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

if you poke them they won’t grow, and we cradle them through the weeks of frost that persist long after the light is back. Oh, to be in England, I say, now that April’s there, and whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware, that the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf. We were made to memorise it at school, as if we might be bound for the Raj, and even at the time I thought that there were a lot of places in England where you could wake any day of the year without seeing elm trees and brushwood, including the parts of Manchester where we were in fact living. We tramp along the beach, faces aching with cold, hopping from foot to foot as we wait for Tobias to finish watching the geese, who have come back, now that April is almost here.

We’ve been waiting to go to Hveragerði all winter, waiting for a day when it’s warm enough to go more than a few minutes from home and dry enough for the idea of voluntary time outside to be appealing. Hveragerði, the tourist brochure promises, is in an area of geothermal activity where hot springs boil out of the ground and you can swim in a warm river. There’s a hot springs hiking trail, and a bakery! A swimming pool and a pizza restaurant! Best of all, it’s not Reykjavík, and so lets us feel as if we’re travelling, at least gesturing towards intrepidity. In spring, we’re going to explore all the places we’ve collected leaflets about, use the long days to visit archaeological sites and climb mountains and see geysers leap for the sky. It’s not as if we’ve been snowed in all winter, but when the temperature’s above zero it tends to rain and when there’s a clear sky it’s usually icy. In sheltered places, such as the patches of lawn between buildings at the university, there are needles of green poking through the yellow grass, and a couple of the houses down by the lake in the city centre have crocuses and snowdrops budding under leafless shrubs. If you went out without gloves, you’d come back in again. There’s still a frost every night, and the roadside thermometers show minus numbers in the mornings, but there is the occasional jogger on the coast path again and ducks with bright plumage bobbing on the waves. And then one Saturday the infallible Icelandic Met Office promises nothing worse than showers, and by the time we’ve finished breakfast the real-time online road map shows that although the temperature over the mountain pass is minus four, the road is frost-free and fifty-two cars have passed through since midnight. If not now, when?

Later, it will seem funny to me that Route 1 ever seemed alarming, after I’ve learnt to drive on gravel tracks, to coax the car up hills so steep that you think you must have driven onto a hiking trail by mistake, not to look down as we follow pot-holed single track roads along the sides of hills so vertiginous that the car probably wouldn’t even roll if you went a few inches that way, but plummet into the sea like a dive-bombing skua. But this is my first time driving outside the city. The road climbs across a snow-covered lava field towards jagged mountains and it feels too different, too strange, as if we’re driving into the kind of landscape that tells you it’s a fantasy film. The lava field’s stone waves are like a frozen sea, each crest white on one side, where the snow has drifted, and black on the other. Down in the city, bright green is beginning to spread like mould across the dead grass of the empty spaces between roads and car parks, empty spaces that no longer seem odd, but here there’s no sign of spring, or indeed of seasons. It’s monochrome, the shapes of the land nonsensical to the European gaze. There is dark cloud twining around the mountains above us, and no cars in the rear-view mirror or on the road ahead.

Your fingers have gone white, says Anthony. I try to relax my wrists. We’ve just had the car serviced. We have two mobile phones, a packed lunch (not really a picnic because there is no question of eating it outside) and lots of winter clothes and we are, for goodness’ sake, barely ten kilometres from home, not five from the edges of suburbia. Even Tobias could walk to the nearest bus stop. We drive on. The road is well made. We begin to descend the hairpin bends into what must be Hveragerði, where a grid of flat roofs folds out from the bottom of a creviced mountain. There are trees in the crevices, massed pines, and plumes of steam rising from among them and from the black scree paused on the hillside above, and from the bare red ground above, waving in watercolour lines and pastel scribbles into the sky.

The town is empty, the way Icelandic towns seem to be. There is a row of shops bordering a large car park: a branch of Bonus, a bank, a video rental place. I pull up in front of Tourist Information, which appears to be closed. Why are we here? asks Tobias. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to get out. I want to go home. Anthony opens the door to investigate, and a block of cold air takes his place in the car, much colder than in Reykjavík. Max slides down in his seat, reading about the Romans, and I stare out of the window, wondering what it would be like to live here. Anthony returns with a map of the Hot Springs Trail and we set off again, past commercial greenhouses where they grow flowers but no fruit or vegetables, to park in front of a garden centre which is somewhere between closed and abandoned.