Flights

THE EARTH’S NIPPLES

These young people – a girl, at most nineteen, studying Scandinavian literature, and her boyfriend, a small blond with dreadlocks, insisted on hitchhiking from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður. They were categorically advised against it for two reasons: first, there’s not a lot of traffic in Iceland, and especially up north, so they might get stuck somewhere along the way; second, the temperature is liable to plummet out of nowhere. But these young people did not listen. Both warnings, as it turned out, came true: they got stuck in the wilderness, where before getting off the road to go to some distant little village their previous car had left them, and no other car was forthcoming. In the course of an hour the weather changed radically, and snow started to fall. Increasingly worried they stood by the road, which crossed a plain full of lava rocks from one side to the other, and they kept warm by smoking, hoping that some other car would finally come along. But it didn’t. Evidently people had given up on getting to Ísafjörður that evening.

There was nothing to make a fire from – only damp cold moss and sparse bushes the fire wouldn’t even put in its mouth, let alone digest. They camped out in sleeping bags between the rocks in the moss, and when the snow clouds disappeared and a starry freezing sky was revealed, they saw faces in the lava stones, and everything started whispering, murmuring, rustling. It turned out that all you had to do was reach under the moss, under the stones, in order to touch the earth, which was warm. Your hand could feel distant, delicate vibrations, some far-off movement, a breath – there could be no doubt: the earth was alive.

Then they learned from the Icelanders that no real ill could have come to them: for lost souls like them the earth is able to bare its warm nipples. You just have to suck at them with gratitude and drink the earth’s milk. Apparently it tastes like milk of magnesium – what they sell in pharmacies for hyperacidity and heartburn.