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

up there, crunching over the lava to the empty heart of Eldfell, the fire mountain, and we could peer down into the crater and turn to see the sea crawling against the new coastline. Heimaey gained a third of its present landmass during the eruption. But we do have Tobias, and so we join a boat trip around the island, acting like the tourists we are.

The guide is an off-duty fisherman who has a blonde beard flowing down his smock – I can’t remember now if the smock was actual or metaphorical, but either way it was there – and speaks the idiomatic, placelessly American English of the Nordic countries. The boat slides out between the edge of the lava and the cliffs which make a steep wall on the other side of the channel. There are sheep strolling along the edge of the cliff, a hundred metres above the quiet water, and sea-birds patrolling the airspace on the way down. We begin to bounce on the waves outside the channel, and Tobias holds on to me, which is a relief because it means that falling off a boat must be one of the few dangers apparent to a two-year-old. We’re looking up at the new lava, the guide tells us, seeing a mountainside that wasn’t there when he was a boy. And here is the cliff where the coolest man in Iceland swam ashore. The coolest man in Iceland was one of four fisherman who survived when their boat sank offshore – he points out to sea, where clouds are gathering in the south-east and the waves are, I’m sure, bigger than they were ten minutes ago – in a winter storm. The men clung to their upturned hull, shouting encouragement to each other, for as long as they could, but the wind and waves strengthened until they were washed off the keel. The water temperature was six degrees and it was dark, but the coolest man knew his way and began to swim the six miles to land. (All the best stories have repeating numbers.) When he was close enough to hear the waves, the coolest man realised that he was coming in too far to the north, where the cliffs lean out sheer over the sea, so he swam back out and made a second approach, further south. He climbed out of the waves in the dark, and up those cliffs there, and made his way to the nearest house, there (not very near at all, really) and woke the inhabitants, but although he’d broken his leg climbing the cliff he refused to go to hospital until he was satisfied that a rescue operation was under way for his comrades. By the time he was ready to see the doctor, his blood temperature was less than twenty degrees, which is why they call him the coolest man in Iceland.

Anthony, who finds most swimming pools unpleasantly cold, looks rather despondent at this, and it’s only later, when we find a signboard above the cliff confirming the story, that he finds that I didn’t believe it and I find that he did. Any ordinary person, I assert, probably even most Icelandic men, would give up somewhere between the sinking bit and the getting washed off the keel bit and succumb regretfully to hypothermia, which is apparently not a bad way to go. It’s not normal to take yourself that seriously.

We bob on, the Americans and Spanish taking shelter in the cabin while we and the Danes lift our faces to the wind and wrap our scarves around our heads. We go round the bottom of cliffs that are shrieking tenements of sea-birds, gannets and fulmars, and we hear stories about how people (men) used to climb down the rock-face to take the eggs. There are thousands of puffins, blundering and tipping in flight but sleek as seals when seen underwater from above. The islanders used to kill them in great number, and there are still puffin breasts on the menus in the main street. Now there is the annual puffling rescue, for which we are too late. Sometime in August, the fledgling puffins (which really are called pufflings; when I first read about this I thought it was one of the more beguiling examples of Icelandic English) notice the bright lights of town and fly off to investigate. The island’s children collect them in cardboard boxes, take them down to the harbour and put them back in the sea, a moment which the tourist leaflet describes as ‘full of joy and delight’. On, round the far end of Eldfell, where no lava flowed, the land is bright and green as if nothing had happened and a couple of old farms sit undisturbed where they have always been. We are hugging the cliffs here, in a way that would make me nervous if something about being a tourist hadn’t made me suspend judgement. (Is this what happens to all those people who die doing foolhardy things in foreign places, is it something in the infantilising process of becoming a tourist and a stranger that makes you stop thinking like a grown-up, something that makes it OK to board a plane with people carrying ammunition and take a toddler round a North Atlantic island in a small boat?) There is a rock formation like a rose and one like an elephant, which disappoints Tobias who was expecting a real elephant, and then the guide turns off the engine and we glide into a cave, where the water lies black and still, and pale green stalagmites prod the surface. Drips fall, amplified, and then the fisherman takes out his clarinet and drops a few bars of slow jazz overboard, his body swaying with the boat while he plays. The boat is moving slowly towards the rock, but he finishes the melody before starting the engine. The echoes sing back, and back again.

The next morning, after a surprisingly refreshing night because the only