Another Dispatch From the Window

One last dispatch from Aðalstræti

Writing in front of a window can be dangerous. When I’m locked in, it’s not a problem: I keep my head down and try to get as many words on the page as I can. But as soon as I look up to blink my eyes or think, I start watching people pass by outside. Because it’s a small town, I see a lot of the same people and I start to think I know them. Sometimes I nod hello if I see them out on the street—and then I remember that they’ve never seen me before in their life.

I see the staff from the place across the street go out to get coffee at the same time everyday. They march across the street with empty mugs and return minutes later, smiling down at their coffee. 10/10. No notes.

There’s a bike shop next door, and I know the guy who owns it. I know him mostly because I found out he’s a skateboarder. So when I was here a few years ago, I went and introduced myself. My favourite part of the week is when I hear him skateboard down the street to the post office and then watch as he returns with boxes stacked on his board. I helped him unload a cargo bike from his van the other night. No more trips to the post office on your board? I asked. Nope, he said. So be it.

Every now and then I see the letter carrier go past on an electric scooter. I wave every time, but she never sees me. We were introduced last month and sat on a trivia team together at a pub. We came in second. She knew her stuff.

A surprising amount of people who walk past are wearing crocs. There goes someone right now. Earlier, I saw a boy run past in gold sneakers. Life is beautiful.

There was another cruise ship in town the other day, which meant a lot more foot traffic going past. The cruisers, that’s what I call them but it’s not really catching on, tend to walk down the middle of the street looking in every direction but forward—much to the frustration of the drivers trying to navigate this narrow street. I watched a group of cruisers take photos with the mountain in the background, each of them pretending to somehow embrace the mountain with their arms outstretched as if enveloping a giant invisible globe. Very cute. I’d love to see those photos.

At a certain time in the evening, if the weather is just right, and sometimes even if it’s not, I see a veritable parade of men (almost always men!) drive past, each one with an ice cream cone in hand. Soft serve from a place around the corner. It’s the sweetest scene! And also, it makes me want ice cream. My friend brought over some gelato a few weeks ago—made right here in town. I somehow convinced her to leave the unfinished carton in my freezer when she left. She asked me a little while ago if there was any left. Ha! That carton was empty before she finished walking the two blocks back to her place the day she left it here.

I saw an ice cream truck drive past the first week I was here. I was told during a previous visit—though I’ve never looked this up—that this particular ice cream truck circumnavigates the country and ventures into small towns ringing its bell and selling ice cream to anyone who flags it down. I haven’t looked it up because I want to believe this to be true. Willful ignorance! It was too far past for me to flag it down when I saw it that evening, so I took a photo of it instead and sent it to my family. Thinking of you, I said.

I bought myself a carton of ice cream at the grocery store that evening.

The first time I saw that truck was in Skagaströnd, a town with a population of just 500 people. I had spent the afternoon and part of the evening trying to climb the mountain that overlooks the town. Like so many rocks and mountains in this country, this one has a name and a story to go along with it. The mountain’s name, Spákonufell, translates as ‘the fortune teller’s mountain’. It’s named after a woman who was said to have lived in the area back in the 10th century. Þórdís, a fortune teller, climbed the mountain each day and combed her hair with a golden comb at the summit. Queen. I’d love to know what the deal is with that daily habit of hers. But I haven’t been able to get a clear answer. After predicting her own death, Þórdís buried treasure (golden comb?) up at the top of the mountain—and in a clever twist, she disguised the treasure as a rock that only an unbaptized woman would be able to identify and collect. Good one, Þórdís.

Spákonufell is not a big mountain, not at all. It’s about 640 metres tall; the highest mountain in Iceland, Hvannadalshnúkur, is 2110 metres high. But climbing Spákonufell was my first real foray up a mountain here in Iceland. I’d been hiking in Iceland before this—honestly what I do is closer to traipsing. I’d spent time walking over hills and through valleys, but I hadn’t ever really been to the top of a mountain here. And so it was that I walked, hiked, traipsed, and climbed that day. I stepped over boulders and sheep fences. I circled, I skittered and I slid. I sat and rested and ate a sandwich. A very fine thing to do on the side of a mountain. Everyone said there was a trail, but as far as I could tell, there was no trail. They lied. The maps lied. As I made my way closer and closer to the summit, I couldn’t figure out how to get up on top of it—a steep wall seemed to surround the summit, a wall that was largely composed of olivine. The mineral olivine doesn’t really stand up to Icelandic weather—it has the unhelpful quality of crumbling in your hands when you grab hold of it.

I scrambled around the summit back and forth, but it was just too steep everywhere that I tried to ascend. To be fair, I wasn’t wearing hiking boots; I was wearing old Blundstones with worn-out soles. It was all I had on that trip. I was pretty disappointed with myself. This is not something I usually struggle with—I mean, I struggle climbing mountains, but I’ve climbed mountains before, higher mountains, and what I consider to be more difficult mountains—and I did just fine. Or, if not fine, then satisfactory—or if I’m perfectly honest, maybe closer to whatever is a little less than satisfactory. But I did it. The boots are a good excuse. I’ll stick with that. But it might also be that I was alone and very far from home—there was a moment, clinging to the side of the cliff and looking down, that I thought about my family, and I thought about falling, and I thought about what it would be like to have to drag myself off the mountain on my hands and knees. Or worse, I imagined being found on the side of the mountain, bleeding and broken. Or worse still, what if I wasn’t found? Afterall, it was evening and I hadn’t told anyone where I was going. I may have even been explicitly warned not to climb it alone. I am prone to catastrophizing—especially when I am clinging to a weathered rock near the top of a mountain.

As I clung there, mere metres from the summit but with no obvious route to get me there, I asked myself, Is there any disappointment greater than being this close to the summit without actually reaching it? And I answered with an unequivocal yes. Because in fact there are many greater disappointments, and they are numberless. I turned, then, and made my way back down. I found patches of snow and slid down as if skiing—an activity my boots seemed especially suited for. I made my way through a rock fall by jumping from boulder to boulder (a favourite thing to do, worn-out boots notwithstanding; you can feel almost weightless as you make your way down from boulder to boulder—until you fall, that is). Then it was back over the sheep fence, through fields, and back to the house where I was staying.

I returned exhausted but happy enough because at least I had spent several hours outside. I ate supper and went to my desk to write. But not for long because I heard a bell ringing out on the street. The ice cream truck. I ran to the door, giddy, school-boyish. But as I pulled the door open, I realized that I didn’t have a single kronur on me. I rushed around like mad searching for loose change in drawers and cupboards. To no avail. Soon the truck was out of sight, and the sound of the bell grew distant. I became mopey, now school-boyish with disappointment, a disappointment that felt somehow more upsetting than not having reached the summit of some dumb mountain.

Last week, I heard the bell again. And when I looked out my bedroom window, I saw a man a little younger than me standing on his porch across the street, shifting from one foot to the other in anticipation—and with a fistful of kronur and a smile on his face.

Okay. Back to work.

IR