Water & Earth (for Sigríður Tomasdóttir, Iceland’s First Environmental Activist) by A. J. Bermudez

Water & Earth

(for Sigríður Tomasdóttir, Iceland’s First Environmental Activist)

by A. J. Bermudez

Everything worth loving can kill you, she thinks. And this just might. The road stretches before her like a ribbon, grey on green, a grim sliver dissecting the living world into undulating puzzle pieces of north and south. Behind her, further with each step, is the thing that she loves, the thing that might kill her. When she closes her eyes, she can see it: faintly gold, violent and delicate, pouring into itself. Elegant. Inexorable. “I can see why you love it here,” the Englishman in the suit had remarked, his mouth hitched in a jagged smile. He had stared at the falls from a distance, as one examines a painting in a gallery, extolling the artist’s finesse while fingering one’s checkbook like a trigger. Tómas had handled the man exquisitely, narrowly averting Sigríður’s impulse to spit on his shoes. Still, she had slipped into nightmares for days, visions of the falls sliced and cloaked by concrete blocks and spires. She had cured her dreams with every sense beyond sight, drawing the mist of the river deep into her lungs, plunging her feet in the water, memorizing its scent and speed. She had glided her hands over the velvet moss in summer and the sharp, sloping petals of ice in winter. Now, as she walks, she ponders the water whittling away at the land, carved in the rock as though God had traced his finger through the surface of the earth. She thinks of the rock giving way, bit by bit, little tendrils of erosion winding their way down the walls. She considers the character of the waterfall, sculpted by loss, defined by change. She feels herself being whittled. She feels strong. (Of course, 120 kilometers on foot will make a philosopher of anyone.) A strip of hair whips wildly across her throat. Her fingers work nimbly to tuck it back into place. She will look like a one-woman catastrophe when she arrives, but that’s at least peripherally the point. She is here for the water but is currently becoming well acquainted with the earth. Beneath her feet, the road is rougher than it looks, and dark flecks of the earth have begun to pepper the soles of her feet. She imagines her footprints, etched in red, creased with the dirt of every inch from here to Gullfoss, marring the polished floor of the Parliament House. She will be told, when she arrives, by more men, more suits, that change is inevitable. That this is the way of the world. And she will smile, knowing this already. Bit by bit, tendrils of exhaustion wind their way down her limbs, blossoming in plunge pools of agony beneath her ankles, between her toes. But she is determined to be courageous. To not sell one’s friends. And she is determined to return home, to the thing she loves, carved and sculpted by the earth, to dip her aching feet in the water.