The View from Here

On impermanence and connection

You would have loved this.

These words come to me again and again, with each new landscape we come across, my sixteen-year-old daughter and I, driving across Iceland. Our first multi-day trip together, just the two of us. We found cheap tickets on a red eye, and here we are.

It’s a trip full of long drives, and of course most of the time she has her headphones on, slumped in the passenger seat, immersed in a book. I try to let her be, but then I can’t help it: these stark, volcanic vistas are so breathtaking, I’m back at it again, nudging her and making a sweeping can-you-believe-this gesture at the windshield. She sighs wearily, looks around, gives me a shrug, and goes back to her book.

I remember being the teen with headphones on, slumped gloomily against the side window of a rented minivan you drove up the rugged northeast coast of Australia, proudly showing us your homeland. I am listening to a cassette, Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick on one side, The English Beat on the other. Every so often you reach your hand behind the headrest and give me the turn-it-down motion. I roll the volume up, just a little.

“Look how beautiful,” you call out after a long while, gesturing at the vista before us. Then, almost shouting, loud enough so you were sure I could hear it over my Walkman’s tinny beats: “LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL!” 

I didn’t want you to be right, so I’d pretend to ignore the rust-red rock formations that looked like wild creatures dancing, the turquoise coves with violent surf surging into a mesmerizing churn of whitewash, the flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos sailing overhead—things that made me gasp privately. I kept my headphones on and sneaked sidelong glances, not wanting you to know that I was in awe of this place, of what you were showing me. 

Now my daughter and I hurtle across this other desolate coast, 9,500 miles and 35 years from that van trip. I love this stark bleakness of Iceland at the end of winter, the remoteness, the sheer lack of any signs of humans for hundreds of miles. It’s a land overflowing with metaphors writ large: waterfalls, rainbows, glaciers, volcanos. Like fantastical, AI-rendered scenes of Earth before the animal kingdom existed. Snow-capped mountain ranges like giant rows of shark’s teeth, vast lava fields, moss, lichens. The two of us zip along in our little silver car, too inconsequential in all of this to even be intruding.

The ever-shifting, dramatic weather matches her moods: sunny to gloomy and back, rain suddenly lashing the windshield, then blue skies again. I struggle to keep up.

On one long straightaway, she takes her headphones off and we blast ABBA, singing along. I tell her about the time when she was a toddler and we were singing this very song in the car. I somehow butt-dialed the chief of the fire department I’d just joined, and left a two-minute voicemail of the two of us belting out Take a Chance on Me. 

If you change your mind…

Yesterday we climbed a headland, something she’d spotted on the map and decided we should do. We clambered up the first 500 feet or so of steep switchbacks. The words came back to me, again: you would have loved this. And then: you would have loved seeing her, at this age. This beautiful, smart, hilarious, and complicated girl, who is deep in the trenches of figuring things out, so often feeling like it’s all too much.

She scampers ahead of me up the goat trail, looking like a babushka with a yellow scarf wrapped around her head to block the icy wind. We’re driving several hours every day, so I’m grateful to be able to move my legs. As we near edges, I walk cliffside of her, as always. 

Everything around us, the vastness, the volcanic landscape, the emptiness with miles-long swaths of ice, reminds me of death, of impermanence. But in that comforting way, the way that geological scale makes you feel your own insignificance. My little problems, my grief—my life—all feel… not like nothing, exactly, but held in the midst of something so much bigger. Merged.

My daughter and I are alike in this. Peering out at an approaching curtain of rain as we stop for a quick sip of water, she casually mentions what she wants done with her body after she dies, which is a startling thing to hear from one’s child. I try not to flinch as she tells me conspiratorially about the time she mentioned to her maternal grandpa her desire for a natural burial—to become fertilizer for a tree. This understandably silenced him, as it now silences me. “He could not deal,” she says, laughing.

“It doesn’t matter,” she tells me, as we start up the trail again. “You won’t be around, as I’m planning on living to 90.” This feels better, more remote. Still, I’d prefer 95. 100. Maybe we don’t need to put a number on it. 

Now that you’re gone, I often think of what you’re missing with her, this granddaughter of yours. There’s a video on my phone of her playing piano and singing last week, back in New York, in front of 130 people. I was twenty feet away, enrapt, teary. A friend sent me the video afterward, and my first thought was that I couldn’t wait to send it to you. She’ll love this, I thought, before I remembered.

We reach the top of the headland, your granddaughter and I, our perch overlooking a flat, gray sea on one side, a vast horseshoe of glaciers and mountains on the other. An Arctic wind cuts into both of us, making us zip our collars up and bow our heads. I think of you. I want to tell you how much I loved the landscapes on our drives together. 

The words come to me now, over and over: 

Look how beautiful

Thanks so much for reading.

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