The day before the eclipse, and the town of Hveragerdi feels like it's holding its breath. I woke to the soft patter of rain on the guesthouse window, the light still low and grey at half past eight, and I lay there for a while listening to the sound of water everywhere — the rain, the river, the steam hissing from the ground. It's a town that never really goes quiet, not in the way other places do. There's always some small hiss or bubble or drip, a reminder that the ground beneath you is alive.
I walked up to Almar Bakari for breakfast, the same bakery I've been going to since I arrived, and the queue was longer than I've seen it. People were buying bread and pastries in armfuls, stocking up for the festival and the eclipse, the way you might before a storm. I got a cinnamon roll and a coffee and sat by the window, watching the street. The town is small enough that you start to recognise faces after a few days, and there's a particular energy in the air, a mix of anticipation and nervousness, like before a wedding or an exam.
The forecast has been shifting daily, sometimes hourly. I checked the weather app on my phone while I ate, and it said light rain, a few millimetres, clearing by late afternoon. The eclipse is tomorrow, the twelfth of August, and I'm told Hveragerdi sits just outside the path of totality. So we'll see a deep partial eclipse here, while the crowds and traffic head west to Snæfellsnes and the Reykjanes coast. That feels somehow right for this town, to be just outside the main event, close enough to feel it but not quite in the spotlight.
After breakfast I wandered down to the Geothermal Park, the Hveragarðurinn, which is free to enter and always full of people. This morning there were families with children, a tour group from somewhere in Europe, and a couple of locals who looked like they were just passing through on their way to work. The steam rises from the mud pools and fumaroles, and the smell of sulphur hangs in the air, that sharp, mineral scent that you get used to but never quite forget. I watched a father show his daughter how to lower an egg into one of the boiling hot springs, using a little wire basket, and she squealed when the water bubbled up around it. The eggs take about seven minutes, they say, and you can pick them up at the little stand nearby, paid for by the honour system.
The geothermal rye bread, the hverabrauð, is baked in the ground here, buried in the hot earth for twenty-four hours. I bought a small loaf from the stand, still warm, and ate a piece there by the steam vents. It's dense and sweet, almost like a cake, and it carries a faint trace of the earth it was baked in. There's something deeply satisfying about eating food that was cooked by the ground itself. It costs about a thousand kronur for a loaf, maybe seven or eight dollars, and it's the kind of thing that makes you understand why people come to this town and never quite leave.
I spent the rest of the morning at the LÁ Art Museum, the Listasafn Árnesinga, which is free and has a couple of summer exhibitions still on. There's a show by Bernard Khoury called Toxic Grounds, and another in Hall 2 called The Space In Between, and both felt oddly appropriate for a town that sits on a volcano. The museum is small but well-curated, and I had the place mostly to myself, just the sound of my footsteps on the wooden floors and the occasional creak of the building settling.
By early afternoon the rain had stopped, and the sky was doing that thing it does in Iceland in summer, where it can't quite decide what colour it wants to be. I walked back through the centre of town, past the Sunnumörk shopping centre where the Quake 2008 exhibition is housed, and I stopped to look at the Sandhólshver hot spring beside the church. It was formed in the 1896 earthquake, apparently, and it steams there day and night, right in the middle of the town, a reminder that this whole place is built on a threshold.
I had lunch at the Greenhouse Hotel food hall, the Gróðurhúsið, which has about seven stalls serving everything from fish soup to ramen to lamb stew. I got a bowl of lamb soup with flatbread, which cost around two thousand five hundred kronur, maybe eighteen dollars, and it was exactly what the weather called for. The food hall was busy with a mix of tourists and locals, and I sat at a long shared table, listening to the conversations around me — English, German, a bit of French, and Icelandic, of course, that soft, melodic rhythm that I'm slowly starting to pick up.
In the afternoon I drove out to the Reykjadalur valley again, the steam valley, though I didn't have time for the full three-kilometre hike to the hot river. I just walked a little way up the track, past the first few steaming vents, and stood there for a while, listening to the earth breathe. The path is well-marked, and the signs warn you to stay on it, and they're serious about it. In places the crust is thin enough that you could break through into boiling water underneath. I watched a couple of hikers coming down from the river, their hair still damp, their cheeks flushed, and they had that look of quiet satisfaction that comes from soaking in a hot river on a cool summer day.
Driving back into town, I passed the greenhouses that ring the village, acres and acres of glass and steel, growing tomatoes and cucumbers and bananas, of all things. The world's northernmost commercial banana plantation is here, apparently, and there's something almost absurd about the idea of bananas growing in Iceland, powered by the heat of the earth. But that's Hveragerdi in a nutshell, a town that has turned its geological fate into a way of life.
In the evening I went to the Laugaskarð pool, the big geothermal outdoor pool on the edge of town. The water is perfect, naturally heated to body temperature, and the air is cool enough that the steam rises off the surface in thick clouds. I swam laps in the fifty-metre pool, then sat in one of the hot tubs, watching the sky change colour over the mountains to the east. The forecast for tomorrow is still uncertain, but the evening was clear and still, and the stars were starting to come out, the first few appearing in the deep blue above the valley.
As I walked back to the guesthouse, the town was quieter than it had been all day, the festival crowds not quite arrived yet, the shops closing up. The steam from the Geothermal Park drifted across the road, catching the last of the light, and I stopped for a moment, just to watch it. There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over a town the day before an event, and Hveragerdi has it tonight. Tomorrow there will be the eclipse and the crowds and the festival, but tonight, it's just this town, and its steam, and the long summer light fading slowly over the hills.
Back in my room, I looked at the weather app one more time, then shut my phone. There's nothing I can do about the clouds, and whatever happens, the town will be here when it's over, and the steam will still rise. That's the thing about a place like this, it's been waiting for this moment for a long time, and it'll be waiting long after the eclipse is a memory. The ground doesn't care about our festivals or our forecasts, it just keeps on heating, and boiling, and steaming, the way it has for thousands of years, and the way it will, I suppose, for thousands more.
I've been in Hveragerdi for four days now, and I'm only just beginning to understand it. It's a town that wears its geology on its sleeve, that cooks its bread in the ground and heats its pools with the earth's own fire. And tomorrow, when the moon passes between the sun and this island, I'll be here, in this town of steam and greenhouses, watching the light change, and thinking about how we all live on a crust that's thinner than we like to remember.