A Long Flight, a Barrel Roll, & Bookstores

It’s early afternoon, and I’ve given up on exploring because I’m so tired that I basically want to either go to sleep or die. It’ll be over an hour before my room is ready, so I’ve taken a seat in the spacious hotel lobby, tucked away at the far end in a leather armchair. Outside, two dark birds are cavorting. One of them does a barrel roll, and I blink. An actual barrel roll, a twist and there it goes into a full airborne one-eighty. I’ve known that ravens are capable of this but I’ve never seen it, and at first I doubt myself. Did it really barrel roll? Is it really a raven? I’m used to seeing ravens in remote territory, not the middle of downtown. But then, this is Viking land. Later, when I’m unpacking in my room, I’ll hear the unmistakeable throaty caw and feel the pleasure of confirmation. Ravens have welcomed me to Reykjavik.

The hotel itself, Eyja Guldsmeden, is a posh boutique hotel owned by Danes. The aesthetics inspire me to take notes for my own decor: wood floors, natural textures, made vibrant with jewel-tone cushions and vases and rich red rugs. I sit in my armchair and read until my lack of sleep pulls on me so hard that I close both the book and my eyes. I jerk awake a few minutes later. Have I been snoring? Maybe. I’ll continue to doze off and on until my room is ready, at which point a hot shower and several glasses of water will restore me from my jet-lagged misery.

Rewind: The flight from Seattle is slightly delayed, so it’s close to five o’clock when we finally push out from the gate. As we taxi to the runway, the full thrill of my adventure finally settles in me. Until now I’ve been caught up with thoughts about work and plans and relationships, with fretting about my COVID test and making sure all the essential travel preparation is complete. Now, leaning forward to drink in the view from the window, everything falls away but the ecstasy of takeoff. As we taxi, I see a red-tailed hawk jump from a runway sign and work its way up the runway. I would say it’s competing with the planes around it, but that’s silly. It’s a hawk. It doesn’t give a shit about planes, doesn’t have an ego about its own grace. It flies because that’s what hawks do.

Meanwhile, my seatmate confuses me; he’s a tall, moderately plump middle-aged man, and his quiet politeness and meticulous ways are delightful but somehow off, a subliminal contrast to my expectations of the average American businessman. He’s contained in a way that sets me fully at ease. At the end of the flight, I’ll glimpse his passport and suddenly the world will make sense again. He’s Norwegian. I’m gobsmacked at how visible culture is on us, even through the subtlest of interactions.

As the plane approaches Iceland, I bemoan that it’s too dark to get the glorious view of tidal pools and lava fields that I so enjoyed the last two times I landed at Keflavik, but I still watch out the window. The view is interesting despite the darkness, a grayscale of ice and snow and rocky land.

Keflavik airport doesn’t disappoint. It’s clean and quiet; I’m through passport control in two minutes, and although I have the unaccustomed delay of waiting for my checked bag, even that process takes only a few minutes before I’m moving on to my COVID check and then am free. The last time I was here, I waited in a gloriously chilly drizzle for the shuttle bus to the Blue Lagoon the day before the summer solstice; this time, I step outside into a still, dark morning. Cars and asphalt and sidewalks are all covered in a thin rime of ice, and I’m grateful for the grip on my snow boots.

I walk into the silence, completely alone. The air is intoxicating; it smells like ocean and lichen, as clean and cold as the beginning of the world. I walk along the parking lot, turn left to follow signs for “Rental Car Shuttle,” and stop at the end of the path, unsure. Is this the right place? It doesn’t matter. If it’s not, I’ll find it eventually. After a couple minutes, another traveler comes to the same area and stops; he confirms that this is the right place. “This is where they usually pick you up,” he tells me. Usually; he’s been here before, and more than once. Probably several times. I wonder how often, and why, but don’t ask. My own nature is Scandivanian enough that I’m content not to intrude.

The car rental place is about as exciting as any car rental place, although made more charming by the soft edges of the clerks’ Icelandic accents. All the other customers are distinctly American, and while I wait for my vehicle to be ready, I watch the proceedings with mild interest. Americans get a bad wrap, and indeed can be horrible tourists, but what strikes me today is how dang earnest we all are. We want what we want but we’re so enthusiastic about it.

Then my car is ready, a diesel-powered Hyundai Tucson. I load up my bags and adjust the mirrors and then I’m off, driving towards Reykjavik. Traffic gets heavy as I approach the city, the sky gradually lightening with pre-dawn glow, and once the thrill of being on the road fades, the thoughts rise, unbidden: when can I go home? Was a month really a good idea? What was I thinking?

I know the thoughts for what they are, the sourness of exhaustion. I let them wander around my head, grousing, while I keep most of my attention on the road. Once in Reykjavik, I locate the hotel, pull into a parking space, and look at the clock. 8:30am. Check-in is at 3pm.

Okay. No point going in yet, and even if I could get a room I would probably lie down and sleep and demolish my hopes of a quick jet lag adjustment. So I look for a good place to get breakfast; I want something homey, and as un-touristy as possible, and ideally on the water. I find a good candidate and put the car back in gear.

Reykjavik befuddles my eye. I keep fumbling for adjectives: it’s so clean. No… well, yes, but no. Switzerland is clean; this place is something else besides. Pristine? Spare, maybe. For the first 24 hours, my eyes are constantly looking for details that aren’t there. I couldn’t even tell you what the details are, exactly, but I my expectations are constantly off the mark.

It makes the Harpa concert hall that much more striking when I come around a bend in the road and see its asymmetrical shape on the water’s edge, undulating borders in the glass looking like a luminous snakeskin. In the dawn light its glass reflects deep blues and greens, with pops of pink and lavender and cerulean on the north side. I feel my spirit rise, forgetting its melancholy of twenty minutes ago.

Just around the corner from the Harpa is a spit of land crowded (by Reykjavik standards) with shops and industrial parks. I pull up to Kaffivagninn, a restaurant in a little standalone building on the harbor. Inside, my judgment is immediately validated. It feels like any number of neighborhood cafes, simple and homey, the tables crowded in to maximize number of seats rather than ambiance. A long table down the middle of the restaurant is accumulating old Icelanders, a crew of older men who have probably known each other for sixty years or more. They complain and tell jokes and spin tales in Icelandic, the soft consonants somehow comforting despite being the closest thing we have to the old Viking language. One of the men has a black jacket with red embroidery on the back: Slim Shady. EMINEM.

The guy at the register has to point me at the food menu, and at the list of omelette fillings, and at the tea menu. It’s clear my brain has run out of juice. But soon enough, I’m sitting at a table from which I see the distant outline of the famous church, the Hallgrimskirkja; in the harbor are sailboats and yachts, and multicolored shipping boats with Nordic names on the hulls. My mushroom omelette and green tea arrive, and as the food and caffeine do their work on my tired animal body, my desire to flee the country fades.

Fed and watered, I waste no time with my most important stops: just on the other side of this little peninsula are a grocery store and a book store. The grocery store is small but well stocked, and I get a few essentials like tea and skyr. The book store has a tiny English language section, which doesn’t have either of the books I want but does have a road atlas that will probably serve me better than the fold-out National Geographic map I brought with me.

I drive around the edge of the city, and find a spot to park in a neighborhood so I can walk along the water for a while. It’s deceptively cold; I feel like I don’t need that many layers until I walk a hundred feet and realize my hands and face sting. The scant puddles are frozen; not a layer of ice, but frozen through. Small animals could ice skate on them with confidence. I crunch over the black volcanic soil, down over rocks and seaweed coated in frost to the water’s edge, where all I can do is stand and breathe it all in. The sky and the water, the air that smells of leagues of empty ocean.

The beauty of it pushes me up to a high, but soon enough I’m crashing again. I drive to the Nordic House, where I had every intention of exploring for a couple hours more, but the exhaustion pulls me down like a sleeper wave. That’s how I end up back at the hotel, drowsing while ravens do barrel rolls, waiting for my room.

Once I check in, a shower and several glasses of water put me back on track again. I valiantly avoid taking a forbidden nap, instead wandering the city, including finding another book store (they have one of the two books I wanted, Halldór Laxness’ Nobel-prize-winning Independent People, which the clerk tells me “80% of Icelanders have read”) and then have a light dinner at a little vegan Asian restaurant near the hotel.

By seven o’clock I’m quite literally falling asleep while trying to type. It’s time to give in. I put my laptop aside, put my head on the pillow, and in seconds I’m as deeply asleep as I’ve ever been in my life.