking that the lights of the city seemed just a little more brilliant than they usually were. I don’t know what I had imagined our last day to be like (does anyone ever know what last days will be like?), but I think wandering around a seaside town, listening the organ being played in a sunlit church, and watching the sun set over the harbor counts as a pretty good one.

Iceland was a real adventure. Alice came up with the idea to drive around in a camper van for the two weeks in June we still had unplanned while we were in London a little more than a month ago. In some ways it feels like bits of the past nine months have been building up to these last two weeks: getting increasingly used to playing things by ear; practicing my driving; swimming in Antarctic waters; taking photographs by land, sea, and air; learning all about glaciers, icebergs, and volcanoes; and driving through remote landscapes that felt truly in the middle of nowhere; all these little things came together on this last trip that we hadn’t even imagined doing when we set out on our travels last October. I had worried when we booked our flights that arriving back in New York a day and a half before starting work again, having left the afternoon after finishing it nine months ago, would be a bit too punchy. But down to this very last day, this sabbatical has been a process of constantly relearning that the world is big enough and full enough that you take any chance you get to experience more of it.

First night at home

Camper van living was a lot of fun. I’m not sure if the bed was actually comfortable, or if we were just so tired after each day that it felt that way, but I really did look forward to cozily settling into the back of the van each night. Having the freedom to decide where to sleep each night, depending on how we tired we were of driving and how long we had decided to spend at the attractions that day was, in retrospect, the only way to explore Iceland properly. The one downside: on our second last night, a bunch of fruit flies appeared in the van after Alice had already fallen asleep, and I wandered around our campsite in the early glow of sunset, a little after three in the morning, trying to figure out how to build a trap out of a spare mini-bottle of prosecco we had lying around. I eventually gave up and went to bed; they were gone the next morning.

Behind the falls

We saw a lot of waterfalls during our trip. Seljalandsfoss was the first, the most memorable, and as Alice put it, the most interactive. The only thing that can compare to being caught in the full force of a 200-foot waterfall is the time during freshman year when Ramon, Anita, and I ran from Eliot House back to Harvard Yard as the remnants of Hurricane Sandy tore through Boston.

Noodles and spam

We took our camping trip cuisine very seriously. We stayed in Long Island City at Jon and Grace’s during our two days in New York between Albuquerque and Iceland, and took advantage of the Teso Life next to their place to stock up on all sorts of Asian goodies ahead of the trip. Momofuku soy and scallion noodles with fried spam carried us through multiple dinners, and Choco Pies, chestnuts, and packs of spicy konjac-based imitation tripe and tofu filled in the cracks. Jon and Grace also gifted me two packs of Sichuan-style instant noodles. We saw another couple at a campsite eat a dinner of spaghetti noodles, oil, and herbs, and I both felt immensely pleased with our food stock and wondered how often camper vans in Iceland are filled with the scent of mala hotpot (almost certainly not often enough).

Falljökull

There was no time on this sabbatical when the effects of climate change felt more real and pressing than they did on our day around Falljokul, an outlet glacier of Iceland’s largest ice cap, Vatnajokull. Falljokul is the third outlet glacier that our tour company has guided on over the last fifteen years, as the two glaciers closer to base camp at Skaftatell have already melted too much to be able to support safe tourism. Our guide thought that the sort of trip we took, where we could feel comfortable meandering our way around the glacier without a predetermined path, would probably cease to exist in the next few decades as Vatnajokull’s outlet glaciers continued to recede and become less and less structurally sound.

Icefall

For some reason, the sheer scale of glaciers still doesn’t quite compute in my brain. I made the mistake of thinking hundred-foot wide crevasses were animal tracks the first time we saw Antarctic ice cliffs in the distance from our Zodiac; there’s something about the flat whiteness of snow and lack of a reference point that distorts all perspective. On Falljokul, it felt like the crevasses and seracs of the icefall above us just kept growing as we approached them, my guess at the size of any one of these features being surprised to the upside, time and time again, until it was literally in front of me, something I could touch and maybe even climb.

Somewhere past Vestrahorn

The stretch of the Ring Road after Hofn, as it curves along the coastline towards the Eastfjords is amazingly scenic. We rocked out to pop punk as birds drifted alongside us and dramatic volcanic rock formations passed overhead. Eventually we turned onto Highway 929, a stretch of gravel road that took us into what felt like the first true wilderness we’d encountered on the trip. The mist thickened as we climbed higher and higher, and eventually it began to snow. It’s pretty easy to see why the Ring Road is just barely scratching the surface of this country.

The eastern tip

Wildlife photography with my 27mm lens is close to impossible. I don’t have any particularly great photos of the animals on safari, and even in the Galapagos, where you can get as close to the birds and sea lions as you might want, I didn’t love the way any of my photos came out. The puffin colony at Borgarfjörður was the first time I felt like I was able to get the shots I wanted, thanks to the puffins’ total lack of fear of humans and the undulating landscape that often let me get eye-level or even below the birds. Alice and I both loved watching the puffins grab a tuft of grass with their beaks before walking into their little holes for the night.

Circa 1am

We stayed on New York time for most of the trip, waking up around noon each day and sleeping an hour or two after sunrise at three or four in the morning. We arrived in Akureyri a little before one in the morning to find these mountains glowing in the last hints of the sunset, after a day spent applying for our new apartment, driving along the northern coast among lupines and sheep, and soaking in hot springs. The sunset had moved back almost forty minutes since we had landed in Iceland between the summer solstice approaching and our movement towards the north.

Two years later

We spent most of the day on our way towards the Snaefellsnes peninsula driving and writing up our application for our new apartment in New York. I had planned for us to camp just outside of the peninsula, but Alice was feeling energetic and we decided last-minute to push into the peninsula itself. We arrived at Selvallafoss around ten in the evening, just as the sun was beginning to set. The waterfall wasn’t particularly memorable, but something about the light and the landscape really struck me that night; looking back, I think they reminded me of the hour we spent walking through Whistling Straits after dinner on our wedding day.

Berserkjahraun

Our midnight drive through Berserkjahraun might have been my favorite part of the trip. The landscape here was truly otherworldly, the product of volcanic eruptions multiple millennia ago. There was no one else anywhere to be seen, and there was a moment where we could look back and see a sliver of the sea, shining in pastel purples, pinks,  and blues, beyond the mountains.

Shorebirds

Past the Svörtuloft Lighthouse on the western tip of the Snaefellsnes peninsula, we found the Atlantic Ocean shimmering under the late afternoon sun. Hundreds of birds were circling around these cliffs, and all I could think of was a song I used to listen to: I woke up to shorebirds / I must be close to the sea / I walked through the parking lot / Felt the pavement burning my bare feet / I stumbled out eastward / Pushed my way through the reeds / I woke up to shorebirds / I dreamed about drowning at sea. Standing out here might have been the first time that I really felt the end of the sabbatical, as I wondered when the next time I’d hear the crashing of the ocean waves against cliffs like these would be.

Silfra

Meltwater from Iceland’s second largest glacier filters through lava rock for decades before emerging in Silfra. It’s exceptionally clear, and exceptionally cold, though still a few degrees warmer than Antarctic saltwater. We put on drysuits for the first time here and still emerged from the fissure forty minutes later feeling brainfreeze from the outside-in. It was amazing to see how ordinary the Thingvellir valley looks from above, and how dramatic it looks from below.

The end

On our flight back to New York, I found myself instinctively wondering where we’d be off to next after our quick stop back in the city, before realizing that this was the end, at least of this particular time in our lives. But while we’ll put down some roots for now, I think it’s pretty safe to say that there’s another adventure, of one kind or another, waiting for us somewhere down the road. Until then, I guess.