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

in Akureyri that almost bisects the airport’s runway and has, Guy notes, a petrol station positioned exactly where an over-shooting plane would crash into Route 1. Then we follow the road along the peninsula until it ends at the fish-processing plant in the village of Grenivík (population 300). Large wooden houses are scattered along the seafront in Grenivík, and the grid of roads takes us past the school, nursery school, swimming pool, church and museum. There is one shop, which is also the petrol station and the café. I go in to buy chocolate to use as an inducement to co-operation on the walk. Sixteen years ago, these village shops had a range of American snacks, Icelandic dairy produce and sliced bread. The only fruit Kathy and I ate was blueberries we picked from the hills. In Grenivík there is olive oil, salami, artisanal cheese and a whole cabinet of fruit and vegetables, including aubergines, kiwis and grapes. Now, I think, approaching the till, here and now in Grenivík I’m going to speak Icelandic, actually say the words, but before I open my mouth the cashier greets me in English. How did you know I was foreign, I ask her, a question I asked myself all of last year and never dared to voice. She smiles, looks from my hiking boots to my dark hair. Well, I don’t know you so you’re not from round here, she explains, so I speak English.

We park in front of the fish-processing plant, and try to allay Guy’s Londoners’ anxiety about parking regulations and traffic wardens, the nearest one of whom may be an hour’s drive away in Akureyri and is almost certainly not working a Saturday afternoon in August, because Icelanders really don’t care that much about parking. We set off along the track. The fjord, full of the deep blue from the top of the sky, sparkles below us, and the hill rises steeply to the east. Cotton grass, buttercups and miniature gentians bow with the grasses and reeds along the path. There are patches of shade, dark as water spilt on cloth, on the mountainside across the fjord, but we are flooded with sunshine. The smell of wild thyme and summer rises like incense from the warm turf. There is a house between the path and the water, a concrete cube mostly covered with peeling pink paint. It has 1960s steel-framed double glazing and a warped wooden front door with an inset glass sunburst. An approximate garden spreads to the north. It looks deserted, and I begin to fantasise about buying it, coming here alone to wander the hills and write, and en famille in summer for the children to run wild and mess about in boats, but as we approach we see curtains in the windows and a table in the garden. Someone else’s life, and Anthony is muttering about what it would be like in winter. (Fabulous, I think. An unparalleled view of the Northern Lights, and no expectation that anyone should do anything other than stay inside reading and eating and watching the sky.)

After the pink house, the track narrows, and soon the only habitation we can see is across the fjord. Broad streams cross the path; Tobias wants to do the stepping-stones on his own. We go northwards across the bright day, Max far ahead, making his own relationship with the place, Tobias lagging to pick buttercups and drop stones into pools. The path leads on, out of sight around the headland, and I want to follow it so much that it feels as if my feet can’t break the rhythm of walking and stones, but the sun is high, south of the zenith because the solstice was weeks ago and here on the Arctic Circle we can already feel the planet’s tilt. Soon people will want lunch and lunch is in the car. We stop. Anthony and the children pick blueberries, Guy stalks us with his camera, and I sit on a high rock, circled by ravens. I can see to the end of Akureyri’s long fjord from here, out to the Arctic sea, and back to where the town is a sprinkle of glitter at the foot of mountains dusty in the sunlight. The hills over Eyjafjörður, above the fishing town of Dalvík where one of last year’s students remembered her father taking the milk to market on a horse-drawn sledge, are mottled like batik fabric with snow. The water ruffles no more than crêpe paper, currents marked on its surface like lines drawn with a finger on misted glass. I can hear the questioning note of a plover moving across the hillside above me, whinnies from the herd of Icelandic ponies browsing the grass on the headland below, the putter of a fishing boat moving down the fjord towards the sea.

I have made everyone excited about going to Mývatn. I remember a landscape so strange that Kathy and I spent days trying to find a vocabulary to talk about it, where impossible lava formations congregated around boiling mud and unnaturally coloured steaming pools. As we drive, I worry that maybe it’s not as startling as I remember, maybe I’ve exaggerated the effect on a teenager seeing her first volcanic landscape. We pass through a bit of the Peak District and down through the Alpine foothills. The horizon opens around us as we enter the plain, and there’s what looks like a stationary tornado on the horizon. Steam. Then there are more plumes of steam, blossoming out of the rock in the distance, and mountains like giant slag-heaps of cinnamon and turmeric, and in the foreground a lake bluer than the sky, which appears to have piles of fresh grass-cuttings floating around on it. Islands, some just big enough for geese to nest. We’re starting with the Dimmuborgir, lava formations that I remember as vaguely reminiscent of Mount Rushmore, towering rock presences rising out of the ground. The smell of sulphur seeps into the