I’ve had, off and on since last summer, intermittent, overwhelming urges to get away. Not flights of travel fancy, or daydreams of a countryside drive. Away away. Far, far away. For an indefinite period of time. Maybe for good.
Perhaps you can relate.
We’ve all got our own markers of what news or world events may have spurred these feelings, and your mileage will certainly vary, depending on your own perspective and priorities. I remember, very specifically, feeling a profound sense of loss and despair upon the Supreme Court’s release of the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision, which you may know as the overturning of the Chevron deference. In essence, it removes the power — or deference — once granted to government agencies to give guidance when laws are murky. It opens us up to all sorts of lawsuits and judge shopping and all the awfulness we’ve seen in isolation to this point, at massive scale. Anything and everything we’ve taken for granted would be appropriately regulated, for nearly as long as I’ve been alive, is up in the air.
I suppose you think about these things more when you have a young child. Is that the world you want them to grow up in? Are there better options? With our deteriorating information ecosystem, how can one even be entirely sure what those options are? Like many other Americans, we’ve been doing our best to research and evaluate them. And we’ve been so busy dodging the out-of-control, whipping fire hose of daily idiocy that I had basically forgotten we had an international trip planned. Perhaps that was for the best in the run up, given the state of air travel and recent international passport snafus.
We’ve never been the types to view a fully-staffed, all-inclusive resort as “getting away from it all.” Now, a lone house at the end of a gravel road, on a volcanic island in the middle of the ocean, between the roaring sea and the snow-capped mountains, a 45-minute drive from the nearest town, with hardly another human structure in sight? That’s one way to do it.
When you leave the airport in Keflavik, there are signs leading you outside. Rather than directing you to ground transportation, or shuttles, or any other specific designation, though, they read simply: Exit to Iceland.
No, really.
It’s the kind of thing that perhaps hits you a little harder coming off a redeye during which you slept not at all (for all the lovely flight attendants we encountered on Icelandair, I don’t know if I’ve ever flown with less legroom on a flight, and I’ve flown a lot). Because you step outside into a much more abrasive cold than you’re expecting, and you’re just standing there, as easily on the surface of the moon as anywhere else.
Even as someone born in Alaska, the scale of the landscape against its sparse inhabitation is hard to truly comprehend. The country has a population roughly the size of Wichita for a landmass about the size of Kentucky. Almost two-thirds of the people live in and around the capital city Reykjavíc, leaving only about 140,000 people for the rest of the nearly 40,000 square miles. Washington, D.C. has more than 11,100 people per square mile. Iceland has 10, a number that drops precipitously for everywhere other than the capital.
That meant, largely, not dealing with other people, especially other Americans. Having that remove from the relentless news cycle, even as the stock market tucked into a headlong swan dive, was a refreshing reminder of how little each shockwave of news matters to you personally, if you’re willing to step away from it.
It felt very good to mostly put my phone away, unless I was photographing some cragged, windswept landscape, or capturing video of my giggling toddler running around on it. The natural ruggedness of everything, the utter foreignness of it all, felt cleansing in a way that, on the rare occasions I checked back in with the world at large, made me feel at once guilty — for being able to check out — and angry — that we’re being forced to abide the destructive whims of individuals whose self-regard is quadratically greater than their intellectual capacity.
There was also something fundamentally disorienting about the hot tub at our house. Aside from not using chlorine, it also had no cover. It just sat, steaming, at over 100 degrees, in the frigid, open air. My brain almost couldn’t comprehend the energy waste. Why would anyone do that? Unless, of course, it was heated geothermally — naturally, from below, from the heat of the earth itself, which would spill out on its own if it wasn’t channeled into this particular vessel. Which, of course, it was.
There’s no room for, nor culture of, unnecessary waste in a place like that. The excesses only come in the forms of natural beauty and natural power, of which there is an abundance of both.
Anytime I travel I like to think about what life would be like actually living in the place I’m in. I think it’s the reason I generally prefer an apartment or a house to a hotel in any place I’d actually consider moving — you get a much more realistic experience of day-to-day life, even if you aren’t working on the trip. Having to cook at least some of your own meals, do your own laundry, clean up after yourself — it’s not what everyone wants out of a vacation. But I tend to like it.
The smaller and more homogeneous a population, the easier it is to implement large, structural changes. America is famously neither of those things, at increasing scale, something no amount of regressive policy can undo anytime soon. It’s what makes progress so achingly slow, at times. We have so many different sets of priorities, even among like-minded populations. Still, there’s one overarching set of values that, to me, seems inarguable: we should try to make life better and easier for as many people as possible. That doesn’t feel like it should be in any way controversial, yet here we are.
I thought about that dynamic a lot as I learned about Iceland’s energy use. So much of the world’s power structures, not to mention the future livability of the planet, revolve around energy sources. Iceland’s mix of hydroelectric and geothermal energy powers basically the entire nation. These are fully renewable, clean energy sources. This allows them to have freedom from much of the global energy market, and even more so as they transition away from gas vehicles. It means their impossibly pure water stays that way, that their air stays clearer and cleaner, that there are not toxic dumps or seepages or spills.
These are also not energy sources you can sell off to other places and get mind-boggling rich from. That feels like a fair trade-off to me, but I’m certain a good many of my fellow Americans would disagree.
Everything else there is expensive, as you’d expect from an isolated, island nation that has to import a huge percentage of everything it consumes, but it didn’t feel unreasonably so. Even in the tiny seaside towns where people do coalesce to form communities, we found great restaurants — a highway-side cafe slinging European bakery-quality pastries and bistro-level lamb shanks; a family-friendly harbor cafe turning out delicious fish dishes like plokkfiskur, which I recently recreated by (mostly) following this recipe.
And we eschewed the fancy, world-renowned hot springs options for the local, family-friendly pools that likewise take advantage of the natural, warm waters. For about $10 per adult — kids free, another feature of a very family-friendly nation — you could enjoy a collection of variantly heated pools built into, essentially, small waterparks, which existed in seemingly most of the small towns. It was all impressive infrastructure for such small population centers. Nothing extravagant, but easily enough.
I’ve never actually moved to any of the places I’ve traveled for vacation. But I have strived to try to take something back from each of them. Not a souvenir, but a perspective on how life is lived there, something worth adopting, or shifting, or stripping from my current life.
Amsterdam is known for its bike culture, but also highlighted the joy of buying fresh ingredients daily from local vendors to cook with that evening. Paris is filled with a million fancy restaurants, but it’s the simple decadence of good bread and butter from any cafe that elevates the daily experience. Asheville is full of breweries, but it’s the walkability so absent in other small cities that creates connection and community there. Chicago’s architecture graces its postcards, but its woven patchwork of different ethnic neighborhoods, each with its own culture and cuisine, make any stop off the red line a different adventure.
You can — and should — be overwhelmed by Iceland’s natural beauty. But there’s a richness to the simplicity of life there. With fewer distractions and fewer options, not to mention an unforgiving landscape without the luxury of instant delivery, there’s a premium on executing fewer tasks with more care.
Our house, with its utilitarian, corrugated steel exterior, didn’t look fancy. But it was situated into the hillside with an incredible view of the mountains, and perfectly arranged to block the fierce winds so completely that you could leave the front door wide open without it budging or bringing in a draft. While the outside was modest, inside were heated floors, an induction range, spacious showers with nearly instant hot water — practical luxuries, where you needed them most.
The supposed superiority of modern American life is propped up largely on convenience — any channel, anytime; any kind of food, made and delivered right to your door; groceries, goods, really any stuff you can imagine, ordered with a click, no need to leave the house or interact with another human. So long as you’re willing to pay for all of that. And while that convenience has its benefits, especially when you’re managing children, or a disability, or illness, or even just a particularly busy day, they have all seem to come at the cost of a slow, methodical degradation of quality.
That quality feels like it stands out more and more these days whenever I leave. We don’t have the capacity to manage everything all of the time, and certainly not to do so well. If there’s one takeaway I want to try to hold onto from this latest trip, it’s that investing my time more deeply into fewer things will lead to better results. I’ll be happier with the finished products and less stressed by the burden of how many balls I’m trying to keep in the air along the way. It requires fighting back against a lifetime of ingrained habits, of the relentlessly bleak and bleakly relentless American hustle culture, and of the desire to escape the headlines of the day at every waking moment through some kind of distraction.
It would be great, one day, to escape somewhere like that again for a few weeks to knock out a book draft, or some other major project, letting that isolation clear my head out. Then again, if that really did work — if a change of scenery made me a better writer, more at peace with myself and my life, more comfortable about mine and my family’s future — what incentive would there be to come back?