Prologue
My right hand slammed down on the white veneer of our kitchen table with a satisfying crack!
My wife, who had been speaking, froze. My five-year-old daughter froze. Her sister, just eight, froze also. And the two sexagenarian ladies — my mother-in-law and the nanny — were paralyzed, too.
I was flushed with righteous zeal. It was horrible. But somewhere in me, the conviction that I was right lent me a certainty and, secret even to me, a twisted sort of pleasure. I was right god-damn it.
There was nothing new in this performance. It was more-or-less standard and had been all my life. But it was the first time my wife went quiet, with a face screwed into fear or fury or both, a face I’d never seen. And it was the first time she ran out of the room and stayed out. When she returned, that night, there was danger in her eye.
“I. Can’t. Stand it.” was all she said. “You have to STOP!’
I was in trouble and I knew it. Apologies would be useless. Arguing was useless. Explanations, excuses? Waste of time.
There was only one way to regain her trust, and possibly only one way to keep her and my family at this point. And that was to be different. And I didn’t think I could do it. This behavior had been baked in for so long, six decades at least, that I thought it was part of me, inseparable from who I was.
I called my friends. I called a psychologist. I looked into medication. I talked to people I trust. But I knew that being different was the only way out and I was certain it wouldn’t work.
But suddenly, later that week, I remembered an incident, decades earlier and continents away. And I remembered what was needed. Armor, and a spear…
Westfjords, Iceland from the air. Photo by Tamara Bitter
The view as we circled towards Reykjavik was almost apocalyptic. The tumbled, pitted, and cratered permafrost was like the lunar surface, an effect relieved only by the glare of ice and some tufts of green here and there.
I was in the center seat. Our DC-10 heeled over on approach and the tundra below was so fascinating that I was almost in my fellow passenger’s lap trying to see out.
Tundra in Siberia from the air from the window of an Airbus-350.
Photo by Dan Kempner
She smiled.
“Don’t forget,” she said, “on your way home you will call me. You will see the Northern lights in the north where my home is.”
“And puffins?” I asked naively.
“Yes, we have those, puffins, fjords, and waterfalls. Come and stay with me and my family and we will show you everything.”
“Great! I’ve got your number. I will be returning within a year and I’ll call you.”
Icelandic Airlines — in 1976 it was still called by the tongue-twisting Loftleiðir — had a unique approach to ticketing the cheapest seats in the air between New York and Europe.
For a ridiculously low fee you could travel without restriction and return any time within the year without booking in advance. The only hitch? You had to deplane in Iceland, walk through the duty free booze, then land in Luxembourg—a nation of which I had not heard up to that point.
Icelandic Douglas DC-8 unloading at Findel International Airport, Luxembourg in April, 1978. Photo by Udo Haafke
It was just perfect! Perfect for a penniless seventeen-year-old who hoped to bike the Alps alone, live on cheese, chocolate, and European breadstuffs, meet some distant relatives at their home in Athens, then head back at leisure.
It was a great plan no doubt, and to add to it, I now had a host who was prepared to show me colonies of puffins nesting in a fjord under the midnight sun. All I need do was call her.
Hungry puffin in Iceland. Photo by Michael Jerrard.
The plan, good as it was, veered off course immediately. My bike was lost with all gears over the Atlantic: it simply vanished from the hold. No 10-speeding through the frozen Alps but rather riding the frozen rails and arriving two months too early to see the relatives: their family was far away in the Peleponnese.
A quick flight to Israel as a backup. A kibbutz romance with a zaftig woman from Köln, Germany. A return to Athens where my bike, miraculously, had been found. Then a pot-smoke contact high on the famous Magic Bus to Venice, and thence—finally!—the triumphant ride through the Alps to Köln. Where, sad to say, said woman jilted me for an old beau.
Jim Croce singing Operator on her stereo over and over didn’t help and so, only six months into my one-year trip, I was back on a DC-10, through the Icelandic duty free, and headed back to New York in disgust. I did not pass go, didn’t collect two hundred bucks and didn’t…
Right. I didn’t make the call. No puffins. No fjords. No romance under the Northern lights. I was eighteen now, but I still just wanted to go home.
Dan at the ashram circa 1979. Photographer unknown.
Time passed.
I joined, then left, a monastery. I worked here and there. And, in a store on Long Island, I met a Swedish woman and her brother, Torbjörn who invited me to visit them in Sweden. As fate would have it, a decade later, the Icelandic Airlines cheap-fare deal was still in place. To get it, however, one still had to stop… in Iceland. Fjords, puffins, the works.
There was a moment, driving south towards Kennedy, when I turned to my friend Marc, told him the whole pathetic story. But before I finished the tale something swelled up in me. A boldness. A fierceness. A sense that I could, by my very word and by main force, take control of my destiny. I could not remember having such a feeling before. It was tingly, terrifying and deeply uncomfortable. Yet I nearly stood up in his little compact car as I declaimed:
Before I return from Sweden, I will meet someone who will show me around Iceland.
He stared at me for so long I almost grabbed the wheel. There was a thrilling sensation down my back. I had, possibly for the very first time, taken a stand, given my solemn oath, and I’d done it publicly. There was nothing else I could do now but make it true.
Marc accompanied me to the ticket counter and through to the gate—you could do that in those days—and we waited about an hour before boarding. Marc jerked his head behind us and said out of the corner of his mouth, “look at that.”
I looked. “That” was an extraordinarily beautiful woman, one who appeared to have been bred in a longship. She was kneeling by a pillar, clothed in a white mantle. Her hair was spun gold. Her face was cream and honey or what you will. The Norse cliches, every one, seemed to apply. She was shapely, and graceful and tastefully dressed. She was, in a word, in a league well above mine.
She was literally encircled, like a Goddess with her serving wenches, by a daisy chain of American girls who seemed to be hanging on her words. Truly, I didn’t notice them, didn’t think about them. They were like blown candles next to her. But one of them spoke to her and I understood from the remark that this beauty was Icelandic.
Slowly, I turned.
Marc glanced at me. I nodded in the woman’s direction.
He cocked his head skeptically.
“Whew!” was all he said.
In the air, I was biting my knuckles in row twenty one, chatting with my seatmate. He was a German artist who’d come to the U.S. for wood to carve.
“Ja,” he drawled, “There iss no good vood back home anymore. The atmozphere vorming has ruined all za vood in Chermany.”
“Mmm,” I replied. I stood up. I walked towards the back of the plane as though I were out for a casual country stroll, all the while scanning the seats.
She was there. I almost went past but I heard my own voice crying, “Before I return I will have met…”
This was it. Now or never. Sydney or the bush! Mentally, I began strapping on my greaves, my breastplate, my chainmail. I slipped into gauntlets, stomped forward and stopped in front of her and she looked up. She was just as lovely up close. I spoke.
“Listen,” I croaked and cleared my throat. “Listen. I am coming to Iceland for a few days on my return flight. I don’t know anyone there.” My heart was pounding, not so much because I was, apparently asking a beautiful woman for a date, but because I’d committed, and I was determined to succeed. If she wouldn’t be my guide I’d find another, but I wanted this to work.
But her whole expression said, “Farđu burt, ķgeđiđ ūitt!” Get away from me, you creep!
“Look,” I said desperately, “I realize you don’t know me, that we’ve never met or spoken, and that this is weird. But I want to see the country and I’d like to find someone local to show me around. I saw you at the airport and realized you were Icelandic, and I just thought I’d ask. I’m going back to my seat now. If you’d like to meet me in Reykjavic, I’ll be at my hotel on Thursday the 24th. Or, if you’re willing, you could give me your number and I’ll call you when I arrive. It’s up to you. Thanks either way. It was nice meeting you.”
I trundled back to my window seat, not at all like I was taking a stroll, and stared out at the dark ocean below. That went well, I said, rolling my eyes. This obviously isn’t going to work. What was I thinking?
I was dozing a little later, and wondering for the millionth time who designed airplane seats, when there was a rustle in the aisle. I opened my eyes to see the most beautiful of norsewomen standing before me. In her hand was a little slip of paper with numbers on it.
“Here,” she said in that viking accent. “Here is my number. You can call me if you want when you come back to my country. I will show you around a little, yes?”
“Uh. Yes, Yes!” I said, but I was thinking, there’s no way this is a real number.
The artist in the next seat was agog. He was young, handsome, and artistic. I was seventeen and had never had a real job. And yet, as Will Hunting was to point out some years later, I got her numba!
But she answered when I called. We met for dinner. Next day she drove me to her house. She fed me a lunch of what I’m almost certain was horsemeat pâté. There was salmon, too, off her father’s boat. I’m a vegetarian. I ate it all anyway.
An Icelandic woman in the geothermal springs. Photo by Michael Fischer
She took me to the baths, where her bikini’d form made the geothermal heat superfluous. She took me to geysers too, and waterfalls, and drove me to the fishing wharfs. And yet, as incredible as the visit was, none of that stood out, nor is it what remains in my memory today. What mattered was this:
I’d felt like a God. I had said there would be light, and there was. I had spoken my oaths into the void and they had been fulfilled. I had never been a God before and the feeling was electric. The myth of thunderbolts felt like myth no more. And yet… despite the high, and the undeniable results, it was long before I was one again.
And that’s the oddest part. Having once understood I could be God-like, if only I would take a stand and make it true; and having just done so… having, by the power I’d vested in myself, decided that such and such would be achieved, then achieving it, one would imagine that the next time I faced an obstacle, or had a mad desire, I would again strap on my armor, summon my thunderbolts, declare my intentions publicly, and charge forward lance to the fore!
Yet, if the definition of insanity is to repeat things that don’t work, what do we call someone who fails to repeat what does?
Yet I did not. I went back to being a small, scared man. I was not bold. I made no powerful declarations and so had no thunder in my fingertips. I was, in fact, sort of kicked around by life for a while, rather than dragging it into the lists and jousting for the mastery.
Even so, though I left that land long ago, the feelings generated there never entirely left me.
Epilogue.
My right hand had slammed down on the white veneer of our kitchen table with that satisfying crack! And nothing I knew of could repair the damage. I had been scaring my kids. My wife. The nanny. The thought of losing my family was horrible. The thought of giving up the way I had always been was horrible. I didn’t know how to fix it. I didn’t believe I could fix it.
I was terrified.
But then, in the middle of making lunch later that week, I remembered my brief knighthood in a foreign land. I remembered the challenge. I remembered the power of having taken a solemn oath, however absurd the reason. I remembered the god-like feelings, having committed and conquered.
But this wasn’t glacier hunting or birdsnesting. Not this time. My family was at stake. Would the same act allow me to bend the universe to my will, again?
I had to wait until she came home. Until the ‘right’ moment, and all of them were fraught. Then, fewtering my spear, and summoning my once-found courage, I entered the lists. I asked if she’d be willing to listen, coldly she assented. I spoke.
Statue near Mont Forchat, France. Photo by Andrea Caramello.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not going to apologize, though I’m deeply sorry. Apologizing won’t do any good.”
There was grim headshake of agreement.
“So here’s what I will do and it’s the only thing I can do. I am going to stop all violent behavior. All of it. I’m promising you, right here and right now. It will never happen again.”
There was a long, skeptical, heartbreaking silence.
“How,” she asked at last. “How will you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t know how. Yet I’m telling you, it won’t happen again. I don’t yet know how I’m going to make that true but that’s how it is going to be. And after a long time, possibly a very long time, you may come to trust me again.”
And as I spoke, I again spoke light into being. Days went by. Months. A year. Then two. I had strapped the armor on and, with nothing more than courage and the breath of a declaration I had again bent the universe to my will. It was glorious! For that time at least I was, once again, a God.
About the Author
Dan Kempner is a writer based in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, where he lives, works and—occasionally— feels like a God for a while. He is the Executive Editor of MDI Legacy Magazine and is, thank goodness, still very happily married with two young daughters.
