Two Jews in Iceland (part II)

...did I mention that Iceland looks like a place that wakes up at weird times, as if from a dream, as if it is an American man waking up at 3 a.m. in a hotel room in the middle of The Atlantic and not knowing where he is in the first few moments of his waking?

Somewhere between Vik and Kirkjubaejarklaustur on the road to Vatnajokull, which you may remember is the largest glacial mass in all of Europe, a gray unmoving speck appeared on the road ahead. The speck became larger and larger the closer my car came to it until it became a large gray car--a 1972 4-door Volvo sitting on the gravelly roadside in the Middle of Nowhere, Iceland.

I stopped, pulled to my side of the road. The old Volvo was a mess--dented, grimy--and the front left tire was sitting on its rim. It looked like it had been abandoned.

Then the car door opened, first the passenger side and then the driver's, and two young women emerged. They'd been touring Iceland for a month in a friend's car. The tire had blown out about a half-hour ago. They didn't know what to do.

We got the jack out of the trunk. The tire bolts were rusted solid on the tire and only by putting my full weight on the lugwrench did they start to turn at all. I noticed that the tire--all the tires--had no tread at all, were worn down to thin rubber and wire. It took me 15 minutues to fit the rusty jack to the undercarriage of the car and crank the recalcitrant jack.

On my knees on the pebbly tarmac that is Iceland's main road, the girls clustered around me, having gone from desolation to hope, they told me they were from Israel. They'd been in Iceland a month, driving the ring road around the island, and were on their way back to Reykjavit to fly home to Haifa. Both were engineers, one preparing for her Ph.D. I was a little surprised at their apparent helplessness, and the fact that they'd driven on such a serious road with such bad tires, but chalked it up to two young women being on a lark and trusting the universe. As I worked one girl said to the other, "you were bored, you wanted to have an adventure, and now this has happened."

I jacked the tire as high as I could until it became clear that the front axle had collapsed and the car's problem was much more profound than a flat tire. I asked the girl's if they had a cellphone. One of them reached inside the Volvo, now precariously perched by the side of the road, while I prayed the car wouldn't collapse on her, and pulled out a backpack. "I think you're going to have to call for help," I said. "Not only do you have a flat tire, but I think your axle's busted which prevents me from lifting the car high enough to extract the tire."

They took the news with surprising equanimity, an almost surreal calm. Once we found the number to call for roadside emergency,  I wished them well, walked over to my rental car, and drove toward Vatanjokull. I hiked around the glacier for 3 days, once getting high enough on the ice field to believe I could see the road down below in the great distance where I'd met the Jewish girls. I thought about them, not only with the full faith that they'd somehow gotten the professional help they needed, but with the knowledge that I was in a country where almost anything could happen, where the earth was every bit as alive as its people.