Vatnsmýri

Chapter 4 of Search For a Dancer, a serial memoir about a week I spent in Iceland. Mondays on Flippism is the Key

On my first visit here I was unceremoniously dumped at the Icelandair Hotel, a half-mile away adjoining the city airport. The BSÍ station was closed that day for some reason, but had re-opened by the time my visit ended. This time the regular disembarking lanes behind the terminal were torn up and the arriving buses (as well as the smaller shuttle buses) were in a haphazard jumble in the front. A bad omen? For the independent traveler without a car in Iceland this place is ground zero. Tours and connections are made here—like any bus terminal. It is a place to shift gears and move on. My metamorphosis was changing from a passenger to a pedestrian. A pedestrian eager for his early morning walk a thing I would never do at home  but with the 5 hour differential this was  akin to ‘walking after midnight.’ My strategy for avoiding west-to-east jet lag is simple, but effective: No alcohol on the flight, get to a swimming pool (with a hot tub) first thing, stay awake until at least 20:00 hours, then sleep for 12 or more hours, completely resetting your internal clock. The pool was about 2 km away, an easy walk, but not with a bunch of luggage.

I looked around for the lockers to store my carry-on and laptop until I could access my apartment later on in the day. In years previous the lockers had been next to the cafe but, like everything in tourist Iceland, the need for them had grown—bigger now having its own room, entered from the outside. The room was brightly lit and smelled of disinfectant is that a good thing or a bad thing? There were dozens of lockers in several sizes, I picked a suitable one and put most of my gear inside, keeping only my small backpack with my swim gear and a camera. I paid the checkout machine with a credit card while carefully noting the return procedures. The credit card worked the first time! A good omen.

My load suitably lightened, I headed back outside, past my recent traveling companion who was squeezing into his shuttle bus, heading out on his adventure. My path began a few hundred years from the station where a spiral pedestrian footpath wound up and over the busy roads and ended at the end of a marshy fen appropriately named Vatnsmýri, ‘water swamp’. Before the British invaded Iceland in May of 1940 the swamp was much larger, including what is now the city airport but this little wetland is all that remains. The area has been restored in recent years; birds frequent it and a wooden walkway passes through ending at the Noræna Húsið: the Nordic House library and cultural center. A place where I have spent many enjoyable, even transcendent hours. Its food space once hosted a future Michelin Star gastronomic restaurant (since moved to bigger quarters downtown) and the dozens of musicians I have seen perform there always created special moments. The music festival is just getting back on its feet after two years of shutdown so this year nothing (as yet) has been scheduled here.

Moving on, I walked through the campus of The University of Iceland. It was still a little early for classes, but I did see one scholar scurrying between buildings. A half-century earlier, in Minneapolis, that would have been me, lost and searching. I am no longer lost, but I am still searching, searching for those ‘moments of shine’ as Björk once put it. I walked past Veröld - Hús Vigdísar, a facility named for the first female president of Iceland, where I had been scheduled to attend a Covid-cancelled writing seminar in 2020. Missed opportunity but not really missed. I was outside looking in, a condition that I’ve never quite overcome in my travels and studies of the culture and the people of Iceland. Right next to Veröld is the big Radisson Blu Saga hotel, where I had once booked a room, also cancelled. Not my preferred choice of accommodations; I prefer to be in the center of town, but the hotel’s location was perfect for the conference. Looking back at the hotel I was cheered by the sight of the sun rising over the building, a promise of fair weather. A good omen.

My lucky streak of beautiful days in Iceland had continued.


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