We have lowland expectations, looking west towards the rising hills, and beyond.  Even less of Dooley.  The gnarled, cracked stoney abutments protect the foothills, the mountain behind. Black stone, white , dark lowering clouds. Promises, threats. Secretive.

Blue mountains smudge in the distance. Why blue? the sky is blue and probably the air is blue, says Dooley. He shrugs.

The salmon come in from the Atlantic, and go back after.  He dreams of this. Rich soil, teeming waters, an idyllic childhood drivng his snowmobile, a Yamaha imported from Canada. This is a promising, lush and dangerous land. 

He tells us of the land.  A bush, a shrub - when you have nothing else it looks like a tree to you. The height of man. Elborg volcano, craters everywhere. Eruption unexpectedly whenever, wherever. Lava fields of broken blackrock, sand and silicate. Precarious farmhouse adventures. Exhilarating, beautiful, impermanence. Inviting, the siren call of a dark hill, touched with sunlight suggests an escape from gloom and worry. Sparkly arctic lupin as far as the eye can see. 

He tells us that country people feel safe, protected from the violence and pressure of the city. He remembers buying flowers and three little trees to plant with his mother on their garden, a new thing available from an enterprising neighbour.  Naive,sweet, innocent. 

He is mesmerised by the power of technology, amazed and disbelieving.  This is why we have so many tourists in Icelance, he opines.  They search and find a crevice on Google Earth to flock to, imagining lines of yellow waterproof anoraks trudging inside. He doesn't mind as long as they spend money.

In the minibus, his seat is sprung to cope with the rough two lane unmarked tarmac. He bounces, unperturbed by the jolt and twist of the road. Country people like talking, he adds. The lonely green roofed Lutheran church looks like a monopoly board piece. Craters like broken pustules abound. Black fingered aged ash falls, creeping dark green mats between, feeding on new earth. Rich, luscious. Grey moss, blueberries. Life from loss. Mountain grass soup. Sheep with horns and long shaggy coats sleeping contentedly beside a black wood church on a lava field. Tar, not paint. Deceptive and fierce, both.  

The swans are summer birds, fly here in May. Nice to hear the summer birds singing, says Dooley., in his gentle icelandic lilt. They coo in the shadows of violence, mate and nest in the valleys of lava fields. Float in ponds of spring meltwater. 

Random small hills bulge like pustules. Ready to burst. Bodir. People walking into the cracks between the mountains.Black rock lava fields of stone cooling in waves, a moment of time captured millions of years ago. Sudden, an eruption under an icecap. The shock, unseen, unheard. Unimaginable forces. Faces of trolls captured in profile emerging from waves of magma. He tells of the trolls with a dry cynical humour masking his excitement at their possibility. 

Endless lava fields, endless volcanoes, craters, magma trails, white lichen, moss, and the cycle of planetary repair.  I feel like we are watching geological evolution in practice, my photos of young volcanoes snaps of an adolescent planet's acne, wildly out of control angry and hormonal, bubbling beneath the surface. Pressure building. Earthquakes the trembling anxiety of change. A rash.

When we reach the coast, black oily water swirls from out on the North Atlantic, breaking frothy and frosty on black rocks teeming with arctic tern, gulls, a  handful of black cormorants looking forlorn. 

Orka means energy.  Orkan petrol stations, dreams of gleaming hunting whales  powering their way through the shining sea. Surprise curves of black sand beaches, sparkling icy water, powerful landscape, timescale, earth's memory. Little exclamation marks of red spires on remote country churches beside the ocean, vulnerable and spare. 

Boulders, massive and black, line the bridges between fresh and salty water, cuts across the bays. Red iron stained mountains hinting at the earth's riches. 

I suspect he makes up the numbers but they might as well be real.  There, an ice cap 10,000 years ago, which I privately think was basically a blink of the planetary eye.  Ice, 2km deep covered the land. All the land, all of Iceland. More, maybe. Dooley grins and shrugs. 

His thoughts meander.  He tells us of little villages, where "people just stay. It's different what people like to get out of life. No big ideas, just being happy.  Maybe they walk to work, walk home, just relax and watch TV and don't want to do anything more. But some travel, want to see what's out there. People are different, all good as long as they have a good time, "says Dooley. Like hobbits, I think. He likes seeing people just having a good time.

He waxes proud and elemental as he tells us of Greenland shark meat hung to rid it of poison, consumed for oil but not a meal. Smells.  You learn to get along with it, he smiles. This makes sense to him. He tells us, "the first time we ate salad, mama said we are supposed to eat this, it is good for us, healthy." Dooley still harbours suspicion of salad, and thought it was meant for the rabbits. 

Later he talks of eruption under the ice, under the glaciers, where the only evidence you see are huge floods of water leaking from the underside of the ice.  Huge floods, concrete bridges washed away, a quiet revolution, change we don't see coming.  Secret eruptions. You never know what's going on under the surface.  Assume trauma. What triggers are we pulling now?

Dooley's grandmother lived in a turf house untill 1958, never went to school. She learned to read from visitors bringing something new, or they helped each other, "we figured it out" she told him.  Communal.   Dooley thinks about the old farmers, country people fishing and hunting, salmon in summer and  ice fishing for lake trout in winter. A memory remnant of a time past. A connection with nature every time he drinks from a mountain stream. He reads the rivers. Sleeping out at night, watching the stars and the Northern lights. "It gives you a connection, an experience you cannot put into words."  I suddenly feel the absence of this.  He goes into himself for a moment, and the road wanders on.

What happened in these turf houses, in the dark, unseen,unheard?  What eruptions were triggered?  Heat from only the animals. Sleeping naked.  Endless silences and the drama  of the sky and the land for entertainment.  Lie in the snow to watch the stars, and dream. Singing and dancing in the living room, guitar and violin, what secrets did your mother hold?