The wounded glacier

Snæfellsjökull, grief, hotdogs and listening to a changing landscape

Reykjavík’s inhabitants have an automatic reflex that whenever they are in the sight-line of the Snæfellsnes glacier they will glance west to check if it is visible. And every time they will say to themselves “Look the glacier is there,” as if it’s the first time, even if it’s the hundredth time.

But each time does feel like the first time as the magic of seeing the glacier is never lost. On a clear day the two gentle peaks with a shallow dip between them are clearly visible. In certain light, especially in winter sun or in late evening, the ice cap of the glacier glows brightly and the land below it fades into grey so that the glacier appears to be hovering above the sea.

Driving along Snæfellsnes towards the glacier, the lushness of the farmland gives way to a more barren landscape. Fields of moss and heather are broken up by rocky outcrops and swathes of lava. At Ytri Tunga, a popular seal watching place, the car park is filled with white Dacia Duster rental cars.

“Tunga,” I say. “Tongue. Another body-part place name.”

Iceland loves its anatomies of land: heads, shoulders, tongues, backs, knees, ridges like spines. The land is a body here. Perhaps that is part of why it has never felt inanimate to us. We do not only walk across it; we walk across the named body of it.

We slow down to let a sheep with two lambs scampering behind her cross the road. She stops and looks at us with the cool disdain sheep do so well as if saying, “you can just wait, we’re much more important than you are.”

At Arnarstapi, the car parks are busy with rental cars and the odd local car, but we find a spot on the edge of town and park up.

There are places that do not need to fill the whole view in order to command it. The glacier is only partly visible; a white brightness held between moving grey clouds, but the whole landscape becomes magical, simply because of its presence. The petrol station, the cars, the hotel, the tourists, the hot dogs, all of it falls away for a moment.

“The icecap looks smaller than I remember,” I say eventually.

Memory is unreliable, and grief-memory perhaps even more so, but I’m still shocked

“Yes,” my companion replies. “It is smaller.”

Of course it is. We know this. Everyone knows this. But knowing is not the same as seeing.

I have sat with Snæfellsjökull before. Not here on the grass at Arnarstapi, but higher up, on the ice itself, near the top of the glacier. I had come because others had persuaded me, and because some part of me, however frozen and unreachable, must have known that the glacier had something to give me.

A few weeks ago my husband and I found a box of old slides from a trip on Snæfellsjökull glacier. We got the photos out and viewed them through a small plastic viewer, the kind you pop the slide in and put to your eye against a light source, and like magic you are transported back in time to the place and the person you once were. Slide photographs have an ethereal quality, they are clear and dreamy and three dimensional in a way that digital images aren’t.

In one of the photos I’m sitting near the top of the glacier, below one of the peaks. There is a reluctant smile for the camera, barely lifting the corners of my mouth, but my eyes are not smiling. I look as frozen as the glacier I am sitting on, not from cold as it wasn’t a particularly cold day, but frozen emotionally. Our first baby girl had been stillborn only a few months earlier. I remember feeling separate from the others on this trip, even separate from my husband who took the photo, my grief acting like an invisible wall that had erected itself around me. The photo captured the moment when I had lost myself. The part of me that was a mother had come loose, been lost; ablated

Ablation is the word for what is happening to the glacier. The removal of snow and ice through climate change; melting, wind, evaporation, calving and runoff. A scientific word, precise and useful, but it carries grief inside it.

The removal of ice from a glacier.

The removal of part of a body.

I know something about ablation. I know what it is to lose a part of yourself and still be expected to continue. To remain recognisable while something essential has gone missing. To function, speak, work, love, cook dinner, answer phonecalls, and yet feel that part of the self has been cut away.

When I looked at the old slide, I saw that in myself. When I look at Snæfellsjökull through the clouds, I see it in the glacier.

Not the same wound. Not the same grief. But a recognition.

The glacier had held my frozen self once, when I could not hold myself. Now the glacier itself is wounded.

Snæfellsjökull has always been more than a volcano with ice on its crown. It is magic; power; mystery. Jules Verne made it famous to the wider world when he used it as the entrance to the centre of the Earth, though he never came to Iceland himself. But the idea did not come from nowhere. The glacier already felt like a doorway. Older stories had gathered around it long before: Bárður Snæfellsás disappearing into the mountain and becoming its protector, Stapafell with its holy powers, huldufólk, hidden people in the rocks, artists, mystics, walkers, farmers, fishermen, children in the back seats of cars, all drawn to the same white presence.

That is why its disappearance feels unbearable in a way that is hard to explain. We would not only be losing ice. We would be losing a presence. A white crown. A mythic centre of power. Something that has looked back at us for generations.

The glacier is shrinking: the healer is wounded.

Ecological loss happens on ordinary days. A glacier melts while people buy petrol, send invoices, drink coffee, laugh at the wrong moment and eat hot dogs with too much mustard.

I think of Ok jökull, the Icelandic glacier that shrunk until it was no longer a glacier.

lost its status and was marked with a plaque; a letter to the future. My fellow country man Andi Snær Magnason wrote the words on the plaque:

A letter to the future: Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.Only you know if we did it.

August 2019

415 ppm CO2

Only you know if we did it.

That sentence has the quiet force of an accusation and a prayer. We cannot say we did not know. We cannot say no one told us. We cannot say the glacier vanished quietly without warning.

And still, knowing is not the same as acting.

Perhaps that is why the nature-rights movement matters to me. It is not only a legal argument, though law matters. It is a spiritual correction. It asks us to stop treating rivers, mountains, forests and glaciers as objects that exist only in relation to human use. It asks us to recognise that the more-than-human world has its own existence, its own dignity, its own voice.

To some people this sounds radical. To me it sounds ancient.

In Iceland we already know, somewhere under the skin, that land is not inert. We know rocks can be inhabited. We know certain hills should not be cut into. We know a place can say no. Even people who laugh at the huldufólk often hesitate before dismissing them entirely. The old knowledge is still there.

So why should a glacier not also have a voice?

I think of my grandson and of what I want him to inherit. I want him to look west from Reykjavik and see more than a name on a map. I want him to see the white crown itself, not only photographs of what used to be there.

The clouds shift over the summit and suddenly the idea of listening to a glacier feels less like a spiritual curiosity and more like an act of witness.

“I wonder if it’s lonely,” I say, surprising myself.

“The glacier?”

“Yes. Or perhaps not lonely exactly. But I wonder what it feels like to be looked at by everyone and listened to by almost no one.”

We walk slowly back towards the car, but before leaving we stop at the service station for pylsur, hot dogs, because Icelandic hot dogs Icelandic hot dogs are one of the great levellers when things get too serious. We order them með öllu, with everything: remúlaði, mustard, ketchup, raw onions and crispy onions.

“Very spiritual,” I say, looking down at my hot dog which is dribbling ketchup over my hand.

“Extremely,” my companion replies and we both burst into a giggle

As we stand there, beside an ordinary service station on an ordinary day, the cloud shifts. Not dramatically and not with any grand theatrical clearing, but enough. A pale tear opens above the glacier and suddenly there it is: A glimpse of white. Snæfellsjökull, showing itself through the clouds as if to say “Hey, I’m still here. For now.”