Iceland

Traveling along at 60 KM an hour on the Round Road of Iceland among the cracks, crevices and ditches that volcanos make on an island, we rounded the top of the bend and saw it. It was a dead volcano. Alone among the masses of glaciers, hot springs, fields, valleys, grasslands and tundra that make up the country that's called an ice wasteland by most. Only the interior can not be traversed. It's really the most beautiful island, more interesting than than the Bahamas, more colorful than Aruba, or any South American continent, Iceland is home to some of the most gorgeous landscapes that such artists as Kjarval (the country's famed painter) can produce. It's a painting of colors: black volcanic ash, green moss on the rocks and a rosy horizon among the glaciers represents the scenery that most people assume is just a block of ice.

We climbed to the top of the inactive volcano that once erupted and created the setting. Looking down at the empty hole, we said "This is where it was. A lasting footprint of a shaky, ferocious world."

And, after the hike up the volcano and back down again, I motioned to Billy to come look at moss on a rock. This hole doesn't exist in America. This particular land has not been touched by commerce, it leaks history. We imagined Erik The Red, a viking, had landed here and created a grass thatched roof to dwell in when he wasn't plundering other lands. We imagined a beach at Vik full of Icelandic ponies carrying wooden cooking tools and weapons to settle the area.

Down the volcano we crawled at a frog's pace, leaping across rocks and jumping through the dirt as if we were on a hunt, a mission to find the end of the foot path that led us up to the great hole. It was a lesson in patience as we traversed the rocky pathways that led to the opening of the hole. At the end we saw what had been the bubbling of an inferno, a fiery ruptering of molten gasses and lava. We could almost feel the heat that once existed at this grand place, a new and obscure event had made even the most weary travelers marvel at such a feat that the earth could create in this once flat area a hole so large, a mouth so agape that a city or town could fill it.

And that is my last memory of us in Iceland.