Ring Around Iceland’s Ring Road
This piece is for my Generation F: my two fun, fearless female friends who turn navigating this world (Iceland, in this instance) into a story worth sharing.
I flew to Iceland out of privileged pity for my best friend. “I don’t want to go alone!” Hannah lamented. Because I freelanced, I obliged. Then our other best friend, Marcela, joined the trip; our duo turned into three.
Together, we’d drive Iceland’s Ring Road: an 827.7-mile looping journey along the coast.
After an evening of heavy drinking in Reykjavik, we stranded Hannah (who arrived one day after Marcela and myself) at the airport the next morning. Hours behind schedule, we began driving almost halfway across the country. The landscape changed from grassy and expansive, oceanic and peaceful, volcanic and otherworldly. I begged them to pull over so I could throw up, marring the breathtaking beauty.
We drove to one waterfall, then another. We lay in the grass, our clothes damp and clinging to our bodies. Then we peeled away our soaked layers, like soggy labels from beer bottles. Marcela drove; Hannah made cheese sandwiches; I tinkered with my phone. For hours we subsisted on gas-station snacks.
Female friendships, Elena Ferrante wrote, “are a terra incognita, chiefly to ourselves, a land without fixed rules.” When both women declared me their best friend, I remembered my surprise and pride—the feeling of belonging, knowing we could navigate our friendship according to our own code.
Like romantic love, deep friendships dispel long-endured loneliness and pain. Shortly before I met Hannah, I left my boyfriend of four years. A few months later, Marcela lost her mom. Right before our trip, Hannah had lost someone like a sister. Packed together inside that tiny, rented car, as Iceland’s lunar landscape rushed past our windows, our friendship became the balm soothing every unhealed hurt.
Curving along Iceland’s coast, I watched lava burn into the sea. In the backseat Marcela and Hannah were jostled awake when I steered us onto a suddenly unpaved road. By now we had driven for ten hours straight. We were lost, we were tired, we were hungry: an unholy trinity that devours some friendships forever.
Yet no one yelled. No one screamed. No one hurled blame. Instead, we laughed. Marcela, always compassionate, spoke soothing words. Hannah, so solution-oriented, assumed her copilot position.
“It’s shit on the right,” Hannah warned.
“It’s shit on the left,” she confirmed.
“It’s shit on both sides!” she said. And we barreled along in the darkness, together.