Monday, July 25, 2011

hiking adventure


I am writing this on the night before I leave.  The apartment is—well—it is not clean yet, but I am pretty well packed, so I feel somewhat relaxed.  So, I thought I’d write a little tale of my last weekend where, again adventures in the mountains made me wonder if I was going to make it back alive.
            One of the fellows from my hiking group invited me to go to Thormork for two nights.  This is an area where the group goes a lot and I have been there a couple of times now, once ten years ago when I hiked in along the remarkable “Catwalk” hike, and last year for their 35th year celebration.  It is also a popular tourist area, and I am pleased to say, well managed by this hiking group.  It is accessible only along a very rough dirt and ash Jeep track and one has to cross several rivers to get there.  So tourist companies provide daily buses during the summers, using buses mounted on huge wheels, to take people in for the day. 
            The person who invited me was Jobbi, a man in his mid to late sixties, a veteran hiker and mountaineer, well known among outdoors people in Iceland for being the only person to have ever skied across Iceland alone during the winter.  He did it when he turned fifty.  He said we would perhaps do a hike one day and hang out with everyone there.  It sounded lovely to me for my final weekend.
            So we started on the hike along a canyon below the Catwalk, full of wild flowers on a sunny day.

As we walked up the canyon it got more rugged and narrow, jagged peaks above us.


Finally we reached the end and a beautiful shaft of a waterfall. 

I was pleased.  The hike had not been easy, being as there was, as usual, no trail and we had to scramble along the canyon walls, but I felt fine for the trip back.
            But then Jobbi said, “We could go up that side canyon,” pointing to the left up to the Catwalk high above us, “or we could go up the other side.  It is very interesting over there, a view and all.”  I had, as I said, already walked the Catwalk.  It is a narrow ridge, perhaps three feet wide or a bit more, and sweeps down a thousand feet on both sides.  I remembered it well, so I decided I preferred to go to the right. 

We started up the rock and ash.  The way got exceedingly steep. 

“Use your poles like this,” Jobbi said, “then you don’t have to crawl.”  I didn’t think this was possible, but it got steeper.  Then we came to a cliff.  “Hmmm…” Jobbi said, “I’ve come up the wrong canyon arm.  We should be there.” And he pointed down and across more lava rock faces.  It looked impassible to me.  “OK,” he said, “this is very steep (as if I hadn’t noticed).  Your poles are two different lengths and you sink the lower one in like this and hold it on the top, not grasping it.  And you don’t have the strap around your wrist because if you fall you want to be able to use it like this, like an ice axe.”  He pointed, "And look, you can see the mountain you climbed last year."  

            We set off.  I just let my mind go blank.  I took no photos of this since the last thing I was going to do was pause or test my balance in any way.  When we got across I did.

  Then he said, “OK, for this last part, I want us to just slide.”  I looked at him.  “You slide on your front and you control the slide with the pole, think of it again like an ice axe.”  He slid down and jumped to a rock at the bottom.  I slide after him and ripped my hands to pieces.  I ignored the bleeding and kept walking.
            Finally we made it to the ridge.

  I was ready to kiss the ground—which in fact I did because at the ridge a sixty-mile an hour wind hit us.  I immediately sank to my hands and knees to avoid getting blown off the cliff.  My sunglasses blew away. 
            “OK,” Jobbi said. “Think like a sheep here.”  What?  I do know that Jobbi grew up, like many Icelanders, herding sheep up and down the mountains.  “They have four feet so they are much more stable than we are.  So your poles are your other two feet.  Put them downwind and dig in.  If your poles are stable the wind can’t blow you over.”  Right.  We stumbled through the wind.  Now I didn’t have my sunglasses and the ash started sand blasting my contacts. 
            “Is the other side as steep?” I asked.
            “No, no,’ Jobbi said.  “It’s grass.”
            Grass grows on precipices. 

I lengthened my poles for a descent and was almost bleating I was so much trying to think like a stable little sheep.  We came to a rock.
            “Shall we stop for something to eat?” Jobbi asked.
            “No,” I said.  “I will not be able to eat until we get off this grass wall.”
            Finally we made it to the narrow track. 
“We should be careful here,” Jobbi said. (How could I possibly be more careful than I was already exhausted from trying to be?  The track was supposed to somehow be MORE dangerous than what we had just decended?)  “I am a bit worried about this wind, it can burst along anywhere here, and it is a turbulent canyon.  It can blow you right off.  So let’s hurry a bit.”  I hurried.
            And finally, a view of Thorsmrok valley below.

  My knee was wobbly but fine.  I was shaky but not from exhaustion—although I was very tired later—but just the continual strain of holding off of panic for hour after hour. 
The valley felt like home.  The hiking club does a wonderful bonfire on Saturday nights and everyone was passing drinks around.   I admit I got a bit drunk.

            People started singing loud raucous verses of some song.  “Is that a football song or something?” I asked.
            “No,” Jobbi said, “Icelanders don’t sing football songs.”  He started to laugh.  “No, here is the song.  There is this guy trying to get away with this bull and there are two trolls chasing him, a mother and her daughter.  So first he throws down a hair from the bull and up rises a mountain to stop the trolls.  But she gets a drill and drills a hole through the mountain.  Then he throws down another hair, and a river rises up between them.  So the trolls drink up all the river and come across.  So, then he throws down a hair and a huge fire erupts.  But then from all the water she drank from the river, the troll pees on it and puts out the fire.”  He paused. “And it goes on like that.”
            “Oh,” I said.  No, not a football song. 
The crowd had moved to another song.  “This is a love song,” Jobbi said.  “It is about a flower of the mountains but really it is a love song.”
            “Where are all the foreigners?” I asked.  “Everyone here seems to be Icelandic and I am sure there are some tourists staying here.”
            “The tourists hike around the area and go to bed early.  Icelanders stay up most of the night.”
            Silly tourists, I thought.  They are missing something wonderful here.  I guess you just don’t sleep.
            I crawled into my tent sometime about midnight and soon after the rain started.  The volcano ash had been so heavy in the air the day before that it created a thick film over the entire tent (this area is right under where the volcano went off last year and ash is still everywhere).  And still it rained.  The next day the clouds hung low over the mountains and the forecast was more rain.
“We might as well go,” Jobbi said, “And the rivers will just get bigger.  Sometimes they have to close the track.”
            And indeed when we got to the river, a smaller Jeep, almost certain to be a tourist as Icelanders only come in the bigger Jeeps (that still have much lower gas mileage than the American ones I have to note).  So the small Jeep had tried to cross, got caught in the glacial current, and was bobbing its way down the torrent.  Two larger Icelander Jeeps came and managed to pull it out while Jobbi and I took photographs.

            Then we started across.

But Jobbi knows what he is doing.  After all he has been coming here for thirty-five years, winner and summer.  Even through the raging white water I felt perfectly safe. 

            So, I made it back to Rvk in one piece again.  And I think when I get back I should give a seminar on hiking pole use—think like a sheep.

Monday, July 18, 2011

More expeditions through the West Fjords


I said a sad good by to the farm.  The long nights and long days of peace and laughter, it seemed so much longer than the four days.  I had stepped into another space, concerned just with the smell of the new-cut hay, harvesting the rhubarb (the largest and healthiest group of plants I have ever seen.), feeling the quiet. 

          

  Then, early, my friend took me to the vacant road to meet the bus.  We had called ahead, and then called again in the morning to confirm that it would pick me up.  Finally it came, and because it was full, I got to sit up front with the driver.  It was a min-van and was full of tourists.
            “Don’t Icelanders ever take this bus?” I asked.
            “No,” he said.  “They say they don’t know about us, but we have been running this bus for twenty years.  It just runs in the summer of course since this road is closed later.  I think the Icelanders just all drive.”
            Included in the tourists was a German woman who had biked over the mountain road on her small folding bicycle.  It sounded completely miserable to me.  As you all know, I bike all the time and everywhere, but biking in Iceland—no.  The roads are very narrow, people drive very fast, the distances between any habitations are very long and there is literally no one if you have a problem.  Also the roads are terrible, the tourists are swerving all around the place on the roads, and the weather changes in a lightening flash.  Also, there is continual wind.  Iceland is great for hiking, kayaking, fishing, just wandering, apparently for pub drinking in Rvk—but biking, terrible idea. 
            The driver began to tell me about his life and family.  He had had all his retirement fund in an Icelandic kind of money market, and in the crash, because the banks had invested everyone’s money in foreign banks, he lost it all (everyone I know here is either losing their house, is trying very hard to keep up with their doubled mortgage payments or have completely lost all their savings because of this crash).  His father is a farmer, he said, a dairy farmer outside isafjordur.  He grew up on the farm and would like to be a farmer too, but there is a ‘farm quota.’  It is supposedly to control how much milk is produced, but, as with the fishing quota, has been made into a privatized commodity in its own right, so it is bought and sold.  And even mortgaged.  So, in order for him to start a farm, he would not only have to invest in all the farm equipment and land, but also he would have to buy very expensive quota.  And this he cannot afford to do.  So he is driving a bus. 
            “And what,” he said, “will happen to our farming knowledge, those of us who know farming, who know the land? “
            He stopped at a magnificent waterfall for us to scramble out and romp up the hill for a few minutes, then we were on again. 
He let me out at the same hotel where I had begun hitch hiking several days before and I met a local woman for coffee. She and her family fish for lump fish on the fjords, just taking the roe which they sell mostly to Japan.  She and her husband grew up in the area, on farms surrounded by mountains and stone, and had sheep before.  Now they just keep a few sheep and for the rest they fish.  She said that sometimes the sheep, when the moon is full, go down to the rocky shore at low tide to eat the seaweed.  One night about twenty years ago, their sheep went to the sea and when the tide came in a hundred of them were drowned.  Their herd was 185 so they had 85 left. 
            “I had this sheep, sometimes they are special when they are born.  They are more intelligent than the others and they become like a pet, your friend.  She was like that, she was always around the house.  And she was the first one I found dead on the beach.  It always seems to be like that.”
            After coffee, she headed back to her farm, and I set off—again!—to hitch hike my way to Patreksfjordur, out by itself on a point probably fifty kilometers away.  I thought it wouldn’t be so bad because at least the road it paved to there so perhaps it would have more traffic.
            On this I was wrong.  A Swiss couple (the Swiss always seem to be the people, if not Icelanders, who pick me up) took me along for some miles and left me beside a ‘gas station.’  This was the reality: a solitary farm above the fjord and near the road a shed beside a flat area of gravel that included a pump.  I stood a half an hour and not a single car passed.  I made a sign, “Patreksfjordur.  Please” remembering my luck of the week before. 
No car.  The wind rose.  I put on my jacket and put up the hood.  No car.  I couldn’t hold the notebook sign because the page kept trying to fly away.  No car. 
            I began to calculate how long it would take to walk. If Patreksfjordur was ten kilometers say, then I could walk there no problem.  It would stay light all night, so no danger of that. I would probably get there faster than standing here until the next ferry that night (the ferry comes twice a day). 
I began waling up the road.  It curved around a point at the mouth of the fjord, and the moment I began the curve, the wind blasted me at triple the volume.  Then—a car zipped by!  I turned quickly and put out my thumb, but too late. It was gone. 
Now that we stupid, I thought.  I also reconsidered my walking idea.  I didn’t actually know how far Patreksfjordur was.  I decided to walk back to the ‘gas station’ and see if there was anyone inside I could ask.
            The gas shed was indeed inhabited, by two gentlemen in their late eighties.  One was clearly the person running the place and the other, who walked with a crutch, seemed to be a friend who had stopped by for a chat. 
            “How many kilometers to Patreksfjordur?” I asked.
            They both looked at me with complete noncomprehension.  Most Icelanders speak at least a bit of English.  These fellow did not.  Not a word.  “Patreksfjordur?” I said, showing them my sign and walking my fingers along the counter to show I intended to walk. 
            “Nay, nay” they said in unison.  The owner showed me a map on the wall.  He pointed to a spot on the road, clearly us.  Then he held up his fingers to demonstrate 28 kilometers.  My heart sank.  That was a long way.  They asked me where I was from.  This at least I understood.  I said in Icelandic that I was from America.  This they understood.
            “Obsma?” the owner said, “og Bush?”  I smiled.  He then indicated that he wondered which I liked.
            “Obama,” I said.
            “Nay, nay,” he said. “Obama.” He pointed his thumb down.  “Bush,” he pointed it up.  I smiled and nodded. Probably the first person I have ever met in any country outside the United States who preferred Bush.  Oh well, I thought. 
The man with the crutch picked dup my bag and indicated to his friend that it was very heavy.  It was heavy for its size being full of my computer and all kinds of other heavy things.  I noted that he, and the gas station owner afterwards, seemed to lift it with ease.  Strong men.
            They continued to talk and stopped me as I headed toward the door.  The idea of a lone woman standing in the wind was apparently too much for them.  The man with the crutch was going to give me a ride.  At least that’s what I thought.  I wasn’t completely sure, but he indicated that I should put my bag in the back of his jeep.  He got in so I got in as well.  The gas station owner waved us good by.
            My new-found ride began to amble down the road at about five miles an hour.  He scanned the horizon and the mountain slopes, all the while chatting to me.  I smiled at him and said, “yeow, yeow,” the best rendition of the Icelandic for yes I can do.  I have not idea what I was saying yes to. 
            Then he stopped before a group of sheep, halting the car dead in the middle of the road.  Of course, there had been zero cars for the last hour, so I didn’t think this was a grave danger.  He explained me in great detail something I assumed was about the sheep.  We drove on—slowly.  Soon, we came to another group of sheep and again he stopped.  Again, the massive detail.  “Yeow, yeow,” I said.
            About the fourth time, I began to understand that he was showing me the markings of the sheep, that this indicated to him who owned them, and probably he was telling me all about the owners, or the sheep.  Too bad I couldn’t understand any of it. 
            Then, at the top of a hill, we saw another Jeep bumping its way along a dirt track.  It neared the main road.  My driver waved his hand out the window and it stopped.  The other fellow got out and he and my driver chatted.  They clearly knew each other.  Then the other fellow, who was in his late fifties, said to me in English, “I am going to Patreksfjordur to get a part for my hay machine.  I’ll give you a ride the rest of the way.  And he,“ indicating my driver, “wans me to say his name is Oli and he loves you.”  I laughed.  “Actually his name is Einer,” he said. 
            “Well, tell him I love him as well for giving me the ride.”
            I grabbed my bags and piled into the next Jeep.  This fellow told me he had a farm, that he was haying (as was everyone), trying to get it done before the impending rain, but of course, as would happen when one is trying to get it done, his haying machine broke. He was going to Patreksfjordur, hoping that the part he needed from Rvk had arrived so he could continue that night. 
He let me off at the guesthouse where I was going to stay. I was going to spend the night to see some people, then head off to catch the noon ferry the next day.  And, I thought, I am NOT going to try to hitch hike that road again.  So I asked every person at the guesthouse (two French girls--no car, they came on the bus a couple of days before; an annoying man on a motorbike who I think was South African; a group of Icelanders in a car backed to the gills and—a German couple in their expensive rental Jeep (cars are SOOO expensive to rent in Iceland!) who said they would be happy to give me a lift.  Ahh.  I could relax.  

Saturday, July 16, 2011

More West Fjords


Tunnels.  So let me tell you about tunnels in Iceland.  The mountains are so difficult, particularly in winter, and the fjords so long to drive around (and the roads too difficult to keep on the mountainside) that they have built tunnels everywhere.  They say Norway is even more like that—people here say Norway is like Swiss cheese, full of underground holes.  Norway even has—according to rumor here—a round-about in a tunnel. 
            Leaving Reykjavik (I will use the shortened form of this town of Rvk) going north-or west—it is all the same road, one goes through a very long tunnel that goes under a major fjord.  It is long, and very deep.  It seems that you just go down, down and down, deep into the bowels of the earth.  Then finally you perceive you have leveled and then you climb up.  It is steep.  But that tunnel, although disturbing, is at least in a form one expects from a highway tunnel, it is fairly wide, has a high roof, decent lights—and is two-lanes.  The tunnels to the west and north are different.
            All of the other tunnels I have encountered in the west and north are—single lane if you can believe this.  They go on for miles, they look exactly like miner’s shafts, low, chiseled ceilings, dim lights at intervals, uneven rough stone sides.  They are disconcerting because you are supposed to be driving through tem but it is hard opt tell exactly where the road is.  They put striped cones every few feet on both sides theoretically to guide you, but the effect is almost petite mal and you feel as though you are going to pass into tremors at any moment. 
            The way the tunnels work is that one side has passing bays.  The cars on that side, when ever they see headlights of an on-coming car, slide into the next passing bay and wait for the car to pass.  On the other side, you continue—slowly—until you also see a passing bay.  Then you wait for the on-coming car to reach that passing bay, slide into it, and then you pass.  A problem is that the headlights are blinding so it is rather hard to tell where the on-coming car actually is. 
            I have to admit I was terrified the first time I went through one of these, but as I have continued to have the experience, I have become, if not relaxed, at least fairly comfortable.  Of course I am not driving I have to admit. 
            The Icelanders who live in the villages these tunnels lead to tell me how the tunnels have liberated them, how before when winter came, they were trapped, sometimes for weeks at a time, because the snow and avalanche danger made the roads impassible.  They tell of huge rocks falling down the slopes on the mountain roads, pushing cars off the roads, of winds topping cars, of the having to be in boarding schools in a town that is now, with the tunnel, fifteen minutes away, because it took ages on the old mountain road—when you could get there.  They all tell me they love the tunnels.
            The tunnels work in part also because there is not much traffic.  But now is tourist season.  The tourists rent cars, head off happily on their around Iceland in eight days trip (the thing people seem to like to do it try to drive the road that circles the island in their eight days or so of vacation.  Sometimes this works and sometimes not.  Recently there has been some issue because recent volcanic activity made a huge gush of water flood one of the rivers in the south and it took out a bridge.  That means the ring road is broken and you can’t get through.  They have been trying to ferry tourists across in huge buses but several days ago one of the buses got swept away and all the tourists had to crawl on top of the bus as it went bobbing down the river.  They were all recued I am happy to say)
            But then in their rental car, the tourists encounter their first tunnel—and they stop dead in the tunnel, terrified.  A car approaches and they have no idea what to do.  Even at the best of times, they go about five miles an hour.  Icelanders swear at them as they almost crash into them or have to crawl through the tunnel at a snail’s pace.  I now have sympathy for both sides.  I think the car rental agencies should issue little booklets for people renting cars telling them how to deal with the tunnels.  But that is not Iceland so I don’t expect it to happen. 

I stayed with my friends on their family farm in the small village of Flateyri.  Their grandfather settled the farm in the late 1800s, then their father farmed it. He died a couple of years ago.  So the seven children, none of whom are farming the land anymore, were trying to decide what to do.  The farm is about three kilometers long, stretching perhaps a third of the way along one side of the fjord.  In the end the family decided to keep it and use the old farmhouse as a summerhouse among all the children and grandchildren.  Others in the area were so happy, they were so afraid that if the family sold it some rich banker would buy it and build some huge monstrous house, not take care of the land and not understand the community. 

            The farm is magical. 

We spent part of every day cutting the grass, clearing areas, planting trees—their 89-year-old aunt planted trees starting almost fifty years ago.  They are still small by our standards, but each year she goes out to plant a few more.  This year she still climbed the mountain slope with us, but let us all do the planting. This is my friend laughing as she dug the tough grass.

            One evening, we all went fishing from the dock in the center of the village.  My friend’s fourteen year old son was there with a buddy of his and he was the expert fisherman.  I even fished—and caught three flounder.  They did not want founder, they wanted the big fish, but the big fish were too smart and just sat looking at our bait while the silly flounder snapped it up.  We are fishing about elevent at night in the photos.
      
Flateyri has a special relationship with its tunnel.  In 1995, when the tunnel was dug but not yet open, a huge avalanche cascaded down on the village in the early hours of the morning while every one was sleeping.  This was in late October.  The snow literally covered half the village and many of the homes.  At the time the village was 500people. 
            Frantically people ran from their homes, digging people out.  Some they saved but in the end twenty people died.  But the only reason the search and recue crews could get through as day broke, who saved so many who were injured, was because they could get through the not yet completed tunnel.
            One woman, who was twelve when it happened, told me that many of her school friends died.  “There weren’t any children here after that,” he said.
            “Why,” I asked. “Did you all leave?”
            “No,” she said.  “After an experience like, that no one is a child any more.”
            Now they have built huge ‘dams’ or barriers along the mountainside which are supposedly to divert any impending avalanches There is also a large stone marking the edge of the avalanche and no one is allowed to build close opt the mountain.  It is though the presence of their recent history sits above them, a power that is their heritage and  a source of tragedy that everyone one in the village shares.

The sun crept along the mountainsides, glowing magenta at midnight.  It never got dark, so we sat in the old kitchen, telling stories, everyone loath to leave the light, a special light that inspires confidences and intimacy.  It has a special energy this midnight light, not a twilight but soft, intense color, cobalt sea, verdant yellow grasses, the mountain rock an orange tinged with blue—who can try to sleep in this color?  So we drank coffee until three AM, until the sun was high and in the new morning light that had never seen dusk, we lay finally in comfort on our beds.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Adventures in the West Fjords


                  The trip started with a bus ride to the town of Stykkisholmur about three hours from Reykjavik.  There I waited for about four hours for he ferry that would take me to the island of Flatey where I planned to spend the night.  So, for four hours I cambered up and down hills, lay in the grass on cliff tops and generally enjoyed the sun. 



                  The boat ride to Flatey is about an hour and a half. 

Flatey is grassland surrounded by rocky shores.  There are about seven people, two families, who live there full time and have done so for well over a hundred years if not more.  They are fishermen and they also collect the eider from the ducks to sell.  In the summer a hotel runs and some people also have summerhouses.  I stayed in a guesthouse with a family whose daughter I had met before.  They invited me to have dinner with them and we had cod cakes, potatoes and seal meat.  The seal was a dense texture, not very strong tasting—not at all like the proverbial chicken--but a very red meat.  The seal had got caught in their fishing nets.  “It had just died,” they said, “We knew it was good, so it would be silly not to eat it.”
                  They told me stories of their families who in last generations had emigrated too Canada when things were very bad in Iceland—only to find them worse in the freezing heartland of Canada. Of the twelve children born, six had died. 
                  About eleven in the evening, I went for a walk in the evening sun, a long slanting light of color and haze.  The island is full of birds.  It has not real roads, only a gravel track and the birds sat in the middle of the track, not getting out of your way even if you clucked at them.  I climbed a hill to see the view and when I tried to descend along a small path, the birds got furious, screaming at me and trying to dive bomb my head.  “OK, OK,” I said.  “I get the idea.”  I turned around and walked back down the track.  Behind the house where I was staying, a mother bird was tending her chicks.  “They will leave tonight,” my hostess said, “You can see, they have white on them that gradually disappears.  When it is gone, then the babies will leave.”  And indeed, in the morning, just as she had known, they were gone.


                  The next day I took the ferry another hour or so to the ferry landing on the other side, on the West Fjords, planning to make my way to the town of Isafjordur three or four hours away over deserted gravel mountain roads.  There is a bus in the summer, for the tourists, that runs three times a week.  But this was not its day, this was Thursday and the next bus was Saturday.  So it seemed that my only option was to hitch hike. 
                  I got a ride to the junction with the mountain road with a Swiss woman and her mother.  She was in Iceland working for a Swiss tourist agency and was in the West Fjords checking out the guesthouses they had in their guidebook—to make sure they really existed.  This section of the coast road was paved but the mountain road turned immediately to gravel and twisted its way straight up a mountainside (hence its name…).  And there at the junction were—two other hitchhikers!  Oh on.  And they looked quite scruffy.  More hitch hikers than a day’s quota of cars, I thought.  Not good. 
                  “The hitch hiking is really crap,” one of them said, “We have been here since yesterday.”
                  “Yesterday?” I asked. “But yesterday there was a bus.  Why didn’t you take the bus?”
                  “We thought we’d just try our luck at this.”
                  And you are even more stupid than I am, I thought.
                  “We spent last night in the forest.”
                  Forest?  I looked around and could not see one single tree.  I decided I just wouldn’t ask about that.  They sat down on the road to eat their lunch.
                  I wandered up the road, realized that no one would pick me up there because they would not want to slow on the gravel, walked down again.  Stood for about 45 minutes.  One Jeep drove by full to the tip with gear.  The occupants shouted a greeting in German.  I decided to walk down again to the guesthouse where the Swiss women had headed for a coffee.  They were sitting on the porch eating a pizza.
                  “Try making a sign,” the woman said.  “Ask someone in the restaurant.”  There was no one in the restaurant except them.  “Take your sun glasses off so they can see your eyes.  And have a piece of pizza.  I can’t finish it.”
 I accepted her offer, chomped on the pizza, drank my coffee and pulled out my notebook.  “Isafjordur,” I wrote.  I looked at the sign and then added in dark letters, “Please.” 
I walked back to the junction.
                  “No one has come by while you were gone,” the man of the couple said.  “So you didn’t miss anything.”  They had finished lunch and were sitting on their packs. 

                  I walked past them to just before where the gravel started and the asphalt ended, took off my sunglasses, held my sign on the ready and squinted at the landscape.  After another half hour I heard a car. It slowed—and turned up the mountain road!  It passed the two at the bottom.  I gave the driver my biggest, most hopeful smile and held up my sign in a most tempting way I thought.  The car slowed, stopped.  Yes!
                  The woman driving said she was from Isafjordur and drove this road all the time.  Her two children were in the back.  As she zipped up and down the mountainsides and along the cliff ringed fjords, seeming oblivious to the sheer drops and crumbling talus slope above, she told me about her life, how she had met her husband when they were nine.  How her husband was an actor.
                  “In Isafjordur?” I asked.
                  Yes, he worked at the hotel, but he also worked with the youth theater.   She told how she and her husband had slid off the road once on the ice.  So had her father but he had jumped out of the car before it crashed over the edge.  She and her husband had presumably gone over a slope not one of the cliffs since she was clearly still alive.  The road was closed in winter but they drove as long as they could until the snows came generally in September sometime.
                  Finally we hit the paved road and the first tunnel—more on the tunnels later—I arrived in Isafjordur to lounge in the sun waiting for my friends with whom I was going to stay for a few days.



Sunday, July 3, 2011

Fishing in North Iceland




I am in Reykjavik on a brilliant sunny day. I have been in Iceland only a few days, but it seems like an age. I am on the su-filled courtyard of the art museum coffee shop. I love this coffee shop, it has a sense of quiet and peace about it.

When I arrived Monday morning, my friend Agusta picked me up from the bus station–I caught a bus from the airport to town–she grabbed my large suitcase, I grabbed my small bag and we hopped over to the domestic airport nearby. There I immediately caught a small plane north to Akeyreri. This flight was very rough, the plane buffeted to and fro, below I saw whitecaps on the bay and the landing was even worse. Strangely, I wasn't nervous, thinking, "This is summer, these pilots do this all year round, so surely to them this wind is nothing."

It had been sunny in Reykjavik, but in Akeryeri it was pouring rain, Windy and about 40°. Growl. It felt like a Seattle November (or maybe May this year).

I am always stunned in Iceland how quickly one can be completely remote. As my friend Alfrun (whom I had come north to meet) drove me to her parent’s summer cottage in the nearby village where she grew up, she told me about the road. We were traveling high above the fjord on a road along the mountainside. Then we popped into a tunnel. These road tunnels in Iceland resemble a miner’s shaft: low rough arch above you, the walls hugging close on either side, dim lights every several yards. This was one of the many single-lane tunnels where the walls seem to almost touch the sides of the car. "They” (road crews?) had placed cones along both sides at regular intervals, presumably to keep the driver centered, but the effect was more like petite mal and I began to feel dizzy. These tunnels function by one side having passing bays, everyone going reasonably slowly (tourists at a snail's pace) and those with the passing bays to the right pull over as they can whenever they see headlights.

"I would find this a horror if I had to drive it all the time," I said to Alfun.

"Oh, no," she said, "we love it.  Before they built it, you had to drive over the mountain." 

She later showed me the old road, snaking at a precipitous angle up and up the mountainside. "In the winter,” she said, "with the snow, we were sometimes trapped for weeks at a time." Another new tunnel, she reported, on the far side of town had just been completed last year linking their town to the next town along.

"That was a horrible road," she said, meaning the one to the next small town.

"Was it paved?"

"Oh, no, just at the beginning by the sea, most of it was never paved."

"You should see Norway,” she said, "it's like Swiss cheese. One tunnel even has a round-about in it where all these tunnels intersect."

So, it depends upon your perspective. To me the tunnels meant claustrophobia, to her they meant mobility.

We stayed in the old farmhouse beside her parent’s cottage. "You want to see some baby birds?" her 10-year-old son asked me. "I know where they are, some duck eggs too."  We tramped through the wet meadows. The baby birds had gone, but the ducks still guarded their new eggs. Later we pulled in a net they had set earlier, it held five fat trout.

"You kill the first one," her son said. "Kill it with a rock."

Alfrun's mother then took the ungutted trout, laid them in the grass beside the cottage and covered them with more grass she had just pulled up nearby. "We'll just keep these there until tomorrow," she said, "I always think the trout tastes better after they set for the day."

"You cover them with grass," she said," because the damp keeps them cool and so the birds won't see them."

I wouldn't be so worried about the birds, I thought, but also the bugs, the bears, the dogs, and a whole host of other hungry beasts. But here, none of this seems to be a worry. And the boiled trout she served with new potatoes and salad for dinner was delicious.

Because it was still raining, the children went into their room to watch television. Alfrun and I talked. Sometime later I looked at the clock.  It was 1 AM. It was still raining, but it was perfectly light, just the same as noon. "I love to climb the mountain to see the midnight sun," Alfrun said. Sadly, no sun tonight, I am sad to miss that, the slanted light of the mid night sun.
Time gets a bit strange with the continual light. It no longer matters if you sleep midday or at night, the light is just the same. And indeed, people seem to stay up late, sleep late in the morning, or sleep whenever seems convenient.

Here is a picture of the cottage in the rain.










Here is the fish caught!

Here is Alfrin's daughter juggling fish.



I think I will go out to enjoy the sun while it is while it lasts.

Later:
I had fun today pretending to be Icelandic for some American tourists. They were walking in the park, wearing high-waisted unfashionable jeans, trainers, and floppy hats. They carried a map.  I was impressed they had ventured this far, most tourists stay just around downtown.

"Can I help you find your way?" I asked making my tones soft, feigning an accent I thought might be credible as Icelandic to an unknowing non-Icelander.

"Yes, is this the way to the park?" the man asked.

"Yes, it is," I said.

"This seems like a real mice place," the man said, "but it sure is expensive."

"Yes, yes it is," I said

"So what about people who can't earn so much?" he asked. "What do they do?"

"Do with less", I said.