For me, the idea of a year in the Westfjords was appealing. It would take me beyond Reykjavík and towards what my father and most Icelanders saw as the other, more interesting Iceland of the farmlands and fishing villages: the outer extremes of the island, where the Icelandic character was, supposedly, distilled. Olanda liked the idea, too: she wanted to help me return, but she also needed to change things for herself. If nothing else, the Westfjords would be a change.
Bergur and Rut were not the first to express their misgivings—my mother, our friends in Brisbane, Olanda’s parents, and my colleagues at the university all wondered what on earth I thought I was doing taking my new wife to a village in the Arctic Circle. But Bergur’s father had been a merchant in Flateyri, a village in Önundarfjörður just to the south of where we were going, and so Bergur’s questions were the most searching.
‘In winter, there’s no direct sunlight for weeks on end,’ he said. ‘Even on clear days, the sun doesn’t make it over the mountains.’
‘And what will Olanda do while you’re teaching?’ asked Rut.
I didn’t answer. What did you do in a fishing town eight hours’ drive from Reykjavík, closer to Greenland than Europe? Now and then, polar bears arrived there by sea ice. There was only so much entertainment to be gained from that.
Then, I said, ‘I don’t think the difference between Reykjavík and Isafjörður is as great for us as it is to you.’
‘And I will get a chance to think about what I want to do next,’ added Olanda.
What I really wanted to say was that I didn’t care about the practicality, because in the end it was all a little beyond my scope. I was here to chase something that I had been chasing for the last twenty years. There was nothing more uncertain than returning to the place where you thought you might belong. How was I meant to think about whether it would actually be enjoyable as well?
I didn’t tell them that, not because I didn’t trust Bergur and Rut with the truth, but because I was embarrassed to admit my hope of a homecoming and my belief that it would all fall into place. Instead, I laughed off their concerns and declared that Olanda and I would go seal hunting on the weekends. And, yes, I promised to find something horrible for her to do in the fish factories.
We landed in Ísafjörður on a clear afternoon in August, when winter couldn’t have seemed any further away. The airport, a single strip tucked along the fjord’s eastern side, was just a shed. But a ten-foot conveyor belt had been built through the wall, making the baggage claim more official looking. Behind the locals collecting their shopping from the baggage claim stood Guðni, the school caretaker, who said that he’d been sent by Ólína to take us up to the school.
It was mild outside, at least fifteen degrees Celsius; much warmer than we’d expected. The fjord was long and green, and patches of grass reached all the way up to its topmost ridges. I noticed that above the airport lay a large hollow in the mountains. My students would later tell me that trolls were the cause, and indeed it looked like a troll had made his seat there. Later that day, when I went up to the schoolrooms to introduce myself, I found that my office looked out across the spit to the hollow.
‘You can climb up there,’ said Guðbjartur, the deputy principal.
‘I must,’ I replied, ‘seeing as my office faces it like this.’
He had been assigned the duty of giving me a tour of the school. He took me through the history of nearly every corridor and teaching room, each time adding something about what we were seeing through the windows. I think he was announcing his role in my life, which was less about guiding my teaching than introducing me to rural Iceland. He believed in details.
The next day, I met Rúnar, the sociology teacher who, like Guðbjartur, saw me as a prodigal son and wanted to make sure I felt at home. Both he and Guðbjartur were castaways, each looking for something new in the Westfjords, and perhaps that is why they wanted to help me. It was the sort of helpfulness I knew from before, from my mother’s experiences and from my other returns, when the locals would demand that I come back for good. There is nothing you can do better in Iceland than like Iceland—if you share their intense fondness for the place, the locals will do just about anything to teach you why you love it so much.
There were obstacles, though. Very quickly it was clear that there wasn’t going to be any work for Olanda, and my joke of sending her to the fish factories took on the look of a prophecy. The apartment we’d rented in advance of coming was in Tungudalur, a beautiful valley of summerhouses and forest walks, but hopelessly out of the way. It seemed that most of the people in the town were either school-aged or late middle-aged—our own age group was, I suppose, as in most remote towns, away either studying or making the better money on offer in Reykjavík. The beautiful isolation of the fjords was looking like it could also be a bit lonely.
Ólína’s husband, Sigurður, who was writing a book about the town, said to me that in the 1980s the town had been a lively, but worn-looking place. What I now saw out of the staffroom windows was a very pretty version of Ísafjörður, but also the quietest it had ever been. As it turned out, only a cluster of old houses in the centre of the spit were pretty. Around them had been erected a Soviet fence of concrete houses and factory buildings, and the main street wound indecisively through some of them before crumbling into the sea.
It would always be the location of the town that was most stunning. Ísafjörður followed a spit out into the middle of the fjord, curving into a shipping lane of trawlers and small fishing boats. The calm side was still enough to be used by kayakers, but to the north the fjord opened towards the wild, abandoned mountains and valleys of the country’s extreme north-west. Some of the richest fisheries lay just out there in those waters, but increasingly they were being harvested by companies from Reykjavík and Akureyri. Ísafjörður was in danger of becoming a museum town, a commemoration of the old days when fishermen had to live close by the fishing grounds.
My students, most of whom were in their last year at school, had no doubt about what lay ahead. They would reluctantly have to leave, probably for Reykjavík, which they regarded as the one truly vile town in Iceland. None shared my love of the late evening light in Vesturbær or over Mount Esja, which they joked was just a mound. But I understood their reluctance to leave the place they loved; it was the same as mine.
Olanda and I moved closer into the centre of town to a tiny basement apartment in a large house in Hjallavegur, or ‘Slope Street’. The house was owned by the only other occupant, Alma, a widow who lived upstairs and worked in the local council. She told us we could keep our bikes in her late husband’s workshop, still cluttered with his tools and half-finished projects. She’d have to do something about the workshop one day, she said. Upstairs, the rooms felt as unchanged as the garage. Very much a woman’s space, full of framed photographs of grandchildren and holidays. Alma was originally from the East Fjords, but she didn’t want to go back. This was home, I guessed because it had been their home together.
‘I would never leave Ísafjörður,’ she said, ‘not now. This is a good town.’ I wondered whether she was lonely, being so far from her family in the east. But they visited once or twice a year, and each summer she would go to them.
We had bought our bikes at a drastically reduced figure from their summer price—I was almost afraid to buy them. The sales assistant assured me, though, that there was nothing wrong with them; it was merely that some people didn’t like riding in the winter. I taught in the mornings that semester, and Olanda and I spent the afternoons cycling, most often to Tungudalur, the same valley where we’d decided not to live, but which became our regular destination instead.
The valley took us past a small golf course and into a hillside forest of conifers and mossy groves. A steep stream ran from the heathlands above—the ridges dividing us and the next fjord to the south, forming a path of grey-blue movement through the b
erries and stone escarpments. We had a picnic table to ourselves that, along with a flag post, furnished a raised clearing. From there, we could see the plane from Reykjavík making its precarious final turn into the fjord, becoming minuscule against the soaring immensity of the mountain, the troll’s seat, and the bluffs.
We once rode as far as Súðuvík, the village in the next fjord. It was a difficult ride, and took much longer than we’d expected. Passing cars threw up stones that caught our ankles, and the drivers rubber-necked as they sped by. But on the way back we had a long downhill stretch, and Olanda took off on her own, arms in the air. She wooed the whole way down the hill, a good kilometre in length.
‘Slow down!’ I called out, but she wouldn’t have it. I watched as she cycled further away, until she had even passed the airport and was nearing the bend in the fjord. I think she was reminding me that this was her adventure as well, and not just mine.
Women are Vikings, too—you only have to think of Hallgerð and her famous refusal to give Gunnar a strand of her hair. The school’s principal Ólína was similarly famous for her Nordic strength of character. Everyone knew her, and everyone had on hand a short biography of her life as well as an opinion about how well she suited the job of running a small school. She was very Icelandic, I was told. She would have things her way. She was not afraid of a fight. She didn’t know when to stop.
Ingibjörg, the other English teacher, was noticeably more charismatic and loud—every morning, she walked into the teachers’ common room singing Beatles songs. She had recently followed her husband Hermann, a local of the Westfjords, to Isafjörður. Her response to the quiet life in an isolated and closed town had been to emphasise her difference from the locals, which here meant being open and free with others. Hers was certainly not the Westfjords way, not the way of independent people; she had on only three occasions been invited into the locals’ homes, once for each year she’d lived in the area.
It was a hard place for newcomers to fit in. But every Tuesday the teachers played volleyball, and for the whole time we lived in Isafjörður we made a point of joining in, however difficult the short walk to the sports centre became during the winter blizzards. After our very first game in late August, Olanda said, ‘Ólína and Ingibjörg can’t stand each other.’ I asked how she could possibly know that—I hadn’t detected any animosity. It was intuitive, she replied, but it was there. No woman would have doubted it.
At the time, I didn’t think any more of it. But over time we returned to Olanda’s first impression of Ólína and Ingibjörg again and again to explain and interpret a fight that would, during our year in the Westfjords, erupt in the school; it would distort not only our’s, but the whole nation’s, sense of Ísajörður. We were in for a difficult year.
Ingibjörg and Hermann were determined that we shouldn’t feel isolated, and would invite us around to their place for coffee and dinner.
‘You two must keep trying,’ Ingibjörg said, although we hadn’t said we weren’t. ‘This place may be different for you. Maybe you belong here. People realised very quickly that I don’t.’
Towards the end of autumn, the couple asked us to join them in the annual sheep round-up. They had a share in an old farm building that they used only as a summerhouse, but they were bound by convention to help with the herding. It wouldn’t be strenuous—Olanda and I wouldn’t be doing much herding. All the same, arriving in jeans and joggers seemed to confirm a view among the others that we would be part of the herd, and more of a burden than the sheep. Ingibjörg led us to the farmhouse and found Wellingtons. Olanda’s were quite luxurious, with woollen lining. Mine were two sizes too small, but better than joggers.
Apart from Ingibjörg, who giggled at our clothes and called us hopeless townies, there was a good deal of seriousness in the air. Many of the herders were dressed in elaborate Lycra running outfits. Ingibjörg said we weren’t to laugh at their tights as they would be taking to the upper reaches of the valley, as high even as the cliffs at the top of the surrounding mountains. We, on the other hand, were to keep close to the river on the valley floor. It was very wet there, but completely safe.
The method of shepherding used in such valley round-ups was wonderfully simple. There was no contact with the sheep. We just had to walk to the end of the valley and back again. That was it. The sheep would sense we were coming and stay a good distance ahead of us. If all went well they would stay in front of us right up to the farm gates. It was farming at a level that even we could manage. As the thin men in Lycra scrambled off into the gathering fog we too bounded away from our guardians. Olanda positively hopped.
‘Don’t go too quickly through this stuff,’ I said.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Stick close. The mud can give way under foot.’
‘Relax. I’m just here.’ But in fact she was off, released into the countryside like a spring lamb. Except, one of her legs disappeared. The other was bent back on itself, looking for leverage.
‘What did I say?’
‘Help me,’ she said. But she couldn’t wait and swung the other leg around to give her some leverage on the mud. It sunk in, too.
‘You haven’t gone and stuck the other one in as well have you? You’ll get pneumonia.’
‘Get me out then!’
I began pulling her out.
‘No, stop, stop!’ she screamed. ‘My boots are coming off.’ I stopped for a moment. It was either her or the boots. ‘Just pull,’ she said.
Across the valley, on the other side of the river, one of the Lycra men was waving his walking stick. I gestured with a thumbs-up and called out, ‘Yes, we’re fine.’
No. He was urging us on. There was no mercy. We obeyed, Olanda barely able to walk in her sodden trousers. Half the lining of her boots, which I had recovered from the bog, still hung out.
‘I hope he rips his tights,’ said Olanda.
The encounter with the sheep was, as promised, late in coming and unglamorous. Two hours into our march we met an ancient, massively overweight sheep that had been left behind by the others. As I shooed it on, she growled and stomped.
‘She doesn’t growl at me,’ said Olanda. ‘It must be because you’re a man.’
‘What should I do?’
‘Shoo louder,’ she replied. I shooed louder.
Ingibjörg was watching from a ledge above. We should throw stones, she signalled.
‘No,’ I shouted back.
Ingibjörg’s hand gestures became more deliberate, frustrated even. She began to throw stones towards us.
‘You’re kidding me,’ I said. ‘I’m not throwing stones at an old sheep.’ Ingibjörg made her way towards us through the scree.
‘I don’t think you’re ever going to be farmers,’ she said as she reached us. ‘Not at the sheep. Just around her. To make a noise.’ We celebrated when the stones didn’t work for her, either. And then we waited until the farmer came. He picked up the sheep in his arms and carried it over to a red van that was parked by a fence.
‘We’ve got her into trouble, haven’t we?’ asked Olanda.
‘We don’t know what he’s going to do with her. I’m sure she isn’t the only difficult sheep in the herd,’ I said.
‘None of them want to go back in after summer,’ said Ingibjörg, ‘especially not the older ones.’
Olanda was given a change of clothes, and we walked together to the newest of the farmhouses, where a late lunch was put on for all the herders. Laid out on a crisscross of tables were a dozen legs of lamb, served with strawberry jam, peas and boiled potatoes.
‘Isn’t it good to be back in Iceland?’ asked the farmer’s wife. Yes, it was. The reasons were not always easy to explain, but I thought there were only a few who wouldn’t have enjoyed being half-Icelandic on that autumn day in the Westfjords.
As we left the farm the fog
cleared, revealing the pale, damp colours of the season. Low clouds remained and crowned the valley in blushes of orange and auburn. On the cliff tops, a single Lycra man remained, fetching in the rogue sheep, which from the valley floor were barely the size of toy figures.
There was a famous line in the The Saga of Gísli, a work local to the area, about all the streams running down to the fjord, and I now understood why it seemed such a natural metaphor. The streams in the saga stood for fate, for the point at which your course in life seemed inevitable, but also for what the mountains did to everyone all the time: shaping their relation to the sea and the narrow stretches of farmable land that met it. In the Westfjords, you were forever being tipped into the water. But the fjords also sharpened your perception of the sky, which was shaped by the flat, sharp ledges of the mountains.
In September the northern lights began to show. Early one evening as we walked home from volleyball we noticed the fine streaks of green light gathering over the fjord. The light intensified and moved very quickly towards where we were standing, until just a few minutes later the pulses had collected above us. They reared ferociously across low clouds that had settled in the fjord and then, as if a match had been put to it, red flames engulfed the clouds. We stood at the door of our apartment shaking with cold.
‘I just can’t believe it,’ said Olanda. ‘I can’t believe anything could be so beautiful.’ I looked across to see her crying with excitement.
The heaths and the mountains closed you off from the rest of the world, but they also gathered you in the increased activity of the town, as had the fierceness of the northern lights. My students, I noticed, would scoot off during breaks between classes, snatching an hour here and there to fulfil myriad other obligations. It hadn’t occurred to me that life in a small town would be more hectic than life in the city.
The Promise of Iceland Page 18