cold beer over my head to stay cool in the sauna, and then after a while Sarah and I stepped outside and walked knee-deep into the lake. The eighty-year-old patriarch whose name was I think Lasse joined us, and he was standing there completely nude, next to the ridiculously modest Americans in their bathing suits. And then Lasse clapped me on the back in what was intended to be a firm gesture of camaraderie. Unprepared for the strength of his embrace, I fell face-first into the lake. I was uninjured but my glasses were thoroughly and irreparably scratched from an encounter with the rocks in the lake bed. The next morning I woke up reminded that my abject fear of hangovers is fully warranted, and also unable to see much on account of the gouged glasses.
* * *
By the time we arrived in Reykjavík, Iceland, two days later, I was still hungover, which for me always means a sour churning in the left side of my abdomen combined with a general desire to dissolve into the landscape. This is the real crux of a hangover for me—alcohol consumption increases my vulnerability to despair. I understood that it was only the hangover talking, but the hangover does talk rather loudly.
Hangovers also make me quite sensitive to light, which would’ve been a problem except that it was a hideously gray morning when we landed in Reykjavík, not just overcast but misty. It was one of those days where you realize that “sky” is just another human construct, that the sky starts wherever the ground ends. Sky isn’t just something way up out there, but also something that your head is swimming in all the time.
We took a taxi from the airport into the city of Reykjavík, Iceland’s largest (and really only) city. The cab driver was listening to some kind of Icelandic talk radio that was turned up entirely too loud, and I was squeezed between Sarah and Laura in the backseat. As we entered the city, I was struck mostly by its eerie silence. There was not a single person out on the streets, even though the weather wasn’t that bad. It was a Friday in summer, and I had imagined a small city where people walked all day to the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker or whatever. Instead, the town was utterly still.
About four blocks from our hotel, the cab driver said, “This is good.” He stopped and asked us to pay him. We expressed an interest in his driving us all the way to our hotel, but he said, “No, it is too much. It is too, what do you say, too much stress.”
From my perspective, it didn’t seem too stressful to drive on these empty streets, but whatever, I’m not an expert in Icelandic driving. We got out of the cab and began wheeling our suitcases down a wide, abandoned sidewalk in central Reykjavík. What I remember most is the sound of our suitcase wheels on the sidewalk’s stone tiles, the noise overwhelming amid such silence.
And then, from nowhere and everywhere, simultaneously, came a shout followed by a groan. The entire city, hidden somewhere inside the buildings all around us, seemed to have made the exact same noise at the exact same moment.
“That was weird,” Ryan said, and we began speculating on why the city was locked down. Maybe there’d been some kind of weather threat that tourists weren’t made aware of. Maybe it was a national indoor holiday.
“Maybe,” Laura said, “they’re all watching the same thing on TV?”
And at that moment, the city’s silence burst apart. A tremendous roar erupted all around us. People poured out of every doorway—out of homes and stores and bars, and into the streets. They were screaming in exaltation, all of them, yelling, “YYYAAAAAAAAAA!” Many of them had their faces painted in the colors of the Icelandic flag, and quite a lot of them were openly weeping. A tall fellow around my age picked me up and held me up to the sky like I was Simba in The Lion King and then embraced me as he wept. Someone draped a scarf around Ryan’s neck.
“What the hell is happening?” Sarah asked, with her trademark precision.
Beers were handed around. We took some. The initial chaos of screaming soon organized itself into song, songs that were apparently very emotional, because everyone except for us was crying as they sang in the streets. Some people had to sit down on the curbs