Rocks Don't Lie

Most of my first summer in Iceland was spent in the closet.

Well, not literally a closet, more like some weird sitting room not much larger than a standard walk-in wardrobe that was perched atop our apartment building in Keflavik.  It was the largest building in town and was known as “Hotel America” to the locals, as it served as overflow housing for American military families waiting for housing on the base.

The perch was sort of a novel landmark on the limited Keflavik skyline, as it pointed up and out from the frame of the five-story building and looked as if a navy ship had been carried by a tidal wave from the Atlantic and settled on the top of the building, crashing through the roof and leaving only the bow exposed, covered with red primer.

Adorned with large bay windows that also lent the look of a conning tower to the structure, from the inside it afforded anyone inside looking out a spectacular view of Reykjavik Bay, the shoreline of which was a scant one block away but not impeded or blocked by the smaller buildings on the opposite side of the street.

I didn’t want to go to Iceland initially – none of us did - but being the son of a career military man, I knew that I had no choice in the matter. But the first hint that it might not be the worst place in the world that we could have ended up was when my father announced over our protests that at least we wouldn’t need to be vaccinated for any strange diseases.

Just a month earlier, he had received orders to report to Ankara, Turkey, and my sisters, my brother and I had already been exposed to a round of shots to protect us against Cholera and Typhoid that left us bed-ridden with muscles so sore that it hurt to move – an event that had such a profoundly negative effect on Dad that he pulled strings to procure orders for anywhere but the Middle East.

That anywhere turned out to be the Naval Air Station at Keflavik on an island so remote, the seasons so pronounced and atmospheric conditions so extreme, that the United States military community considered it isolated duty, and many members opt to do one year by themselves rather than expose their families to the volatile intangibles of the volcanic island whose northern fjords straddle the Arctic Circle.

When my family moved into the fourth floor apartment directly below the closet, I begged, pleaded and threw out every ounce of teen angst that I could muster on my parents to allow me to make it my bedroom instead of having to share a room with my six-year-old brother, who had been my constant roomie since he was born – and perhaps it was wrong of me to use Christopher as the reason why I needed my own room, but I couldn’t tell them the truth.

They wouldn’t understand why I wanted such a small place for my bedroom, and I wasn’t about to tell them.  I had kept my secret all through middle school.  I didn’t want anyone to know, particularly my parents, as they were old-school tough and what I was keeping from them would most assuredly be looked upon as a weakness that would shame them.

But, in fact, my closet was something that I wished I had had back in Utah, a place to hide from life.

I was Skinny and with a mild but increasingly distressing case of acne, middle school was a nightmare from the first day. The sudden freedom of 45 minute classes had replaced the rigid structure of grade school, but while the configuration of elementary school may have been stifling, it also protected my psyche somewhat as I had come to expect certain behavior from my classmates over the years – and our familiarity with each other protected us from what middle school promoted.

My thin frame and acne made me an easy target.  Not just for bullies, but even for kids that had been subjected to being pushed around themselves in the recent past, and wanted to gain a small measure of dignity for themselves by targeting me.

It was a pitiful existence, one rife with anxiety and the occasional Band Aid. The effort it took each day to even get out of bed to face whatever pounding – emotional or physical – was coming that day had me sweaty and exhausted before I even got on the bus, which was a horror of being nauseatingly close to my hecklers in a confined space.  Not even my friends from elementary school would stand to help me for fear of being treated the same.

I didn’t blame them.  Some of them had it just as bad as I, but none of us acknowledged the others’ difficulties.  If it wasn’t the “Jocks” berating us in the locker room or in gym class itself, it was the “Cowboys” taking our money. There must have been a half dozen cliques in that school.

Some days my eroding ego would be bruised before I ever reached school, and the thought of what awaited me in the hallways, bathrooms or gym class preoccupied nearly all of my thought processes, and if I happened to make it through the school day without having to endure too bad of an emotional beating, I would opt to walk the three miles to my house instead of taking the bus, and enjoy my five senses for a fleeting moment without the psychological noise of rampant fear and anxiety drowning it out, and think of how wonderful life was at that particular moment.

It was on days like those that made me glad that Utah was home.  On the high plains at the base of the Wasatch mountain range, I could go out in my back yard in the mornings and look eastward to watch the deer navigate the mountainside, though obscured by thick patches of blue spruce pines, herds were clearly visible when they emerged onto the sedimentary rock formations that separated them – and then to the west, where the Great Salt Lake was spread out in front of me as far as the eye could see.

There were some days, particularly in the middle of summer, that my senses were overcome by the smell of the lake.  Nothing but brine shrimp can survive in the lake, due to its high concentration of salt, and when the brine shrimp start dying off in the broiling summer sun, the air becomes thick with a foul egg-like odor that could make even the best day a little dim.

Keflavik had its own nasty smell issue, as the only road from the hamlet ran right by a seafood processing plant.  

The smell was similar to the spoiled egg smell from the Great Salt Lake, only just about fifty times more intense. My brother puked all over the back seat the first time we drove past it on our way to the base, about a 5 kilometer drive, so my mom would bring along plastic bags in case it happened again, which it did a few times, but just like the smell of the Salt Lake valley, we got used to it.

I suppose a kid that gets constantly bullied would get used to that after a while as well. Maybe that’s why I didn’t want to leave Utah to move to Iceland.

Of course, I never told my parents what I was going through at school, but every once in a while my dad would catch me red-eyed from crying in the bathroom after school. I hated getting caught so I tried to hold in my tears until it was bedtime, and I could let them flow knowing that I could soak my pillow without it judging me or feeling sorry for me.

This closet could also be such a place, I thought when I saw it.  I could lock myself in and be alone with my psyche.  I could listen to my music without anyone telling me to turn it down.  I could ponder the photography and writing in Sport Illustrated magazines, but most of all I could console myself as I had all of the years leading up to moving to Iceland, and no one would be the wiser – and as long as I had my place to both be sad and to repair, I knew I could survive high school.

Iceland, however, was like another world.  Once I got my bed set up in the closet, barely squeezing it in sideways to allow enough room for the door to open, I would sit on the opposite side of the bed and watch the tide roll in or out – the meditative offerings from Black Sabbath, Boston and Bachman-Turner Overdrive washing over me like the waves from the Atlantic.

Every Wednesday when my Dad would come home from the base, I could count on the sound of my new magazine sliding under the narrow gap under my door.  He never failed me, nor did my new-found appreciation for music, nor the stark photography in Sports Illustrated.

I had all of these things in Utah, but Dad was always working and no one else in my family valued my brand of music and only my Mother shared my love of football, though it seemed like all of those things were fodder for her to keep from me should I misbehave – but suddenly, here, that wasn’t the rationale.  I was left alone in my closet, my Oasis.

It was warm in there all the time as it seemed to collect the rising air radiating from the four floors below it, easily flowing between the pronounced gaps in the hardwood planks on the floor.

The warmth and hardwood planks that extended up the wall and coming to a point six feet later gave the room the aura of a log cabin, the closeness of the walls seeming to drape across my shoulders like a favored blanket, the relentless summer sun that never set magnifying the temperature like some sort of reverse chill factor.

I felt good.  Really good for the first time in a few years.  Utah seemed so far away as I peered out across the bay toward Greenland, and it seemed even farther away as I observed the locals from my lofty periscope.  Every morning at 7:00am, the old woman who ran what looked like a small convenience store or newspaper shop across the narrow road would come out and sweep the cobblestones in front of her shingle, then drag a worn wooden table from inside the store to the stones, then the four weather worn wooden chairs.

In short order, the rest of the blue hairs appeared from inside their houses or shops, armed with brooms. They would all make their way down to the table and sit idly as the proprietor of the store brought out ceramic tea pots and small cups and soon I could hear them laughing, seemingly without a care in the world.

I wanted that.  At first, I didn’t understand it, but seeing how happy and carefree the old woman gang seemed to be with their routines made me want it more than anything I could ever remember.  One morning, I asked my Dad for a few Kronur, the local currency so that I could go across the street to see what the store was all about, and it turns out it wasn’t all that dissimilar from a 7-11 or Circle K in Utah.

I ended up buying some Swedish Fish licorice and walked out of the store to see my Dad had followed suit and was sitting on one of the wooden chairs, sipping a fresh cup of tea from the old lady.  He got out of the chair and laid a few Kronur on the table and asked if I wanted to go see the pier.  It felt good to be out of the building after two full weeks of hellish introspection in the closet, but it was nice to know I could always retreat there if things got rough.

We trundled along the rocky shoreline and up onto the old wooden pier and walked to the end, looking out at a couple of fishing boats making way from Reykjavik in the distance, the coolness of morning air in stark contrast to the blast furnace that the closet turned into in the middle of the day.

"Son, what do you think of this place?” he asked softly, staring off into the distance. “I know you didn’t want to leave Utah, but I thought it would be best for all of us to have a fresh start.”  I nodded as he looked over at me. “Especially you.”

“Why especially me?” I replied, “I was fine”.

“No you weren’t,” he said sternly. “I had to get you out of that place.  I had to get all of you out there, and this is the only way I could do it.” He stopped and swallowed hard. “This is a good place. The people respect each other, they have morals. They appreciate life.”

“There’s something about this place, Mike,” he continued, turning to look at the buildings facing the bay. “They are full of life.  This is what I want for you, I hope you can understand that and forgive me for uprooting you from your life back in the States.”

I grabbed his hand and held onto it like I remembered doing in elementary school when he walked me to school. I started crying, my chin down on my chest letting the tears fall and disappear into the wood of the pier. “I hated that place.” I whispered. Dad brought me closer and hugged me, his fingers massaging my scalp like he always used to do when I was younger.

“I know you did,” he said, then we both fell silent.  The sound of the waves washing up on the rocks seemed to be trying to tell me that things would indeed be better, even in this place where I wouldn’t see any deer on the mountainside, nor any trees for them to hide in – and for a brief moment I was 10 years old again, back when I remember being happy and not needing a closet to hide in.

Iceland was different.  The rocks didn’t lie.

I started school on the base a few weeks later.  Nobody mocked me, in fact, I was surprisingly normal.  I was still essentially the same person that I had always been.  I hadn’t miraculously sprouted muscles in the week-long trip from Utah to Iceland, nor had I found a magical cure for acne, nor had I sprouted six inches in height.  I was the same geeky kid that had been pushed around and made fun of in Utah.

At first, I thought the kids there had discovered some sort of new cruel joke, the idea that somehow treating me nicely was a way of setting me up for the fall. I kept waiting for the punch line.

I kept to myself, as I always had before, until about two weeks in, the first assembly of the year was scheduled on a Friday afternoon, but all I could think about was getting back to my closet, to be alone with my psyche, my music and my Sports Illustrated magazines where I was most comfortable - but I soon found myself on stage with all of the other new students, and as the principal said my name I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable jeers and raspberries and name-calling.

          But instead, polite applause. I went home smiling.  I didn’t even notice the stench as we passed by the fish factory, nor my brother blowing chunks into the plastic bag as we drove by.  I made my way up the five flights of stairs and into my closet, bounding onto my bed and landing on my butt on the other side to my familiar haunt at the window.

Iceland has earned the moniker Land of the Midnight Sun, which is true only a couple of months of the year, and always in the dead of summer, when the axial tilt of the earth prohibits the sun from retreating over the horizon.  The closet on those days were filled with direct sunlight, as the curvature of the planet combined with the position of the bay windows would allow someone sitting in the room to watch the “sunrise” which was when the sun was at its lowest point on the horizon and the “sunset”.

This August day was one of those days.  The sun had begun its descent to the horizon where it would magically bounce up from in a few hours and get a fresh start.  I had heard that the opposite was true in the wintertime, when the sun wouldn’t rise for more than two months, leaving the island nation devoid of light, except for the Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights - and for the first time in years, I was looking forward to tomorrow and looking forward to something beautiful and pure.

I crawled across my bed and opened my door, making my way down to the fourth floor where I knew I would find my Dad working on some project around the apartment.  I wanted to let him know that I did like it here, and that I appreciated what he did for me and that I knew that what he did in bringing us here was out of love.

There was indeed something about this place.  He was right, the people here respected each other. They were full of life and knew how to live.  I would grow here.

I found him in the kitchen looking out the window as the old woman from across the street dragged her wooden table and chairs back inside her shop.  I joined him and watched her as well.  Smiling and without taking my gaze from the old lady’s routine, I reached over to him without saying a word.

I held his hand, knowing that he would understand.