you must be this tall to ride this ride

Vetrarsólstöður. Just now the blue glow is creeping up from behind the mountains on Reykjanes after the longest night of the year. Candles are flickering in the coffee room.

The shortest day brought a nasty little thaw and sloppy rain that curdled the snow where it lay and turned it into a sullen mess of cottage cheese that sucked at your feet as you walked about the city. But the shortest day was blessedly short, and with the further fall of night, the temperature dropped again. This made of course for instant treacherous slickness everywhere as meltwater became glassy black ice. The wind came up and drove the last of the fine snow along the streets in long, shifting skeins like wool being carded by the thin spirits of winter.

But that wind settled, and then the swirling hundslappadrífa (snow falling in clots the size of a dog's paw) was lovely against the dark, especially as viewed from below, through glass, with a glass of red wine in hand. Today the town is white again, slowly turning blue. The sun will come up a little ways back, rather than further, on the path it has taken all winter.

That's what vetrarsólstöður is: the stopping place of the rising sun in its progress along the horizon before it marches back again. The Icelandic word has nothing to do with light and dark and all to do with the solar path as viewed from rather high up on the bowed surface of the third planet. We were just yesterday at an outermost point of earth's complicated, annual, carnival trajectory. The little spinning boat is still for an instant and you gape out at the lights of the fair and the illuminated faces of the nearest fair-goers before the gears engage and the arm of the machine jerks you back. And you gasp as the little boat spins again, now suddenly the other way, jamming you against your friend there beside you, and both of you laugh in terror and delight.