When I was a kid, I aspired to drive the tractor without having to sit on my dad’s lap. A few years later, I yearned to drive a car. “Enjoy driving while it’s still new,” I was told. I suppose the idea is that after the novel becomes stale, the experience is no longer as exhilarating. Driving does often become tiresome, so the sentiment holds weight for the most part…but not today.
Today, I drove around the Tröllaskagi peninsula, which is off the main road circling Iceland. With the ocean on my right and towering, snow-capped mountains on my left, I wound my way carefully over sometimes unpaved roads, stopping now and again to take a few photos. There was no way to really capture the scale of the environment, the fragility you feel in your human-constructed automobile as you cling to the side of sheer rock cliffs like an ant scurrying along the crevice of a brick wall. I felt that same, fresh excitement from the first time I applied pressure to a gas pedal and controlled a car. I felt free, unleashed, unstoppable.
Then came the tunnels. Oh my goodness, the tunnels. Quite abruptly and with barely a hundred meters’ warning, I plunged into the mountainside. I quickly discovered that when they say “tunnel,” they don’t mean no Lincoln Tunnel; this is a roughly carved, dimly lit channel several kilometers long. You can FEEL the weight of the mountain around you, unthinkably massive yet so ready to fracture should there be an earthquake.
Oh, and did I mention there’s only one lane? Whenever I see the headlights of an oncoming car in the distance, I have to either rush for the next niche carved into the wall on the right to let the oncoming car pass or back up to the previous niche, depending upon how far away the car is (which is nearly impossible to judge).
Luckily, some tunnels were wide enough for two lanes, so I took this as an opportunity to shoot a little video. Just picture the single lane tunnels as being much, much more confined.
It actually reminds me of a scenario in so many video games, the goal of which is to push forward through a narrow space. Of course, this space gets filled every few seconds with lava, tornado-force winds, plasma, or a death rays, so you have to duck into some crevice and wait for the deluge to cease before proceeding. Indeed, I felt today the same sort of exhilaration mixed with sweaty anxiousness I’ve felt while playing those types of games. Except in the tunnels of Iceland, there’s no restarting from the previous check point when you are incinerated.