The Bizarre Truth Read Free Page B

After 20 minutes, we see a Zodiac boat puttering over to us. It lands on the beach and off steps Pall. He’s a modern-day Viking: six feet tall, blond hair, 175 pounds, and shakes your hand with a grip that could crush pecans. Not big and muscley or long-haired with a horned Helga helmet, but he was clearly the kind of guy you just know can repair his own engines, build his own house, fight his way out of a bar brawl, and shoot the wings off a butterfly. He’s the kind of guy who would travel alone in a Zodiac, a fourteen-foot flat-bottom rubber boat, across five miles of open ocean from an uninhabited island to pick me up. Hot on Pall’s heels is a closed-cabin, twenty-foot cruiser with an inboard engine that will ferry the crew as they capture Pall and me having the “authentic” experience of taking the Zodiac to the island of Alsey, where his family has hunted for years.
    I was glad I put on my knee-high rubber boots that morning as I piled into his boat from the surf side. The crew has already headed out into the channel on the cruiser, headed toward a giant boulder looming in the distance. I’ve been in a Zodiac plenty of times, so I plopped down on the edge of the craft on the gunwale, just as I did as a little kid puttering around the inner harbors of the South Fork of Long Island. It’s the perfect vehicle for flat, calm water. Easy in, easy out. But today Pall instructs me to sit down on the floor of the boat itself, explaining that’s how it’s done in Iceland. I’m all confused—
What do you mean, sit on the flat bottom? In the water, no less?
And in his stern, Vikingly way, he says it again: Sit on the flat bottom. Next, he instructs me to wrap my arms around the ropes attached to the gunwales.
What do you mean, wrap my arms around the ropes?
He explains that I have to hang on tight unless I want to get thrown out of the boat. It is then that I begin to get a brief idea of what the afternoon will hold for me. He turns toward me, sees the look on my face, and a huge grin spreads across his, because he can clearly see I’m fucking shit-face petrified. After a moment of pure self-satisfaction, he tells me, “Today will be a great test of your manhood.” And he goes back to staring out at the horizon as he guides the boat out of the quiet water and into the rolling seas.
    When you’re in a fourteen-foot flat-bottom Zodiac in rolling waves, maybe about eight or ten feet high, it’s like being stuck on the longest roller-coaster ride of your life. No life preservers. No radios. Just me and Pall the Viking, cranking down the engine as hard as it could go in this little rubber dinghy. Oh, and in case you forgot, we’re in Iceland. The water is just a degree above freezing. We are miles and miles from civilization as the crow files, at least ten miles from the nearest town. If you fall into that water, you’re a goner. You can’t survive; it’s just too cold. I say a prayer in my head.
    Out of nowhere, an entire pod of killer whales pops up next to us. All those friendly, Sea World—inspired killer whale images goright out the window when you see this thirty-foot monstrosity cresting the waves adjacent to your itty-bitty keel-less Zodiac. I am sitting so low in that boat that I am almost eye level with the water. The killer whales are right there. The immediacy of the situation was oddly thrilling, and I am not a ballsy guy by any stretch of the imagination. The fear that was on my face became more and more evident to Pall, who just kept smiling at me. I know he thought it was just hysterical that I was almost peeing my pants.
    We finally arrive at our destination after about a half an hour at sea, up the side of a wave and down the other side, repeat. The island looks like a giant round cylinder of granite rising straight up out of the water, topped with a grassy Kid ‘n Play haircut. As we got closer, I could see a wooden cabin built on stilts on the side of the cliff. And I think I can see Pall’s