The Day of the Á

6. Thursday. A day of looking at ice. We leave Hof under grey low hanging clouds, the kind of weather one expects and follow the highway along the coast, over one glacial stream after another. In Icelandic, the basic word for river is á, pronounced "ow." Driving around the country, one sees it many times in the standardized signs at the bridges. It is always part of the word, at the end. A basic word for a basic concept.

The ice cap is tantalizingly close, just over the crest of the mountains. Coming around certain points on the coast reveals the sprawl of glaciers in streaked splendors emerging down into the coastal plain. But the sky is snarly---not great for pictures.

We get our fill of ice close up at the glacial lagoon of Jökulsárlón, which literally means "glacial lagoon." It is a large lake with an opening to the coast, where pieces of ice calve off from the retreating glacial. Then they float in the pond, breaking up into small pieces that have the consistency of ice sculptures, and seem via pareidolia, to at times resemble broken fragments of a heap of ancient classical sculptures.

The glaciers are retreating lately, but they are still further advanced than in the Middle Ages when Iceland was first settled. Along the southern coast are many dryland fjords where early settlements were wiped out in the centuries after the first settlers arrived, because the ice advanced.

We spend the night at a quaint small bnb run via a Latvian immigrant on a farm outside the harbor town of Vík, about as far south as one can go on the island.