Irish Snap in the Shadow of Eyjafjallajökull

by Rhianna Slade (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

I didn't expect to find Iceland

It was a strange feeling to wake up to, really. At first, it felt like a calm and familiar rocking; then you could feel the whole cabin shake - you could feel it shiver. Shiver like everything did out there, from the lining of yellow vegetation to the thick black rock. Even the distant shadow of Eyjafjallajökull shivered. And, as all things did shiver that day, so did our bus. All of us, fresh from a night filled with the tremors of 160mph winds, clung to the windowsills; we gazed out first to the swaying bus, and then to the land beyond. The places we couldn't quite reach unless we walked out into that bone-gnawing wind - which, somehow, the outlandish terrain and muted colours half-convinced you to. It made you want to walk out into the cold and forget everything else. When I ventured out into the corridor, I saw everyone sitting against the walls, with a large suitcase set out between the rows. I joined them after setting my boots against the skirting board. Cards were dealt and jokes were suffered, and hands were left crippled by round after round of Irish Snap. We felt so warm in a place surrounded by so much cold; disjointed, and out of place. A discrepancy laid everywhere you looked - so much like a person that it scared you when you thought about it for too long. As we each retold our version of what happened the day before - who, quite literally, fell victim to the glacier, and who didn't - another game was set up. I thought back to that behemoth of a place, which had a presence all too much for some sort of inanimate beast. Then I realised it, like I realised there: that glacier was alive in its own way, cast in those pretty pale blues and grazes of black and white. It held an undeniable presence, albeit a haunting one. A sight you wouldn't forget, as it towered before you. I remember the slight tremble of my legs. One slip, I thought, and I would disappear completely into its underbelly. All I would see then would be a ceiling of ice. Admittedly, there was an attraction to it in the same way there was an attraction to walking out and never being seen again. For a brief moment, I couldn't think of anything more perfect than laying there, half-dissociated and staring up into the ice. If you stared for long enough, it could become your sky, I suppose. It's strange to think that now, but Iceland does that to you: it makes you romanticise, in the most unusual ways, the art of dissociation. Eventually the driver was confident enough of the situation to drive us out into that unknown. Apparently, 'confident enough' meant the eerie tilting of the bus when passing massive valleys. Partly, though, it stopped mattering all that much; your heart would stop leaping at, and instead grow comfortable with, the lurching of the bus. That was again nothing but the Icelandic charm: the odd, almost palliative feeling watching the scenery change instilled you with. Reykjavík was... quiet. As a city, I guess you could say it symbolised everything we had seen until that point. It was filled with both the familiar (a Hard Rock café) and the unfamiliar (a niche side-street art gallery a friend and I unknowingly wandered into, separated from the group). The people moved and changed but the land remained indifferent. At the hotel on that final night, we knew it was all coming to an end. So, naturally, we outmanoeuvred curfew by fleeing to the top floor, and there we played more Irish Snap, laughing and mourning. To think then that I may never see those people again...? It caused a sinking feeling in me. But, I knew it was inevitable. Such was the feeling I got from my time at Iceland - from those intimidating glaciers and expansive black sand beaches. There was an inescapable sense of the inevitability of life wherever you went. Once you found it, you just couldn't go back to how things were before. I greeted Iceland like a place, but said farewell as though it were a person.