by Clara Parkes
The cars seemed to have no agenda. They slowed, like sheep, to let us cross. I could only imagine how baffled an Icelandic pedestrian would be upon encountering drivers, honking, selfish, impatient, in one of the United States’ capital cities.
I asked where we were in relation to home, and Ragga pointed to a street sign nearby, apparently our street. It said “Skólavörðustígur.” I didn’t even bother to ask her to repeat it, nor did I bother to try and write it down. I memorized the first part, “Skóla,” and then replaced the rest with what would become my standard banter, a bad imitation of the Swedish chef from the Muppets.
You don’t realize how highly keyed your barometer of danger is until you go to a place like Iceland. I only saw one police officer the whole time I was there. Graffiti did cover walls and fences, but it was always a bright and colorful artistic adornment. The few pierced youths I passed, walking four across on the sidewalk, still stepped aside to let me get by.
Ragga left me at a market on our street to stock my kitchen with provisions. You can tell so much about a place by its grocery stores. In Iceland, the biggest difference may be in the bottled water aisle—by which I mean you won’t find one. Buying bottled water in Iceland would be like traveling to Poland Springs, Maine, and refusing to drink from the tap.
Instead, I picked up a tetra pak of Mjölk for my tea, daydreamed in the baking aisle, and gaped at the selection of Skyr. This decadent Icelandic concoction claims to be strained yogurt but tastes for all the world like unadulterated crème fraîche. Having already gotten hooked on it in the States, I snagged an obscene amount, just because I could.
I’d come to Iceland for an eight-day trip of a lifetime billed as the Clara Parkes Iceland Experience. What it really meant was that I’d be teaching two three-hour workshops on yarn and wool, Ragga would teach one three-hour workshop on the lopapeysa, and then the group would pack up our bags, head into the country, and be tourists together, collectively fondling yarn and gawking at sheep. We were sixteen people total, including Ragga and her cherubic assistant, Fanney. I knew two people on the tour from the Knitter’s Review Retreat. Everyone else was new to me.
We hailed mostly from the United States, with a demographic leaning toward an over-fifty crowd. We were women mostly, and many of us were grappling with empty nests, recent widowhood, spinsterhood, and Peggy Lee’s eternal question, “Is that all there is?” Iceland was a major line item on each of our bucket lists.
Everyone else in the group bunked together at a hostel down the hill from my apartment. Sets of strangers had been tasked with duking it out: Who got the real bed, who would sleep on the couch, and who could pretend to be least bothered by the choice? Nanci, a New Jersey expat living in Toronto, took one look at the accommodations and demanded that Ragga find her a proper hotel.
Our workshops were to be held a short walk away at the KEX, a waterfront hangout that just happened to be one of the top hostels of the world. The carefully rumpled lobby was a Grand Central Station of hipster—just the previous week Patti Smith and Russell Crowe had given an impromptu concert in the library. The day after I arrived, Ragga took me there for lunch before we met the group for the first time. She glanced over my shoulder, smiled, and whispered that members of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós were there giving an interview to the foreign press.
In the company of the right person, someone as knowledgeable and connected as Ragga for example, it’s possible to feel like you’ve slipped right into the fabric of the city. They love tourists in Iceland, especially since they have played such an important role in the rebuilding of the economy. Just don’t try to move there permanently. Iceland has erected very high, costly, and time-consuming barriers to permanent immigration including, but not limited to, a complete FBI criminal background check. As traditionally difficult as immigration has been, cultural assimilation is even harder. My friend Anna was born in a tiny Iceland town, moved to the United States as a child, and was completely rejected when she tried to return as a teenager. As devastating as that experience was for her, she is still fiercely proud of her Icelandic heritage.
Keeping intruders out of paradise is nothing new. My friend Bettina told me the same thing about South Carolina. “They love you down there, they really do,” she said, “as long as you don’t move there.” Come to think of it, I’ve heard that about parts of Maine, too.
Our group quickly warmed to one another in that way strangers do when thrown together. Characters emerged. Like Kelly, a short, freckled redhead with razor-sharp intellect and an infectious laugh, who became our unofficial legal counsel. She’d retired to Arizona after a career in Los Angeles prosecuting murderers and drug lords. We took turns testing theories on her, trying to concoct the perfect crime for which you’d never get caught.
Playing Hardy to Kelly’s Laurel was the tall, slender Helen from Rhode Island, long-ago divorced and recently retired and always, always in a good mood. She’d slink away and photograph things none of us had found, triumphantly returning to show us her latest windowsill vignettes, cats, croissants from the local French bakery, and details of passing lopapeysur. Kelly and Helen were plunked in a threesome with Lou, an avid handspinner from Evansville, Illinois, who Skyped with her cat every night.
Every group has its puppy, or pair of puppies, and ours were Kat and Frog, a young couple from Australia. This was their first major journey off their island, and their bright-eyed enthusiasm was contagious. Rarely have I ever been around two people who were more game for anything.
Their Australian accents were charmingly thick and chewy. I loved the way they said “Pith” instead of “Perth,” “bick” instead of “back.” Thwarted by Icelandic, I set about mimicking their accents instead.
Having already established her reputation as the Princess-and-the-Pea of our group, Nanci-from-Toronto-but-originally-from-New-Jersey surprised us by actually being quite game for anything, too.
On our last night in Reykjavík before leaving for the countryside, we were gathered at the KEX for dinner. Ragga had just finished giving Nanci directions to the famous hot dog stand where Bill Clinton ate (just before undergoing open-heart surgery) and where Anthony Bourdain filmed a late-night segment of No Reservations.
“Be sure to get the ‘everything’ hot dog,” Ragga advised.
Nanci’s eyes narrowed, “What’s on it?”
“It has remoulade, it has mustard . . .”
Nanci interrupted, “No, no, no mustard.”
“It has ketchup . . .”
“No. Listen,” she squared off. “I like my hot dogs split down the middle, with grill marks down the back . . .”
“Well, you will not get that hot dog in Iceland,” Ragga smiled. “Yours will have crispy fried onions . . .”
Nanci perked up. “Like onion rings?”
“No. Like an onion that has been fried.”
“Do they have onion rings?”
You could see Nanci struggling. At last, she shrugged. “Oh well, I’ll try it anyway. Now exactly where is it again?”
Later that night, as I was finishing up my last class, there was a banging at the window. The chef had gone out for a smoke, glanced upward, and spotted the Northern Lights. This dazzling phenomenon is best viewed in the magnetic polar regions where it gets really, really dark at night—making Iceland prime viewing territory.
“Everyone, outside!” Ragga yelled. “Class dismissed!” We donned our coats, grabbed our cameras, and trotted out the door. Once our eyes had adjusted to the darkness, we saw magical wisps of Ghostbusters green in the sky.
I stayed up far too late that night, nose to my bedroom window, gazing at the green. It kept shifting shape. First it was fog, then distinct rays, then a giant bubble like a cartoon caption. I tried to Skype the sky back home to my partner, Clare, but my camera just couldn’t capture it. Not even our cat was interested.
The next morning, it was time to leave the city, head north, and find some sheep. We trundled our suitcases to the street and
boarded a narrow bus driven by Reynir, a stern and sullen young man with a baby face and the beginnings of a belly. He wore a dark jacket with the tour-bus company’s insignia embroidered on it.
We were barely fifteen minutes out of Reykjavík when we made our first stop. Our destination was the town of Mosfellsbær and Ístex, which is to yarn what Willie Wonka’s factory is to chocolate. The typical image of a spinning mill always seems to involve ancient brick buildings perched next to a rushing river, but the Ístex mill—the largest mill in Iceland, and the one where nearly every skein of Icelandic yarn comes from—occupies a thoroughly modern box of a building.
The original mill, Álafoss, went bankrupt in 1991 after ninety-five years of operation. Three of the original employees bought the company (and now share it with a fourth owner) and changed its name to Ístex. They retain 50-percent ownership, and the other half of the company is owned by the Icelandic Sheep Farmers Association, which currently numbers 1,800 members and represents nearly all sheep farmers on the island.
We walked down tidy beech-colored hallways of an IKEA-styled office building, not quite sure how it related to the manufacturing of yarn. And then through a set of heavy doors that led into the site we wanted to see: the mill.
Here were the ancient machines, still operating with loud, mesmerizing precision. I had the feeling of watching a vintage B-52 bomber that’s been carefully maintained in perfect working order, Singer Featherweights on a massive scale. Some of what we smelled wasn’t wool at all but the grease necessary to keep all the moving parts lubricated.
We gazed, dumbfounded, at the bales of scoured Icelandic wool stacked from floor to ceiling. This represented the bulk of wool produced in Iceland. The average farm has between 300 and 500 sheep. Multiply that times the 1,800 farms that sell their wool to Ístex every year, and you begin to get a sense of the scope of this operation. Of course, wool is just part of the sheep equation, the bigger and more profitable half being those Icelandic lamb chops being sold at your local Whole Foods.
But here, we were too busy gazing at the mountain of Icelandic wool bales. A nearby bale had been cut open and a tuft of wool was sticking out. When our guide turned away, Ragga grabbed the clump, yanked it from the bale, and shoved it in my raincoat pocket. In one moment, I’d gone from stupid tourist to felon. “You’ll want this for later,” she said.
Our circuit through the mill followed the natural order of yarn production, as everything had been laid out so that the fibers could be moved sequentially (and efficiently) from one machine and process to the next. We watched giant steel hooks lift dyed fleece from their tanks, still dripping. We gazed into the room in which different colors of fiber are blown and tossed about. Many of the Lopi colors are heathers, which means that what we see as blue might actually be an artful blend of light and dark blue, purple, perhaps a dusting of red. That mixing room is where the color magic begins. Next, the mixed fibers are transported to massive carding machines that tease the fibers apart into a smooth sheet of blended beauty that is, at last, peeled off into narrow strips, rubbed together, wound onto long spools. These spools are then lifted off the card and moved to spinning frames, where they are stretched and twisted into true yarn. The barely spun Plötulopi doesn’t even go to the spinning frame, the fibers get pulled off the spool and sold as-is.
The pièce de résistance was a new investment, an amazing robotic machine that winds the yarn into tidy balls and plops them into little cradles on a conveyor belt, where padded mechanical “hands” reach down and give them a squeeze. Another set of mechanical hands retrieves each ball and wraps a thick paper label snugly around its belly. At the end, the skeins pass by conveyor belt to a woman who slips them neatly into clear plastic bags and tucks them in boxes that are shipped to yarn stores around the world. With almost no exception, if you buy yarn from Iceland, whether it’s labeled Plötulopi, Álafosslopi, Bulkylopi, Léttlopi, or Einband, it comes from here.
Not everything had been mechanized at the mill. Near the end of our tour, we reached a woman standing at high table not too far from the robotic wonder. Her task was to twist finished hanks by hand, slide paper labels over them, and then stack them in a tidy pile. There she stood, government-mandated ear protection firmly in place, patiently doing one of the world’s most tedious jobs while we all smiled and took videos of her graceful, well-practiced motions, giving her the universal thumbs-up sign.
Primed and ready to spend, our next stop was the Álafoss factory store, located along the Varmá River in the older part of Mosfellsbær. Here, we finally had the picturesque old mill building beside the gurgling stream, with creaky wood floors and haunting black-and-white photos of how things used to be. A mill has stood here since 1896. Today, it is strictly a place for tourists to come and part with their money. Our bus parked in a lot next to a nondescript building that happened to house the studio for the same band that I’d spotted at the KEX earlier in the week—Sigur Rós.
Once across the street and inside the factory store, everyone went nuts. We’d been given a discount on already inexpensive yarns, and people stumbled back to the bus with giant bags that had to be stuffed in the luggage bays. I, however, was smug. I’ve seen enough yarn in my lifetime, I thought. I am above buying more just because I’m at a factory outlet and have been given a discount. Just to prove my point, I made it out with a single set of rosewood circular needles.
From here, we quieted down for our two-hour ride north to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. Our road took us right along the coast before dipping down, down, down, 500 feet beneath the Hvalfjörður fjord. The two-lane tunnel ran for more than three miles. After a few light jokes about claustrophobia, Reynir mumbled something and Ragga pulled out her microphone. “Our driver tells me this tunnel was closed briefly last year after a truck exploded.” For the first time, he smiled.
Ears popping, we ascended into a wilder, more remote landscape. Jagged mountain peaks shot up on our right, their soft, green sides sloping elegantly to a frothy coastline on our left, the landscape of a Dior gown. We’d passed the outer limits of the North Atlantic and were now gazing at the Denmark Strait.
Suddenly, we turned off the road and into the parking lot of the Icelandic equivalent of a suburban Safeway. “Okay, folks!” Ragga announced over the PA system, “This is it! Our last grocery store for quite a while. If you’d like any snacks for the next few days, now’s your time to get them.”
We all dutifully marched in, heads bowed against a brutal wind and the beginnings of rain. You’d think we were remote explorers preparing for a year in the outback the way we heaped our carts high with cookies and crackers and chips. Past the dried fruit I sauntered, eyeing the canned goods, the school supplies, the . . . I stopped.
There, inside a regular old grocery store, was a complete yarn section. Not just a shelf or two, but shelves and racks and bins and an entire wall of every conceivable color and weight of Icelandic yarn, from the barely spun Plötulopi to the chunky Álafosslopi, from Bulkylopi to the lighter Léttlopi and lace-weight Einband.
This was identical to what I’d just left at the factory store. But something about the supermarket setting made me snap. The heathered colors were suddenly exquisite and irresistible. Right then, I decided I would knit a small blanket during this trip, something I could put on my lap while reminiscing about my time in Iceland. The ever-game Kat and Frog kept me company, augmenting their stashes with multiple shades of green for a project they would complete during their trip. (Only they actually did.)
“Did you see the yarn section?” we asked one another back on the bus, stowing our bags of cookies and drinks. Ragga smiled patiently.
“They had yarn!” we kept repeating in disbelief.
“In a grocery store!”
“I KNOW!”
The fact that the prices made no sense made the whole thing even more exciting. Unless you had a calculator or a gift for numbers, it was almost impossible to know exactly what you’d just spent. Everything seemed lik
e a bargain and a splurge, we never quite knew.
We bounced our way up the peninsula, lulled to sleep by the thwack, thwack, thwack of the windshield wipers. Reynir’s seat had a life of its own. Every time we hit a bump—which we did with increasing frequency—his seat would rise high, then let out a slow hiss as it settled back down again.
Suddenly, a cry came from the back of the bus. “Sheeeeeeep!”
All eyes turned to see our very first, true, capital-I Icelandic sheep. Out there! In the wild! We pulled out our cameras. We oohed and aahed. This was why we’d come.
The Icelandic sheep is a rarity in the modern world. Its genetics can be traced to the original sheep brought to the island by early Viking settlers in the ninth century. Back then, we relied on sheep for everything—milk, meat, wool, and skin alike. They grew varied coats with fibers ranging from the fineness of silk to long, rugged strands best used for ropes. Everything came from these sheep. Even the sails on Viking ships were made from this wool, spun by hand on a spindle.
While the rest of the world set about “improving” their sheep breeds from the late 1700s onward, to grow bigger bodies and softer, brighter wool, Iceland’s sheep remained untouched. Smaller than the average bulked-up commercial sheep, their coats still grow two distinct kinds of fiber. Thick, long rugged fibers are called tog, and they act as I-beams in the yarn, making it strong and durable. The short, exquisitely fine fibers are called thel, and they act as blown-in insulation, making those strong and durable garments also extraordinarily warm. Icelandic sheep still produce coats in a gorgeous array of natural colors far beyond just brilliant white. Their overall lack of genetic meddling makes these sheep an eerily accurate time capsule to the ninth century, which, in turn, makes Iceland such a compelling tourist destination today.