The journey is not over until you have told its story.
Scott and I reached the bottom of Rekavík into Hornvík and pressed on around Einbúi to Höfn camp. At one point we used fixed ropes to help us over a steep hump of rock along the beach and walked a foot trail overlooking a sharp precipice falling away into the sea. Seabirds—puffins, black guillemots, and arctic terns—spun along the sea cliff below us.
Vividly illustrated by Julia Oldham, Iceland Summer recounts Kurt Caswell’s journey traversing the country by foot and bus accompanied by his lifelong friend Scott. The pair set out from Reykjavík and travel clockwise along the Ring Road, stopping along the way for backcountry walking trips.
Höfn was a busy place. The Icelandic ranger was in his cabin, and a few groups of 12 to 16 people were camped on the flat. We counted more than 20 tents. We found services here too—a WC with flush toilets, a couple of pit toilets, and a sink tapping water from a spring.
We pitched our tent against inevitable rain, cooked again in front of the tent door, and drank off the edge of our sore muscles and aching joints. An arctic fox made a pass to test us for handouts. The sign near the spring reported that feeding foxes is all right, but please no sweets.
“I’m tired,” Scott said.
“Me too,” I said. “But maybe we should walk around the horn to see the birds?”
“Birds?” Scott said. “All I’ve seen for days is birds.”
“Yeah, but this is supposed to be one of the greatest seabird cliffs in all the world.”
“Maybe so,” Scott said, “as dramatic as that is. But I’m all broken.”
“Same here, but we should probably do it. I doubt we’ll ever make it back here again.”
“Probably not,” Scott said. “In fact, I’m surprised I made it here this time. I bet you were sitting around in your house wondering who would be dumb enough to think this was a good idea. Cold. Wind. Rain. Birds shitting on you from the sky. You were looking for someone dumb enough to say: yeah, okay, Caswell. I’ll walk all over Iceland with you. You were asking that question, and the answer you came up with was me.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And here you are.”
“Yeah, here I am, and now I’m all broken. I can hardly stand up, and my little toe is mangled and purple. How am I going to walk out on this?” he said, inspecting the puffy little sausage.
“Yeah, that doesn’t look good, but that’s why we should make the walk out there to the horn,” I said. “It’ll loosen us up.”
“No, we shouldn’t. We should stay here and drink the rest of this vodka,” Scott said. “And besides, I’m not as dumb as I used to be. I’m coming to understand, after 30 years of friendship, that you’re just a bit crazy.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah, just a little bit.”
“Okay,” I said, hoping to sound less crazy. “Let’s stay put. I’ve seen plenty of birds too. And why didn’t we grab that deck of cards from the ferry terminal? We could have another game of Dirty Oyster.”
“Yeah, why didn’t you think of that, Caswell?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “And it’s likely that nobody will ever use those cards again. They’ll just sit there in the terminal forever.”
“Yeah, ’cause nobody else is dumb enough to get stuck in that place for seven hours.”
“Here,” I said. “Let’s pour out a bit more.” I emptied the vodka bottle into Scott’s cup. “That’s the end of that one.”
“Good thing we’re not staying on here another few days. We’re out of alcohol.”
“No,” I said. “We have a bit more rum.”
We sat up a while longer until the sky came down to squat on the flat and the rain popped against the tent fly.
“Well,” Scott said, after we’d crawled into the safety of the tent, “I’m going to sleep.”
“It’s a bit early, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like 8:30 p.m.”
“Yeah, it is. But you know what? At 9:30 it will still be light. And at 10:30 and at 11:30, it will still be light. So, what does it matter what time it is when I go to sleep?”
“Good point,” I said.
“Yeah, it is a good point,” Scott said. “And besides that, you know what?”
“What?” I said.
“I’m going to sleep, ’cause there’s nothing to fucking do.”
“It’s all wet outside,” Scott said, because someone had to say it for us both.
I made coffee, and we cooked up the muesli, added our honey, and ate and talked about the day. As we packed our wet tent, the ranger walked up and gave us his name: Jón Björnsson. In these parts, we later came to understand, he was a bit of a legend. He might have been 65, perhaps older, a beanie with a tassel on his head, a light jacket, and cotton pants tucked into his knee-high rubber boots. His face was bright and open because this rain was nothing to him, nor these dark clouds menacing a storm. He bore the countenance of a man who’d lived his life outdoors, an easy, wiry look, and hard as nails.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. “You are heading out today?”
“We are,” I said.
“That is very good. It is best to get an early start. It will be heavy rain in the afternoon. It is best to be on the other side.”
“We’ll be on our way shortly,” I said.
“Very good,” he said. “You are taking the boat then, in the morning?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I will be joining you on the boat.”
“Oh, great,” I said.
“Not great,” he said. “I must go to a funeral in Reykjavík. It’s a sad story, you know. But Icelandic funerals, there is a lot of alcohol. So it won’t be too bad.”
“What time will you start up the trail today?” I said.
“I will go in the morning.”
“In the morning?”
“Yes. The trail is little problem for me.”
“And you probably know the way.”
“Yes, I know the way. I could walk all of it backward.” He smiled. “Well, you best be getting on. This here is the most direct trail. Easiest for you. I will see you in the morning.”
We finished loading our packs and set out, walking the easiest route for us and ascending a high bench above the flat, crossed and cut by flowing waters. The mists that hovered above us set down on the back of the mountain, and the higher we climbed, the closer we came to the clouds. Soon we were shambling along inside the clouds and through the mists where we crossed several snowfields, so bright in the dark air we put on our sunglasses. In places we did not know if we were on the route or not, and then a cairn came into view at the limit of our sight, so we walked to it. Arriving at the cairn, we followed a dirty footpath through the snow, trusting that in time we’d see another cairn, which we did, just as we began to question where to go.
Walking these paths, it was easy to become disoriented and get lost in the boulder fields. The GPS would show us the way, but if we were delayed and the batteries ran down with no sun to charge it, what then? Crawl into some deep hole in the rock for shelter and wait for a clearer day? These cairns, like sentinels, one after the other, appeared when we needed them most. Still, what separated me from the complete loss of my bearings was not the wish or belief in these stone guides but the permeable membrane of friendship, my companion who, if needed, would put out a hand in the dark.
We walked on and on, until our path turned sharply up, the final hump to the saddle of the pass. We ascended, pushing up the pathway to the top, 515 vertical meters from our camp. At the summit pass the wind pushed and beat us, coming cold out of the mist and dark. At my feet I discovered fox droppings set down in an X on a stone in our path, and next to it a collection of tiny white flowers bending in the summit wind.
Making a journey like this is difficult, I have learned, because each time you set out on a journey, you sever your ties to home. You do not know—not really—when you’ll be back, or even if you’ll get back at all because you don’t know what might befall you on the road. You leave your warm house for the bright world, moving along from place to place, and with each place are new possibilities. Above all else, new possibilities are what hominids desire most: a new day, a new chance, a new place. “Wayfaring,” writers Merlin Coverly in The Art of Wandering, “is the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the earth,” and “the act of walking becomes a means of reading a landscape.”
Scott and I walked and read out the signs that would lead us through, the dirty tracks over the snowfields, the thick, squatty sentinels of the cairns in the mists, the swirl and spin of the clouds, until we came out on the other side where we descended at an angle across a steep snowfield, down, down, until we dropped below the clouds at last and a blue sky greeted us in a bright day. From here, like the day before, we could see our way down the long, slow slope across the boulders to the waters at the head of Veiðileysufjörður. My heart warmed and felt at ease, as it appeared that we were almost home. “He who enters it is lost,” writes Ibn Battuta, that 12th-century prince of travelers, “and he who leaves it is born.”
Yet the way seemed to resist our going, for when we reached the bare rock below the sharp, snowy descent, we found no more cairns to lead us. The problem was not that we could not find our way, as the waters of the fjord were in sight, but that we would not find our way easily. We struck out across the pathless lands, keeping watch for piles of stones. We skirted around great boulders, over streams and their companion patches of mud and swampy grass, and back to the boulders before us. In time, what looked like a pile of rocks became a cairn, and back on track, we followed the faint path down. Behind us, storm and cloud spilled over the pass and filled the void below, pushing us down the fjord to the water. Out of the distance, a younger walker overtook us, a Frenchman with a big camera, and he beat us in to the safety of our camp.
We found a depression in the ground to pitch our tent and tied out the wind anchors, setting them firmly in the ground. We cooked and ate as the sky grew darker, and just as we finished up the dishes, the rain came down the fjord. The wind forced the rain against the fly, bending the tent poles in.
Seated there in the tent in the storm, I made my notes on the day. The journey is not over until you have told its story, I wrote. I sketched a picture of our tent in the wind, regretting the angle we had pitched it. A little more that way, the narrow end more into the wind, would ride out the storm a bit better. No matter. Scott woke from a troubled sleep as I wrote, the tent bending and luffing in the wind. “Here,” he said, “I’ll just press my big ass up against the wall of the tent so we don’t blow away.”
“Did he walk all that way in those rubber boots?” I said to Scott.
“Damn,” Scott said. “I bet he did.”
“Good morning,” Jón said. “I see you arrived all right.”
“We did,” I said. “What time did you start walking?”
“I departed at about 8 a.m.,” he said.
It was now 10:30. What had taken us most of a day to walk he had accomplished in two and a half hours.
“Now that’s walking,” Scott said.
I wondered what the Hornstrandir felt like to Jón, who negotiated its steeps and boulders and snowfields with such ease, its stream crossings and marshes and bogs, the beach sands, the grassy swales running up the fjord bottoms, the winds and rains and snows of summer. He must feel perfectly at home in the land, and if so, did that feeling come from outside him, from the place itself, or from inside him, a feeling he created? If the land was empty, if nature is indeed indifferent, perhaps it is still possible to love a place, to love a landscape, when love is projected onto it. Perhaps when we cast the net of ourselves into the void, instead of drawing it back in we might leave it out, so that next time there is a there to go to.
The boat appeared in the fjord, the white line of the wake trailing behind it. Scott and I broke down the tent and packed it away. We still had a good string of days to explore the north and east of Iceland, and as the boat pulled in I was ready to move on.
Julia Oldham uses a range of media, from animation to graphic storytelling, to explore the complex relationships between nature and technology, humans and animals, and science and creativity. Her work has appeared in the book Iceland Summer and at the San Diego Art Institute, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City and Eugene, Oregon.
Read more by Kurt Caswell appearing in Terrain.org: “His Life Helped: In Memory of Barry Lopez, 1945-2020,” Kurt’s Letter to America, “A Face in the Window” (an excerpt of Laika’s Window), poems with Japanese prints by Ando Hiroshige, “Getting to Gray Owl’s Cabin,” and “The Road to Crownpoint.”
Header illustration and all other illustrations by Julia Oldham.