Spring in Iceland

The drive down from Gunrdafjordur was very snowy; we couldn’t see much of anything, let alone the road.

But once in Reykjavik, after a few more days of snow, I awoke to a rainy, Seattle-dismal day.  The snow turned to slush, so I waded to the university through foot-deep water and horizontal rain.  Along the road, I met a couple from Louisiana; he had a conference so they had come for a little holiday.  They had just arrived, they were soaked, looked freezing, and their tourist-slick Reykjavik city map was already battered and torn to shreds from the wind and rain.    

“There are beautiful mountains at the horizon,” I said, pointing to the grey mist that obscured everything (somehow this reminded me of similar phrases I have used with visitors to Seattle).  The Louisiana pair looked at me in doubt (just like visitors to Seattle).  They asked me what there was to do and I suggested a hot cup of coffee. 

I know Iceland is promoting itself as the tourist destination of choice, but its marketability in March is dubious.  When I was in Grundafjordur last week, the local hotel had convinced a small group of English tourists to come for three days to see the whales and Northern Lights.  It was too cloudy for Northern Lights and while indeed there were orcas in the fjord, the driving snow hit your face like a scouring pad making the tiny distant fins somewhat hard to discern.  I never saw these tourists on the street so perhaps they intelligently stayed snug inside the hotel, drank beer, and played cards. 

I very much like the statue that adorns the front of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. It is of Saemundur Sigfusson the Learned, the Icelandic scholar and priest who lived from 1056 to 1133.  He is famous for his scholarship, but also well-known here for his ability to outwit the Devil.  He was studying in Paris and wanted to get home, so he made a bargain with the Devil to give the Devil his soul if the Devil could get him back to Iceland without Saemundur getting wet.  So the Devil turned himself into a giant seal and carried Saemunder on his back across the Atlantic.  But just before they reached Iceland, when the Devil was positive he had a new and exciting soul, Saemundur slammed him on the head with a book (a Prayer Book of course).  In the confusion, Saemundur slipped off the seal and swam to shore.  He made it home wet and saved his soul.  I like a university that presents the many ways a book can be valuable.

  Here is the statue in the soggy rain:

At the end of the week I went to a small fishing village near Reykjavik called Akranes.  About 14 years ago, they built an eight-kilometer tunnel under the fjord, making the entire trip only forty minutes.  Previously people took an hour-long ferry (which sounds very pleasant to me….). The tunnel is very deep; you just slip down, down, down to the bowels of the earth (where the Devil is perhaps still waiting for Saemundur?).  Then it is as if you are climbing a steep mountain pass (a very dark one) up, up, up, bursting thankfully into the light.

            It is strange about Akranes.  I think I am becoming the one-person advocate of this little town as a tourist site near Reykjavik.  No Icelanders I know who have not lived there, have ever even been there.  Tourists are never directed there.  There is almost nowhere to stay, except a hostel and a recently opened guesthouse (where I stayed).  A bit meager on cafes (only one that I could find at this time of year), but it is the closest town to Reykjavik that has beaches, it is on the end of a peninsula, backed by glorious mountains, has cliffs and in the spring, millions of birds. 

            It does have a dubious reputation; it is an industrial town in addition to being a fishing village. There is an ugly cement plant squatting right at the end of their city beach.  According to a person who lived there for years, the cement plant used to spew gases in the middle of the night when people were sleeping, and then, because this left a disturbing gaseous film on the cars, they also sent a midnight machine around to wash the cars before people awoke.  There is also an old aluminum smelting plant across the far fjord that used to send god knows what pollution their way.  Local people report, although unconfirmed (as these kinds of things so often are), a high cancer rate among women and children who lived nearby.

            But the cement plant, thankfully considering these reports, has now closed, so it stands a brooding bulk blocking the beach, but the guesthouse owner actually came to Akranes for the clean wind, and her health, she says, has improved.  The entrance to the town is pre-2008 Crash sprawl, now left incomplete. But along the waterfront are the old buildings, the okra-red fish factory, an old cinema converted to a theater, homes stubbornly standing for a century against sea gales, and (always important) a bakery of three generations where everything is made from scratch.

 In the 1990s, some of the local people organized gravel bike and walking trails around the seashore and through the grassland.

 

            I walked out toward the lighthouse that stands on a rock breakwater, jumping from rock to rock.

The wind then convinced me that this was a silly plan that could end me up flying off the breakwater into the turbulent and freezing sea, so I turned back and walked the shore that surrounds the town.

Everyone in Akranes (and elsewhere) was getting ready for confirmation parties, which are generally held at this time of year near Easter.  These are very important here.  People do their confirmation at about 14 and it is a huge party of food and lots of expense.  Then guests give gifts, totaling thousands of dollars.  Parents save for ages to pay for these gigs (or pay off debts afterwards), but it is also a kind of initiation. People don’t seem to go to church much, but this confirmation is the symbol of when a young person become an adult, a coming-of age, and I hear people now in their fifties talking about getting together for a reunion with their confirmation peers.  

The next morning before I left, I arose to see the bay in front of the little guesthouse covered with literally thousands of eider ducks.  I tried to get a photo of it, but even with the zoom, they come out as just a collection a dots on the water.  Then, on the way back to Grundafjordur where I am again now, as we drove across the bridge that spans the fjord just before the village, an eagle flew so close to the front windshield it almost hit it.  Then we saw five more, circling above our heads.  A signal of spring.  Indeed, just since last week, here in Grundafjordur, most of the snow is gone.  Of course, you can’t see the mountains or event the water for the rain and a furious howling gale makes it literally impossible to walk the street.  I hope no poor British tourists came to the hotel this week as it is now too warm for Northern Lights, they could be convinced they were staying on a flat plateau for all they could see of the mountains, and the fjord is way too rough to even think of looking for whales. But this is spring in Iceland.