Walking through a country that has not finished being made

Collaborative Post | Most of the landscapes a European walker knows are finished landscapes. The fells of the Lake District were shaped by ice that has long since gone. The pastures of the Alps were cleared centuries ago by people whose great-grandchildren now run the inns. The forests of the Black Forest have grown, been cut, and grown again according to a rhythm that has the steadiness of furniture. When you walk in those places, you walk through the past tense. The ground is settled.

Iceland is not that. Iceland is a present-tense landscape. New lava has cooled within living memory, glaciers are visibly retreating each summer, and rivers shift their beds between one season and the next. This single difference rearranges almost everything about what walking there is for.

Photo by Josh Reid on Unsplash

The discomfort of being on ground that is not done

The first thing that happens, somewhere on the second day, is a low and unfamiliar discomfort that the walker initially mistakes for tiredness. It is not tiredness. It is the dawning recognition that the surface they are crossing has not agreed to be a surface. A finished landscape offers the walker an implicit contract: I will hold still, you will move across me. Iceland does not sign that contract. The lava field that looked like a field on the map turns out to be a tilted, broken thing that no glacier has yet ground smooth. The river crossing that was a river yesterday has shifted twenty metres east overnight because the meltwater above changed its mind. The slope of black ash that the boot expected to grip slides loose under the heel because nothing has yet bound it.

A walker who has only ever walked in finished landscapes finds that a great deal of their unconscious competence falls away. They had not realised how much of their stride depended on the assumption that ground stays where it is. They had not realised how much of their pleasure in walking was the pleasure of moving across something settled. In Iceland the ground is not settled, and the boot has to be placed with a kind of attention that elsewhere is reserved for scree slopes or wet rock. That attention is constant rather than occasional, and it changes how the day feels.

In Iceland the ground is not settled, and the boot has to be placed with a kind of attention that elsewhere is reserved for scree.

What the eye has to relearn

The visual habits of European walking are also formed by finished places. The eye is trained to read a hillside as a composition: meadow, treeline, scree, ridge, sky. Those layers are themselves the residue of a long quarrel between people and weather, eventually settled. The Icelandic eye, in the first days, keeps reaching for those layers and not finding them. There is no treeline because there are no trees. There is no meadow because the soils are too young and too poor. The composition the walker is reaching for is not absent because it has been removed; it is absent because it has not yet been written. This is a different absence and the body knows it.

What replaces composition is a kind of raw legibility. Without trees and hedges and walls, the geometry of the land itself becomes the only subject. A glacier sits where it sits, in its full shape, with no foreground softening it. A volcano is a volcano from the toe of its slope to its summit, with nothing growing up the side to break the line. The eye, denied its usual armatures, starts reading the underlying gestures of the place: the curve of an outwash plain, the long shoulder of a ridge, the wandering braid of a glacial river. The walker discovers, often with surprise, that they have been looking at trees for most of their walking life and not at landforms.

Why a multi-day walk is the right frame

A day hike from a road cannot do this work. The discomfort of an unfinished landscape, and the relearning of the eye that the discomfort produces, both take time, and they only happen when retreat to a finished world is not on the table that night. The slow format of organised hiking tours iceland matters here for that specific reason: a string of huts that keeps the walker inside the unfinished country for several consecutive nights, instead of letting them dip a foot in and return to a heated lobby, is what allows the country to actually rearrange the walker's defaults.

By the fourth day, something has usually shifted. The constant adjustment of the foot to uneven ground stops registering as effort and becomes the normal way of walking. The walker has been crossing fresh lava, ash, and outwash long enough that the body has rewritten its defaults. They will go home to their finished landscapes, and the finished landscapes will look, for a while, slightly fictional, like sets struck after a long run.


Disclaimer: this is a collaborative post