Monday, August 31
The tiny island of Grímsey is the northernmost point in Iceland. Forty-one kilometers from the coast of Akureyri, it’s the only part of the country located inside the Arctic Circle. Despite the warnings against tourists visiting the place, I head to the small coastal town of Dreyvik to catch the ferry. The three-hour trip has a bad reputation because of the groundswell; some ships have had to turn back halfway with all of the crew nauseous. Once we leave the port, in the passengers’ cabin they show an ethnographic documentary about the island … Puffin egg hunters on the cliffs … Before there was machinery to do so, the entire town helped pull the climbers from the abyss onto terra firma with their valuable treasure … “The abysses contain treasures … others help us out of them,” I write down … The last polar bear came to the island floating on an iceberg from the Arctic in 1969 … They usually ended up attacking people’s pets and had to be shot … Some winters they could walk to Iceland from the island on the layer of ice that formed on the sea … While I’m writing I start to feel poorly and run out onto the deck. I laboriously vomit my breakfast overboard while the few tourists who withstood the cold wind on the prow are photographing the backs of distant whales. After a couple of the worst hours of my life, Grímsey emerges on the horizon. Miraculously, the sky above it is clear. The piece of flat land atop the cliffs that are coming into view has a surface area of some five square kilometers. When we arrive we are greeted by a few fishermen’s houses, a small grocery, and a single hostel. On the arctic tundra surface, nothing else stands out. The sky, populated by thousands of different species of birds, is the only part of the island that’s truly inhabited. Glaucous gulls and arctic terns are the main species. I get off the ferry with the rest of the tourists, a smallish group: six young American nuns, four women in their sixties who seem to be celebrating something, a couple of French guys with big cameras, and an Icelandic mother and son. After leaving the port the group disperses calmly.
I need some time to recover from my seasickness and I have a hot soup at the hostel bar. When I’m feeling up to going out everyone has disappeared on the clear horizon—as with Iceland’s mainland, there’s not a single tree. Looking at the sea, the Icelandic fjords in the background are imposing. Described as rugged and windy, Grímsey today seems friendly and spring-like, perhaps to compensate for the hardships you endure on the trip there. I take the path through the tundra toward the point marking the polar circle. A few arctic terns fly over me, closer and closer, threatening me in their language. I start to feel like Tippi Hedren in the Hitchcock film. As I find out later, the arctic tern is one of the most aggressive and territorial types of tern. They are the true masters of the place.
I wonder if the legend of Hyperborea, the northernmost land in all of Greek mythology, prompted us to visit Grímsey. According to René Guénon, Hyperborea is where various esoteric systems believe the earthly and celestial planes converge. Located within the Arctic Circle, it would be the supreme country according to the original meaning of the pole: the pole as the point around which everything revolves, the axis. The Vedic texts call it Avesta, and at different moments in the history of humanity it has been located in different places, all of them close to the North Pole. Often this axis of the world is represented as a sacred mountain. As I mentally review that mythology my eyes follow the nuns as they head toward the post marking where the Arctic Circle passes. Of course everyone knows it doesn’t really mark the correct spot; the circle moves about fifteen meters a year and now must be about twenty meters away. Like the post indicating the North Pole, which is mobile because of the ice drift, this post has to be moved periodically. We need points of reference, but reality often doesn’t let itself be measured. The need for these references when we are in unknown territory is what, despite how absurd tourism seems in our own hometowns, makes it so easy for us to shift into that role when we are away. By the post there is a small set of stairs with a platform to take a photo of yourself, and various signs indicating the distance in kilometers from the main world capitals. The group of nuns ahead of me are already there. They kindly offer to take my portrait to commemorate the feat. The Icelandic mother and son watch us thoughtfully. They observe us a long time in silence. The French guys arrive later, place a stuffed toy on the commemorative platform, take a photo of it and head off laughing.
Once around the field of tundra and cliffs and I can confirm that, apart from that secular pilgrimage, photographing birds is the only possible activity. I decide to go back to the bar to finish writing the postcards I planned to send from there to prove I’d made it. They collect the mail at the grocery store. While I write postcards at the bar, a man who looks like an Icelander and was on the boat asks me if I saw “the whale” from the ferry.
“I was busy.”
“Yes, I saw that,” he says smiling.
He explains that he’s an anthropologist, doing a thesis on the women of Grímsey Island.
“You see that woman?” he points to the waitress. “She’s not from here, she’s from Reykjavík. She fell in love with a fisherman and came here to live with him. I met her last year when I arrived. She was very pregnant and was waiting at the port with a big smile on her face. This year the baby is already big and she still has the same smile.”
I think about Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli, marrying a fisherman to get out of a refugee camp. The couple settles in a town constantly threatened by the volcano—the volcano where Otto Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel appear at the end of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Oppressed by a town that rejects her, Bergman (Karin) flees, crossing Stromboli as it erupts. In the end, near the crater, Karin asks God for help. Tired of waiting for a reply, in my story the protagonist enters the bowels of the magma chamber. She navigates seas of lava for days and nights until she emerges from the mouth of Snæfellsjökull. The final image of the film is her hitchhiking amid Icelandic lava fields.
K, emerging from Snæfellsjökull.
On the way back, the ferry advances motionlessly and we reach the Dreyvik port without any queasiness. They told me there’s a bus to Akureyri from the port, but all I find there is a man waiting in front of a car. He is the bus driver. From what he tells me, since he only had two people to pick up, he brought his regular car. The other passenger is a young woman who’s been hitchhiking across the island. I wonder what her story is and whether she’s emerged from the volcano.
The day ends with fish soup with touches of curry, and a dish of pokkari, a cod and potato stew that’s typical of the region.
What was my pilgrimage? Unable to answer my own question, I sleep heavily and peacefully. The next day I remember that there was not a single moment of nostalgia, there, at the end of the inhabited world.