Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

for the last twenty-five miles. We find ourselves leaving the coast and climbing into North Yorkshire, where it seems to be November. Fog swirls around the car, and visibility drops until Guy is following the reflective marker-posts along the side of the road. They’re twice the height of the ones in North Yorkshire, tall enough to reach up through winter’s snow. When the fog clears we have left Earth altogether. The road is winding down a long, broad valley, and on both sides there are battlements, walls, of black rock, too near the vertical to be mountains but higher than the most ambitious skyscraper. These sky-closing fells doodle gargoyles and curlicues of what must be lava along the skyline, such fantasies of wrought iron that they can’t possibly stay up. Guy pulls off the road and goes to lie in the middle of Route 1, taking photos.

And so we go down the hills to Akureyri. The town has spread in sixteen years, eating up a couple of outlying villages, and there’s the familiar growth of half-built apartment blocks and housing estates spilling up the valley. The apartment I’ve booked turns out to be in one of these unfinished suburbs. It reminds me of the Big Flat in Garðabær, the same show-home ambitions surrounded by the same unfinished shells. Nonetheless, after ten days of living in quaint, provisional spaces designed for fewer people to spend less time than we are doing, soullessness is fine. While the children dash out to play on the grass, all three grown-ups wander around opening cupboard doors and marvelling at the washing machine, which says ‘hello’ when you open its door, and the dishwasher, which has a light inside and shines a red beam onto the floor when you switch it on because it’s so quiet that otherwise you wouldn’t know it was running. There is underfloor heating, granite counters, new IKEA furniture and bedding, candle-holders that still have their price-labels. I remember Matthew saying that he felt implicated in the kreppa because he rejoiced in the fruits of commerce when they came to Iceland, and stop playing with the white goods. Pétur doesn’t have a dishwasher. His summer house doesn’t even have a washing machine.

I look out at the children, who are rolling down the grass bank that screens the ground-floor flats from the road. Between and behind the new buildings, the windows are filled by mountains patched with snow not far above the town’s roofs, mountains whose peaks are high enough to shape the clouds. Below the town, there’s a fjord that glimmers black under the grey hills as night draws on. By the time the children are asleep – after ten, because timings are slipping and because even to our British parenting it seems wrong to send them to bed when there’s sun slanting across the grass and Icelandic children running and laughing around the gardens – darkness is falling. It’s August. Night is back. The brightest days are already over, and there’s a breath of autumn on the night air.

Akureyri is as pleasing as I remember. The town was built by the Danes at the beginning of the twentieth century, and within the New-Jersey-style periphery there’s an old, European town centre. Red and blue clapboard houses crowd the harbour, and there’s a pedestrianised main street lined with shops and cafés. Cruise ships call; Max identifies one that visited Falmouth just before we left. I remember that when I discussed a possible trip with some of my students last year, they were ambivalent about Akureyri’s colonial architecture, seeing the newer, mall-centred urban sprawl as the face of modern Iceland and refusing to be nostalgic for an era of cold, hunger and social inequality. Middle age looms; I like the painted shop-fronts.

We go to the pool I remember from Kathy’s birthday. It’s been developed into a complex of pools, built to recognise that babies need to bobble in peace while toddlers splash, that children old enough to want to dive are not old enough to see the point of lane-swimming. A group of people in their eighties sit under an artificial waterfall with hot water playing on their necks and shoulders. It’s the seven ages of man in aquatic form. Taking myself off for some proper swimming in the lanes, I notice that there’s a similarly lavish playground, offering a trampoline and electric cars for the children to drive, beside the unfenced water. I remember reading last year that the number of child drownings in public swimming pools was falling.

The days are blue and bright, the air so clean that distances are hard to judge. Looking across a valley is like looking down through clear water and not knowing if the rocks are pebbles within reach or boulders ten metres down. Sun and shadow play across the hillsides, and there are mountain tracks leading up to the sky. I know we are not equipped. I know four-year-olds don’t climb real mountains. I know that Guy has city shoes and a suede jacket, that this is a family trip with picnics and swimming and time to play with toy cars before supper. I haven’t done any real climbing for years, not since I moved to the south of England and started having babies, but those paths call me. Vaðlaheiði, Fjósatungufjall, Stórihnjúkur. Sunrise and sunset happen behind the mountains and we see them reflected in the sky. There are valleys in Iceland where winter is extended by weeks because the horizon is so far up the sky, villages in the shade for all but a few weeks of summer, and mountains named for the day the sun falls behind them.

I pore over the map, looking for family walks that might sate some of my longing for altitude. On the other side of the fjord, there’s a track that runs along the hillside, past deserted farms to the beacon on the northern tip of the peninsula. We set off, driving over the causeway