I first went to Europe forty years ago this summer. I was a
poor graduate student, so I flew Icelandic, then known as Hippy-Dippy Airlines.
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| In the middle of nowhere, or so I thought in 1972. |
Two-thirds of a lifetime ago, I took off from JFK around 12AM. In what seemed like the
middle of the night, we landed at the Keflavik Airport. I’m a city girl, so I’m
used to SOME sort of activity twenty-four/seven. In Keflavik, it seemed like no
one was home. AND everyone had left in a big hurry.
An imposing Brunhilde of a stewardess yelled over
the loud speaker in a foreign language that made her sound like she was choking
to death. Then she barked her orders in English. All of us were expected to get
off of the plane.
When I tell you that it was pitch black outside, I mean it
was pitch black. I could hardly see to put one foot down in front of the next,
and when I did, it felt like I might fall off the end of the world. I snaked my
way toward the lone beacon of light in the darkness, a tiny hangar.
The only thing open inside—the gift shop! I remember mailing
my husband Terry a postcard with a goat on the top of a mountain. “Love from beautiful
downtown Keflavik,” I wrote. Hardly the most original phrase I’ve ever set down on paper.
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| Moonrock landscape from a bus window in 2012. |
The sun was just beginning to rise as I made my way back to
the plane, having spent a dollar of my hard-earned American money on whatever
Iceland had to offer. As we rose and headed toward Luxembourg City, I stretched
over the empty seat between me and the window, staring hard at the landscape
below. I wondered what it would be like to live in such a place.
A few minutes later, Brunhilde approached me with a tray
containing a plate piled with sickly yellow eggs. I tried to decline, but she
was having none of it. Since she outweighed me by at least seventy pounds, I
decided it was best to accept graciously what she had to offer.
Over the intervening decades, I have often asked myself why
this particular plane ride made such an impression on me. So many things have happened
in the course of my life, most of which I have sloughed off like old skin. But
this memory stuck with me. Was it the Twilight-Zone silence of the place? The Wagnerian
flight attendant? The glacier-pocked, volcanic land that looked the surface of
the moon?
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| Volcano, Westman Island-- more about this later. |
When Terry proposed the idea of a trip to Iceland, after we
watched several shows about the country on the Travel Channel, I thought, “Yes!
I was there once. I want to go again. As long as I don’t have to eat a sheep’s
head with the eye still in it.” Which is apparently a popular fast-food item there.
We saw a movie in Reykjavík (with English subtitles) in which the hero ordered
a one to go from a drive-in window and scooped the eye out first. Yuck!