The interpreter worked on the report with Dr. Lassi, Bernharður wrote in his letter, passing on the words I spoke there on my sick bed at the hotel in Freysnes. The interpreter had a hidden narrative gift, filtering out all the delirious babble and needless descriptions; she weaved together a pithy narrative, an escalating, logical sequence of events. Dr. Lassi found it highly compelling and envisioned publishing the report in the Journal of Agriculture or even submitting the report to the great agricultural paper Freyja or publishing it in Friends of the Animals or just in Nature Papers; she imagined, too, getting to know the interpreter rather better, though Dr. Lassi didn’t yet know if the shy country girl had any lesbian inclinations.
I wanted to reach Mávabyggðir, said Bernharður, Dr. Lassi’s report says, and stay there a while to study the place names, their origins and local forms; my intention was to go from Mávabyggðir over to the pass, Hermannskarð, where Captain J. P. Koch and his companions went on their 1903 expedition to measure the ice shelf at Öræfajökull, those preeminent men after whom the pass is named. I was planning to celebrate the 100th anniversary of their expedition there, and then to go up to Tjaldskarð, the valley up from the glacial shield volcano, between two peaks, where Captain Koch spent two weeks in a tent in a variety of weather conditions, knuckling down to his research during the periods he could not be outside taking measurements. One day, as he was sitting writing in the tent, hoarfrost and a heavy snowstorm outside, he saw that the oilcan had sprung a leak and so he and his companion, Þorsteinn, would need to fetch a new one from down in the settlement, and return the horse they had with them since they were no longer using it and all it was doing was risking death. They dressed and hurried away from their spot, following an ancient, perilous way down the precipitous, fissureridden Virkisjökull, the horse with them; Virkisjökull is a tumultuous glacial cascade that descends from high cliffs, a difficult and obstructed glacier, and visibility was low due to fog and rain as they were coming down. They descended to the valley Hvannadalur, where in the old days people picked angelica; it was a long trip, Koch and Þorsteinn went with their horse over the great belt of rocks the glacier had created, tracing a slender path of loose stones at the bottom of a precipitous landslide, with sheer drops down into gaping fissures, I will need to go carefully once I get there, I thought to myself, Captain Koch and Þorsteinn headed to the cave Flosahellur on the way because Koch wanted to examine it; it’s great to be here, Captain Koch said in Flosahellur, Bernharður said, Dr. Lassi wrote. From there Captain Koch and Þorsteinn headed down a peat landslip to the lowlands, then down the mountain to get supplies at Svínafell. There was a man there with a newly-acquired wooden leg: not long before he had been out to the shore with three other men hunting seal. They were caught in extreme weather and frost and blown off their path; two of them were lost for good while the third made it home to Svínafell, about 40 kilometers away, with tremendous difficulty: the leg had frostbite and so was sawn off, the stump bound together, and a peg leg made from driftwood, a boot painted on it. Koch and Þorsteinn paused briefly, wolfed down some provisions, gulped down coffee, got a new can and rushed back that very same day, the same route up Öræfajökull; no-one would do such a thing nowadays. I planned to descend the glacier this way and make a research expedition to Svínafell and confirm J. P. Koch’s measurement of Öræfajökull, although all the time I was worried about how I would fare with the horses and my traveling trunk, a large wooden box; I would find a way when it came to it, having never been there before and knowing nothing about the way it was, but I had to go if it were at all possible. Captain Koch had taken a horse down there so I knew it was possible, and I was of the mind that someone ought to traverse the same route in the year 2103 to remember Captain Koch and the 200th anniversary of his expedition, though probably everyone will have forgotten him by then. Place names, though, last forever. On this trip there were many names to encounter: for example, Fingurbjörg, or Finger Rock, the name Captain Koch gave to the large rounded rock on Mávabyggðir, or The Place Gulls Settled; Hermannskarð, The Soldiers’ Pass, the gap through the glacier the soldiers took on the way to Öræfajökull; Tjaldskarð, the Tent Pass, where they were situated when measuring Öræfajökull; and Þuríðartindur, a large and beautiful mountain peak named after Þuríði Guðmundsdóttir from Skaftafell, Þorsteinn’s sister; under this rock Koch and he enjoyed the pancakes she had baked for them as provisions, and they were so grateful to her for the delicacies that they made her immortal in the peak’s name. I found for my part that the way to the glacier from Mávabyggðir through Hermannskarð went on rather too long; I was crushed by gnashing hoarfog on the glacier, by fierce gusts; I did not want to believe that I was lost and walked for many days on my skis going short distances in adverse conditions; most of the time I hunkered down inside my trunk, which suited me fine, until the storms and blizzards worsened and one by one I lost my horses, a disaster, I was morose at having taken them with me out on the glacier, I became estranged to myself—this was a travail I had dreamed about for such a long time, the idea of the expedition had become the idea of myself, my identity, but as soon as my dream was coming true, I was a stranger. The last horse, the one that drew the trunk, disappeared, the trunk along with him, with it all the data for my thesis. Unless the data reappears in fifty years’ time somewhere, at glacial speed. Probably, I took a wrong turn on Hermannskarð and went a long way out onto the glacier, thinking myself safely and correctly almost arrived at a settlement. I reached instead a luxuriant valley surrounded by cliffs that I clambered down; I could not find this valley on a map and there were no external landmarks visible from within it, neither peaks nor elevations—it was as if the land had suddenly slipped apart and up sprang a luxuriant valley full of forest, heather-moss and grasses inside the glacier. A rollicking sense of joy seized me, both at having gotten off the glacier alive and at possibly being in an unknown valley, one which would be named for me, Bernharðsdalur, it would be a real boon for my dissertation, would bowl over the professors in the toponymy department at the University of Vienna, I would become a toponymist and explorer … these days, it’s rare to get a place named after you.
In the valley my compass got completely confused, utterly unable to function, the arrow turning circles at lightning speed, then the compass stopped and pointed resolutely right at me, no matter how I twisted myself about and tried to wrestle myself ahead of the arrow. I attempted that for a while. After the compass stilled, I marveled at all the rich vegetation, the valley’s fragrance, its weather, here in the middle of powerful Vatnajökull. I sat beside a little spring and washed my feet. From there I saw where sheep, long-legged and almost like steinbocks, grazed on the slope; they seemed to glisten. There were rams so obese and rotund that they resembled wethers more than sheep, heavy and sluggish; when the herd became aware of me it startled; the animals began to stamp their feet and the mountains resounded with the noise; it was like darkness crashing into the valley, amazingly intense in contrast to the twenty-four-hour sun that shines this time of year in this latitude. And then a hundred glowing eyes were approaching in darkness. I became so horrified that I lost my faculties and lay prone beside the spring, my whole body going to sleep. I did not lose consciousness; on the contrary, I was too alert, hyper-aware yet paralyzed physically, I felt able to engage everything in the whole world, to hear everything, to see everything, to feel everything; I saw the black sky and the sun enormously large behind the darkness, all a burning fire, I felt myself flying through space as though sallying on in a dream, suddenly a piercingly bright light appeared and the sun was directly over me, stifling hot, I had the notion to remove my clothes and immerse myself in the spring, but then I saw a single fearsome ram standing over me, bleating loud and cruel and biting my leg, but he vanished just as suddenly as he appeared. I was slow to re-orient myself and struggled to shift. I first tried crawling, then hopped a while on one leg, supporting myself with a staff; a blizzard struck and the lush valley im
mediately became submerged in snow and slush, such that I had great difficulty keeping myself upright in the snow and not being submerged in slush; I sweated buckets causing a thick armor of ice to fasten itself to my clothes, leaving me board-stiff. My leg was numb, lead-heavy, useless; I felt like a weighted-down sled was tied around me, or a horse and carriage, or that my leg was terribly long, unmanageable, and in this fashion I climbed up the rocks and scree out from the valley, like this I crawled along the ice for a long time, like this I crawled over the hills, like this I crawled across rivers and streams, like this I crawled through forests—and like this I crawled back to civilization.
This happened on Holy Thursday. On Good Friday, 18th April 2003, Bernharður Fingurbjörg crawled into the Skaftafell Visitor Center, Dr. Lassi writes in her report, telling the interpreter: I have no option but to believe you what you’re saying, or else the ground beneath my feet will open up, but I am going to make it my immediate mission once I reach Reykjavík to sign up for German language courses in the Continuing Education Department at the University of Iceland in order to read Goethe in the original and talk to all these tourists.
The farmers who owned land and had pastures in the wasteland, Öræfi, took offence when the evening radio news reported wild animals up in the mountains; an emergency farmers’ council took place in the dining room of the hotel at Freysnes early Saturday morning. This disgrace needs to be wiped out, Dr. Lassi writes in her report. The meeting was attended by the District Magistrate of East Skaftafell; he stood up first and spoke, not needing to ask for quiet because there was absolute silence in the room before he said: A herd is on the loose in the National Park. And so his speech ended. Well, said Runólfur from Mýr, that’s not good. No, it’s not, said Flosi from Svínafell. Well …Tempers flared, the report says, they went absolutely crazy by Öræfi standards, although an unfamiliar visitor could have mistaken it for meditation class. The animals are probably on the Skaftafell slopes, didn’t the lad come down that way? He came down the glacier at Morsárdalur, said Jakob from Jökulfell, falling asleep in mid-sentence … Didn’t this little punk head to Mávabyggðir without letting anyone know about his trip and without a sure sense of his route, said old Muggur from Bölti; he deserved to die. He must have gone directly from Mávabyggðir straight across the glacier to descend at Morsárdalur. But where did he get himself bitten? Or is it something other than a bite, Dr. Lassi? asked the magistrate. Perhaps this wild sheep is from Núpsstaður, having wandered from Eystrafjall over the glacier and into the National Park, said Odd from Gröf. Oh-oh, this is all just speculation, the magistrate said. Some were convinced the sheep belonged to Jakob from Jökulfell, it’s your sheep, Jakob, said the farmers from Mýr, or at least it’s on your land. This is not my land, Jakob said, this is State land. From one perspective that’s not really so, Bjarni from Nes chimed in, this is the land of the Lord our Creator and it’s the duty of all of us, Jakob, to herd together …These are State sheep, said someone, and where is the State shepherd? (laughter) Well, well, said the magistrate … wouldn’t it be best to saunter up there in the morning and see what we can find. Has anyone heard the forecast? Of course everyone had listened to the weather report; they knew the weather by heart going back decades.
It is a humanitarian duty of farmers to retrieve sheep from the mountains, I said in a maternal manner at the meeting in the dining room of the hotel in Freysnes, wrote Dr. Lassi in her report, just as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals requires all farmers to do, it’s horfellislögin, an old and just law meaning farmers must ensure sheep have shelter and winter fodder: what is there for sheep to eat up on the glacier? They cannot simply eat up the whole of Skaftafell forest and Bæjarstaðar forest and Núpsstaðar forest, or why would tourists want to come to see the National Park then? The black desert sands? … Besides, grazing is prohibited in the area. You must retrieve the livestock and prevent it from suffering; it must not go wild over winter, for it will be cold, it will be hungry, it will suffer because of your negligence and lack of culture; such a thing cannot be tolerated, it is inhumane, I said at the meeting, so says the law of the land and so agreed the farmers, more or less, with much mumbling and muttering, resolving to go out on a well-manned mission to the countryside to fetch the sheep from off the slopes, to save it and bring it into human hands … that is, to the slaughterhouse.
I knew several of the people present at the meeting thanks to my work in the region, the report continues. Flosi from Svínafell is not a tall man, but strong and powerful, big-boned, reasonable, quiet, reminiscent of Japanese ancient emperors; Flosi never feels pain even though he has repeatedly been badly hurt working on the farm, merely a scratch is what he called a bloody dent in his shin the time a horse kicked him—someone asked at the dinner table why his pants were wet with blood, why there was a big puddle under the table that the children were sliding about in … I saw steaming coffee poured over his hand when the cup overflowed, but he did not notice the difference, and once I witnessed the trunk of the old Volvo he used for saddle storage get slammed shut on his fingers; when asked if it hurt, he said: there’s no damage … I thought, this man cannot recognize pain, but I did not know the Öræfi region well then, I had only just started working at the vet’s office, he must feel the way other men do but just does not like to show it, not in front of others nor to himself. One time, up in the mountains, a fox bit Flosi on the thumb and would not let go. Flosi strangled the fox with his free hand and walked for a whole day with the dead fox dangling on his thumb. He grew tired of the carcass by nightfall so cut the head off the fox and slept like that through the night; the next day he finally gave up on the head, cutting off his thumb with a pocket knife at the breakfast table. Muggur from Bólti was at the meeting, a hot-tempered fellow, gruff, someone with whom few dared speak, neither at the meeting at the hotel in Freysnes nor outside, old Muggur is broad-shouldered and repulsive, with a glowering face and a paltry scraggle of toothbrush beard, eyes like ball-bearings, loud-mouthed, impulsive, he once got struck by lightning when he was laying telephone lines across Skeiðarársandur, he fell screaming down from the pole, some eighteen feet; he simply got up unharmed, but steam rose up off him, however, and his fellow workers’ eyes smarted; they noticed he smelled like a grill, and that gave them hunger pangs. At seventy years old he took a charging bull in a chokehold and flipped it over, a bull which had gored three teenagers and done some serious damage, Muggur held the beast down and stuck a lynch-pin through its nostril and fastened it to the back of the tractor and dragged it home to his house; the bull has been tame ever since, friendly, even.
In Öræfi the weather can be awful, Dr. Lassi’s report says, everything gets blown away, things which people in other parts of the country would never imagine could blow away. During a great sandstorm rocks fly about and then a boulder flings through the air and shatters everything in its path. One time, the fresh haybales were being protected from the weather, tied onto a truck so they would not blow away; that night, the truck was blown on top of the haystack, which was lying under it like a squashed cranefly when the men came out to the farmyard the next morning. Not long ago, a tractor was blown out of the farmyard in Svínafell and flew over the nearby houses. In Svínafell there was a church once; that got blown away. A new church was built but it flew away, too, so people stopped bothering to have a church in Svínafell. Here in Öræfi, cars blow off the road like empty plastic bags; bus windows explode in a hail of rocks and the lacerated tourists on board freeze to death, perishing in large numbers; afterward, a new highway gets unrolled like a licorice curl, slung across the sand. One time, the farmers clubbed together; they were getting tired of visitors to the region constantly being killed by the slightest gust, so they flew to Germany and bought a tank from the military and transported it back to Öræfi; the tank is a tremendous, heavy vehicle which proves successful when it’s necessary to go out onto the sand in bad weather to collect trapped people. At first, the Öræfin
gs simply used the tank as a school bus, but Runki from Destrikt had once been on a course with the Regional Rescue team and decreed that the tank could only be used in storms, whether for transporting children from school, fetching old people from a crumpled bus, or bringing dead tourists to the Visitor Center. Runki from Destrikt is not from these parts and his mentality is very different from the Öræfings: an uneasy man, he took the tank under his command, saying it seemed like the Öræfings wanted to use the tank in mild weather to drive sheep to pasture or kids to school, to cruise around, count birds, survey the sand … at the time Runki invited everyone to a summit at the hotel in Freysnes, wanting to establish a special regional rescue force with the tank at its heart. There was certainly a need, the countryside was full of tourists run amok, ever since the river, Skeiðará, was bridged once the National Park was established at Skaftafell, something he considered entirely outrageous … a National Park! Instead of utilizing the country, Runki from Destrikt said at that meeting, Dr. Lassi wrote in the report, everything these days gets protected, he said, are they going to protect foxes next!? Minks!? Today, farmers can’t think about cattle or agriculture, they’re always having to deal with tourists, the tourists want to camp in the hayfields, they want to go horse riding, they want to poke around the farm, they want to birth a lamb, they want to drive a tractor, they want to make hay, they want to stay on the farm, they want to eat lamb for dinner, to eat with the family, to experience a real country atmosphere, coffee and toast in the morning, helping with farm chores; they start driving after us, they ideally want to become the farmer himself during their damn vacations! And, of course, they get in the way! I never get any peace, said Runki, you can’t move without a busload of tourists taking your picture, whether you’re mowing a field or pissing against a wall, better to have sheep in Skaftafell rather than these tourists who trample all over everything, that way the national park would be protected because this nation lives on sheep, at one time there were herds on the slopes and now tourists go walking with their worthless currency in all directions! … (they all had to think a bit to understand this last assertion) … you cannot survive on beauty alone; if anything defines beauty, it’s livestock on a mountain.
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