the cassandra pages

The Air We Breathe

 A clear day, two years ago.

Mexico City's air quality has improved in the last two decades, but it is not exactly good. On clear days, the view from our hotel room included the mountains in the distance, but during this particular stay, that was an exception.

A typical recent day.

The city is at 7,000 feet, and fills the Valley of Mexico: once surely one of the most beautiful places on earth, surrounded by mountains including active volcanoes more than 17,000 feet tall.

Above, The Valley of Mexico from Del Rey Mill, by Jose Maria Velasco, painted in 1900. The Chapultepec castle is in the middle and the city itself is the small white expanse in front of the lake. Today the castle and its woods are a park, with the city extended all around them, over all the green space you can see in the picture above. Popocatepetl, on the right, erupted recently and has no snow cover at the present time.

Looking in the same direction on a pretty clear day, from the Torre Latinoamericana: nothing but city fills the entire valley.

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For the first couple of days, travelers from lower altitudes, like us, generally experience some breathlessness, especially when walking fast, carrying luggage, climbing stairs. I don't usually have too much of a problem with that. But I was very aware of discomfort in my lungs, and found myself coughing. After a week, I came down with a respiratory flu. Whether it's something I picked up on the airplane, or in the crowded metro, I'll never know, but I'm convinced that my lungs were already struggling from the pollution. Now at home, a week later, I'm still ill but gradually getting better. Yesterday when I looked out of the airplane at the frozen fields of Quebec, I wasn't shuddering like many of my fellow passengers: I couldn't wait to take a breath of that cold, clean air.

I was on the street every day, both as a cyclist and pedestrian. Every day, trucks passed us belching black smoke, buses filled the air with diesel fumes, the highways were choked with car traffic. In our neighborhood and all through the city, many people work outside or in spaces that are open to the outdoors - there's no way they can avoid exposure to the air. The effects on everyday health must be devastating. I don't think I couldn't survive there, but for the 22 million citizens of Mexico City, there's no choice. What about all the people who live in the Maximum Cities of the world, and can't fly away to places with better air, let alone water and sanitation? I have a close friend in Beijing. She has no options in that very polluted city.

What I observed, and the fact of my own fragility, have made me think a lot this week about us as biological organisms, with simple needs for air, water, and nutrition: things the earth naturally provides in abundance. Most of the time, we don't even think of ourselves in this way - like a plant or a bird or a goldfish - so dependent are we on our technologies and the ways they keep us removed from and oblivious to the cycles of life. I've thought about what we are doing to ourselves and all the living things, and it's been more appalling to me than ever. Air to breathe: the most basic requirement of all, and yet for millions and millions of human beings, even this is impossible.

What do the indigenous people think? First the Spanish came and violently took away their land, massacred thousands of people, decimated their rich and highly-developed native culture, and converted the people to Christianity; then industrialization destroyed much of the natural world with which they had always lived in harmony. And now, many of the indigenous people are forced to come into the city for work, to sell their foods or handcrafts on the street, or worse yet, to beg. In Mexico as nearly everywhere, the darker one's skin, the more discrimination there is, the more menial the jobs, and the fewer chances for education and economic advancement. There's more than one way to suffocate, and unfortunately the people with the least power are always the ones who suffer the most.

As I hope is obvious, I love Mexico, and I don't mean to be negative - simply realistic about some of the very real problems that became even more obvious to me during this trip. The legacy of colonialism continues, and we have to look it in the face if there is ever to be a hope of addressing what we've wrought.

Road Trip 13: The Black Beach at Vik

After coming down from the promontory, past the cliffs full of seabirds, the tall blooming angelica, the sheep on their rocks, the car left by young men who had been convinced they could drive to the top but ended up having to walk, just like us...after all of this, we drove out of Vik and around the back of the long weird hill we had just climbed, toward the glacier and then away from it again, following a road along the other side of the promontory, past a church, past small houses with Icelandic horses grazing in their yards, down to a parking lot bordered by low dunes.

It was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. The beach, absolutely black and made of tiny round stones in graduated sizes like pearls, smaller and smaller as you walked closer to the ocean, glistened like caviar. The waves thundered as they broke, swept onto the black sand and retreated in a pattern of brilliant white lace.

To the right, the famous pierced rock peninsula called Dyrhólaey:

On our left, the tall standing rocks iconic to Vik: legend says that they were trolls who were turned to stone.

And behind us, the rock wall made of columnar basalt, and a famous natural cave crowned by studlaberg as beautiful as any carved cathedral, and guarded by a cacophonous colony of nesting birds above it in the cliffs. (See the small figures of people below, for scale.)

Unusually for Iceland, a sign had warned that the surf here was dangerous, and to be very careful when approaching the cave - and to do so only at low tide. The tide was out, so we were able to walk all along the beach, but the waves were definitely unpredictable and caught my toes twice when I was concentrating on close-up photos - so I don't think the signs were kidding.

On an island of extraordinary places surely this is one of the most beautiful; the waves and the black sands feel like they've entered me and won't let go.

Road Trip 12: Climbing at Vik

We left Skaftafell and drove back across the Myrdalssandur to Vik, the southernmost village on the Icelandic mainland, reaching it just after dark. The small fishing settlement looked like a metropolis after the uninhabited desert we had been in for the past few days: full of lights, homes, even some places of business. After putting our stuff in the guesthouse where we had rented sleeping bag accommodations for the night, we headed to the local gas station/convenience store/restaurant for some supper -- burgers, fries, and a couple of Gull draft beers -- then took showers and went to bed, because we planned to rise early and climb the promontory overlooking the village, as well as visiting the town's famous beach.

Vik must be located in one of the most beautiful spots on earth, on the edge of the sea near the  Myrdalsjokull glacier, but underneath that glacier lurks the deadly volcano Katla. Katla is well overdue for an eruption - the past one was in 1918 and the longest period between eruptions was 95 years. Furthermore, each of the three previous eruptions of Ejafjallajokull were followed by eruptions of Katla. If Katla were to erupt, Vik could be destroyed by a glacial flood. There are periodic drills where the townspeople take shelter at the highest point, the church, because it is the only place likely to be above such a flood if it should ever occur. But a flood might not be the worst of it; Katla's eruptions have been of a violent magnitude from VEI-4 (that's the Volcanic Explosivity Index) to VEI-6, the latter comparable to Mt Pintatubo in 1991. Katla is monitored regularly, but while earthquake tremors have been frequent, the expected eruption has not yet occured.

But on that particular morning, Vik was peaceful and beautiful. We decided to forego breakfast at the guesthouse and just get some rolls and coffee before our hike, because we had to make a ferry crossing some distance away in the early afternoon.

Immediately after parking our car, we had company as we started up the long hill.

As we climbed, the view just got more and more spectacular, as the glacier, shining under a clear sky, was revealed behind the local hills.

Like the sheep, it seemed easy to feel oblivious to any danger other than falling off the edge.

Birds nesting in the cliffs cried and swooped in arcs above us, the glaciers shone, and back toward the east, the sea stretched out along the sands beyond the diminishing houses of the town, still asleep under the volcano.

Road Trip 11: Vatnajokull/Skaftafell: Glimpses of Glacial Peaks

We climbed up above Svartifoss, higher and higher, and began to get little glimpses of the Vatnajokull ice cap that had been hidden by the clouds.

Ahead of us to the north were these peaks, and if we had started earlier we could have gone much closer to them. Our goal was a nearby peak, less high than these.

From the top, looking south across the Skeidararsandur glacial outwash plain. That's a storm on the horizon. This was a Japanese couple we had seen before. After they left, we were alone up there and never saw anyone else until we had rejoined the main trail, halfway back down.

And looking to the west, across the vast Skeidararjokull glacier, with the tundra in its autumn magnificence.

We were given brief glimpses of the high mountain peaks at the top of Vantajokull; it was so beautiful, and so quiet, that you could almost forget that under this glacier lies Bardarbunga, one of the most active volcanic systems in Iceland.

 

Road Trip 10: Vatnajokull/Skaftafell: Svartifoss and Stuðlaberg

In the morning, still dark and drizzly, we drove just a few miles from Hof (just off the bottom right of this map) to reach the access road for the Skaftafell wilderness in the Vatnajokull National Park. From the road, we could see the Skaftafellsjokull glacier lying in its valley beneath the giant glacial cap, across the sands and tundra:

The parking lot was full, and tour buses bound for glacier walks were loading, but not too many people were actually around. We went into the visitors' center to look at the trail maps, and get the lay of the land. It was pretty cold and raw, but some native Icelanders in their Lopi sweaters seemed to barely feel it. The Japanese, on the other hand were bundled up in parkas and high-tech rainsuits from top to toe.

Concerned about the weather, we decided to climb up to the Svartifoss waterfall first, and if we had time later, to take the flat trail that ends very close to the Skaftafellsjokull glacier. As it turned out, we only did the first hike, but were very glad we'd made that choice. So we headed out in the opposite direction of the people above, to the north and west, up the mountain.

The mountains are split with gorges, each of which seemed to contain numerous waterfalls, cascading off precipitous cliffs skirted by the trail, mostly without ropes or rails, only an occasional warning:

Once we'd gained some height, we could begin to really appreciate the extent of the glacial outwash plain below, so large that we couldn't really see the sea beyond.

Finally we got our first glimpse of Svartifoss, the Black Falls:

We drew closer.

From the bluff on the right near the falls, a trail led down to its base.

These astonishing rock forms are columnar basalt, which results when an unusually thick basaltic lava flow cools and cracks. It's such an iconic feature of Icelandic landscapes that  national poets have written about it, painters have painted it, and architects have emulated the five-and-six-sided columnar forms in their buildings. But before I saw Svartifoss, one of the most famous and dramatic examples of columnar basalt in the world, I hadn't recognized what I was seeing in less-dramatic places. In fact, one of the drawings I had done a couple of years before was of columnar basalt, but I didn't even know it. (Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and the Giant's Causeway in Ireland are other examples of the same geologic structure.)

From Svartifoss we continued to the left, up the mountain, on steps formed from sections of the basalt, which looked just like ancient ruins.

I found out something interesting when looking for references to the Icelandic Stuðlaberg which is their much more beautiful name for columnar basalt. The word Stuðlar means pillar-stone or basaltic pillar and stafr, which means approximately the same thing. The Old Norse alphabet, or Runic Alphabet, contained straight lines also called pillars or staves. Studul is a characteristic of old Norse song, referring to its rock-fast form that allowed it to be committed to memory. I should ask Language Hat for more about these word origins, in which the early words for these basalt pillars seem to have become terms for unchangeable, steady forms that gave structure to oral Norse poetry and in music. And guess what? Even Icelandic knitting patterns draw their inspiration and name from studlaberg; it's part of the bedrock of Icelandic consciousness. Once I had made the connection, through Svartifoss, I saw it everywhere.

Road Trip 9: Hof

From behind the church at Hof, looking west.

After all this wildness, I thought you might be interested in some human habitation. Hof, where we stayed on our second night, is a small cluster of farms and houses tucked under the shelter of towering cliffs. There's nothing else around, except perhaps a tiny isolated farm or two, for miles and miles. The location of the settlement is fairly high above the glacial outwash plain, and looks as though it would be protected from flooding.

looking east

and looking south, across the sands toward the ocean

I looked up the Icelandic word hof and found out that it descends from the Old Norse, hov, in turn descended from the proto-Germanic word hufą, which meant (1) a hill or elevated place, or (2) house, hall, estate. Hof was the same word in Old English, Old Friesan, Old Saxon, Old High Dutch, and Old German. I guess we can conclude that there has been a settlement here for a very long time -- maybe as much as a thousand years.

Today there is a turf church that was the last of its kind to be built in Iceland - in the 1880s and recently reconstructed - and a churchyard with mounded graves. The Hofskirkja church is maintained by the National Museum of Iceland, but also functions still as a parish church. The other buildings include a few homes and farms, a couple of guesthouses, some sort of school or daycare center, and the modern hotel where we stayed. Except for the yellow church and a very modern house up above the settlement (below), pretty much all of the buildings in Hof are white with red roofs. (If you follow the hotel link there's a video that shows the area better than my pictures do.) It was strange to drive up the road in the rain, enter a door, and find ourselves in a low-slung, modern, Scandinavian-style hotel that felt like an upscale IKEA showroom: white walls; grey fabrics and dark grey wood and stone; bold, brightly-colored art; sleek contemporary fixtures.

It was also pretty expensive, and the dinner price turned out to be more than we wanted to spend. Instead, we showered, soaked in the hotel's hot tub, took a sauna, and then drove half an hour west in the now-pouring rain and complete darkness to a gas station-with-cafe we had noticed on our way out. This oasis in the wilderness sold souvenirs, maps, chocolates, snacks, dipped ice cream (Icelanders eat ice cream year round) and had a lunch counter and tables -- where we saw some of the same travelers we'd seen earlier in the day. We ordered lamb burgers and fries, and two cold Gull beers, and were as contented as a couple of fat grazing sheep.

I'm sure that there are trolls in those cliffs, aren't you? Nevertheless, we slept well, and after a similar but more lavish breakfast than the previous morning, left Hof to set off for nearby Skaftafell, and a hike in the Vatnajokull National Park.

Road Trip 8: Another Glacial Lagoon

At Jökulsárlón (top right in the map above) we turned around and headed back west, across the Breidamerkursandur glacial outwash plain. For a long time, we could see this glacier in the distance:

...but it was only when we got close that we noticed a gravel road leading in toward it. A drizzly rain was starting to fall, and clouds were rolling in, but we decided to see if we could get a better view. The road led all the way in to a hill overlooking the glacial tongue, and when we got out and approached the crest of the hill on foot, this sight greeted us:

Another glacial lagoon! But this time, we were a lot closer to the glacier itself, and could not only see the glacier much better, but also its relationship to the lake and to the icebergs, and the terminal and lateral moraines. Apart from three or four hikers and a couple of photographers, we were alone. As the map shows, there is a walking path (indicated in red) that goes from this lagoon all the way over to Jökulsárlón. That would have been a long hike even if it were morning instead of late afternoon, and not raining, so we noted it as a possibility for another time.

The pictures here can't adequately convey the size of this place or the height and massiveness of the glacier itself; I felt awed to be this close to it. The crevasses you can see in this picture are far deeper than the height of a person, and the iceberg at left is the size of a multi-storey house.

When the steady drizzle turned to real rain, and the light became flat, we hiked back to our car and headed for our night's lodging in the little settlement of Hof, still a good drive to the west.

Road Trip 7: Jökulsárlón, the Ice Beach

The North Atlantic at Jökulsárlón is monochromatic, but full-range. The volcanic sands, in various stages of tidal wetness, shade from absolute black to medium grey; the sky is the color of doves; the ocean, mercury; and against these shades the whiteness of the waves is of an almost-blinding intensity.

Within this black-and-white world, the transparent and translucent blues of the glacial ice shine with a strange and compelling otherness: they seem to belong to the sky more than the land or sea, but only to our idea of sky, not the one that exists here. But once the ice is cast ashore, both in huge chunks sculpted by the waves and tide, and pitted or polished pieces the size of a head or hand, it becomes crystal: glass sculptures on black velvet stretching for miles along the lacy, foaming edge of the sea.

We walked along this astonishing beach for an hour while gulls shrieked overhead and a pair of seals played around the icebergs, enchanted by the forms of the ice and compelled by the fact that we were touching pieces of the ancient glacier, as the ocean slowly licked it back to water. I put my hand into the ocean; it was very cold but not as painfully numbing as I'd expected. And, instinctively, I raised a handful of black sand to my lips and touched it with my tongue, wanting to taste its salty grittiness and somehow link my body to this place.

Road Trip 5: Skeiðarársandur and Vatnajökull

The palisade of Lómagnúpur forms a corner pillar at the far western edge of Öræfi, dominating the view as you approach, but preventing any glimpse beyond. But when you pass it, what awaits stuns you into silence.

To the left (middle and right in the picture above) stretches the huge expanse of the glacier Skeidarasjökull, completely filling the valley like the rivers of ice I had always heard glaciers to be, but never before seen.

In the distance ahead were other bits of glacial ice cap, shining in the sun. And all around us stretched Skeiðarársandur: the glacial black sand desert, crisscrossed by rivers of meltwater, flat, vast, endless, all the way to the unseen sea.

We drove and drove, past other rivers of ice, past glaciers in hanging valleys that would one day become cirques, past small groups of white swans swimming in ice-cold water on black sands.

It was cold, we were completely alone, and the unobstructed wind blew without ceasing.

Small gravel roads lead in closer to the glaciers. Passenger cars like ours are actually prohibited from leaving the paved roads, but in some instances we felt OK driving a short ways on the gravel. Most of the terrain was like what you see above: endless, a seeming wasteland of sand with a sort of terrible beauty. But in other places, the tundra had gained a foothold, and was glorious in its own fall foliage. I was mesmerized by the glaciers themselves, and the way they seemed to glow as if illuminated from within; this place where we paused was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen.

 (I'll be away this weekend but will resume this travelogue next week. Thanks to everyone who's been reading and commenting, both here and on FB.)

Road Trip 3: Kirkjubæjarklaustur

I thought it might be helpful at this point to post a map of the island. Iceland is about the size of the state of Kentucky. You can see Reykjavik, the capital, on the lower left. The road we were driving runs all the way around the edge of the island. We traveled east, through Selfoss, along the southern coast below the big glaciers of Myrdalsjokull and Vatnajokull, not quite as far as Hofn, which you can see on the coast at lower right. Kirkjubæjarklaustur is a little village between those two glaciers (the name is below the word SUDERLAND in the lower center of the map.)

I woke early at our simple guesthouse (above, beneath a gorgeous double waterfall), and went for a walk by myself along the river. As had been true the day before, I realized I was seeing strange formations, but didn't know what they were. I've since learned that the region surrounding Kirkjubæjarklaustur has been devastated repeatedly by volcanic events, throughout recorded history since the settlement of Iceland (around 900) and long before that.

"Kirk" is the root that means church, and "klauster" ("cloister") refers to two religious foundations - a monastery and a cloister of nuns - that were there long ago. There are stories about impropriety between the monks and nuns, and of good nuns and bad nuns who are buried near significant rocks (above) or swam in the lake above these cliffs.

The Systrastapi (sister's rock) is where two of the convent's nuns were buried after being burned at the stake. One of the nuns was accused of selling her soul to the Devil, carrying Communion bread outside the church, and having carnal knowledge with men; the other was charged with speaking blasphemously of the Pope. After the Reformation, the second sister was vindicated, and flowers are said to bloom on her grave, but not that of the first nun. (Wikipedia)

As was true in many places where Christianity was introduced, pagan religion and folklore became interwoven with the new faith. This persists even now. In one area of strange volcanic cones, the interpretive sign (below) carefully explained the geology, and then went on to caution visitors to show respect because "the hidden people" had been seen near these formations. (You can see the volcanic cones behind the sheep in the last photo of the previous post.)

It all makes sense to me: in such a strange landscape animated by inexplicable and sudden, life-altering events, and where the rocks take human-like forms, I too could believe in elves, trolls, and magic.

This sparsely-populated region has a name, Öræfi, that means "wilderness." For many years it was cut off from the rest of the island; this was the last part of the ring road to be completed. The reason is that this area contains two volcanic sand deserts: huge expanses of black sand that is subject to sandstorms in the summer, and to "glacial bursts": flash floods that arise when water that has built up under the glaciers (melted through the heat of the volcanoes that lie beneath them) reaches a critical mass. When that happens, the glacier actually lifts up, the water spills out, and rushes down across the sands, taking out roads, bridges, and anything in its path. There was a glacial burst a few days after we returned to Reykjavik, making front page headlines, and undermining one of the bridges we had just crossed. As we drove across these vast plains, I thought about the early settlers, crossing on horseback or even on foot: it seems incredible. But it must have been even worse to have to cross a lava field.

Öræfi has been a no-man's land because of its history of catastrophic volcanic activity; the most active volcanoes in Iceland are located beneath these glaciers. To the west of Kirkjubæjarklaustur is a huge lava field that was laid down during the 1783 -1784 eruption of Laki, or more correctly, the Lakagigar, a volcanic fissure that's part of the Grimsvotn volcanic system. This eruption was absolutely devastating: it released clouds of poisonous hydrofluoric acid and sulphur dioxide that killed 50% of the island's livestock, and the resulting famine killed a quarter of the population. Basalt lava flowed over a huge area, 14 cubic kilometres. The eruption caused a drop in global temperatures that caused crop failures in the Northern Hemisphere and possibly as far away as India; it changed the monsoon patterns and caused a famine in Egypt that killed 1/6 of the population there. It's estimated that six million people died as direct result of the Laki eruption, making it the most deadly eruption in recorded history. I only learned this after we traveled through that lava field, now covered with thick moss that makes it, ironically, very beautiful.