This story is a part of the Stories She Told series. It has been modified from its original version. View the original version on Instagram.
When a volcano starts erupting 20 minutes from your campsite you… drive there as quickly as possible?
At least that is what I would do. Well, it is what I did.
So wildly grateful for the serendipitous moments of my final night in Iceland. Saturday night a little after sunset, I noticed orange clouds over a volcano that had stopped erupting 10 days earlier, asked the friendly biker I had been chatting with if he wanted to join on an adventure, and drove to the base of the mountain.
For over an hour, we scrambled up the side of a mountain in the dark with our headlamps. It was late and I was tired, but Brian distracted me with stories from his decades of biking around the world (including a trip across the US towing a veggie garden in a cart??).
Once we found a place on a nearby ridge with a good view, we sat mostly in silence, as we watched lava gush out of the crater, and bubble in the filled-in valley. I don’t know if I will ever have the words for what we witnessed. It was a night of sensations. Neon rivers, slow motion explosions, the changing of the landscape right before my eyes, the heat of molten rock on my face and the cool atlantic wind on my back. It was like watching the end and the beginning of the world all at once.
In my head, I heard “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone, the part near the end where she sings “POWER.”
We didn’t make it back to the car until close to 2am. I drove Brian back to the campsite, packed up my things, and headed to the airport at 3:30.
These days, so much must be calculated and I definitely don’t end up in intimate conversations with strangers as much as I used to, but WOW, it was incredible to fall into that moment, to connect, to disregard sleep and logic, and to give into the flow of the neon river for a few hours.
