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

research, would rather trust Guy’s driving over the mountain pass than Icelandic engineering through a seven kilometre tunnel. I am outvoted.

The road climbs out of Dalvík, and up and up, clinging to the side of the cliff. There’s no safety barrier. There’s Grímsey, I say, pointing out to sea where the grey lump on the horizon must be Iceland’s northernmost island, forty kilometres offshore, inside the Arctic Circle and home to ninety people. Don’t look, I add to Guy. I’m not, he says. You look, here’s the tunnel.

There’s an orange flashing light at the entrance. Guy stops. We see no road signs or instructions. Guy inches forward. The tunnel is single track and barely lit at all. What if something comes the other way? It will come slowly, I suppose, says Guy, going up to second gear. Anthony wants to back up. Guy refuses to reverse out of a tunnel onto the edge of a cliff. We go on. There are headlights coming towards us, not slowly, and a bay hacked out of the rock on our right. Guy pulls into it, and a cement truck roars past with a few inches to spare. I swear. Max bounces with delight in the back. I get it, says Guy. The orange light meant that oncoming traffic has priority, so when we see headlights we run for the next passing place and get out of the way. He pulls in again and we wait while a large jeep comes the other way. Another jeep comes up behind. Guy edges forward. Another car comes behind and our passing place is full, but there’s a fourth vehicle trying to get in. The oncoming jeep passes and Guy, watching in the mirror, gasps as it grazes the car that couldn’t fit into the passing place. I close my eyes until the pale sunlight of Ólafsfjörður shines on my face.

The buildings of Ólafsfjörður have trickled in between the mountains. There’s a spacious graveyard in the middle of the village, between the harbour and the houses, and behind it the school, campsite and swimming pool. The houses are large and detached, most with mid-century dates set in concrete over the front doors. It’s the first time I’ve seen dates from the mid-1940s so emblazoned, but the war years brought sudden prosperity to Iceland’s fishing villages and it’s not surprising that there was a building boom. We drive on a gravel road up the valley, where farms hang on the hillsides, and park beside a white, red-roofed church, sheltered by a crowd of rowan trees. A track winds up from the church, past a farm and over the lip of a higher valley slung between two mountains. We set off. The farm’s wheelie-bins are strapped with broad webbing to wooden stakes set in concrete. It’s calm today, but remembering the winter storms in Reykjavík I think that there must be many days on which collecting the bins at all out here is an act of heroism. The farmhouse is the usual white concrete bungalow, but attached to it, reaching the full height of the roof and doubling the house’s footprint, is a glass room in which trees brush the walls and roof. An indoor garden? The hothouse smell of growing plants and coddled flowers would be like the breath of God on this hillside in the middle of winter. Above the farmhouse, there’s a cluster of summer houses, each with a hot tub on its wooden verandah. A woman sits in the sun knitting outside one of them, chatting to a man who is simmering in the tub, leaning his head back with the sun on his face and the blue sky over him. What about one of those, I ask Anthony, and to my surprise he says yes. But only once the children have grown up, he adds, and only in summer. We’re up above the roofs of the farm now, and into the higher valley. The map confirms that there are no dwellings up here, but the track is broad and well-graded. There would once have been higher farms, and feet that walked this path week after week. A river rushes through a gorge. Birds call. We stop and listen to the valley, and then turn back to the car for lunch.

I sit in the back for the long tunnel to Siglufjörður. People who live here must have no nerves at all, and when the tunnel ends I understand why. Siglufjörður has been piped into the valley bottom. The buildings balance on a few hundred metres of steeply sloping ground, with the fjord in front of them and sheer cliffs blocking half the sky behind. The mountain’s slopes are fenced and propped above the town, presumably to hold back landslides when the snow melts in spring. There are docks built out into the dark water, and corrugated iron houses on a grid pattern up the lower slope. We park in front of the Herring Era Museum and walk into the town. The big thermometer on the harbour says it’s nine degrees, but there’s a wind coming straight from the Arctic ice sheets and it feels much colder. Siglufjörður doesn’t feel entirely Icelandic to me. There’s something provisional about the relationship between the wooden and corrugated iron buildings and the cliffs, as if the geological time of the mountains and sea hasn’t meshed with the town’s history. Some of the houses are newly painted in shades of duck-egg and lavender-grey, with olive trees on the window-sills framed by Marimekko curtains. Summer houses. Others have sagging grey net curtains and warped wooden doors. Several are empty, with hand-written notices in the windows saying Til sölu and giving a phone number. There is a shoal of fishing boats in the harbour, bigger and higher specification than the ones we see in Cornwall, but only a few tourists wandering the streets. We come to the main street which reminds me of Gold Rush towns in Colorado. Most