Thanksgiving in Silfra
Me, snorkeling in near-freezing water in Silfra
I’m driving faster than I should through slushy snow. My confidence driving in winter weather has grown, but more importantly, we’re running late. I’m deeply afraid we’ll miss the tour.
I’m worried about missing a tour! Usually I’m skeptical at best when it comes to tours, but today’s adventure is one I insisted on: snorkeling in the Silfra fissure in Þingvellir’s rift valley. From the moment Robert told me about it I’ve been obsessed. Now it’s a dark winter morning, after nine but cloudy and still pitch black, and I’m speeding through inches of unplowed melting snow to get to the Silfra dive point in time. I didn’t factor in the time it would take to clear the vehicle of snow, or the slow winter driving, or the fact that once we arrive we’ll need to pay for parking and walk from the public parking lot to the assembly point. Hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, eyes sharp on the road, body tuned to the Tucson’s motion. I manage to make up a little time — the ETA on my phone ticks slowly backwards, a minute earlier every ten or twelve minutes. By the time we park in the icy lot and walk up the narrow road to where our tour van awaits, the clouds above us are brightening with sunrise. We find our van among the throng of tour vehicles, unmistakeable with its stylized Viking logo. We’re the last to arrive, but no one bats an eye, and I can finally relax. Well, I can relax a little. I’m still reserved, still cautious of other people, but my nerves have settled.
The dive is led by a pair of guides. Chico comes from Portugal and radiates mellow cheer, orchestrating our preparations with practiced confidence. Gretar is Icelandic, taller, quieter. One gets the sense that if he were crowned emperor of the world, or witnessed an alien invasion, he would nod thoughtfully and weigh his options. I would follow him anywhere. Chico has me sign the release form and then passes me off to Gretar, who sizes me up and selects an underlayer and a drysuit.
I’ve worn a double layer, merino wool under leggings and a warm shirt. Thick socks. I shed my coat and hat and gloves, remove my watch and jewelry, and climb into the black quilted underlayer before stepping into the drysuit. It’s my first time wearing a drysuit, which is a thicker and baggier wetsuit with more accoutrement. The legs terminate in solid built-in boots; the arms and neck have thick rubberized gaskets. Our tour companions are further along in the process, and I stand with the top of the dry suit dangling around my waist while the guides draw the other participants’ arms and heads through the gaskets and zip them into their suits. There are advantages to arriving last; by the time it’s my turn, I’ve witnessed several iterations and I squeeze my hands into tight claws, punching them through the gaskets. I pop my head forward and up through the neck of the suit, an eager turtle ready for her swim. I have a few inches on Chico, who stands on the raised boardwalk behind me to zip the back of the suit closed. Then Gretar fits a big zip-tie around my neck to ensure water doesn’t leak into my suit (why yes, I’ll let a tall Icelandic man tighten a zip tie around my neck, thank you very much). An exuberant English woman in the group makes many sly jokes at this point; Robert endures the same depredations and then we’re all ready to waddle after the guides to the water. We pull on neoprene mittens and neoprene hoods, grab our fins and mask and snorkel, and we’re off.
The parking lot is a short walk from the dive point. We’re in the broad valley that lies between the North American and European tectonic plates. Advertisements imply that you’ll be swimming right between the plates, as if you could float from one to the other, but Chico is quick to dispel that notion. The distance between the plates is about 6 kilometers here; we are, in fact, on a microplate. The watery fissures we’re going to swim through this morning are filled with glacier melt that’s a constant 2 degrees Celsius (34 degrees Fahrenheit), regardless of time of year. Some people swim in wetsuits, colder but more nimble — I wanted to wear a wetsuit so I could more easily dive beneath the surface, but my fresh tattoo can’t be submerged, so I’m resigned to practicality like the rest of the party.
We make our way across the back gravel pathway, dodging patches of ice, and queue up at the dive point. The guides are pleased that there’s not much of a line today; some days they have to wait as long as an hour just to get in the water. We go down the stairs to the metal pier that is the dive point, and spend a few minutes donning the rest of our gear: fins over drysuit boots, masks snug on our face, snorkels at the ready. The guides take photos; when I show Robert the pictures later, he’ll tell me I’ve gotten it wrong. “That’s two men,” he’ll say of the photo of us suited up at the dive point, and I’ll insist. He’ll dissolve into helpless laughter. “We look horrible!” he’ll say, and then go incoherent with laughter as he swipes through the photos of us underwater. He’s not wrong, and I don’t care one whit. These are some of my favorite photos of myself I’ve ever seen. I can’t think of when I’ve been happier.
I’m first in line for the first group. Only my deep-seated love of collective order keeps me from diving in ahead of Chico. Finally he signals I should descend the steps into the water, which exerts a comforting compression on my drysuit as I enter. Can I feel the cold, or do I just know that it’s cold? Chico has me roll onto my back, give a thumbs up that I’ve mastered the maneuver, and roll back onto my stomach. I move ahead to make room for the rest of the group, kicking forward lightly.
I put my mask in the water. Cold. Cold and clear, perfectly transparent down to the bottom of the small canyon in which we’ve started. For a moment my body tenses, expecting breath to stop. It takes a moment to relax into the freedom of the snorkel. I can breathe; I’m underwater, and I can breathe. The last time I went snorkeling I was ten, or eleven, in the balmy waters of the Mediterranean. I had given the bored Israeli teenager at the beach entrance a slotted token, and walked down to the beach with my friends, and waded into the sandy waters at Herzilyaa Pituach, a suburb of Tel Aviv. I didn’t see much then; a shell or two. Golden light. Sand. It was a long time ago. Back then I was confident that my life would unfold it should, that I would fall in love with a handsome man and have two smart and beautiful children, that I would get a college degree that led to an obvious career and we would buy a house with patios and good lighting. In 1989, I knew everything would work out as it should. When Chico and Gretar asked if I had snorkeled before, I said yes, and this is what I was referring to.
In the cold water, I roll onto my back again, watching the rest of the ducklings enter. Chico swims ahead of me and tells me to follow.
“It’s going to be really shallow for a minute,” he warns, and then we’re drifting over rocks that are barely deep enough for us to float over top of them. Gray-ochre rocks, textured and so so close. My breath loud in the snorkel. I drift too far to the left and have to push off a rock, guilt-stricken to put my flesh on such pristine terrain. I push myself back on course, and then we’re over the shallows and the planet drops away from me. Ten meters? More. Twenty, forty, as deep as sixty meters in places. Perfectly clear water. It is the third day of creation, nothing in the world but light and water and bare earth around us. No plants, no animals, nothing that teems in the water or crawls on the earth, not even a sun above to warm the firmament. It is the third day of creation and I am floating over newly created stones, the first blue rays of light to illuminate the universe. My hands are cold, my face is cold, the water that occasionally splashes into my snorkel is cold and clean and tastes like the first water to be tasted in the world.
I’m going too fast. I know it; when I pop my head up, Chico gently suggests that I slow down so we don’t get too far ahead of the group. “You’re trying too hard,” he tells me, “you’ll wear yourself out,” and he shows me how to flip my fins slowly to propel myself with less effort. He’s right, of course. I’m always trying too hard, always pushing too hard. So now I drift, my face in the water, me and the freshly created universe, until the group catches up. Chico takes pictures of each of us, first me alone, then me and Robert, then Robert alone, and so on. Finally Chico leads us onward. I practice the slow twisting kick with my fins, as intent as the first time I learned to paddle a kayak. Water dissolves my ancient shame at how difficult it is for me to follow verbal instructions with my body, my embarrassment at the painfully slow messages between brain and limbs. I practice good form for the rest of the swim, earnest as a swan.
The fissure broadens and narrows, twists and turns, deepens and shallows. We are in the water for perhaps twenty-five, thirty minutes, but it feels like four minutes, or four hours. It’s too short, but as I write this part of me is still there. Part of me will never leave the Silfra fissure. At the end of the dive, we’re freed to swim around a shallow cove and explore for as long as we want. I swim the perimeter, popping my head up now and again to monitor the group. I was the first one in and I’m the last one out, grudgingly; I could spend the whole day just in that cove. Why? Why? Why? I don’t know. It’s just rock and winter-dead algae and cloudy light. It’s a freezing day, barely above freezing in the water. My hands are stupid with cold and my snorkel’s bite guard is broken so my lips are sore from holding it in place. I don’t care. I would stay there the whole day. The whole week. Would apprentice myself to the guides just to spend another ten minutes in that clarity.
But I love the collective order, so I let Chico guide me out of the water. Robert is waiting for me. “That was cool, but I’m ready to be done,” he says. I’m still high and laugh. “I’m not!” I say, and he shakes his head in wonderment.
Our group comprised four people in addition to Chico: me and Robert, plus an American couple who just arrived in the country today. We joke about how the cold has blown away their jet lag. The husband got frostbite years ago climbing some mountain or other, and he’s braced for the pain when his hands start to warm up. We walk back with Chico, laughing and talking. The ground is black. The sky is gray. Why is everything so vivid?
Back at the van, Chico systematically removes us from our drysuits, careful not to damage the gaskets. We change our socks and rub our hands, put on gloves and talk while we wait for the second group to finish their swim and join us. I’m giddy, as fully awake as I’ve ever been. The cold has brought every cell to life. I sit on my coat, not yet ready to yield to warmth. The American couple tells us tales of living on their sailboat, climbing mountains. “Has anyone ever told you you look like Bill Hader?” Robert asks the husband, and he gives Robert a blank look. “You know, from Saturday Night Live?”
He shrugs. “I haven’t watched television or movies in twenty years,” he says, and I think, these are my people. It’s the first time I’ve recognized that I’m part of a tribe: people who choose to swim in freezing water on Thanksgiving day. The first time I’ve recognized that my people are out there, that if I keep following my obsessions I will keep finding them.
Finally the second group returns and peels out of their suits while Chico makes hot chocolate. The exuberant Englishwoman continues her schtick — “I’ve had three babies, I have wide hips,” she opines when trying to extract herself from the drysuit. The cold has melted my reticence and I chat and joke with the group as comfortably as if I’d had a bottle of wine. We all sip thin hot chocolate and trade tales of our travels. All too soon, it’s time for the Americans to drive to their hotel, and the English tourists to return to Reykjavík, and we scatter.
Robert and I aren’t ready to leave. We pick our way through snow and ice, climbing up a small cliff to take in the view of the rift valley, exploring a little gift shop. Socks and hoodies and refrigerator magnets. Eventually we climb into the car and return home, where I’m finally ready for a hot shower to finish thawing out.
That evening, we have a reservation at the Geysir Hotel for dinner. Earlier in the week I spent a good hour sipping a latte in the cafe next door; tonight we’re in the fancy restaurant in the main hotel. I put on makeup. I wear my one good outfit, the only clothes I’ve brought that don’t scream “Pacific Northwest hiker.”
Thanksgiving is my Hansel and Gretel holiday, ominous and conflicted. The reasons for that could fill a book — are filling a book, in fact. The scars of one life. It’s no accident I’m in Iceland today, neatly sidestepping potential traumas. Today’s cold has been like icing an injury. Take down the swelling. Rest, ice, compression, elevation. Tonight is probably the best Thanksgiving I’ve had since I was, what, ten? Eleven? Since Herzilyaa Pituach. Don’t worry, when I get home from Iceland it will all come tumbling down on me again, thirty years of puzzlement and pain. But that’s okay. That’s how it works. For today, for this moment, everything is perfect. The Negroni, the oily carpaccio, the Icelandic bread and butter that have filled my dreams for the last three years. Slow dinner with a friend who has seen me at my worst and now, on this trip finally, has also seen me at my best, and has loved me through both. Love-love has always failed me, but friend-love has been my anchor, and I thank all the gods for friends who carry me through. The salmon — I grew up in Maryland but I’m Pacific Northwest to my core and will never turn down a good piece of salmon. The risotto, rich with butter, grounding me; roasted broccoli and cauliflower and zucchini. The salad, tart tomato and light vinaigrette balancing each other. The bottle of wine, biodynamic and fruity. The restaurant is tastefully decorated for Christmas, silver and gold and just the right degree of glitter, and here there’s no hint of Thanksgiving. No Puritanical hats or buckled shoes, no pumpkins or marshmallows. It’s just a quiet Thursday at Geysir and two old friends having a merry time of it.
We’ll go back to the cabin after dinner and putter. We’ll finish packing our suitcases, tidying the cabin, and tomorrow we’ll get up and drive through the generous sunrise to Reykjavík. I’ll be impatient, antsy, swimming out in front as usual; we’ll have coffee and chocolate croissants around the corner from my tattoo studio and then I’ll go the airport early. I’ll drive through Reykjanesbær, retracing my steps from years ago — the restaurant where I had dinner, the spare hotel where I wished I could set up for a month and write, the rocky windy shore — before getting my COVID test (oh gods I hate that sensation, the swab in my sinus just millimeters from brain tissue). I’ll sit in the IcelandAir lounge, because airport lounges are the greatest invention since the snorkel, and will listen to obnoxious American businessmen pontificate to their subordinates and wonder again why I think it’s such a bad thing to be a starving artist.
And here I am swimming out too far ahead again. There’s more to tell about the days before I left Iceland, and then more to tell about the journey home. But if Christmas is, for you, a tangled celebration like Thanksgiving is for me, then consider this. Perhaps someday you will go to a remote land where the holiday that weighs on you is just another Thursday, or just another Saturday, and you’ll discover your tribe, and you’ll find yourself as awake as you’ve ever been.
Perhaps you’ll find yourself swimming through one of the days of creation, and even though all the mess and heartache of life will still await you upon your return, you’ll find yourself with a new reserve on which to draw.
