It was where I had spent some of my happiest moments. Floating on my back in the geothermal pools of Iceland. Staring up at the clouds. Connected to to the earth and sky and myself. Until 2014, I would have told you my happiest moments were spent driving around with friends with the windows down and the music turned all the way up. 2014 was the year I turned thirty. At the time, I was working as a therapist at a hospital for people with cancer. Most days, I cried on the train ride home and then numbed out with reruns of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to deal with the immensity of suffering, fear, grief, and loss my clients processed. You don’t wade into the waters of existential crises and the temporality of the physical body on a daily basis without confronting the fact you’re in the water too. I decided that if I found myself on the other side of a chemo infusion I wasn’t going to wish I’d chosen the bigger life. Instead of planning another karaoke birthday party, I booked a week-long trip to Iceland.
“Why Iceland?” was tip of tongue for my friends, family, and co-workers. I had a list of reasons: weird landscape, ample hot dogs, potential to see the aurora borealis, hot tubs everywhere. Between you and me, the trip was inspired by Land Ho! a goofy buddy comedy about a pair of septuagenarian brothers-in-law who go to Iceland to get their groove back. The terrain looked like Middle Earth transplanted on Mars with red and black rock expanses that gave way to moss covered mountains. I was particularly struck by a scene where one of the characters hikes into a beautiful pool built into the side of a mountain. That’s how I wanted to live before I died, swimming in a secret pool in the clouds.
The trip was incredible. Despite it being overcast and in the fifties every day, I spent the mornings in the outdoor public pools of Reykjavik and along the southern coast of Iceland. For the cost of a movie, I could move from one hot tub to a hotter one all fed by underwater volcanic hot springs, then cool off in a heated pool, dreaming of the next Scandinavian style hot dog with the creamy sauce and crispy onions I would have for my next meal. In the afternoon, I would drive the rented Honda CRV to my hiking spot and revel in how green the moss was against the grey sky. I leaned over the railing in a rainstorm to take in the meeting of two continental plates at Thingviller. I hiked behind the waterfall at Skogafoss, getting high off of the positive ions in the mist. In the same day, my shoes crunched the black sand beach at Vik, and hiked around trails where lava had flowed during the volcanic eruption of 2011. You may remember that as the time smoke from the the tongue twisting Eyjafjallajökull volcano shut down European air traffic, stranding President Obama in France. Each site was awesome both in the colloquial fun and exciting sense of the word, but also in more formal sense of being extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear. And still I yearned for that pool from Land Ho!
I had never tried to research the pool because it hadn’t occurred to me that it was a place I could go. It was a location perhaps not for tourists or even mortals. But one night having a hard time falling asleep from the days excitement, I decided to reread reading the Lonely Planet guide book entry for the Southern Region for the 12th time. I felt a surge of pleasure so powerful it bordered on nausea as I read the simple description I managed to eclipse over the last few months. “Seljavallalaug, a peaceful 1923 pool, is filled by a natural hot spring and has become very popular. Park by the farm, and walk up the beautiful river valley for about 15 minutes. There are very basic changing facilities at the spring.”
It wasn’t quite so easy to find. I turned off the ring road on to a gravel path and drove until the end of the road. Nothing looked like a farm to me, but I parked next to the only visible car. There were small rocks and everything was wet, but did this count as a river valley? I made the executive decision to walk along some grass and climbed a steep ridge. At the top, there was no pool, no bathhouse. I sat on opposite sides of a tree from each other to recapitalize. I tears of frustration wet my cheeks, I’d risked damaging the undercarriage of my stupid rental car for just another scenic view. All of the sudden I spotted hikers emerging behind a rock outcropping in the distance. I skittered my way down the hill and caught the the couple as they rock hopped through a shallow stream toward the fence. They reassured me if I walked twenty minutes in the direction they came from I’d find the pool. It was a silent hike as I minded each footfall, careful not to twist my ankle, and finally I came around a bend that revealed the three concrete walls that with the mountain itself formed the oldest manmade pool in Iceland. What Lonely Planet had dubbed “simple changing facilities” was a green and white hut that felt more like a murder shack. I quickly changed out of my hiking clothes into my purple bathing suit as much from the cold as from the irrational fear someone was going to materialize from the pile of wet rotting t-shirts in the corner and hatchet me to to death. A group of Australians were just leaving as I eased into the water, instantly slipped on the algae on the bottom and dunking into the murk below. The initial shock and disgust melted away as I took some deep breaths, floated onto my back and gazed upward. Mountains surrounded me. It was overcast, there were some individual clouds visible and birds drifted back and forth. The water that came out of the mountain was warm, but not hot, and smelled vaguely of sulfur but not in an old open hardboiled egg way. It had the viscosity of essential oil in a bath. The cool fall air created wisps of steam around me and chilled my belly. All I could hear was the soft waves of my respiration. I felt like Dave Bowman the end of 2001 a Space Odyssey, nestled in the womb of the pool in greater the vastness of nature.
I took a mental Polaroid of this moment, rife with duality, hot and cold, dilapidated and gorgeous, man-made, and natural, water and air, disgusting and exquisite. At work, when I guided clients through perfect place visualizations for grounding and relaxation, I had conjured up a textbook tropical beach, but now I had my own moment of transcendence to connect to in times of unease. The happiest moments aren’t the necessarily the easy ones, the perfect ones. This moment like a lot of my happiest moments were fucked up, accidental, and hard won. Moments to be lived so we can die certain we showed up when we were here.