Chasing the Northern Lights: Driving Iceland's Ring Road
Most people navigate the Ring Road from south to north, but I was traveling in September and knowing that the weather would only get colder and the nights shorter, I headed north and circled round to the south. As I drove through cool early morning mist, steam rose from geysers dotted across the barren landscape. I passed Icelandic wild horses grazing in the fields, dark clay-colored mountains that look like enormous mounds of mud, or sometimes sand.
The Ring Road took me between mountain passes, across valleys, high up into heights with steep drops on either side and no guard rails, just evenly spaced posts with reflectors to help navigate anyone foolish enough to drive these roads at night. I saw a mountain backlit almost black, sunlight illuminating a verdant pasture at the mountain’s very edge, a lone white church with a bright red roof popping against the green, dotted with white sheep, heads down, grazing. I saw rust-colored fields with a backdrop of mountains dotted with snowy caps. I saw a splash of aquamarine in the center of the red earth, a lake out in the middle of nowhere with no road to reach it. I saw rushing rivers burst forth from between vertical walls of stone. I saw a field, half of it golden, abutted against dark barren hills, and at the foot of the hills, a white farmhouse with a sky-blue roof. I turned a corner and the Atlantic emerged, its wavelets glowing silver and blue. The road has its monuments and is scattered with cairns. Icelandic ponies gaze at you with watery eyes, inviting you to stroke their thick manes.
I have lain awake at night sometimes wondering what it will feel like to die. Will I close my eyes and the world would go dark, my consciousness dissipating like the geyser’s bubbling mud? Driving the Ring Road, as I emerged from the darkness of a deep tunnel cut through a mountain too high to see its peak through my windshield, an expanse of golden moss clinging painfully to gray volcanic boulders emerged, stretching outwards to the very edge of my vision. Then the sun streamed in from between clouds and suddenly the land was gilded. And I realized – this is what it will feel like to die.