As Orion's sword passes directly overhead, I know it's time to get up. Most nights I have ample opportunity to track the stars' progress. Malaria is endemic to these East African plains, but after a couple weeks of Larium induced dreams featuring iridescent game-show host piranha and a flying carpet song-and-dance routine, I wonder how the disease could be much more disconcerting than the cure. Most mornings I'm left awake, alert and questioning my sanity.
Sunrise is still more than an hour away when I crawl from the tent, look for the first glow to the east and put on the coffee. I've mastered a system where I can tear down and stow my tent and sleeping bag and have the truck packed just as the water boils. Three tablespoons of Blue Mountain ground, two cubes of sugar and a splash of milk and I'm off. In the gloom I run into a termite mound hidden in the grass, spilling the assembled scalding ingredients onto my lap.
The hotel is a tiny concrete slab. Stalin with seasonal affective disorder. The lobby is all Danish surgical ward sterility. The obligatory Icelandic wool sweaters, Viking postcards and tourist twaddle are stacked amidst an expanse of blond wood and chrome.
And the place is utterly deserted. No wandering guests. No one at reception. No one anywhere at all. It’s like a TV news set after hours.
Feeling homesick, I pick up the lobby pay phone and dial home. Just as I start talking, from behind one of the pine slab of a door erupts laughter. Cackling, raucous gales of mirth. Not a soul is stirring anywhere. It’s a little hard to concentrate, standing as I am in the middle of such a perfect metaphor for my experience here in Iceland.
Somewhere close by everyone is have a grand old time, drinking and laughing and screwing on their blustery little island paradise. And I’m standing just outside, staring at my feet and wondering if I said something wrong.
The door swings open and a lone man walks out. Cheeks flushed, he’s wiping away a single tear of laughter. Seeing me he is transformed; assuming what I have taken to be the national expression, that of a Lutheran pastor with fallen arches and a nagging conscience.
He walks through the lobby in funereal silence, and only when he rounds the corner do I hear a single snort of suppressed laughter.
I jumped the fence. I always do. Why is it that picture I want is always just a couple of feet on the other side of where I’m supposed to be? And how was I to know the President was watching.
There he was though, dapper but otherwise undistinguishable from the thinly assembled rabble of tourists out admiring Gullfoss waterfall just like the rest of us on a blustery summer night.
How was I supposed to know El Supremo anyway? Where’s the motorcade? Where’s the beefy guys talking into their sleeves?
I’m not in the habit of breaking the law in front of heads of state, but there I was, blithely hopping fences and scrambling around one of Iceland’s most beloved landmarks. In any civilized country I would have been rightly arrested, imprisoned, flogged and sent packing. But you have to admire a country that doesn’t take itself quite so seriously. Belatedly seeing my error, I slunk up to apologize. El Supremo gave a hearty handshake and laughed it off. But then he turned mean. He invited, no he insisted that I come back to Iceland sometime. In February.
Exchange in downtown Reykjavik in 40 mph gale.
“This is nice.”
‘Oh, ya. It’s like autumn here, this wind. But then it’s raining. Or February. Then it’s cold, too.”
“Oh.”
“And snowing.”
“But at least it’s dark.”
“It’s important to have sometime to look forward to.”
Imagine the Norwegian military conquest of Patagonia and you start to get the idea of this place. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what happened one thousand years ago. The same glaciers and fjords, the same sheep and green hills. The same bloody cold, relentless winds whipping in off an ice-clotted sea.
But it’s the fair-haired sons of Oslo here, not some scruffy band of lisping Castilians. And the lads have grown strong and tall on all the fresh air and herring. Lacking an indigenous population of natives to slaughter, they had to settle on bashing the odd Irish monk. And each other, of course.
But the market for pillage and rape is not what it once was. And the sons of Vikings are now reduced to bashing around in Toyota Land Cruisers tarted up in monster truck drag, with a couple of baby seats in the back.
The presidential motorcade speeds past, consisting of two cops on Harleys and a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham left over from the Nixon Administration. El Supremo is touring downtown Reykjavik in honor of Icelandic Independence Day. The sidewalk cafés are jammed with patrons affecting a studied nonchalance in the face of twenty-knot winds keening in off the North Atlantic.
Onstage it’s battle of the bands here, with white boy rappers taking on with the death metal band next door and some imported Jesus acapella group getting drowned out by the Akuryeri Hillbillies, twanging with all their considerable might.
