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HARLINGEN — She stands in a lava field strewn with rocks wet with a perpetual rain, and her smile says it all.
Camryn Hale is having a blast in the photos, peering into lava tunnels and eating salted cod fish and strolling on a black beach with arms out as the wintry surf crashes on the Icelandic shoreline. The photos tell so much of the pure passion of the experience, and she fills in the facts like a fine narrator.
“Any mountain that you see, and there are many of them, they are volcanoes, every single one,” said Camryn, 20, who was the salutatorian of the Harlingen High School Class of 2021.
Camryn is working on a double major at Texas A&M University in College Station in supply chain management and business administration honors. She spent two weeks in Iceland in May to earn college credit for studying sustainable business.
“It was focused around the geothermal energy produced in Iceland because they are one of the world leaders in geothermal energy,” said Camryn, who’s also the daughter of CBS 4 Meteorologist Bryan Hale and Harlingen CISD Instructional Coach Diana Hale.
Iceland is an island nation in the North Atlantic 500 miles off the coast of Scotland. It was settled more than 1,000 years ago by Norse and Celtic peoples. As such, it has maintained much of its Viking culture and the language.
But there’s also a clear familiarity for any American who visits, she said.
“Icelandic is their national language, but everybody speaks English,” Camryn explained. “It’s the oldest natural language around. It hasn’t changed since the people got there, so it’s the same thing you would have heard Vikings speaking.”
Language is just one of many unique things about Iceland. The country has found ways to use its geothermal energy which have captured the attention of people throughout the world, Camryn being one of them.
“They have this system that they take steam out of the ground at really hot temperatures, steam and water, and then they release the steam to make electricity,” Camryn said. “As the water and steam cool, they use it for other things as well. It might be used to give you a hot bath, that kind of thing.”
Camryn took those baths in her hotel room for two weeks, which was intriguing and innovative, but there was one aspect she didn’t particularly enjoy.
“In every hotel they have signs in the bathroom because the water smells like sulfur,” she said. “The hot water does, the cold water doesn’t. But any heated water smells like eggs. So I smelled like eggs the entire time.”
A more visible evidence of all this geothermal energy are the abundant volcanoes, and everything in between. The land is filled with a sort of brutal beauty, with the lava fields between the volcanoes, and the springs and the creeks running through the mountains as glaciers melt with the seasons, and the explosive waterfalls rushing into clouds of thick mist.
Camryn’s pictures reveal a place of joyous calamity, of an earth somewhat confused about what to do next, and that confusion revealing itself in a sort of jagged and fascinating landscape rupturing and healing and erupting again.
While Camryn was fascinated by what she saw, she gained vital knowledge and insights to take with her into the world of business consulting.
“There are many types of consulting in the business world, but with a supply chain major I’m most likely to go into what is called operations consulting, which means we make operations in a company more efficient,” she said. “I think a lot of companies, especially with an increasing environmental social movement, really care and are at least appearing to be environmentally sustainable.”
Earlier this year Camryn did another study abroad — in Singapore, where she studied Asian business culture.