Golden Poncho

I could boast about being a member of the lucky few, but it occurs to me, with the advantage of hindsight, that to do so would not be all that dissimilar from boasting about having successful bowel movements before one’s derrière has kissed the seat hello. (That is not to say I take for granted my current faecal capabilities, only that I do not need assistance as soon as some of my nieces and nephews think.)

           Few of this – shall we say, elite group of travellers who had found the hot spring through the years, for it was to be found, not stumbled upon, wanted to climb out of its waters. But it had to be done. Of course, it did. There were more places along the West Fjords to tour, more purple-lupine filled fields to snapshot. At some point or another, prune-fingered and lethargic-limbed, every traveller had made the same trek back as I had, from the rock-riddled beach on which the chamber sat. Through the chilling cold, every traveller had scurried on to their tent, and the comfort of an insulated sleeping bag. Which made it all the odder when one young lady did not – get out, that is. For all I know, she’s still in there now, all these years later.

           I remember thinking she had a fantastic demeanour about her – which is not to denigrate her undeniable beauty but to choose not to focus on it. It wasn’t how pitch-black the bundles of her hair were, even as the Summer Solstice loomed, nor some remembrance of a dimpled smile which impressed upon me her difference from other twentysomethings. However, I do believe she had both if memory serves me correctly. No, it was that mythic composure of hers. And perhaps she was indeed some mythic figure; a siren comes to mind most immediately. I’ve regularly thought it in the years since, but I did not catch a glint of emerald scales, I’m sad to report. I knew within the second (or if not the second, within the minute) of my immersion into the spring that I was sat with someone rather peculiar.

           For one thing, her posture was impeccable; her shoulders were pinned back as if by the unseen strings of a grand puppeteer, her chin held at a near-perfect right angle from her neck. I supposed she had gone to one of those elite finishing schools, though I was quite sure there were very few of them left. Another peculiarity: she did not so much as glance at me as I got settled into the spring, despite my offering a prim, “Hullo. Good evening.”

           Nothing.

           Well then, I thought to myself, no bother Jack, young ladies don’t want to converse with old farts like you. I’m a chatterbox, however – just ask my wife, God rest her soul. If there’s a conversation to be had, I’ll have it. And let me tell you – with years of teaching geography to pubescent teenagers under my belt, I was well-versed in the art of drawing blood from a stone.

           So I went on, “My word, what a place.” I really was being an old fart, I’m unashamed to admit it. “Have you been in here for very long? The spring that is.”

           She met my gaze then, with these stony eyes. “I guess, yeah.”

           “Well, that’s just marvellous,” I said. It wasn’t marvellous but saying that it was felt good and neighbourly to me. “How long have you been in beautiful Iceland for?”

           “Not that long, come to think of it. Then again, I don’t think of it.”

           “I see, I see. And much longer left?”

           “Probably, yeah. If I want it which I will.”

           In an attempt at full transparency, I was a little miffed she didn’t ask me some questions in kind. With other travellers, I had struck up some great conversations. A few days earlier, while I had been climbing Kirkjufell, at least as high as I could before I let the youngsters go on without me (I had no interest in touching the lethal precipice), I’d been more or less escorted by three Indian students. Lovely fellows, very polite and accommodating. I sent each of them a graduation card that year. We’ve fallen out of touch since mind you. But still, they really were some lovely fellows.

           Yet there we were, the young lady and I on the cusp of the Atlantic ocean, and she didn’t have a word to say to me. It just wouldn’t do, not for me. So I said with more gusto, “If one of those mountains there is Kirkufell, I was there less than two days ago.” I was looking towards the peaks in the distance then, and my hearing was not what it used to be, so I didn’t realise she had already gone underwater. Oblivious, I kept on, “surely one of them must be Kirkufell, I’d say. It looks a heck of a lot smaller from here, but up close and personal, gosh it was enormous…”

           I heard her head plop up then, with more splash than grace. Once she’d slicked her hair back and wiped the water from her face, she said, as snooty as anything, “Who knows, maybe one of them is Kirkjufell.” My ego was a little sore for the correction. She was all grace until she moved or spoke, then she became a real madam.

           “Mind you, dear,” I said, pretending to take no notice, “I got three-quarters of the way up, and it got much too steep for me. Does it make me a fraud if I leave that part out at dinner parties?”

           “That’s up to you, sir.”

           For a moment, I was right back inside the fourth floor Geography classroom in which I’d taught hordes of brattish students. Sir, Sir, Sir. It’s all I’d ever heard.

           “I was travelling with a group too,” she said, bringing me right back.

           “Oh? Wonderful.” It was clearer to me than my toes were – the spring was considerably less murky than some of the algae cesspools I’d bathed in during my travels – that she wanted to talk more about this group. I’m nothing if not well-mannered, so of course, I said, “do tell.”

           “Okay then… Well, there were six of us.”

           “Did you all know each other before? Or…”

           “Before. We all went to the same university.” She splashed her shoulders with water then.

           “Ah. Marvellous. Did I just miss them on my way down, perhaps?”

           “What?” She had this ugly look on her face then. It did, it irritated me.

           “Your friends,” I said. “So they’re back at the camp –”

           “They left me a while back.” 

           “Left you?”

           “Yeah. I told them to. I’d had enough. We did the golden circle in three days, and after that, I said to them, ‘I’m not travelling with you anymore.’ Then I just, er, started hitchhiking on my own like everyone else.” She must have seen the pity on my face because she felt the need to lighten things up. “I couldn’t take eating one more Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodle.” The edges of a smile crept up her face.

           “I can’t blame you there,” I said.

           We didn’t speak for a short while, which was pleasant enough. The hot spring was at blood heat. The evening, although it showed no signs of darkening, nor would it, was a rather splendid one. I was content, bathing as I was.

           “Truth be told,” she said, breaking the silence that had fallen between us, “I was sick of them, sick of travelling with them.” She paused, then went on with more poise, “All we did was gallivant along the same roads as all the other tourists… We were all artists – that’s why we were friends. Every one of us had a thirst for something. Yet, there we were, taking the same contrived but supposedly ‘candid’ selfies as everybody else… David, the filmmaker, right, he made us stand next to the largest geyser, waiting for it to pop off in our rain ponchos, so he could boomerang it.” I was tempted to interject to ask what a boomerang was, but I didn’t want to interrupt her flow. I could hardly see the purpose as to this David fellow throwing a boomerang through an erupting geyser unless his intention was indeed to melt it. “I mean, where’s the artistic inclination in that?... And then, when we were done there, we drove back through Reykjavik and paid nearly 7000 Krónas for the permission of some corporation to sit in a steaming bath of blue milk… If our camera rolls weren’t filled to the brim with narcissistic, virtue-signalling nonsense” – I don’t care to repeat the vulgarity she actually came out with – “then call me a liar. But they were, I can promise you…”

           “But it’s not that we were glued to our phones that bothers me. It’s really not….” She seemed to become distracted by the point half a metre above us, where the steam faded into the sky, but I suppose I’ll never know what was in that head of hers.

           “We just stuck to the golden circle,” she said sometime after, “having such a golden time behind golden filters. Not one of us so much as bounced an idea around for our art, let alone worked on something… The performance poet might have written down a shopping list at best… It was all miserable, really. And when I finally started to look around, I realised that… It’s really not about technology at all. It’s about the lack of everything else. It’s about realising you’re not scraping the bottom of the barrel – you are the bottom of the barrel… It’s that we didn’t even go anywhere near the Interior, we just followed the tourist guide…” She angled her head back until her hair was submerged underwater, her face a floating islet, a facsimile of the Lady of Shalott.

           “The interior’s not all that safe though,” I said, as delicately as I could, when she rose back up. I’m sure I came off as a condescending father or uncle anyhow. “People go out there, thinking an extra can of petrol is enough, but when things go haywire – maybe a tire bursts, they get lost somehow, or they just end up running out of petrol plain and simple, they die out there... I wouldn’t like to go there myself.” The fjords were secluded enough for me – six or seven hours it’d taken me to drive there. Some people want nothing more than their own obscurity.

           “It’s not as dangerous as the tour guides make out,” she said.

           “You, you mean to say you’ve been to the Interior? By yourself?”

           She was glaring at me, with this intense poker-face. “I’m having you on,” she said, her expression no less stolid, “but one day, I will.”

           Perhaps it’s worth restating, she was odd; I didn’t much like her sense of humour, but my word was her posture impeccable. I’ve tried since to imagine her roaming around Iceland in a campervan full of artists eating Pot Noodles, but I can’t make sense of that. Three days seems to be about right.

           “Which one were you?” I asked.

           “Which one what?”

           “Sorry. Which artist? Are you a Painter? Singer? Dare I say, Trapeze artist?”

           “I dabbled. I didn’t stick to a medium… I had the least motivation out of all of us. Being in a car full of artists, mediocre at best, and realising, they still had more discipline than I did, it was… pretty rough to be honest. I had about as much inspiration as whoever left this piece of plumbing,” she said, showing the black tube to me. “A man-made natural hot spring.” She scoffed.

            “Too good to be true, I suppose.”

            “The Interior’s the only thing left in the world that hasn’t had tourists trotting all over it. I’ll get there. I promise you that. Once I’m done figuring stuff out.”

           “But we’re tourists ourselves, aren’t we?” I said, thinking I was positively hilarious.

           She didn’t like that at all. “Meaning?”

           “Well,” I said, sitting up straighter, “anywhere one person goes, a dozen follow, and before you know it, that place is overrun. Take travel journalists, for instance. They’re all about ‘eco-friendly’ travel – which I’m all for, of course – but broadcasting the whereabouts of some Edenic lagoon in the Galapagos Islands is only going to lead to one thing: more people coming. It’s inevitable: one person brings an army –”

           “But I’m not a travel journalist, am I?” she said flatly.

           “Of course not,” I said, trying to soften my point, “I suppose I’m just thinking of the bigger picture.” I regretted striking up the conversation – really all I’d wanted was some small talk, something light and cheery – but I was polite if nothing else. “You said you were figuring some things out?”

                      “My art,” she said as if I was foolish to ask. “I’m going to sit in here till the inspiration comes to me.”

           “And I’m sure it will.”

           We didn’t make any more conversation after that, which suited me rather well, for I was becoming more fatigued by the minute. As I dried myself off – quite convinced my bone marrow had turned to frost – I told the young lady it was lovely to meet her, which, of course, it was not. She nodded and mumbled something polite in return.

           Clothed, I had taken a step or two up the slope that led back towards the campsite when I felt the need to tell the young lady, “Perhaps this is the type of place you stew over. As an artist that is... And one day you’ll birth a masterpiece… A painting of a geyser so vivid it sprays anyone in the gallery that comes to close to it. You’ll call it ‘Golden Poncho’… I’m told they blow all through the night, long after the last lens is off them…

           The following morning I felt positively lackadaisical. Unusually so, I might add. Simply putting the keys of the Jeep I had rented into the ignition and finding the car’s bite took a toll on me – it was all I could do but hold onto the steering wheel and endure the sudden bout of inertia that disarmed me. It was as though I had aged a decade overnight. I had a rising urge to return to the hot spring, taken by the curious idea that was I to return to the bend in the road, beneath which I knew the hot spring to be and look down, I would still see her there, her locks spread out around her, waiting in everness for an inspiration that may or may not come. I can’t articulate well enough just how much the qualm niggled at me. In any case, it was strange.

           But I persevered. I was a man of order after all, and I had no interest in skewing my schedule, for that’s precisely what the little detour would have done. Instead, I kept on heading southwest along the ridge of the peninsula as planned. As the kilometres rolled by, the sublime edges of the fjords and contours of the ocean rescued me from lingering thoughts. I was glad to find solitude, comforted by the awareness that white churches, identical to the ones I passed, would soon be the bread crumbs guiding my return.