sand – Energy and Time

Iceland day 10: Ice Blue Glaciers Come And Go

Has it been a million 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?
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.

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. 🙂

We stopped by a huge dairy, but their ice cream shop was closed for COVID. The building on the right (behind the tanks) was the cow milking room.

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.

Our guide shows off a chunk fished from the water.

I took about 20 pictures like this, but if you’ve seen one iceberg you’ve seen ’em all. 😛

the famous Diamond Beach, which is glacial ice drifts on black sand and gravel

When you need ice for your cooler and there’s a glacier handy

Quest item: Find Dr Pepper in Iceland (took 4 days!). Quest item: glacial ice. Combo quest: Drink Dr Pepper with glacial ice (location bonus: at Diamond Beach).

Seals were hunting in the channel to the sea.

For dinner, I finally cooked. Rotini with choice of sun-dried tomato pesto or basil pesto.

Iceland day 9: East Fjords

At 08:00 the Viking Jupiter cruise ship arrived. It was on an “Iceland’s Natural Beauty” tour that circumnavigates the island.

I thought about taking that tour sometime in the future just to eat sushi here again, but $2800 for a sushi meal seems excessive. 🙂 Cheaper to fly in and stay for a few days.

At the summit on the way back in to Egilsstaðir we passed the old (now unused) bridge from when it was a one-lane road. Well, actually we passed it on the way out too, but I missed taking a picture then.

In some of the Eastfjords there is fish farming.

For lunch, we stopped at the Hotel Framtíð restaurant in Djúpivogur. I had the Fish Soup, which came with bread and an extra pitcher of soup.

Carol had the catch of the day (salmon in Bearnaise sauce) with onion soup.

After lunch we headed to the famous “black sand reflecting beach”.

Except it wasn’t sand at all (Icelanders do not seem to know what “sand” means), as I found out when I tried to walk on it. It was a mud flat. I sank in up to my ankles.

For dinner, we headed to Kaffi Hornið in Höfn. Carol splurged on the Grilled Lobster (langoustine) platter, while I settled for “just” Lobster Pasta.

To Colleen

Perhaps
the fragile, redolent aura
of the caftan you left behind ...

or the sketch I colored
with your skin, your hair
years before we met ...

or, again
walking the path
we ran together, winded, laughing,
our limbs melting effortlessly
into one harmonious rhythm,

your absence more tangible
than the presence of those who are near me ...

perhaps none of these things
or all of them and something more.

But like salty sands,
my days taste of return,
of the tide coming in.

Oakland
circa January-February 1975