I had been awake for twenty-two hours when I pulled into the car park at Seljalandsfoss.
Red-eye from Seattle on the inaugural Alaska Airlines flight, no sleep. The kind of tired that sits behind your eyes and makes the world feel slightly unreal. I stepped out of the car and the wind hit me like a physical fact — not a suggestion, not weather, but something with intention. Then the rain, (which I should be used to, living in Seattle) but Iceland rain hits different. I could hear the thunder and spray from the waterfall before I could fully see. You could feel the sound.
I was soaked within minutes; thank goodness for good gear! The roar of the water into its basin was so complete it replaced thought.
I walked behind the waterfall anyway.
Standing in that curtain of water and mist, drenched, wind-battered, running on nothing — I was more awake than I had been in months. Not the jittery awake of caffeine or anxiety. Something older. The kind of awake that your nervous system produces when it decides that this is real and everything else has been a rehearsal.
Then I found the smaller waterfall tucked around the bend. The one most people miss. And I laughed out loud, alone, in the rain, because Iceland had already given me a bonus and I’d been on the ground for less than two hours. And this was just the beginning.
I had expected the midnight sun, but what I got was gray. Constant, layered, textured gray — and no darkness at all, which is a different and stranger thing than I had imagined. Not light exactly. Just the absence of night. The sky never went black. It shifted through pewter and silver and a particular shade of pale that has no name in English, and then it was morning again without the ceremony of sunrise. Again I’m used to gray living in Seattle, but the shades of silver and gray that fight amongst themselves was a unique experience.
What I hadn’t expected was the fog.
It moved like it was alive. I watched it slither over the mountains, pouring over ridgelines and into valleys, and something about it felt — this is the word that keeps coming back — comforting. As if the landscape was pulling a blanket over itself. As if the mountain didn’t need to be seen to know it was there.
Iceland in one word: raw.
Raw in the geological sense — young land still being made, volcanic and restless and indifferent to human timescales. Raw in the sensory sense — wind that doesn’t ask permission, cold that has texture, silence that has weight. Raw in the emotional sense: I cried. More than once. Not from sadness but from the particular overwhelm of being in the presence of something that operates entirely outside human scale and simply doesn’t care whether you’re keeping up.
There is neurological science for this. Awe — the specific emotion triggered by vastness that exceeds our cognitive frameworks — activates the default mode network and temporarily quiets the self-referential processing that makes up most of what we call thinking. In plain terms: awe makes you stop narrating your own life for a moment. It’s one of the most restorative states a human brain can enter, and it is genuinely rare.
Iceland is an awe machine.
Further east, I was driving across a bridge toward Jökulsárlón, focused on the road, thinking about the zodiac tour I had booked. Then there was a glint to the left. Ice blue. Impossible blue. The specific blue that doesn’t exist in most of the world. I turned my head (I know, while driving) and my jaw dropped. Literally. I felt it happen. And then I remembered I was driving on a bridge and I had to actively return my eyes to the road because my brain had simply stopped cooperating with anything that wasn’t what I had just seen.
Icebergs, floating in the lagoon, this ancient ice calved from a glacier, drifting slowly toward the sea, catching light in a way that made them look like they were lit from inside.
You never forget your first iceberg.
Not because it’s beautiful, though it is, devastatingly. But because it’s the first time you understand, in your body rather than your mind, that this planet has been doing things without you for an incomprehensibly long time. That ice chunk may be a thousand years old. The glacier it came from has been moving, slowly, for longer than recorded human history.
You are very small, and the world is very old. And somehow, for reasons your rational brain cannot fully account for, that is a profound relief.
Then I got in the zodiac.
They put us in full floaty suits, the kind that make everyone look equally ridiculous, equally human, and took us out among the icebergs themselves. The scale from the bridge had not prepared me. Nothing had prepared me.
Up close, an iceberg doesn’t make sense. Your brain keeps trying to categorize it, to fit it into something known, and it keeps failing. The color glints and shifts as you move around it; blue that has no business being that blue, lit from somewhere inside the ice itself. You stare, trying to resolve it into something comprehensible. You cannot. You just keep staring. The guide explains all of the science of the blue, but still, you stare.
Rain was hitting my face sideways, water dripping off the suit, in my eyes, my hair freezing. The zodiac weaved through channels between walls of ancient ice.
And then we rounded a bend and the glacier was just there.
Not a piece of it. This entire coming-at-you glacier. Arched and vast and impossibly, slowly present at the edge of the sea. The kind of scale that doesn’t register in photographs, and I say this as someone who photographs everything. I have the pictures; they are beautiful. They are completely inadequate.
There is no image that gives you what it is to be dwarfed by something that has existed for longer than any human story we tell about ourselves. To feel your own smallness not as diminishment but as fact. As relief, even. As the particular peace of being temporarily released from the weight of being the main character.
I laughed, dripping wet in my floaty suit, surrounded by thousand-year-old ice. Because, what else do you do.
I think about what I look for when I design travel for other people. Not comfort, though comfort matters. Not luxury at every moment, though luxury has its place. What I’m actually looking for is the category of experience that reaches a person below the level of the rational mind — in the part of the self that knows things before it can say them.
For some people, that category is ancient stone. For some it’s total silence. For some it’s being underwater, surrounded by something alive and indifferent and vast.
For me, apparently, it’s standing behind a waterfall in the rain on no sleep, laughing, soaked, more awake than I’ve been in months.
Iceland found that in me before I knew it was there. That’s what the best travel does.
Daniela Ferdico, PsyD
Evocative Travel Collection
