Bridges and Walls

On our ride up to our hike, 3 police cruisers rushed the left lane and blocked traffic. As we waited in frustration, we wondered whether it was an accident. 10 minutes later the entire southbound lane of the west side highway was overtaken by thousands of Black lives matter protesters. 5 days ago a Minneapolis cop, Derek Chauvin, clamped his knee down on handcuffed George Floyd’s neck snuffing out his life while Floyd pleaded his last words, “I can’t breathe... you’re killing me...and mama.” Marchers crossed over the median to the northbound lane and streamed around our line of stalled cars.

Outrage over police brutality has spawned race riots across the country. Notions of social distancing for corona were thrown out the window. Ironically for ‘black lives matter’ protests, within a month we will see the next wave of corona virus deaths hit America spawned by these mass protest gatherings. These protestors were so mad, they were willing to risk spreading viral deaths and infections to vent their rage. Many more black lives will be lost.

Once the traffic cleared we headed to Stamford. Our latest hiking obsession. A suburb I had known only through passing views of garish office buildings whenever I rode commuter trains en route to new haven. Drive 15 minutes north of downtown, there are 3 preserves that were once farmland in 1890s now designated for hiking and recreation. Mianus (pronounced “my anus”), zofnass family preserve, and ward pound ridge reservation.

Yesterday we visited ward pound ridge reservation. upon arrival, the sounds of honking and racial protestors were supplanted by oblivious bullfrogs and crickets. We’ve gotten into a sort of corona hiking routine. Arrive late in the late afternoon, get lost on winding trails, drive frantically to Tabouli grill for chicken shwarma sandwiches a few minutes before they close, and return to nyc. Our exploration of the trails has been matched by the exploration of Tabouli’s menu. At first it was stream walks, then it was beech and poplar forest hikes, and yesterday it culminated in pond wading and J, getting completely wet. The first time we ordered food it was standard schwarma and falafel, then we explored tabouli and Israeli salads, and yesterday mujadarra instead of pilaf and Moroccan salad and a series of smoothies.

All the hikes we’ve done in Stamford share one curious characteristic - meandering waist high stone walls. Miles and miles of serpentine walls slither through the landscape. back in 1890’s they marked extents of property. One can imagine the cows and sheep bound by these walls. Then the farms were abandoned, probably because farmers could not compete with the agricultural efficiencies in the flat plains of the Midwest. Today, towering tulip poplars, beech and maple conspire to coverup the history of place. 24,000 years ago, the Wisconsin Ice Sheet glacier covered half of north America. Like a slow moving river, the glacier which was 1000 feet deep at one point, picked up till – an array of sediments, rocks, sand and clay, as it advanced. At their farthest point of expansion glaciers left the most till. 16,000 years ago, the glacier retreated leaving the protective moraine of long island, and sheltered harbors of Connecticut coast line and rocks that are so abundant that farmers nicknamed them “New England Potatoes.” The farmers used these rocks to construct the walls we see today. Current day hikes cut through the walls providing a slice through time – modern day recreation hiking trails reveal the bygone farm borders and agricultural endeavors from 200 years ago, and retreating glacier action from 16,000 years ago.

                                        

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Newcomb Hollow Trail - Cape Cod

We first stayed in wellfleet 9 years ago. it was my first time staying overnight in the outer cape.. the forearm of the peninsula. Serendipitously on our first night at a rental house, we found bed bugs on Ben’s mattress. Our family crowded on the only clean mattress in the house marooned sleepless that night. We had to find a different place to stay immediately. While it was annoying to start our vacation breaking a lease and arguing over security deposits and exterminator probes, it turned out, in retrospect, to be the best way to start our love of the cape. we ended up procuring Jack’s house rental on Wood Duck Lane. jack was a longtime local resident originally from nyc who built his house and knew the area well. Jack and i hit it off, and he spoke of his time seeing MLK speaking at his nyc high school, and how he found the salvaged wood to construct his house. More importantly he imparted to us his local knowledge of the area--  “duck harbor beach for sunset, pb boulangerie for sandwiches, nauset beach for the bike trail, cahoon hollow for the cliffs....  A typical tourist may enjoy the mini golf and fried seafood stands on route 6, and maybe a crowded beach, but the true beauty of wellfleet lies in the ponds… the same ponds Thoreau wrote about 170 years ago in his book Cape Cod.”

Wellfleet is 1 only mile wide, straddling the bay and the atlantic. i never knew about ponds. By car, they are easily overlooked and passed in getting to the popular beach destinations. cape cod is a physical record of glaciation. the glaciers pushed the land into the ocean and formed hilly topography. when the glaciers melted 15,000 years ago, they left behind massive holes or "kettles" that later filled with fresh water.  Those kettle holes with a layer of clay beneath them collected water early on, filling up.  You need resident parking permits to visit the kettle ponds in summer and even if you have one, the lots are typically full of people seeking a pond to swim in. Additionally, there are many ponds that you have hike in to gain access. when Jack told me of his early morning swims in such remote ponds we didn't have time to hike these ponds 9 years ago but i always remembered jack's recount of them and envisioned his swims out there. 

Since we got a late start out, we decided to check out a trail that wove through kettle ponds nearby our house. i didn’t expect much… having seen beautiful trails of truro and provinceland, and having visited wellfleet several times over the years, it was hard to imagine something new could appear. We never ventured on these trails, because in summer the brush is overgrown with shrubs and ticks, and mosquitoes eat people alive. but in early spring, when the brush and air are both clear, the trails are perfect. Like the typical cape landscape, we proceeded on a trail behind the beach with pitch pine forests and sandy pine needle floors, skirting behind the backyards of some houses up and down gently sloping hills... It was nice... nothing spectacular, till we came upon Horseleech pond. The sky was clear, out of view of the ocean, the wind through the trees played tricks on our ears and sounded like waves. Sometimes the wind would come in sustained gusts and the surface of the pond would fan out in ripples in different directions. It was like a display of fireworks on the surface of the pond. We stood there waiting for the next wind and the next round of sweeping ripple aquatechnics. My feet froze as I waded in the icy cold and clear water.

We navigated trails that continued between ponds. At intersections, one would see signs of private driveways branching off to the distance. I noted one sign name in particular… Chermayeff. A network of foot paths interlaced with dirt roads which accessed houses. Climbing in grade, we saw a view of 5 cormorants standing on a dock in the middle of herring pond. Stately and black with their unusual posture, they looked like penguins sunning from afar. At the end of the road was a small trail along a stream. Both sides of the stream were raised moss embankments, which felt like soft carpet beneath our weary feet. The green was punctuated with fiddle head ferns. The stream bed was orangish in color. A series of small wooden bridges traversed the stream, and to our delight we spied a school of herring swimming up and down as if in a serpentine lap pool. We walked by the elevated stream bed, till we could no longer advance through thick brush. Had we continued along the stream, we would’ve ended up in wellfleet bay. Some of the deeper freshwater ponds like herring pond are connected by active creeks or brooks to saltwater often serve as the final destination for herring runs.  During the spring, thousands of these alewife fight uphill to their place of origin to lay their eggs and renew the cycle. No wonder we saw the cormorants at this pond. Following the herring as they swam up and down the stream became our unplanned activity of the day. On the map, the trail we were on was represented by a thin blue line tailing off the pond. In reality, it was our fantasy world of spring beech trees, meandering stream with carpets of moss, herring schools and resting cormorants.

Our hike back threaded loops between higgins, gull, and slough ponds, and different intersections of driveways. I saw a driveway sign for halpirin house. To have chermayeff and halprin within the same walk was too coincidental. Chermayeff was a Harvard architecture professor.... Halprin house was designed by Hayden Walling. A search of these buildings yielded there are about 100 or so famous mid-century modern buildings in the outer cape. i knew wellfleet was a hotbed of modern architecture between 1940-70's but i had never seen the houses. they were tucked discretely into the landscape at the ends of long private driveways. this was the vacationland where gropius, breuer, saarinen, and walling would experiment in house design. 

I’ve trespassed on private property and have been yelled at before (i.e., aalto’s summer house)… it's uncomfortable to encounter an angry house owner wanting their privacy annoyed at people taking pictures of their home. yet I headed down the private halprin driveway that explicitly said “No Trespassing” to find the building and an open screen door to its living room. Fearful of being discovered as an intruder, or shot with a rifle, I quickly snapped a photo showing the iconic large suspended noguchi paper globe light of the living room and headed back. 

Up and down the hills, weaving between slough, herring, William and higgins ponds we finally made it to the sands of newcomb hollow beach. I could see the paddleboarders were still in the ocean, waiting for a good wave to surf in on, just the way we had seen them when we had arrived at the trail head earlier in the morning. Just a quarter mile inland from the beach lay secret trails and hidden ponds, pine needle floors and sandy trails, herring runs and moss lined streams.

                                       

 

                                       

  

 

                                      

 

                                                  

  

                                       

 

                                                

   

 

       

                                         

 

 

                                    

  

                                     

                                                  

 

                                      

Black Sand Beach - Iceland

Reynisfjara black volcano beach is one of the most unique black sand beaches in the world. The black sand is very coarse and granular and was created by lava flowing into the ocean which cooled almost instantly as it touched the water. 

On the side of the beach are hexagonal basalt columns which was formed when lava flowed out, cooled and contracted and cracked slowly.

There was no rain. I stood on the beach with all black attire. The way the white waves washed onto the black lava sand was mesmerizing. Each wave created a new abstract painting of natural motion on the black canvas. the white foam of the waves were absorbed into the sand clearing the canvas for another set of waves. Without any land masses between Antarctica to Iceland, the waves were surprisingly strong at times, and I thought it was interesting the waves had traveled thousands of miles to create these final patterns in the beach.

I climbed up the basalt to get pictures closer to the waves. I was probably 5 feet off the ground taking pictures of the waves. A group of 4 Chinese tourists walked by me and ventured toward the water... one stood on a column of basalt 2 feet below me. All of a sudden a sneaker wave came in, I yelled to warn people to run, but the one standing just below me was knocked into the water, and the 4 other Chinese were knocked down on the sand. They were completely drenched, but lucky they weren’t pulled into the ocean. On the way out, I saw a sign showing how sneaker waves have claimed lives at the beach. In all beautiful places, tragedy strikes. people are lured to the edge of danger by beauty, and some never return.

                                          

Diamond Beach - Iceland

Pictures of hundreds of large scale ice crystals broken off from the glacier, strewn on a beach were the attraction for me to this area of southeast Iceland. It was disappointing to find a couple small chunks of ice... the summer heat melted all the diamonds away. It was more annoying to me to see Chinese tourists scavenge the beach collecting little chunks of ice to place in the sand to make photos. I watched a group of 10 such tourists smiling and laughing, taking selfies and then a photo of every possible group combination that could be made from 10 people. Mathematically, the number of photo combinations that can be made from a group can be described by P(n,r)=n!(n−r)! And the time it takes to make each photo is roughly 15 seconds... this group of Chinese tourists took pictures of small ice chunks that I could’ve fabricated in my domestic freezer for an hour! All their photos were taken from the vantage of a standing person... with no thought to camera angle or layout... just a documentation of all the possible subsets of smiley people that you can create from a group. All I wanted to do was take a picture of a diamond for myself devoid of any people, showing the elemental forces that shape iceland. The Europeans stood around the Chinese, patiently placing their cameras near the sand level to make more ‘artistic’ compositions while artfully cropping out the Chinese. I took a picture of these ridiculous tourists and started walking up and down the beach.

Upstream of the beach is the translucent blue jokulsa river channel that connects the ocean to the lagoon. I saw seals bobbing their heads up and down there. There must be many fish here to support the seals. At the far side of the lagoon is the tip of a glacial tongue that extends from the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier. The portion of the glacier above waterline doesn’t appear to be that tall, but beneath the lagoon water, it extends down 300 meters making the lagoon the deepest lake in Iceland. The lagoon is comprised of icebergs, or floating masses of ice calve off the tip oh the glacial tongue, spend 5 years melting down in the lagoon small enough to float down the river and wash up on the beach to the delight of Chinese tourists.

To get up close to the iceberg and glacial wall I reserved seats on a small inflatable rubber raft with high speed motor. These boats are the fastest mode of transportation (compared to kayaking or amphibious vehicles) on the lake, able to cover the most ground. During the reservation, I thought 6:20 time would be around sunset, (I didn’t know the sun sets around 10 pm here) and I imagined a beautiful crimson sky. In reality, when I arrived at the lagoon, it was dreary and incredibly rainy... kind of like a downpour actually. My shoes became soaked as I waited in line to confirm my reservation despite using an umbrella. It seems every other tourist here got the message to bring waterproof pants and shoes except me. Wet jeans are the worst for this Iceland weather. They become cold when wet and chafe the skin. Luckily the tour offered all passengers a special astronaut suit to brave the wind and rain. So I wore the suit over my wet clothes and headed to the boats. Our tour guide told us to hold on tight. He revved the motor and headed straight towards the icebergs.

The rain stopped while we were in the middle of the lagoon. They say in Iceland, if you don’t like the weather, just wait 5 minutes. The weather is always changing. Blue is the only color that is absorbed by the ice. The form and the colors of the icebergs are amazing. Some are white and black, showing striations of basalt dust, some are iridescent blue. When the icebergs are small enough, they actually tip over... so sometimes the texture is smooth because it is the bottom of the iceberg that is exposed.

I found myself taking photos like a Chinese tourist... the tantalizing combinations of iceberg and mountains and glacial wall was too hard to resist. P(n,r)=n!(n−r)! But with extra factors to include all the Panoramas, photos and video permutations... I must’ve looked very annoying. I probably looked like a Chinese tourist to all those onboard the boat. The water splashed at the bottom of the boat at 2 C, my feet were numb, my hands were red and cold from being exposed while taking all my pictures, but the novelty of seeing these landscapes distracted me from the discomforts.

The guide then took us within a couple hundred meters of the glacial wall. This is a safe distance to view the wall since at any given moment a portion of wall could calve off creating massive waves that would overturn the boat. The guide mused that he had swam in this water twice before. He said a person could survive 5 minutes before succumbing to hypothermia. With the suits we were wearing we could survive 15 minutes if we remained still.... but he chuckled, a tourist not used to the water temperatures would flap around like a chicken and increase the flow of water through the sleeves and succumb in 5 minutes.

At the glacier wall, you could see the history of volcanic eruptions embedded in the striations of the glacial ice. On the west, the glacier was completely covered in basalt from the recent massive eruption from the relatively small volcano.......The guide then listed all the larger volcanoes in the area and said they have all been overdue for an eruption based on historical eruption cycles. One such eruption thousands of years ago was able to decimate all the redwood forests growing in southeast Iceland and replace it with desolate black basalt landscapes. Hopefully i won’t experience such a tragedy here. To Icelanders, it’s normal to live near these ticking geological time bombs. I thought being overturned in a tiny raft caused by glacier calving waves triggered by massive seismic eruptions and lava flows, flapping my body like a chicken in 2 C water only to be scorched by lava would be the most terrible way die (especially while on vacation). Hopefully it won’t happen during the tour, I thought. I took more pictures to take my mind off these imaginary catastrophes.

As we headed back to the dock, the guide pointed to a pair of large rocks (tops of large hills) in the lagoon a 100 meters from the edge of the glacial tongue. A few years ago, they were completely covered with glacial ice. Now they are exposed due to global warming. The landscapes have changed so drastically over the past thousands of years due to eruptions and ice ages but the most devastating impact may come from the hands of man.

Pingvellir - Site of Iceland's parliament

A normal traveler would’ve probably hung out around Reykjavik (named smoky bay due to geothermal steam activity) to recover from a red eye flight, but I figured it would be better driving inland a couple hours and hiking around pingvellir, “the fields of parliament”. Iceland lies at the intersection of ever moving North American and Eurasian tectonic plates and seismic zone in the south west. It’s unique in that the plates are visible above land. At pingvellir, you can see the North American plate, which continues all the way to California. From the entry, you can start at the top of the North American plate at can survey the land... a strange landscape of lakes, fissures, volcanic rock, streams. With the four hour delay, I got there in time for a free tour of the site in English which started at the church at the bottom of the valley. The modest parish church sits next to a Norse pagan circular mound where two famous poets have been buried.

It is said that the Greeks first landed here.. the Irish monks.. then the Vikings from Norway. By 900 AD there were 39 chieftains on the island. To ensure people lived in harmony, Geitskör proposed this area as the meeting place for Icelanders in 930 AD. Like Washington DC, he chose a place that was neutral. DC was sited where it was because it was between north and south... industry vs agriculture, free vs. slave... it was a compromise in location to ensure one side did not have an advantage. The same reasoning held true a pingvellir. The chieftains all around the island would come here during the summer... when it was warm enough to travel here by horse. The horses in the summer could graze in the fields on their journey, that’s why the convening occurred at this time of year. For 2 weeks, the chieftains had to lay their arms down before entering pingvellir... it was a place where all could air their concerns. They speakers would make their pleas in front of the North American tectonic plate cliff. In this dramatic location, the longest standing parliament in the world was created and still operates today (but in Reykjavik).

Today, you can see the layers of settlement.. the stones laid out for foundations, the barren landscape that resulted from tree harvesting, the pagan mound, and the church. What’s striking about this place is the running water. It’s glacial water but crystal clear which is unusual. Glacial water is usually cloudy with minerals. In the Canadian Rockies the water is milky translucent blue and green. Here it is exceptionally clear. You can see 100 meters through the water it’s so clear

The tour guide looked like a Viking. Very tall and solidly built. As we walked the streams and rivers he told the stories of the place through Icelandic sagas (which he aid usually end in lose lose tragic situations), and political history (ambitions in power).

The saga story he told of the site was a love story. At a summer meeting, gunnlaug fell in love with beautiful helga. He asked and received permission to marry her from her dad. But before marriage he took part in Viking conquests for 3 years. In battle he met a good friend hrafn.... he told him about helga and her legendary beauty. Little did he know, when Hrafn left battle, he went to Iceland to meet helga. He told helga that gunlaug had died in battle, and married helga. Upon return, gunlaug felt betrayed.

It was at pingvellir that they decided to settle the score. Since they were both great warriors, the parliament made a rule, that they should not fight to the death as that would lose a great warrior. So they fought till they drew first blood. Gunlaug won, but they were unsatisfied with the result... they wanted to fight to the death.

So they went to Norway to fight. There Gunlaug chopped off hrafn’s leg. As he lay dying, Hrafn made a dying wish. He wanted to drink some water. When gunlaug returned with a helmet of water, Hrafn plunged a sword into him, killing him. The next year, helga married another man. In this way, the saga ended lose lose--  the typical ending of Icelandic saga.

Would you have guessed pingvellir was Iceland's Washington DC? Murcutt would say it starts with geology... then the streams and water to support the fish and trees... the backdrops for their hearings and airing their grievances in natural amphitheaters... thousands would descend on this valley yearly for 1000 years..

Ice Cave

100 million years ago
Iceland is unique in that it is the only land on earth not moving with the drifting of the continents because it lies over a hotspot. The volcanic plume ‘hotspot’ under Iceland was formed between the north American and Eurasian tectonic plates. Nyc is moving away from Paris 3 centimeters every year due to tectonic plate movement.

20-30 million years ago
As the European and American continents drifted apart, the land bridge was submerged leaving Iceland the only remaining land above water.

When the land bridge existed, Scotland was connected to Greenland. Once the land bridge was submerged, lots of animals were stranded on Iceland and needed to settle.

15-3 million years ago
Iceland was warm with forests, no valleys, no glaciers like a tropical island.

3 million years ago to now
The ice age started and Iceland was covered by glaciers. Every 100,000 years of cold ice age is followed by 10,000 years of a warmer period. We’ve had 30 cycles of cold. We’re currently in a protracted warming period. 9000 years the big glacier melted. 4000 years ago, southern Iceland volcanoes erupted spewing black basalt rock. The glaciers didn’t reappear in Iceland till 2500 years ago on the mountains here. The glaciers are like frozen rivers of accumulated snow. They move slowly every year and their weight over the volcanic basalt rock creates the distinctive black sand on the beaches of south Iceland. In contrast, the volcano in westman island had high iron content. As a result the rocket there oxidized and turned red.

The glacier was a 40 minute ride on dirt roads. Our approach on a special Jeep was on flat black basalt gravel roads that used to form the ring road in Iceland. Driving on this road reminded me of driving the desert roads of New Mexico. At times the car had one wheel on the embankment another on a track. The main difference in our car was that the wheels were huge with pressure adjustment, the driver lowered the pressure on sand to 8 lb/square inch (psi) versus 22 psi on roads. As we approached the volcano, the driver was silent, so I asked a lot of questions to tease the story of the ice cave out of him.

“Why is the stone black?” It’s basalt. “Is it the same basalt you find on the beaches here?” Yes, the basalt was ground fine by the glaciers. What kind of vegetation do we see here? That was lupin plant planted to prevent erosion and dust storms from closing the ring road which encircles Iceland on the perimeter. “How come the lupin doesn’t grow everywhere here?” Where you see lupin is where special soil was transported to foster its growth. “How come plants can’t grow on basalt?” Basalt is very sharp and angular and can’t retain water or nutrients. In wind, the basalt blown would cut into roots like little knives. “What kind of animals do you find here?” Mice and some mink. By this point, the people in the vehicle were rolling their eyes at me... but I kept up my cross examination to learn more. “When was the last eruption here?” In 1918. The eruptions here started around 900 ad and have cycled every 50 years. “So there’s potential for another eruption here soon?” I asked in a kind of worried voice imagining my glacial cave tour turning into a disaster with lava flows melting the ice and flooding all the cave visitors to their deaths. Haha don’t worry, seismologists are keeping track of the situation. There have been some small eruptions in the past 10 years... nothing major. “So the glacier sits on top of the volcano here?” Yes. I thought in my mind this visit like going to a ticking time bomb. Any moment, a huge eruption could wreak havoc in this area and blow the glacier up. I tried to keep my questions happier and optimistic. “How thick is the ice?” 100 meter thick where we are going? “Why is the ice white and black?” In the winter the snow accumulates and is compacted in an ice layer. During the summer, the wind blows black dust on the surface. Repeat this cycle for 2500 years, you see the striations in the ice we see today. “So the glacier can be read like tree rings in a tree?” Yes, exactly.

As we approached the glacier, it started to rain hard. I was hoping to stay dry, but it was not meant to be. We put on helmets, crampon ice spikes for our feet, and were each given a flashlight. We went across glacial melt streams as we approached the Katla ice cave. There were planks splayed across the streams which were chewed up by the crampon spikes in people’s shoes. Up and down basalt mounds, we finally got a close view of the cave. The glacier was actively melting, the water flowing through had carved the cave system, a series of ice steps were formed by a pick axe and a rope was anchored into the sidewalk for support. Because of the rain, everything was a little slippery. The ice was not solid. Lots of bubbles could be seen up close, pockets of air trapped for hundred or thousands of years waiting to be release in the melting process. The cave itself was not spectacular. This was primarily due to the gray overcast weather. On blue sky days, one could imagine the ice inside the cave would glow translucent blue. Today, white gray and black and dreary. We crossed a series of planks and bridges to enter the cave. At the end was the real treasure. A natural glacial ice bowl like an amphitheater open to the sky. The driver sat on some ice in his waterproof outfit and said, you are free to roam for 40 minutes. My jeans were wet. I was drenched again. It’s ok, the beauty of the site is worth getting wet again. I saw a small stream and followed it up the glacier. It wound like a snake and was gushing. The black and white glacier looked like a pointy straciatella cake. Jumping over the stream at times... I found the trick to hiking the glacier was to find basalt patches for traction and ascend without slipping. What I was witnessing was the force of melting. Rain and warm air melting ice that cuts like a organic knife hollowing our caves and crevices. This was like antelope canyon but in ice. 40 minutes passed by quick. I could hear the driver yell to convene. With all my questions, he probably thought I was the most annoying person on the tour. I was also the one farthest from him having climbed halfway up the bowl. Of course I took pictures all the way down.. trying to suck the marrow out of this experience. Whenever I run out of time at a site, like a museum exhibit at closing that I will never see again, I start taking pictures of everything on my way out to the guards’ annoyance. It’s one of my bad traits, but I do it to study pictures after the fact. I was the first one in, right behind the guide asking questions, I was the last one out, ushered by the guide on my way out asking more questions.... “why? How? When?” Trying to gain an understanding of the site. And so on.

I had shorts under my jeans so I prepared my attire to strip down on the car ride back. I hung up all my wet clothes on a window and fell asleep on the ride back to the parking lot.

I would spend the next 3 hours driving through bleak basalt landscape in the rain to our destination in the east... Glacial lagoons and diamond beach (where chunks of glacier wash up on a beach).

                                          

Perpetual Motion - Iceland

Like no other place in the world, I’ve come to understand Iceland as a landscape in perpetual motion. The weather is constantly changing. Within the span of a day, you’re liable to see a little sun, some mist, a bit of drizzle and fog, and driving rain. It’s maddening but a drenching lurks at any time for the unprepared. Depending on the weather, your view of nearby valleys or glaciers or horizons may be cloaked in mysterious mists hiding all that is picturesque. Or the wind may pick up such velocity, the puffins that normally take flight for herring supper stand perched on cliff sides.

The tides rise and fall on daily cycles. At high tide, strong waves pound the shore and wash stray iceberg diamonds onto beaches. Treacherous sneaker waves conspire to pull people into the deep. At low tide, the waves are calm and gentle on most beaches... revealing coastal paths and hidden caves. But at rivers that feed into the ocean, the low tide creates a strong siphoning currents out of lagoons able to pull massive icebergs out to sea like small toys in an draining bathtub vortex. In the ocean, the waves are calm at times allowing for quick safe passage to islands, other times rolling and tempestuous causing unexpected ferry route changes and different types of sailing strategies.

The season changes and alters the experience of the land to the extreme. From 22 hours of sunlight in the summer to 4 hours of light in the winter. Some ice caves which form in winter vanish completely by summer.

The glaciers which descend from the mountains like massive 300 meter deep frozen rivers flow at an imperceptibly slow snail pace. During the dark winters, the layers of snow build them up inch by inch. During the summer, they melt in mercurial ways to form ice caves. Calving at their tongues creates thunderous noises in the valleys and iceberg flows into lagoons. The remnants of their inertia is the ubiquitous volcanic basalt sand that is produced by their massive grinding power. When their melting accelerates, massive flows of water wash out all in their path creating massive flood plains.

The volcanic eruptions are intense events which explode like atomic bombs and alter the island like no other force. Thankfully I haven’t experienced an eruption in person, but I can imagine the devastation by looking at the land. In the south, a single eruption laid waste to lush redwood forests... leaving behind crenellated lava fields, cratered mountain tops, and vast plains of basalt devoid of flora. On westman island, the eruptive force and fiery lava flows laid waste to entire sections of town. Their destructive force and trauma only softened by the cloak of soft lichen and moss.

The Eurasian and North American plates are drifting apart 3 cm a year, which over geologic time causing rifts and fissures in the landscape... routes for water to percolate and flow, cliffs that become amphitheater’s for parliament, or cracks in the rock for hot springs and geysers to surface. Some geysers blow off steam every 5 minutes, other hot springs bubble up constantly like the seconds hand on a clock.

Longer stays in Iceland offer the ability to see and understand the places in motion. The forces in motion here are like no other in the world and uniquely (for better or worse) shape your experience of the land.

Tale of the Tape (Ski Bum Part 2)

We borrowed a car from G. He told me he parked his car tight next to a pickup truck at the Costco parking lot yesterday. He noticed his car got scraped when he came back to the car. Oh the misery of suburbia! He was pissed but didn’t think much about it cause the car is so old till... this morning when he found the bumper dangling loose from the car. Apparently his car got scraped so hard the plastic bolts that fasten the bumper to the trunk were sheared off leaving his bumper hanging. I called Costco to see if they had surveillance cameras to catch the criminal in action. They didn’t. It’ll remain an unsolved mystery in the suburbs.  

To make sure the car was safe to drive on the highways at very high speeds,  I asked G. if he had any duct tape. G. only had a few inches  left on the tape roll, so despite his skepticism, i taped his bumper back on just secure enough to drive it to the local supermarket to buy more duct tape. Instead of taping along the seam (like most normal people would probably do), I taped perpendicular to the joint to maximize shear capacity.  G. is a mechanical engineer by training and he thought I was being  idiotic and probably daydreamed laughing at me when  I’d drive back from the store without a bumper,  but I remembered from my structures classes, shear stresses are counteracted proportionately to the length of of straps  that span joints perpendicularly (i.e., strap anchors for wood connections). But as Schopenhauer said, first the truth is  ridiculed, then violently opposed, then when proven right, accepted as self-evident. I was willing to look like an idiot for the truth. 

In the supermarket parking lot, I put 8 more pieces of duct tape onto the bumper to keep it from falling off. I thought if I put the duct tape in triangles like a truss, maybe it’d be stronger? My brain at work. Anyways when G. saw what i did when I drove back victoriously, he was incredulous. I couldn’t tell whether he was rendered speechless by the structural success of the duct tape, or the fact that  I managed to turn his car into a worthless junkmobile. Who tapes their car together? (Except the same guy who tapes his ski jacket. Picture ski bum emerging from taped car in middle of winter at ski resort) 

We drove 3 hours north to our destination stopping at a huge outlet mall on the way.  The parking lots are immense, and encircle the mall. Hundreds  of cars are in the parking lots. I took some pictures, like the sea of cars, an elevated police lookout point overlooking the cars, a sheik man holding shopping bags and looking kind of burdened.... After we finished shopping, we couldn’t find our car since there were so many cars in the lots.. but with our duct taped bumper we were able to locate the car a lot easier while walking the lots because it’s so unique. So far so good, the bumper hasn’t fallen off yet and it makes car identification at mega malls easier. 



Flashback to Indonesia 1996. I was on a biology fellowship to study macque evolution there. I bought a cheap acoustic guitar to pass the time. I strung it with metal strings instead of nylon for the quality of sound. Surprise surprise, the cheap guitar head with all the pegs snapped off the neck after a couple weeks due to the unforeseen tension of the metal strings. To salvage the guitar, I nailed the head to the back of the neck in an act of desperation. Luckily the nails didn’t split the neck. It looked completely ridiculous, like those headless duct-tape-masked spray painted Eddie Van Halen guitars from the 1980s but acoustic... with a head nailed backwards to the neck.  Every time I played it, the locals  would gather around... and thought it was amazing. Between songs I would adjust the pegs on the back of the neck to tune it like a rockstar.  They had never seen a guitar like that before and probably never will again. They thought it was some special American guitar, when in reality it was just a hack desperate attempt of mine to fix something, like the duct tape holding up the car bumper today.

Saratoga Springs lies 3 hours north of New York City by car and is a springboard into the 4th dimension, time. There's a confluence of three overlapping scales of history there: military and modern settlement (hundreds of years), indigenous inhabitation (thousands of years), and geological (millions of years). Recently I’m finding a recurring theme - geology plays an underlying role in war, migrations, and settlement patterns and city planning. I have a friend who made a thesis that in a lot of city planning, main roads were and are situated  over flowing  rivers... he’s devoted himself to underground urban exploration slogging through train tunnels, sewers, and aqueducts.  Murcutt really opened my eyes to geology’s relation to flora and fauna. The geology will support certain flora which in turn support certain fauna which in turn support certain herbivorous or carnivorous people, which in turn support certain settlements, which in turn support certain architects who in turn design certain structures for certain uses for certain people, who in turn buy tuna fish sandwiches... everything is connected. While I possess a profound understanding of duct tape and its applications, I must profess I have no geological knowledge whatsoever... if I could tell one rock from another, that would be a great accomplishment.  I can, however, tell the stories of the effects of geology. 

100s of years scale....
There was a pivotal battle in Saratoga between US and Britain that helped determine the outcome of the American Revolution. At the time, the British controlled Canada in the north, and were trying to go down the Hudson River to New York City to try to cut off the rebellious troublemaking Northeast states from the rest of the country. Since the Hudson River constricts at Saratoga, it was a coveted location for a military control point. The British divide and conquer strategy failed because they overextended themselves by sending troops to Philadelphia and Bennington. They underestimated the resilience and guerilla tactics of the Americans. The fields of Saratoga are marked abstractly with white posts with blue markings for the american lines, and white posts with red markings for British battle lines. The fields are rolling and lush. It's hard to imagine the savagery that visited the place. It's also interesting to imagine the small scale of the war. The losses for either side was less than 500 people, but the battle had a tremendous  impact on world settlement patterns. Now america has over 250 million people... 


Millions of years scale...
A few miles west of the battlegrounds  lies Saratoga Springs. Pre-dating the age of the dinosaurs, 400 million years ago in the Devonian period, the site was a shallow bay. Shells of marine life fell on the ocean floor, gradually turning into limestone when it was compacted by the weight of accumulated sediment above. The limestone layer was essentially covered with an impermeable mud-like layer of shale until 12,000 years ago when an earthquake ruptured the shale allowing the trapped water in the limestone strata to surface.



Thousands of years scale... 
The Mohawk Indians were the first people to discover the springs as they hunted the animals that would come to the springs for their high salt content. All the mineral spring water in Saratoga springs surface at a 55 degree temperature.  The two dozen  springs that comprise Saratoga Springs State Park are the only naturally carbonated springs east of the Rocky Mountains. Each spring has a different chemical composition. The Polaris spring is high in calcium carbonate and was used to treat acid reflux. To spout the water up so that the water could be easily accessed, a pipe was installed with a slight tilt northward... hence the name Polaris.  Karista spring, named after the Mohawk word for iron, has iron and iodine in the same proportion as human blood so it tastes oddly  like blood. To drink the spring water here is like drinking an aged wine... except the spring water is 400 million years old, and it’s sulfurous smelling bouquet is composed of minerals and gas byproducts of ancient marine animals.  People with anemia and thyroid problems drink Karista water. The Hayes spring contains magnesium and lithium. Lithium is a free ionized mood stabilizer... but the magnesium is a laxative. To drink enough Hayes water to become happy, one would probably end up sitting on the toilet first. A parks tour guide mentioned a couple weeks ago, a trucker came by to fill up 3 thermoses full of Hayes water. When he told the trucker that drinking all that water would cause a bowel cleanse, the trucker replied he knew that and would drink the water in the morning daily to relieve himself in the morning to avoid making pit stops the rest of the day. 

 

Back to the present... 
For a period of time around 1900s, large monstrous pipes were bored into the ground to harvest the spring waters for its carbon dioxide. The water was transported to Albany and the gas was extracted to manufacture carbonated drinks. Several springs within the park ran dry, prompting officials to halt the commercial spring water extraction activities on site. In the 1930s during the Great Depression, large lavish neo-classical buildings were constructed with lavish pools and water bars inside. People would come to the springs for 3 week stays, and treat their ailments with various baths and drink spring water. The bath water was heated with underground equipment. Once the equipment broke down, the buildings and baths were abandoned in the 1950's and have become curious monuments to water.

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