Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Glacial Friendships
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Global warming is killing off Iceland’s glaciers. In 2004, an entire glacier passed away. Completely gone, never to return.
Today’s inner city is tomorrow’s beach resort. Today’s beach resort is tomorrow’s underwater reef.
In the rugged scars of the raw Alpine landscape, in vanishing tundra and thawing glaciers, the hot-and-cold story of lost friendship is told. Day by day, the once grounded, glacial friendships of my life have been liquefying to the puddled point of no return.
Friends that were once firm, fixed, frozen in place have melted away like a dying glacier. Even if hell freezes over, a dead glacier remains as irreplaceable as a cold, cadavered friendship.
Iceland in winter is a landscape of ice cubes, avalanches and ruddy faces. A Caravaggio painted in luminescent white, charcoal-grey and Mars black.
Each morning, I set my alarm thirty minutes ahead of normal. Before the meager four-hour day begins, I need extra time to layer on my winter clothes. Long underwear, mittens, thick parka, raingear, bulky socks, scarves, knitted headwear, goggles and heavy boots are mocked by the subzero winds. I should have asked my doctor if drinking anti-freeze is an approved protocol for hypothermia.
Reykjavík, the world’s northernmost capital, means ‘steamy bay’—a remembrance of the underwater thermals that the city founders saw roiling the local harbor. The plumes hint at the day ahead of me.
Stuffed with a hearty breakfast of thunder bread, smoked trout and hot coffee, I haul myself into a minibus to visit a geothermal field. Chimneys of dark grey steam spewing a hundred feet into the air signal our arrival. Vents in the lava bed force and focus the heat upwards towards the heavens.
On leaving the minibus, standing a mere two feet from a vapor column that could boil me alive in seconds, I’m still chilled to the bone. Friendships are a bit like geothermal plumes. On fire and passionate while they last, but when I step away—even for a short time—I am left in the bitter cold, alone.
Cold is the temperature of loneliness. The numbed, empty feeling of having no one. Of being unloved and unlovable.
From the gurgling subterranean mud pools, primordial sounds murmur, whisper, hiss. Your friends, former friends, false friends—to a one, all human glaciers—are vanishing.
By day, the harsh realities of an Arctic hospice for icebergs horrifies me. In the night at the hotel bar, drinking vodka made with water from 4,000-year-old lava fields, I brood about the state of our planet.
Twenty-six-million volcanic years of violent winds, ice packs, rocky soil and Viking overlogging has completely denuded Iceland of trees. The country has no fuel for its fireplaces. Geothermal powers the country, so the air is free of carbon pollutants.
I think about family and friends—and former friends. Warm with alcohol, long-frozen feelings defrost. Faded friends are a frostbite on my heart. Like ice crystals stuck in my arteries, stinging.
Who knows the truth of a failed friendship? There’s no one to blame, not really.
When I open my hotel window, a cleansing breath fills my lungs.
