The Wedding Glacier
A creaking wooden dock on the shore of Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon in southeast Iceland at 3:15 PM, where a rented string quartet is tuning up on a flatbed truck and a school-bus-sized chunk of ice has just calved off the glacier and is drifting directly toward the ceremony site.
Double and Bust are co-best-men at their friend Katla's outdoor wedding, which is supposed to start in 22 minutes on a floating pontoon platform anchored 40 meters from shore. The iceberg — roughly 9 metric tons of translucent blue ice — is rotating slowly in the current and, by everyone's best guess, will reach the pontoon in about 19 minutes. The officiant is already on the platform. The bride is in a camper van doing her veil. A local boat operator says he can try to nudge the berg off course with his 14-foot aluminum skiff, but he wants 380,000 króna up front and "no promises." Double wants to pay the man, get on the boat, and help push. Bust wants to move the entire wedding onshore in the next 20 minutes.
“It's nine tons, the boat's got a motor, and I've pushed heavier things out of my life — we nudge it ten degrees and Katla gets her dream wedding on the water.”
“You want to fistfight a glacier in a rented suit for a ceremony that could just happen fifteen meters to the left on solid ground?”
Double and the boat operator made it 25 meters before the skiff's propeller tangled in a garland of floating wedding bunting, killing the engine — the nine-ton berg drifted silently into the pontoon at roughly walking speed, folding it like a taco and dunking the officiant waist-deep into 2°C glacial water while the string quartet played Pachelbel's Canon from the safety of the flatbed.
The berg actually slowed down right before impact, so technically we almost had it.
Katla got married onshore in eleven minutes flat, the officiant performed the vows wrapped in a horse blanket, and somehow it was the most Icelandic wedding I've ever attended.