After a Midnight Arrival

Zak –

There was a day we piled into the back seat of the family’s large pick up truck and let Ari, the father, be our captain for the day.  We ambled over gravel roads that took us through clouds and rarely past another car.  After we’d taken the slow turns of the switchbacks down to the Red Sands beach and built canvases out of its flatness, seen the refurbished but locked church and Icelandic dog, eaten our packed lunch back around the breakfast table and briefly trod on the ruins of old fishermen huts built into the ground itself; but before we sat down for afternoon coffee out of camping thermoses at a picnic table, and before we went to the recreation center hot tubs that overlooked the fjord; we laid down on the very peak of the cliffs of the western most point of Iceland, of Europe.  We could see from there the remnants of June when a million seabirds, puffins of all kinds, return and roost with great screeching and constant stench to begin another generation.  The cliffs were perilous and truly felt like the edge of the world, the expanse of the cold ocean appearing further than ever.  And I felt gladness for the wild for the birds, that here was a place where we were the visitors and the land was providing its natural elements to greet their species.  Culminations of nature that I could be privy to.

The gray of that day somehow made the colors of all the landscapes even more vibrant.  The chill came with comfort.  The bumpy pick up truck travels sometimes felt long.  The outdoor hot tubs allowed for good conversation and some relaxed gazing back at the steep rock faces.

Tim