By Gretchen Ayoub
Bronze Solas Award-winner in the Travel & Healing category
The sky is still pitch black at 9:00 a.m. but there is a glowing orange band gradually appearing along the horizon. Here and there an occasional light from a home is briefly visible, like a firefly in the darkness, as the bus smoothly navigates snowy roads in the silent countryside along the southern coast of Iceland. I have been awake since 5:00am but it feels like midnight, save for that horizon. The bus is quiet; other passengers have fallen back asleep and I am the lone observer, gazing out on this frozen land as the ribbon of orange ever so slowly rises and expands.
I am in the in between place, darkness with the anticipation of light. For me, this has always been a time to think about what was and what may be, alternating between grief and hope. Traveling always brings memories of some of the happier years of my life, trekking through national parks and countries with my son, now gone three years, a wildly adventuresome soul, stricken down not on one of his high risk journeys all over the world, but by sudden cardiac arrest at the age of 33 on a normal Tuesday morning at home.
I think back to last night, standing outside bundled up in multiple layers, also transfixed by the horizon. Our hotel is a brutalist cement block rising up in a barren, endless stretch of snow covered fields and glacier mountains. It could pass for a compound in some futuristic science fiction movie. The lack of light pollution makes it an ideal, isolated spot for a hopeful viewing of the Northern Lights. At around 10:30 pm, a sudden swath of green lines the sky, then another, followed by a pale white streak. It is 10 below zero, but I don’t care. Unanticipated light is a gift.
It is the end of December, a time when there are about five hours of daylight in Iceland. Far from feeling distressed about this small window, I am strangely taken in by how the hours of blackness can make any light seem all the more luminous – the horizon, the aurora, the
occasional farmhouse, the brilliance of stars when there is nothing else around to compete with them. We eventually reach our first stop of the day, a rushing glacial waterfall that appears bathed in gold as the morning sky turns a pale pink and white, outlining the bare trees in black silhouette. At home, this type of sky is visible around 7:00 am at this time of year; here in Iceland it is 10:45 a.m. Each day will start like this, black splashed with orange at the edges, eventually giving way to neon blue skies, made more brilliant by the reflection of the snow everywhere and icy mountains with their inkblots of black lava.
My moments of darkness and dawn here have been peaceful, but daylight offers many opportunities to take in the beauty of this country of geysers exploding steam into the frigid air, black sand beaches, waterfalls, and more waterfalls. This is the land of Game of Thrones, Nordic legends about trolls who eat children, elves, and hidden little people, small sturdy horses who can withstand the freezing cold all day and seem to be able to find enough to eat even in the hard, snow-covered ground. It is the place of lagoons, bread baked outdoors in hot springs that are next to ice-covered lakes, villages from centuries ago, volcanoes, and lava fields. It is the country where homes are built of cement due to earthquakes and fishing is front and center, but carefully regulated.
This is the land of light, both in its presence and absence. I am standing on the observation deck at the top of The Perlan Museum in Reykjavik, which offers an unparalleled view of the city from all angles. It is early afternoon. The sun came up a few hours ago, and it is
already beginning its descent. Colors cross the sky in shades of blue, then pink then orange, like an abstract watercolor painting. The wind is bone chilling up here and tourists quickly run in and
out, but I can’t leave yet. Darkness is coming soon, but I want to witness this light as long as I can, even as the wind burns my face.
Darkness on the edge of light reminds me that in the end it is all temporary. The orange band on the horizon, the multitude of colors in the early afternoon sky, the green swath, the black silhouettes. The light in Iceland is so different from that of home, yet it is all universal. There is always light somewhere even in the coldest and blackest of places.
Light is my marker of the passage of time – daylight savings coming and going representing another year of summer gone by, the inability to sleep at night and lying awake, knowing that the dawn will eventually happen, the many walks in the late hours of the evening, punctuated by the silently changing traffic lights and the moon in its various stages, as I go over and over in my head what cannot be changed.
The cover of darkness for fifteen to sixteen hours a day at this time of year when it is frigid does not sound appealing. However, for me Iceland represents adaptation. How does one adjust to such darkness and bitter cold? How does one adjust to the bleakness of sorrow and the chill of grief? By waiting for the light to make its way out of the darkness on a cold morning or
to know that even at 3pm on a winter’s afternoon, the sun’s receding show of brilliance is preparation for another day.
I am back on the plane heading home and by some miracle, have managed to have the entire row to myself. We leave Iceland at 5:50pm and will get home at about the same time in Boston, due to the time change. I lean over the three seats to look out the window. We are flying over the ocean far below us. The sky is inky black but there it is again, that band of orange lining the horizon. Is the sun coming or going? I ask myself. Either way, the glow is still there. Someone I love has left the lights on.
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Gretchen Ayoub is a career educator who has always loved engaging with high school and college students. She currently works as a success coach with students at an art college, providing support as they navigate through their degree program. Her stories have won awards in the Writer’s Digest writing contest and she has published three essays on grief and healing in Living with Loss Magazine, as a guest blogger for the online forum of Psychology Today, and for Boston Book Festival’s At Home Project during COVID.