716 Kilometres

Everyone knows the one on the black sand. This is not that one.

This one sits in a meadow — green and gold, mountains a long way off, a red-roofed farm building over at the edge of the field. A US Navy DC-3, bare aluminium with a red nose and a red band along the belly, standing on a bed of grey gravel someone laid for it in the grass. Both wings are off and lying on the ground on either side, which from the tail makes it look like something that has just landed and hasn’t folded itself back up yet.

It came down in July 1969. The crew walked away — that part matters, and it changes how you look at the thing. Then it stayed where it stopped, because getting it out again would have cost more than it was worth. Fifty-odd years of that: sheep sheltering in the fuselage out of the wind, somebody’s children treating it as the best climbing frame in the country, the weather doing the rest.

A monument of time. And my own entrance into the island of cold and silence.

Then in 2023 somebody decided it shouldn’t be left to finish disappearing, and they moved it. Seven hundred and sixteen kilometres, on Icelandic roads, to this field. I keep turning that number over. It is not a short distance anywhere; here it is most of a country, and a country with very few roads and a lot of weather. Somebody worked out how to put a broken aeroplane on a trailer and drive it the length of Iceland so that it could go on existing.

So it isn’t really a wreck any more. It’s a wreck that was rescued — which is a strange category, and I don’t think I’ve stood in front of one before. Everything else in this journal is being left alone. This one was picked up and carried.

Day one

I had landed a few hours earlier. This was the first thing I stopped at on the island, before any of it — before the fjords, before the boat at Akranes, before I had any sense of the scale of the place. So it is fixed in my head as the doorway: aluminium ticking in the cold, wind coming across open grass, nobody there, horses in the next field entirely uninterested.

You can climb up and stand on it. I did. From the top of the fuselage there is nothing in any direction but grass, mountains and light, and a very old aeroplane under your feet that has been driven further since it crashed than most planes fly in a week.