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

cars ahead and behind, too fast and too close together, all going south as if we were fleeing rather than visiting a natural disaster. The tour guide points out a small white cloud apparently caught on one of the more distant and flatter mountains. That’s it, she says, that’s the eruption. It looks a long way away.

The sun is low now, the bus’s shadow wavering half-way up the hillside where the winter grass glows yellow. We’re going to stop in ten minutes, the guide says, for a technical stop. Max looks up. She doesn’t sound as if she’s just told us that the bus is breaking down. There will be no further, er, facilities for a technical stop, she adds, so you should make your technical stop now. And if you want to eat this evening, you should buy some food too. I meet Max’s puzzled gaze and explain that I think this technical stop has nothing to do with technology. The women behind have worked it out too and are mocking, but I can, sort of, see the problem. Icelandic is a language with no sensitivities about biological function, no rude words or taboos around body fluids. There is one word for peeing, weeing, making water, spending a penny, using the bathroom, urinating, doing a number one. Pissa. Icelanders speaking English, in my experience, use the word ‘piss’, even when excusing themselves from the dinner table or a seminar. If this is your tradition and you’re talking to an audience likely to include Americans, I see the cause of wariness. But it’s a very Icelandic solution. Rather than admit uncertainty and ask a native speaker for the appropriate term, you co-opt something you heard once and use it with scorn. Don’t show weakness, don’t admit ignorance, don’t give anyone a chance to laugh at you.

The ‘technical stop’ lasts half an hour. It’s eight o’clock and the sun is beginning to set, a process which takes several hours even in spring. A north wind slices across the plain. Max and I stand in the car park and try to eat the skyr I’ve brought, but it’s too cold; with gloves on, the spoons slip out of our hands, without them, our hands are too cold to steer spoons. We’ve been told not to eat on the bus, where all the doors are open and the British blonde huddles in her seat, shaking and whining with cold. At last the guide comes back and walks the bus, counting and eating a sandwich. Two people are missing. The doors stay open. Max’s teeth are chattering and his face looks blue. Across the aisle, an Englishman tells his Irish seat-mate that it’s really good to be here because now he knows what it’s like for the natives, the Eskimos, the Inuit and what-have-you. Someone else is beginning to devise public humiliations for the latecomers. They come at last, Italian, unapologetic.

The doors close and we set off again, through a different landscape. Streams glimmer down the sides of valleys lined with brighter grass. The farmhouses here are wooden, with painted lace under the eaves, and sometimes there is a white church on a knoll, with a bell shining in the low sun. I understand for the first time why this could have seemed like a promised land to settlers from the wilder bits of Norway: fertile green land with fresh water running off the hills, the land itself heated and sheltered fishing grounds close at hand. The light is dusty now, the sun resting on the edge of the glacial plain. The cloud we’ve come to see is nearer, pointing like a cartoon speech-bubble into one of the snow-covered hills. We leave the metalled road and begin to judder down a track, not the kind of track on which anyone would drive a bus in England. There are a couple of those wooden farmhouses on the hillside above the road, and their lights come on as we pass. I try to imagine how much I would resent all these cars tearing up my track and shining their headlights into my quiet sky and ogling the volcano that threatened my home and livelihood, but I don’t think I can. And then the road is lokað, closed, and we turn off into what I take for a makeshift car park, complete with Portaloos for any technical needs, but it’s just the stony floor of a glacial valley. There are perhaps a hundred cars here, and a throng of Icelandic jeeps and SUVs nosing at the river like goldfish waiting to be fed and then lumbering across the water and up the mountain. Right, says the guide, here we are, and there’s the volcano. We’ll be leaving in an hour and a half. The fat blonde whimpers. There’s nothing to do here, she moans. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be looking at. What the hell is she supposed to do for an hour and a half?

Max and I put on all the clothes I brought and pull up three hoods each and put mittens over our gloves. Take a deep breath, I tell him, and we jump down into the cold. The wind funnels up the valley. But there’s a sulphurous red glow now at the bottom of the speech-bubble of cloud, exactly the colour of my grandparents’ living-flame-effect electric fire, and we set off on foot, across a makeshift bridge over the river which leaps and flexes with every step, jumping and paddling over a shallower tributary and across the boulders in the fading light towards the grassy side of the hill. Icelanders in snowsuits, ski-masks and moon-boots are spreading like ants up the mountainside, while tourists, like us cold and like us inadequately equipped, hover within sight of the lights from the car park. On and up. As long as we keep moving, we can keep moving. If we stop, we’ll get too cold. I glance back, measuring our progress against the setting