AGAINST ALL ODDS A trans

VENTURE OUT

Against All Odds

A new film follows a trans woman’s quest be the first person to kayak solo around Iceland—against the current.

By Jacob Anderson-Minshall

Over 4,000 people have successfully climbed Mount Everest. Nearly 400 have summitted the dramatically more difficult and dangerous K2, the world’s second highest peak. And barely over a dozen people have successfully circumnavigated Iceland in a kayak, with even fewer having made it around the sub-arctic island nation solo kayaking on their own.

Attempts at that feat are rare thanks to a perfect storm of unpredictable weather, the short summer season, and the unforgiving North Atlantic Ocean that surrounds the island on all sides. Many previous attempts have ended in tragedy.

The new documentary, Against the Current, chronicles the efforts of an Icelandic woman, Veiga Grétarsdóttir, as she attempts to become the first person in history to solo circumnavigate her native land in a kayak while paddling against the current. She happens to be transgender. The comparison with summitting one of the world’s highest peaks comes from someone who knows from experience, Guðni Páll Voktorsson, one of the few Icelandic kayakers who has successfully circled the island. He calls Grétarsdóttir’s attempt to paddle 1,300 miles while battling the current, the equivalent of summiting K2. Just keeping up with the calories burned during long days of paddling can be a constant fight. Burning 5-7,000 calories a day Voktorsson says you’d need to eat 100 Snickers bars to keep up.

It is not a journey for the faint of heart. Covering the story, one newscaster says, “Of course, there will be a boat following you, in case something happens.”

“No,” Grétarsdóttir replies in her usual, almost brusque manner. She is a woman of few words. “I’ll be on my own.”

And so she is. She’s alone, except for a friend who accompanies her for a few days, and the filmmaker Óskar Páll Sveinsson who follows her journey, sometimes tracking her GPS, other times literally driving along the coast to follow her path and gather drone footage.

“He just followed me,” Grétarsdóttir recalls. “Day after day, sometimes he had a boat, but mostly he was just doing interviews on land and using his drone.”

There’s a point in the film where Grétarsdóttir is centered on the screen. She talks about kayaking alongside Látrabjarg, one of Europe’s largest seabird cliffs. It is home to millions of birds (many of them puffins). The camera zooms out and the drone flies farther and farther out to sea. Grétarsdóttir becomes a small spec in the frame — and still we cannot see the top of the cliff. It’s a powerful scene, even on a small screen.

This is Iceland’s South Coast. While the beauty of the cliffs is undeniable, so is its danger. Few beaches exist along the unscalable cliffs, and most of those are easily consumed by tides. Reaching one of the few precious places to pull ashore requires battling ferocious winds and pounding surf.

It is on the South Coast that Grétarsdóttir’s unflagging confidence slips for a moment and she feels genuine fear.

“There was one moment, yeah,” she admits. “I never thought I would not make it, but it was a time I was just paddling around cliffs and there was no place to land because this is just rocks. It’s [7-foot-high] waves. It was foggy out. I couldn’t see anything. I was just paddling off the GPS. And I started thinking, What the fuck are you doing here alone?”

As soon as she had that thought, she says, “I got scared. So, I had to take a break. Start breathing deeply. Doing a little bit of meditation. Talking to myself: You can do this. I just calmed myself down, and after about 15 minutes, I was just fine.”

As the days go by and Grétarsdóttir continues to face and overcome difficult challenges alone, her confidence thoroughly returns. To pass one particularly difficult section of coastland, she must paddle almost 30 miles across open ocean, far from land. Her longest day is 13 hours of dipping paddles into water, over and over. Thirteen long hours alone with her thoughts, and the omnipresent landmass of Iceland which, with its dramatic scenery, is the other big star in this documentary film.

Time is compressed in Against the Current and the venture’s 103 days pass quickly, especially interspersed with the story of Grétarsdóttir’s own coming out and gender transition. It was bittersweet for the athlete, as her marriage did not survive.

“I had a wife to die for,” she recalls. “And I was losing her.” It’s clear that that heartbreak still weighs heavily on Grétarsdóttir, but she has made peace with it. And with Iceland.

Just before she completes her journey, Grétarsdóttir talks about the feat she’s just accomplished, and compares it to transitioning. Two challenging journeys she faced on her own, two exhausting ordeals she survived. And at the end of each is a homecoming. Coming home to a body that authentically reflects her gender for the first time, and returning home from a long, arduous odyssey.

For Grétarsdóttir, home is once again the small fishing village of 2,500 people where she grew up. It’s a place she left and “felt I would never be able to come here again because everybody would attack CONTINUED ON 71