It feels like everyone’s been (quietly) going to Iceland. Maybe we’re tired of the rage and confusion and polemics. All the heartbreak and controversy.
Maybe we just want a place that feels neutral, a place that turns off the street lamps so that you can see the northern lights, a place that looks like we’ve arrived on another planet and yet in some ways we know exactly what to expect.
The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
— Tuck Everlasting
I’ve got a
lot of good
ideas but not
one that
will get me
through
August.
— Eileen Myles
J. has been posting about August for weeks, and I’m here still going around in circles too. Looking out from the windows at the faults splitting the earth in front of me, riding it out. What is it about this month?
It’s incredible, every single book I pick up by accident discusses at length the following topics: volcanoes, earthquakes, Iceland, love, grief, and/or being alone. (see: The Faraway Nearby, The Importance of Being Iceland, Falling Off The Map, Becoming Wise). So much land to cover, is it thrilling? Exhausting? Both? For both you who keeps reading and for me too. Like Hamilton, I’m definitely writing like I’m running out of time. I wake up before dawn, filled with something inarticulate, that hangover feeling you get after the loss of love.
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is a whole book of her attempt at writing her way out of it: “Nelson hopes that writing about the bluets will “empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things.”
And me, over the past three weeks I’ve written maybe over 50 essays about you, Iceland, love, grief, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.; so I might as well keep on towards closing out our book before the month runs out. I always joked that if you don’t want to be written about, don’t date a writer. And I wasn’t lying when I said I’d write my way out of this.
Onwards, then:
reprise (see notes on traveling with a backpack from 2013 — all of which still held true this time, too!)
thoughts on hiking/backpacking, unedited.
