In high school, I went on a two-week trip for history nerds that put me at the foot of such sites as the Acropolis, the Suez Canal, and Michelangelo’s David. For a freshman who had read each volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as if it were a novel—and who had previously only ventured from her home state to visit her aunt in Central Florida—the experience awakened a lust for travel I’ve never shaken.
After that, I tried to land a jaunt abroad at every opportunity. For my second cookbook, I even pitched to move my family of four to another country for a year and document the experience in recipes. I told my publisher to pick the place. I’d happily nest anywhere that wasn’t cold; preferably a big, people-packed city or a far-flung village on a body of water, but we could make do with any locale with an enviable food culture rife with ingredients, techniques, and traditions that would interest both the readers and me.
My publisher didn’t pick a place, and I didn’t get to write that book. But in suggesting the idea, I had connected the attributes I considered bucket-list-worthy into a constellation to guide my travel.
Iceland, clearly, did not make the roster. As its name implies, Iceland is cold. It lacks man-made eye candy like the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum. For a portion of the year, the whole country lies in darkness. And the most celebrated delicacy is fermented shark. All that to say, after a recent trip to the land of fire and ice, I’m astounded to report that I kind of can’t wait to go back—for reasons you may find surprising.
To be transparent, romance took me to Iceland, and everything and everywhere just feels better under the grateful glow of new love at middle age. Still, my experience was delightfully unexpected, and during long drives through the country’s extraterrestrial landscapes, I would stop conversations repeatedly to remark on how much Iceland reminded me of—of all places—home.
Plenty of elements render this island on the edge of the Arctic unfamiliar to the non-native eye, but that’s not how its frigid waterfalls and fields of moss made me feel. I recognized the scrappy ingenuity that Icelanders have wielded to address the temperature inside and out, using the only energy readily available: heat from the volcanoes beneath. Their inventiveness works so well, in fact, that I wore a bathing suit more the week I was there than I did last summer in North Carolina. Every town in Iceland has a heated outdoor pool, as well as an intimidatingly large hot tub where people of all ages soak and swim in the open air every day of the year. Full-on theme parks, like the Blue Lagoon, center around communal soaking. Natural pools lined with hot rocks and rivers that constantly push off steam dot the desolate countryside and lure even the likes of me to hike a mountain dressed in layers only to strip them away for a dip.
What some might see as Iceland simply reveling in the phenomenon of geothermal energy—or an unrelatable cultural tradition that goes against everything we were raised to believe about the dangers of a bare wet head out in the cold—I view as a culture that created places for young and old to come together. Like Odell’s Country Store, the egalitarian gathering place of my youth, Iceland’s public pools are where old folks pass the time, young parents distract their kids, and like it or not, everybody knows everybody.
I admired the resourcefulness of a people who have done a hell of a lot with a hostile climate and more than thirty active volcanoes. Not only have they heated everything, including floors and sidewalks, with the volcanoes’ virulence, but Icelanders also used their geothermal magic to carve a new niche in the travel world. Or, in the words of my dad, they made the most with the least: the most admirable trait a country person can have.
Iceland also has volcanoes to thank for the fact that the island is essentially a cylinder of dried lava. Soil erosion and land degradation are big problems. This should make the line between Iceland and Deep Run, North Carolina, harder to draw, since all anybody did here for generations was work the fertile dirt. Yet in Iceland’s massive greenhouses, which nurture the majority of the country’s lettuce, tomatoes, mushrooms, and peppers—as well as some of its coolest restaurants—I witnessed the work of pragmatic, proud people who had to solve the riddle of how to grow food for themselves against the odds. Sure, they could rely solely on brown romaine from Spain or moldy avocados from Chile, but Icelanders wanted more for themselves. They figured out how to stand on their own. In my estimation, that is indeed very country of them.
What’s more, the Icelanders knocked me over with their hospitality. The shy apology offered by a butcher when I asked him about a cut of lamb that turned out to be horse; a restaurateur’s insistence that he sit and chat with us as we sipped crowberry liqueur; the twelve-year-old boy who cooked us brunch one Sunday—all reminded me of myself when I stumble upon tourists in my rural neck of the woods. I’m always flattered they chose this out-of-the way place to visit, and, worried they will be bored or disappointed, I kick the hospitality up a notch or three. I’ve even been known to host strangers at my house because it’s that important to me that they enjoy their trip to Eastern North Carolina.
It’s funny and ironic, though—Iceland’s connections to home didn’t occur to me until I saw my first Subway there. I’ve often bragged that rural America has survived the everywhere-ness of the United States. Meaning that while every town and city of a certain size in our nation has generally grown to include the same strip of McDonald’s, Starbucks, Chipotle, and Wendy’s, Deep Run still resembles its former self.
For a long time, our only chains were Ace Hardware and Piggly Wiggly. Now Pink Hill, a ten-minute drive from Deep Run, has its very own Subway. While we lack the population density for stand-alones like Burger King and Bojangles, we can for some reason be trusted to support the sandwich artistry performed at Subway. On my next trip to Iceland, I plan to warn them about Dollar General.
