"Two days ago, it was spring here," Halldor said. "Everything was green. They were handing out fines to people who were still driving with studs on their tires."
Halldor told us that this pool -- and his school -- serve a farming region of about 200 people. The six girls splashing around at the deep end of the swimming pool were his only students. "A few decades ago, there used to be about 30 students, but everybody is moving away from places like this to Reykjavik," he said. "But I have two boys who are not yet in school. I guess they will repopulate the community."
Icelanders have ample opportunity for bathing in the country's many geothermal springs, lagoons and swimming pools.
(Silvia Otte)
|
|
We lingered for a moment in the warm water and then changed, got back in the truck and headed up the mountain road to Siglufjordur.
IT'S SORT OF COMPLICATED how we decided to take a dip in as many Icelandic swimming pools as we could. I blame part of it on the tourist brochure I had read in my guesthouse in Reykjavik: "A major factor allowing Icelanders to stay forever young is that a trip to one of the thermal pools to swim laps or unwind in a thermal bath is a way of life." I recently had the chance to return to Iceland after several years away, and I decided that this time I'd like to gain an even deeper understanding of its people.
During my twenties, I spent what some might consider to be an eccentric amount of time in Iceland. I would like to tell you that I had some grand purpose, that I was translating the ancient sagas or persuading the Icelanders to stop hunting whales. But, no. When I wasn't driving around aimlessly on gravel roads shooting photos of the strangest, most beautiful landscape in the world, much of my time was spent hanging out in Reykjavik's nightlife, stoking the last embers of my aimless youth. And, of course, swimming in the sundlaug.
Reykjavik is a wonderful place to lose one's sense of time. In my nostalgic dreams, I am sitting in a bar on one of those glorious Icelandic summer nights when everyone drinks too much beer, and Icelandic schnapps, and the endless Arctic sunlight pours in through the windows. One of those nights when you look at your watch and suddenly realize it's 4 a.m. and your friends -- among them those impossibly lovely Icelandic girls bandied about by so many men's magazines, the ones with the icy blue eyes and the rosy cheeks and the blond hair and the eyebrow rings and the tattoos peeking out from above their jeans -- invite you to go for an early morning swim in a steaming thermal pool.
It is these visits to the pools that remain perhaps the most vivid -- the feeling of dipping from cool air into hot water, settling in, chin deep, as steam rises around my head, and feeling as though the days will never end. In my mind, they are like the elusive fountain of youth. I am not so young and aimless anymore, but for some time I've dreamed of swimming around Iceland, of breast-stroking and doggy-paddling from swimming pool to hot spring to swimming pool, slicing through a river of hot water that has gurgled up from the center of the Earth.
I also partly blame John Cheever for this idea. I'd recently reread "The Swimmer," Cheever's most famous short story of suburban despair, in which a troubled, aging playboy named Neddy Merrill, losing his grip on reality, attempts to swim home across the county by hopping from swimming pool to swimming pool. "He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool," Cheever wrote, "but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure."
Unlike Neddy Merrill, however, I didn't make this swim alone. I drafted Hjalti -- a poet who supports himself by painting houses in Reykjavik -- to come along. For years, Hjalti has also been writing an idiosyncratic dictionary in Icelandic that has now grown to more than 2,000 pages. If his book is ever published, Hjalti may be known as the Samuel Johnson of Iceland. His chances are good. Iceland publishes the most books per capita of any nation in the world -- one out of 10 Icelanders will publish a book in his or her lifetime.
Hjalti agreed to the swimming mission, but he set one rule: If we went to the trouble of traveling to a pool, we would swim in it, no matter the conditions. Remember, Hjalti said, quoting from "The Swimmer": "He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools."
IT IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE the significance of hot water in Iceland. The entire nation runs on clean geothermal heat, drawn from deep underground. When you arrive in Reykjavik, you can't miss the largest edifice in the city: two giant, gleaming silver tanks, each holding thousands of gallons of geothermal water, which loom on a hilltop above downtown. Every home and office is heated by the water from these tanks, which is piped underneath the city's roads and sidewalks. Beyond Reykjavik, there are hundreds of hot springs that bubble up from underground and that Icelanders have soaked in since the days of the Vikings. In fact, the old Icelandic word for these thermal pools -- laug -- is so central to the culture that the word for Saturday in Icelandic, Laugardagur, literally means "pool day."
Iceland has geothermal power in abundance because it sits on a geological hot spot between two continental plates. But Icelanders also use their many glacier rivers and waterfalls to produce hydroelectricity, which alone accounts for 90 percent of the nation's energy usage. Further, Reykjavik is experimenting with hydrogen-powered buses, which rumble through town trailing telltale foamy white clouds of water vapor behind them. The Icelandic government says it hopes to do away with fossil fuels -- for cars and trucks, as well as its massive fishing fleet -- within the next 30 years.
I was reminded of Icelanders' aquatic pride before our trip began, when I ducked into a little convenience store to grab some bottles of water. As a rule, Icelanders don't pay money to drink water out of a bottle. The bottles of water I was looking for read "still water" in English, and I had to search the back of the bottom shelf of the refrigerator to find them. A girl in a hooded sweat shirt and a nose ring stopped me and said, "You know, this is the same as the water from the, uh, krana," making the international sign for "tap."
Another girl came over and said: "Yeah, don't buy that water. That's too expensive. Drink the water from the tap. It's the purest water in the world."
