I fell out of the tent, catching my foot on the pile of boots. No time to put them on: I rushed behind the stone enclosure and peed in the wind. The cloud was still low, enclosing wet air that rushed and swirled eerily in eddies of green-tinged vapour. Cold steam from a hot, boiling earth. I crawled back into the tent, picking lava and black ash from my socks and curled into the sleeping bag, pulling it closed over my head. Wrapped in a down cocoon, drifting in and out of sleep, I could feel a sense of air, earth and sky moving as one interwoven current of molecules.
I’d read a magazine article in the airport that discussed the role of the sea as a sink for CO2 emissions. Apparently one-third of atmospheric CO2 is taken up by the sea. In the surface ocean that volume is rising in line with rising atmospheric levels. But in the deeper, colder oceans it’s rising at twice that rate: vast quantities of CO2 held trapped in the deep oceans. It seems this whole system is only held stable by the salinity of the water. I put my duvet coat on inside the sleeping bag and tried to block the vision of the ice melting into rivers beneath the ice fields the day before. Fresh water running towards the sea. What will happen when the glacial melt increases? Could that CO2 sink system be affected? If glaciers are melting then so too is the permafrost of the northern hemisphere, where unquantifiable volumes of CO2 and methane are held. Greenhouse gases poised to be set free into the atmosphere. I could almost feel the coming heat, but not enough to stop me shivering into the morning light. One of the lucky ones, still able to feel the cold of the high north in late August.
I made tea and porridge while still sitting in the sleeping bag having hardly slept – my own fault for half-reading articles about science. But even as the water boiled, I couldn’t shake the sense of the utter irrelevance of mankind to the terrifying, powerful forces that form the earth. The sense that despite our destruction of its equilibrium, the earth and the atmosphere would continue to move as one. In that wild place, close to the birth of the land, there was an overwhelming awareness of the earth gathering itself, preparing. Rising towards the moment when it would shake like a wet muddy dog and then go about its business. Rid for good of the annoyance of humanity.
‘Porridge?’
‘Oh, is it morning already? Can I have tea first?’
‘No, it’ll go cold.’
‘Why so grumpy? Did you sleep okay?’
‘No, not exactly.’
The other cold campers, and the warm ones who’d stayed in the huts overnight, set off into the mist, out of view before they’d even left the stone circles. We were alone again, shaking fog from the tents and drinking more tea as the cloud began to lift and the landscape reappeared. Below our viewpoint on the rocky, ash-covered mountainside, the trail markers fell into a flat valley bottom that appeared to stretch uninterrupted to a ridgeline in the far distance.
‘Looks like a nice easy walk. What does Paddy say, Moth, you’ve got your glasses?’ I knew mine were buried somewhere in my rucksack, probably wrapped in the sleeping bag.
Moth thumbed through the guidebook; then he looked again at the pages, slightly puzzled.
‘Yeah, just seven and a half miles, no problem, nice and easy.’
No, from your expression he doesn’t say that at all.
‘Read it out.’
He raised his eyebrows above his glasses. There was no hiding from Paddy’s words; we both knew what they meant.
‘He says, “As summer advances and the snow melts, crumbling gullies emerge, with rounded ridges between them, proving slow and tiring to negotiate.”’
We stood in a line looking out across what appeared to be a flat valley. There was no snow, not a flake between us and the high glaciers in the far distance.
‘Oh shit.’
We examined the open landscape. Black lines scored the surface, but it still appeared flat. Until a group of orange and blue coats appeared from a black line, then walked in a straggling group across a flat section of stone and ash before disappearing again into another line.
‘What time did that last group leave from the hut?’ Julie was scanning the valley with the monocular.
‘About nine o’clock, like.’ Even Dave was shuffling uncomfortably.
‘Two hours ago.’
‘Oh shit.’ Moth’s hand squeezed my arm. So much in that squeeze. I don’t know if I can do this, I’m going to find it really tough, don’t let the others know. I didn’t need the hand on my arm to tell me that. I lifted his rucksack on to his shoulder, unsure how I’d manage myself with legs that felt like lead and a pounding headache from lack of sleep.
Standing at the edge of the first gully, we knew Paddy hadn’t been wrong. If this had been tiring for the superman of long-distance walking, we were going to find it really hard going. The black gullies were formed of slippery ash that moved like mud underfoot and sharp, jagged outcrops of glass-smooth obsidian rock. We slid down twenty metres and then scrambled back up a down escalator of moving earth. Exhausting. Looking ahead the plain of gullies seemed to stretch into the distance, only finally ending at an escarpment on the far horizon. It could be a few hundred metres or a lot more, hard to say, as the scale on the map in the guidebook didn’t seem to relate to the gullies. I took a deep breath and carried on. Two hours later the ridge began to rise ahead, but still more gullies remained. Black gashes that became strewn with coloured rock and sulphurous outpourings of vapour. At the bottom of the final gully a hole in the ground exposed an underground river of boiling water that raced past the hole at tremendous speed, spitting horizontal jets of hissing water at ankle level as it went. I watched the jet-stream of violent, explosive heat in awe, unable to turn my eyes away. This isn’t a quiet, stable planet that we live on, but a living, breathing entity powered by the boiling forces of heat and movement that melt rocks and move mountains. The core of its strength was visible here at this surface vent in this empty place where the earth begins and ends. That same strength lies under our feet in tarmacked cities where we live so far removed from the natural environment we could almost believe it has no relevance to us. But this is one earth and this wild, unstoppable power moves beneath all our lives.
Scrambling to the top of the ridge we turned to look back across the valley. Not a few hundred metres, but miles of gullies crossed. The huts of Hrafntinnusker were just green and red dots in the far distance. Ice-cold winds blowing from distant glaciers froze our sweaty clothes, yet the sun burnt our faces from clear skies. We walked on for a while, away from the wind of the edge, but Moth dropped his pack, finally sitting down in exhaustion.
‘Mars bar anyone?’ Julie, far more in tune to Moth’s body language than I realized, seemed to have the deepest pockets and the very best snacks.
‘Thanks, Julie, can’t think of anything better. Although I could actually kill a plate of beans on toast right now.’
Was he hungry? I’d barely felt hungry at all; maybe the cold had reduced my appetite as well as my thirst. It was easy to see how people quickly perish in this environment. I fished around in my food bag for anything that he could eat cold.
‘Oh, what the fuck? I don’t believe it.’ Moth was holding his Mars bar up for us to look at. ‘Look.’ Two shards of white stuck out of the chocolate bar.
‘What, how?’
He picked the white things out and held them in his palm. Two white shards of broken teeth.
‘Where have they come from? Smile for me.’
Moth smiled. Where once there had been a smile that made old ladies feel at ease, now he had a broken flash of spiky teeth that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a boxer.
‘Wow, not from the back then. I know your teeth are quite thin, but how could that have happened?’
‘So where are they from? Oh jeez, the front, I can feel it.’
‘Does it hurt?’ I began to panic about how to help him if he was in severe pain in an Icelandic wilderness. I didn’t think a few ibuprofen would solve that one.
‘No, I can’t feel a thing.’
I looked again at his teeth. One had sheared in half horizontally, the other had split vertically to the gum. How could that not be hurting?
‘Moth, how is that not hurting? I broke my tooth and it was absolute agony, I had to get it fixed straight away.’ Julie was looking at his teeth in astonishment.
‘I don’t know, but I really can’t feel anything.’ For months he’d been saying he felt some numbness in his face and mouth. At times he’d bitten his tongue without realizing, but other than being amazed that he could be bleeding without knowing I hadn’t given it too much thought. But this was surreal.
‘So, no more cold Mars bars for you then.’
Moth rolled the teeth in his hand, and then continued to eat the chocolate bar through the side of his mouth.
‘I’ll just have to warm them from now on. What shall I do with these though? Do you think if I keep them they could be stuck back in?’
‘What, with a bit of superglue, like? Don’t be daft. We should bury them. Let’s put them here in the rocks around the marker post.’
Moth dropped the broken teeth where Dave was pointing, in the rock pile that held the post upright.
‘Goodbye, teeth, part of me forever in the Subarctic.’
I scattered some ash over his brittle teeth; there was something almost funeral-like about the act. Something final. He would possibly never stand on a high Icelandic mountain again. But more than that, it was an unspoken acknowledgement of the frailness of his body and the almost imperceptible changes CBD was bringing.
The black ash of the valley behind us, we re-entered the multi-coloured hills, the sun still bright in the late-afternoon, highlighting their colours with even greater brilliance. The path levelled at last and we walked parallel to an ice-capped mountain, the frozen wind keeping us in waterproofs despite the sunshine. And all around, the earth continued to breathe out plumes of sulphur which rose from the blues and greens that surrounded the vent holes. Two sheep walked slowly past a steam cloud. There are very few sheep in the southern highlands, despite there being more than twice as many sheep on Iceland as there are humans. There’s nothing to attract them up here, just an occasional ribbon of green on a distant hillside, yet intermittently they appeared in twos and threes, small family groups. A harsh and difficult life trekking miles between sources of food and water, but here in the highlands they are free to be the unfettered, wild animals they really are. We carried on, touched by the sight of the only animals we’d encountered for two days. No animals or birds, no insects, no life other than humans. This vast, barren landscape wasn’t a place for life. But as we walked through it, silent, each in our own state of wonder, I felt closer to my real self than I had since leaving the tent for the last time on the South West Coast Path. Only the land breathed here and I breathed with it.
Over a small crest, the path wound faintly away along the top of a rounded hillside of shale and boulders, the land spreading out around us in multi-toned bare rock. A mounding landscape of muted gold and ochre, beneath a blue sky broken by white, scudding clouds. A landscape so new, so alien, my eyes could barely process the sight. The vivid colours of Dave and Julie’s clothing, already on the other side of a small valley, stood out in sharp relief. It was a photographer’s dream view, and I took photos that I knew couldn’t possibly capture the scene through the broken lens of an old mobile phone. But I stared until the brightness of their clothing passed out of sight, trying to imprint the wonder of the moment on my memory. A raw, open landscape. A land untouched by bacteria, microbes or ash, nothing here that could turn to soil or growth. Just an empty canvas, covered only by the wild, uninterrupted colours of a new earth. A place so thin both sides of infinity meet in a cycle without end.
At the edge of the ridge the world changed. The coloured mountains ended abruptly, falling steeply down a rubble-strewn scree run of path to a black valley floor that spread for miles, scattered with lakes and vast waves of rock rising out of the land into peaking crests about to break in angry foam against some wild black shoreline. In the distance, spiked mountains streaked with green surrounded the black valley. Vegetation. Life. And beyond this strange landscape, rising huge and cold in the background, a distant glacier formed a white slice between earth and sky.
The four of us stood in a line at the edge of our known world as two men, tough, hardened mountaineers wearing the most up-to-date hiking gear and professionally packed rucksacks, took our photo before disappearing confidently over the edge and down the mountain.
Far away, at the edge of a lake, the sun caught the corrugated zinc of the Álftavatn huts. A shimmering oasis, for us still hours away. We inched our way down on unstable ground that slipped and ran beneath our feet, legs clenched in the hope of protecting knees from the pain of jarring. The slope went on unendingly. I sat on a boulder for a moment and looked across the scene, still only a third of the way down. Four people past the point when joints spring back from hard use, sixty getting closer for some and receding into the distance for others. But just for a moment I was twenty-two, standing on the side of Great Gable mountain in the Lake District, Moth at my side in a faded pair of blue tennis shorts that he’d worn through every day of every summer for years. We’d climbed the mountain in the early morning of a bright summer day; then we’d lain on the top, staring at the sky and passing clouds for hours. We were about to go down and it was still only mid-afternoon. We desperately wanted to head straight back up the other side of the valley and on to Scafell, the highest mountain in England, but we didn’t have time, we needed to get back on to the motorway and head south for work the next day. A steep grey slope of broken rock fell down the mountainside in one continuous sheet to the bottom. The path we would follow passed through the middle of it on awkward, moving ground. Moth pushed his long hair off his face, the wind catching it and blowing the mousy blond strands upwards, giving him a manic, half-crazed look.
‘Scree run?’
‘What?’
‘Scree run, then there’s time for a late lunch in the pub before we leave.’ He bent his knees, turned his feet sideways and began to run downhill on rocks that slipped like an avalanche beneath his feet. ‘Or you can crawl down like a granny while I’m eating pie and chips.’ And he was gone, daypack bouncing on his back, surfing the stones towards his lunch.
I always followed. There was no question; if he went I would be behind him. I took the pose he had, spread my arms like a surfer and let the rocks take me. Hips loose, knees bent, flying on an escalator of stones, to Moth waiting at the bottom, wild-haired, dust-covered, arms open to catch me.
When do we lose confidence in our bodies, forget how to trust them without thought or preparation? What was the difference between then and now? I watched the others making their way down. Dave, younger than the rest of us, already near the bottom. Moth, carefully picking his way down with the pole, not trusting his legs and feet to support him. Julie, older than all of us, placing each foot with the same care as Moth, fearful of knees that caused regular problems. It was the way we moved. We clenched our muscles, holding our legs stiffly like the walking poles, trying to protect our joints from jolting pain. When we were young our muscles were relaxed, they bounced, cushioning the compression, acting more like hydraulic suspension. I stood up and flexed my knees, releasing the tight angry tension in my thighs and hips. I could try; I could just let myself go. I turned sideways and thought about beginning a scree run, but a steeply curving path with boulders sticking out at dangerous angles was probably no place to risk it. So I put my pole away in my pack, flexed my knees and bounced slightly with each step, letting the mountainside take me. I was in another place, another time, another body as I reached the bottom without pain or stiffness. Maybe ageing really is all in the mind. Possibly the best way to defy it isn’t through expensive serums, endless hours in the gym and overly sharp scalpels, but simply by trusting our bodies to be as strong and capable as they ever were, being in the wild outdoors whenever we can and not spending too long looking in the mirror.
At the bottom we faced our first river crossing. Too deep to keep our boots on and hop across the boulders, we would need to wade through the ice-cold, crystal-clear rushing water. Rolling up trouser legs and replacing boots with neoprene shoes we’d carried for this moment, we walked tentatively through the river. Halfway across, the force of the water pushed at my knees and I hesitated too long, allowing a cold pain to grasp my feet, but steadied by the pole they found gaps between the boulders despite their growing numbness. On the other side, drying my legs with a neck scarf that I’d just taken off, I looked over at Moth sitting on his upturned rucksack by the side of a river of water that had flowed from the ice-capped subarctic mountains, drying his feet on a red spotty bandana, a glacier high in the distance. All I could think of was the doctor sitting on the edge of his table in his surgery in Wales after he’d told Moth he possibly had only two years left: ‘Don’t tire yourself, or walk too far, and be careful on the stairs.’ But here he was, exhausted, bruised, hungry, but laughing as he put his boots back on to fresh cold feet. Already four years into borrowed time.
‘When I googled the Álftavatn huts it said there was a café there.’
I could see him smirking, knowing he’d saved this nugget of information until the moment when it would have the greatest effect.
‘What, a café with real food, like?’ Dave was tying his laces just a little faster.
‘Well, it said food, and probably some sort of heating.’
‘About two miles away? Better get there then, before this food’s all gone.’
After only a few days, the novelty of a return to dried noodles had already worn off. The valley opened ahead, miles of flat ash and shale between the waves of mountains. We walked on, in an endless space where time and possibility seemed infinite.
Eric with the ginger hair and huge pack was standing outside the toilet block, shuffling his feet, his hands deep in his pockets, clearly waiting for someone to emerge.
‘Hi, how was it coming down that mountainside with your heavy pack? It was so loose underfoot, wasn’t it?’
‘Hmm.’ He didn’t even look up, but turned his back and stepped away. Maybe he’d forgotten we’d spoken the night before.
We pitched the tents at the edge of a shallow river and walked over to the lake. Piles of clothes lay at the edge, abandoned by a group who had hoped to dive in for a swim, but had waded naked into the water only to find that after fifty metres they were still only up to their knees. They had to run a third of the way into the lake before it was deep enough for them to hide, splashing and shrieking through the shallows. The water must have receded in recent centuries, as a man was supposed to have drowned in this lake. Falling off his horse while hunting swans with his daughter, he disappeared and although she searched the lake his daughter couldn’t find his body. She went back to her village to get help for the search, but in the night her mother had a dream in which her father asked the search team to look for his body under an overhanging cliff. The next day the villagers found him in the exact spot. Apparently not just folklore, but a true story, or so it said in a leaflet in the toilet block. Icelanders believe that their dead speak to them through their dreams, so the girl cleaning the toilets said, and obviously this story is proof. It’s a shame the mother couldn’t have asked the father how he drowned in water that only came up to his knees.
Moth hadn’t been wrong. There really was a café. After the iced wind of the mountains, the heat that sucked through the door as it opened felt Saharan, and we happily left our boots at the door and went inside. Huge bowls of vegetable soup and toasted sandwiches were a luxury that we had only dreamt of: supplies brought to this remote spot by four-by-four trucks with immense wheels.
‘Just a few more days, then the trucks will be in to take away the huts that are on wheels. Two weeks and we’ll shut up the remaining huts for the winter and get out before the snows come. Just staying open for the last few stragglers on the trail, like you, then after that anyone who comes up here is on their own … well, if they’re mad enough to set off out of season we just hope they’re prepared.’ The German boy behind the counter poured steaming tea from a pot, happily telling us that his bags were already packed, ready for a return to civilization. ‘Four months up here – believe me, you’ve had enough.’
I sat by the window, watching the last of the light fade across the water, highlighting the mountains in shades of grey and silver. Outside, Eric seemed to be holding court at a picnic bench, the girl in the red trousers with the wild eyes sitting next to him and others that we’d spotted along the route listening intently to what he was saying. The engineer who carried his food was nowhere to be seen. Battery lights came on in the café hut and I realized the tough mountaineers who’d taken our photograph were sitting on the table next to us. They ignored me, heads buried in guidebooks, tanned skin and week-old beards glowing in the faint light. The German from behind the counter began lighting candles, placing them in the dark corners and put one down on the mountaineers’ table.
‘A romantic light, so you can talk of love.’ One of the men raised his head and merely nodded at the German. As I looked away I noticed their feet, heavily padded in thick woollen socks, intertwined beneath the table. I was as guilty as the people whom we’d met on the South West Coast Path. Like them I’d jumped to conclusions about these men. I’d just seen two weather-worn, hardened mountaineers on an efficient expedition; I hadn’t seen the rest of their story, or even considered that there was one. No different to the people who had immediately assumed we had issues with substance abuse or mental health the moment we said we were homeless, I had assumed these were straight men with patient girlfriends waiting at home. Not two people in a loving relationship having the trip of a lifetime. And they had really great socks.
‘Excuse me, where did you get those amazing socks?’
‘In the Mountain Mall bus at Landmannalaugar, so nice, made from Icelandic wool.’
‘Damn, wish I’d bought some, my feet have been freezing at night.’
We reluctantly left the café hut, the wind feeling even colder after the extreme warmth inside. Despite that, at this much lower level the cold was almost tolerable, but I still longed for woollen socks.