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A Winter’s Tale

01.11.05 | 12:51 AM ET

In a wash of gray, a treeless lava field melded into the sky as the weak sun crept below the sea. The four-hour day was closing and a handful of American tourists on a tour bus with me gazed dully out the windows, clearly less than enchanted with wintertime Iceland.

Our minder, Osk Vilhjalmsdottir, was trying to engage the gang by recounting some folk legends. Among these were the malevolent Christmas Cat, who inexplicably eats people if they don’t get gifts, and the huldufolk—the “hidden people” who live invisibly on certain mountains and occasionally appear out of some parallel dimension to seduce hapless humans to come to The Other Side.

You recognize the huldufolk this way, she said: “They look exactly like us, except they’re much more beautiful.”

This incongruous statement didn’t prod the other tourists out of their listlessness—they didn’t perk up until Osk mentioned the bus could drop us off at the shopping mall.

But I couldn’t get it out of my mind and it still dogged me an hour later as the rest of the bus debarked at the mall, some of the women chuckling as if they were doing something clever and risque.

These cryptic words were exactly what I wanted from Iceland, why I’d come when the country is locked in darkness. Ever since Iceland popped up in my 4th-grade geography book, I’d been infatuated, feeling that information I needed to know was held somewhere in its remote, austere expanse. The book’s single sentence on how Reykjavik is heated by scalding water from the Earth’s core hinted at primal power more thrilling than my suburban life of tract houses and finicky flowerbeds had led me to expect.

At age 9, I didn’t know the word “epiphany,” but I knew that’s what I hoped was waiting for me in Iceland.

Thirty-odd years later I made two summertime trips there. Although I was delighted—the play of subtly changing round-the-clock light on the severe mountains; sheep grazing near thin, shining waterfalls; steam shooting from cracks in the earth—I’d left each time gnawed by the sense that I’d somehow missed its essence, the galvanizing moment.

Every couple of months I’d dream of Iceland, seeing it riding on the horizon and feeling it to be unreachable. The sense that I couldn’t get to a place I’d already been to puzzled me; what was I doing wrong?

Maybe I’d just held a childhood fancy embarrassingly long into adulthood. Or I’d misunderstood what travel, even as a tourist, is supposed to be about—should I have gone to Iceland with the aim of disinterested learning rather than hoping to be enraptured?

This maundering led nowehere and I concocted a theory as a way out: I’d erred by visiting Iceland in its most benign season; to reach a country’s emotional core maybe one needs to visit in its most difficult conditions, the weather that placed the greatest challenge on its people to be inventive and cooperative. So I headed off in the depths of December for one more try at the Iceland I yearned for.

Osk’s elliptical comment on my first day there seemed like a promising indication that my theory was sound. In subsequent days, as I explored without a clot of other tourists in tow, my confidence rose.

I began to regard Osk’s strange tales as realistic accounts rather than fancy: winter Iceland is shot through with agreeable eeriness.

For Advent, Icelanders place red-lighted crosses at cemetery graves, so the fields of the dead have a warm and welcoming aura while nearby white-lighted houses of the living seem cold and lonesome. A snow-caked dog stands in an empty field, wagging its tail at something unseen. The chill sky stays black for hours, then rips open in swirling spears of orange and purple and green—the aurora borealis.

In the few hours of daylight, the air is so clear that far-off mountains seem just a few blocks away, like the truncated distances one experiences in dreams. Even hip, high-tech Reykjavik was uncanny in December. The simple lines of its trim white buildings stood out against the obsidian night as precisely as an etching, and seeing people move on the street was like watching an architectural drawing come to life.

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Photos Courtesy:  REUTERS  |  iStockPhoto  |  flickr  

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