I had a nine hour layover to spend in Iceland, all in the grey, perma-twilight that passed for day there. I chose to spend it in a geothermal pool, created partially by man, partially by lava, and heated by the molten magma at the center of the earth. I could have gone into Reykjavik, but after getting out of an international flight, cramped, stuffy, smelling of other people’s farts and body odor, I knew that my body would be craving a series of saunas more than walking on some cobblestone street, disoriented and cranky.

Enter Magnus. Magnus and I had been conversing over the internets for a couple of weeks. I had found his taxi company online, and all of his emails had been stereotypically Scandinavian, in the Father Christmas kind of way, not the playing-chess-with-Death sort of way.  His emails were hearty, if one can say the written word is hearty, filled with good cheer and excitement over my approaching trip. I wasn’t sure if it was a sincere good nature, or gratitude for some tourist money well after the summer season. Turned out to be a little of both.

As Magnus drove me in his comfortable four-wheeler past suddenly erupting mountains of black lava, precariously close to an angry, steel-blue atlantic ocean, he paused to point out to me the place were the North American and European tectonic plates meet. He showed me abandoned fishing villages, and seaside towns straight out of Cold War fiction. It was a brutal landscape, completely alien to me. If I were filming a post-modern Hamlet, the coast of southwestern Iceland would be perfect for Elsinore Castle.  As we drove the short twenty minutes from the airport to the spa, we went through rain, to mist, to snow, to blizzard conditions, and finally, upon arrival, to sleet.  Magnus was unfazed.

It should be noted that I love to swim. I love the water. I moved to Rhode Island in part because of how much I love to be in/near/on the water. So it is a rare occasion fr me to meet the prospect of swimming anywhere with middling enthusiasm. But when I looked out on the landscape of this geothermal hotspot, all I saw was cold. There was snow on the lava rocks. There was sleet falling fast and furious from an increasingly angry-looking sky. The lifeguards were wearing foul weather gear one usually reserves for Alaskan crab trapping. But I had come all this way, after all. I wasn’t going to be stopped by some flurries. I ran outside, threw off my robe, and jumped into the milky blue water.

I don’t remember being in the womb, but I would imagine this water is what it felt like. Enveloped from ears to toes in warm, brackish water, full of nutrients and silica, it felt healing and restorative, in a totally un-new-agey way.  Problem was, it had begun to hail in earnest, and I was being pelted in the face by spiky ice. From the neck down, all was warm relaxation. From the neck up, Ice Planet Hoth. Not being an alligator with top set nostrils, or blessed with gills, there was nothing to do but face away from the storm, and laugh. The laughter came out of nowhere, bubbling up from somewhere near my stomach. Laughter unbidden, a product of pure joy.

I looked around the lagoon at the equally joyful Icelanders swimming with me in the primordial water. I thought about Magnus, and the formidable way he shifted back and forth from front to all-wheel drive, never pausing in the face of rapidly-changing terrain and weather that would send even Minnesota drivers into the fetal position. Icelanders eat rotten shark meat and chase it with bitter licorice schnapps. And after that meal, they go outside in the middle of a blizzard and jump into a pool of murky water, operating on a faith that they will be rewarded with warmth.

According to Magnus, the economy of Iceland has not quite hit rock bottom, but its getting there with an alarming speed. Their monetary system may never recover. But these people will certainly endure.

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