Atlantica - 01.06.2006, Page 77

76 AT L A N T I CA
‘Uh oh...My front wheel just won’t turn
quick enough,’ I think. “Uh...!” and I
am flying over my handlebars. My shoulder
hits the soft moss – just off to the side of the
rocks that had me turning my front tire so
frantically – and my rented mountain bike
bounces over me. I slide for a bit and when I
get up, unhurt and laughing, my waterproof
pants are red with mud from the volcanic
hillside.
Behind and above me is the steep decline
which the Icelandic Mountain Biking Club
has led me down. Below is a deep green
stream, algae rich and steaming, heated
by fissures filled with boiling water from
somewhere in the earth’s belly. I’m a few
kilometers from Hveragerdi, a town east of
Reykjavík where geothermal power has been
harnessed to warm greenhouses growing
bananas and mangos. But the jets of steam
across the valley I see are anything but con-
trolled.
The earth is not just rugged; it’s alive, and
I’m riding it on a mountain bike.
“Freyr is in,” said Gudbjörn Margeirsson in
the Icelandic Mountain Biking Club’s head-
quarters, an old fire station that the City says
is uninhabitable because it now serves as a
power transformer.
I guess the ever-present threat of electro-
cution is just an afterthought when you spend
your free time hurdling down lava fields and
riding over glacial rivers. In the week that I’ve
been in contact with Iceland’s mountain bik-
ing community, I’ve learned there is a hierar-
chy: the tough guys whose daredevil biking is
legendary, and the others who ride Reykjavík’s
extensive bike paths in awe of the heroes.
By the way Gudbjörn spoke about him, I
thought Freyr would be one of those heroes:
all legs, scarred from mountain bike adven-
tures in the Icelandic outback. I was about to
take three rides with the legends of the island,
and measure how I stack up.
Two days later, with bikes rented, the
photographer and I arrive at the designated
gas station outside of Reykjavík where the
ICELANDa
Reykjavík
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