I'll end today at home
Fields of heather reach from the tarmac east, unbroken by even a single tree, rarely by a road, knee-high unbowed flowers that reach the sea. An inlet, in reality: behind you see a ridgeline rising, and on the ridges snow; past the ridges, over there to the north, Iceland’s 66th parallel, a frosty whisper south of the Arctic Circle.
I saw, as we flew in, the sparse houses huddled in the even sparser green, huddled near the shore where the demands of weather are not impossible to satisfy, the incursion of ice not quite a glacial burial, and the overlay of lava not too frequent, so that somehow, somehow, through experience and (equally important) sheer persistence, these humans just like you and just like me chiseled a foothold into the stone and tundra, so here they stayed, and here they remain, twelve-hundred years of history, speaking a language left them by the Vikings, composed in blood-lines and written out in lines of these faces.
What do I know? I have spent a few jet-lagged hours, when my mind is sleeping but my body awake, or vice versa, listing to the trilled river that is Icelandic, and overlooking a landscape familiar in its foreignness, the Canadian North transplanted, now that a night will never quite arrive, and day will never quite depart, and that snow I see on that ridge sends its chill right down the slope through these windows to my back, causes a shiver, and then flows on.
This morning I was greeted by a moon that wouldn’t leave and a sun that wouldn’t leave, the sky a dull and dusky rainbow. Back where the reds turn toward purples is Boston; and if I turned my eyes ahead, instead, you’d see a brightening, as though that way lay day, brighter prospect, certainly more warmth.
I am drifting on, like sand. At the extreme end of the circle, Spain, and a heat that is quite literally the polar opposite of today. I feel a hero wandering in vague errantry through the ice-flows of the north, seeking… what? What was I supposed to discover and bring home? Should one’s nomadic time stretch on too long, the hero loses will or loses way, wonders why they ever came this way.
I wonder…
I’ll end today at home. Home! I haven’t used that word for years with much conviction; and though the places I have rested were made comfortable, even dear, I never said (with the tone of voice that makes one feel safe, or true) “Here.”
Now, however, I point my heart toward lands whose atoms, sped by the sun, excite everything to move faster and at one with greater ease. That’s my future, and hers… and hers.