From THE MUSEUM OF WHALES YOU WILL NEVER SEE by A. Kendra Greene, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020 by A. Kendra Greene.

Arrival

Lilja collects me from the airport bus under a gray morning sky and, swinging my bag into her little silver car, asks if I got her message not to worry about the volcano. “Because you shouldn’t, and it won’t affect your trip, and these things happen all the time.”

The whole  trans-Atlantic approach from Boston to Reykjavík takes less than five hours, which is scarcely time enough to fall asleep or start a third in- flight movie or convince yourself of the proper pronunciation of every unfamiliar letter in the Icelandic  alphabet—eth and thorn, especially—but it is apparently long enough to board an airplane and cross half an ocean without having any idea you are aimed straight at a sudden increase in seismic activity.

Not that it should be surprising. Just the  forty-  five minutes from the international airport to the bus terminal downtown is a misty drive through old lava fields and venting hot springs, a gradual accumulation of houses and buildings tracing the ocean’s edge of an island straddling two tectonic  plates—  an island that rose up from these waters in the first place precisely because of those plates, their penchant to slip and grind and spill their molten heart.

Lilja says, “Don’t worry about the volcano,” and in the same breath begins to describe the possibility of ash clouds and gas masks and helicopters plucking hikers from the mountains because there’s no better way to alert them that they may be in mortal peril.

She pulls up the national weather service’s website, teaches me to toggle from the outline of Iceland annotated with the forecast of rain, to the one predicting the visibility of the northern lights, to the dots and stars mapping a string of tiny earthquakes, every shift and shock detected for the last seventy-two hours. Mostly, on the map, they register not much more than a 3.0 on the Richter scale. I grew up along another shoreline, in California, and the freckling map prompts a certain kind of nostalgia, a tenderness for these almost imperceptible events.

I am to keep vigil, Lilja says. I am to refresh and refresh and refresh the map. It doesn’t matter that they are tiny, doesn’t matter that they are all but obscure. I am to watch whether the number of tremors waxes or wanes. I am to notice how their alignment is not random, every one of them a sign. I am to witness: Their accumulation, in fact, articulates the frontiers of fault line and fissure we cannot otherwise see. It describes those underpinnings shaping everything else. And, though we may tremble, it points us ever toward what may just happen next.

The ridgelines here are black rock or lupine laced, perhaps dotted with sheep, if not dusted with snow. Where there is shoreline enough I pick up sea glass and shards of china, walk past feathers and sometimes bones. I have come, I think it is right to say, because of the borders of this place. Because not just here but always, something happens at the edges.

I have come for the perimeter of territory staked out under the name “museum.” Because for all the museums I have worked for or volunteered at or interned with, for all the continents where I have been the museum visitor, I have never known a place where the boundaries between private collection and public museum are so profoundly permeable, so permissive, so easily transgressed and so transparent as if almost not to exist.

“So maybe don’t make plans until we know if the lava is melting the glacial ice, if the flood of all that water unbound will close the northern roads or the southern roads or, who  knows—it’s  happened—both.”

They say that if you’re baptized wrong, if the holy water does not wash over your eye, you may retain another sight, may see the elves even when they do not choose to reveal themselves to you. And I feel something of that old story here, that I have been given a glimpse of something extraordinary, hidden though it was there the whole time, interwoven amid everything else we see or know or put in our pockets or hold in our hands.

Sometime later, in the calm of a museum café, I will be chatting with a family visiting from my homeland, and I will tell them how the local  museum-studies professor puts the count at 265 museums and public collections in this country of 330,000 people, how that alone would be  astonishing—but remember almost all these places have been established in the last twenty years, like seeds dormant forever and then triggered at last by some great fire, some sharp snap of frost, to finally take root and bloom.

Amazing, they agree, though they sit there in the museum café, sipping their coffees, never leaving the antechamber for the exhibits within. Outside, the mist collects and recedes, gathers up and blows through, the world beyond the museum’s glass wall always there but veiled, disintegrating, fading in and out of perception’s reach.

“And anyway it doesn’t have to flood; it could spew ash. Maybe the crops die, maybe the sheep are poisoned, maybe you breathe through a washcloth and famine sparks the French Revolution.”

These are old forces. The magma and the tremors. The famine and the want. The way we love rocks and birds and old boats and brass rings, and the way we survive this world because of the stories we fashion from its shards. We do not just keep and collect things, amass and restore them. We trouble ourselves to repurpose, create, and invent things just to carry, a little easier, those stories we cannot live without. Enchantments and mysteries and monsters and—the woman on the cusp of transformation searching for her sealskin so she can return home, become again what she was before—this is what we have always held on to, this is how we lash ourselves to the mast. These are old forces—irresistible, shaping the world anew.

From THE MUSEUM OF WHALES YOU WILL NEVER SEE by A. Kendra Greene, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020 by A. Kendra Greene.