In 1973 a United States Navy DC plane ran out of fuel and crashed on the South coast of Iceland.
Lieutenant Gregory Fletcher, a 26-year-old pilot in training who had only flown 21 hours in a C-117, grabbed the controls of the plane and made a forced landing on the black beach at
Sólheimasandur.
– “I knew we were flying somewhere over Iceland, but I swear that thing looked like the goddamn
moon”, he said.
Fortunately, everyone in that plane survived.
I hate to interrupt at this dramatic point of the story, but there are a couple of things you should know before I continue.
First, is that during the summer months in Iceland there’s something you’ve maybe heard of called “the Midnight Sun”. This means that the daylight hours are endless. Yes sir, there is no night. When midnight arrives, the sun barely deigns to touch the horizon line and stays there like if it were doing some kind of strange dance surrounded by beautiful lights. Only three hours later, resumes its path to the highest, leaving us, poor mortals, with the most beautiful sunrise of our lives.
And this keeps happening over and over again, every day, causing us this need, like an addiction that pushes us to travel only by night. While others sleep, we stay awake and keep driving to not miss a second of this wonderful show.
The second thing you should know is that after midnight, the roads along the coast belong to the fog. It’s just a matter of minutes. A great mass of white mist rushes and assails land like an ancient giant conquering new territories. We were there just to witness it and there was nothing we could do about it. Suddenly, we were surrounded by nothingness in the strangest land.