First Impressions

Iceland. As a kid on the playground, a type of mental currency was being able to recite that did you know, Greenland is actually ice and Iceland is actually green? Children learn at a young age to repeat things that they have no firsthand experience with in order to project a sense of worldliness that we could, in most cases, never possess at so young an age. While this childlike behavior is relatively innocuous, I can't help but wonder, with the current political climate, whether it's the grown-up versions of these learned behaviors that are bringing us more and more destruction and chaos. But that belongs in its own post.

Seeing Iceland for the first time brought that childlike description of Iceland to mind, mostly because it was nothing like what I had pictured for so many years. Yes, I'd seen pictures of glaciers and of the Blue Lagoon, but I purposely didn't look at too many pictures before I left. I do this as a rule. There's something about looking at pictures of a place before I visit that seems indecent. I like to be in total awe of every aspect of a location's natural beauty. It's a bit like watching the end of a movie before you've sat down to watch the whole thing -- the impact that the movie might have possessed is dampened by any frame-grazing that happens beforehand. Yes, I'm that person that prefers not to watch movie trailers, especially these days when the movie's parts are all hanging out on display -- it's highly improper and ought to be outlawed.

Back to Iceland. There were many movies that have been filmed there, but I didn't think about what a high proportion of them actually take place on a different planet, or at least somewhere we're supposed to think of as extremely remote. I'm no world traveler, but there was an otherworldliness about Iceland that hits you right away. First of all, the entire country only has about 300k inhabitants, and a good third of them live in the capital of Reykjavik. The small population hits you right away -- although Iceland has been inhabited since around 871, you get the feeling that nature still runs the place. Humans are but guests in the harsh beauty that surrounds them, and they know it. I wonder what the US would be like if we had more reverence for the land. Would it take a harsher climate to whip us into submission? Is there an alternate universe in which nature is thriving and we live a modest existence in awe of our country's natural wonders, instead of dabbling in it during a weekend trip to the "country"? We use the "country" to mean somewhere remote, where there are fewer people and nature is more prominent. We present this idea as idyllic, yet are content with only inhabiting this type of place for a small amount of time, once in a while. What if "the country" and "our country" could be synonymous?

The other thing that makes Iceland feel like a different planet is the volcanic rock. It's jet black and it's everywhere. That's because Iceland was completely created by volcanoes. It wasn't around when Pangea separated into the Americas and Eurasia. I've never been to Hawaii so this was a first for me. We went to Iceland when April turned to May, so there still wasn't much flora. On the car ride from the airport we saw vast amounts of moss-covered volcanic rock. I couldn't rap my head around it. It looked so foreign, the ocean floor, if not another planet. It was like a never ending chocolate chip cookie, with chocolate chip mounds, and cracks in the top showing the formerly-molten volcanic rock center. In the distance were towering black peaks with meticulously uniform horizontal streaks of snow. As we drove elsewhere, we'd see the inverse -- mountains of ice (glaciers) with insulating coatings of volcanic rock and ash. Many pictures I have look like they were altered to be black and white, but it's really the landscape that's devoid of color. What you see out the car window driving anywhere in Iceland seems like that which you'd have to drive hours of the way to merely catch a glimpse of anywhere else. I'm ready to explore.