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

fissure stretching down into the sea. Molten lava had begun to pour down the hill. The police returned to town, sounded the community’s fire alarm and drove the streets with their sirens sounding. Within half an hour, the first boats were leaving, carrying children still in their pyjamas and parents who had not waited to pack a case. By dawn, everyone but emergency workers had left, ferried across forty miles of rough sea to the harbour on the mainland at Þorlákshöfn.

I imagine a wall of flame sweeping through the town, a settlement left burnt-out and desolate. I imagine Pompeii, but what happened was more gradual, a partial apocalypse with wisps of good news. The boats returned the next day, and repeatedly over the following weeks, carrying men who worked through the abandoned houses, salvaging cars, refrigerators and sofas as well as toys and jewellery. There were teams of emergency workers on Heimaey throughout the eruption, spraying the lava with seawater, building a dam meant to hold it back above the town, trying to save the electricity station and the fish-processing factories, trying to keep the airport and the harbour open. Ash fell across the island, to a depth of several metres, so the men reinforced the roofs of schools and houses to bear the extra weight. Lava flowed over the dam and, inevitably, towards the houses on the eastern side of town, and then over them, and down towards the harbour. The harbour was vulnerable. Heimaey was, and remains, the base of southern Icelandic fishing. The island was so populous – five thousand people on an island four kilometres by seven – because it had a natural harbour sheltered from all winds and deep enough for the largest ships. But the harbour was so sheltered because it had a narrow entrance, and the lava was flowing towards the harbour mouth, layering new rock into the sea. Without the harbour, Heimaey would have no reason to exist. Even without the ash and smoking lava, there isn’t enough land for more than half a dozen farms. The water supply has always been problematic, the mountainside being too steep and rocky to hold much of the abundance of rain, and access to the island, by air or sea, remains unreliable. Pétur’s daughter, a vicar who regularly substitutes for her colleague on Heimaey, always arranges overnight care for her daughter before taking the twenty-minute flight, because the schedule depends on the weather in a particularly stormy corner of the Atlantic.

So the Westman Islanders increased their efforts as the lava approached the harbour. No-one had ever been able to stop or even direct molten lava, so vulcanologists and geologists from around the world peered over their shoulders as the men decided what to do. The US Army flew in pumps and hoses so that the islanders could pump seawater onto the lava as it edged across the mouth of the channel, having covered all the houses in its path. And it worked. (Or perhaps the volcano had always meant to stop there anyway). The entrance was left narrower but deeper than it had been, and angled so that when the sea outside is exploding white against the cliff-face and the waves are taller than boats and blowing back against the tide, the reflections of puffins’ nests are unbroken in the channel. There was a reason to come back.

We fly from the little airport, the one by the university whose runway will distract me when I’m teaching. The planes to Greenland go from there. We arrive in good time, having taken the bus before the logical one in case of delay, and go to check in. There doesn’t seem to be a queue, only a hall full of people milling and shoving, rucksacks bouncing into the people behind. Tobias gets knocked over and I pick him up, and then a rucksack hits his head so I put him down. A man stands on Max’s foot and Max pushes him off. Icelanders are tall, especially the kind of Icelander who flies across the country with hiking gear and fishing rods, and I can’t see over people’s heads to the departures board. We sidle around the edge of the crowd, Anthony in front and me herding the children. We can’t get to the check-in desk so we go to the outsize-baggage deposit. You’re too early, barks the woman. Come back in an hour.

We struggle back out. Are we not going, asks Max, and Tobias starts to cry. A bus that would take us back to the flat goes by, and I can see the windows of my office across the marsh. Of course we’re going, I say, but we’re going to have a little walk before we get on the plane. No, says Max, I’m not going. We’ll miss the flight. I go for a walk, says Tobias, setting off along the chain-link fence that separates the runway from the university. I follow him. We watch a cat flatten itself through a hole in the fence and scamper across the runway. We watch a plane land, count its six windows and wave to the twelve passengers, who don’t wave back. We watch another plane take off and turn back to fly past the disused water towers of Perlan. Max joins us, brandishing a fistful of leaflets. He wants to go whale watching and ride in a helicopter and take a day trip to Greenland and is it safe to let people take guns on planes because he thought it said at Gatwick that you weren’t allowed. What? He hands me the leaflet, Air Iceland offering friendly advice about what’s ‘Good to Know’:

You do not need to have a permit to carry firearms on domestic flights in Iceland. At check-in the firearm will be checked by an Air Iceland employee who will confirm that the firearm is not loaded. All ammunition must be separated from the firearm. The quantities of ammunition must not exceed 5 kilos.

I look