Run Aground

I keep a list of these. This one I’d wanted for years, ever since I first saw a photograph of it: a ship, run aground at the end of a fjord, going to rust at the foot of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.

You don’t happen on it. Getting deep into the East Fjords is one thing; reaching this particular one is another — the way in runs over a mountain pass, a thin road climbing and dropping with nothing around it but rock and cold light and the snow still sitting in the high gullies. I wasn’t sure it would pay off. Then the road tipped down toward the water and the whole fjord opened up, and it did. The view alone would have been worth the drive. The wreck was just the reason I’d come.

It’s there exactly where the maps said, low and orange against all that grey and green. A landing craft — wartime, they say, left here when whatever it was doing was finished, and never floated off again. Eighty-odd winters of salt and weather have had it since. It’s all rust now, slowly disappearing: the hull gone the deep orange that steel goes when the sea works on it slowly, the plates opened up so you can walk right down the spine of it, the ribs running away under your feet into the shallows.

The way in runs over a mountain pass with nothing around it but rock and cold light. Then the fjord opens up, and the view alone is worth the drive.

A waterfall comes down the green slope behind it, the same as it has the whole time. That’s the thing that got me: how little the place cares. The ship was built to carry men and machines onto some beach, a piece of the most violent decade there’s ever been, and it ended up here, at the quiet end of a fjord, with a waterfall and a few birds, slowly being taken apart by the only forces that were ever really in charge.

What the cold keeps

Iceland keeps its abandoned things differently. No graffiti out here, no one coming to tag it, no city pressing in to swallow it the way the mills and hospitals get swallowed further south. Just weather, and a lot of it, and a sort of enormous patience. A wreck like this would have been stripped and gone in a year almost anywhere else. Here it’s allowed to take its time — to keep rusting, quietly, in front of one of the best views I’ve ever stood in front of.

I stood on the hull a while with the wind coming up the fjord and thought about how far this thing had come to lie down — across an ocean, through a war, to the edge of a country that’s mostly rock and water — only to end up as one more orange shape the land is quietly reclaiming. Some places you photograph. This one you just stand in front of.