THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2019| 19
travel
It was the promise of danger that en-
ticed my 11-year-old son. Sebastian, my
oldest child, has grown up reading fan-
tasy novels and watching “Lord of the
Rings,” so he knows every inch of Frodo
and Sam’s journey, from the Dead
Marshes to Mount Doom. So this is how
I sold it: We were going to Mordor. We
would be crossing snowy mountain pas-
ses, black sand deserts, raging rivers
and hot, acidic mud pits. It would be a
fantastic adventure, with a small chance
of death.
Naturally, my wife bristled at the
mention of mortality. “This wouldn’t
happen,” I assured her (repeatedly), but
its ever-so-faint possibility was crucial
to the magic of the endeavor. We weren’t
playing on the Xbox. This was real. We
were headed to the remote, volcanic
highlands of Iceland — and together we
would live to tell the story. Salesman-
ship. It’s a vastly underappreciated fac-
et of parenthood.
It was, of course, something of a con-
ceit. I like hiking and acidic mud pits as
much as the next man, but what I really
wanted was time with my son. For
months, I had been sensing that he was
at a precarious age — no longer child,
but not quite teenager — and I could feel
the steady tug of adolescence, like grav-
ity, pulling him away from me.
There always seemed to be home-
work, soccer games, track meets, sleep-
overs, band practice, you name it — it’s
insane, really, the number of obligations
that we cram into our children’s lives un-
til we’re collectively exhausted.
Then one night, as I lay in bed, staring
at the ceiling, heart pounding, acutely
aware of time slipping away, I grabbed
my iPhone and booked two tickets to
Iceland. No, I didn’t want travel insur-
ance. We were going.
We were headed to Landmannalau-
gar, a remote outpost in southern Ice-
land. This was the start of the Laugave-
gur Trail, a 34-mile trek through an as-
tounding diversity of terrain — all of
Middle-earth (minus the orcs) — and,
according to our guidebook, there was a
shack, somewhere in the middle, that
served beer. The plan was to do it in four
days and to stay in huts along the way.
We soon found ourselves on the Ice-
landic equivalent of a Greyhound, cruis-
ing down the highway, when the bus
driver made a sharp right turn onto a
vast expanse of black sand fringed by
distant mountains. And we just kept go-
ing. Sebastian looked at me quizzically:
“Dad, uhh, does this even count as a
road?” Our bus approached a narrow
river and plowed into the current. It
briefly appeared as if we were in a boat,
surrounded by water. And on we went,
for the better part of two hours.
When we arrived at Landmannalau-
gar, heavy clouds hung low overhead,
melding with the ubiquitous gray stones
of the valley. It was a melancholy place. I
later met a warden who had spent part
of the winter here, largely by herself.
She lived in a hut, which she shared with
mice. “I killed the mice,” she told me.
“And I really started regretting it, be-
cause then I was truly alone.” This war-
den, Heidrun Olafsdottir, was also a
poet, and she intended to write while
stationed here, but found it impossible.
Such was the mood this valley conjured.
THE TREK BEGINS
Sebastian and I exited the bus and did a
quick equipment check — boots, water-
proof pants, jackets, hats, gloves, packs,
deck of cards, freeze-dried meals and
enough Snickers bars to resuscitate six
diabetics from hypoglycemia. In the
warden’s hut, where prospective hikers
check in, the warden eyed me apprais-
ingly. “Weather at the pass is not great,”
he warned. “Visibility is poor.” He then
asked about our gear. The moment had
the somber feeling of a border crossing,
as if we were on the cusp of entering a
foreign land, which, in fact, we were. All
of this, by the way, is typical at the start
of the Laugavegur Trail, and wardens
often turn people away.
The trail was well marked, the warden
explained, with poles every hundred
yards or so. And there were plenty of
other hikers. The only dicey area was
the first mountain pass, just before the
hut at Hrafntinnusker, where we would
spend our first night. Snow and fog
sometimes obscured visibility here.
“You can always turn around or dial 112
on your cellphone in an emergency,” he
said. I hesitated. Several years back, a
young Israeli died on this very pass, in a
freak summer blizzard; and he wasn’tthe only one to perish. “We usually have
one death every two years,” another
warden said.
“We’ll take it one kilometer at a time,”
I told myself.
At the trailhead, I tried to take some
weight off Sebastian’s pack. He had won
the state championship in the 1,500-me-
ter for his age group, but running on a
track and shouldering a pack over
mountains are different tasks entirely.
Sebastian gently pushed me away.
“Don’t think of us as father and son, just
as extremely good friends, and equals,”
he said. The expression on his face was
so proud and earnest that I had no
choice but to agree. And so we began our
ascent to Hrafntinnusker.
It was Sebastian who spotted the me-
morial for the young Israeli — Ido
Keinan — a modest pile of stones with a
metal plaque. The frightening part was
just how close Keinan was to safety
when he died. Just a few hundred yards
later we reached the Hrafntinnuskerhut. The two wardens who maintained it
— a young British couple, Katie Feather-
stone and Daniel de Maine — welcomed
us. It was not fancy — a few spartanly
furnished rooms and a kitchen — but it
was warm, safe and dry.
As afternoon turned into evening, the
weather steadily worsened. The wind
intensified, visibility dropped and the
air grew colder. Other hikers arrived, in-
cluding a large contingent from South
Korea, filling the small house to capaci-
ty: 52 people unfurled their sleeping
bags in every nook and cranny. (Spaces
at these huts are hard to come by; typi-
cally, reservations must be made
months in advance.) Outside, a handful
of brave souls pitched tents.
Around 8:30 p.m., three young wom-
en from California arrived. They were
cold, wet and spooked. They did not
have reservations and they hadn’t
checked in with the warden at Land-
mannalaugar. Katie told them, gently
but firmly, that there was no room;
they’d have to pitch their tent and make
it through the night. If the situation
turned dire, Katie said she would open
the doors. It was a challenging situation,
but one that she and Daniel were up to.
Before coming to Iceland, they had vol-
unteered at a refugee camp in Calais,
France. “There was a lot of saying no to
people in France — people in consider-
ably worse situations,” Daniel recalled
with regret.SILENT AND SHIVERING
The next morning, Sebastian and I set
out from Hrafntinnusker into a howling
wind. Our route would take us along sev-
eral mountain ridges, down into a valley,
across a river and finally to the lakeside
hut at Alftavatn. We were the first ones
on the trail and soon felt like the only two
people in the world. Cold rain pelted our
faces. We spoke little. Our goal was to
reach Alftavatn as quickly as possible.
As we began our descent into the val-
ley, whose slopes were covered with
electric green moss, it felt as if we had
emerged from the moon, and then the
Arctic, only to find ourselves in the glens
of Scotland. Sebastian didn’t complain,
but I could see that he was cold. When
we reached the river, the water came up
past our knees, and we had no choice but
to take off our boots and cross in hiking
sandals. The water, which was
snowmelt, numbed our feet; when we
reached the far bank, Sebastian was
shivering. I knelt down, put his socks
back on, and tied his boots — as I once
did when he was a small child. “Dad,” he
said in a quiet voice. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said.
We shouldered our packs and, as
quickly as we could, completed the last
leg of the journey, across the valley, to
Alftavatn. Here we found our hut and
the trail’s legendary bar in an adjoining
shack. We were the first hikers to arrive
and had the bar to ourselves. It was a
cramped, cozy space with the scent of
chicken stew in the air and a guitar on
the wall for patrons to play.
An hour or so later, the weather
cleared. Entirely. Wind died. Rain
stopped. Clouds parted. That evening, in
the hut, the South Korean hikers invited
us to join them for a raucous dinner of
fish, kimchi and vodka. Everyone
toasted Sebastian for his stamina, and
he delighted in the attention.A CHANCE TO TALK
The next morning, Sebastian and I set
off across a sprawling, black-sand
desert, hemmed in by mountains and
glaciers. The weather was perfect —
sunny with a slight chill in the air — and
we chatted as we walked. “Dad, tell me
your life story,” he said. He wasn’t jok-
ing, so I obliged him and did my best not
to sugarcoat it — as if, in his words, wewere just “extremely good friends.”
I told him about growing up, and
working crummy jobs, and where I was
on Sept. 11, and why my parents got di-
vorced, and how I fell in love with his
mother. And he talked, too. He recalled
memories from age 5, when we lived in
India and he walked to school past ram-
shackle homes and yards with red-eyed
rabbits.
After the trials of the previous day, we
savored the conversation.
The sun got stronger, compelling us to
look for our sunscreen, which I could notfind. Sebastian grabbed my cellphone
and, to my amazement, used FaceTime
for an impromptu videoconference with
my wife in Connecticut. “It’s in that little
side pocket in Sebastian’s pack,” she
said.
Alas, our male bonding was briefly in-
terrupted and sunburns were avoided.
We spent that night at the mountain
outpost of Emstrur and, the following
day, finished the trail to its end in
Thorsmork. The weather remained per-
fect and we talked a great deal more,
even as the bus carried us back to civili-zation — to the tidy streets of Reykjavik.
On our last night in Iceland, we feasted
on sushi, and then returned to the hotel.
We had adjacent twin beds. Sebastian
dozed off immediately and then rolled
over, in his sleep, so he was snuggled
close, with his gangly arms draped over
me. It was late by then, almost 10 o’clock,
but the sky was still awash in light — the
slow burn of northern twilight. Soon our
busy lives would resume. School would
start. Days would pass.
My son would grow up. But for now, I
cheated time, and dusk lingered.Bonding in Iceland, along a trail of perils
A father seizes the chance
on a hiking trip to keep
step with his growing son
BY JAKE HALPERN
On the 34-mile Laugavegur Trail in southern Iceland, the writer and his 11-year-old son hiked through rugged mountain passes, lunar landscapes and freezing rivers.PHOTOGRAPHS BY BARA KRISTINSDOTTIR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESTHE NEW YORK TIMESAt the start of the trail, a strategic plan: “We’ll take it one kilometer at a time.”
Drawn to a journey with the hint
of the possibility of a little danger.RadioPublicLISTEN WITHCULTURALCATHARSISA podcast with culture writers Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham.
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