Monday, April 9, 2012

spring in Iceland


Each of the villages where I have been doing research has its own personality.  Grundafjordur (see photos in previous blog) is called the “new village” because it only came together shortly after 1900.  Previously, there had just been a small collection of houses along the bay, but the emergence of the boat motor in 1907 in Grundafjordur changed where people fished.  Before that, they had to row out to fish, so they would choose a bay where they could get out to decent fusing grounds in a short distance.  These were often rough harbors, and Iceland is full of stories of sea people foundering on the waves while trying to come ashore, so close to shore that people on land could see their faces.  With the motor, they could go out further (many still drowned, a major cause of death until fairly recently), but they no longer had to row.  The boats, open rowboats of about 20 feet, were modified to have a bit higher sides to accommodate the motors and the harbors where they went out changed.  Because of this, Grundafjordur consolidated and people moved their houses up the hillside, rebuilding them in pieces, so the older homes have a quality of looking as thought they were added onto one section after another.  Grundafjordur is called the “windy Village” by the other villages, and having spent several days there when it was literally impossible to walk straight because of the wind, I have some sympathy with this description.

Another of the villages is Olafsvik.  On the day I was going to do some interviews there, I had to hitchhike because there is no bus. 
Hitch hiking spot

So I stood alongside the chilly windy road hoping someone would eventually come.   This is a fairly populated area (comparatively….) even in winter so after about ten minutes a car came by and kindly picked me up.  The fellow, clearly a fisherman, did not speak any English, so we exchanged simple pleasantries about the weather and wind.  This road between the two villages was impassible until the early 1960s and one can see why.  Halfway between the villages is a mountain rising straight from the sea, its sides of very loose lava ash and scree, impossible for keeping a road secure.  Even today they have to continually repair the road as it is always threatening to go tumbling down the cliff.
            Olafsvik is just slightly larger than Grundafjordur, about 1000 people, and lies protected beneath the mountains.

Of the three villages, it has the most fishing, and is considered by everyone to have the most money.  The economic crash of Iceland in 2008 actually helped the fishing because their local currency, the krona, fell by half.  This meant that the fishermen got a lot more for their fish, which are sold overseas.  The problem for the villages is that the quota system here is one where people can buy and sell their right to catch fish.  So if a fisherman with quota sells it to a person or firm from another village, or even to a person in Reykjavik, then the village that has fishing no longer has a right to fish for anything.  This has caused huge problems here because the quota is owned by a fairly small number of people and most of the fishing is moving to just couple of places in the country, leaving everywhere else with nothing to do and no way to make a living. 
            The major quota-holders in Olafsvik however have not sold their quota, so the town has a thriving industry and seven working fish factories (three of them with female directors…..).  Being as this is what my research is about, I thought I had better wander down to the harbor after warming myself in the little bakery with a traditional cardamom donut and a coffee.
            I will digress here a moment to talk about Iceland’s coffee.  Seattleites may drink a lot of coffee, but the consumption is nothing compared to Icelanders.  Every time you come to a person’s house you are offered coffee, coffee is drunk morning, noon, afternoon and evening.  And people seem, as far as I can tell, to be able to sleep just fine (although they do tend to start their dances at midnight).  Every café or bakery has an espresso machine—and the coffee is almost uniformly superb.  When I read stories about Icelanders in the impoverished not-so-distant past, near starving each spring, they still served each other coffee, or if they absolutely had nothing, and that means coffee almost as much as food, then they would grind up some cheap substitute, but if at all possible, the nonalcoholic drink was choice was coffee.  It is very much that what tea is to the English, coffee is to the Icelanders. 
            But back to the chilly Olafsvik harbor. 


After my wanderings, I met with an older fellow who is a real scholar of the local history.  He knows so much history with clearly a very exact memory for dates, places and names.  The life has changed so quickly here: their final independence from Denmark in about 1944, meant they owned their own fish, and rapidly transformed the average person’s life and the wealth of the nation.  I have met people here, who grew up before the 1940s, who lived in stone low huts with no electricity, reading by whale oil lamps at night; the roads were so bad, even until the mid-1960s, that villages such as Olafsvik were completely cut off for months of the year. 
           
Accompanied by the historian, I went to a restored fishing home from the 1930s outside Olafsvik. 

The main part of the house had an open fire pit for cooking and the upper part had a series of beds where people slept two or three to a bed.  Because the beds were so short, they had high pillows and slept half sitting up.

The next day, my friend who has been working with me on this research and I drove from Olafsvik to the bottom side of the Snaefellsnes peninsula, taking the gravel mountain road over the center.  Fog enclosed us and snow crept closer and closer to the car.  She is a very good back road driver however, having grown up herself in such a village further north in the country, so I felt very safe.  We visited a farm and some small communities along the shore.

  This area, so benign in the summer and getting increasingly popular with tourists, seemed solitary, very remote, and beautifully desolate in this early spring.  The harbor was full of birds (which you can’t see in the photos), and, if you can imagine, hosts up to 40 fishing boats in the summer during the fishing season here.


Now I have returned to Reykjavik and today the sun has come out!! Such joy.  I think I will run outside, shout a bit, and see what small plants have emerged.  

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