Fun with Elves

Iceland has elves--well, they call them the Hidden People there--everywhere. There's a guy at the Ministry of Transportation whose job is to make sure the roads don't piss off the elves. They're real, they're all over the place, and they're a force to be reckoned with.

I was off hiking through a field of obsidian boulders the size of small cars. The ground was a weird orange color, and off in the distance, there was smoke coming from a volcanic vent.

Iceland is maybe the most beautiful place in the world. The light there would make Rembrandt dig out his eyes with a dull spoon, because he'd know he could never paint it.

Along the way, I saw a small, orange rock, with a perfect ring of obsidian chips around its equator. Think a kid's dream model of Saturn.

I picked it up, started to carry it away. It told me, in no uncertain terms, that it wanted to go back where it had come from. I can't explain this, but it happened. The rock didn't want to go.

There are, oddly enough, a lot of stories about this kind of thing in Japan. People moving Buddhist images, and then the image becomes too heavy to move, because it has reached the place where it wants to be.

Everything knows its place. Screw entropy. Everything knows.

So I put the rock back down.

A couple days later, I was on Mt. Hekla. Cool place, a traditional gateway to hell, the volcano they used in the movie version (not the book, though) of Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was highly influential to me as a kid. Both book and the Pat Boone movie.

So, on the mountain, I reached down, picked up a small piece of pumice, stuck it in my pocket.

That night, back in Reykjavik, I emailed a friend, told him what I'd done. Next day, his reply said, "Oh, I wish I'd known you were going there, I would have had you pick up a rock for me, that was my favorite movie when I was a kid."

So I thought about it for a second, wrote back, Look, I was there. That's enough for me. You can have the rock I picked up. I don't need anything but the memory of a perfect day.

Let me repeat this: I picked up a small piece of pumice. That was it. One. Small. Piece. Of. Pumice.

And a week or two later, when I reached into my pocket to send it to my friend, there were two there. No, the one didn't break. Two quite separate and distinct pieces of pumice.

All I can figure is, the second one--which sits on my desk now--was a thank you from the elves for putting the first rock back.

I don't have any other way to explain it.