Eruption

A trip to Iceland, the urge to escape, and the world we’re (un)making.

“You are now approaching the end...” - the moving walkway

Heathrow airport security. Biometric face detection. QR codes. X-rays. Finger swabs. Oh, you’re swabbing my waist also? Why not.

“Stand here please — legs wider apart, arms like this — thank you.” The security attendant says for the hundredth time today. They bark orders like a collie herding sheep.

Duty-free. A tsunami of synthetic perfume smells, fluorescent lights, luxury brands. Dior. Gucci. Camel cigarettes. That curving path designed to hold and direct your attention to one ultimate motive: consume.

I cut across it, defying its wishes the only way I know how: head down, getting out of there as quickly as possible. Escape has long been one of my strongest traits, for better or for worse. And ironically, no place makes me want to escape faster than an airport.

But it isn’t a place. It is as Augé would say, a non-place. A void.

Built for transience, efficiency, function. A quality that was once confined to airports, train stations, motorways, petrol stations and the like — but now appears to ripple outwards, infecting the wider world with its bland uniformity.

I put my sunglasses on and headphones in, pulling the peak of my cap down to block it all out.

“See it. Say it. Sorted.” The speakers declare ominously.

---

11 years ago.

The year is 2015, I am 17 years old. I’m on my way to Iceland—apparently—shaking off a 3 hour sleep and weed-induced daze. I’m at the pinnacle of decline. A path of self destruction that had been bubbling away for some time, and was now in full eruption.

A school trip with my environmental studies class, this is a welcome break from a bleak English winter, most of which I cannot remember due to the consumption of various substances and general abuse of both body and mind.

We were all like that—my friends and acquaintances. Finding whatever coping mechanisms to deal with what we could not deal with. Naturally, it didn’t work.

Iceland was a welcome escape. A reset. A detox. School-trip induced rehab.

Prompted by the forceful hand of none other than my own mother. She always has a way of pushing through even the most stubborn and resistant, myself included.

As rugged as the landscape may be, Iceland is a place of fragility and impermanence. Little appears taken for granted, unlike our archaic British tendencies towards stasis. A volcano may erupt and force an evacuation at any time. It will erupt.

I get off the plane and get immediately blasted by a freezing cold wind. We have to lean into the wind to avoid getting knocked over. Uncomfortable no doubt, but cleansing, purifying, in an Atlantic kind of way.

---

At this time, Icelandic tourism was in relatively early days. The attitude towards health and safety was rooted in common sense and self responsibility. If you come here, your life is in your hands. It felt adventurous. Brutal. Awe-inspiring. Elemental.

I felt a weight being lifted. Travelling can do that to you. It can pull you out of the black hole of your own self, place focus elsewhere, inspire curiosity in the wider world. I resist the word, but it was, in many ways a healing experience. Not that it stopped the decline upon returning, but that’s a story for another time.

---

Childhood.

I am nine years old and sat on a hay bale at some kind of hippie festival by the river Thames in Reading. It’s mid-summer and the sun soaks into everything.

The market stalls smell like incense and I’m drawn in by the gemstones and crystals—a source of childhood wonder that I hoarded like a magpie.

A speaker is on stage talking passionately about resisting Nestlé and the damage it was causing to water supplies in vulnerable countries. I had no idea what the fuck he was on about.

I saw Tim, the Thai mother of my then-best friend nodding in fervent agreement. All we could think about was how damn uncomfortable these itchy hay bales were to sit on, while this person on stage kept blabbering on.

However, a seed was planted. One that would take years to find its form.

---

Present day.

I’m arriving in Iceland, once again. I have emerged from the hellscape of the airports to collect a rental car with my family.

A Toyota Land Cruiser no less. Not a real one. A modern one. The kind that steers for you, brakes for you, and kindly reminds you—with incessant beeping—to pay attention when the camera detects inattention.

We have come for an adventure. My mother’s birthday trip.

---

Memory is a hazy and disputable thing. My recollections of this landscape don’t mean much. It comes in fragments: gusty winds, spraying waterfalls, a stark and unforgiving volcanic terrain which feels liberating as well as intimidating. Humility-inducing.

But I do remember one thing compared to the present tense. It was far less Americanised.

No doubt Iceland has reaped its harvest from Stateside tourism, being within a few hours of New York. Here, big trucks are arguably more justified. But these extra wide wing mirrors and mega tires are well and truly patriotic in all the wrong ways.

This Iceland is far different from the one I recall. Many of the roads to waterfalls are paved. Ropes keep people away from the edges. Warning signs give heed to even the most ignorant tourist.

Is it such a bad thing? That’s not for me to say. But it is Industrial Tourism as Ed Abbey would say—and “Industrial Tourism is a big business. It means money.”

He continues:

“Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment."

I let out a sigh.

---

I have my cinema camera with me and consider creating a short film about it. I’m staring at a CCTV camera in a parking lot next to the Gullfoss waterfall. But I feel drained. I can’t fight it. I don’t want to.

Instead, I focus on the natural details that feel emblematic of the place.

Maybe I’m nostalgic, or just an old man on the inside—but the way the modern world is heading makes me feel heavy. So I look for a way out by focusing on what remains. The fragments of beauty that are still there.

---

Sunset.

We arrive at Seljalandsfoss. A waterfall well known for being able to walk behind, and within, as the case may be when the wind is blowing in a certain direction.

The sun shines and the light is at a particular angle which creates a beaming rainbow across the waterfall. Inspiration calls. I have a set of vintage German and Soviet lenses ready for the occasion. There are many people, but I decidedly cut them out with the right focal length.

I pull out the rain cover for the camera and begin shooting.

I’m magnetised by the colours, the patterns, the textures. The water plummets confidently, forcefully, dispersing into a million droplets— some landing in the pool below, others dissipating into the air.

The evening light and water collide with each other. Every angle reveals a different perspective. Time disappears. In some subconscious way, I’ve always been looking for this moment. The moment. But it doesn’t come by looking for it.

I’m thoroughly soaked as the water sprays backwards. I’m pushing my luck with the camera’s waterproofing, but I can’t help it. It’s now or never. It’s now.

---

The return.

Boarding the plane, heading home. I’m confronted with a flashing screen, inches from my face. Inescapable advertising. A hundred screens, perfectly synchronised. Strobe-like, hypnotic. So normal and yet so utterly horrifying in its normality.

It’s advertising Iceland, no less. The aurora. The blue lagoon. Wonderful things indeed, but now commodified, commercialised, reduced to sensation, spectacle.

In a way, domesticated.

“The tourist destroys what he is looking for, by finding it.” Enzensberger once said.

I feel gutted by the premonition of Edward Abbey and what he witnessed in the national parks decades ago. The unrelenting march of Progress. And perhaps too by my own premonition that I couldn’t yet articulate.

The drug-fuelled escape of teenage years wasn’t without justification. I was filled with weight and dread and anxiety and found ways to escape, as we all do, in ways deemed socially acceptable, or not.

I’ve found better ways to cope, but still I am coping nonetheless. I express it in other ways, healthier ways. But I can’t help but feel that the “disorder” sometimes comes from too much “order”—our civilised existence, its sterility, its emptiness, is incongruent with our human nature.

Like the terrain of Iceland, we asphalt every curve, bump, imperfection which made the place what it was. We do to our landscapes what we do to ourselves. It’s denial. And we pay the price in ways that can’t be measured.

We look for ways to escape ourselves—and what we create.

I’m not mourning the loss of Iceland that I experienced 11 years ago. I’m mourning the mirrored loss of my own sense of place—if I ever had it—and of what little left of it there was, and the speed at which this transformation happens.

The Atlantic still blows. The water still falls. The crooked, wind-swept pine trees continue to grow out of the harsh volcanic earth.

---

What remains.

I look at the footage from Iceland and I feel a little lighter. Humans are not visible in these scenes—not because I am overtly misanthropic—but because I am visualising a world in which the natural wonder of the world continues, despite our rapacious destruction.

“It’s the market though, isn’t it?” My mother mentioned once, offhand.

This might be my last trip.

I didn’t go for myself anyway—but without drama, I may truly be done with travel.

We are all wrapped up in this mess of the modern industrial economy, and there is little escape for those of us living in the so called “developed nations”—but international travel feels so deeply inconsistent with my values that I see little reason to engage anymore.

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I’m watching the water cascade over the grassy cliff face. I’m not sure what to do with the footage. Then I look outside. Snow capped mountains are calling me. I’m signing out.