Cooking salmon under the glacier.A short tale about memory, loss (and love)

I am smiling as we turn off road number one towards Skaftafell national park on the south coast of Iceland. My husband and I are on one of our road trips in Iceland, exploring new locations or re-visiting old haunts, places where we camped as young star-struck lovers or  places where  I hiked with my parents, in my memory always wearing soaking wet mittens in  horizontal rain. 

I’m telling my husband about a camping trip I took with my  friends to Skaftafell in the late eighties, over 30 years ago. It seems absurd that time has moved so quickly, I remark. Do you remember how the main road was still merely a gravel track in places as it hadn’t been tarmacked yet? Do you remember how  journeys seemed to take so much longer but we never minded? The journey itself  was of as much importance as the destination.  Time somehow felt more elastic, a journey could take a whole day but when you reached your destination there was still the whole day left. 

Our trip today has brought us from Eystri Fjallsfjara by the Jokulsarlon glacial lake, more commonly known as Diamond beach. I’m telling him how me and my friends lit a fire on the deserted black beach  and cooked a whole fresh salmon. Today the beach is teeming with tourists in brightly coloured coats scurrying around the iceberg shards that are scattered along the beach, and then there are the content creators. We watch open mouthed  as young, beautiful people from a continent halfway across the globe change outfits in the shelter of rented suvs, the biting Atlantic wind whipping their Balanciaga  coats and Chanel dresses, and then they are carried  down to the shore by assistants  so that their expensive  shoes don’t get wet. 

We walked down to the water’s edge, dodging the influencers and the icy diamonds that give the beach its name.The diamonds are the broken shards of icebergs that have been carried by the river out to sea but are washed back onto the shore by the tide. Here, they are battered by waves until there is nothing left. Are influencers  like the icy diamonds? Special for a moment in time but once the moment passes do they simply  melt away? 

A beautiful Sapphire blue iceberg sits in the surf and I watch mesmerized as the waves crash against it relentlessly, knowing that tomorrow it will be gone. A young man in furry Gucci slippers tuts at me, gesturing that I’m in the way of his selfie and it dawns on me how nature is seen as a commodity, something to be used for likes and clicks. Today Iceland, tomorrow  Bali. It doesn’t matter where it is, as long as it can be used for content and the  material gains that come with that.

It feels like a dream that me and my friends  were completely alone in the landscape. A group of friends in our late teens, still innocent of what life would bring, we were excited about moving into adulthood where our options and possibilities felt abundant.

The next day, a little worse for wear, we hiked the short distance from the campsite to Skaftafellsjokull, a magnificent glacier tongue that extends from Vatnajokull, the largest glacier in Iceland. We clambered some way onto the glacier, rather ill equipped I recollect, but it was the obvious thing to do. The glacier was a part of who we were. We were brought up in the small city of Reykjavik and felt urban and sophisticated, we  wrote poetry, read Dostoyevsky and Kurt Vonnegut and  studied art and music, but we were only a couple of  generations away from living in turf-built houses with no electricity or running water  and battling the elements every day for survival. 

I am still smiling at the memory of my friends  when I get  out of the car in Skaftafell, holding the door firmly so that it doesn’t blow off in the strong easterly wind  that sweeps across the glacier hinterland, bringing with it a  dry metallic scent not dissimilar to the smell of dried blood. I pull the hat down to cover my ears but the wind still whistles through, teasing its way through my scarf and down  my back. A cold shiver runs through me as the smile fades from my face.

I stare at the empty space  where the glacier used to be. In my memory it dominates the landscape, like an ancient icy troll guarding the land and its people below. What now  lies before me  is an  empty plain covered in swampy brown moss, gravel and small rocks as if someone  has scattered the contents of a troll’s vacuum cleaner across the landscape. Tracks cut the earth like  scars, cuts left in the ground by the retreating glacier. Kettle holes are  filled with muddy stagnant water, formed where the weight of the retreating glacier has left a depression in the soil. The land feels exposed and vulnerable, like a wound that has had its dressing ripped off too soon. It feels like the glacier has retreated so rapidly that nature hasn’t had a chance to adapt. Is this the landscape that is awaiting us when all the glaciers are gone?

I lean against the vehicle trying to process my disbelief. Did  I imagine that the glacier was much closer to the campsite than it is now? Did I imagine erecting a heavy, orange canvas tent that smelt of wet socks and cooked eggs. Had I imagined drinking too much cheap Blue Nun white wine and singing rousing folk songs in the campsite toilets, to the delight, or annoyance, of our fellow campers.

Did I imagine tripping over the stay-robe of a neighboring tent, and German tourists emerging to find a tipsy but  serious wannabe poet excusing herself  profusely in school- book German, my friends pissing themselves with laughter in a neighboring tent.

If it wasn’t for a couple of granny black and white photographs from that trip, I wouldn’t believe my own memories.

I grab binoculars and peer at the glacier far in the distance. It looks shriveled, like a wounded animal. I sniff the air.  I’ve read about dogs being trained to identify cancer through scent and I’m sure I can smell the glacier’s illness. A sickly sweet smell mingles with the metallic, glacial  smell. Is it  the smell of exposed earth?

I should have been prepared for this, after all I had just read the results of a recent study published by the British Antarctic Survey. The study stated that increasing  melting of west Antarctica's ice shelves is unavoidable in the coming decades resulting in unbelievable changes to sea levels and weather systems.

I read the report  and it made me feel angry and sad, but it had felt distant, un-real, but now the melting of the glaciers is staring me in the face. Later, I read  that the Skaftafellsjokull  glacier has retreated by at least 2.5 kilometers since the late eighties, the time I was here with my friends.

Glaciers are a magical, living  phenomenon. They form where more snow falls than melts. A glacier's accumulation area, located at higher elevations, accrues a wealth of snow and ice. The ablation area, located at lower elevations, loses ice through melting or calving. Ablation can be the natural and seasonal part of glacier life and when snow accumulation equals or is greater than melt, the glacier remains in balance. But with the changing climate, ablation increases and the glacier retreats.

In the Oxford dictionary there are two definitions of ablation: 1. The surgical removal of body parts and 2. The removal of snow and ice from a glacier or iceberg by melting or evaporation. 

I am glad my friends and I  didn’t know what was to come in our lives. If we had known, how would we have reacted? Would we have refused to believe that such things could happen? Would we have been paralyzed with fear or would we simply  have seized the day and lived life even more fully? Psychics, tarot cards and coffee-dreg readings did not foresee what we would experience.  We didn’t know that only a few years later my firstborn child would be stillborn. We didn’t know that barely into my twenties,  my beautifully perfect but lifeless baby girl would be  pulled from my body: a part of me lost forever. We didn’t know that our friend with the pixie haircut  and dragon earrings would experience the ablation of her breast  due to cancer, and that her life and health  would be altered forever. We didn’t know that our gentle, bright eyed friend would lose her life to cancer, leaving a gaping wound of loss in her young children’s  lives.  The earth has had  its ‘tarot card readers’ in the form of scientists for decades but humanity seemed to have  chosen not to believe them. Does  what they are suggesting seem too far-fetched and unbelievable or is it just too painful?

Changing landscapes due to climate change will cause physical changes to our lives, such as where we will be able to live, what we will be able to grow and eat and what water we will be able to drink. But the  psychological and  spiritual impact that climate change will have is barely mentioned. Psychologists explain that grief has five stages that  we move through as we ‘come to terms’ with loss. The stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It seems that too many people are  still at the denial stage when it comes to climate change and its effect on the earth and humanity, and that feels dangerous especially when it is those that have the power to change things. Others have entered the angry phase as they are experiencing the effects of climate change on their landscape and their livelihoods already and they feel like no one is listening and no one is acting. 

Surveying the landscape I felt an acute sense of loss. This is just the beginning. If global temperatures continue to rise at the levels they are, in150 years there will be hardly any glaciers  left in Iceland. To put it bluntly, there will be no ice left in Iceland. Iceland has around 270 glaciers covering 11% of the country. Glaciers are embedded in our psyche, they inhabit our stories, art and our poetry. Without glaciers, who are we? Are we still Icelandic?

My mother lived to be 94, if my daughter has a daughter who lives to be 94, my granddaughter will live through the last remnants of the glaciers disappearing. It is fairly certain that her children will never see a glacier with their own eyes. 

Perhaps, one day my great-grandchildren will retrace my travels  around Iceland carrying my photographs of glaciers and glacial lakes. Will they stand on this  same spot in 250 years time and hold up a photograph from 2023 of a  retreating glacier? Will they look across the empty landscape and  feel a sense of loss? Or will they feel  anger? Or  will  humankind have  moved into the phase of ‘acceptance?’

Perhaps they will travel to where the Jokulsarlon glacier lake and Diamond beach used to be, but there will be no icy diamonds and no brightly clad tourists battling against the biting wind. There will most certainly  be no Chanel-clad influencers from halfway around the world. They will be facing their own challenges in their own countries and traveling to a desolate rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for content  won't  be appealing  anymore. 

They  will sit down on the black sand, alone in the landscape and light a fire and pass round a grainy black and white photograph from 1986 of their great grandmother  and her friends on a camping trip in the same location. The black sands may look the same but will the surrounding landscape feel like a different country?

I get back into the car and my husband and I  discuss whether to attempt a hike to the glacier’s edge  or not. It’s unclear if there is a path or if we will have  to traverse the swampy rock strewn landscape. It’s late autumn and I argue that we are  losing the light and it might be too dark by the time we turn back. Being a photographer I’m acutely aware of the quality of light at any given time, but this is an excuse and we both know it. I simply haven’t got the heart. 

“The past is a different country" a writer famously declared, and suddenly it feels like the truest thing I have ever heard. This landscape is becoming  another country and I’m not ready to accept it. I haven’t passed through the stages of grief yet  but I feel on the threshold of something. I never imagined that in my lifetime, we  would  experience grieving for lost landscapes. Landscapes felt solid, unchanging, certain.  Lost babies, yes, parents and too, too many friends, but landscape? Never.  

Loss makes memories more precious. They rise to the surface to soothe and comfort, sometimes hurt and upset, but they are still all precious. I close my eyes as we turn back onto road number one and allow the memories to flood my mind, gently thawing my unease. I think of my friends and how much they still mean to me,  and how on one  special day the glacier watched over us as we cooked and  laughed and sang, and how  we were still whole and unscathed by life and time.