Glaciers and Geysers

The proper name of the country is not “Iceland” but “Island”. That’s the name that is printed on all its postage stamps: Island. I knew about the stamps because I went there with a group of middle-aged stamp collectors.

If I made a list of places I wanted to visit, Paris would be first, never mind the rest of France. Then I wanted to go to England and Italy, and lots of other countries. Never in my dreams had I imagined that the first time I flew away from the U.S. it would be to go to Iceland. But when Wallace offered to take me there, I packed my bags. I found a unique and fascinating place.

I was not surprised recently when a volcano suddenly erupted out of the center of a glacier. When I went there I saw, just off shore, a new little island created when a volcano suddenly came up out of the sea. Iceland is a large island, about the size Virginia, totally formed by volcanoes pushed up from the bottom of the North Atlantic, just as Hawaii was formed in the Pacific.

While Hawaii is tropical, Iceland is just south of the Arctic Circle, so far north that big trees won’t grow there. And it has enormous glaciers.

The plane landed at the air base at Keflavic, and we rode a bus for miles toward Iceland’s capital through a landscape that looked as if we had arrived on the Moon. The only thing vaguely similar was that barren stretch of Arizona desert on the road to Las Vegas.

After a few days in Reyjavic, the stamp collectors and I were taken on a tour of the countryside. We went around bare, rocky mountains, where our guide insisted trolls lived underground, and across pastureland, where long-haired sheep roamed about in the short grass.

We traveled on unpaved roads and over bridges so narrow that the bus had rubber bumpers on the sides to keep it from being scraped against the railings.

We saw a glacier, about as high as a four-story building. That was just the end of it. We were told it stretched for miles between the mountains. Was this the one that the volcano poked through to spew ash over Europe? I don’t know.

We saw a magnificent waterfall, like Niagara falls dropping into the Grand Canyon.

We also saw a field of geysers, like in Yellowstone Park. Or, more properly, Yellowstone has geysers like Iceland, as the Atlantic island was discovered first. The word “geyser” is an Icelandic word. We were told that, unlike Old Faithful, Iceland’s geysers do not erupt on schedule. Our guide said he could pour a box of Tide into the opening, and the geyser would retaliate with a splendid shower of steam.

All this was extremely interesting, but the best part of Iceland was meeting the people. I’ll tell about that in the next blog.