About four blocks from our hotel, the cab driver said, “This is good.” He stopped and asked us to pay him. We expressed an interest in his driving us all the way to our hotel, but he said, “No, it is too much. It is too, what do you say, too much stress.”
From my perspective, it didn’t seem too stressful to drive on these empty streets, but whatever, I’m not an expert in Icelandic driving. We got out of the cab and began wheeling our suitcases down a wide, abandoned sidewalk in central Reykjavík. What I remember most is the sound of our suitcase wheels on the sidewalk’s stone tiles, the noise overwhelming amid such silence.
And then, from nowhere and everywhere, simultaneously, came a shout followed by a groan. The entire city, hidden somewhere inside the buildings all around us, seemed to have made the exact same noise at the exact same moment.
“That was weird,” Ryan said, and we began speculating on why the city was locked down. Maybe there’d been some kind of weather threat that tourists weren’t made aware of. Maybe it was a national indoor holiday.
“Maybe,” Laura said, “they’re all watching the same thing on TV?”
And at that moment, the city’s silence burst apart. A tremendous roar erupted all around us. People poured out of every doorway—out of homes and stores and bars, and into the streets. They were screaming in exaltation, all of them, yelling, “YYYAAAAAAAAAA!” Many of them had their faces painted in the colors of the Icelandic flag, and quite a lot of them were openly weeping. A tall fellow around my age picked me up and held me up to the sky like I was Simba in The Lion King and then embraced me as he wept. Someone draped a scarf around Ryan’s neck.
“What the hell is happening?” Sarah asked, with her trademark precision.
Beers were handed around. We took some. The initial chaos of screaming soon organized itself into song, songs that were apparently very emotional, because everyone except for us was crying as they sang in the streets. Some people had to sit down on the curbs in order to sob properly. The crowd continued to swell. There are 120,000 people in Reykjavík, and they were all on the streets, all seemingly on this street. Making it to our hotel was an impossibility now. We were in the throng, amidst some great wave of human experience, and all we could hope for was to hold on to our suitcases. As one song ended and everyone began to shout again, I decided to try it myself. I lifted my unopened can of beer into the air and shouted “YAAAAAAA!” Although I did not know what we were celebrating, I felt exultant. I loved Iceland. I loved Reykjavík. I loved these people, whose tears and sweat smudged their red, white, and blue face paint.
Eventually, we were able to ascertain that Iceland had just secured its first-ever team Olympic medal, in the sport of men’s handball. I found myself wondering what event in my home country might lead to such shared celebrations. Cities celebrate when their teams win the World Series or the Super Bowl, but the only time I’d seen any public celebrations of a national event was in 1999, when the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team won the World Cup. I was living in the small town of Moose Pass, Alaska, that summer, working at a cafe. My colleagues and I were watching the game on a tiny TV in the corner of the shop, and after Brandi Chastain scored the winning penalty kick, I heard horns honking, and then a couple of minutes later, a single voice from somewhere in Moose Pass shouted, “FUCK YES AMERICA!”
I didn’t know much about men’s team handball,* but I am willing to get excited about almost anything in sports, and by the time we got to the hotel a couple of hours later, I considered myself a die-hard fan of Icelandic men’s team handball. I wanted to rest in the hotel and perhaps watch some highlights—the excitement of my beloved team winning an Olympic medal had exhausted me—but my compatriots insisted that we go out and soak in some Icelandic culture.
The crowd had thinned considerably, and it was still early in the day, so we visited a museum where we learned that because the Icelandic language has changed so little over the centuries, their classic sagas read like contemporary literature. We saw the chess table where Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in 1972. Later, we took a tour bus trip to the island’s interior, where endless plains of volcanic rock make it feel like you’re on another planet. Our tour guide extolled Iceland’s many virtues. “In Greenland it is always icy,” she said, “but here in Iceland the weather is quite mild. They should call Iceland Greenland and Greenland Iceland.” Then we all got out of the bus to observe a waterfall. It was fifty degrees Fahrenheit in August, and a cold rain was blowing at us horizontally, rendering umbrellas utterly useless.
Shouting to be heard over the wind, the tour guide said, “ICELAND HAS MANY NATURAL WONDERS AS YOU CAN SEE THIS WATERFALL IS VERY HISTORIC.” Even now, I cannot look at a waterfall without thinking, “Very historic.”
* * *
When we returned to the hotel around six, sopping wet and bone cold, I begged my friends for a quiet night in. We’d done so much. Couldn’t we just order room service and watch some handball highlights and go to bed? But no. The marrow had to be sucked out of life, and so I reluctantly followed my wife and friends out into what would’ve been the evening, except that in summertime Reykjavík, the sun doesn’t set until after ten.
We walked to B?jarins Beztu Pylsur, that hot dog stand Julie recommended, and stood in a surprisingly short line outside a small building decorated with an anthropomorphic frankfurter wearing a chef’s hat. I’d been told to order “one with everything,” and I did—a hot dog with remoulade, sweet mustard, and bits of fried onion. The hot dogs at B?jarins Beztu Pylsur are famous—they are featured in travel guides and TV shows. B?jarins Beztu Pylsur has been rated on a five-star scale by thousands of Google users, and like anything that has become exceedingly popular, there is widespread backlash. Many reviews point out that this is, after all, just a hot dog. “Nothing too special,” one wrote. “Not that good had better at a gas station,” reported a visitor named Doug.
Like Doug, I am often disappointed by much-hyped culinary experiences, perhaps because of the weight of expectation, and perhaps because I just don’t like food that much. And yet, I found the hot dog at B?jarins Beztu Pylsur not just worthy of the hype but, if anything, underappreciated. I don’t even particularly like hot dogs, but that hot dog was among the most joyous culinary experiences of my life.
* * *
A few months later, in the fall of 2008, an economic recession would sweep the globe, and Iceland would be among the nations hardest hit, with its currency declining in value by 35 percent in just a few months. As the recession took hold and credit markets froze, experts said we were experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime economic contraction, although as it happened, the next once-in-a-lifetime economic contraction was only twelve years away. We should get out of the habit of saying that anything is once-in-a-lifetime. We should stop pretending we have any idea how long a lifetime is, or what might happen in one.
And yet, I strongly suspect that our long day in Iceland really was once-in-a-lifetime. On the chilly summer day Iceland secured their first-ever summer Olympics team medal, I ate a hot dog while huddled with my friends. It was the greatest hot dog I’ve ever eaten. It cured my multiday hangover and cleared the film from my eyes and sent me out into the Reykjavík twilight feeling the kind of close-to-the-chest joy that can’t last—but also doesn’t need to.