Iceland
I didn't think I was ready for a reopened world until I traveled to the land of fire and ice.
I was terrified of catching COVID at the start of the pandemic. I was afraid of being unable to breathe, of dying alone in a hospital. I don’t know which scared me more: the thought of dying alone or not being able to breathe.
Not being able to catch your breath is a terrible feeling—it’s why I believe drowning is probably the worst way to die. But not being able to breathe while lying in a hospital bed with no one you know there to hold your hand, to tell you everything is going to be OK (even though it isn’t)? That sounds even worse.
Back in March and April of 2020, New York City was so overwhelmed by the pandemic that everyone feared hospitals would have to start rationing the few ventilators they had. Would this mean that doctors would decide who gets a ventilator and who doesn’t, who lives and who dies? I thought about this a lot during the darkest days of quarantine: how do we decide that one person’s life is more worthy of saving than another’s? It scared me because I was pretty sure I would always be on the losing side of that coin toss.
I’m in my 30s (32 to be exact). I have no children. I majored in English, and I am now studying to become a librarian. I live a very insignificant 30-something millennial lifestyle. I’m young and healthy, which might earn me a few points, but if ventilators were scarce and a decision had to be made, I’m pretty sure the life-saving machines would instead go to a mother of 2, a brain surgeon, or a climate scientist. How many of us would have lived our lives differently if we knew our fate rested on whether a doctor believes we deserve a ventilator?
How many of us would have lived our lives differently if we knew our fate rested on whether a doctor believes we deserve a ventilator?
Not that it really works this way—doctors don’t have time to evaluate and compare how patients have lived their lives. Who gets a ventilator and who doesn’t is a split-second decision.
Protocols for making these types of decisions are normally established by a committee to help keep doctors from playing God. We never did run out of ventilators, but NYC hospitals also didn’t have enough staff trained to handle the number of intubations that needed to happen on a daily basis, according to an Atlantic article from December 2020.
Back in March, the bioethicists who make up the New York State Task Force on Life and Law met with the state’s health commission to recommend what should be done if COVID reached the ultimate crisis point. Even though the worst didn’t happen with ventilators, medical professionals were still put in a position to make impossibly hard decisions, because the required declaration from Governor Cuomo to enact the Task Force’s crisis recommendations never came.
I stopped thinking about dying from COVID as I fell into a sort of quarantine routine. In many ways, pandemic life has been good for me. I’ve been able to work from home, exercise when I want, avoid going out on Saturday nights without FOMO. For once, my time has felt like my own. I’ve been able to think about who I really am and what I really want from life. I know this hasn’t been everyone’s experience, that many people desperately need life to get back to normal. But normal has become what I most fear.
I guess you could say that I have reopening anxiety. As more and more people in the U.S. get vaccinated, we’re seeing more and more COVID restrictions disappear. New York City is starting to look like the city it was before.
But I’m not sure I know how to be a person in this reopened world.
I didn’t go to Iceland to test whether I would be ready to travel again. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I quit my job, had some time off before starting a new one, and needed to go somewhere to clear my head. I know there’s no way to escape COVID, but I wanted to go where it would at least feel like I was escaping it. And since we seem to be desensitized to the fact that over 600,000 people have died from the virus here in the U.S., Iceland looked like a utopia. Plus, they’re open to fully-vaccinated tourists.
I’ve wanted to go to Iceland since I was 11. That’s when I discovered Björk’s music and that she came from Reykjavik. I thought (and still do) Björk was the coolest woman on the planet, and I needed to visit the place that gave the world someone so weird and wonderful. In high school, I started listening to more Icelandic bands that made me fall in love with the country even more: Sigur Rós, Of Monsters and Men, Múm, Sólstafir, GusGus, Björk’s former band The Sugarcubes.
I was so set on going to Iceland that I bought a travel guidebook when I was 15. I still have it. I brought it with me on this trip and used it to plan what I wanted to do and see. Apart from prices, I figured that not much about Iceland would have changed over the past 16 years. Of course that’s a crazy thought, not least of all because the world has changed since 2004. I’ve changed. I’m nothing like the girl who longed to go to Iceland when she was in high school, except that I still really wanted to go to Iceland. I guess I also still want to be anywhere but the United States. That hasn’t changed.
The type of change I’m talking about is reinvention. I’ve reinvented myself over and over again, and I’ll continue to do so. In some ways I’m drastically different, I’m new. But at my core I’m still the same, stable. I think this could be true for countries and landscapes, as well. The Iceland I just traveled to couldn’t be the same one that’s written about in my 2004 travel book. It’s a volcanic island, constantly being reinvented by eruptions and earthquakes and climate change. That said, it’s still the country that gave us Björk.
I read an article in The New Yorker a few years ago about a glacier in Iceland that died due to anthropogenic climate change. After a 700-year life, Ok (short for Okjökull) was declared “dead ice” by the glaciologist Oddur Sigdursson in 2014. In 2019, The New Yorker reported on the funeral service people in Iceland gathered together to have for the glacier, to honor its memory. How should humans mourn what we have a hand in destroying? On a deeper level, the article grapples with what we should be doing about climate change in general, as more glaciers in Iceland are destined to die over the next 200 years.
I hiked on the Sólheimajökull glacier in Southern Iceland, which is situated between the 2 volcanoes Karla and Eyjafjallajökull. The tour guide told us how much this glacier has receded in just 10 years, pointing out how far the ice used to extend. I heard several Icelanders tell this same story about different glaciers on my trip: how quickly the’ve melted away, leaving behind a new landscape.
When I started traveling in college, Iceland wasn’t my first trip. I went to England, Ireland, France, Germany, Holland. I went to China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia. Iceland is the 23rd country I’ve visited, despite my lifelong dream of traveling to the land that gave us Björk. I’m not sure why it’s taken me this long.
In my 20s, when I was traveling a lot, Iceland became trendy. Everyone I knew suddenly wanted to go there. Maybe that was it: Iceland no longer felt like my travel dream.
Pandemic travel restrictions made it easy to finally plan a trip to Iceland, because it’s one of the few countries open to fully-vaccinated Americans. I realize this makes me a bit of a hypocrite. My excuse for not traveling to Iceland sooner was that it was too popular with Americans; it lost its “I’m-the-only-American-who-wants-to-travel-here” appeal. Now, Iceland is swarming with American tourists, since we’re ahead of the rest of the world in vaccine distribution. Not to mention that we all want to get the fuck out.
Iceland’s mask mandate and capacity restrictions were lifted a week before I arrived. Enough of the population was fully or partially vaccinated to warrant moving into post-pandemic normalcy—something that looks a little like what life used to be but carries the scar tissue of being told to fear human contact for more than a year.
Does normal really mean getting back to everything we did before COVID? Does it mean crowded bars and subways and concert halls? Does it mean putting on real clothes and commuting to an office to put in 8 hours at a job you hate? Does it mean falling in line with the old order of things? How can we just go back to the way things were?
When I first got to Reykjavik, I wasn’t sure it was OK to take my mask off, even though almost no one was wearing one. I’ve come to think of my mask as a shield against coronavirus, against the gaze of other people. Wearing a mask has allowed me to hide in plain sight, to be invisible in a way. It’s much harder to get a sense of a person or remember them when you don’t see their full face. When we all wear masks, we become invisible forms moving through space.
I’ve come to think of my mask as a shield against coronavirus, against the gaze of other people.
But walking around in a mask didn’t make me invisible in Reykjavik. Now, instead of a shield, it was the physical manifestation of my fears and anxieties. No one asked me why I was wearing a mask or made me feel like I should take it off. As my first day in Iceland went on, it just didn’t feel necessary.
The first time I took off my mask around a crowd of people in more than a year was in a basement comedy club in Reykjavik. The room was filled to capacity with no more than a few inches of space between all the tables. I was so close to the people sitting at the table next to me that the occasional brushing of arms and legs couldn’t be helped.
Before COVID, I wouldn’t give too many people crammed into a comedy club a second thought, but now it felt less than normal. It turns out there’s nothing normal about getting back to normal.
Each comedian who performed that night began their set by talking about how excited they were to be in front of a live audience again. It won’t be long before we take it all for granted. Laughing with total strangers in a dark comedy club will no longer feel as momentous as it does now. But on my first night in Iceland, it felt like a reason to celebrate. Iceland was open again and willing to welcome me as a tourist.
Normal has never come naturally to me. What I mean is that I never feel quite at ease in the world. I’m always giving myself a pep talk: “Just act normal, just be normal.”
The week I returned from Iceland, I met up with some work friends at a bar in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was official: the city was no longer a shell of its former self. Everyone was out on this warm summer Friday, reveling in the normalcy of it all. I probably wouldn’t have had plans if my coworker hadn’t invited me out. I would have spent the night doing my own thing. That’s my natural inclination.
I went to Iceland on my own. Solo travel has become my thing. I talk as though I enjoy it, and I do, but I wouldn’t say that it always feels like a choice. I might tell other people that it’s my preference, but the truth is that solo travel is sometimes your reality when you’re always on your own.
What I like about traveling alone is the space I have for reflection, something I wouldn’t necessarily get traveling with friends—my time is my own. And most nights it’s nice to return to the silence of an empty Airbnb, but there’s always that one night (maybe one where I’ve been drinking) where I really feel the weight of coming back to no one but myself.
It was still early in the evening when I parted ways with my work friends. They all had dinner plans and other people to meet. I had hoped that we could all stay longer, so that I wouldn’t feel like I had to find something else to do.
On my walk home from Fort Greene, the sidewalk tables were overflowing with friends meeting up for dinner and drinks. Neighborhood after neighborhood I passed through was a scene from a New York we all feared was gone for good. I thought about stopping somewhere and getting lost in the crowd. I keep promising myself that I’ll become a normal New Yorker one of these days. I’ll be a regular somewhere, let people get to know me. I just have this tendency to hide, to watch people being in the world rather than joining in myself.
I’d like to say that I do this because I’m a writer and it’s a writer’s job to observe, but that would be bullshit. On the long list of things I can call myself, writer really isn’t one of them. I know this in my bones. But I also don’t know what else to say about myself.
I’ve wanted to be a writer longer than I’ve wanted to go to Iceland. Maybe I’ll stop putting it off.
On my 3rd day in Iceland, I hiked to see the Fagradalsfjall volcano that’s been erupting since March of this year. Jasmin is a geologist who led the hike. She was actually scheduled to be on vacation while I was going to be in Iceland, and she graciously offered to take me along on an excursion she was leading to the eruption site with other geologists. “This will be different from my usual tour,” she said. “We’ll be talking a lot about rocks and sediment, and collecting samples.” I didn’t care; I just wanted to experience a volcanic eruption in person.
Jasmin moved from Germany during the pandemic to specifically find a job as a geologist in Iceland. It took months, including waiting at her parents’ home in Germany for Iceland to allow EU immigration again, but she finally found one. She first visited Fagradalsfjall the week it started erupting. At that time, there was no walking path to make getting to the site easier for tourists like me.
“Jasmin had to crawl on her hands and knees up the side there,” Marta, another geologist from Germany, pointed to a steep side of the mountain covered with rocks that were sure to cut through skin like glass as we walked up a path that had since been made for people going to see the volcano. (I was hiking with 4 geologists in total: Jasmin, Marta, and 2 from the U.S. who were anxious to collect rocks to bring back with them.)
Jasmin couldn’t have been more than 5-feet tall, but she talked so passionately about her work that I could picture her using every bit of strength she had to get herself up the side of the mountain. I wondered if I do or could ever feel that intensely about writing. Is writing something I could claw my way up the side of a mountain for? I mean, I can’t even skip a meal for the sake of getting an idea down on paper. I don’t get lost in the writing.
I told the geologists and other people I met on this trip that I’m a writer, which is the easiest way to explain how I make money (I’m a content strategist for a tech company) but feels like a lie when I think about the writer I would like to be. Jasmin asked me what I like to write. “Essays, mostly. And I’m also trying to freelance more.” The truth is that my oeuvre doesn’t amount to much. Notebooks filled with randomness. A piece or 2 published here or there. I’m a hack, really. And I felt a little guilty about not prefacing writer with trying to be.
I learned from Helga, my guide for a different hike, that Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world. I’d read about the Icelandic tradition of giving and reading books on Christmas Eve, which of course endeared the country to me even more. “Jolabokaflod,” Helga called it— “Christmas Book Flood.” It refers to the fact that most books in Iceland are sold from September to November. But the other interesting thing about this tradition is that the books Icelanders give and receive and read are likely written by people they know. “Pretty much everyone in Iceland dreams of writing a book,” Helga said. And according to a 2012 NPR article, around 50% of people actually do it. It’s something many Icelanders hope to achieve before they die.
Writing. Writing. Writing. That’s all I was ever going to do. But I haven’t. Not really. I’m too comfortable being in a place of wanting something. What I need to do is climb a mountain on my hands and knees.
What I need to do is climb a mountain on my hands and knees.
When we finally reached the cliff where we could safely view the volcano—not an easy feat with strong gusts of wind and random downpours of icy rain—we sat with other Icelanders and tourists to watch the eruptions that happened every 5-10 minutes. The anticipation sort of reminded me of what I felt at waterparks when I was a kid, waiting for one of these giant buckets to fill with water and tip over onto the people standing in the pool beneath it. The volcano was putting on a show. It’s strange to think that it continues to spill boiling lava even when no one is around to see it.
“It’s changed so much since I was here a few nights ago,” Jasmin said. As soon as the lava reaches the surface, it cools and turns black, forming a new ground that looks like waves of charcoal. We passed this hardened lava on our cold, wet journey to the viewing site. We could still feel the heat emanating from it, and when Jasmin said it was safe we’d move close to it to warm our hands as though it were a fireplace.
Watching a volcanic eruption was a religious experience. I may never see anything so violent, so intense, so incredibly powerful again. As I silently watched Fagradalsfjall erupt over and over, I could hear the geologists discussing what was happening before us in a language I couldn’t grasp. They understood the science, I was beginning to understand what Icelanders already knew: the volcano’s purpose wasn’t to be watched. Volcanoes, if they could give a shit, don’t give a shit about us. They spend their days doing what they’re meant to do, whether that’s erupting or sitting patiently for when it’s time to blow.
Are people meant to do anything as naturally or intuitively as a volcano? I want to write, but am I meant to? Maybe that’s the trouble with us: we want too much. We want without even knowing what we want.
Before I left Iceland I went on a final group hike led by Helga to the Glymur waterfall in Hvalfjörður. She told me that she looks forward to reading the book I publish. I didn’t know what I would be returning to back home. A post-pandemic New York City, probably. But what I did know was that at least one person in Iceland is looking forward to reading my book.
In a reopened world that’s what I’ll be: Finally, a writer.
Iceland has changed me. I give Iceland 5 stars.
Weren't you always a writer?