by Kurt Caswell
This was not so when Wordsworth, in a fit of youthful delinquency, left the comfort of his studies to roam on foot through the Alps. Or when Stevenson led a donkey through the Cevennes. Or when the greatest American walkers set out—Thoreau, yes, and Whitman, the poet of the public road, or Lewis and Clark, who also journeyed on horseback and in boats. In those days, nothing moved faster than a horse, so all roads were foot roads too. But these days, to travel on foot, it’s best to seek out the places at the edges of other places where the wild country is, where now all walkers must go.
Walking up Hesteyrarfjordur, Scott and I angled out toward a bright snowfield where the British volunteer ranger at the landing had told us to go, picking our way through steepening fields of boulders and using our trekking poles for support. We did not find a path so much as a lightly worn discoloration of the rock, an occasional bootprint in a chance pot of sandy soil, a dirty sightline across a snowfield, a string of great rock cairns drawing out the way. Over the wider, flatter passages along the treeless rimtop of the fjord, the defeated snowpack formed streams that fell away into the sea far below. We crossed sometimes by skipping from stone to stone, and at other times by stopping to change our shoes for sandals and wading the frigid, fast-moving runnels. This, so Icelanders claim, is the cleanest water on the earth, so we drank freely without filter or compunction.
We rose to the final push of our first mountain pass, Kjaransvikurskard, just below Geldingafell (598 meters high). At the base of it, Scott and I stopped. The way up was covered in snow and much steeper than we were prepared for, as we wore only simple low-top walking shoes, which had no hard edges. Already our feet were bruised by the hard stones of the path. The snow arced above our heads, breaking over the broad back of the mountain saddle into that permanent blue, a ramp into the sky.
“Which way do we go?” I asked.
“We go up,” Scott said, and up he went, kicking a stairway into the snow with his light shoes and pressing up with his legs under his heavy pack. I watched him rise a few steps ahead before I followed up behind. Though others had gone before us this season, the sunstrike on the exposed snowface had erased all traces. It was as if we were the first people on earth to ascend here.
The way was slow going, and with the weight on our backs, a slip, a moment’s hesitation, or a failing in the courage of the legs would send us tumbling down the mountainside. We would likely survive such a fall if we rolled well and somehow avoided a cracked skull, but it would certainly ruin the day. We beat out a rhythm as we went: kick, kick, step; kick, kick, step; kick, kick, step. To look up was to risk losing my balance, so I mostly kept my head down. Kick, kick, step; kick, kick, step. Listening to the sound of my buddy above me in the interstices of my own climbing, I moved up ever more slowly, hoping my little shoes would keep their place in the snow—kick, kick, step—until that comforting presence above me seemed to draw away and then vanish. I went on, feeling a strange emptiness bind up my heart, and then I looked up to see Scott press on over the top and out of sight. The slope curved away from me now, and the ground flattened out beneath my feet, but it was here, as my lot began to improve, that I felt a twinge in my right leg, a weakness at the next step. Was the leg going to give? Was my knee going to buckle? Was this a message from the muscles and bones of my body or from the temperature of my courage? I did, in that moment, imagine falling, the twinge in my leg leading me to a little break at the joint, a giving way, as the weight of the pack pulled me back, my head landing me upside down as my feet came over into the sky, and then, in my mind, the view from some other place of my now broken body at the bottom where the snow turned to rock, exposing the bones of the mountain. But I did not fall. I pressed and stepped, pressed and stepped, pushing that pack up the slope, until I found myself standing on relatively flat ground next to my old pal, Scott. We paused to look out onto the fjord far below, a blue line that widened into Jökulfirðir, and on around Snæfjallaströnd to Ísafjörður, where we had started earlier that day. Our walk into the Hornstrandir had just begun.
What causes loneliness?—especially the loneliness while traveling in foreign lands that skips or catches in the breath and then sinks the heart from a high place of exaltation to the darkness of fear and loss. What is it? As a younger man discovering the wild landscapes of North America—the Frank Church Wilderness in Idaho, the canyons of southeastern Utah, the endless boreal forests and lakes of northern Saskatchewan—nature was a balm to me. It was in wild places that I felt closer to the divine, as close as I could, anyway. I am not a Christian, and though I believe in prophets, I do not believe in a loving god, nor do I believe in a religion that persecutes and executes and burns in the name of a loving god. Still, out in those vast wildernesses, I felt the presence of something greater than myself, and that something, I felt, knew me. I wanted to believe in that something when I was in other places too, but I never found any evidence to support it. None. No sign or symbol or voice out of the whirlwind. Just silence. Enduring, empty, black silence. Prayer, I learned, is an impish wish, a childish fantasy, as selfish as two opposing football teams on bended knee, each with the same ardent belief that God is on their side. The older I get, the more certain I am that there is no “spirit in the woods,” as Wordsworth asserts. There is no hand of god to guide me. Everything does not happen for a reason; rather, given enough time, everything will happen for no reason at all. The older I get, the more I am convinced of the utter indifference of nature to human wishing and human suffering. And at some point in my travels, I came to feel that that indifference was beautiful, that beauty is an aesthetic of bleakness, of the black emptiness of cosmic space. In imagining tumbling to my death in the Hornstrandir, I did not look to god in nature to comfort me or save me. My only refuge was the beauty of these empty lands and traveling in the company of my old friend.
We descended. Down the other side of the mountain pass we went, walking now at a good pace, the northern sun waning in its arc but not falling, a colder air coming in over us. We sweated and beamed and delighted in the power of our legs, the ease soon to come to us, for we could now see all the way to our camp, the shining waters of Haelavik facing the Greenland Sea. I began to think of the rum we had brought along and the vodka, spirits that might lift our spirits in this cold, desolate, beautiful place where now we darkly walked. The valley made a series of great benches carved by a long-forgotten glacier, and as we came off one and then another, more great benches were revealed to us. After an hour of walking, Alfsfell (584 meters) rising above us on the east and Fannalagarfjall (618 meters) on the west, it appeared we were no closer to the bottom.
“Shit, man,” Scott said. “Isn’t it just right there? We’ve been walking awhile.”
“We have,” I said. “And it is right there. I can see it.”
“Got to be,” Scott said. “But it isn’t getting any closer. And I’m wrecked.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m ready to stop too.”
Strange how light worked in that country under evening summer sun, that this series of benches, from our point of view, made our camp look refreshingly near, but it was instead painfully far. Perhaps the angle of our sightline allowed these long benches to appear stacked, one on top of the next, and, foreshortened this way, gave us a pleasurable false hope.
We pressed on, our quads and knees and feet bearing the weight and jounce of our walking, and the hard, stony ground came up under us, battering the bruising in our feet. The path got clearer now, and in some places it became a trail, and we walked it out from cairn to cairn all the way to the sea. The beach sound roared in against us, with that fresh sea air, and at the first wide grassy place where other walkers had camped before, we threw down our packs and shucked off our shoes. First order of business: a slug of spirits to toast our long good day.
Now in this lower light of evening—it was past ten—the sun moved sidelong behind a headland, and the temperature sank. We put on another layer, set up the tent, and sat in the lee of it to cook
a simple meal of tuna pasta with onion and broccoli, crisp bread, and chocolate digestive biscuits. While we ate, two figures emerged from a tent we spotted away on the hill. They stood into the wind held in each other’s arms, seemingly impervious to the bracing cold. A postcard you might send home.
“Damn,” Scott said, crawling into his bag inside the tent. “I’m beat.”
“Nice to have a clear night, though,” I said. “Happy it’s not raining.”
“True,” Scott said. “True. I’m beat, but good thing is, I’m dropping weight. I got to be. We got worked today.”
“Right. You got to be. I’m probably dropping a few pounds too.”
“Did I tell you I’m down to about 230 now?”
In high school and in his early twenties, Scott had been a talented athlete: football, basketball, track, and rugby. But a few years ago, he hit an all-time low by hitting an all-time high of 265 pounds. His gut spilled over his buckle, and his face became fleshy and soft. It looked like he was headed for more weight, too, and the many problems that come with it: diabetes, heart disease, immobility, and chronic joint pain, not to mention sexual dysfunction leading to a general distaste for life. But something awakened in him, and he put himself on an exercise regimen and started eating better food. This wasn’t a flash weight-loss gimmick, which always results in a frustrating loss/gain cycle: the weight he’d lost would stay lost. Over the past year, a major motivation for him was making this trip. He ramped up his regimen to get into good walking shape.
“Damn, 230,” I said. “Would you say this trip saved your life?”
“Shit, yeah,” Scott said, “it saved my life. It gave me something to work for, a goal. I needed that. My long-term target weight is 195, and a couple years ago that felt impossible. But I’m going to hit it.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m feeling fucking fantastic, and fucking fantastically too.” He paused. “But lucky for you, Caswell, sleeping next to you so many nights in this tent, my libido is at an all-time low.”
Morning came to the Hornstrandir, and I crawled from the tent for a piss. The shore was white with driftwood, a great logjam of giant trees built up on the beach—mostly larch, fir, spruce, and poplar—speckled with colorful fishing floats that had come in out of the sea. Where did all this wood come from, as Iceland is mostly devoid of trees? Out of the forests of Siberia, one of my sources indicates, carried down by those great rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean: the Lena, Ob, and Yenisei. Traveling four hundred to a thousand kilometers per year, such logs remain at sea for a minimum of five years. The salt water cures the wood, toughening it, so the longer it remains adrift, the tougher it is. The early settlers of Iceland (mostly Norse traders and raiders) used driftwood for building shelters and homes, boats, furniture, bowls, barrels, and boxes, and for making charcoal. Driftwood belonged to the owner of the land and was often branded like livestock. The Icelandic sagas include stories of disputes and negotiation over driftwood caches. And of particular note, during the Middle Ages, my source tells me, witch burning was based not so much on an abundance of witches as on an abundance of wood, especially driftwood. When the wood supply was sufficient, witches seemed to show up everywhere, just waiting to be burned.
I returned to the tent to join Scott for coffee and a simple breakfast of muesli cooked in water, which we choked down with honey. The sky looked fairly steady, though overcast and gray. We broke camp, loaded our packs, and set out on our way.
Auden proclaimed the Westfjords the most beautiful part of Iceland, and the Hornstrandir must be its crown jewel. It was the last region to be settled in Iceland, and the few hardy farmers and fishermen who tried to make a go of it were gone by the 1950s. Winter travel was too difficult, as access was (and still is) only by boat, and the short growing season, coupled with a slow recovery after grazing, made keeping livestock a zero-sum game. In the fjords, seasonal polar ice made fishing dangerous and unsustainable. In 1975, Iceland declared the region a 58,000-hectare nature reserve and national monument, thereby protecting some of the world’s greatest seabird cliffs and habitat for marine mammals, and offering a last refuge to Iceland’s only endemic mammal, the arctic fox. Elsewhere in Iceland, foxes are hunted and killed as vermin. Once, not so long ago, in the colder world of our grandparents, an occasional polar bear drifted to these shores from Greenland on pack ice, but even as the guns of the sheep ranchers are gone from the Hornstrandir, climate change makes it unlikely that the island will ever see another.
The Hornstrandir is part of a great basalt plateau dramatically inscribed by fjords and bays and short valleys, eroded by glaciers. The plateau rises 400 meters from the sea at Adalvik in the west and up to 700 meters in the east at Hornvik, where we were going; though to look at it, you see not the plateau that has long since eroded away but a vast and wild landscape of rugged and misty mountains. The bedrock here is 14 million years old. Cirques, amphitheater-like valley heads, are a characteristic of this region. Climatic features include prevailing northeast winds, a mean annual temperature of about 3.5 degrees Celsius, and annual precipitation of roughly 1,250–1,350 millimeters. Polar winds push onto the northern coast, which is just some 300 kilometers from Greenland.
During the Last Glacial Maximum (18,000–20,000 years before present), the Hornstrandir was largely covered by an ice cap, which extended some 6–10 kilometers beyond the coastline. The highest points of the plateau, however, were buried not under glaciers but rather under perennial snow, or firn, an intermediate stage between snow and glacier. Such high points in the Hornstradir were dotted with nunataks (exposed ridges or rock features surrounded by firn) and ice-free slopes between glaciers and the plateau edge. After some 10,000 years, during which glaciers advanced and retreated, changing the landscape dramatically, the Hornstradir’s deglaciation ended by about 9,500 years ago. The remnant glacier, Drangajökull, is the only glacier in Iceland that is not currently in retreat. With its volcanic and glacial activity, Iceland, and subsequently the Westfjords, must be a world center for rheology, the study of the flow of matter. To the human eye, such mountainous landscapes are fixed, but across immense spans of time, they move. Mountains do walk, as the ancient Buddhist masters have always known. “If you doubt mountains’ walking,” writes the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, “you do not know your own walking.”
Walking the shoreline that morning, we made our way along the easy breakers as they came, pushing us up the beach. As the water drew back out to sea, so did we, so that we walked a little wave pattern along the waves, along the wrack line, mindlessly, really, angling down onto the harder black sand where the surf was soon to be, and then back up into the drier, loose sand where the waves pushed us. There was no path on this section of the Hornstrandir and barely a path anywhere in the whole of it, certainly not out through the basaltic boulder fields, which kept no footprints and resisted wear, and not the clean white fields of snow, the paths over which were momentary. A good path is not made to walk but made by walking, as Antonio Machado has written. And a path made by walking is the keeper of all walkers’ dreams, those who go upon it now, those who will go upon it, and those who have gone before. You have to be very careful walking in a landscape like this, careful that you do not tread upon another’s story. Rather, you walk alongside it, paying homage as you pass, paying homage as you make a story of your own, the outcome of which cannot be known while walking. You do not ask or strive for knowing, or strive for meaning. You just walk, as walking itself is the meaning for which you strive. If someone asks you what you learned out there, it is best to answer that you learned nothing at all. You just walked, and that is enough. You walked, and by walking, you became part of the place you walked, part of it, so that a place that was not a place to you before you walked it becomes now inseparable from your identity. It becomes part of who you are, part of your body and part of your mind, and, as such, your mind becomes another wild place in which to walk. You walk out along the
edges of the world, just as you walk along the edges of your thoughts and so, thereby, into the strangest country. The real journey is inward, the thought of which you must keep very quiet, else those threatened by such ideas will invest considerable energy to unhinge you. I have never made a first ascent of a great peak or a first descent of an impossible river or sought the knife-edge between life and death. Such adventuring, while it may make fascinating news, has become all too routine. Everest, for example, that peak of human desire, isn’t a journey anymore; it’s a commercial industry, where you pay and then get in line to do what everyone else is doing. The real journey, I think, is not in feats of derring-do, but in paying attention to a place, to the outward details, the sights and sounds and weathers, and to the inward details, to exploring the deep and quiet places of the mind and of the heart. Then, once home, the greater adventure is in making beautiful sentences. “The gaiety of language” is our master, writes Wallace Stevens.
The quiet beach that morning led on toward a distant headland dropping sharply into the sea, and beyond it, a massive cirque running up to the sky, white with snow. The way looked shut, and which way we were to go seemed then impossible to know. I looked down at my feet and noticed fox tracks in the sand, two sets—one going out and one coming back. The set going out appeared to be running, as the prints were deeper, more distantly spaced, the animal going along the sea at a charge; the other, coming back, a quiet saunter, a morning wanderer, out for a look around. Perhaps they had passed here at different times. Or was this the same fox twice, with different intentions? I stopped as Scott came up behind me. “Nice,” he said, and then we two stood in silence on that silent beach, our own footprints leading to the camp we left behind. Every road leads in two directions: where you’ve been and where you are going. And since where you’ve been is not possible to get to, we had no choice but to walk on.
