FINDING MAGNUS

In which a stranger nurtures a soon-to-be parent, & I semi-willingly find my footing

We all need a Magnus. Mine showed up on a fairly gnarly bike, cutting his way across the base of a mountain in Iceland.

My husband Sam and I were preparing to ascend the same mountain on foot. We were sorting through our last-minute purchases of cramp-ons to add to our insufficient boots (which were leaky, slippery, & poorly insulated, but LOOKED GREAT) and some telescoping hiking poles we’d never tried (very nice colors).

Magnus had just descended from the summit on four-inch diameter tires over fine, dry drifts of snow and loose, cobble-like rock. There was ice in his beard. (He smiled at us! Maybe we were doing something right!?)

He introduced himself as a small-town local. “I am staying at home dad,” he said, “so I am coming here four days per week while my girls are at school. I have three girls,” he added, with unchecked tenderness, which made me decide immediately to name my future son Magnus. (I did not, but only because I have a husband.)

Meanwhile, back in the US, our twin babies were gestating inside my friend Laura. I had tried my hand at pregnancy before and gone down in spectacular flames. Hoping to avoid a second apocalypse, we had entrusted gestational duties to someone eminently capable of pregnancy, selflessness, and not going bonkers while two humans comprised of other people’s DNA grew in her belly. Of course, we should have been back at home with Laura and our grapefruit-sized amphibious progeny in case anything happened, but we were abroad right then specifically because so much was about to happen.

To be clear, though the purpose of the outing was to climb a mountain, I am not a fan of heights. My butt tries to climb my spine when I look down over a distance of more than eight feet. But at that time I was just beginning to develop a sort of careening, semi-morbid interest in what bodies are capable of (the kind of fascination that eventually leads to ultramarathoning), so climbing a strange mountain that day, with questionable gear, seemed pretty much on point.

Sam punctuated the huffing conversation as we climbed with the word “summit” as often as possible. I believe he was hoping to inure me to the final part of the climb by employing his own brand of verbal exposure therapy. We’ll be to the summit before three… looks like it’s clear at the summit… summit’s not far now… summit summit summit…

After a while I stopped listening, and kept my ears doggedly on the reassuring crunch of the gravel and snow under me. That sound meant that my feet were still connecting with the ground, not sliding out into the thousands of feet of air around and below us. It sort of worked. I gritted it out through the first three-quarters of the ascent, reasoning that it wasn’t likely many people had died here because there weren’t any informational bulletins about it in the parking lot.

When we got to the really high part, where everything was coated in ice, it was time to whip out our fancy new cramp-ons and wrestle them over our flimsy boot soles. I pretended that the wobbling rock I sat on while I dug through my pack was on flat ground. You wouldn’t fall walking on a path this narrow if it ran through the woods at home, so why would you fall now? I asked myself, with feeble cheer, over and over, after we got up and began, finally, to approach the summit.

The rocks at the top, where the wind had scoured the snow away, were a bright, sulfur yellow, a tourist attraction in summer. This was late October, and it was clear we were the only ones on the mountain, since we’d watched Magnus drive away before we began our ascent, with me feeling perhaps just a tinge of regret that he hadn’t offered to take Sam up the mountain himself while I stayed safely at sea-level to consider such geological wonder as was easily accessible to the enthusiastic parking-lot tourist with binoculars.

Before he left, though, like the father he was, Magnus had casually mentioned a nasty but all-too-common bout of weather, and some tourists who had been foolish and tried to keep going when there was no visibility. (The implication seemed to be that they’d fallen off a cliff and died, but his understated delivery made it hard to tell. I was hoping they’d just gotten very scared and really learned their lesson.) Oh, we assured him, we certainly wouldn’t do that.

At the summit, the wind was blowing maybe thirty to forty knots, which made it hard to stand up without being blown back down. We crouched and crawled to the final peak. Our fingers froze into numb little tapping machines as we fumbled to take pictures. But we got our mementos, and the wind remained regular mountaintop wind. No “real” weather ever came. (How much of our success on that trip was a result of sheer dumb luck, and how much we built from our decisions and abilities, I’ll never know. It turns out that roughly the same is often true with parenting.)

Why did meeting Magnus, who spoke few words in aggregate, but demonstrated thoughtful concern and a breezy kindness, leave such a mark in my memory? There are likely many reasons, including the receptiveness that rugged landscapes, distance from home, and the vulnerability of uncertainty can cultivate.

But what it boils down to, I think, is that a stranger was kind to me. The fact that I felt surprise, relief, gratitude, and fascination because of Magnus’s brief friendliness a) belies my belief that I am somehow alone in the world, and b) plucks and flings that belief as the parasite it is.

I have since expanded my understanding of meaningful connection to include, simply, “the free and willing provision to others of what they may need, irrespective of past or possible future interaction.” Though of course I value and prioritize the hard work of long-term individual relationships, I think there’s something rather clever about allowing intimacy to arise in unexpected, odd, and transitory spaces. For some, the possibility that moments of closeness can arise and transform on the fly, without any preparation other than general willingness, is joyful news. 

So, if you are a person who could use that news, imagine me dispatching your Magnus right now. He’s on his way to the mountain already— he didn’t even stop to pack his PBJ. All you have to do is scan the horizon now and then. Look for a flicker against the snow.