Has it been a million years
from Rescue Me, an imitation-Hendrix song I wrote for a proposed fictionalized biopic of Jimi Hendrix which could not get rights to any actual Hendrix songs and so put out a call for fake Hendrix-like songs. I responded with two (the second one written with Todd Wayne). Fortunately, the movie never got made. Jimi’s lyrics often had extreme exaggeration of scale (“I stand up next to a mountain, chop it down with the edge of my hand.”); here I was going for extreme exaggeration of timescale, with the protagonist seemingly stuck in one place for thousands of years.
since our memories embraced?
Stars are falling down like tears
Will I ever see your face?
Ice blue glaciers come and go
I ask them all but they don’t know
How much longer, baby, till you rescue me?
The south of Iceland is sparsely populated. When people first arrived 1200 years ago, the glaciers stretched all the way to the ocean and there was no place to raise crops or even hunt. They’ve retreated quite a bit since then, but still dominate the landscape. The giant Vatnajökull (“Lake Glacier”) covers 8% of Iceland’s surface area and is up to a kilometer thick in places. Its tongues are so big and so numerous that they have their own names. All eleven of the glaciers in this post are parts of Vatna.
There was no way we could hike to each tongue, or even park at them all, so I became a drive-by shooter. 🙂
Finally we hit our first glacial lagoon.
I had time to grab a “lobster sandwich” (langoustine on a hot dog bun) before our lagoon tour on an amphibious truck/boat.
For dinner, I finally cooked. Rotini with choice of sun-dried tomato pesto or basil pesto.