RAINY DAY IN REYKJAVIK

I have been seven days in Reykjavík, and rather than rue the weather, I look at the clouds in wonder. They plaster the firmament like icing on a cake. The ceiling is gray and unbroken. There is no movement, only stasis — these are not roving clouds. With due frequency, the sky weeps. Not a downpour, but a dispersed, tentative rain of the smallest drops that makes me question the weather’s true intentions.

It is July, in a land where “summer” has dubious meaning. True, there is veritable twenty-four hours of sunlight this time of year, but the orb is mostly obscured behind the cloud cover, and the temperature lingers in the low 50s. I walk along Laugavegur, Reykjavík’s main shopping street. It is packed with tourists, all damp from being out in the rain. Hair wrapped around faces. Backpacks sagging. Few carry an umbrella, because the wind carries the rain sideways, so there is little point.

I recently read an article titled, “Icelanders miss living in peace.” I understand. There are only 370,000 Icelanders, but last year over two million tourists swept over the island. Today, amid the bustling bodies on Laugavegur, I feel as if all two million are here. The street is dense with shoppers, strollers, gawkers. I find myself angling my way among Americans, Brits, Italians, Spaniards, Japanese, Middle Easterners, and the ubiquitous Poles, who constitute the largest immigrant wave in a country formerly unacquainted with mass immigration. There are now quarters of Reykjavík where the susurrations of Polish are as pervasive as the rain.

I continue to walk, until I come to a van that has burped out a band of young, well-dressed Icelandic males, all drunk. One of them grabs my arm and announces that they are on their way to a bachelor party. This grabbing is unusual behavior in sober Icelanders, who are famously reticent and standoffish. The blond, fit man — they are all blond and fit – addresses me in accented English. Having learned his language, I reply in Icelandic. This electrifies him, and he cries out, “What have we here!” He cozies in even more, throwing his arm around my shoulders. Then he hugs me close, waving his can of beer with his free hand. His friends gather around me to observe this freak of linguistic nature — the American who has learned Icelandic. The tourists swarming down Laugavegur part around us without comment, like a school of fish on the run from some predator. Once past us, they coalesce again. I decline the offer of a beer, as well as an invitation to accompany them to the bachelor party. They release me, and I move on.

Reykjavík is bursting at the seams. Half the nation’s population now lives in this pocket-size city at the edge of the sea. It is a neutron star of social and mercantile energy, sucking in not only tourists, refugees, and jobseekers from abroad, but Icelanders from distant farms and villages. In fact, there are whole settlements, prominent in Icelandic history, that were depopulated when their inhabitants gravitated to Reykjavík in search of opportunity. This means that the capital must build, build, build, to accommodate the influx of warm bodies. Construction seems to be happening everywhere, the growth so robust and eruptive that one can travel to the very limit of the development and stand on the border between city and void.

Months later one will have to travel out yet farther, because the place where one stood has become a hotel, or an apartment complex, or a block-like tourist shop selling International Penis Museum shirts imprinted with, This Museum is Not for Pussies. “Block-like” is the operative word. The construction mania is progressing apace because it seems to consist largely of easy-to-manufacture concrete cubes. In Reykjavík the Scandinavian fetish for the straight line is on full display. In the newer parts of town, it makes it difficult for me to get my bearings, because, well, everything is a cube.

The rain has ceased, for the moment, but the air is heavy with residual moisture. The cotton candy clouds stir above Lækjargata in the heart of old Reykjavík, where one can enjoy blessed relief from cubism. Here there are examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century structures, from the period when Iceland was governed by Denmark. There is a quaint coziness about the snug buildings, clad in corrugated iron, replete with dormers, spires, peaked roofs, and wood-framed windows that open out. These classic old buildings thus far seem to be holding their own against modernist development that threatens to muscle them aside as the city pulses like an alien egg about to burst.

On a whim, I detour into the small, narrow side-streets of Reykjavík. These götur, like those traditional downtown buildings, have managed to maintain their character against the odds. I explore Leifsgata, Eigilsgata, Eiríksgata — gata, gata, gata, like a ratchet. There are modest and not-so-modest concrete homes here, tucked shoulder-to-shoulder. Front-yard gardens are abloom, despite the wind, despite the lack of sun, despite the less-than-inviting temperatures. The flowers smile forth almost defiantly, wagging desperately in the wind, hanging onto their weathered petals. One garden is outlined by a wall made of chunks of lava.

(In Iceland, as elsewhere on Earth, one uses the resources at one's disposal.) Some of the homes I pass are hard against the sidewalk, with no buffer. No yard, no porch, no portico, no overhang. The windows of these conjoined homes offer zen views of Icelandic family life, and I cannot resist the impulse to steal peeks as I stroll past. The interiors are white, neat, and tastefully, sometimes sparingly, appointed. I get a glimpse of bodies on the move, bodies in repose, a barefoot little girl on a sofa, a man pondering a book, an elderly couple communing over coffee (the adoring husband still with Arctic stars in his eyes). Domestic bliss.

The rain begins to fall again. It’s what Americans mean when they say, “It’s sprinkling.” And then, a gloss: as I come around a corner, I see two elderly gentlemen sitting across from each other at a small, white enamel table in the front garden of a well-kept older home. They are drinking tea and eating, unmolested by the precipitation. One of them looks up at me, and I raise a hand in greeting. He nods, then returns to his meal in the rain.

Reykjavík is nothing if not affluent. I gather the sense that disposable capital is abundant. I haven’t seen one homeless person, or a beggar, or anyone who seems to be near the end of his rope. There are new muscle cars, and Teslas, crowding the streets. Little children are dressed in designer clothing. Is it possible for life to be too good? The teenagers are swanky in that sassy, the-world-is-my-oyster way that screams out, I’d like more of everything. Please! For this reason, I am jarred — but gently — when I happen upon Urðarstígur, a short, quiet, narrow residential street. It is careworn but not run down. There is an intimacy, even a familiarity, in its used appearance, in the statement it seems to be making in the faded yellow paint of its corrugated iron sheathing: Homes are meant to be lived in, and we are living the hell out of these.

The rain relents and is now more like the wringing out of a damp sponge. I see the drops reflected in the puddles before I actually feel them. I pull the hood of my anorak down and continue past the stunning, supersonic-looking concrete cathedral called Hallgrímskirkja, its scalloped spire designed to suggest the volcanic basalt that forms Iceland’s backbone. If one gets lost in one's wanderings in Reykjavík, this rocketship-shaped behemoth, looming on a rise above the surrounding city, will act as a sort of North Star, reestablishing one’s bearings. Given the frequency of volcanic eruptions and lava flows in Iceland, I imagine, in the face of some final catastrophe, the entire Icelandic population streaming into the church, which would then blast off into space to seed a New Iceland (Nýja Ísland) elsewhere. Vikings again on the move.

In short order I come to the campus of the University of Iceland, a congeries of disparate buildings representing a variety of architectural tastes. The centerpiece is the brutalist main building, completed in 1940. In its imposing concrete grayness, it blends in with the clouds and the veil of light rain. The campus is peppered with Icelandic adolescents on summer vacation. They are everywhere, like strikingly good-looking ants, doing all sorts of sinecures. On their hands and knees, with tools in hand, they are scraping weeds from the cracks between the paving stones. These kids look as if they’ve stepped out of the H&M catalog. The girls are peaches and cream come to earth. The faces of the tow-headed boys are still soft, but they will one day mature into the chiseled lines of Ivan Dragos. Some of these young people are so strikingly beautiful that one can barely look them in the eye.

Icelandic children enjoy special protection, per the Icelandic constitution. This makes sense. In a country of so few souls, every child counts, and children are considered a national treasure. As I walk across campus, I see mothers with children, fathers with children, couples with children. But I also see quite young children on their own, romping and exploring, and roving in small packs in this uber-safe country. My impression has always been that Icelanders raise their children the way they raise their horses: giving them all but free rein early on. I once saw four or five baby carriages — avec babies — parked outside a supermarket in Reykjavík while the mothers shopped within. One of the babies began to cry. At that moment a pack of young teenage boys, whooping and laughing and generally full of themselves, detoured and headed for the wailing youngster. Having grown up in New Jersey, my immediate response was, “Oh-oh, this is trouble.” When the boys reached the carriage, however, they gently rocked it and spoke soothing words until the baby quieted. Then they moved on. I’m not kidding.

A short walk later and I am on Hagamelur, another quiet residential street in the western part of the city. The concrete homes are gray or white, some covered with a sort of pebbly stucco. They are the product of the philosophy of one Einar Sveinsson, who provided a vision for domestic architecture in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. There is a basic sameness about these stout, square, benignly forbidding structures, and yet, if one looks a little more closely, there are individual glosses — a peaked roof, a filigree — distinguishing one from another. These homes are well kept and unimaginative, but muscular, reflecting Iceland’s earthquake-conscious building code.

Cloudburst, and I pull my hood up again. I don’t quicken my step because no one else does, because rain is simply part of the ether in which one moves here. And so I let it wash over me, and I watch as the street, cars, homes, children, become rain-slicked. It doesn’t matter for another reason: I am bound for the outdoor swimming pool.

Swimming pools are ubiquitous in Iceland. All Icelandic children must learn to swim — common sense when living on an island — and most of them are proficient by the age of ten. I enter the Vesturbæjarlaug in the western part of the city, where the first directive on the “Rules” sign above the front desk is, Get Naked.

It’s true. Icelanders will not talk to strangers on the street, but they will get naked with them at the swimming pool. The nudity is limited to the open showers, which are posted with a graphic detailing which parts of the body to scrub — hair, armpits, crotch… Some pools have a warden, or minder, whose job it is to make sure the naked showering mandate is obeyed. The men’s shower (as well as the women’s, I presume) is full of bodies of all ages and types. No self-consciousness here, only a businesslike, industrious rub-a-dub-dub. Finally, the bathing suit. Then the exit into the cold air, the wind, and the rain — the purgatorio before the paradiso of the hot tub. I expose my delicate greenhorn sensibilities as I scurry across the promenade to a tub advertising 38-40°C. I immerse myself.

Nirvana.

I have the tub to myself. It is a people-watcher's delight, affording me a vantage point to observe Icelanders and tourists disporting themselves as the rain, moderate now, continues to come down. There is nothing unusual about going to a swimming area in the rain. Wet is wet. I watch as children splash and scream, parents lie in state in the shallow water of the wading pool with their eyes closed, and clutches of teenagers burble their confidences for everyone to hear. It is always interesting to observe all-but-naked bodies, and nobody giving a damn. We are all, at root, pieces of meat. Even the adonis-like Icelandic teens, with their streamlined physiques, are on a ticking clock. In five years they will be a little more serious, perhaps a little less ripped. In ten, the girls will have filled out, the boys will be checking their hairlines. In fifteen, twenty, twenty-five…well, we all know the drill. I think of the wonderful poem, The Act, by William Carlos Williams: …we were all beautiful once…

A fantastically obese woman emerges from the changing area and lumbers across the promenade. There are three hot tubs, a sauna, a steam bath, four swimming lanes, and three large wading pools, and Murphy’s Law dictates that, out of all this largess, she will choose to immerse herself in the hot tub with me.

And so she does.

Part of my reason for being in Iceland is to have access to the language. But small talk does not come easily to Icelanders. People pass one another on the streets in silence, with no greetings, no smiles of acknowledgement (unless they know one other). It’s possible to be in a car with an Icelander for hours on end, no one saying a word, and that’s okay. Every Icelander’s worst nightmare is that someone will sit next to them on the bus. But the hot tub lubricates the Icelandic tongue, and the sphinx suddenly becomes loquacious. This is what happens now. The woman inthe tub with me sighs and says, rhetorically, “Jæja.”

This is my cue. The nearest equivalent we have in English to Jæja is "Well,” as an opening gambit to something one intends to say. And so I seize the morsel and reply, in Icelandic, “Það er gott að vera í heita pottinum” (It’s good to be in the hot tub).

She agrees, and a smile breaks across her face. The conversation takes wing from there. Her name is Gróa and she comes frequently to the swimming pool. She loves to travel. Speaks fluent Italian. Has children she is proud of.

I get my two cents in as well. My American accent gives me away, but this doesn’t keep Gróa from complimenting my Icelandic. We both land on the subject of what’s been happening to the language for some years now, and, in Gróa´s opinion, it ain’t good. It all comes down to 1. immigrants and 2. Icelandic kids.

First the immigrants. Rósa confirms what I’ve already discovered: that the welcoming of the newcomers comes with a cultural price — they’re not learning Icelandic. I’ve gone into many shops where none of the help speaks the language. English is the lingua franca. Sometimes they don’t even say “I don’t speak Icelandic,” but simply greet the customer in English and everyone is expected to get with the program. Gróa complains about not being able to use her own language in her own country. She asks if it’s like this in America. I explain that it’s unusual to go into an American store where nobody speaks English. She approves of this.

Which leads her to her second complaint: Icelandic children are mixing English in with their Icelandic, or worse yet, they are choosing to speak English instead of Icelandic with each other. “They say it’s ‘cool,’” she adds with finality.

Such a qualm might seem alien to most Americans, notorious monoglots, who regard English as the stuff that dribbles out of your mouth when you open it, and don’t really give a hoot about how it’s used or who’s using it. But again, Iceland has 370,000 people, and they speak an antique language largely unchanged since Viking times. It seems as if it wouldn’t take much to shove the kit and kaboodle of Icelandic speakers off a cliff into the cold North Atlantic. An Icelander once told me that the language is the last bulwark against the loss of their identity: “If we lose the language, American culture will wash over us like a tidal wave.”

I believe it. As if to demonstrate that she is not a language prude, Gróa shifts into English mode and regales me with a few lightly accented bon mots. I compliment her, but she frowns because I seem to have missed her point. “There is,” she tells me, “more English than Icelandic in the atmosphere.” That seems to be her high note, because she excuses herself and exits the hot tub, to be replaced by a man with two small boys, perhaps four or five years old. One of them looks at me doubtfully and says, in Icelandic, that he’s afraid I’m going to piss in the hot tub. In juvenile fashion, I suggest that it is he who is more likely to piss. When the father hears my Icelandic, it incites another useful conversation, but the topics are the same: immigrants are ghettoizing and not learning Icelandic; Icelandic kids are gravitating to English. “Come back in ten years,” he says. “You’ll see.”

I emerge from the hot tub into the light rain and chill air. I swim a few laps. I shower in the common area. Naked. My skin feels tight and restricted. Perhaps I’m dehydrated. After dressing, I find a krambúð — a store that sells a little bit of everything — and buy a sandwich and a bottle of skýr, a kefir-like drink that comes in a variety of fruit flavors. I go to pay the woman at the cash register, who is Filipino. I address her in Icelandic, but she stares at me. “How much?” I say in English, and we complete the transaction.

The rain has taken another of its frequent pauses. There is a bench outside the store. It’s wet, but I don’t care. I sit down and enjoy my egg-and-shrimp sandwich and my bottle of skýr, grateful that I’m not eating any of the objectionable Icelandic delicacies, like hákarl (raw, decaying shark) or súrsaður hrútspungur (pickled sheep testicles). I sit and watch as the sun slowly descends behind the cloud cover, the sky retaining a sort of buff glow. A gaggle of teenagers passes, a boy screaming out, in English, “Give me a break!” as another replies, “Mér er skítsama!” (I don’t give a shit). Another adds, in Englandic, “Þetta make-a ekki sens” (This doesn’t make sense). But what is more remarkable than the linguistic kaleidoscope are the complexions in the group. The requisite blue-eyed, tow-headed boy is there, but so is a black kid, a Latino, and an Asian. They seem to be doing okay with each other. Maybe the Icelanders won’t have to blast off in that church-rocket after all. Maybe this is the New Iceland. The black kid glances at me as he hops past, and I salute him with my half-eaten sandwich.

It will be interesting, to say the least, to see what happens to this growing, busy, multicultural, materialistic, and yes, wet country as the years peel away. I first came to Iceland forty years ago, and everyone I met was Icelandic (Iceland for the Icelanders!). The language was also being officially protected against infiltration by foreign words (the Icelandic word for telephone, a cognate in many languages, is sími, an old Norse word which literally means “long thread”). There were only two TV stations, and no programming on Thursdays, a TV holiday. The rationale? To encourage people to visit one another, talk with one another. It was an Iceland in which such a sentiment was possible, and I smile when I consider that an attempt at a similar policy in America would mean war.

It seems fitting that I should end my rainy day in Reykjavík with a visit to Bessastaðir, the home of the President of Iceland, about nine miles outside Reykjavík. I had visited once before, about thirty years ago, with an Icelandic friend. The president at the time was a woman, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. We had walked up to the unguarded front door, knocked, and asked if she was home. The gentleman who opened the door informed us that she was presently out of the country, and that was that.

This time I go alone, but with no intention of knocking, recalling that headline about Icelanders missing their peace and quiet. And so I drive out and walk the lovely grounds, enjoying the placidity of the modest (by American standards) white-washed buildings, the simple church, the manicured grounds, the sea beyond. I am in heaven to have the whole place to myself. And then, the low revving of a motor. I turn and watch as a sleek black car pulls up alongside me. The driver rolls the window down. A kind-faced, middle-aged man throws me an inquisitive look. “Who are you?” he asks. This being Iceland, I sense neither a threat nor an angle, so I identify myself as an American visitor. But I feel entitled to return the inquiry. “And who are you?”

The man’s response contains not the slightest hint of arrogance or guile as he informs me, “I’m the President of Iceland,” with as little gravity as if he had said, “Unusual weather we’re having.”

I hadn’t even noticed that the sun had come out.

Robert Klose teaches at the University of Maine. He is a regular contributor of essays to The Christian Science Monitor. His work has also appeared in Newsweek, The Boston Globe, and various literary magazines. His books include “Adopting Alyosha — A Single Man Finds a Son in Russia,” “Small Worlds — Adopted Sons, Pet Piranhas and Other Mortal Concerns,” “The Three-Legged Woman & Other Excursions in Teaching,” “Adopting Anton — A Single Man Seeks a Son in Ukraine,”which was a finalist in the Maine Literary Awards, and the novels, “Long Live Grover Cleveland,” which won a 2016 Ben Franklin Literary Award and a USA BookNews Award, and “Life on Mars,” which was a Finalist for a 2019 Best Book Award, International Book Award and American Fiction Award. His latest novel, “Trigger Warning,” was published by Open Books in September 2023 and was a Finalist in the American Fiction Awards.