Jonah Walters | Longreads | October 24, 2024 | (4,468 words)
An unquiet bowl of orange rock-soup, filmed from above by a drone, played continuously on the sole television screen in the lobby. Standing in line with our luggage, we took in the boisterous sloshing of the lava, our wide eyes tracking each plume of gas against the soggy North Atlantic sky. It was a vision almost too dramatic to believe. Even from the comfort of a hotel antechamber on Hverfisgata, in downtown Reykjavík, one could gaze into the frothy mouth of The Newest Volcano in the World.
That’s what tour guides were calling it, at least. But the eruption site, situated a short drive from the Icelandic capital on the southern Reykjanes peninsula, was more properly understood as one explosive node of a larger volcanic system, called Fagradalsfjall, where there had been three major events in the previous three years. These events were fissure eruptions: great tears in the earth, generally a few meters wide, that formed due to built-up magmatic pressure below. Geologists would object to this description, I bet, but what distinguishes a fissure eruption for me is that within it the properties of a volcano and an earthquake are combined.
When magma tore through in early 2021, it was the first volcanic activity at Fagradalsfjall in almost a millennium. A smaller fissure eruption followed the next year, and then, on July 10, 2023, came the big one. Fresh lava suddenly spilled at a rate of about 600-700 cubic feet per second through conjoined fissures that at one point stretched longer than a kilometer. Soon a crater formed at a place called Litli-Hrútur, its black walls growing at a rate of 10 feet per day. That’s what we were watching on TV.
“Lava,” wrote the American poet Eileen Myles, “is Iceland’s version of molding clay.” But it’s also “like an ominous clock that has stopped.”
Iceland is a popular tourist destination even in normal circumstances, and with Litli-Hrútur just a taxi ride from Keflavík Airport, the international enthusiasm intensified. At the baggage claim last summer, watching travelers delicately inspect their camera lenses, I had the sensation of being caught in a tide. Many thousands of tourists have visited Fagradalsfjall since the eruptions started in 2021. My traveling partner and I made two more.
We, too, had come to gawk at the rip in the world. What is it about disaster that draws us in?
A few days later we met our guide in the parking lot of the Hallgrímskirkja church. Soon we were beyond the city limits, watching the gunmetal ocean sway through tinted windows. The permanent sun of the Icelandic summer squatted overhead, glowing like a parking light.
We turned south to bisect the peninsula. Steaming rivulets of milky turquoise water flowed in channels beside the roadway. Its source was the Svartsengi geothermal power plant that stood just ahead along the highway, in a skirt of billowing steam. Some portion of this bejeweled water is diverted for use at the Blue Lagoon, a world-famous outdoor bath.
My traveling partner and I had been there earlier with my parents. We floated as a family in shallow canyons full of cerulean milk, white mist rising from every puddle, black craggy moonrocks looming on all sides. Some say the landscape has spiritual properties. Certainly its volcanic mud is good for the skin. The power authority recently incorporated a luxury skincare brand to vend the stuff in international airports.
In any event, our guide piloted the van past the Blue Lagoon without comment. We glided through the tidy town of Grindavík, with its streetlights and pretty houses. Then we pulled into a makeshift parking lot already crowded with rented SUVs. From there we decamped on foot towards Litli-Hrútur.
The route was about 10 kilometers of steady hiking across a stark volcanic plain.
We, too, had come to gawk at the rip in the world. What is it about disaster that draws us in?
At one point, we paused to take in the site of the 2021 eruption: a cooled lava sheet extending nearly to the horizon. Far in the distance, well beyond the marked trail, a few hikers took wide, delicate steps across the jagged basalt. Old lava is brittle; it tends to form hollow tubes, the insides of which can remain somewhat molten for months. Absentmindedly, our guide told us about an acquaintance of hers, a geologist, who once stepped on a section of lava he thought entirely cooled, only for his legs to break through the crust into the hot bubble below. She even described the smell. Then we were off walking again, keeping strictly to the trail.
“Iceland’s dark grey sweater is everywhere covered with bright green lichen,” wrote Eileen Myles, and at one point, as we strode quickly past a lichen patch that was not only green but also pillow-top soft, our guide told us to be grateful for the low clouds overhead. Most days she endured the din of helicopters, which took off from Reykjavík loaded with the most affluent of tourists. The choppers would scream across the land, hover briefly over the hellmouth, then bank away against the wet horizon. This activity pissed off the local seismologists, she said, holding a finger to her lips, since it disrupted the many hundreds of devices placed throughout the area to monitor vibrations of the earth’s surface.
After several hours we reached the windy peak of a cone-shaped hill. We slipped into the crowd of hikers gathered on the summit. Deep in the valley below us, in the middle distance, gaped the great black cauldron of Litli-Hrútur, its insides awash in a churning fiery stew. We stood in silence on the observation mound with our hands on our hips, faces cast in childish masks of wonder and awe.
In the novel Miss Iceland, by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, it is one character’s lifelong aspiration to witness a volcanic eruption. “He wanted to see glowing blocks of lava,” she writes, “whole boulders shooting into the air, he wanted to see the red fiery eyes spitting shooting stars like sparks in a foundry, he wanted to see a black lava wall crawling forward like an illuminated metropolis.” Safe to say we observed all this and more at Litli-Hrútur. Even now, the vision resists my efforts to put it into words.
I was prepared, to an extent, for what I saw. What surprised me was how audible it all was. Currents of molten lava rose and collapsed like thick tongues of muddy ocean water, making a concussive sloshing sound that snapped and boomed.
Next to us, on a blanket, a group of Danish teenagers used a kerosene camp stove to prepare a roll of cinnamon buns. A bakery-like sweetness filled the air, mixed with the dust and gas, and the scent was enough to make us giggle into the collars of our rain-repellent windbreakers.
In another novel, Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was, by the mononomic Sjón, a group of townsfolk gather on a hill in Reykjavík to observe the distant eruption of a volcano called Katla. “They gaze intently at the light show in the east, where the volcano is painting the night sky every shade of red, from scarlet through violet to crimson, before exploding the canvas with flares of bonfire yellow and gaseous blue.” Despite the stubborn daylight, we saw the painted sky, too.
But we were closer to the fumes than Sjón’s fictional crowd, so we didn’t linger long in our trance overlooking Litli-Hrútur. When it was time, we hurried down the cone-hill to the gravel meadow below. We hiked quickly back to the van, taking ill-advised shortcuts, like prey-animals in flight.
Our visit to Fagradalsfjall took place more than a year ago. I don’t know why it’s on my mind now. But if I were to guess, I’d say it’s because I’m about to move to Southern California.
I’m moving alone. My traveling partner, who at home is simply my partner, will stay behind in New York City, riding the subway and feeling the rain. My parents will continue their lives in Central Pennsylvania, where sometimes they must brake at stop signs for buggies pulled by blinkered horses. These are the only places I’ve ever lived, the only people with whom I’ve properly shared a home. In a week or so, I’ll be removed from them by a minimum distance of 2,677 highway miles.
“Unsteadiness is the country’s deepest force,” Myles wrote in The Importance of Being Iceland. “It’s the youngest country in the world, errrk, pulling apart.”
Last spring, during one of my reconnaissance trips to Los Angeles, a friend suddenly gripped my elbow like an evangelist. “Have you heard of the Earthquake Map?” she asked, pulling me into the nearest bar. Her voice was grave. I bought two beers and leaned in to listen.
What surprised me was how audible it all was. Currents of molten lava rose and collapsed like thick tongues of muddy ocean water, making a concussive sloshing sound that snapped and boomed.
After the San Fernando earthquake of 1971, which caused 58 deaths (excluding heart attacks), the California State Legislature decreed that all building surfaces above known fault lines would constitute distinct regulatory zones. The map they commissioned was a horror: it revealed high-risk corridors darting through some of the most populous and trafficked areas of the state, including Culver City, Inglewood, Hollywood, even LAX.
Then the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (death toll: 63) delivered the term “liquefaction” to the paranoid vernacular of the California homeowner. Especially in San Francisco’s Marina District, the tremor caused vast shelves of loose-packed soil to lose their stiffness all at once. In a fraction of a second, groundwater flooded into the trillions of microscopic pores between each individual grain of dirt, resulting in a free-fall effect that was, according to Allen Hazen, the scientist who first identified the phenomenon in 1920, “practically equivalent to quicksand.” In the aftermath of the quake, the legislature tasked geologists with locating places where the subsoil was most likely to collapse. When their survey was finished, vast “liquefaction areas” spread across the state like inkblots on an atlas. The riskiest zones encompassed vital infrastructure, like the Port of Los Angeles, as well as some of the world’s most affluent neighborhoods, like Beverly Hills.
“I feel a weird affinity for earthquakes,” the novelist Jade Chang told Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles. Chang is a native of Northridge, the neighborhood that in 1994 became the epicenter of LA’s most recent major quake. “I think it’s an awareness that the Earth is alive,” she elaborated. “Like, all right, We see you, we’re aware of you.” Baldwin, for his part, discovered shortly after moving to Hollywood that the house he rented with his wife sat atop a sprawling liquefaction area. “When we signed the lease, we knew by virtue of a little research that we’d become fault line residents,” he wrote. “But not that the soil beneath us could go molten. How do you defend against quicksand?”
There is a government website where the faultline and liquefaction maps are overlaid. The relative riskiness of tens of millions of prospective addresses is easily discoverable there via a search bar. Still gripping my arm, my friend advised me to consult the website regularly. The exercise should come naturally, she speculated, since my academic profile identified me as a professional geographer. I ought to at least be competent with maps.
But a few weeks ago, from my desk at home, I impulsively rented a ground-floor apartment in West Hollywood, sight unseen. At that moment my anticipation was a bodily thing; it was a tear in the stomach, a hot flash behind the corneas; it was unknowable to everyone but me; and it burned. I avoided the Earthquake Map like an unopened biopsy result.
In Quake, a novel by Auður Jónsdóttir, a young mother in Reykjavík experiences a series of seizures that are to her the equivalents of private earthquakes. “The colors around me are whirlpooling into a blitzwhite that’s more actual than any other color,” she says of one seizure, her largest: the Big One. “I am no longer inside myself; I am up on the ledge now and below is a beauty so sublime I feel dizzy. I feel sand under the soles of my feet.” But in a few moments she’ll wake up on her back next to a bus stop, and all that sublime beauty will be gone. Disappeared. How do you defend against that?
Late last night, while my partner slept, I finally did it. I clicked the link like a debtor entering a casino. I punched in my new address. I breathed. I clicked again. My future apartment, which sits on a shaded avenue near a baseball diamond, is not above a fault. Nor is it in a liquefaction zone.
Is that what I wanted? When the bad day came, “when fires stretched for blocks and the streets were ankle-deep in jagged glass,” as Baldwin writes, would my location be a relief? Or would I wake up peacefully on an undisturbed block, brick-dust in the atmosphere, sirens in the distance, and feel bereft at being left behind?
The lava flows at Litli-Hrútur stopped in August 2023, a few weeks after our visit. But in October there was a fresh magmatic intrusion beneath the Fagradalsfjall field. The ground shook almost constantly; an estimated 3,200 earthquake tremors occurred over the next several weeks. Conditions seemed primed for another magmatic breach.
On this volatile plain—in fact, directly in the path of one projected fissure—sat the town of Grindavík, whose 3,000-odd inhabitants suddenly had to flee. Speaking to a Guardian reporter, one evacuee described “a big animal coming, it was like a lion—and of course we saw the Earth moving.” The townsfolk took shelter elsewhere, many of them in nearby Reykjavík, to await nature’s verdict on their homes.
Geological officials (Iceland has those) warned that new fissures could open up at a moment’s notice. The Blue Lagoon closed its gates, the Svartsengi power plant operated remotely. But no fissure materialized. By November, seismologists were recording a mere 200 earthquakes overnight. The boldest of the locals began to trickle back, in defiance of the warnings, to walk their dogs on freshly snarled roads.
It is extraordinarily rare for volcanic events in Iceland to cause any human deaths, thanks to the country’s sparse population and thorough monitoring system, and so far, the fissures had steered clear of habitations and infrastructure almost entirely. By God, one could even observe flocks of tourists huddled like puffins on a stony hill, admiring the disaster through their cell-phone cameras! There was an aura of surreal harmlessness about it all.
Plus, in a wild stroke of luck, the tremors carved a lovely crosshatch across Grindavík’s street grid. Surveying the damage, Snorri Valsson, Iceland’s official spokesperson for tourism, anticipated the village would see an influx of international sightseers. Speaking to an Independent reporter, an unnamed local pointed out a grand crater in the center of Grindavík. “I think it will definitely become the number one selfie spot in Iceland,” he said. He even suggested opening a fish-and-chips shop at the site, for visiting Brits.
Then, on November 10, 2023, a team of construction workers rushed to the Grindavík outskirts. The ground nearby was inflated, indicating the presence of magma below, and now a swarm of earthquakes threatened to funnel the underground dike toward the village. The builders were tasked with fashioning earthen barriers capable of diverting lava-sludge from any structures in its path. Scientists thought the plan could work, based on computer models. Now it was time to shovel stone. Fast.
The job consisted mostly of moving basalt from one place to another. Crews scooped the rocks in nearby fields, then used backhoes to fashion them into crude berms. At some point, the sculptors found time to speak to a correspondent from Scientific American. “This is insane!” said Daði Freyr Þorgeirsson, a builder. “What are we doing?” When fresh eruptions broke out before the work was complete, he added, “Nature was just giving us the finger.”
As of this writing, no fewer than eight new fissure eruptions have occurred in the area since November 2023. The basalt siphons slowed the destruction, to an extent, but in February 2024, lava outflows disabled a network of pipes from the power station. In Reykjavík, the world’s northernmost capital city, an estimated 20,000 households endured a handful of winter nights without hot water.
Grindavík, meanwhile, was long since reevacuated. At a town hall, one village homeowner said that observing a recent lava breach was “the worst moment since the evacuation”—not because her house was destroyed, but because it remained intact. As long as the home still stood, she couldn’t claim her insurance payments. “If my house had burned down, I would have gained financial independence,” she said. “This noose around my neck would be gone.”
Recently, in the journal Terra Nova, an international team of volcanologists predicted no end in sight to the drama on the Reykjanes. “Iceland will have to prepare and be ready for this volcanic episode to continue for some time—possibly even years to decades,” said one of the study’s authors. When it’s narrated by future historians the coming period will likely be compared to the storied Reykjanes Fires of 1210-1240, which devastated medieval Iceland.
The Fires, a 2020 novel by Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir, is famous in Iceland for having anticipated the current fissure swarm in unsettling detail. In one pivotal scene, a seismologist peers through an airplane porthole at the Reykjanes coast. She spots a fresh fissure yawning below. A foreign correspondent chooses this moment to snap her picture.
When the seismologist encounters the portrait later, hanging in a gallery, she takes it off the wall as quickly as she can. The photograph exposes her. “My expression describes wonder, fear, and profound rapture.” She is unmasked as “spellbound and vulnerable. . . . just a human being in the face of nature.” She buries the picture in a linen closet, out of sight.
“If my house had burned down, I would have gained financial independence,” she said. “This noose around my neck would be gone.”
“It seems that we are now witnessing the earliest part of a major eruption episode,” said a volcanologist last June. “Scientifically, we are lucky to be able to observe this,” he added. “But from a societal point of view we are not.”
There is another level, of course, besides the scientific and the societal. But apparently no one asked the volcanologist whether he, personally, was lucky. Perhaps the answer was so apparent as to be unnerving. Because, yes, obviously he was. Lucky to be alive and watchful when the ground split open, lucky to be near enough to feel the heat and smell the gas, lucky to see the viscous lava slop slowly downhill like honey from a spoon—even lucky, perhaps, to feel so humbled and afraid.
What is it about disaster that draws us in?
This morning my parents called to say that awaiting me in West Hollywood was a box bundled by a firm specializing in disaster preparedness. They called it an “earthquake emergency kit.” I’d wager it cost them a minimum of several hundred dollars, though they wouldn’t divulge its price. They said it contained D, AA, and AAA batteries; several flashlights; a device for purifying water; a compass; flares; a radio. It also contained some high-calorie meal-replacement products like protein bars and athletic gels.
During the call, my dad reminisced about his childhood on an Air Force base in New Mexico, where everyone would gather overnight in a vast underground bunker during fallout drills. He said the kids were permitted to eat K-rations for dinner, which he thought was pretty fun. My mom instructed me to buy a heavy table immediately upon arriving in Los Angeles, since the emergency kit included no furniture to crouch under. I thanked them for the gift and hung up the phone.
I consider myself moderately intrepid, as far as geographers go. I’ve witnessed multiple structure fires. I’ve glimpsed a distant tornado from the back seat of a moving car (it felt like sighting a bear). I’ve been on the ground during a hurricane. I’ve even peered past the lip of an active volcano, as you know.
I’ve never felt an earthquake. I think maybe I’d like to. This is a disconcerting realization to have about oneself, but I think such a desire isn’t so unusual. Having stood on that crowded hill above Litli-Hrútur, I can’t deny there’s something within me, within us, that craves disaster.
Some eager part of me—my inner novelist, perhaps—leaps at the opportunity to explain this compulsion in narrative terms. Perhaps we are all, every one of us, heroes awaiting our battle. We seek out disaster because we yearn to be tested, to know our mettle, to prove our worth, to face down a hardship so impersonal and grand we can only understand it as an act of God.
But the rest of me won’t entertain that theorem for long. It’s too loud, too brash; the truth doesn’t shout like that, at least not to me. I think there’s another, less heroic, impulse that draws us to disaster.
In every life, I suspect, there come moments when what we want is disruption. We can’t help but long for something mighty to come along, some incontestable force that will shake up all that is familiar and deposit us someplace new. We want to experience a big, cataclysmic, comprehensive change—a rip in the world—but we don’t want to be the reason for it. We can handle the challenge. What we can’t handle is the blame.
I can’t deny there’s something within me, within us, that craves disaster.
What scares me most about moving away, I think, is the sensation of being a cause. This disruption did not happen to me; I chose it. And the thing about choices is sometimes they turn out to be mistakes.
It’s dusk. I’m in Queens, which is still my home, at least for a few more days. I’m pacing the lacquered floor of my dusty little room. I’m pulling books from the white-pine shelves I mounted myself, during one of my more industrious periods, and placing them in cardboard boxes I swiped earlier today from a liquor store. I weigh each box on a bathroom scale, then print a shipping label with my California address.
Pigeons roost noisily on the windowsill, as always. This is one of the things I love about this place. My neighbor used to fly them, waving his cane in wild circles overhead to make the funnel of bird-flesh spin. He’s dead now, I think, but his beloved animals remain. Their guano is all over my air conditioner. They chitter among themselves day and night, bodies pressed against the glass, and occasionally a tuft of their underdown will float across my room, as delicate as a dandelion pod.
I’m being selective about the books I take and those I leave behind. Into the liquor boxes go monographs about land use, river systems, the market forms of peripheral economies: books a respectable geographer can be relied upon to own. I’m meant to be conducting research. I’m doing my best to cauterize the portion of my mind that gravitates to stories, like a vasectomy for the imagination. Besides, how does one hang a bookshelf in an earthquake zone? I’m also avoiding hardcovers as best I can.
The mind is capable of keeping secrets even from itself, and it is only in packing my books away that I realize I’ve become a collector of translated Icelandic novels. When I pile them up, the stack is tall enough to trip over. They’re all paperbacks; most are fairly slim. It’s a real test of my discipline to leave them unboxed. But I do, serious scholar that I am.
“Icelandic sagas,” wrote Myles, “are the first written prose stories we have. . . . What I like is the notion of an ‘immanent saga.’ That’s a story known regionally by all in several versions.”
There is a novel by Sjón that in English is called From the Mouth of the Whale, but its Icelandic title is Rökkurbýsnir. This is a kenning that evokes a natural transition to darkness and also an unfinished human endeavor. Something like “dusk-business” or “twilight-affair”—though neither is quite right, clearly, since when translator Victoria Cribb ferried the book into the only language I can read she left the word behind on the opposite shore. The kenning’s true meaning lies beyond the edges of my comprehension. Which is appropriate, I suppose.
The narrator of Rökkurbýsnir, Jónas Pálmason, is a mad 17th-century mystic, marooned on one of Iceland’s volcanic islands and awash in the brilliant incoherence of his own mind. He shares my first name, which I find exciting, but in truth I am more similar to the bumbling academician whom Jónas hoodwinks, in the novel’s most memorable scene, by convincing him a narwhal tusk is the magical horn of an undiscovered beast.
Come to think of it, foreign dilettantes like me are always getting misled in Icelandic novels; thank God so few of us can read them!
In one called Öræfi: The Wasteland, by Ófeigur Sigurðsson, a toponymist from Vienna sets off to explore an Icelandic glacier atop a chain of volcanoes. When he returns to civilization, which in this case means a gossipy campground by a fjord, it seems he has been bitten in the groin by some sort of supernatural sheep. A veterinarian carves up his body while interpreters vandalize his words. For a man obsessed with names, there isn’t much about the world he is able to describe.
In the translator’s note for Öræfi, Lytton Smith notes the beguiling peculiarity of Icelandic humor. Jokes told in the ancient language of the sagas may come off like riddles to the uninitiated. But to those who experience the world as Icelanders do, they are more like koans, pithy descriptions of mysteries that cannot be studied, that must be felt to be adequately known.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I think it was this odd quality, this uncommon wash of wisdom and wonder, that drew me to Icelandic novels a year ago. Only in their pages could I find the kind of education I craved in the aftermath of my visit to Fagradalsfjall. And later, only their pages could comfort me as I prepared for my California expedition, too.
“If one watches a river of lava,” says Jónas Pálmasson, during one of his rare visits with lucidity, “the eye and mind will not rest until they have tracked down familiar images in the flow.” He may as well be describing me. “Even though these figures are never still, never clearly defined, never whole, never the same, one’s mind can grasp them merely by blinking.”
If the world rips in West Hollywood and paperbacks fall from the rafters like diving pigeons, I know I can at least trust myself to blink. I’ll blink, then blink again, and maybe whatever I grasp will be something worth keeping. I’ll shelve it next to my memory of Litli-Hrútur. I’ll solve the riddle; I’ll get the joke. I’ll walk through the fires and across the glass. I’ll rise to the challenge, and I’ll tell myself I’m not to blame.
Jonah Walters is a freelance writer and postdoctoral fellow at UCLA. His essays and reporting appear in Full Stop, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. As of recently, he lives in Los Angeles.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo