There must be plenty of ways to amuse yourself if you’re stranded for two long hours in a lonely ski hut at the foot of an Icelandic glacier with a handsome young French tour-guide. I was too busy to think of any. I was trying to stop Toby from hurling himself off the dilapidated balcony onto the portapotties perched among the sharp volcanic rocks below.
The glacier was just one item in the day-long excursion, sandwiched in between lunch at the geyser and afternoon tea at the waterfall: Scootering on Langjökull. It was free for the scientists, but upwards of a couple of hundred dollars for any family members who wanted to join in. Apart from wondering satirically whether James would get a discount for bringing his own wee scooter, we hadn’t really given it a second thought. I assumed there’d be options for non-participating spouses, or failing that, we’d find some clever way to entertain ourselves. That’s usually how these things work, and I’m a good sport.
Before we left Geysir, I double-checked with the Icelandic tour guide about the wisdom of tagging along. Geysir had a geothermal swimming pool, we had brought our swimming gear, mightn’t it be better for the boys and me to stay put? The bus could pick us up on the way back through.
“Oh, you should not miss this!” said the guide. “Magnificent views. Extremely desolate landscape.”
He mused for a bit. “You can perhaps walk to the glacier, very healthy walk. Sometimes they have a small glass-walled carriage to pull behind, for the little ones, although I cannot guarantee,” he added doubtfully.
I raised my eyebrows, keen for more reassurance than this. “Yes, extremely desolate landscape,” he repeated, as if to seal the deal.
So, eyes wide open, we went along for the ride.
The tour bus turned off the main road onto an unpaved track so fearsomely bumpy that the older boy threatened to re-enact the geyser we’d just visited. Soothing views of scrubby vegetation and doe-eyed Icelandic horses were replaced by a panorama of unforgiving bleakness, cinders and rocks as far as the eye could see. I got the picture: the boys and I would be left to our own devices in this blasted wilderness while their father roared off on a snowmobile with the other scientists.
OK. I could handle it. It would only be an hour, max, and there must be some amenities. A bathroom, at least, perhaps a coffee urn. Surely?
Forty jiggly, jostling minutes later, we found ourselves not merely in the middle of nowhere, but at its absolute outer rim. Red and grey rocks stretched out on either side, under a vivid blue sky. A string of jagged mountains and the glittering grey snout of the glacier lay ahead of us, with the distant cone of the still-active Mt Hekla visible to the southeast. It was like being inside a snowglobe from Mars.
There was a decrepit ski hut clinging to a wall of rock, and a large truck containing the snowsuits, helmets and boots in a range of sizes. The bad news: no glass-walled carriage for mothers and babies. The good, nay, mind-blowing news: James would be allowed to accompany his father on the snowmobile onto what turned out to be the actual glacier on which the actual Iron Giant comes back to life in the film of the same name!
He’s not one to look a gift ski-doo in the mouth. As the scientists wriggled into the waterproof gear provided, he speedily zipped himself into the smallest snowsuit on offer, and wedged the smallest available helmet onto his head, with two woolly hats underneath as stuffing to make it stay on.
“Come back alive!” I joked nervously, as Toby and I waved our menfolk onto a smaller, stronger bus that would drive them the last mile to the glacier itself. The pre-flight talk had warned of the dangers of crevasses and the importance of following the leader. My guys are constitutionally contrary, the sort of jokers who go in the out door on bloody-minded principle. Now I wished I’d kitted them out in bespoke fishermen's jerseys, the better to identify their mangled remains after they worked their way down the glacier fifty years from now.
Our bus drivers retreated to their vehicles, and two non-scootering types headed off to explore the terrain on foot. So there we were, the bored French youth, his cellphone, his iPod, my toddler, and me. Toby was well overdue for a nap; with any luck, I could nurse him to sleep and then get stuck into, if not the Gallic guide, at least the copy of Harry Potter and The Last Hurrah that I’d dropped forty dollars on in Reykjavik.
Was it that my milk was all shook up by the rocky road, or was it the invigorating air and the brilliant sunshine? Whatever it was, Toby was not buying the idea of an alpine snooze. He preferred to bolt from one end of the decrepit balcony to the other, then climb down and clamber over the basalt lava like a post-apocalyptic Heidi.
If this holiday was my parenting Outward Bound, this two-hour segment was my Overnight Solo, stranded in a harsh, unforgiving environment with no tools save my own wits and a water bottle. Toby and I were unwilling extras in a director’s cut of Quest for Fire, or perhaps Beyond Thunderdome, without even Tina Turner for company. Time slowed to a crawl as the wind whipped around us and the French kid dozed in a deck-chair.
We sat among the rocks and dismantled small cairns left by previous visitors evidently unaccompanied by small vandalistic sidekicks, then clumsily rebuilt them. We played hide and seek, to the degree possible in a place where there are no hiding places. After we figured out by leaning on the door that the hut was unlocked, we inspected its non-working toilet, then counted each and every deer on the plastic tablecloths that covered the abandoned tables. (It would have been a lovely spot for a café, except for the access issues and the small matter of the defunct plumbing).
Back out on the balcony, we rolled a water-bottle back and forth, a surprisingly absorbing game. This sparked the first signs of animation from notre ami in the deck-chair, who prognosticated a fine future in football. While I can do chit-chat in several languages, the Esperanto of sport is not one of them, a fact that was rubbed in by the arrival of a Taiwanese-Icelandic guide with the next party of glacier tourists. He and the French guy launched into a debate in fluent English that spanned several countries and a dozen sporting codes. I could only make out the words “Yao Ming” and “Madrid Réal.”
Meanwhile, Toby leaned on an unsecured railing that tilted perilously out into the void, and I snatched him back to safety by the collar of his little woolly jacket. That was close. I was reaching the absolute vertical limit of my wrangling skills when an angel appeared in the form of a gentle fellow from Taiwan.
He was tired of waiting on the bus for the tardy physicists to return from the glacier, so he wandered up onto the balcony with his teenagers. We managed about six words of conversation, but he saw the whites of my eyes and spoke the universal language of parents in extremis. For a happy quarter of an hour, he defended the crumbling, unfenced end of the balcony while I blocked the perilous stairway, and Toby hurtled back and forth between us, claiming hugs and chuckling like a drain.
The end of my ordeal was in sight. Surely all this high-altitude exercise and fresh air – for by now a blustering gale was taking the edge off the sunshine and whipping tears from my eyes -- had worn him out? As if. So it was back to stacking rocks and rolling bottles, as the minutes crawled by.
When at long last an ant-like line of snowmobiles made its stately way down the far-off glacier, I perked up, but still Toby did not perk down. Half an hour later, when his sun-and-wind-burned father and brother stepped down from the 4WD bus as exhilarated and exhausted as astronauts returning to earth, he was still happily wide awake to greet them. Then he conked out on the bus as we lurched our way back to the main road.
Later, Richard confided that scootering on the glacier had been an odd mix of the sublime and the ridiculous, much tamer than expected. Rumbling across the ice while inhaling exhaust fumes wasn’t exactly his idea of fun, but the father-son snowball fight on the magnificent, silent glacier was worth the trip.
It sounded exciting, but I think we both knew who had spent the afternoon performing the real extreme sport.