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

white tanks and tubes extending spidery legs across the turf. Follow signs for the tunnel, says Alec. The tunnel under Hvalfjörður, which is nearly six kilometres long and one of the deepest in the world. There have been no disasters that I’ve heard of, but I can’t help feeling that tunnels under the sea are the sort of thing best left to the land-locked Swiss, say, or the Germans, people with an eye for risk assessment. We go down. And down and down, until after a while I can’t tell if we’re going down or up. The orange lights in the walls swoop. Down, says Kathy. Up, says Alec, definitely up, and we embark on a futile argument that takes my mind off the distance between the fire extinguishers and the near-certainty that there’s no escape route. They’ve just cut the number of fire engines and firefighters at the airport, because there’s never been an accident, and I dare say there’s never been a pile-up in the tunnel either.

(A few weeks later, the Iceland Review reports that the Hvalfjörður tunnel has been found in the annual inspection of tunnels to be the most dangerous in Europe, requiring urgent remedial action to meet basic standards. I read the EuroTAP report. The lighting is too weak, the inclines too steep, there is no automatic fire alarm system, the one hydrant in the middle of the tunnel is inadequate for fire-fighting, the escape routes are not marked by lighting and the ventilation system would ensure that the whole tunnel filled with smoke in a fire. I begin to have more faith in my judgements about Icelanders and risk.)

A paler light appears in the distance, but when we come out the rain has closed in. Without the fog, you’d be able to see over to the glacier there, I tell them, right across to Snæfellsnes that way. There are white farmhouses stretching gravel tracks towards the road, and corrugated iron barns low under the cloud. Horses stand beside stone walls, as if waiting for the rain to stop, and then flurries of snow come scrambling off the mountainside and buffet the car. In Leiden, Kathy and Alec have been cycling to the beach with a picnic.

The town of Borgarnes appears at last in the bottom left of the windscreen, crouching under a black mountain and muffled by cloud. Route 1 goes along a causeway across a kilometre or two of sea to get to Borgarnes; it’s not a town that you could reach at all without a vehicle. Or perhaps, in good weather and with a good crew, a boat. Gosh, says Kathy, as we set off across the dark waves, which is what we said to each other a lot fifteen years ago, when we’d look out of the bus and see water on both sides. Let’s stop for coffee, I say, because with only a few weeks left to go I’m beginning to feel more adventurous about spending money on coffee when there’s a perfectly good kettle at home.

Borgarnes is another town built for cars. It has two clusters of shops around car parks: a couple of banks and petrol stations, a video rental place, two small supermarkets and a shop (closed) with mannequins in the window wearing women’s fashions of the late 1960s. Streets peter out up the mountainside, as if the houses have slid slowly from the top until inertia overcame them on the shore. I drive through the town, which is doing a good impression of having suffered a poison gas attack in the night, to the Settlement Museum, which tells the story of the first people to arrive in Iceland. I park at the tip of the town’s peninsula, and we force the car doors open against the wind and huddle under the boot struggling with zips and scarves that flail in our hands.

There’s a path down to the sea so we take it, and it leads round the headland and then winds up the hill towards a sculpture positioned and presented like a war memorial, looking out over the fjord, across the causeway to the scree-covered slopes on the other side. It stands on a black marble plinth, behind loops of knee-high chain, and we prepare to be reverential. A shipwreck, perhaps. The loss of half the settlement’s men. A landslide slicing the roofs off houses in the middle of the night. We approach, rain mottling all of our glasses. It looks like a flying snail, says Alec. Maybe one landed here, suggests Kathy, one dark and stormy night. Perhaps that’s how the elves got here, I add, and then we start making fun of the sign explaining that we are standing on the very spot where someone in Egill’s Saga threw a rock at somebody. The Flying Snail is there to commemorate the throwing. We’ve had fifteen years’ practice at making each other laugh, but I’m over-reacting; there are tears running down my cheeks and I feel a flicker of concern for my pelvic floor. It’s not that funny, says Alec, and he’s right, but I realise it’s a long time since I laughed so much. Maybe since we left England (in fact, since Guy visited six months ago and we bought the car). I feel as if I’m not allowed to find things funny here, because the least the foreigner can do is to take everything seriously, nod earnestly over Icelandic history, and I know I’m behaving badly, crying with hilarity over the Icelandic reverence for the sagas and the way the tourist board assumes that the rest of the world is just waiting to find out Egill Skallagrímsson’s nurse’s gnomic utterance when her charge was dropped on his head one winter’s day a thousand years ago. We take pictures of each other in silly poses until our hands are too cold to control the camera. I’m freezing, says Kathy, can we go get a coffee? Not easily, it turns out, because although it’s mid-morning