From Little Iceland to Big Iceland

For the second time in the span of several weeks, I find myself sitting at an airport, looking up at the national flag of Iceland.

Only this time the airport is not the impromptu one at Black Rock City in the Nevada Desert, and the flag is not the one I had hung in the inside of the rental trailer. Instead I am in the main terminal at Keflavík International Airport (63°59′06″N 22°36′20″W), about thirty miles outside Reykjavik, near the tip of a short volcanic peninsula jutting out into the North Atlantic. The flag is a decal on the side of a window for a shop selling locally made wool sweaters and other winter garb.

Our trip here had been marvelous---everything we had hoped for. Indeed, for all the preparation we had done, the months of research and planning, and the playing at being Icelanders at Burning Man, we had somehow succeeded. Arriving here for the first time it had felt like home to both us.

The idea had begun as a whimsy last spring, when deciding where we should go in the fall after Red had taken her boards. She wanted to travel for a couple months until she began her formal career as a physician. Similarly I had wanted at last to take my road-work lifestyle abroad, as I had been talking about for some time.

I had been cautious about taking this step until the the time had been right. I had wanted to perfect it in the U.S., where I felt comfortable.

In my perfectionist logistic way, I had wanted the arrival here to go smoothly, like a rehearsed routine. But it had turned out to be quite hectic, mostly because of all the events leading up to it, not the least of which was the enormous time, money, and energy spent on Burning Man this year.

Even arriving back in Portland from Reno our work had not been over. We had only nine days until our flight from Seattle on Icelandair was due to depart.  The days were crammed not only with the usual slog of cleaning up our clothes and gear, but with the daunting task of packing up Red's apartment in preparation for all of our possessions into storage.

During this time, most of my possessions were out on the porch where I surveyed them and rearranged them.

"For someone who came up here with only a car trunk full of gear, I sure have wound up with a lot of stuff," I told Red. "But it seems ninety percent of it is for Burning Man."

It wasn't until the night before our flight, when all of our things were finally in secure storage down on the Portland waterfront that I could begin the task of arranging the things I would take overseas into the plum-colored Rick Steeves rolling carry-on that I had recently ordered. It had arrived from the warehouse in Seattle only a day before our departure for Reno.  Seattle was a recurring theme for this trip, which seemed appropriate since I had spent my last birthday there. I enjoy that kind of subtle continuity in life.

Even at that point we faced a small crisis when our plans for long-term storage of Red's car near Sea-Tac fell through at the last minute. She scrambled and found an alternative. We drove up there the day before our flight, and after a night at the Hampton near the airport, we dropped her car off with a friendly retired couple who tended the storage facility, and rolled our carry-ons to the shuttle they provided.

As we waited for our flight in the lounge I practiced some of the phrases of Icelandic that I had been learning over the summer. Then like a true Icelander,  I broke out my Kindle and read a bit from my download of Independent People (Sjálfstætt fólk) by Halldór Laxness. I had been working my through it for a over a month, savoring each chapter.

The novel is considered the "national story" of Iceland by many folks there, the characters and theme reflective of the way Icelanders see themselves. One finds prominent copies of it, both in Icelandic and English, displayed in bookstores all over the country.

Then they called our flight and we boarded. The captain and the head attendant gave us our instructions in both Icelandic and English. We took off over the North Cascades on a bright sunny afternoon and headed across the Canadian border on a great circle route that would take us over Hudson Bay and Greenland. At last we were on our way home.