‘Hi, it’s Dave. You know, Dave and Julie. How’re you doing?’
‘Dave, fantastic to hear from you.’
‘We’ve been thinking, it’s about time we went for another walk. Do some camping and stuff like that, do you want to come?’
Dave and Julie were eating ice cream in a car park when we met them. Walking the South West Coast Path, we hadn’t come across many other backpackers who were wild camping, and even fewer middle-aged ones. So we’d been immediately attracted by the size of their packs as they lay on the ground; they were obviously camping. Dave, a brusque, Northern, no-nonsense man who worked hard long hours, but in his free time insulated bird boxes, walked alone on the Lakeland Fells, and adored Julie despite pretending he didn’t. Julie, externally calm, quiet, unassuming, was under that veneer a tough, remorseless campaigner for the underprivileged. A mirror image of each other. They’d appeared repeatedly as we walked along, our paths crossing and interweaving, until we’d given up trying to avoid each other and walked together along a hot, tranquil section of the south coast of Dorset.
‘How weird that you’ve said that; we’ve just been saying the same thing. Do you fancy going to Iceland?’
‘Iceland? I’ve always wanted to go to Iceland!’
We stood under the covered walkway outside Keflavík Airport as rain fell in curtains from its domed plastic roof. The lights from the building and car park blurred into an impressionist painting of night. Waterproofs on, we hoisted our rucksacks, Moth putting one arm through the shoulder strap while I took the pack’s weight and helped him manoeuvre the second strap over his second painful shoulder. We crossed the car park through the torrential downpour, dropping our rucksacks in the lobby of a hotel on the opposite side.
For weeks Moth had known he needed to do this. He was beginning to understand the needs of this new body, the one that didn’t always respond to his instruction, that tired without effort and agitated his thoughts. He was learning to sidestep it, to move when it told him to lie down, to shout when it said be quiet and give in. He willingly rewaxed his boots and bought the same model of Vango tent that we had used on the South West Coast Path, knowing that our old tent with its duct-taped poles wouldn’t survive the subarctic winds of Iceland. But this trip couldn’t have been more different from our Coast Path walk if we’d designed it to be so. The Salt Path had unexpectedly sold quite a few copies and we could afford to walk into the airport hotel at midnight and check into a room, rather than put the tent up in the torrential rain on some scrub grass under the flight path of the planes. We opened the blinds and watched the last plane of the night land on the small runway, lights smudged through the water running down the window.
‘So, we’re in Iceland. Top of the habitable world. Above us, only the Arctic, and below, the green earth curving away in an arc of increasing heat and dust, before cooling to the Antarctic. Weird thought.’ I had my face pressed against the window, trying to see beyond the rain on the glass.
‘Not as weird as getting on the plane in an August heatwave and getting off into early winter. I’ve read that there’s no autumn here, but that summer ends and winter begins. Have to say I thought we’d still be at the tail end of summer.’
‘How did your pack feel?’
‘Not too bad, but I have only walked across the car park.’
The same rucksacks that had walked the Coast Path were propped together against the wall of an Icelandic hotel: Moth’s looking quite full and mine straining at the seams. I’d packed it so tight that the fabric had split and was now displaying a bright green patch that I’d hastily sewn over the hole before rushing to the airport. Crammed with things we hadn’t needed on the Coast Path: a warm jacket and waterproofs that didn’t let the rain pour through, a water filter and ten days of dried-food rations. We had no idea if we would be able to access provisions where we were going, but knew that even if it was available the price would be excessive. The island imports the majority of its food supplies, making the cost of food far higher than in Britain, higher still when we reached the mountains. The three-kilogramme weight limit on foods brought into the country hadn’t left us too much choice about what we packed. We’d considered pre-packed hiking meals, but they were so expensive we might as well have bought them in Iceland. I opened the rucksack and looked for my toothbrush, moving the food pack aside and trying not to think about it. I knew it contained things I’d thought I would never eat again, but that was two days away, no need to dwell on it now. We made tea and ate the biscuits we’d bought in the airport.
‘This seemed like such a good idea when I was standing in the orchard in Cornwall, but I don’t know if I can do this. What if I get into the mountains and find I can’t?’
The orchards and fields of the farm were feeling suddenly distant. After Sam’s visit, we had finally begun to feel as if there was a chance of letting ourselves relax, a chance to consider the possibility that for a while at least we could simply be without the fear of our time there ending abruptly. But now we had snatched ourselves away to walk a trail in a wild, inhospitable land. A trail we might not even be able to complete.
‘We’ll just take our time; that’s why we’ve got so much food. If we need to stop we can and just wait until we feel able to go on. And Dave will be there, he’s like a man-mountain – we’ll just give him your pack. Anyway, we know who wrote the guidebook for the trek. We’ll probably have to cut the sections short; you know we can’t keep up with the pace he sets.’
Moth marked the page in the guidebook that illustrated the start of the Laugavegur Trail. A small book with a practical waterproof cover that fitted neatly in Moth’s jacket pocket. Paddy Dillon’s Walking and Trekking in Iceland. We could have found a lighter book, one that didn’t cover a whole group of trails, or just a map. But there was something reassuring about having a guidebook by the same author who had steered us through every cove and gorse thicket of the South West Coast Path. A sense of knowing there was someone we could rely on who absolutely without question would tighten his bootlaces and show us the way. The friend in our pocket.
‘Well, here we are then, in the rain in Reykjavík. Who’d have thought – from the Coast Path to Iceland. But we’re here, bloody brilliant.’ Dave, as large and loud as he had been the first time we met appeared out of a crowd in the main street of the island’s capital. As he enveloped Moth in his bear-like grasp there was a shocking change to the view I’d had of the two men hugging goodbye in West Bay on the Coast Path. The weight that Moth had lost became not just something that I could feel, but a large loss made visible by the mirror of our unchanged friend. Suddenly I could see him as Dave and Julie must too. Was his deterioration so gradual that I was taking it for granted? Forcing him into more and more physical challenges that he was fighting to achieve just for me, battling on because I couldn’t accept that one day he would have to give in to CBD, to give himself over to the wind and the dust?
‘Julie, you’re here, can you believe we’re doing this?’
‘Not at all. We said let’s meet in Iceland, but I didn’t really expect it to happen. Now look at us, in the rain with walking poles.’ A gentle-natured woman, not much bigger than her purple rucksack, she couldn’t have been in greater contrast to Dave, Northern England to the bone, filling the street with his seventy-litre pack and huge presence.
‘What on earth have you got in there, Dave?’
‘Twelve days of food and stuff we need, like.’
‘But we should only be out for six, eight at the most.’
‘Well, you never know what might happen. It might snow and we get trapped on the mountain, or someone could get hurt and we’d have to wait for help, or we find it too hard and stuff like that. If not I’ll just eat it anyway.’
Julie looked around the vast pack and raised her eyebrows. We were all laughing at Dave, but he had a point. It wasn’t just Moth who would find this hard; all four of us were well past our prime. Standing in the pouring rain just below the Arctic Circle about to start a trail that Paddy Dillon, who walks the South West Coast Path at superhuman speed, describes in part as ‘steep and rugged climbing, with some narrow, exposed ridges’. What were we thinking of?
A sense of nervousness dulled the excitement as we booked the bus tickets to take us to the trailhead at Landmannalaugar. Not really a place that should have a name, more a word on a map that people collect around. An encampment in the southern highlands of Iceland. We would follow the Laugavegur Trail from there to Þórsmörk, which Paddy said would only take four days. From there we would cross the Fimmvörðuháls, a high mountain pass that would take us across the Eyjafjallajökull volcano that erupted in 2010, shutting down airports across Europe and beyond. Two more days. If we’d understood Icelandic weather patterns a little more, we might have been even more nervous. The Iceland tourist offices would assure you that there are four seasons in Iceland, just like any of the more southern countries. But the old Norse calendar knew the truth. Iceland has only two seasons, summer and winter, and the locals know almost exactly when winter’s coming. On the first Sunday in September. We put our rucksacks in the hold of the bus with only five full days of August left. Five days of summer.
As the bus left the main road we began to understand why it had such immense tyres. Two hours into a four-hour journey and we were off the tarmac on to a stony track that headed towards mountain peaks unlike anything I’d seen before. No gentle hills here, but ripped earth pushing up in near vertical shards from flat, desolate river valleys. Boulders in a stationary landslide from long-dead eruptions and ash everywhere, flowing smooth and black over the hillsides like a sheet of fluid porcelain. The bus forded rivers where small jeeps stood with bonnets up, engines washed out by the cascading river. Small clusters of sheep clung to occasional green patches of subarctic vegetation, their thick fleeces making them look much bigger than their delicate legs said they were.
An arctic fox stood in the open landscape, its front paws propped on a boulder, his back fur brown in its summer colours but his chest and belly white, his coat already adapting to its winter camouflage. He obviously knew Sunday wasn’t far away. As Iceland’s only native mammal, he knows this land better than any meteorologist ever can. Even on the hot bus I felt a chill and wished my rucksack was as big as Dave’s, stuffed full of four-season sleeping bags and Icelandic jumpers and a lot more food than my forty-litre pack could ever hold.
We climbed over a pass between two mountains, where fingered combs of rock pointed skywards, on an ever-narrowing track that fell into a valley bottom. Carved by millennia of snow, ice and rain, the valley ran like a river of shale between mountains of mysterious colours. Sunlight catching the peaks of luminous peach, sand and green. And between them, abrupt and violent, the dark angry head of a lava flow. Thrown out of a volcano with unstoppable power, an outpouring of rock, flames and lava had cascaded down the shattered hillside, cooling as it came. Possibly hitting a vast river running over the shale bed, the lava had stopped moving, its energy spent. It now stood frozen in time, a snarling face looking out across the dried riverbed. The Laugahraun lava field came to a halt in 1477, but it feels much older, ancient beyond time. At its head, only metres away from the last fall of rock, was Landmannalaugar. A scattering of sheds and tents, people milling around in the rain between a toilet block and an information hut, or making their way to a collection of old green buses that stood together like a stockade of American school buses about to repel an attack of teenagers.
We got off the bus, stiff from two hours of jolting, and dragged the rucksacks from the hold. Faced with the immensity of the lava head, the four packs lay together on the ground like a row of hand luggage, far too small and feeble to provide a means of survival in this wild landscape. A scattering of tents were erected on the bare stony earth between the sheds and the buses, so we erected ours with them. We piled rocks around the edges, copying the other tents, unsure exactly what we were hoping to achieve. If the wind was so strong that it would rip the tent pegs from the ground, a few hastily placed rocks wouldn’t stop it.
And the rain continued to fall.
‘They’re still in a heatwave back home, you know.’ I was already feeling a longing to be somewhere safe, green and familiar.
‘We could have done the Corfu Trail, just packed shorts and eaten in a taverna every night, like.’
Not just me who was feeling intimidated then.
‘Shall we take the stoves and make food in the communal tent, rather than sit out here in the rain?’ Julie, as practical as ever.
A white canvas tent was secured to the ground behind the toilet block: a strange place to position the kitchen where most people cooked their food. But when we got inside it was obvious why it was there. Tucked in behind the main concrete building and secured to the ground with large iron pegs and winching straps, it was clearly in the most sheltered spot on the site, protected from the winds that are funnelled up between mountains and pushed into valleys, ripping in from the sea and lifting cars from the road and hikers from the path. Winds with the force of a volcano that make British gales feel like a gentle breeze. If an Icelander tells you it’s going to be a bit windy, you really should listen.
Some wind that night might have been helpful; it might have ventilated the cooking tent. From the cold vertical rain, we passed through the plastic doorway into a hot sauna. Ten picnic tables filled the tent, most of them crowded to capacity with people cooking food on gas stoves. Waterproofs hung dripping from every possible point, water pouring from them and through the decking floor. We found a gap at the end of a table and squeezed on, setting up our gas stoves to add to the wet, steaming warmth. With a sinking feeling I put the food bag on the table. Moth got out a bowl and let out a deep sigh.
‘Okay, let’s do this.’
There had been weeks on the Coast Path when we had eaten nothing but dried noodles simply because we couldn’t afford to buy anything else. After the path, when there was enough money to make a choice, we had chosen never to put a fork into a slimy bowl of string noodles ever again. But in looking for really lightweight freeze-dried food that would rehydrate in just a few minutes of immersion in boiling water, there wasn’t much choice. In the week before we set off I’d bought sacks of freeze-dried rice, vegetables and soya mince in the hope of being able to create something that wouldn’t take a lot of fuss or gas to cook, but found that the rice was cold before it rehydrated and the mince had the texture and taste of a sea sponge. So we’d taken a deep breath and given in to the noodles. I’d unbagged them and added dried vegetables, fruit and nuts in the hope of making them a little more palatable. We emptied the Ziploc bag of dried shreds into the bowl, poured on the water, covered them and waited. The tent was full of people chattering and excited about the trek to come, comparing equipment, stirring food, drinking. But we sat in silence and stared at the noodle bowl. For a moment, we were back in another country on a windy headland as the sun set on another day of living in the wild landscape at the edge of the land.
‘Do you remember – we were so hungry each night we didn’t care what we ate.’
‘We were so hungry it hurt.’
‘Let’s just eat them then.’ I put my fork into the bowl of slime, part reluctant, part in anticipation.
‘Not so bad …’
‘Actually, so much better than I remember. Maybe it’s the dried figs.’
The biggest hurdle of the trip was crossed and we could focus on the room while the water boiled for tea. Dave seemed to notice the same thing that I did.
‘They’re all kids, like, twenty-somethings. Where’re the grown-ups?’
As we all scanned the tent we couldn’t see anyone over thirty, and as the room began to empty they gravitated away from us and clustered around the tables on the farthest side of the tent.
‘What do you think it is? Do we smell already, like?’
‘No, it’s simple.’ Julie, always quick to pick up on the mood in the air. ‘We remind them of their parents. They’re gap-year kids, or away from home on an adventure; we represent repression, control and conformity. Like the teachers on a school trip.’
‘Well, by the sound of it a lot of these will be trekking the same route we are – we’ll break through it, I’m sure.’ I could see the confusion on Moth’s face. I haven’t met many people, old or young, with a lower conformity threshold than him. He’d spent his life turning left when he’d been told to go right. ‘Anyway, fancy a bath?’
‘A bath?’
‘In the river. It’s a hot spring – that’s where everyone’s going.’
Taking your clothes off in the darkness of a subarctic night doesn’t feel like the most natural thing to do. But after the cold we’d felt since arriving on Iceland, to slip into the warm, shallow water of the river was an unexpected relief. People gathered in a line where a hot stream fed into the cooler river water, forming a pool the temperature of a hot bath. The group milled around, a line of fish waiting for an invisible barrier to be lifted before they could rush upstream. A rising chatter of unknown languages bubbled with the water. Beyond the line the water was too hot, but in the spot where the hot met the cold it was perfect. It felt faintly ridiculous to be sitting in chest-high water on an open valley bottom, the lava flow rising high above us and the mountains outlined beyond, black against a cloudy sky, in what was really just a hot puddle. But as the night became darker and the warmth eased away all the aches of the long journey, the other swimmers began to drift away and the river became a wild place again. Dark, syrupy, sulphurous water pushed hot steam through the sparse, spiky grasses of the riverbank. We floated in two feet of water, silently moving like water skater insects on the surface of a spring pond, as the dense cloud cover became a little brighter, fingers of faint light from somewhere way above highlighting the boiling, massing movement of heavy cloud over serrated mountains.
‘So we set off tomorrow?’
‘What if it’s still raining as much as this?’
‘We could stay here for another day, we have time.’
‘We could just stay in the river.’
I should have said no. No, Iceland in the seasonal cusp between summer and winter is not the place for someone with a terminal neurodegenerative disease. If we wanted to walk a long path in the hope that we could replicate some of the physical benefits we’d found on the South West Coast Path, then maybe we should have looked at the Pennine Way or one of the many other long-distance paths in the UK. Paths that you can easily get off and catch a train back to a house with a bed and warmth and ordinary comforts. Not take him to a foreign country, to an alien landscape with wildly unpredictable weather systems and a path with relatively few points of escape. Or had that been the point? Had that been the draw for Moth, that sense of forcing himself into something without a safety net always close by? I helped him out of the tent into raindrops that rebounded from the flysheet with the force of ping-pong balls and watched him walk awkwardly to the toilet block, shouting as he went.
‘Meet you in the kitchen tent. Get the porridge on.’
I knew him too well; he didn’t have to explain it. There were days when he would answer a question I’d barely formulated in my head and certainly hadn’t spoken out loud. He would sing a song that I was humming internally, or pass me something I needed before I asked for it. A silent enmeshing of lives lived in unison. ‘Get the porridge on’ carried so much more than an instruction to start breakfast. It meant ‘I feel like shit, but don’t even suggest that we don’t do this. I’m doing it regardless. Just give me the support I need. And don’t, under any circumstances, let Dave and Julie think I won’t make it.’
‘Okay, see you there.’
Rain poured from the food-tent doorway in a curtain of water. Inside a throng of twenty-somethings huddled, stoves lit, cereals being eaten, last-minute adjustments being made to full, heavy packs. I unpacked porridge on a table in the corner and watched the melee of action. A group of young Finnish people poured a last round of coffee from a communal pot before packing it away, along with wooden hand-carved mugs and the reindeer pelts that they sat on. I quite envied the pelts. Even dressed in most of my clothing, with waterproof trousers between me and the bench, the seat was still cold. I boiled water as two men squabbled over who would carry the frying pan and a woman walked past in a yellow bikini. Dave and Julie fought their way through the crowd and sat at the table.
‘More rain then. She’s either got no dry clothes, like, or she’s off to the river before breakfast. Preferred it in the dark, me, can’t see all that flesh.’
‘Yep, must be an age thing.’
Moth ducked through the curtain of water, took his hat off and looked around the tent.
‘So are you all heading off this morning then?’
A bedraggled scattering of responses came back in a wide selection of languages. Clearly they were all leaving to start the trail, pulling on waterproofs and tightening rain-covers around their packs. Moth sat heavily down on the bench at the end of the table, bouncing the water on the stoves.
‘Most of the tents are packed and they’re all off in the rain. Don’t know about the rest of you but I’m happy to hold on here for another day and see if it’s any better tomorrow.’
‘Absolutely.’ Without hesitation Julie was in agreement, which meant Dave would have no argument; his larger-than-life character was always modulated by her reasoning.
‘Porridge then?’
Iceland sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge: an underwater mountain range that runs through the Atlantic for thousands of kilometres. In the north it rises where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet; on Iceland they come to the surface in an open fissure that moves a measurable amount each year. Where these plates meet the pressure and power forces the plates to the surface, creating an eruptive land, where the old is pushed outward and a raw uncontainable energy creates a new earth.
As the day wore on, the rain eased and we were drawn up into the lava field. One of the points where the earth had boiled out from below the surface to begin its cycle anew. Black crusts of rock shattered into millions of jagged, crystalline shapes and then re-fused, caught in a matrix of molten magma. But now, only a few thousand years after the earth spewed out its devastating contents, the torn landscape is changing, slowly calming. Stone and ash breaking down in the rain and sun. At a speed so slow it can hardly be recorded, the land is being recreated. Ash and mudstone almost imperceptibly becoming the building blocks of a black, slimy, peat-like soil. And in that soil, tough short grasses and moss grow from spores and seeds carried on the wind. Moss draped over rocks, a bright green cushion of growth, a basic starter pack of life. We picked our way through on a path that wound around, over, up and down until it flattened into a riverbed where a central rush of water forced itself into a narrow gorge. This deep gash of land had been formed by the edge of the lava flow on one side of the water and a confused up-swell of rocks on the other, where over time layers had lifted and mixed in an amalgamation of ages that jangled the senses and confused the eye. Black, polished, smooth obsidian lay over mudstone and shale and beneath jumbled outcrops of basaltic and rhyolitic magma. Over it all, smooth and slipping, a dense cloak of ash dust. The remnants of a land in transition. And rising above it in a contrast of ochre, cream, blue and green, the exposed hills colouring the horizon like unpolished gems against the grey sky.
The backpackers were all gone; only a few tents remained alongside ours. The bus trips had been, their passengers had used the toilets, walked around for a while in plastic ponchos, taken photographs and left. We stood in the wide-open glacial valley with a herd of horses. The sun lowered on its axis, blending their chestnut coats and long blond manes to the same colour as the rhyolitic hills. These hills were formed beneath glaciers millions of years ago, but now sit open and exposed to the light. The brilliant, undulating colours of the mountains changed with the sun as it emerged weakly, brightening as it found breaks in the clouds, then deepening and darkening with the coming evening. Plumes of sulphur cloud emitted from vent holes rose into the air, steam from a boiling land. A sense of the earth breathing. We breathed with it, inhaling sulphur and dust, four people alone in an alien landscape. A place where the earth is born and life begins.
It seems not all noodles are the same. Some aren’t just yellow mush, but are practically edible. I emptied some nuts into a bowl of teriyaki noodles and they almost smelt appetizing. Moth sat guiltily at the end of the table waiting to use the pan, his tin of baked beans waiting to be opened. I glanced up the table, unsure whether to laugh or be annoyed. He was finding it impossible to convert the value of the Icelandic krona into pounds sterling and had unwittingly paid five pounds for the tin in the tiny shop in the school bus. Next to us two young Germans had the contents of their rucksacks hung from the roof of the food tent and draped across their table.
‘Just drying out?’
‘We went to Hrafntinnusker, but the weather was so bad we turned around and came straight back.’
‘You walked all the way there and back in a day? Why didn’t you just stay there?’ The next huts were at Hrafntinnusker, eight miles away across the mountains and mainly uphill. I couldn’t imagine why they would go all the way, then just come back again.
‘The path from there looks really hard and this weather is so bad. We’re going back to Reykjavík to hire a jeep for a week. No more hiking for us.’
‘Crikey, that’s a long way in a day. Well, have a good time in the jeep.’
‘Thank you, we will. We’re very happy not to be hiking.’
Moth rolled the bean tin between his hands. If it was too tough for young, fit, well-equipped hikers, what chance did we have?
‘You shouldn’t go up. It’s not safe for people like you up there.’
The bean tin was gently placed on the table.
‘Like us?’ He pushed it slightly away.
‘Yes, old people: it’s not safe for you.’
I passed Moth the pan so he could empty his beans. Obviously we’d be starting the trail tomorrow, whatever the weather.
The few remaining campers gathered in the river as the evening became colder, a multi-lingual shoal in the steaming warmth. The rain had stopped and two curious sheep grazed close to the water, sitting down to chew and watch the odd behaviour of the humans. Hours passed, our skin shrivelled and slowly all the others left. I sat back to back with Moth, propped together at the extreme of our heat tolerance. Dave and Julie headed to the tent and we were alone in the water, just us and the sheep, watching the clouds change colour as if backlit by volcanoes. Drifting in and out of sleep, warmer in the river than in the tent. Even with down-filled three-season sleeping bags the nights were already proving to be too cold to sleep through. I had no idea how we’d stay warm in the mountains, or if we would make it up there at all. No need to discuss it; we’d find a way, or not. Just a few years earlier the possibility of us sitting in a hot river in Iceland had been as unlikely as us walking the South West Coast Path, or living in an orchard. But we’d learnt so many things on that long, long walk. Things that we’d carried with us like precious jewels into the life that came after. So there seemed little point in worrying about whether or not we were capable of climbing the Eyjafjallajökull volcano or passing through the Fimmvörðuháls mountain range. We knew that time would answer most of our questions, so didn’t bother asking them, but sat in the river instead. Shrivelled but warm, breathing sulphur fumes until we fell into a deep sleep and woke underwater.