In Which I am a Volcano

A few months after the hurricane that put a several hundred year old oak tree through our roof in the middle of the night, my older sister and I hopped the fence to the woods behind our house as we often did. The woods held all things that were magical. There was an old car with bullet holes in it, a broken down Buick someone used for target practice, but with a little imagination was an old 40’s gangster car dumped in the woods after a police chase where the bank robbers took off on foot. There were mounds of rocks that were clearly Indian burial grounds. After the hurricane, it became a mess of tangled trees, navigable by only the most adventurous explorers.  We built a fort for our secret club in the huge branches of a fallen oak and called ourselves The Volcano Girls, after the Veruca Salt song that was out at the time. It was edgy and empowering. Volcano Girls, we really can’t be beat.  

I knew nothing about volcanoes, and continued to know nothing about volcanoes when, during my senior year of college, I failed a geology class.  I failed a class because I could not, under any circumstances, make myself get out of bed and go to class. I missed deadlines at the newspaper where I worked. I rarely left the house. It was, I assumed, a bad case of senioritis and I continued to hole up in my apartment for days on end. I’d been hospitalized a few months before with a panic attack so severe I couldn’t breathe, taken a hiatus from the paper where I worked and started sleeping on my friend’s couch most days. My living situation was not good, and the idea of going home was so stressful it sent me into fits of panic. But this was different, I’d removed myself from the situation and was living healthfully and happily with my wonderful roommates who kept me safe, well-fed, and stocked with a constant supply of Jason Schwartzman movies. And still, I couldn’t manage the energy to just get out of bed. I tried taking anti-depressants for a few months, but they made it worse and I, being impatient, didn’t bother to try a new medication or adjust the dosage. I just stopped, and continued to be miserable for another year.

Three and a half months ago, in the middle of a very serious Funk, I flew across the ocean to be alone with my feelings and center myself in the most beautiful country on earth. I hiked a glacier, ran on black sand beaches, ruined $3000 worth of camera equipment when I hiked in the rain, and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

I’ve thought a lot about what it meant to be in Iceland, alone. What it meant when, while driving through the night looking for the Northern Lights, we pulled over on the side of the road by a waterfall, and I took off alone, without a flashlight, climbing behind it over icy lava rocks on my hands and knees by myself in the darkness, what it meant to be near hypothermic on a boat, sharing a handful of words and a tiny heater with an Italian family, what it meant to stand in the shadow of a great volcano. Under Eyjafjallajökull, the famous unpronounceable volcano I can now almost pronounce  you’d never have guessed it disrupted the universe. It was lovely now, a green rocky mountain with waterfalls from the side and a glacier on top.

But the truth is that I bought a plane ticket to Iceland on a whim because I was sad, and when I got there I was still sad. Mental illness does not give a shit that you are standing on a bridge over a river where the European and American plates collide and that you are literally watching the earth form in front of you. If mental illness stayed in one place, I’d have moved a long time ago. It ignores beautiful things in favor of collapsing inward on itself and imploding, slowly. It tries, but there is always an aching sadness brewing somewhere in this deep, dark part it can’t even find. Mental illness is a volcano, with bubbling lava deep within that erupts when things shift beneath your feet. When things are good I notice everything. I’m annoying effervescent, I want to tell everyone about the way the light came in my window this morning. Look at these trees! And these flowers. And isn’t life amazing? Everything is the best. But anxiety doesn’t let you leave the house to see that, and depression doesn’t care when you do.

The Volcano Girls may not be able to be beat, but the next line is but now and then we fail and we admit defeat. Today was a bad day, it was a panicky, anxiety day. With due reason, but it was the first bad day in a string of very, very good days.  It was the first day in a while I had to admit defeat, had to come home early and admit that my body hurt, that my brain was all a-flutter with a million worries. It was a mini-eruption, a tiny earthquake - all shaky hands and rapid heart.

But I know, because I saw it, even Eyjafjallajökull eventually is calm.

Nothing Happened in Canada

and it was amazing.

We arrived from all over on Thursday night for the big surprise, which involved a near asthma attack and hugs for approximately an hour.

And then we did nothing. For five days. We slept until noon and drank whiskey and attempted to drink (to no avail) some weird schnapps made of moss I brought back from Iceland. It was horrible. We went to a bookstore and ate donuts and so many different types of french fries we declared it St. Starch’s Day. We watched cartoons until 2am and giggled and reminisced and rarely got out of our pajamas, and none of us could stop hugging each other.

But there were sneak attack hugs.

And there was poutine.

There were taco bell fries (that’s a thing in Canada! Weird!)

There was a sunset over the bridge back to the States.

And riverfront laughs.

There were snowy rooftops.

And there was the realization that being a grownup is totally overrated.

I found this poem today while doing some casual internet-ing, and I think it sums up why I like to travel and hike alone way more beautifully than I could. Mary Oliver is one of my favorite writers as of late, and so naturally this was pretty perfect.

The Coffee Shop at the End of the Universe

I have fallen in love. Hard. With a tiny, frozen, volcanic country. I’ve been back from Iceland for four days now, and I’m already plotting my return.  In my life, I’ve never been so tired, perpetually drenched, cold, sick, and so happy all at the same time. I saw a whale from a boat in the Greenland Sea. I ran in the sea foam on a black sand beach, climbed on icy lava rocks and stood behind a waterfall at night, by myself, without a flashlight (my Icelandic driver would later call it, laughing, the “dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of, you stupid American girl.” I’d like to pretend it’s the first time I’ve been told that. It’s not.) We drove through the night looking for the Northern Lights (we didn’t see them), I ate an amazing meal of communal soup with strangers on a farm. I hiked and hiked and hiked some more. It’s pure magic, and if it’s not on your list of places to go, change that now.

In a glacial valley in the south of Iceland, there’s a coffee shop with volcanic rocks on the table as centerpieces and vats of hot soup and tons of fresh hot coffee and tea. It caters almost entirely to hikers and their guides. I cannot imagine locals come all the way out here to the middle of nowhere, to a place that feels like the end of the universe, just for a bowl of soup. The glacier slowly comes to an end down the side of the mountain, ending in a small lake of melted icy water.  

Three days prior, I’d strapped a pair of crampons to my hiking boots, wielded an ice pick and hiked to the top of this very glacier - in the process experiencing what I can only call the rainiest rain to have ever rained, ruining $3000 worth of camera equipment and pictures for the rest of the week, all while not really caring that much. This time, we’d returned to the glacial valley, a u-shaped rift that is so tremendous there is no way to believe you are still on Earth, to pick up a hiker on our way back to the city.

While she took off her gear, I ordered a cup of coffee and drank it with two French women, an elderly Russian couple who - despite being easily in their late 80s - hiked with no problem, and our Icelandic guide, a man in his 50s who could have passed for 30 with his bright blue eyes and blonde hair.

“We drink a lot. We sing a lot, even when we shouldn’t. We read a lot, and we laugh a lot.”
“I love that about this country. Everyone has an amazing sense of humor,” I tell him.
“You can’t live in Iceland and not have a sense of humor,” he says. “The weather is miserable here. It’s dark half the year, and a volcano is always about to kill us.”

When there is an earthquake, the tectonic plates shift so much that new waterfalls and geysers are formed or disappear completely. There’s a story of an woman who, months after an earthquake, smelled something strange in her kitchen. The smell got worse and worse until a newly formed hot spring broke through her floor. There is a volcano that has been due for a catastrophic eruption at any moment for the last few years. The last time it erupted in 1918, 1 in 5 Icelanders were killed. And people still hike on top of it.

“And you don’t worry about that?”
“Of course we worry about it, but it’s just part of us. It’s just life.”
“But, it’s going to kill you.”
“Eh, we’re vikings.”

So that’s it, the secret to happiness as learned over coffee in the middle of a glacial valley from a descendant of Lief Erikson. When the earth is shifting beneath your feet, when you wake up one day and the landscape you’ve known your whole life is entirely different, when your entire country is in financial collapse, even when you know your world will literally explode, the only thing to do is laugh and sing “even when you shouldn’t.”