Pilgrim

Published in the Spring 2019 issue of Prairie Fire.

“Walking is how the body measures itself against the earth.”

— Rebecca Solnit

* * *

Less than a month after I moved away for university, my mother boarded a plane to Spain to walk from one end of the country to the other. Like thousands of good Christians before her, she walked the Camino de Santiago, where upon arrival at the burial site of Saint James she would be granted direct entry to heaven without having to waste any time dilly-dallying in purgatory.

My mother was only baptized to appease her father’s mother. The last time she had set foot in a church was to admire its architecture while on holiday, and she refuses to believe in God. My mother was really walking the Camino for her own mother, who had died a few years earlier. When you’re a single mother with a fulltime job it’s hard to find time to grieve, so she was walking to Santiago to give herself space to reflect on death.

When she returned from Spain, my mother told me stories about drinking copious amounts of wine with other pilgrims, eating lavish feasts after a 30-kilometre day, and buying beer and chocolate from vending machines. It sounded like a party. But as often as there were joyous moments spent around the dinner table sharing advice on how to sooth feet that were covered in blisters, she also told me there were days when she wept her way across the countryside as she thought about her mother.

I am an avid walker, but I’ve never been one for pilgrimages, which imbue the simple act of placing one foot in front of the other with so much meaning. Instead, I like to think I ascribe to the Virginia Woolf approach to walking. In her essay “Street Haunting,” Woolf writes that when we leave the house for a walk, “we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.” My best thoughts come to me while walking, and if I were more handy I would design myself a mobile desk strapped to my hips so I could write as I stroll around the city.

I’ve never been one for pilgrimages, but less than a year after my mother got back from Spain I found myself on my own. I did a lot of walking the summer I lived in Iceland. I was working at the English-language newspaper in Reykjavík and living in a small studio apartment on the edge of downtown, just steps from the icy waters of the North Atlantic. After getting home from work, I would sometimes walk for hours along the waterfront, getting lost in the unfamiliar city and looking for landmarks to guide me home. In that part of the world the sun barely goes below the horizon during the summer months, so even at two in the morning there is a pink glow that paints the night sky.

My pilgrimage came on a Sunday, which was entirely accidental. I was nearing the end of my time in Iceland, and I realized I still hadn’t made it to the Library of Water. So I walked to the edge of the city, stuck my thumb out, and waited for someone to pull over and offer me a ride north. It took me half a day to get to my destination, which was less than 200 kilometres away. Most of that time was spent walking through Snæfellsness peninsula, just a stone’s throw from the volcano Jules Verne imagined was the gateway to the centre of the earth, after the group of tourists who had been giving me a ride realized they were in fact not going to the same destination as I was and deposited me unceremoniously on the side of the highway.

***

The Library of Water sits at the end of a street in the fishing village of Stykkishólmur, at one of the highest points in the hilly community of just over 1,000 souls. The permanent art installation by American artist Roni Horn has turned the town’s old municipal library into a memorial to Iceland’s shrinking glaciers. Inside the building, visitors are greeted by 24 floor-to-ceiling glass columns that are scattered throughout the open room and are filled with melted glacial water from ice caps across the island. The suggestion is that once climate change has rid Iceland of the glaciers that give the country its name, the water catalogued in this library will be all that’s left.

Visitors are asked to take off their shoes and tread lightly on the floor that is soft and springy on bare feet, like the moss that blankets this island. Windows on all sides of the room provide a panoramic view of Breiðafjörður, the body of water that surrounds the town. On sunny days, the hundreds of islands in the bay become green gems embedded in blue velvet, and the sunlight refracting through the columns of water sends rainbows shimmering across the floor. On days when the fog rolls in, swaddling the town in grey, the columns become tombstones and visitors are left alone to walk among ghosts in the dark.

In her book The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit describes her time as the writer in residence at the Library of Water. It’s not an altogether positive description. She writes about the darkness of winter, the solitude she felt living in this town, and about the standoffishness of Icelanders, who remain generally distrustful of foreigners after spending, until recently, over 1,000 years isolated from the rest of the world. Yet there was something that seemed so beautifully idiosyncratic about the Library of Water that I was compelled to make the pilgrimage to this archive of ice.

On my way back to Reykjavík, I was grateful to be picked up by a woman named Guðrún. She told me I reminded her of her son, and offered to drive me all the way back to the city as long as I agreed to entertain her with conversation. The terrain between Stykkishólmur and the capital is kaleidoscopic, from the vibrant greens of moss to the dull reds of volcanic rock and the iridescent blues of glacial lakes. Icelanders are fiercely protective of their land, and the main worry they have with the influx of tourists is that they will spoil the island’s natural beauty. The more time I spend here the more I can see why.

Guðrún has a story to go with every rock formation we pass. Most of the stories are borrowed from the Icelandic Sagas, which narrate the history of the island from its settlement nearly 1,200 years ago. “There are trolls who come out of their caves at night to walk across the island,” she tells me. “If they don’t make it back to their caves before the sun rises they turn to stone.” Depressions in the land are all explained as troll footprints, and any mountain that looks vaguely trollish is one who was caught off guard by the early dawn.

* * *

About halfway back to the city, Guðrún asks if I wouldn’t mind taking a bit of a detour. She has something she’d like to show me. She veers off the highway, and begins driving up a gravel road into the mountains. We stop at a field of moss surrounded by peaks capped by snow, which doesn’t seem too different from the terrain we’ve been passing for the last hour. “Blueberries!” She grabs a plastic cup from under her seat and points into the distance. She sets out into the field, crouching every so often to grab a handful of wild blueberries that I now notice sprout from the rocky soil. They are small, dark purple, and are sour when they burst between my teeth.

I stay near the car while Guðrún roams up the mountainside, filling her plastic cup with the berries. I check the time. It’s getting late, and I work the next morning. Just as I begin wondering if I should start walking to the highway to hitch another ride back to the city, I see Guðrún loping back through the moss and blueberries. She’s grinning. “I have enough here to make a pie!”

When we get back onto the highway I notice how much darker it is than before. It’s August, and at this time of the summer the sun begins to dip below the horizon earlier and earlier, and the nights are beginning to get darker and darker. I ask Guðrún about her son. She tells me he died last summer. Leukemia. He was my age. She reaches below the steering wheel and rolls up her pant leg. There’s a portrait of a young man tattooed on her calf.

“I got this done in Spain,” she tells me. “I walked the Camino after he died. Have you heard of it?” I tell her my mother walked the Camino too. They must have walked it around the same time. Although she’s not religious, Guðrún tells me she walked the pilgrimage to give herself the space to think and the time to grieve.

We spend the rest of the drive back to Reykjavík in comfortable silence. I reflect on death, and mothers, and walking, and place, and space, and climate change, and how sad it is that Iceland’s glaciers will one day be gone, and how beautiful it is that a part of them will remain at the Library of Water. I reflect on how willing some people are to share so much with complete strangers. I wish Guðrún could meet my mother, but I also know my mother is not the kind of person to tromp through fields of wild blueberries to make a pie.

Guðrún tells me she has somewhere to be, so she can’t drive me downtown, but she offers to drop me off at a mall in the east end of the city. I give her a hug in the parking lot before watching her drive away. It’s a long walk back to my apartment, but sometimes you just need to go on a really long walk. After all, I was taught to walk by women like Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Solnit, my mother, and Guðrún. I was taught to place one foot in front of the other, over and over, until you get to where you need to be.

***

“To walk alone . . . is the greatest rest.”

— Virginia Woolf