On the ground floor of our house, just where the door leads to the porch, there hangs the large map of Iceland I bought last September when I ducked into a visitor center near the Malarrif Lighthouse to escape a sudden rainstorm. I pause at this map nearly every day, either sentimental about a family trip or hopelessly trying to retain names of places nearly impossible to pronounce. Lately my eye keeps landing on a spot called Bifrost.
We spent three nights in a rented house in Bifrost, taking day trips to places of such beauty they will remain in my consciousness forever. In Norse and Icelandic mythology, Bifrost is where a burning bridge connected Midgard, the world of humans, to Asgard, the world of the gods. Scholars argue about the iconography of this burning bridge. Some say it is Aurora Borealis, the brilliant lights universally associated with Iceland, and others claim it is the Milky Way. A third possibility, the one I like best, is that the burning bridge is a rainbow.
At home in Vermont when the conditions are right for a rainbow, we race from door to door and window to window, and we might see two or three of them in a good year. In Iceland the sky is bigger, the weather is mercurial, and rainbows are plentiful. There were days when we saw twenty or thirty of them, sometimes far away and sometimes close enough to nearly touch. The afternoon I bought my map we stood on a cliff by the Malarrif Lighthouse under a broad sky that included at once black squalls over the Atlantic, sunlight on the lighthouse, and a pair of spectacular rainbows arching over land and sea to the southeast.
Bifrost looked green and pastoral the day we arrived, a sharp contrast to the moon-scape Central Highlands where we had spent the previous night. There were sheep everywhere, and a river called the Nordura, where a fly rod and a $1000 permit will give you a good chance to catch a salmon. Without the Edda, people might not know that the way to the land of the gods goes right through Bifrost, where, yes, there were for us plenty of rainbows.
For a skeptic like me, gods are imaginary, created by humans, but the stories we tell about them throb with metaphorical truth. The literature I love descends from religious texts and alludes to them liberally, so the idea of an ineffable bridge between Earth and Heaven appeals to me as an abstraction even as it seems literally absurd. It suggests that there is more to this life than we know or have yet realized, and it suggests that imagination is a bridge with exciting and dangerous possibilities.
I don’t believe myths, folktales, or biblical stories in the literal sense, but their messages resound for me because they come in ambiguous stories filled with flawed people and suggest that the people we live amongst and the problems we face together are mysterious and complex. They are stories are about humility, failure, and hope in the possibility of finding new ways to solve old problems.
Is it any wonder that I find myself staring at a map in a time when in Washington and Tel Aviv and Moscow, in capitals all over the world, leaders dream at night about killing their enemies? What we see in our leaders – and now I am talking about Washington and both sides of the political divide– is a withering lack of imagination about how to solve problems. Immigration, income inequality, climate change, and public health are just a few of the challenges most Americans recognize; but look at the bizarre and partisan ways we address them with rockets and bombs and diplomatic trash talk, with memes and mockery, and rarely, if ever, with analysis and remedy. Our leaders behave like adolescents playing video games on a night before a chemistry exam.
The news I read, the news I hear on the radio, distresses me terribly, and beneath it all there is a subtext that screams, “Do something!” What I’d like to do is sneak into the White House and hang my map of Iceland upstairs in a hallway where an insomniac president is likely to roam late at night with his phone. What I imagine next is not the first or second or even the twelfth time he pauses at this map; maybe it’s the thirtieth time, long after he has confused the island with Greenland and decided he has to have it, long after he has stopped being annoyed by the tangle of letters in a name like “Kolugljufur.” This time is different because he sees the word “Bifrost,” one he can pronounce, and it makes him curious. He googles it on his phone and learns about the burning bridge between Midgard and Asgard.
It’s time for me to rub my eyes and admit I’m drafting my own folk tale, fanciful and absurd. But imagine a president whose curiosity and imagination are so stirred by a map that he continues to read about Iceland and learns that it is a country without an army. His first instinct is to see this as a sign of weakness, but it’s the time of night when insomniacs have doubts. “TOPEKA!” he gasps. “MAYBE I’VE BEEN WRONG ALL ALONG.”