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A Winter’s Tale

All of this was amid profound stillness, as if the silence of Iceland’s empty center was flowing out into the coastal settlements.

By the time I left for the northern town of Akureyri, I was enthralled with the otherworldly atmosphere and ready to believe anything. Though when I arrived, I didn’t believe I’d made a smart move.

Akureyri’s boosters brag that it is Iceland’s second-biggest city. What they avoid mentioning is that it has just 15,000 people. The only cinema was showing films so stupid that even I, who enjoyed “Dude, Where’s My Car?”, couldn’t see coughing up money for them—especially since movies, like everything else in the country, cost a bundle.

Going to a bar, my reliable default strategy when at loose ends, seemed unwise: in Iceland, “happy hour” means a glass of beer drops to about US$8. Life didn’t look promising, and the next bus out didn’t leave for two days.

The next day, lacking other ideas, I headed for the edge of town, where a fine path appeared, along the lower edge of a range of flat-topped mountains that rippled back from a fjord toward Iceland’s vast, uninhabited center.

Wind-driven slate clouds seethed over the mountains toward me, but swerved abruptly before reaching me, leaving blue sky above and the air perfectly still around me, as if a spell had been cast. I walked a couple of hours, not just killing time anymore but pulled by the sense that something was waiting for me in the interior: a chapel, a cup of tea at a peaceful hut, a loyal dog.

The feeling was amorphous but intense, like a teenager’s belief in true love. If there had been a soundtrack, it would have been a choir holding a single tonic chord.

The sky slid from turquoise to amethyst en route to black; going further would be romantic but foolish, heading back would be prudent but spiritless. A rock padded with moss made a nice place to sit and figure out a compromise.

Taking photos seemed right: I could do the safe thing and return to town, knowing that I’d have lovely pictures to look at that would someday spur me to come back and take the trail to its real end.

Up the fjord loomed a mountain whose shoulder wore a stole of white cloud; the mountain I would aim to reach someday. But when I checked my digital camera’s screen after clicking the shutter, the mountain wasn’t on it. A couple of adjustments didn’t help.

True, it was a second-rate camera in the hands of a third-rate shooter—but still, missing a 2,000-foot mass of rock seemed like more than incompetence. The accumulated oddities of the day spooked me—the storm that never came, the silent siren call, the elusive mountain—and I began to worry about a question I’d failed to ask Osk: How do you know if you’re on one of the mountains where the huldufolk work their wiles?

A soft scraping noise broke through the hush, and another, and in moments a woman came running out of the empty mountains in just shorts and a halter despite the freezing air and in another instant she zoomed out of sight. Although she’d be judged as homely by a guy prowling in a bar, she was extraordinary out here: strong, with an easy stride and a luminous smile as she relished her gracefulness.

They look exactly like us, except they’re much more beautiful.

Her passing was so quick, I didn’t even think to try to snap a photo. All to the better: If she’d shown up in my camera, that would prove my thrill was just a spasm of overheated imagination.

Instead, I have the luxury of not knowing.

What I do know is that the dreams about being unable to reach Iceland haven’t come back.

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Photos Courtesy:  REUTERS  |  iStockPhoto  |  flickr  

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