Busy with cats, piping plovers, and nieces right up til the last minute, I took Elizabeth and Andrea on a field trip to my house to meet Wilbur and to the cat shelter to see where he used to live - their idea. With nieces from 9 to 5 and tons of driving it is miraculous that all I forgot to pack was my comb. I spent Saturday morning recording Snow-White & Rose-Red, The Wild Swans, and The Frog Prince on tape for Andrea's birthday. I had to get the tape in the mail before I left to get it there before her birthday. It was Saturday afternoon before I started packing. We made it to the airport in plenty of time, ran into Jeff Duboff (BT colleague - he told me John Taylor had left and Frank Girard is now president) at the airport also going to Iceland on the way to Denmark, had a great flight, watched the sunrise for hours, and landed in the moonscape of Keflavik intact. I'm writing this with less than my usual flair as I dropped a piano bench on my "good" hand on Friday so am temporarily typing-impaired on both sides.
Iceland sits on the crack between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, which are pulling apart at about 1 to 2 centimeters per year. That doesn't sound like much until you realize it does it in huge fissures every few years rather than a continuous slow movement. Volcanic activity and earthquakes are the norm.
The first thing I saw in Keflavik was a sculpture that looks like a giant claw coming out of an egg. I have no idea what it is supposed to be but it made me think of ferocious Vikings. The Viking women of Hertz had a hard time with the fact that I had reserved a "group E" car and all they had left were "group C". They called in supervisor after supervisor. We sat down for a good stint of people watching while they sorted it out. After about an hour, the head Hertz Viking - a tall, stout woman with the butchest haircut I've seen on anybody who is not transgendered - decided it was OK to upgrade us to a Toyota Corolla. Its being 7:30 in the morning after a night of non-sleep on the plane, I drove to Reykjavik in a sort of dream state, which suited the landscape just fine. The Mid Atlantic Ridge rises above the ocean floor only in Iceland. (At this point it becomes the Reykjanes Ridge). This explains why the drive from Keflavik to Reykjavik felt more like a ride along the sea bottom with the water drained out. The landscape is surreal. Jagged, black, dotted with green farmsteads, even the sheep look surreal.