My sleep is fitful over the following 12 hours. Ensconced in our small room with the storm raging outside, totally removed from time and routine, I feel like a deep-sea diver recovering in a hyperbaric chamber. Jane is snoring; I rise a few times throughout the evening and overnight, checking the status of our clothing (wringing towels and replacing toilet paper as necessary), eating a half-breakfast-half-dinner, and working through my photos from the day. Ultimately, I get plenty of rest and awake feeling refreshed - at four in the morning. Jane is awake by this point as well; we have a long day ahead, but agree to depart only shortly before dawn for the sake of not missing the landscape in the dark. We sit and munch on breakfast in bed while watching Icelandic television, which has two available channels: one is playing The Elephant Man, a 1980 movie about a hideously deformed man and the torment he suffers. The other is Pop Girl, a British teeny-bopper music channel which, for lack of programming at 4 AM, is endlessly looping a saccharine, comically off-tune theme song whose lyrics (reproduced here in their literary entirety) are: "POP GIRL. POP GIRL. POP GIRL." This is all very surreal. Jane bites into her smoked lamb sandwich and promptly decides that traditional Icelandic food is out of any future question for her ("Is this rotten?" "We bought it half a day ago." "I think it's rotten." "It technically might be."). I have better luck with my tuna salad; Jane settles on fruit and another cup of wholesome, nourishing skyr.
At around 6 AM, we pull out of the hotel's dirt driveway and resume our eastward course on the Ring Road. I am driving to afford Jane some more nap time. The weather is beautiful and calm, and the dawn slowly encroaches upon the land as we speed past it, winding through the coastal flatlands, past steep old hills that dominate the landscape, and across an neverending plain of bulbous, ancient lava flows overgrown with delicate moss. "Moss poops," says Jane, who is enjoying the landscape too much to sleep. "They look like moss poops." I take this statement at face value.
Just before we reach the small parish of Kirkjubaejarklaustur ("Church Farm Cloister" - thankfully Klaustur, for short), we turn onto the upland road toward Laki. We will only be traveling the first few miles of this road, if our car will let us, to Fjaðrárgljúfur ("Feather River Canyon"), an imposing, moss-covered ravine carved out by the Fjaðrá River before it winds into the lava plains of the southern coast. Just past a guesthouse on the road, the pavement turns rough, and soon becomes a bumpy gravel ride. We are not far now, and the Volkswagen is sturdy, but the bumps grow uneven, and there are good chunks of ice to dodge, and a slippery final slope to descend. Jane reaches her threshold and transforms into team safety captain ("Okay. Just turn around if you don't think we can make it. Whenever. Feel free. It's your call. How much further?") Carefully, I ease the car into the canyon's trailhead parking lot, which has more potholes than parking spaces. "See, there's an outhouse here, and an informational sign," I say reassuringly; we are the only ones there. Outside the car, the wind gusts down from the mountains towards the plains behind us; yesterday's storm is past, but its ripples reverberate. We don our winter wear and ascend the grassy path; the earth is springy and soft underfoot.
At the top of the cliff, we gaze down the steep canyon walls, the sides of which are blanketed by dark green clumps of moss. Upriver, the canyon curves beyond our view, disappearing into the mountainous highlands; downriver, it widens into a broad channel, and the water passes under a highway bridge and out into the flatlands. Jane climbs a grassy ridge and looks out over the vista to our south - endless moss-covered lava cross-cut by numerous rivers. The coast stretches away beneath us; we can just barely see the Atlantic beyond the barren plain. From the canyon edge, a grassy path extends terrifyingly out into the middle of the ravine, seemingly suspended in mid-air. I look down at the cliff base and see the tell-tale signs of a harsh winter - rock piles and shattered moss clumps evident of cataclysmic erosion. This is not Disney World, and there are no signs, handrails, or fluorescent caution tape. We decide not to take our chances with the canyon path.
On our way out of the canyon, we again tackle the icy slope, and our little VW Golf earns its permanent moniker. "C'mon, Baby!" we both whisper as the little hatchback crawls up the valley. Thankfully, we are soon back on the main highway, Baby none the worse for the wear. We pass Klaustur, a one-roundabout town amidst the rolling moss-covered plains. The Ring Road continues north and then east, winding past farmyards and hamlets, tucked beneath picturesque former sea cliffs dotted with waterfalls - some large cataracts, and some mere rivulets, mountain streams flowing off the cliff edge and being blown skyward by the updraft. In half an hour, we reach the base of Lómagnúpur, a mighty palisade famed as a living stone guardian in Icelandic folklore. We stop by the side of the road just before it curves around the mountain; the mesa, nearly half a mile tall, is utterly imposing.
Once past the mountain, we cross into a truly nightmarish landscape. The road narrows into a massive one-lane bridge as we cross the Skeiðará River; all around us, an expanse of pure black. To our left, we see a titanic sheet of diamond-blue ice, the glacier from which the river originates; it is distant yet impossibly large; I can see a visible width of at least ten miles, and the ice recedes into a gargantuan landmass, a mountainous blue shield upon the island whose size is incomprehensible to me. The Skeiðará sandur (outwash plain) stretches on as far as the eye can see, hellish and desolate. I have seen the infamous helicopter footage of this bridge, its entire kilometer length, crushed and swept away in recent decades by a jökulhlaup - a glacial outburst flood generated when planetary fire wells up inside a continental block of ice, and the latter's barriers break. I shiver as I imagine the entire shield of ice in the distance, transformed into water and mud, raging toward us at a hundred miles per hour. Truly terrifying.
Beyond the bridge, we are in a land of ice. All around us, the sea cliffs and mountains have given way to great azure slabs that we cannot outrun despite miles and miles on the highway - the largest glaciers in all of Europe. We reach Skaftafell (now part of the larger Vatnajökull National Park), entryway into southeast Iceland's mighty ice valleys and glaciated mountain ranges. At the visitor center, we get a cup of hot chocolate and flip through beautiful books of Icelandic photography, but are disappointed to learn that our planned hike - a 1.5-mile walk to Svartifoss ("Black Falls") - is unofficially closed due to icy, muddy conditions. Unofficially being the operative word here, we move Baby to the trailhead and, after a few moments of tenuous investigation, decide to be daring this particular time.
The trail up the mountainside is actually quite passable, and in the muddier segments we are careful to avoid stepping down on wet ground, which would damage the trail with the weight of our bootprints. We ascend along a river with numerous skips and falls, and reaching an open hillside, are rewarded with sweeping views of the glacial outwash plain to our south. Further along, we cross the swollen river of snowmelt along a wooden bridge; the path continues uphill but becomes icier, and in some places we must skirt the path edge and skate along carefully. As we crest the hilltop, the path drops away before us, and we finally see Svartifoss far below in the valley, sitting in its black throne of basalt columns. It is not obvious to us where or how we should descend into the valley; we can plainly see a footbridge in front of the waterfall, but our track disappears high up, into mounds of ice and snow. We trudge along for a few steps, our legs sinking deeper and deeper into the snow, before we decide against continuing. We are unfamiliar with the landscape, and a single slip, loose rock, or hidden crevasse beneath the packed snow could place us in true danger. We sit on a small boulder and spend awhile gazing upon the scene below. On our way back to the car, we look east and west, trying in vain to spot some end to the mighty ice floes surrounding us. We look south, watching as gray clouds blow in rapidly from the coast. The elements are ever-present here - primal, powerful, and utterly apathetic to our presence. We feel dwarfed by the changing weather, and the clouds are visibly sweeping toward us.
We reach our car not a moment too soon. Rain sets in over the span of five seconds, followed by ten seconds of hail, a momentary pause of good weather, then ten more seconds of rain. This basic pattern continues as we drive out of the park and resume the main highway eastward, stopping soon at a gas station for fuel and lunch. We sit inside as the weather moves through its caprices, almost comically. Jane orders a delicious lamb burger with bearnaise sauce, and I order a basic cheeseburger; they come with a generous helpings of paprika-topped, crispy fries. We eat ravenously as a tourist family argues behind us. We purchase more sandwiches (of safe, standard construction), more juice, and a souvenir magnet, and we are eastbound again, Jane at the helm. I turn my shutter speed up and lean out the window, capturing a few tiny glimpses of the southern coast.
Around two in the afternoon, we arrive at the eastern terminus of our road trip - the famous Jökulsárlón (literally "glacial lagoon"), a massive lake of ice created in the wake of a receding glacier. From the parking lot, we climb to the top of a sandy hill, where we encounter gusts that stymie all movement. Far below, the lake shores recede, surrounded by glaciers and mountains on the far two sides. Jane sits on a little bluff on the edge of the lagoon, legs dangling. On the shoreline (and sometimes in the freezing water itself), photographers crouch to frame their shots over slabs of glowing blue ice. I am about to consider doing so myself - I am in the process of taking my ND filter out of its box - when hail suddenly rains down from a totally clear sky, the Icelandic weather mounting a painful, vengeful assault. All of us sprint, laughing or screaming, into the little parking lot cafe. Thirty seconds later, we are given the all-clear.
We move the car just across the highway from the lagoon, where the black beach meets the Atlantic Ocean again. This side of the road is much more isolated and, to me, actually much lovelier than the lagoon proper. The little icebergs that sweep out of the glacial estuary and under the highway bridge are met by ocean waves, which push them - car-sized chunks of them - back up onto the beach. Jane runs forward to touch and walk among the cold, luminous boulders - then dashes back, in fear of the relentless tide.
Heading back west on the highway, we take a right-handed (northward) turnoff that leads toward another glacial lagoon, Fjallsárlón ("Mountain Lagoon"). We find a gravel road, and though it appears eminently passable, we pull over and decide upon the mile walk up the valley - partially in deference to our rental agreement, but also because we are itching to spend more time on foot before the long drive back to Vik. We walk along the track, admiring the mossy terrain and reflecting on our time studying oceanography and earth sciences together in high school. To the east of the glacial cap, a pair of horns rise from the mountainside, two proud spires remaining from an age of ice. We race each other to the top of the hill, and are quite taken aback by the valley below us, studded with rocks and boulders, dropping into a lake before the glacier's face. To the west, the gravel road continues past the crude hilltop parking area; the late afternoon light shines softly across the rolling floodplain below. We spend what feels like an eternity here, silently admiring the landscape.
I take the wheel for our drive back to Vik. On our way, we pass the same blue glaciers, the gaping void of the outwash plain, all the rivers, the streams, the sea cliffs with their teary rivulets, colored in the golden warmth of sundown. Nearing Vik, we make a final stop by the roadside at what appears to be a picnic area. There is enough of a footpath here that we are able to gently creep in among the moss-covered flows without disturbing much vegetation. Sitting there on the lava, we try to imagine a time before all of this existed, back when the distant mountains were the continental shelf, separating Iceland from the sea.
Back in Vik, we stop at Hotel Katla to unload some of our equipment. The lake outside our window is, indeed, quite lovely, especially at sunset. We drive into town and find ourselves a meal of cauliflower soup, fresh loaves of bread, and grilled Arctic char from a local river. At dinner, Jane casually suggests that since we will be returning west via the same route, we could rise extra early to catch what we missed in yesterday's rainstorm - sunrise at the promontory lighthouse near Vik, and if weather permits, an early morning hike to the downed U.S. Navy plane. It is not like Jane to mention rising early, and I feel profoundly in love with her.
