The day I almost died: An Icelandic dream come true

I’m twenty-three, broke, and impulsive. Two of my friends randomly asked me if I wanted to take a trip to Iceland in three weeks. Despite the fact I had to max out all my credit cards, I still responded with a unequivocal and resounding “YES PLEASE!” and on October 12th, we booked our tickets. We made plans to embark on a week-long road trip around the country’s famous Ring Road: a highway that circles the entire country around its rim.

Now, we knew well in advance navigating Iceland in the winter would not be easy. High season is during the months of June to August — Iceland sees very little tourism during the rest of the year, and for good reason. During the fall, winter, and spring, Iceland’s weather is highly unpredictable and even dangerous. But we made infallible preparations to tackle the weather. We would get a four-wheel-drive SUV with snow chains, and tons of thermal underwear. We thought we were going to be absolutely fine. I mean, what could go wrong?

Well, a few budget cuts later, it turned out we could only afford a tiny, two-wheel-drive sedan with mediocre snow tires. But whatever, it was cute and red and had four doors, which we all know is the real priority here. Plus it was only early winter.

Fast forward three weeks and we’re right outside of Reykjavik, the country’s capital. We’ve got our lovely rental car, the weather is a comfy 50 degrees, and my friends and I are laughing in disdain at the poor fools who were conned into shelling out hundreds of dollars on a four-wheel-drive SUV. We laughed, we cried and we saw some amazing things — waterfalls, grassy plateaus, rolling fields of wheat — basically the real-life version of those pictures you see on Upworthy articles that tell you to travel a lot. We were cruising those first two days.

Then day three comes. It starts to get cold. The temperature is in the 20s and we can’t stop shivering in the car. We should have bought that thermal underwear (did I mention that we had to cut that out of the budget too?) And the snow chains started to seem like a really good idea.

It turns out that as your elevation increases, the weather gets exponentially worse. And we had plans to go real high up, because apparently the prettiest parts were yonder, in the heavens.

In Iceland, F-roads, also called “The Highlands,” are roads that are not maintained because they are rarely traversed due to their extremely high elevation. In fact, a car isn’t even allowed on these roads unless it is an SUV with four-wheel-drive. I wish I could say my friends and I didn’t know this, but it said so on the dashboard of our rental car.

At the beginning of the first (and only) F-road we went on, there was a sign that said “Impassable” with a teensy little sedan just like ours, but with a giant X going through it. We knew what we were doing, and we went for it anyway.

We should have known to turn back when we noticed only two cars passing in about three hours, and both had snow tires the size of our entire sedan. We should have turned back the first (or second, or third) time our car made a horrible crunching sound as it dipped into a ditch or got hitched on a massive rock. We should have turned back when we realized driving through “puddles” half the the height of our car was becoming the norm. But it was not until we realized there was nothing around us for dozens of miles but a whited-out sky and enormous, snow-covered mountains, and the “road” we were driving on had become nothing more than the icy side of a mountain, that we realized we should turn back. By then, it was too late — we had to make it to a city before nightfall.

We did not die. We actually did not even need emergency help. We did, however, drive along an extremely steep, narrow, and icy ledge that dropped off into a frozen lake hundreds of feet below, and we slid. Towards the lake. We almost stalled in four different mini-rivers. And we came out of the eight-hour ride around what might as well have been Mount Everest completely different human beings. We were, first and foremost, completely and utterly bewildered by how brutal and remote some parts of our little planet Earth could be. Beautiful, yes, but brutal.

This, folks, is what I like to call “The Invincibility Delusion.” A lot of tourists have this delusion, it would seem. In fact, Iceland has a nationwide volunteer rescue team of over ten thousand members founded solely to respond to emergency situations like the one we almost had. The organization, called the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue, or ICE-SAR for short, most often responds to emergencies that are prompted by ill-prepared explorers of the nation’s interior. They rescue people and their cars from rivers, lakes,  ditches, avalanches and runaway glaciers. The overwhelming majority of these cases, according to records, involve tourists in rental cars not properly suited for the Icelandic terrain. Sound familiar?

As students in the largest city in the world, few of us are aware of how to cope with circumstances more daunting than walking around Times Square while dodging comedy pushers. Crossing Park Avenue is the most dangerous part of our day-to-day lives. And so, we go to countries like Iceland very poorly equipped to make decisions involving the dangerous, or physically threatening. Americans are not alone — the pool of hundreds of tourists that ICE-SAR rescues yearly includes French, Australian, British and Japanese tourists, plus many more.

But this knowledge provides an eye-opening insight: there are many parts of the world where human construction and development has blinded us to the realities of the planet we live on. Earth did not just come with those nicely-paved streets, sturdy buildings and aptly-placed street lights.

New York was once a forest with endless flora and fauna, South American countries have their foundations in a dangerous jungle and Reykjavik, Iceland’s modernized capital, was once a snowy mountaintop. Icelanders know the rest of the world isn’t as exposed to the immensity of the Earth’s elements — that’s why they’ve made a rescue team of thousands. They have a knowledge of a secret part of the world that very few people come in contact with. They probably find it pretty funny to think that most of the world resides in a nicely-carved bubble, safely nestled in the beautiful and destructive “Delusion of Invincibility.” But we’re not invincible — the Earth is, with all its mountainous crags and millions of gallons of water, snow, and ice, just waiting to flush you away.