Sunrise Breaks My Heart

Sunrise usually breaks my heart. “Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot,” says David Whyte, and at home I’m never ready to let go of the dawn. It leaves too fast and I ache to hold it longer. But here in Iceland, in late November, sunrise is the lover who stays.

It’s the Wednesday morning of my vacation week, and I’m standing at the window with my tea. Orange at the horizon melds into palest blue, darkening up the dome of the sky. Dusky pre-dawn light softens the occasional purple cloud. It’s almost nine; the sun will not rise for another hour and a half, and even then the colors will linger past noon. I am savoring it, my heart at rest.

The wind is howling, as it did all night. Each time it woke me, I drowsily noted that it sounded like the cabin might get picked up and tossed into the darkness, then went back to sleep. The winds have swept away the clouds that grouched over us the past few days, so today will be sunny. Also cold: it’s not predicted to warm above freezing.

Yesterday was a wandering Tuesday. My friend Robert and I drove first to the wide, powerful Faxi waterfall on the Tungufljót river, where more treacherous boardwalks took down one of the tourists walking ahead of us. Then we cut east through irrigated fields, did a quick sortie in the town of Flúðir, and turned north to drive through rocky grazing lands whose hills and hardiness reminded me constantly of Scotland. We stopped at an unmarked parking lot from which we walked down to Brúarhlöð canyon, and by “stopped” I mean sped past the parking lot over a one-lane bridge, realized that was where we meant to stop, turned around in a driveway to a farm, and doubled back to park. We picked our way down a rocky descent the color of rain-slicked charcoal and found ourselves at a quiet bend in the river. We were not far downstream from the mighty Gullfoss waterfall, but this spot felt a world away. Great slabs of stone rose up on either bank, and even without the priming of cartoon movies you would recognize these as immense trolls, frozen by daylight, standing over the river. The water flowed deep here through the canyon, the troll-stones channeling the river into a swift but peaceful flow. In all my time in Iceland I never yearned so hard for a kayak. Water eddies glugged now and then, syncopating under the steady sound of water against smooth rock. Unlike the bright icy colors of the Brúará waterfalls earlier in the week, here the glacier melt was a flat seafoam, as if moss had been cooked down to a milky soup.

We climbed back up the slope and made a short excursion up a sheep trail, over frozen mud inscribed with small hoof marks and generous piles of spherical droppings. From above, we could see where the canyon emptied out into wide, shallow rapids, and could just hear their music.

Next we drove north and east, upstream on the same river to Gullfoss. Up here, at higher altitude, the intermittent rain we’d had most of the day was expressing itself as big, wet snowflakes. We got out of the car and teetered across the frozen parking lot to look at the falls.

In just ten days since my last visit here, I’d forgotten Gullfoss’ immensity. It’s a waterfall that does not lend itself to photography; it is too wide, too deep, too confounding of the flat canvas of an amateur photographer’s lens. The eye does not understand that this image is not of mere rapids, not of a mere waterfall; it’s a crush of water tumbling off a giant’s shelf. The river here is nearly three American football fields wide, and the falls angle to each other, dumping water to one side and then the other and then back again across vast swaths of stone.

On this day, the driving snow fuzzed out the stretch of river ahead of us, narrowing attention to just the falls themselves. We peered down at the main tumble of water down into the canyon, the bottom eclipsed by the crazy angles of the canyon walls, then tromped over to the far overlook to stare at the grand stretch where the falls began.

By that point I was getting hungry, not quite to the point of grouchy but within sight of it. We drove to a restaurant I’ve been wanting to try since I arrived, only to find it closed for renovations. So, onward: we found a hotel restaurant that offered a “soup buffet,” also known as a pot of soup with bread and butter. Skeptical but hungry, we took a seat in the retro dining room among formica tables and mismatched dining chairs and helped ourselves. The soup turned out to be a delight: a creamy broth base warmed by turmeric and red peppers, made hearty by generous chunks of chicken. The bread was at least as good, thick and chewy, with the rich Icelandic butter I’ve been dreaming about for months.

Thus fortified, I took Robert to explore Geysir, by which I mean I drove us there and sat in the cafe with a decaf latte and croissant while he explored the park. The previous week I wandered Geysir every morning before work, so today I sat at a wooden table next to the gift shop and watched the eddies and flows of tourists passing through.

Afterwards we went back to the cabin and cooked up chicken and roasted vegetables. By now I’d mostly figured out how to cook a decent meal in the tiny but efficient kitchen: how to line the cracked baking dish with foil so the tomato wouldn’t leak into the oven, how to reorder the counter so there was room for each phase of preparation, how to interpret the hieroglyphs on the oven’s dial.

Tonight we talked and talked and talked. Robert and I have been friends for over a dozen years; we met at a theater event when I was recovering from cancer treatment, and he charmed me immediately by assuming my buzz cut was simply an expression of my punk nature rather than a byproduct of chemo. Tonight, as old friends do, we talked about our heartbreaks — ones long past, others foretold but not quite arrived. The things we’ve let go, the things we hope to regain, the things lost forever. Parents and pets and friends and lovers, vocations and homes, aging and moving and the courage to keep banging our heads and hearts against all of it.

Now it’s late dawn on a Wednesday. I finish my tea, load up my backpack with ice cleats and water and extra gloves, and we step outside, crunching across fresh snow. As I put the car in gear, the clouds to the south are brightening to a bubble gum fuchsia. The empty roads and rosy sky make it seem like early morning, not half past nine. I take us south, first on my familiar road to Selfoss, then east on a new route. Two swans wing overhead, their necks as long as this sunrise. We pass through a town with a cluster of greenhouses at its center, glowing butternut bright. After the town is a tiny bridge strung with white lights, a wee Golden Gate, the water beneath us a silvered mirror.

The gorgeous morning that started while I was plugging in the kettle is still maturing as we cross the light-strung bridge. We round a bend and a hill comes into view, a small mountain really. Iron tinges its flanks red, moss shades its lower curves, all of it rendered storybook beautiful by the soft predawn, and I think to myself that this is the most beautiful hill, or small mountain, that I’ve ever beheld. It morphs as we drive, revealing a new angle with every hundred meters, and then it is behind us and we’re speeding through milky light towards the intersection with 31, which will take us south to the Ring Road and on to Vik.

We drive mostly in silence, awed at the landscape. The Ring Road takes us across coastal flatlands as the sun peeks above the horizon, with the snowy southern mountains rising to our left. Occasional mesas rise from the flat fields, lumpish gingerbread cakes baked by a determined ten-year-old who dumped powdered sugar on top. We approach a jutting piece of mountain and catch sight of our first waterfall of the day, Seljalandsfoss, plunging over the edge of the mountain, grand enough to be plainly visible in the distance.

We park, and as soon as we get out of the car it’s cold cold cold cold cold. The air is cold, the wind is fiercely cold, the sun is a cold orb hovering on a cold sea. We hustle past the beverage truck, face and fingers already sharp, and I determine that I shall have a hot chocolate to warm up on the way back to the car. We navigate around other tourists and approach the waterfall.

Seljalandsfoss’ generous spray has laid down a thick and unforgiving layer of ice on the walkways. After a few teeters and totters I stop and put on my ice cleats. Robert’s microspikes, purchased cheap at a clothing store in Hveragerði, have already come apart, so after we climb the metal staircase approaching the waterfall, he turns back rather than risk life and limb on the slick path. I continue, marvelling at the brave/idiotic souls who are attempting this terrain in mere hiking boots. They are, by turns, slipping, sliding, creeping, crouching, scrambling, and in one case lying flat on the ground in a state of bemused acquiescence.

My cleats serve me well, and I simply walk. I’m proud enough of my gear that in other circumstances I might even strut, but as I clomp into the cove behind the waterfall, I’m too little-kid delighted for arrogance. Basalt rises above me, the moss and grasses thickly iced. The top of the cove juts out, cathedral height above me, forming a ledge over which water seethes before slamming into a black pool.

I never want to leave. I want to scurry down to the water, pace back and forth, set up a chair and stare at the water for an hour, two, three. Dark red-brown rocks descend to the pool, curve around me, all mirrored by ice. As I work around to the far edge of the cove, I see that I could climb up the opposite side, emerge onto a walkway, and descend a set of wooden staircases. I’m exhilarated, in love with the place, and I want to complete the circuit, but the wind is blowing the water in wide curtains across the ascent on this side. I decide that starting the day drenched is probably unwise, given the temperatures and my lack of foresight in not bringing extra clothes. I pause to admire the alien shapes of the frozen plants fuzzing the wall of the cove and then double back, trusty cleats biting into the ice. I edge past clots of tourists taking photos of each other and themselves and the waterfall.

I find Robert and we walk in front of the waterfall to the icy wooden staircases on the far side. The lower steps are wide planks set into the cold earth; then there’s a landing and a steeper staircase up to a platform. The steeper stairs have a wooden railing that’s wrapped with a finger’s width of solid ice, and the bottom step sags into a curve whose sheath of ice sends more than one tourist sprawling on their backside while we’re there. I climb to the landing at the top, where wind blows curtains of water across me and I end up half drenched after all. May as well have come up from behind. But I find I don’t care. This place is alive, too vivid for me to care about the drenching, the tourists, the cold ache in my hands. By the time I descend the stairs, the water has frozen in chunky crystals on my backpack and cleats. A thin rind of ice runs down the sleeves of my coat. I’m laughing and astonished and fully awake.

When we pass the beverage cart, I don’t want hot chocolate anymore.

The next stop is another waterfall, Skógafoss. I’m more prepared for the blast of freezing air when we get out of the car, although the ice on my coat and shoes has melted during the drive so I’m now cold and slightly damp. We walk over to the base of the waterfall, this one shorter than the last but equally stunning. Same as Seljalandsfoss, the water plunges over a ledge above us, but here instead of being able to walk behind the falls, we can hike up to view them from above. We walk carefully across more glassy black rocks to the base of the stairs leading up. The first dozen stairs are two feet high, fashioned from dirt held into shape by vertical planks. I comment to Robert that I don’t need to do my box step-ups this week; step step STEP, step step STEP. Then we reach another metal staircase, standard issue for Icelandic waterfalls: a metal grid with textured circles down the center. The staircase has one railing, sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, with just a low cord on the opposite side. In some places the staircase wobbles side to side under the weight of its pedestrians. As a pedestrian myself, I’m not a big fan of this feature. I go slow and steady, breathing through my nose as I’ve been taught, keeping my heart rate where I can sustain it. I pause every twenty or thirty steps to empty alarming volumes from my nose into a handkerchief. The theme of this entire trip could be “waterfalls and snot.”

To my delight, the path does not stop at the top of the stairs. I push past the main overlook, eager to see what lies beyond. If I was exhilarated at the first waterfall, here I’m reaching religious levels of ecstasy. The wind blasts us from the cold heart of the country, pushing so hard that at times I can almost rest my full weight into its arms. I pull back my hood, wanting to be closer to the air, less encumbered. I pull off my beanie, at first because I fear it will get blown away but then also because I love the wind’s fingers in my naked hair. The river flows in rocky rapids that stair step down to the final plunge. Thick ice crusts have formed in the lee of many of the rocks, white punctuation marks in the purple-blue water. The water is the color of a vein and just as pulsing with life.

These twisting rapids are, to me, better than the overcrowded grandiosity of the main waterfalls. I yearn to walk out to the edge of the outcroppings to get a closer view, but there’s a distinct possibility that I would be blown off the steep bank into the river below. I want to be one with this river, but metaphorically.

What saves me from heartbreak here, as so many other days on this trip, is this thought: I’ll come back. I can hike this river next year, or the year after. Whether true or not, the possibility comforts me. So we turn around at a bend in the trail. We spend a few minutes at the main overlook, staring down through the metal grid at the black water many stories below, and then work our way back down the stairs. By the time we reach the car, the wind has blown my coat and shoes completely dry.

We drive on to Vik, a big town by Ring Road standards but a sleepy hamlet even compared to towns on the Oregon coast. We stop briefly, parking behind a dour tourist pit stop, and walk out to the black sand beach. The views here are adequate, but not enough to hold us. We survey the stretch of sand and affirm to each other, “Yup. That sand is black.”

We’ve reached the easternmost point in our journey. After this brief stop we double back to Reynisfjara Beach, which on Google Maps bears the incongruous icon of a striped umbrella and beach ball. Reynisfjara was a major filming location for Game of Thrones, which has inflated its tourist appeal to absurd proportions. I’ve seen exactly one episode of Game of Thrones, and have a little bit of that “whatever the cool kids are doing is too cool to be interesting to me” vibe going on. When we arrive, dozens of tourists are climbing up on basalt columns to get overexposed photos of themselves; I can’t be bothered.

But I discover a different appeal. For all my life I’ve had intense recurring dreams of being overtaken by an unexpected ocean wave. And several people — not to mention the big red sign when we approached the beach — have warned me about the rip currents and sneaker waves that catch visitors off guard. “There are lots of accidents there,” one Icelander told me, with alarming vagueness. So while Robert admires the rock formations in the sea and the dramatic caves and columns to our left, I stalk the the beach, attention laser-focused on the shape and force of the waves. My caution is formed of several strands: first, a desire to be sharper than the swarm of tourists, who seem heedless of the wily ocean; second, the visceral fear of a wave sneaking up the beach and tugging me irresistibly into the depths; thirdly, a contradictory thrill-seeking hope that a wave will indeed sweep up the shore and that I will escape with my life, but just barely.

Amidst all this oceanic side-eye, I find the energy to study the fine black sand, strewn with rivers of black pebbles. I’m willing to turn my back on the waves long enough to crane my neck and marvel at the terns and gulls wheeling above us, flocking on the charcoal cliffs, settling on the lines of basalt that look as if an obsessive giant scratched careful patterns into the towering cliffs. But always, always with one beady eye on the tumultuous waves behind us.

We leave the black sand beach well after I would normally have eaten lunch. (“I learned something about you on this trip,” Robert will later tell me. “Feed Beth.”) The next hour reinforces yesterday’s lesson that a person should not wing it when it comes to finding food in remote areas of Iceland. Some restaurants we pass aren’t obvious until we’ve already sped past. Others are closed for renovations, or closed because it’s not between eleven and one, or closed because why not? My mood is on a steady downward trend from the euphoria of the first two waterfalls to a glucose-deprived melancholy. Finally we find an open cafe. Their menu is small, but they have another soup buffet. The pot of soup holds a leek consommé, not as hearty as we enjoyed yesterday, but hot and ready to eat. The bread is thick and flavorful, and the butter is as Icelandic as ever. I’m ready for hot chocolate now, and order a cheerful rounded mug filled with rich cocoa goodness, topped with a perfect snowcap of swirling whipped cream. Soon my mood evens out, restored by warmth and food and the modest caffeine in the chocolate, and I feel ready to drive us the remaining hour to the cabin.

The final hour of the drive is quiet. High clouds have drawn across the sun, thinning the light. We drive across the little bridge strung with lights, past the glow of greenhouses, back to familiar roads. Back at the cabin, I make us open-faced sandwiches with leftover chicken and bread that we filched (with permission) from the soup buffet.

By six, the light is gone. Night settles over Úthlíð.

The opening David Whyte quote is from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everday Words. I recommend listening to in the audio version; Whyte’s voice and reading style are uniquely wonderful. Read excerpts on the Marginalian or the entirety of the terrible, soul-restoring piece on heartbreak.