Goodbye, Iceland

I would have rather gone to Paris. But when Wally offered to take me to Iceland and Denmark with him and his stamp collector friends, I grabbed my first chance to travel outside the U.S.

In dreaming of trips abroad, I never thought of Iceland. I’m glad I went. Iceland is fascinating.

I enjoyed meeting friendly people in Reykjavik. Almost all of them speak English. Who outside their island (besides my daughter) understands their language? At St. Olaf College in Minnesota, Martha studied Old Norse. The language of the Vikings is still spoken in Iceland. She read the Icelandic sagas in the original language. That was in college. She still has the books but doubts she could read them today.

I’ve told about our day trip to the Icelandic countryside. The road across the plains between the mountains was barely paved. The bus slowed to ease across a narrow bridge. One of our stamp collectors called out, “Now I know why there are rubber bumpers on the side of the bus.” Sure enough, there was only an inch on each side between the bus and the wooden railings on the side of the bridge.

Watching outside the window as our driver navigated across that long, narrow bridge was one of my most memorable events in Iceland, although we also saw waterfalls, glaciers, and geysers. Most geysers are unpredictable, not like Yellowstone’s Old Faithful. In Iceland a big one may go days or months between eruptions. When important visitors come, they pour laundry detergent into it, and it shoots up as tall as the Empire State Building. We weren’t important enough to see that. We got to see one that spouts up every 10 or 15 minutes. Its fountain of steaming water only went as high as a 20-story building.

From the shore, we looked across the sea to see the volcano which, a few years before, erupted from the depths of the ocean to create a new little island. In 1790, the year the U.S. adopted its Constitution, a huge volcanic eruption covered all of Iceland in three-feet of ash. All of the livestock suffocated, and a third of the people starved to death. In those days before radio or television, no one outside of Iceland knew about it until long afterwords. Last year we heard instantly about the volcano in Iceland which interrupted air travel over the Atlantic for days.

Although, as I said, Iceland was fascinating, I felt a little uneasy while I was there. It’s the volcanoes. My son lives in California with those earthquakes. If I could afford to move there, I would go. It seems unlikely that a volcano will rise up in the middle of Orange County.

After a week in Iceland's dramatic but barren landscape, we flew to Denmark. As we approached land, I looked out the plane window. There was the Jutland peninsula, laid out like a mitten pointing north. Just like on a map. Surrounded by ocean, this first glimpse of Denmark was green. A low land covered in green, green grass, green trees!

What a thrilling sight!