Valerie Bonham

This morning’s travel adventure (which is probably better experienced on a tablet than on a phone) is to Iceland’s Thingvellir National Park which is rather a bleak landscape on the surface, but is the accessible site of two tectonic plates. The direct experience of the plates is in the Silfra fissure where, next to a van in the Icelandic outdoors, visitors can don wetsuits and fins, and then penguin-walk to the entry stairs so they can snorkel between the plates. Bless those staunch visitors and their cameras!

When I saw that first Facebook photo of a diver floating in an underwater chasm and “touching Europe and North America,” I thought the diver was in the sea. Where the diver and photographer really were might be called a large creek in the Icelandic wilderness — the Silfra fissure — where crystal clear glacial meltwater runs to the sea. Still fascinating, but no ocean is involved.

Once the suit-clad snorkelers are in the water and between the plates, their experience must be like that of birds gliding between mountain peaks — really, really close peaks. Those magic moments are brought to us at home by the equal magic of tech: our gizmos, the Internet, the Go-Pro cameras, Google’s map service and, of course, electricity. The magic is now so everyday, but the parts all combine to form the palantirs of our time.

If you visit the Google map site linked above, you’ll still need to click around to find the videos: clicking Photos and then Videos seems to be reliable, but there are always gremlins. Or click on the map to get to the Google Street View walker. It seems to come up different each time.

The writers for the Museum of American Military Families (MAMF) have produced yet another volume in the series of military memoirs, Host Nation Hospitality. This latest book focuses, in their own words, on the experiences abroad of American military families. We leave the greater sociological examination of a post-WW2 worldwide diaspora of military forces to other writers and instead tell the everyday stories of our lives outside the US, going not always where we would have chosen, but, as always, where our fathers, mothers, or spouses were needed.

In the line of books produced by the Museum, the focus is exclusively on the experiences of people affiliated with the American military, but experiences that don’t often get much airplay. In this book, the memoir stories come from around the world remembered by American military family members and by servicemembers themselves. The stories come from all the continents except Antarctica. They come from writers who were children or young adults during World War Two, through the Cold War and Vietnam, through the drawdown years after the Cold War, through the two decades in east Asia, and on up to writers from the present day. The stories range from the comical, to the poignant, to the disastrous. They are the stories of our lives.