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

the sea, there are mountains that are visible only at sunset and – I will learn in winter – sunrise, sharp, snow-covered mountains pink in the low light. They fade as the sun goes down. Nearer, there are filaments of cloud drifting in front of Esja, bright against a hillside matt as sugar paper. Curlews call across the water, and the Arctic terns flicker shrilling over my head, beaks and wings pencil-sharp in the soft sky. Geese are beginning to mass on the waves, their low conversation the bass line to the seagulls’ fish-wife screaming on the headland. I’d like to walk on the headland, where there are paths leading to the President’s official residence, which looks like a Danish farmhouse deposited in a lava field on the shores of the Arctic sea, but every time I try, the skuas come and mount guard, hanging low over my head and shouting at me to go away, and the seagulls land on the rocks by the faint path and swear as I approach. They’ve never attacked me, and a braver person would press on, but I am not a braver person and I don’t. The sun rests on the horizon, and is already beginning to slip away. I try to memorise the light against a time when it will seem unimaginable, even though that time itself is at the moment unimaginable to me.

3

Vestmannaeyjar

If we want to travel, Pétur says, we should go now. Summer is passing. The geese are gathering for their winter migration and the blueberries are already over. Term starts at the end of August. Sometimes when I wake in the night there is darkness, and on late nights I need a bedside light for reading. We are beginning to stuff coats under the pushchair for days out, although most days it’s still warm enough to find a hollow in the lava field and sit among the rowan bushes for a picnic of flatkökur and cheese. If you leave it much longer, Pétur warns, it will be too late. It’s only weeks later that I understand what he’s telling me. It’s not that it’s impossible to leave the city in autumn and winter, but you wouldn’t do it without a good reason and a four-wheel drive car. The weather in the city tells you nothing about the weather over the mountains, and most roads beyond Reykjavík can be officially or practically closed at any time. Even if you set out on a clear day, blizzards can move across the skies faster than a car travels, and the roads outside the city aren’t gritted. We don’t understand yet that for several months the only way out of Reykjavík for us will be on a plane.

In any case, real travel will have to wait for next summer. We have recognised that we will need a car; bumping groceries over the lava field in the pushchair is all very well in summer, but we have already had a couple of days so windy that Tobias couldn’t walk outside, and once there’s snow on that wind we will not want to walk two miles for food. It’s not only financial considerations that daunt us, nor alarm at the idea of trying to buy a second-hand car in Icelandic. Icelandic driving is terrifying. Nobody indicates. Even bus drivers accelerate towards junctions and then jump on the brakes at the last minute, sending passengers and shopping crashing to the floor. People swerve across lanes to leave the freeway from the inside. Icelanders have one of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership and usage in the world, and they don’t stop when they’re driving. Max and I, waiting for a bus, conduct an informal survey: at the junction outside Kringlan shopping mall, where two eight-lane highways intersect, one afternoon in mid-August, six in ten drivers are texting or talking on their phones, four in ten are eating – usually skyr with a spoon – and one has a laptop open on his lap. In one month we have seen four major accidents, the kind that write off cars, trigger airbags and leave glass and blood, and in one case a baby’s car-seat, on the road. It’s the only area of Icelandic life where I feel that I, a foreigner, can say with certainty that they are mad and I am sane. I am in no hurry to get my children on the roads of Reykjavík. But you can fly to the Westman Islands.

The Westman Islands are the tops of volcanoes sticking out of the sea, along the same fault as the volcanoes Eyjafjallajökull and Katla. The largest island, Heimaey, has been inhabited since Irish slaves took refuge there early in the settlement period, and in the seventeenth century it was raided by Algerian pirates who took most of the inhabitants back to Algeria as slaves. (We heard the same story in Baltimore, Cork, two years ago; like the Vikings, Arab sailors found the North Atlantic sea-road, with its isolated farms scattered along deep water, highly profitable.) One of the women kidnapped made her way home overland from Algeria to Denmark, and so back to Iceland where she married the poet Hallgrímur Pétursson, after whom the church that dominates Reykjavík’s skyline is named.

One dark and stormy night in January 1973, the volcano on Heimaey which had been sleeping for around five thousand years woke up. There were just under five thousand people sleeping in their houses on the island’s lower slopes. There had been some tremors during the evening of Monday 22nd January, but the occasional rumble causes no-one in that part of Iceland to pause. Storm-winds had confined the fishing fleet to harbour, so all the island’s men were home. Just before 2 a.m., someone called the town police to say that there was an eruption of lava above the church farm, to the east of the town. The police drove up to look, and found the mountainside opening up, a