The Middlewesterner

JOURNAL: LITTLE CARIBOU LAKE, 2007 (7)

August 1, 2007, continued

I don't have to catch fish, and I don't have to paddle long and hard to have a successful trip to Canada. I'm not an outdoor fellow in that sense; I'm an outdoor fellow in the sense that I need to see the wind in the trees here, the water, the rock, the great empty stretches.

Photo by Ted Abel.

Coming here each year helps me remember my place in the scheme of things: I am not the crown of creation, but a creature like the rest of the creatures around me. The immensity of the water and rock here make it clear how small I am, and it is good for me to be reminded.

JOURNAL: LITTLE CARIBOU LAKE, 2007 (6)

August 1, 2007

This morning, rain on the smooth dark lake like stars twinkling in a black night sky.

This afternoon, rain pulled off the lake like a rip of velcro. We could not see up the where the lake narrows, and we were waiting for Philip and Matt to come back from fishing. They got wet i the storm, yet they brought us pickerel enough for hors d'oeuvres. The perfect taste the last evening as sun dried the rock and we talked about packing up in the morning.

I didn't go canoeing yesterday as expected. Ted decided he'd like to stay in camp, so I stayed in camp as well, and two evenly-loaded canoes went out. Nobody was in a particular hurry to be going.

Mary and I weren't in a particular hurry to be going today, but we did go out this afternoon, down the lake and back, and tied the canoe up a few minutes before the big rain blew through.

The day cooled off nicely after the storm, and the sun has come out, a cool breeze has come up, we have eaten our taste of walleye, and supper will be put on the camp stove shortly. We aren't in a particular hurry.

The fearless castaways. Front row, left to right: Susan, Mary. Back row: Matt, Ted, Tom, Philip. Please note that those who appear short are not as short as they appear, nor are those who appear tall as tall as they seem: we are standing on rock that angles sharply to the water. Photo by Alanna Lawrence.

And I have said, "No, I don't want to go home." The wind blew my words away, so I'll say it again, "No, I don't want to go home."

Yet tomorrow we will have to paddle south, and drive south back into an everyday and ordinary life.

I'll take with me the shush of the wind in the trees, the lap, lap, lap of water against rock. That's what I come for and that's what I take with me, the sense of eternity I find here, and the friendship of our Canadian neighbors, Marg and her friends.

To be continued....

JOURNAL: LITTLE CARIBOU LAKE, 2007 (5)

July 31, 2007

Upon a trip such as this, one's first shit in the woods is a joy. Yes, it is – truly a joy.

The women stopped yesterday for a bit of snack with us when they returned Ted and Matt to camp. We have some conversation and I learned that they'd pulled in a pickerel which disgorged a mouse. Where did it get the mouse?

Soon enough Marg and Cindy and Alanna had to be headed for home, back to Thunder Bay, the Women's Weekend done for another year.

"This weekend starts next year on Friday, the 25th, ay?" Cindy said. It sounded like an invitation.

"It's burned so bad that it hurts to put sun-screen on there," Ted said behind me.

I try to find shade and breeze at once, but will take shade alone if I must choose.

Photo by Ted Abel.

Yesterday was fairly grey. Today dawned bright and blue, but clouds are moving in. There has been some wind above us – one of the Otters headed south was tacked twenty degrees off the direction it was traveling.

We have been lounging about in camp this morning. Later some of the fishers will ascend to the little lake northeast of us, and above, to see about catching some pike. I may go along to hear the shush of wind in the trees, and water against the canoe. Or perhaps, Mary says, we'll go up to that little lake and just paddle about.

Be assured, however, that I'm not going to work too hard.

To be continued....

JOURNAL: LITTLE CARIBOU LAKE, 2007 (4)

July 30, 2007, continued

From time to time I sit for some long stretches on this lumpy rock near the water, listening, watching, being. More and more I seem to be able to be. I can't say that I empty myself; rather I find myself empty, in the moment, in the sound of wind in trees, of water against rock, the endless rocking.

I am a farm-boy, not a nature-boy, yet on this trip north for some reason I am able to let go of purpose and meaning and order, to lay back on the rock with the water at my feet, and I am able to be nothing other than another lump on the rock. I don't worry much about death. The warmth of sun on stone is the metaphor I'll hold: when I'm gone, I hope to leave a little warmth in the stone of this world.

JOURNAL: LITTLE CARIBOU LAKE, 2007 (3)

July 30, 2007

We had our fish supper with the Women's Weekend women yesterday, late in the afternoon. We all got enough to eat, the six of them and the six of us. The pickerel and rice and green beans, a good meal and great talk, and we got to know a few more of our Canadian neighbors – Marg's mother and Cindy's mother and Marg and Cindy's friend Terry.

Then finally Terry said, "Well, it's six o'clock, and I'd like to be on the road back to Thunder Bay so I don't have to drive in the dark." It would be a three hour drive. The women loaded themselves into Marg's boats, and Marg promised Ted and Matt they'd come back in the morning and give them a tour of the lake on the chance that a few pickerel might bite. Although Marg has said her son already knows to tell people, when they ask where he caught his fish, "in the lip."

Some bears in camp. Photo by Ted Abel.

Mary and I washed dishes, and camp got tidied up, and the water turned very dark. A storm started rolling this way. We were all tucked snug into our tents when the first of it hit. Wind. Then the thunder and lightning. Then the rain. "Big drops," I heard Susan say from the next tent. Big drops indeed. And it rained hard.

When the rain let off, Mary snuck out to use the "outdoor plumbing," and when she came back, she said the mosquitoes were vicious.

Then it rained again. I don't know how much of the night the rain continued, but everything was still wet when we rose.

We had bacon and scrambled eggs and hashbrowns for breakfast, and coffee, of course, coffee.

Left to right: Alanna, Ted, and Matt. Photo by the Women's Weekend women.

Ted and Matt have gone off fishing with Marg and Cindy and Alanna; Mary and Philip are puddle-ducking around within half a mile of camp; Susan is reading; I am making these notes; the wind sings in the trees; the water laps the rock. In this moment, all is right with the world.

I am thinking American foreign policy might be considerably improved if each of our citizens found someone in a foreign country to call his neighbor. "We're neighbors, ay?" is how Marg put it last year. It would make a difference in international relations if we thought of each other as neighbors, ay?

To be continued....

JOURNAL: LITTLE CARIBOU LAKE - 2007 (2)

July 29, 2007

Well, Marg and the Women's Weekend managed to snatch a few pickerel from the lake yesterday, fishing morning and evening. Enough that we're intending to have a fish fry here later today, the six of us, and their camp now enlarged to a total of six women dining with us. Our own fishers had luck enough yesterday for one filet of pickerel for each of us last night as hors d'oeuvre before our dinner of bacon-wrapped filet mignon and green beans and sweet corn. I'm not kidding, people, we ate well.

Alanna and a few measly pickerel pulled from Lake Caribou by the intrepid fishers. Photo by Ted Abel.

As our avid fishers fished yesterday, the avid napper napped. I know – it's dirty work, but somebody has to do it, and admittedly I am pretty good at it. Mary enjoyed her relaxation with time to read in the shade.

Marg and Cindy and Alanna stopped at our camp yesterday on their way back from their evening fishing. They left us with some filets of walleye for our breakfast. Marg and Cindy each had a nip of brandy as the sun set, and Alanna – who is quite a funny and lovely young lady, evident now that she feels comfortable speaking around us – told her mom, "I'm driving the boat back to the cabin, you've been drinking...." And she did drive the boat back to the cabin, where they would wait the late arrival of Marg's mother and Cindy's mother and another friend, Terry – all of whom will join the great fish fry this evening on our little rocky paradise here.

The Poet At His Leisure, Making Notes. Photo by Ted Abel.

Marg and her compatriots and Mary and the rest of my compatriots have all gone off fishing today and I have the camp to myself – the camp, the breeze, the shade, and the occasional skitter of chipmunk, the eternal lap of water against the rock, the wind singing in the trees.

It is not heaven, I know, but likely it's as close as I'm going to get, so I sit here and luxuriate. I've got nothing to do, and I'm in no hurry to do it.

JOURNAL: LITTLE CARIBOU LAKE, 2007 (1)

July 28, 2007

"We're neighbors, ay?" Marg had said as we waved good-bye last year. We'd met Marg and Cindy and Patti on Little Caribou Lake three hours north of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, up near Armstrong. The women had been on the lake for their annual "Women's Weekend" of fishing on Little Caribou. Mary and her brother and his wife and I were on our annual canoe trip in Canada's wild waters.

This year, as we made plans for the trip, Marg said Yes, we could leave our vehicles at her cabin at the south end of Little Caribou, the only cabin on the lake. "Glad to oblige" is how she put it when we thanked her. Additionally, she invited us to spend our first night with her and her companions at the cabin, rather than laying over in motel rooms in Thunder Bay on our way north.

We arrived at the cabin about 10:30 p.m. local time last night to a terrific warm welcome. Patti was absent. She has been battling health problems since February, we were told, and hadn't quite recovered enough strength to make the trip to Little Caribou for the weekend of fishing. Marg's daughter, Alanna, was along, however, and was of an age, having just completed her freshman year of high school, that Marg thought she ought to start coming on this "What Happens on Women's Weekend Stays at Women's Weekend" weekend.

Little Caribou Lake, 2007: wind and water, light and rock. Photo by Ted Abel

So we met our Canadian friends, these neighbors, and had cold drinks and warm talk with them on the screen porch of the cabin. We talked. We got pointed in the direction of sauna and shower and outhouse, and we talked. We got shown the sleeping accommodations – bunk beds for Ted and Matt, the young men traveling with us, a fold-out bed for Philip and Susan, and another fold-out bed for Mary and myself. The cabin was actually one very large room with curtains dividing one end into three small bedrooms and affording privacy to Marg in the left cubicle, Ted and Matt in the center, and Cindy and Alanna in bunk beds to the right. Mary and I in our bed, and Philip and Susan in theirs, would sleep in the middle of the living room. Some of us trundled off to our beds and some sleep after the thirteen and a half hour drive. Some of us stayed on the porch and talked in the light of the white gas lantern, for by then Marg had shut off the generator she allows only during the hours between sunset and a sane person's bedtime.

Eventually all of us slept, and eventually all of us rose in the morning to Marg's coffee and a breakfast of toast and bacon and gently-fried eggs. A lovely breakfast and a fine start to our first day at Little Caribou.

We loaded our canoes and set off for our intended camping site part-way up the lake. Fine sky and fine water and fine paddling.

To be continued....

THE WAYFARERS COME HOME

The wayfarers have come home.

We arrived home late on Wednesday night, and I spent yesterday playing catch-up - washing the smell of the ocean out of our diving gear, washing the smell of sweat out of our leisure clothes, looking at the accumulated mail and e-mail, and making a meal, a ham and chicken jambalaya.

Highlights of the trip: the Cozumel Trifecta, of course; three shore dives for me, and shore dives and boat dives for Mary; some hard work on Peter's Story; and a special tamale supper at La Altenita (which I also wrote about last May, here).

First, the Trifecta. Everybody wants you to add their favorites to your Trifecta, of course. I encourage them to create their own Trifectas, and to pursue the challenge as vigorously as I pursue mine: "Come on, people, if you're coming with me, ya gotta keep up!" For those of you who are unfamiliar with my obsessions, the Trifecta is - all on the same day - the best fish sandwich on the island from La Altenita; a grande bowl of pozole from Los Utates; and the best beef taco on the island from Johnny Bravo's. I am pleased to report that this Trifecta was successfully completed the very day we landed on the island. With room to spare, I might add.

Mary did more scuba-diving than I did, since I'd promised myself some days of hard work on Peter's Story. I got out to dive the Parasio reef from shore three times. There was strong current for all three dives, so it was hard work out-bound and we flew back. My air consumption has improved, so I wasn't as much of an "air hog" as I used to be, though I still use more than Mary, who was, I think, born in the water. On her boat dives, Mary saw sea turtles, southern sting rays, a variety of moray eels, and other interesting critters.

As I had promised myself, I spent a lot of time re-working the foreword and first eight chapters of the Peter's Story memoir I have been working on these past three years. I ended up one chapter shy of making three and a half passes through the manuscript. The prose will read considerably better as a result. Eight chapters done, five more to write....

And, as I promised myself, I spent a lot of that work time in the company of one cool libation or another - usually fresh-squeezed orange juice which I obtained in three quart allotments each morning at "The Market." Si, three quarts, gracias. And regularly, by late afternoon, I would crack open a Mexican cerveza from Mary's supply. I sat in the shade at the table in the courtyard of the Hotel Pepita and worked; and as I worked the hotel's maids worked too, soaking sheets and towels and removing spots from them. And what did they use to remove those spots, you ask? Apparently half a lime works as well as anything. Ancient Mexican secret.

The most special part of the trip? A tamale supper prepared especially for us on Monday night. We'd gone to La Altenita for another of those terrific fish sandwiches, and the fellow in charge, Moises Xix Cahuich, recognized us as the group who had enjoyed a great batch of tamales there when we were in Cozumel last May.

"We'll make you tamales special again," he said. "On Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Which? How many?"

"On Monday," we said. "Make us thirty."

"3-0."

Si.

And so on Monday Moises' wife made the tamales, wrapped in banana leaves rather than corn husks, and when  we arrived at the appointed hour the tables were pushed together for us. We ordered our drinks and two or three tamales apiece. Folks, this is as close to heaven as you are going to get. Real food in real Mexico, prepared by real people and served with real care. We were honored to be able to eat these tamales. After supper Moises and his wife and children came out to stand at the end of our table so we could get a photograph and, when Moises' wife stepped into place, we broke into spontaneous applause, a little tribute to her great tamales.

The Happy Feasters at The Great Tamale Feast, La Altenita, San Miguel, Cozumel.

Moises Xix Cahuich of La Altenita, and his wife and children, with the Happy Tamale Feasters.

Moises and family at La Altenita, with our waiter for the evening to their right, your left.

La Altenita is located at the intersection of Av. 15 Norte and Av. Benito Juarez. Moises told us that it stands at the site of the first grocery store along that stretch of Av. Benito Juarez, and takes its name from the grocery store. History is a living thing, you see. The business is a family operation. Last year it was Moises' sister who prepared the tamales; this year his brother-in-law waited on us for one order of fish sandwich or the other. If you go to Cozumel, be sure to take a meal at La Altenita, a meal or two or five. Tell 'em Tom sent you.

All good things come to an end, and we had to step aboard an airplane about 12:05 p.m. on Wednesday for the flight home. I had feared that perhaps Mary might make an ugly scene when it was time to board - she REALLY likes Cozumel - but she walked aboard peaceably enough. Soon we were headed home.

And so here we are, back at it.

OF THE COZUMEL TRIFECTA AND OTHER HOT & HUMID DOINGS: YES, WE ARE HOME

The Cozumel Trifecta -

that would be, all on the same day, to eat a fish torta at the little sidewalk cafe which serves the best fish tacos on the island AND a bowl of pazole (grande) at the pazole place a block north of Hotel Pepita AND a beef taco at Johnnie Bravo's. Our plane landed in San Miguel, Cozumel, about 12:30 p.m. on Monday, and I completed the Trifecta before bedtime. As we like to say, "another sucky day in paradise."

*

We heard that it snowed in Wisconsin while we were in Cozumel. I almost thought "oh, those poor people," but I had problems of my own: "another sucky day in paradise."

*

The reefs are colorless beyond belief. Even at a depth of 80 feet, sand now covers much of the beauty of the coral-heads. Everything looked as if it were layered thickly with ash. So far as I could tell, Hurricane Wilma was not kind to any of the reefs. There are small signs that a recovery is taking place, i.e. here and there little reef creatures lift their heads. The overall gestalt is of a world gone grey.

*

San Miguel is recovering from the hurricane. Along the ocean, government buildings, hotels, and resorts have been damaged or destroyed. We saw sailors with machine-guns at the port, guarding the shell of an empty building, walls gone here and there. The pazole place we love has a new tin roof. Much of the city has been re-painted. Even so, near the square, you can see through the paint that the water had been nearly waist deep. Prices have gone up - taxis are more expensive; food is more expensive. The people of the island stay cheerful: they keep rebuilding, one cement block at a time. They know pace: a little today, a little more tomorrow. They have lived hard lives, so what is another hardship?

*

There is a new little sidewalk cafe in town, which I must recommend. It has three or four white plastic tables on a platform along the sidewalk, and a window opening into the kitchen through which our waiter/waitress sent our orders and received our hot and steaming food. Consistently wonderful food. Consistently exceptional service. It is a family operation. By the time we return in January, I expect they will have knocked a door through the wall to create inside seating. At the rate their business is growing, they will need to. The special on Sunday night was tamales, wrapped in banana leaves instead of corn husks, Yucatan-style. "These could not be fresher," the man in charge told us. "My sister just finished making them." I had already eaten several fish sandwiches there during the week, so I knew the food was good. "These are the best tamales I've ever eaten," everyone said - Mary and her brother, Dr. Phil; and Dr. Phil's wife, Miss Susan; Dr. Bob, the divemaster certifying Dr. Phil's biology students for diving. They are right: these are best tamales you'll find anywhere. Before our plane flew out on Monday, Mary and I went back for Huevos Rancheros. "Tom, these are the best huevos rancheros I've ever had," Mary said. "Mmm-mmm-mmm," I said in agreement. The place is called La Altenita, and it sits just southeast of the intersection of Av. 15 Norte and Av. Benito Juarez, in the shadow of San Miguel's water tower. As we were leaving on Sunday evening, the fellow in charge had said: "Tell all your friends by Internet about us. Tell them to come eat here." I said I would, and that's what I'm doing: Friends, when you're on Cozumel, stop at La Altenita for a fish torta or a tamale or one of their wonderful shrimp tacos, or perhaps the best huevos rancheros in the universe.

*

It was hot and humid on the island. Every day was another sucky day in paradise. I got sun-burned. My hands are tanned right up to my wrists, where the sleeves of my exposure suit have made a straight sharp distinction between light and dark. We walked four miles every morning, dripping sweat. You'd take a shower, and then you'd need to take a shower again. We heard it snowed in Wisconsin. Heh-heh-heh. Eventually we had to get on the plane and come home. Not so funny any more, that snow.

*

We are home.

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY FIFTEEN APRIL 28, 2005 CONT'D - (54)

I knew we had to go home,

but my feet wouldn't believe it. They resisted stepping onto the airplane. Some of that Icelandic soul had twined itself with my middlewestern spirit and would not let go of me. I had to put my head down and lean forward into my walking; I had to step and step again without thinking. Leaving Iceland was impossibly hard for me.

I couldn't say what I had to say: "Good-bye, Iceland. Takk." It was too hard to pronounce the words.

*

We had a safe flight home. Uneventful, which is just the way we like it. The cloud cover did open up beneath us as we flew over Greenland. I could see a great glacier spread beneath us. It looked awfully harsh and barren and bitter cold down there. Not a green land at all, but a land of ice. Obviously there had been some mix-up in the naming of Iceland and its great, barren neighbor.

Then the cloud cover closed back up for awhile, but opened again as we passed over Hudson Bay, so that I got to see rectangular sheets of ice stretching for mile after mile in an intricate and dizzying pattern.

Now I had seen Greenland. I had seen Hudson Bay. And then I saw miles and miles of snow-blown roadless landscape roll beneath us, the humped ruggedness of it, all snow-covered and frozen.

Then the cloud cover closed again and I could only imagine any land at all beneath us. When we came down through the clouds to land in Minneapolis, the world was suddenly and intensely green, so green it almost blinded you.

We had boarded the plane in Keflavik about 4:30 in the afternoon. We touched down in the Twin Cities about 5:45 in the afternoon. This would be the longest day of my life, about six hours longer than any other. We had evening and nightfall ahead of us yet, and we would drive home through these extra hours.

And that's what we did - we drove the bright green way all the way back to Fairwater. To home. Our place. Our journey was done.

*

It is a fine journey into another country which reveals your own place to you in new ways. This was such a journey.

I do not yet know how much I learned in Iceland about myself and the middlewest, yet certainly I shall have plenty to muse on in coming years as I look back at the journey. And, if I'm fortunate, I'll be able to put some small bit of it into words.

I do know that the Icelanders are a fiercely independent people. They remind me most of all of the farmers I grew up among in Iowa, who were independent and stubborn cusses if they were anything. In ways we are different from the Icelanders, yet in many ways we seem alike. Unnur Jokulsdottir noted in her book, Icelanders, done with photographer Sigurgeir Sigurjonsson, that the Icelanders:

"want to live where their hearts beat, where they can be their own masters, organize their own time and way of life. It doesn't matter if you're short of sleep during the lambing season in spring. It doesn't matter if you're snowed in for weeks at a time - so long as you are in your own place."

Indeed, in this way we of the middlewest may be like the people of the Islande: that we can endure, so long as we have our own place; that we know where home is, and we hold to it tight.

To understand this, I know, is only the beginning of understanding.

THE END

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAYS THIRTEEN-FIFTEEN APRIL 26-28, 2005 - (53)

Our waitress was a pretty Icelandic girl of sweet temper

who spoke flawless English to us, and may also have been speaking Chinese to the people she worked for. In a flash of a moment I dreamed up a whole story about this Icelandic girl's fascination with China; she would be studying Chinese at university and working at the restaurant as a place to practice the language and to earn enough that she could take a backpacking tour across China and write a best-selling book about it and become a famous author. And here she was serving me a bit of late afternoon meal.

Then we headed for the airport. We filled the car with gasoline in Keflavik, as close to the airport as we could, and returned it to the rental agency. We unloaded our bags and called my nephew to come pick us up. As we stood in front of the airport terminal waiting for Chad to arrive and take us back to his and Rut's apartment, it was obvious our trip was over. We'd spend a day and a half with Chad and Rut before departing, yes, but we had seen what we were going to see of Iceland. That part was done. It was a somber moment.

*

April 27, 2005
As they had on our arrival, so as our departure neared Rut's parents, Steinie and Erna, fed us a wonderful Iceland meal. This time it was leg of lamb grilled on the Weber, Icelandic potatoes, Icelandic peas. The Icelandic potatoes are small, round spuds, and these seemed to have been infused with butter, to give them a yellow cast and a rich taste. You buy them in the supermarket already prepared this way. Mary and I had seen them on the store shelves in Hofn and Varmehlid. The Icelandic peas are like the peas I remember from my childhood - big peas, intensely green, intensely pea-flavored. They are always served with leg of lamb.

At table, having at the meal, were Steinie and Erna, Chad and Rut, Mary and myself. We devastated that leg of lamb, leaving nothing but bone. Chad and I were the most carnivorous among the six of us, I suppose I have to admit. That piece of meat didn't have half a chance of outlasting us.

We adjourned to the living room to talk some more about our journey. Erna laughed when we told her that the the "mystery salad" we'd asked her about was nothing other than a smoked salmon spread. We talked about the Icelandic educational system which has graduates speaking at least four languages by the time they finish. Steinie told us about his travels around the world some years ago as the masseur for Iceland's national hockey team. He gave me some soccer pins and an Icelandic flag.

We said "Takk" and "Takk" and "Takk" again. Thank you for the wonderful food. Thank you for opening your home to us. Thank you for these mementoes.

We said "Good-bye." And the Icelanders said "Bless."

*

April 28, 2005
Someone who changed planes at the airport in Keflavik has told me what a wonderful airport he thought it was. Perhaps it is a wonderful airport. I did not notice. We would be leaving Iceland in a few hours, in a few minutes, in the blink of an eye, and I was struggling with that and was not looking at the airport. I had never become so attached to another place away from home as I had become attached to Iceland. The hardest thing I've had to do in recent memory was to get on the plane when they called our flight.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY THIRTEEN APRIL 26, 2005 CONT'D - (52)

We stopped at a gas station on the north edge of Reykjavik

to find out where the "66 [degree] North" store in town would be located. The woman behind the counter marked the location on our map, and you know what? We found it. What's more amazing? We're still married. It wasn't easy to reach the store, first because it was off on a kind of cul de sac; and second because you can't read Icelandic street signs and find them on the map fast enough to do you any good in traffic. You can't even read the first, important half of the street sign fast enough. Still we circled and parried and thrust, as if this were sword play, and soon enough the store couldn't be anywhere but where we were.

The main reason for stopping at the store was that Mary wanted to pick up a good windbreaker. There are windbreakers everywhere, yes. The reason for buying one at 66 North? One gets so tired of seeing people who have never stepped off a sidewalk or mowed lawn prancing around in their Columbia or North Face coats or jackets; wearing a 66 North jacket, brought after you've touched the Arctic Circle, is one way of putting down such affectations without saying a word, Mary's way. To wear a 66 North coat, you have to have been there. It's an Icelandic firm and it hasn't exported much to the United States yet. You can't waltz into any store anywhere in the world and buy one of these coats. And the best part? The people you're putting down don't even know it; and if they did they wouldn't get it. This kind of attack is so anti-snobbish that it almost becomes snobbish itself. Oh, and it warms a poet's heart to see his wife have at it that way. Mary did find a jacket she liked. And I got a 66 North tee-shirt for my collection; and we got some things for our daughters and friends.

After we finished shopping at 66 North, we drove back downtown in Reykjavik, mostly because we wanted to walk Laugavegur Street, the main downtown shopping area. It is not unlike State Street in Madison, Wisconsin, teeming with interesting little shops and restaurants and teeming, too, with unusual people. Mary was looking for a few things to take back for friends, but I gotta tell ya that was only an excuse for walking and gawking and stepping into stores when we felt like it.

As I wanted to see what Chinese food in Iceland might taste like, we also stopped for something to eat. It wasn't yet quite time for supper, but - hey - we're professionals. I had lamb prepared according to the chef's preference, which was sliced with a tasty sauce and a few vegetables and served with rice. Mary had fried rice with vegetables. I don't think I've ever seen lamb on the menu in a Chinese restaurant anywhere else; at least I'd never before eaten lamb in a Chinese restaurant. It was lovely. The owners of the restaurant were Chinese so you would expect the food to be as authentic as local resources allow.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY THIRTEEN APRIL 26, 2005 CONT'D - (51)

We drove as far west on the Snaefellsnes as Olafsvik,

then came back to Highway 54 and turned south, heading to the Budir lava field and reserve. Olafsvik is a fishing and trading community of a thousand people; the nearby mountain Enni seems to push to town towards the ocean. Where we got back onto Highway 54, our Guide told us, stands the abandoned farm Forna Froda, "where the 'Froda marvels' recounted in the Eyrbyggja Saga took place."

In the lava field near Budir, there is a cave "said to reach all the way to the cave Surtshellir and be paved with gold." We would have had to hike in about an hour to reach the cave, and hike back out with all that gold, so we didn't bother. Likely we would have a hard time getting the gold through customs, too. We did stop and look in through the windows at the church at Budir, and we walked the black sand beach along the ocean. There was an ancient shelter back from the beach - for sheep or humans, I don't know. I do know it went down twelve feet into the crack of rock there, and back far enough to find some darkness. I climbed down into it and felt its coolness; or, if a blizzard had been raging, perhaps I would say I felt its warmth. Stepping down into its half-light was eerie and elemental, as if I had just connected with something ancient and strong. It gave me goose bumps, then it took my breath away.

At Budir and along much of the Snaefellsnes peninsula we were in sight of the Snaefellsjokul glacier, which has a distinct cowlick that can be seen even from Keflavik far to the south.

We followed Highway 54 back along the southern edge of the Snaefellsness peninsula to Borgarnes, where we stopped for something cold to drink and had our last picnic lunch of the trip. At Borgarnes, we picked up Highway 1 again, and it would lead us back to Reykjavik.

It costs 1000 kr. to take the tunnel beneath the Hvalifjordur, rather than having to drive the whole length of the fjord and back again. The approach to the tunnel was interesting, but I don't know whether that was by accident or by design: as you came down towards the fjord, you could see its water but could not see the entrance to the tunnel. Suddenly, you made a sharp turn and faced the tunnel entrance, and you couldn't see the water. There was no time when arriving that the tunnel entrance that you had occasion to think: "Oh, my God, I'm going to drive under that!"

The tunnel itself hardly seemed like a tunnel and by now we could say we knew something about tunnels. This one was large enough that big trucks could pass through it; the two lanes through the tunnel would be wide enough for three cars in a pinch, and in some places the tunnel was, in fact, three lanes wide. Methinks that by the time the Icelanders got to building this modern tunnel, they'd grown a little soft. Where was the claustrophobic terror of the tunnel to Siglufjordur, high on the edge of this land? What about the three and a half miles of tunnel we endured coming back from Isafjordur, much of it one-lane even while it seemed luxurious compared to the tunnel to Siglufjordur? Has the modern generation gone soft? They seem to prefer the conventional beauty of the Snaefellsnes peninsula to the harshness of the northwesternmost peninsulas.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAYS TWELVE & THIRTEEN APRIL 25-26, 2005 - (50)

We had walked about the town before we ate supper,

and afterwards we walked back down to the harbor to watch the ferry come in and unload its small assortment of cars and people. "There but for the grace of God go I," I could have said, had we chosen to take the ferry.

Mary asked me whether I now have had enough end of the road experiences to last me for a while. And I have to say yes. I won't need to see remote fishing villages for a while. Those at the far edges of Labrador probably look a lot like some of the communities we've seen along the water here. I am ready to go home and stay home for a while. I have taken in just about everything I can take in, I think. I'm full and don't have room for anything more. Fortunately I'm running out of room just about the same time we're running out of trip; convenient, that.

Tomorrow we'll drive from Stykkisholmur to Keflavik, with a stop along the way for some shopping in Reykjavik perhaps.

As we sat at the Narfeyrarstofa waiting for our wonderful meal to be served, I grew awfully melancholic looking at the worn wood of the place, the nicks and dings of life lived fully in the old house, and I started to wonder what we Americans could learn from these good Icelanders. Here's the start of a list:

• Word hard.
• Endure much.
• When the wind blows 55 m.p.h., hold on tight to the place you love.
• Write a lot of poetry.
• Mind your own damn business and let other people mind theirs.

***

April 26, 2005
Oh, the sadness. When we rose today, it was certain we'd be done with our trip around Iceland by nightfall. That we'd sleep at my nephew's house on the NATO base at Keflavik, not at some far-flung reach of the island.

Even with such certainty of sadness, we rose and took the usual breakfast. Ineed, I had my muesli with some of the traditional "sour milk" that we've seen the Icelanders using on theirs. This was not so sour as I'd have thought, and it was thicker than regular milk, thicker than cream, in fact. And this sour milk had some bits of strawberry in it as well. There were the usual pressed meats on the breakfast table, and cheeses. And, for the first time, small loaves of hot, fresh bread were offered, just the right size for opening up and dressing out with tomatoes, cheese slices, and meats. One always wants to have a bit of juice, too - a kind of orange juice this morning, or apple juice. Always koffi and tea. Hard crackers. Sliced breads for toast. Jams. That's the most of it, and fairly typical of all the breakfasts we've had. It is not the taste of home, but I've grown fond of these breakfasts.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY TWELVE APRIL 25, 2005 - (49)

It was a hard day's drive

from Isafjordur to Stykkisholmur and we headed directly into town. Stykkisholmur is a fishing and trading center of 1230 residents; it has had "municipal rights" only since 1987, but "has been a focal point for the Breidafjordur settlements for centuries," our Guide tells us. The oldest house in town was built in 1832 with materials imported from Norway. Continuous, uninterrupted meteorological observations have been recorded in Stykkisholmur since 1845, the longest such record in Iceland.

If we'd taken the ferry, we'd have arrived three hours later than we did in . And we wouldn't have taken our supper at the Narfeyrarstofa Koffihus and Restaurant. We were served by one of the co-owners, Steinunn Helgadottir, who has lived in Stykkisholmur all of her life and who, with Saethor Thorbergsson, has operated the restaurant for the past five years.

The place was not crowded while we were eating, though at 8:00 p.m. they would be serving forty people in the upstairs banquet facility, and during the high season they might serve a hundred fifty diners each night.

The restaurant is in an old house, built early in the first decade of the twentieth century for a chemist's widow, who resided there about five years before she died. The place is authentic, not gentrified for tourists; it is genuine.

And the food? The food was wonderful, of course. Mary ordered a large appetizer as her main course because it would let her taste both the seafood soup and the port-soaked smoked breast of guillemot. I had a bowl of the same soup, plus an entree of pan-fried scallops from the Breidafjordur.

The background music was interesting - Icelandic versions of Harry Chapin's "Six String Orchestra," of a Hank Williams' song, of "Green Green Grass of Home." At least I assume the language was Icelandic; I have a hard time telling it from Old Norwegian.

That's a small joke, hey.

Admittedly the singing may have been in one of the other Scandanavian tongues.

When we finished eating, we lingered to look at photographs on the walls of the place. Steinunn approached us and asked if we would like a tour.

Sure, we're always good for a personal tour.

"This, this is Mrs. Miller, for whom the house was built," Steinunn said of one photograph.

"Those two, those are real Stykkisholmur residents."

"That's what the house looked like when it was new."

"Look at this. We had so much snow that winter."

She showed us the banquet facilities upstairs. There were more historical photos to be seen on the way. They had 40 people coming for supper in ten minutes, so we could not linger. We went downstairs and paid our tab.

Not only did we have a wonderful meal, but - talking with Steinunn - I felt as close to understanding Iceland as at any point on our trip. And we felt the warmth of her hospitality. She went out of her way to engage us, and to share her community with us. I don't imagine that you could get Steinunn to leave Stykkisholmur; she said "it is so beautiful to me."

It is so beautiful to me, too.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY TWELVE APRIL 25, 2005 - (48)

I have to tell you this.

We drove all day. We drove for a full seven hours and fifteen minutes. And we used only slightly more than a quarter tank of gas. The distance between Isafjordur and Stykkisholumur, as we traveled it, was only about 380 km - which is what, 230 miles - yet it took us all day to travel, with only a short stop for a picnic along the way, another stop to build a little cairn of our own, and once we were down out of the mountains a stop to get a cold drink and some ice cream.

Beautiful? Of course it was beautiful, in the harsh Icelandic way. You've got to like fjords and a lot of bare mountain, snowy mountain tops in the distance, blue sky and clouds catching in the mountains here and there, and mountains, yes.

Mary said she thinks there is probably no place you could stand in Iceland and not see mountains. My sense of the country, before our visit, had never been that it was a "mountainous" country. I knew it had mountains, yes. But I didn't realize that the mountains define Iceland as much as the sea does. The mountains and the water. The glaciers and the lava deserts and here and there pockets of houses, little settlements clinging bravely to the landscape.

Most of the cairns we saw in Iceland were the kind that start with a wide base of stones and rise to a point at the top, a kind of pillar. We came around the end of one more fjord to a good field of stones, and Mary parked the car. We got out and collected rocks to leave a marker of our own upon that landscape. Not the usual cairn, but an "innukshuk" in the style found in northern Canada, a marker with arms and a head, that in the distance looks like a little man watching over the landscape. Ha, some day won't some anthropologist see our marker and end up talking about the cross-fertilization of the innukshuk style to Iceland? Our little man says: "Iceland, we were here!"

*

As you approach Stykkisholmur on Highway 58, off to your right you will see Helgafell, which is a small mountain, but stands prominent on the plain. Helgafell was sacred to the people back in the days of the Sagas; it is where they hoped to die, according to our Guide. And, if you will climb Helgafell from the grave of Gudrun Osvifursdottir, she of the Lexdaela saga, up to the Tott (remains of a chapel), and can do it without speaking or looking back, we're told that you will have three wishes granted. The wishes must be pure-hearted and bring no one harm; you must tell no one what you've wished; and you must make the wishes while facing east at the chapel ruins. My Traveller's Guide to Icelandic Folk Tales by Jon Hjalmarsson says "Many people are said to have tried this over the centuries, with good results."

Near Helgafell there had been a monastery from 1184 until the Reformation. "Books and manuscripts from there were burned after the reformation," our Guide says.

North of Helgafell and a bit southeast of Stykkisholmur itself (which lies across the Nesvogur inlet) is the Thingvellir plains where

"some ruins can still be seen, as well as a sacrificial stone, where people were condemned to be sacrificed. Inside the ring is Thor's stone, on which the sacrificial victims were broken. Blood stains can still be seen on the stone."

Imagine.

Mary says every stone in Iceland has a story. Some of the stones have blood on, and some of them are holy. Everywhere you step, it seems, you are standing on sacred ground.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY TWELVE APRIL 25, 2005 - (47)

After we'd looped around the Borgarfjordur end

of the Arnarfjordur, and though we didn't know it at the time, we passed only a few miles from Thorbjorn Petursson's farm at Os. It was later, in reading Icelanders by Sigurgeir Sigurjonsson and Unnur Jokulsdottir, that I discovered what we'd missed. Petursson was raised on that farm at Os with his four sisters. The girls went away to work, while Petursson stayed behind and continued to run the farm with his parents. Now, at age 50, he is the only one left to work the farm. Jokulsdottir's profile tells us that Petursson

"has been worn down by a lifetime of hard grind. Yet there is nothing he would rather do and nowhere he would rather be, he says, though the future is not exactly bright for agriculture, except for those with the largest farms."

If I had talked with Petursson, I would have told him the hard times middlewestern farmers are having. It's tough for farm families out here on the Great Flat Middle; "corporate farming" is taking over: hog barns with 12,000 hogs; cattle lots with 40,000 steers. It's next to impossible for a fellow on half a section to compete - you need 2500 acres just to get in the game. That's what I would tell the Icelander about our lives.

When Jokulsdottir asked him which of the seasons he likes the best, Petursson responded:

"I like the winter most, unbelievable though it may seem. I'm odd that way. I like it best when the nights start drawing in during autumn. In November, December, and January, February too. The green colour doesn't really agree with me. The brightness and sunshine. On the other hand, the darkness doesn't get to me. What are you supposed to be afraid of?"

I would have to tell Petursson about autumn - it is, for me, the best of seasons and the worst of seasons; it is an ending and a beginning - end of the growing season, beginning of the school year; it is about fullness, things come to fruition, and it is about death. There is a long lay of dusty light in autumn that tugs at my heart, and tugs. Winter, by contrast, is simple; it breaks one way, cold and dark. I wish we could have had this conversation.

Petursson also said:

"People who come here say they couldn't bear the solitude. But I say in return that I couldn't live in Reykjavik. I've always had enough after a couple of days. I feel as though I've been put in a prison cell."

I hear ya there, good buddy. A couple days of the bright lights and the busy streets is about all a fellow can stand to need. Petursson and I would trip over each other trying to head for home.

Petursson also noted:

"I don't feel this life serves much purpose. I have to say it like it is, that this heavenly father, if he's up there somewhere... I don't know what he means by making us drag ourselves along here for a few years, some maybe in good health, others in suffering.... Though of course you have to stick it out as long as you're here. Then you just go into the ground, but where does this soul of ours go? That's the question. Does it end up in the coffin too?"

I would speak to him of the great wheel, and of how it turns. Grandpa dies and a new child is born. We are what we are put here for - to be born, to live, to die, so that life goes on. I couldn't argue with him, though - Petursson lives out there at the very edge of the world where it is legitimate to question the existence of God, and God's wisdom; and question he does. Having to watch all the days go round in that far place, Petursson has to wonder just what it comes to. Raising sheep. For Petursson, that's what it comes to.

In our ignorance of Petursson's existence as we headed south on Highway 60, we drove right past the turn-off to his farm. Oh that we had stopped to talk with him, one Iowa farmboy heart-to-heart with an Icelandic sheep farmer.

As it was, we drove on towards Stykkisholmur.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAYS ELEVEN & TWELVE APRIL 24-25, 2005 - (46)

We paid our restaurant tab

and went up to our room and did some calculations about roads and times and psychic stamina. If we were going to drive over horrendous mountain roads so we could take the ferry, we could drive those same horrendous roads to take the shortest route out of here. I was just about full up with all the beautiful scenery I could stand. The next night in Stykkisholmur would be our last night on the road; it was the end of the trip and the horse was running for the barn. Exactly when my soul tilted from "adventure ahead" to "let's get done" position, I don't know, but I was no longer touring Iceland, now I was heading home.

Yes, we decided to take the most direct route out, driving from Isafjordur south to Flokalundur, east and south from there to Budardalur, and then back west on the Snaefellsnes peninsula to Stykissholumr. That's the plan. And because each of us likes to be in control of his or her destiny - especially when traversing such precarious distances - we'll equally share the driving of those mountain roads. It is only fair that we both endure the torture of riding in the passenger seat. With any luck at all, we should reach Stykkisholmur three or four hours earlier than we would if we took the ferry.

Stykkisholmur is our last stay before we return to Chad and Rut's apartment, to spend a couple days with them before we fly out. This vacation is nearly over. Every day we have been amazed; and we have said so: "We're in Iceland, we're in Iceland!" Very shortly that will no longer be the case - we'll be flying home instead. I am starting to want to go home, to get back to my usual routine; but part of me wants to stay here, to live among these self-reliant and independent people.

Tomorrow we drive for Stykkisholmur, last stop on our circle tour of the island.

***

April 25, 2005
The man at the hotel is Isafjordur had told us the road south out of town, Highway 60, was worse than the road coming in from the east along the fjords, Highway 61. His verdict is true only for a short stretch of road where it climbs up into the mountains and clings narrow and percipitous to its high and tenative perch. Otherwise, folks, Highway 60 to the south is as good as or better than Highway 61, or should I say "not any more treacherous."

The big surprise for us was the three-and-a-half-mile-long tunnel under Breidadalsheidi and Botnsheidi moors, or rather I should say "tunnels," for halfway along the length of it there is a "T" intersection. A right turn there would take you out along the Sugandafjordur to Sudureyri; we continued straight ahead towards the Onundarnfjordur, pulling over into the turn-outs as necessary to let oncoming traffic pass by. I hadn't looked at the map closely, so was not expecting the tunnel, and was not expecting that it would be three and a half miles long and would have a right turn into another tunnel partway through. This tunnel was built in the 1990s and is somewhat roomier than the one on the way to Siglufjordur, yet I would not advise those who are squeamish in tight places to try and drive it.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY ELEVEN APRIL 24, 2005 CONT'D - (45)

We asked to look at a menu

for the hotel's restaurant. The special of the day was seafood soup, a haddock and flounder combo, and coffee or tea for 2100 krona. There was also catfish on the menu; there was haddock in white wine sauce; there was lamb; there was chicken. That sounded intriguing enough to keep us in the building.

We went upstairs to our room, popped one of our beers and dug out our crackers and that Icelandic smoked salmon spread we'd bought at Varmahlid. And we had our own little moment of hors d'ouevres while waiting for the restaurant to open.

Some more things I've learned about Iceland:

(1) Restaurants in Iceland don't open for breakfast because you get breakfast as part of your accommodations at guesthouse or hotel.

(2) Whoever is in charge of the hotel or guesthouse also takes care of the menial duties. At the hotel in Egilsstadir the women staffing the desk in the morning was also putting out and taking down breakfast. Here in Isafjordur the man at the desk was also our matre d' and waiter; the only other staff member on duty was the chef, a lad who looked to be not much more than 12 years old - oh, okay, not much more than 22 years old, I'll give you that - but who can make an incredible seafood soup and lay out a lovely haddock and flounder aside a patty of grilled fresh vegetables and a deep-fried starchy something stuffed with a tasty sauce. This last was a food item I had not seen or imagined before but it was very tasty. I do not have difficulty trying the unknown at least once, if not twice.

Mary and I shared a big glass of beer with the meal; and after we'd eaten we sat with our tea (Mary) and coffee (Tom) looking out at the water and the planes landing and taking off at the distant airport, and at the traffic, at children playing, a man waiting for a bus, a woman pushing a baby stroller, the light on the water, the darkness of the high cliffs, the fullness of everything.

We needed to figure out how we were going to get out of Isafjordor on the morrow. In Tom's original end-of-the-road scenario, you always go back out the way you came in, but that would have taken us a long way out of our way and we would have had to climb and re-climb every mountain and drive up and down the length of every fjord, which experience had provoked Mary to remind me that maybe I'd had my fill. "Yeah," I'd responded. "I think so. I think now it'll be awhile before you hear me begging to see the isolated fishing villages in Labrador. I think I'll be choosing a more accessible kind of picturesque beauty for a while."

Yah, we could go back the way we'd come in. We could phone my nephew in Keflavik and say, "Chad, we're in Isafjordur, come get us." We could take the ferry. Taking the ferry would involve a three-hour drive over more mountain roads. I had asked at the front desk about those roads, "Are they better or worse than the road we came in on?"

"Oh, they are much worse," the fellow said.

In addition, even after we'd driven south across the west fjords to the ferry, the ferry wouldn't leave until 5:00 p.m. and it would be a two-and-a-half or three hour crossing, meaning we wouldn't get into Stykkisholmur until nearly 8:00 p.m. What to do, what to do?

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY ELEVEN APRIL 24, 2005 CONT'D - (44)

We came to Isafjordur from Varmahlid.

We passed through a long mountain valley getting to Blondous on Highway 1; then we ran along the water for a bit. We stopped and filled the car with gasoline in Hvammstangi on the Midfjordur. After that, a blur of fjordurs - Hrutafjordur, Bitrufjordur, Kollafjordur, and Steingrimsfjordur along the way to Holmavik, then Highway 61 through the mountains along Mjoifjordur, Skotufjordur, Hestfjordur, Seydisfjordur, Alftafjordur, and then finally, thankfully, Skutulsfjordur. It's down along one side of the fjord, up along the other; down the length of the fjord, and up; down the mountainside, and up; down from morning and up into early afternoon and down into later afternoon and on into Isafjordur.

How much of this end-of-the-road business did we have? Enough that Tom said: "You know, Mary, when we were setting up this itinerary I declined when Erica asked if I wanted her to book us onto the ferry out of Isafjordur. Maybe when we get to the hotel we can check and see if there is still space available for us on the ferry tomorrow. I'm not sure that I want to drive back out the way we came in."

"You've had enough of this end-of-the-road experience?" Mary asked. "You mean you've had enough?"

When we arrived at our hotel, there was a sign at the check-in desk that reception was staffing the restaurant and we should ask for assistance at the restaurant; yet the restaurant was full of people young and old for a family reunion or some such function, and we could hear someone holding forth at the front of the group making a long-winded oration. So rather than interrupt the proceedings, Mary and I decided to walk about town, which is what we did for an hour. Downtown Isafjordur where were staying is nicely compact with that old-city Quebec feel to it again. We walked the streets and soaked in the beauty, both man-made and natural. What a lovely setting! At one point I looked off at an isolated residence in the distance, at the edge of town:

How small the house -
How large the mountain.

Our hotel is 3-star, more than adequate for us, as we are 1-star travelers as a rule, being poor as a poet's family will be and tight with our money. Finally we got registered and then tried to decide what to do for supper. Nearby there was a pizza place with beer and sandwiches; there was a small Thai restaurant a little farther away; and there was the hotel restaurant, which wouldn't open for another hour and a half.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY ELEVEN APRIL 24, 2005 - (43)

It was after we'd gone to bed last night

that we heard the German woman return to her cabin next door to ours on the right. Anywhere else I would say "after dark" in the previous sentence, but here the twilight at 10:00 p.m. is still fairly bright. In fact, Mary said there was still a hint of dusk at midnight last night. She had heard the family of raggamuffins cavorting in the hot tub then and had looked out; they might have been skinny-dipping - she is not sure they swim trunks on. "Oh," I said, "if being naked doesn't bother them, it doesn't bother me."

And at the other end of the day the dawn is already fairly bright at 3:30 a.m.

And the most amazing fact of all: where the sun rose was not very far from where the sun set: you could see both the sunset and the sunrise out the same window. I can't do that at home.

I'd said to Mary yesterday when we entered the cabin: "Maybe we'll cancel our flight home and live here, in this cabin." That's how I still feel about it this morning. Mary fell in love with Akureyri when we were there the other day, so if we move to Iceland maybe we'd have to live in Akureyri.

It is a lovely, inviting country. "But harsh," I'd said to the fellow from Hestasports who led us to the cabin. "It looks like you have to work pretty hard to make a living from this land."

"Yes," he said. "A lot of people have to work day and night."

*

We have arrived safely at the end of the world and the end of the world is lovely.

Isafjordur just might be all the end of the world I'll ever need. It is another European old-town kind of community nestled between cliffs. Much of this town of 3000 pushes out into the fjord on a small spit of land which also creates an excellent harbor. Isafjordur is the only market town in the western fjords. It was chartered in 1866 and claims some of the oldest houses in Iceland, those built in the mid-eighteenth century. There is the harbor and a small airport. Fishing and trade are the major sources of income.

Yes, Isafjordur is remote. Yes, it is farther from Keflavik to Isafjordur than it is from Isafjordur to Keflavik. Yes, we were tired when we arrived. The hard way in keeps out the riff-raff, and just about everyone else. I suppose the people in Isafjordur might be less concerned with getting in and out of town than we are, for they live here.

They were mountain roads we brought in, running along the water, high, narrow, and rocky mountain roads. Lonesome roads. Mary was driving when we encountered "the Icelandic mountain road trifecta," as we called it - the "Curve Ahead" symbol with the "BLINDHAED" sign and one warning of a 12% downgrade. The closest I ever came to an Icelandic trifecta was a "Curve Ahead" sign paired with one for a 16% downgrade, which is about enough excitement for an Iowa farmboy. You lose altitude pretty fast with a 16% downgrade.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY TEN APRIL 23, 2005 CONT'D - (42)

Above Reykjaholl hundreds of ravens

were engaged in a mating ritual. The birds in this great flock would ride the updraft where the wind hit Reykjaholl, ride it high into the sky, and they would circle up there like turkey vultures. Then they'd try to sort themselves into pairs. It seems as if each male were carrying some tasty tidbit in claw or beak and wanted to pass it to the object of his desire so as to say "Would you be my Valentine?" or "What's a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?" or "If I were the last boy raven at the edge of world and you were the last girl raven, would you lay with me the foundation of future generations?"

Every once in a while you would see a male fumble and drop the tidbit as he tried to transfer it from his claw to his beak. Sometimes the hand-off of the tidbit from male to female went smoothly and you'd hear a satisfying ploick; and sometimes when the female did not seem interested in this particular male and the treat he'd brought, she would fold up her wings and plummet away from him like a small bomb dropping, and the male would give chase. Or perhaps that meant she was interested, it was hard to tell. We were supposed to be walking, but I would stop and watch the ravens, stop again and watch again, hypnotized; I was trying to find pattern and meaning in what I was seeing. This circling and pairing of the ravens went on the whole time we were walking, an hour and a half; it had started before we got here and it continued after we returned to our cabin.

Yes, we returned to our lovely accommodations, changed into swim suits, and went out to the hot tub,which we had all to ourselves. Mary was a bit afraid that getting out of the hot tub into the cold air would be a bit of trauma, but I knew from my sweat lodge experience this is not the case. At one point she stepped up and out of the water to check the truth of my assertion (for you always need to check the truth of Tom's assertions - he's a poet and his reality is not necessarily reality as it would be constructed by others) and she had to admit I was right. Even when a cold gust of wind caught her, she said she wasn't chilled by it. We stayed in the water for half an hour or a little more.

Eventually we went back to the cabin and made ourselves a little supper. We tried the bit of that white "salad" we'd gotten at the grocery store and agreed that what had, on the flight to Iceland, looked like bits of carrot in a cream cheese was actually bits of smoke salmon and that this was not a salad but a spread for crackers or bread. It was tasty too. Here's the headline, folks:

Duh - Tom's Mystery Salad
Is A Smoked Salmon Spread

After we'd finished eating, we played some cards for a bit. We had cards, and we had time.

Eventually the couple at the cabin two doors to our right came back and the wife went into the hot-tub and read while she soaked. Eventually the family with several raggamuffins in the cabin immediately to our left showed up and the littles ones were running and jumping and climbing and clambering over everything and Papa was putting hot dogs on the grill for the children and steaks for him and Mama, and Mama was obviously pregnant.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY TEN APRIL 23, 2005 CONT'D - (41)

In Varmahlid we stopped at the grocery store

and picked up a few items for supper. We did find small containers in a refrigerated case at the back of the store which held a white, creamy substance that looked very much like the unidentified "salad" we'd been served on our flight to Iceland. We bought one small serving to have with our supper. Of course the contents were in Icelandic, so we had no idea what we were buying.

We also had a dish of ice cream, each of us, plain vanilla without any sauce. I believe that if you want to judge a people by their ice cream (as I sometimes wish to) you have to taste their plain vanilla; and by this standard the Icelanders pass with very high acclaim. Or so says Tom, who admittedly has never been hired by the State Department to study the correlation between ice cream and democracy, but who would like to be. I'm just the fellow to do it.

Next door to the grocery store was the Tourist Information building. We surprised the woman there as we entered. It was nearly 4:00 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon in the off-season, which may explain her surprise; but she was there and we were there and we were trying to find our accommodations for the night at Hestasports-Husen. The woman spoke no English, or very little, and I could only say "Takk" ("please"/"thank you") in Icelandic, so I simply pointed at the name on the place on our list of accomodations; she looked at it and walked me outside, pointed south down the highway, said: "Two kilometers."

"Takk," I said.

We found the Hestasports building about two kilometers down the road but didn't see anything there that looked like the cabins we were expecting to stay in. I poked my head into the office.

"Hello?" I called.

"Hello" came the reply, and a fellow came forward from a back room to take our registration and lead us back through town and out the other side to a circle of new cabins grouped around a very large in-ground hot tub built of rock and ringed with rock and steaming in the late afternoon air. Our cabin looked like a mansion to us - one large room with windows all along the front; it held three tables - one for dining, one for cards, and one for writing, I suppose; plus cupboards, stove, refrigerator, and sink.

"Would you look at all this silverware," Mary said. "There is more silverware here than we own!"

There was a bedroom on the first floor with two single beds, and a sleeping loft with two more single beds and seven sleeping pads tucked away that could be pulled out for a very large and intimate group. And the bathroom - while it was not the size of Mongolia, it was larger than our bathroom at home. Had we fallen into heaven?

Mary and I walked for an hour and a half, up and down the trails leading to the top of Reykjaholl nearby. Reykjaholl is a wooded hill, apparently a tree preserve of some sort, with some of the largest pine trees we'd seen in Iceland. Particular trees here and there had markers in front of them, identifying what kind of tree it is by both its Icelandic name and its scientific name and its place of origin. There were at least three kinds of trees from Alaska, three kinds from Norway, and three from Russia.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY TEN APRIL 23, 2005 CONT'D - (40)

We stopped for a picnic lunch

at a wayside table overlooking Skagafjordur. In the distance, those icebergs. We were closer to the Arctic than we imagined, and the sign we saw commanding that we report polar bear sightings to the local authorities were not just wishful thinking. At Langhus, just off Highway 76 near Miklavatn, lives the farmer Sigurbjorn (Victory Bear) Thorleifsson, "the only Icelander ever to have shot a polar bear in self defence," according to the book of character profiles, Icelanders by Sigurgeir Sigurjonsson and Unnur Jokulsdottir.

It was mid-February, 1988, and the sea ice lay inshore in densely packed floes. Sigurbjorn recalled:

"Before lunch there was a phone call and I was told a polar bear had been sighted. It was unusual news and I didn't take it very seriously at first. Just laughed. Then I saw that there was something going on so I headed over there."

The bear was sighted on the beach, which lay off to our right as we passed by. As community pest controller, Sigurbjorn was duty-bound to shoot the bear because it "presented a threat to the inhabitants' safety." He did his job. A furor ensued about the killing of the polar bear, but eventually the angry phone calls to Langhus ceased and the uproar died down. The polar bear was stuffed and is now on display at the Skagafjordur Elementary School in Varmahlid.

Mary drove us down the peninsula past where the bear had been shot, drove us across the end of Skagafjordur to Saudarkrokur, and then down to Varmahlid where we'd be spending the night.

*

This is true for all of Iceland, not just the Skagafjordur region: there is hardly any litter. Yes, you might see a bit of trash in the cities - in Akureyri and Rekjavik, for instance - and out in the country sometimes you'd find that pieces of the plastic farmers use to wrap their hay have blown away and gotten caught in fencelines. Yet by and large there is not much litter strewn about. Now, it's either that Icelanders are a much tidier people than Americans, or else nothing stays around for long when the wind is blowing fifty miles an hour, or both. I tend to think that the Icelanders are tidy; and Mary would add that there might not be as much trash because you have to pay for the plastic bags to take your purchases home if you haven't brought your own sacks. Most Icelanders take their own sacks when they go shopping.

*

The Icelanders are much farther along the way to becoming "a cashless society" than we Americans, I think. Credit cards are used extensively on the island, even for a mere two dollars' worth of groceries. Mary and I found Icelandic coins difficult to count and thought it was because we were unfamiliar with the money; yet when I saw a cashier in a store making change for the rare customer who actually paid cash, she was fumbling through a gobbed handful of coins the same as we would. You can buy gasoline day or night at any of the gas pumps which accept credit cards, but you need to have a European-style card which has a PIN number attached to it. Our Visa card does not; or, if it does, we don't know the PIN number. Thus there were several instances in our drive around the circumference of the island when I had to ask the attendant to turn on the pump for me, and I paid inside with the credit card. Some pumps allow you to choose to pay inside, and some few pumps are not set up to accept credit cards.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY TEN APRIL 23, 2005 CONT'D - (39)

I had read about Siglufjordur

in one of Minnesotan Bill Holm's essays on Iceland in his book, Eccentric Islands. He calls it the northernmost town in Iceland, apparently contradicting our Guide which said Raufarhofn was the northernmost village. This far north, with these many mountains, and this much water, it might be that we're splitting hairs: Siglufjordur may be the northernmost "town," Raufarhofn the northernmost "village?" Holm noted that during the Herring Era, Siglufjordur became the third largest community in Iceland "almost overnight." That came to a halt in 1969 with the depletion of the herring fisheries.

"You don't pass by Siglufjordur on your way to anywhere," Holm said. "It is the end of the road." Later, talking about two brothers from Siglufjordur and how isolated the community was during the 1930s when they were growing up, he noted that "neither brother had ever seen a banana." Those brothers were almost grown men when they saw their first oranges. Such testimony is good enough for me: I have assuredly collected another end-of-the-road experience. "How many more do you need?" Mary might have wished to ask. Or "How many more can you stand?"

Holm had been in Siglufjordur in the company of an Icelandic choir which was singing at the sixtieth birthday party of a local resident, Gunnar, a man who had been profoundly deaf since birth. Says Holm:

"The choir lined up on one side of the room facing Gunnar who stood at attention, still holding his birthday flowers, an audience of one. Marcy and I readied our cameras, but I sensed trouble coming. Marteinn gave the pitch and the choir began singing, an old Icelandic folk song probably about the mountains and the blue sea and the longing in a young man's heart. They sang as beautifully, as tenderly as I have ever heard them - or for that matter any choir - sing. The sound broke the heart, but the other sound broke it even more. Gunnar sang along in his strange pitchless voice, still smiling from ear to ear, full of joy. I tried to focus the camera - my eyes streamed with tears, fogging the view finder. I blubbered like a fool. I handed the camera to Marcy. Her face was a waterfall of tears; she handed me Wincie's camera. I staunched the flow for a second to look at the choir: every one of them weeping while they sang. I looked at Marteinn - conducting with one hand, wiping away tears with the other. The serving women wept. The locals wept. The mice must have been weeping in the wall holes, and the handful of flies laid down their wings to weep, ignoring the cream cakes that ought to have been their target. The whole universe wept except Gunnar, who went on grinning, having as good a time as it is possible for a human being to have on this sometimes grief-filled planet."

On our way back down the peninsula, I drove us from Siglufjordur through the tunnel again. I had to back out of the tunnel just as I started nosing in, for an on-coming car had rolled into view. And just as I exited the tunnel at the other end, I met another car entering.

A middlewesterner has to love that kind of excitement: we've got 40-acres to turn our rigs around, usually, and here I was in Iceland clinging to the steep side of the mountain one moment, disappearing into the dark tunnel the next, prepared for head-on collision at any moment. You only live once.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY TEN APRIL 23, 2005 CONT'D - (38)

I knew there was a tunnel through the mountain

on the way to Siglufjordur; I knew we'd have to pass through it. I didn't know the tunnel was only wide enough for one car. I didn't know that it was 830 meters long and bent so that drivers entering at the two ends of the tunnel could not see each other.

So how do these practical Icelanders handle that problem? At five or six places along the length of it, they widened the tunnel enough to create pull-outs for one of the drivers to use so the other could get past. These pull-outs are marked with the same "M" as pull-outs along the narrow highways in the rest rest of the country. As we made our way to Siglufjordur through the tunnel, I had to make use of one of those Ms. The system works. With me over close to the rock wall of tunnel on my side of the mountain, and with the other car over close to the other rock wall, there was just enough room for him to pass by.

If you are at all claustrophobic, don't enter the tunnel. What looks like a lot of space when you enter it suddenly becomes exceedingly cozy once you've committed yourself to it. I think I could be borderline claustrophobic.

You don't want to drive along those mountainous fjords if you're afraid of heights either. The width of the roads is not generous to start with, and you have to add to that the Iceland notion that, if you fall off the mountain, it's your own damn fault.

Siglufjordur is a lovely, if remote fishing town of about 1500 people perched up around the northern tip of its peninsula. How far north, you ask? We saw icebergs in Skagafjordur as we drove towards Siglufjordur, and some great flat pieces with several feet of ice above the water, as if they were sheets of Arctic pack ice that had broken loose, floated south, and got caught in the lee of this fjord.

At places along the horizon to the north, a band of darkness above the water. Fog? I suggested that to Mary. It might be optical illusion, she suggested. I've been taken in by optical illusion before, I said.

The steep mountains behind Siglufjordur push the community nearly into the fjord; it holds on. Parts of Siglufjordur look like nothing so much as parts of old Quebec City, a distinctly European style of architecture. Each street inland from the harbor is laid out about thirty feet higher on the mountain than the street previous, so that as you drive one street and then another you are zig-zagging your way up the mountainside. According to our Guide:

"Two walls have been constructed in the high ground above the town in order to ward off avalanches; they go by the name of Stori-boli (Big bull), 18 m. high, and Litli-boli (Little bull), 14 m. high. Together these two walls, completed in 1999, are nearly 1 km. in length."

The town was an important herring center from 1904 until recently when the herring disappeared, the Guide also says. Siglufjordur has a good harbor, a school, a bank, a hospital. In summer the life of the "Herring Era" is recreated by locals dressed in costumes for the historical re-enactment and celebration.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY TEN APRIL 23, 2005 CONT'D - (37)

It was not far to the north of Hofsos,

according to A Traveller's Guide to Icelandic Folk Tales by Jon R. Hjalmarsson, that Thordur, the farmer at Thrastarstadir, had his most amazing experience.

Upon a winter's day, Thordur set off to do his trading in Hofsos. Soon he lost his way in a blizzard and continued lost until evening, when suddenly he came upon shops with goods for sale, and tall buildings. He heard music playing and through a window saw people dancing. He knocked at a door and begged shelter, explaining he had become lost in the storm.

The good wife of the house brought him food, and the master was generous with the best wine that Thordur had ever tasted. Thordur ate and drank; and drank and became tipsy; and soon he was offered a comfortable bed where he slept the night.

After breakfast in the morning, the master of the house invited Thordur into his shop, offering twice as much for Thordur's goods as he would get in Hofsos, and charging half as much for all sorts of merchandise that was in stock. In addition, the merchant presented gifts to Thordur - a shawl for his wife and bread for his children; these were reward for saving the life of the merchant's son. Yet Thordur did not remember any such thing.

It had occurred was while Thordur was waiting with a group of men for a favorable wind out to Drangey island just off the coast there, the merchant said. Some of the men had challenged each other to throw stones out to hit a certain rock. But the merchant's son had lain down below that rock, to rest on such a hot day. Surely a constant rain of stones would have killed him, the merchant thought, had not Thordur demanded an end to such stone-throwing, calling it a pointless pastime; the men stopped, but oh they mocked Thordur's eccentricities. So Thordur accepted the merchant's gifts.

Now Thordur had done all the trade he'd meant to do; and now the weather had cleared. It was time for him to head for home. Thordur said good-bye to the household. The merchant accompanied the farmer along the way for a bit, then wished Thordur a good journey. The men said good-bye and parted.

Thordur walked on awhile, and then he turned to look back at where he'd come from. He saw nothing but Thordarhofdi, the ancient volcano crater, and several basalt rocks standing off in the distance, rocks which had the shape of church and shops and dwelling places for the elves.

When Thordur arrived home, according to the folk-tale, his purchases

"were put on show and seen by many. Such fine goods had never before been seen in Iceland. Thordur never again saw the merchant or any of his people, but he kept some of the goods he had brought all his life and had them on display."

Today Mary and I traveled Highway 76 north of Hofsos. I drove as if it were just any landscape. We had seen a lot of water and rock in Iceland, a lot of water and rock. And then, off to our right, there was Thrastarstadir, where Thordur had farmed. And to our left, farther on, the prominence of Thordarhofdi came into view, and with it the elves' church and shops and dwelling places. Oh, they looked like rocks to us out there, merely rocks, now, that place where Thordur had been given shelter from the storm.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAYS NINE & TEN APRIL 22-23, 2005 CONT'D - (36)

After Mary and I had finished our late lunch

and then our sidewalk coffee-sipping and people-watching and we'd had enough of Tom's dime-store philosophizing, we got back in the car and drove north from Akureyri along the fjords to Dalvik, which is only a long stone's throw across the water from the pass we'd crossed getting to Akureyri, but it was far far distant by road.

The one thing you learn driving these fjords is that over there is always prettier from over here; that you often can't see the beauty of over here from here. There seems to be a metaphor of modern life in such an observation, don't you think? Someone should distill it to some pithy saying: "The snow is always brighter on yonder mountains" or some such. Heh, heh.

When we got back to our hotel at Lake Myvatn, we decided to drive the circumference of the lake starting along the west side, which we hadn't seen yet, proceeding north, then east to Reykjahlio. At Reykjahlio we followed a jeep track back into a lava field and we found a place where a lava flow had opened up into a large, dark cave. A sign was posted at the site indicating the water temperature was 50 C and too hot for bathing. I had left my flashlight in the suitcase at the hotel, so we didn't go exploring the cave formed by the lava.

Instead we walked for two miles in the lava field along a marked trail through the wasteland. You had to pay constant attention to where you were putting your feet. Remember: if you drive off a mountainside or take a tumble onto jagged lava, you are responsible for your own bleeding sorry ass. In Iceland you don't get to sue some simply because you've got troubles. They've got troubles too.

***

April 23, 2005
We had a short day's travel today, to a cabin at Varmahlid. To get here, we drove back through Akureyri on Highway 1. A great blanket of smoke hung out over the water for much the length of the fjord as we approached Akureyri, from a grass fire apparently some miles closer to the mountains at the inner end of the fjord. We could see the smoke rising but could not determine the source. It was as thick as any fog out over the water, which is where it tended to stay, over the water.

"This is a Tom trip," as Mary would say, so of course we did not come straight from Lake Myvatn to Varmahlid. No, we took a side trip, a half-a-day-out-of-the-way-in-the-wrong-direction side trip. We saw some beautiful mountains and beautiful valleys and, on the way to Siglufjordur, another beautiful fjord. We passed through Hofsos as we moved towards Siglufjordur; Hofsos, our Guide says, is "one of the oldest trading places in Iceland." There's a museum and research center in Hofsos for those interested in Icelanders who have migrated to North America. At this season, the center is open "by appointment" but we didn't have an appointment; and we didn't stop to make one, but went on to the tip of the Trollaskagi peninsula.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY NINE APRIL 22, 2005 CONT'D - (35)

The food. Oh, yes, the food!

We ate at the Bautinn in downtown Akureyri. Mary had the salmon; she was a little slow in noticing the black guillemot among the specials, or she would have ordered that. I broke down - I couldn't hold out any longer - I broke down and had roast peppered lamb. Both meals came with soup and salad bar. And bright service from a middle-aged waitress who cheerfully explained the menu to us in fine English. We would have bumbled through anyway, but the help was appreciated and the moment was human. The food was terrific.

*

They hide the ugly children, I'm convinced of it. In Akureyri they'd been having a skiing competition for children for a couple of days. Erica-who-reserved-our-rooms had told us about that when we talked with her, explaining why we couldn't get a hotel room in the largest city in the north. And indeed the city was teeming with lanky and loose-limbed pubescent boys and girls in ski boots and bright clothes. One boy's voice had changed or was changing and he spoke in a rumble to his squeaky-voiced friend. One junior-high girl wore black and had sun-glasses with blue-tint lenses: she knew she was too cool. She was with her younger sister, who had a pair of those red wax lips and was of an age that she wasn't embarrassed to wear them as she walked up and down the streets. There were a lot of exhausted looking moms and dads with children in tow, marching lockstep. Sometimes you could just tell that Mom had about all she could take, or Dad wasn't going to put up with much more. We sat on a bench along the sidewalk sipping our cups of espresso and watching people. I pointed out at least one such stressed family to Mary. Indeed, to get where they were going, the unhappy Mom and two dutiful young'uns walked on one side of our bench; Father-who-couldn't-win-no-matter-what walked on the other side. The tension between them was evident in the very schism of their walk. Obviously stressed.

Generally, though, the Icelanders I've seen seem as bright-eyed and pleasant as any people on earth, sweet-tempered and helpful. They don't seem to lose the bemusement of those who know what is important and what is not. Nearly every woman's face wears a bit of puzzlement, as if life is still the enjoyable mystery it was for them as children; as if that joy has not yet been pressed out of them. The men look as if they're prepared to do whatever needs to be done.

It cannot be easy, wrestling a living from this harsh, beautiful land, but no one I've met or seen leads me to believe they find life to be an awful struggle. On the contrary, if I could generalize way beyond what I have any business doing, I would say that on the whole the Icelanders tend to look infinitely more happy than most Americans you'll see. These folks may bear incredible burdens, but they smile and say "May I help you?" and their care seems genuine.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY NINE APRIL 22, 2005 CONT'D - (34)

A few notes about driving (and living) in Iceland:

(1) The roads are too narrow by about half.

(2) The native Icelanders seem to want to drive faster on these roads than I'm comfortable driving.

(3) The Icelandic Roads Dept. tends to take a casual view as to guard rails and such, and the Parks people will let you walk right up to the edge of the cliffs and fall off.

(4) All this suggests that that there are not "victims" in Iceland; rather you are responsible for yourself. If you drive off the road and tumble down the mountainside, if you fall to your death from a 300-foot cliff, that would be your own fault. You can't blame someone else for your stupidity. What a refreshing view. In Iceland, if you poured scalding hot coffee on your lap, I think you'd get a lot of "What'd ya do that for?"and not very much "Here's a pile of money from the evil folks responsible for your suffering." In Iceland, I think, you're responsible for your own suffering. Which is almost a middlewestern notion.

*

We drove to Akureyri today, to spend some time shopping. We haven't done much of that. Mary was looking for another sweater or vest, and some souvenirs of Iceland to take back for friends. We had quite an enjoyable time of it, walking the streets of "the Capital of the North," shopping its stores, and eating at a fine busy restaurant downtown, the Bautinn.

With its 15,600 residents, Akureyri is the fourth largest city in Iceland. It has been a trading center since at least 1602 and received municipal rights in 1787. Quite a number of Icelandic writers and poets seem to hail from Akureyri or the area (there must be something in the water), among them Jon Sveinsson, Matthias Jochumsson, David Stefansson, and Frithbjorn Steinsson. It is a lovely city, the downtown crowded and charming like the old streets of Quebec City. Mary and I decided we could live there. She could get a job working in the hospital and I could write full-time and we could enjoy Akureyri's loveliness year-round.

The bookstore we found sells books published in Icelandic, in Norwegian, and in English. And of course I bought a few books at the bookstore and thought I was done with buying books as I've already got too many; then as Mary was browsing in "The Viking," Akureyri's "largest souvenir shop," I found more books there, enough so that when the clerk couldn't determine the price of Three Modern Icelandic Poets (Steinn Steinarr, Jon ur Vor, and Matthias Johannessen) translated by Marshall Brement and published by The Icelandic Review, which I had in my pile, he didn't charge me for it but simply gave it to me. Which is good, because on reading it I found that the translations were not felicitous at all, and the book was not felicific. The book does no service to the poets. The poems may be terrific in the original, but the English here thuds on the page like a water-soaked log dropped onto soft macadam.

In Iceland only a week and already an expert on the translation of Icelandic poetry, are you, Tom?

Well, you decide! This is "Wise Am I Not" by Jon ur Vor. I don't like the translation. Do you?

Wise, wise,
no, I am not wise,
no, wise am I not.

It is a table of my youth
which talks through me,
an unpainted simple table
in the house of a poor man,
veiny, like the old hands,
which washed it clean
every morning
with beachsand
- and water
from a cold spring.

Wise words
of these clean boards
are spoken
in all the
languages of the world,
seeded in the earth and wind.

And that's not the worst of it.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAYS EIGHT & NINE APRIL 21-22, 2005 - (33)

We could teach Icelanders a little bit about apple pie and ice cream,

however. At least I thought it said "apple pie and ice cream" on the menu at the pizza parlor. The "apple" in the apple pie was much like a thick layer of jam on toast; the top and bottom crusts of the pie looked very much like pancakes but were actually a tasty fried pastry. The ice cream was actually whipped cream. This was a tasty dessert but I wouldn't call it pie and ice cream. It tasted a bit like Mexican "fried ice cream."

Mary and I shared a beer with our pizza. When we finished, we bagged our two remaining pieces of pizza, paid our tab, and we were ready to run for home - or at least we were ready to get back to our room at the Sel-Myvatn Hotel on the south edge of Lake Myvatn.

I had thought it was a bit unusual to find a big 3-star hotel and conference center out here in northern Iceland, so far from any large settlement. Yet up along the north coast, even more remote, at least twenty miles down the gravel road and miles from the ocean, we saw another such hotel and conference center. One assumes that in high season they all get plenty of use. We are here in the off-season, which is suitable to us, to our off-ness.

***

April 22, 2005
I think I have not said enough about the water here in the Lake Myvatn region. It smells like hell. It is a sulphurous liquid and the smell of sulphur permeates coffee and tea and is the most noticeable when you step into the shower. "I'm going to wash in that?"

The up-side, Mary said, is you won't run out of hot water.

I considered just how whiny my complaint sounded and I stepped into the shower. The people who live here have little choice about the water. They could move, sure, but one does not easily uproot from one's native place and certainly not for anything so minor as sulphurous water.

It is morning, Friday, April 22nd. We have what you'd call a partly cloudy sky. We'll have the warmest temperatures on the island today, a full 13 degrees Centigrade.

All the windows in Iceland have one pane that opens to let in fresh air and - in this warming clime - a few fat flies as well. These big ol' flies are particularly slow, Mary says, and she'll gathered up a handful of them and toss them out the window whence they came.

We have a view of a couple lovely mountains out that window, which faces south, which faces away from any potential northern lights. Though we haven't seen any evidence anywhere on our trip that the lights have been flashing at all. It is a small disappointment - two weeks in Iceland, no northern lights.

*

I failed to mention our stop yesterday at the black sand beach down the road from our seaside lookout where we saw puffins and a seal, down the road and down from the cliff to sea level. It was an immense beach, all black lava sand, covered with an immense number of dead birds of several varieties, and one dead seal. We walked quite a bit on the beach, taking in every grim reminder that nature is brutal and life is fragile. The ocean was washing gently to shore, wave after wave. At some point the wind and sea had not been so gentle and had, apparently, driven birds and the seal to their deaths. Fortunately, life is promiscuous; and life goes on.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY EIGHT APRIL 21, 2005 CONT'D - (32)

We drove some nine miles beyond Hraunhafnartangi

to Raufarhofn, the northernmost village in Iceland, around the corner and slightly down the east side of the Melrakkasletta peninsula. We had been farther east in Egilsstadir, but you could not be much farther north anywhere. Raufarhofn is a fishing village of 300 residents, a remarkable little community considering the extremity of its location. According to our Guide, this was "one of the biggest herring ports in Iceland and thousands of people worked in the meal factory and salting the herring in the summer." As far north as Raufarhofn is,

"There are the darkest winter nights but also the brightest summer nights and for a whole month in the summer the sun doesn't set."

April 21 is a holiday is Iceland, "the first day of summer," and the children of Raufarhofn were not in school but were playing out on the streets and lawns. Two boys were playing basketball at an outdoor court near the school; one of them was wearing his stocking cap pulled clear down over his ears, first day of summer or not. Two high school girls walked a Black Lab across an open field towards us, and I was given to wonder why we'd seen no ugly children anywhere in the country.

We could have continued on the same road, Highway 85, down along the east coast of Iceland back towards Egilsstadir, if we'd wanted to, but decided to go back the way we came. In Iceland, you can't get much farther from the main road than we did today, I think. That was the backside of beyond we got to see, and then some.

All those miles of gravel road work up an appetite, but in Husavik the restaurant we wanted to eat at appeared to be closed and the alternate we chose, a pizza parlor, wouldn't open for another fifteen minutes. So we spent the time walking leisurely about town. Then we went in and ordered a pizza. And Mary remarked that here we were, just like the people we make fun of, going to a foreign country and ordering food we could get at home. Well, the pizza didn't particularly look and taste like an American pizza, so perhaps we can be forgiven. Although you'd have to say it is strange for a fellow who has pizza only three or four times a year to have two of them in a single week in Iceland.

I have noticed that some Icelanders older than 50 or so have more difficulty speaking English, and those who are younger generally are more comfortable and fluent. Even the young gas station attendant in Egilsstadir spoke English flawlessly. How many gas station attendants in the US have even studied a foreign language? Can we count them on one hand? How many check-out clerks at the grocery stores in the US speak a foreign language? Those in Iceland speak two or three. Could the fact that we think the United States is the center of the universe be the source of some of our problems in the world? These Icelanders could teach us a little bit about playing well with others. If we were teachable. Which I sometimes doubt.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY EIGHT APRIL 21, 2005 - (31)

The lighthouse at the Hraunhafnartangi point

sits well off the road. The most direct path to the lighthouse was obviously closed. Farther on was another path, which also should have been closed perhaps, but was not. Where the rockiness of it got to be more than we cared to subject our rental car to, we stopped. I climbed the rock wall the sea had made and photographed the lighthouse to the east, and the burial mound for Thorgeir Havarsson who was slain here. There in the distance you could see an iceberg on the ocean. I photographed the Arctic Ocean to the north as well, and again you could see an iceberg.

The stones in the driveway out to the lighthouse were huge and they'd become larger than you'd want to drive a rented buggy up and over. So I put my foot in the Arctic Ocean, and we were ready to turn our rig around. But now a tough little pick-up was headed up the driveway behind us, with an old fellow driving. As he neared us, he pulled off the driveway and stopped. I walked to him and said "Hello," and he shook his head and laughed and made that universal expression with his face that meant he didn't understand English. I gave to explain that I didn't be understanding Icelandic either, and I gestured with the camera to show that we had been taking photos.

I was assuming this fellow was caretaker at the lighthouse, intent as he was on getting out there. Chunks of driftwood blocked his way, however. When I say "chunks," I mean logs fourteen inches around and fourteen feet long. He nodded at the end of one of those logs and I picked it up; he picked up the other end. We carried it off to the edge of the driveway and he counted in Icelandic, 1- 2- and we both knew to throw the log on 3. We picked up another one and threw it to the side, too - 1-, 2-, 3.

Soon enough he was on his way, headed up to the lighthouse, his pick-up bouncing like a basketball among the boulders. We backed around and headed out.

Where we pulled out of the driveway, we weren't far from the marker at Meyjarthufa ("Virgin's knoll"). Legend has it, according to our Guide,

"the whole population of the Sletta area died of a plague, except for one woman in the eastern part and one man in the western part. They met up on Meyjarthufa and laid the foundations for a new generation in the area."

"If I were the last man at the end of the earth," I would ask her, "and you were the last woman at the end of the earth, could I lay with you the foundations of a new generation?"

"Oh, Bjorn," she would exclaim, "how you talk so sweet to me."

There is an amazing amount of driftwood all along this north coast - not just modest pieces like those we're used to finding along Lake Michigan, but 12- and 15-foot long logs 12- and 15-inches in diamter. We saw a couple places where people were collecting and sorting such wood, and other debris. Everything that washed ashore up there - driftwood, bouys, barrels, whatever - got collected and sorted for re-use. Stacks of logs with enough wood to build a log cabin. Enough bouys to float a navy. A fellow here, a fellow there, both of them hard at work, competing for the same resource.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY EIGHT APRIL 21, 2005 - (30)

We did drive the length of Asbyrgi Canyon,

along its floor. The walls around us were 270 feet high, in a horse-shoe shape. Unlike the Grand Canyon in the US, Asbyrgi seems to have been formed not by the movement of water but by the movement of the very earth itself. Or, as legend would have it, Asbyrgi is a hoofprint of the god Odin's eight-legged steed Sleipnir. The canyon is a protected area, covered with scrubby trees and filled with thrushes and other small birds which seem to love those trees. The canyon walls at the far end harbor seagulls which, of course, were terribly raucous on their high perches, sounding most like a distressed and gabbling flock of geese. Where we walked in the canyon, we walked on a sloppy snow which held our weight sometimes, and sometimes did not.

What is unusual about Asbyrgi is that there is a huge crag called Eyjan ("The island") at the open end of the U; Eyjan seems of the same materials as the canyon walls themselves, as if the earth has pulled away from itself at this spot. Has it? Our Guide says the orgin of the canyon

"is uncertain. It might have been formed by subsidence, or it could have been formed by floods in the river Jokulsa. There are also signs of sea-water having flowed into it."

The WCs at the parking lot were locked up tight (WC = water closets) so we availed ourselves of the wildness. Because so few public places in Iceland seem to have WC facilities, Mary is convinced these Icelanders don't go to the bathroom on their outings. And when places do have to have them, the WCs are closed at this season.

Then it was on to the harsh northern coastline and that northernmost point in Iceland. We're talking gravel road, of course, harsh mountain road that occasionally dropped down to the seaside and then climbed away again. Even the best roads in Iceland are barely wide enough for two vehicles; and many drivers prefer to take their half out of the middle of the road; I know I do, especially in the high passes.

Mary and I stopped so I could take a photograph of a decrepit old tractor rusting away on a hillside not far from the Arctic Ocean. I thought it had to be the northernmost tractor in Iceland, which is how I labeled it on our rough list of what we've photographed. At this point we were well into Disposable Camera #4, meaning that we'd taken close to ninety photos. I leave most of the photo-taking in our life to Mary, except for such personally-important shots as "northernmost tractor in Iceland," and such. Mary photographed the northernmost sheep.

At one point along the west edge of the Melrakkasletta peninsula, off in the distance to our left along the ocean, was a farm called Nupskatla, which was the birthplace of the novelist Gudmundur Magnusson (1887-1918), whose pen name was Jon Trausti. There's a big pinnacle rock near there that the Icelanders sometimes call "Karl," and sometimes call "Jon Trausti" after the novelist. You're a writer and want to leave your name to something: Trausti gave his to that big rock and all I'll get, I think, is a worry stone.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAYS SEVEN & EIGHT APRIL 20-21, 2005 CONT'D - (29)

We got our bags up to our room

on the third floor of the hotel, then we walked for a while. We looked at an old church at another farm near the hotel; we walked its cemetery and saw gravestones for people born as far back as the 1840s. I also saw a pair of gravestones side-by-side for women born several months apart in the same year, who died several months apart the same year thirty-four years later. I recognized that the side-by-side placement was telling me something, but I didn't know what.

We went back to our room then, put our feet up, read some, and Tom might have napped a bit before suppertime, which here in Iceland doesn't start until 7:00 p.m. The hotel has its formal restaurant serving nouveau cuisine and our waiters looked as if they should have been flashing their blonde good looks in Copenhagen or Olso, Stockholm or Helsinki, not in this far outpost of the galaxy. The service was exquisite, as was the food.

Mary ordered the baked salt cod with dried tomatoes and olives. I had the reindeer steak with cranberry jam. The food looked pretty on the plate and tasted even better than it looked. Of course this kind of food comes at a price, so this was our splurge meal for the trip. When we finally translated the cost of the meal, we realized we'd laid out $125 for our dinner, including the beer. Which isn't much in some parts of the world, but where I come from, that's a lot. It was hard to believe that when you stepped out the door of the hotel you were standing in a farmyard.

Tomorrow we'd drive and drive and, if things went as Tom hoped, we'd throw a stone as far as the Arctic Circle. If things didn't go as planned, we'd enjoy the drive anyway.

***

April 21, 2005
Have I forgotten to mention that we have had sunshine. Both yesterday and today were unexpectedly bright, warm, and without the hard winds we've come to expect. In the far distance we can see snow on the mountains, the air is that clear. This is another side of Iceland entirely.

Today's excursion was to the north coast of the country, to the northernmost post of the island at Hraunhafnartangi, which - according to our Guide - "touches the Arctic Circle."

Along the way we passed through Husavik, a tidy little port to which we'd return for supper. We stopped at an overlook along the ocean and saw puffins on the water below us, eiders, and seagulls. I even a seal in the water far below us.

Indeed, as we'd feared, the road to the Dettifoss falls is closed from the north at this time of year, as it is from the south. So we won't see the Dettifoss this trip.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY SEVEN APRIL 20, 2005 CONT'D - (28)

The high lava desert is not remarkable

except that portions of what we saw had erupted from a fissure as recently as 1984. That's twenty years ago, I know, but is still closer to molten rock than I have been for a while.

We walked the sulphurous mountain and steam field at Namafjall, just a few miles east of Reykjahalio. Mud was boiling and slurping and popping; steam was coming out of three large vent holes in great continuous clouds; the mountain itself was yellow with the sulphur. The smell was not unlike ripe chicken manure, if you know of what I speak. The Guide says:

"Great care must be taken and all warnings observed as there have been many accidents."

To say this is a land of harsh beauty would be putting it mildly.

We got gasoline in Reykjahalio and had our lunch at a picnic table near the gas station's convenience store. It was still early afternoon and we thought we might drive to the Dettifoss falls before finding our hotel, but the road was still closed, barricaded. We were within twenty-eight kilometers of the most powerful falls in Europe - 212 tons of water per second goes over the edge - and we couldn't get there from here. We may not be able to get there from the north end of the road either. You know you are on an adventure when you find this many roads blocked off.

So, instead, we wandered our way to the hotel, stopping to photograph walls made of lava rocks, a large arrangement of sheep-sorting pens. This is farm country, up here in the north, and we've seen some sheep.

We found our hotel at the south of Lake Myvatn, at least I thought it was our hotel. There was a farm behind it. We parked at the sidewalk and could see a doorway into a little ice cream parlor and cafeteria, and windows opening onto a formal dining room, but we could not see the hotel office nor any doorway to it. There was a girl of about eight standing on the sidewalk, she of long hair hanging down and bright eyes.

"Excuse me," I said. "Do you speak English?"

"Yes," she said with such a lovely lilt, "yes, I do."

"Can you tell me if this is where we are?" I asked her. I pointed at the name of the hotel in our information about accommodations.

"Yes," she said with more of that lovely lilt, "yes, it is."

"Well, where is the office?" I asked. "We do not see the office."

"Around the corner," she said. "The office is around the corner. Go around this corner." She pointed the way.

"Thank you," I said.

"You are very welcome," she said, and she smiled.

What a bright and fair child. You'd almost want to adopt her for your own lovely daughter.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY SEVEN APRIL 20, 2005 CONT'D - (27)

Egilsstadir reminds me of Thompson, Manitoba,

up there at the far reach of road in Canada. It's the way both towns sprawl, I think, without a real downtown, with things plopped wherever they fell. Buildings go up wherever they can, where they may. However, the buildings in Egilsstadir seem more put together, more permanent, than those I remember in Thompson.

After we finished breakfast, we lit out for the Lake Myvatn region in the north of Iceland, where we'd be staying at the Sel-Hotel Myvatn, which is a three-star hotel on one side and a working farmstead on the other.

The landscape between between Egilsstadir and Lake Myvatn starts out looking like the exposed Canadian shield of Manitoba, becomes a lunatic moonscape, and ends up with a big lake dug into or out of lava country. When we'd talked with Erica in Reykjavik, she had cautioned us to make sure we had a full tank of gas before we left Egilsstadir, and food for a picnic meal. The drive between Egilsstardir and Lake Myvatn would be pretty desolate.

And it was desolate and lovely. Early on there was the valley through which runs the mighty Jokulsa a Bru, a glacial river carrying a hundred and twelve tons of clay and sand to the ocean each day. There were mountains, always mountains. Mary says you can't stand anywhere in Iceland and not see a mountain. There was the farm and church at Modrudalur, several miles of gravel road out of our way but worth the drive. Modrudalur is "situated at a higher altitude than any other farm in Iceland," our Guide says, and is

"also one of the most isolated. Modrudalur has extensive lands considered well suited for sheep-farming and has thus been a substantial farm for centuries."

In former times, the lands were so well-suited that "the layer of cream on top of the milk vats at Modrudalur was said to be thick enough to float a horseshoe."

From Modrudalur you can see Herdubreid, "one of the most beautiful mountains in Iceland," as well as the Dyrafjoll mountains which are part of the Vatnajokull glacier. So we've seen Vatnajokull at its south face, and now from the north.

How isolated is Modrudalur? Our Guide tells the story of a traveler who stayed at the farm overnight in 1814.

"According to him, the farmer had six grown-up children who had never been to another farm even though the oldest of them was married and the parent of three children."

There is a ghost at Modrudalur, Margret or Manga, the first wife of the last pastor there, Bjarni Jonsson. Prior to her death in childbirth, Manga had asked her husband never to marry, and when he did, the ghost persecuted the second wife

"and finally brought her to her death. Bjarni then married for the third time. He was advised to marry a woman Margret had never seen. He brought her from Vopnafjordur and she is said to have outlived her husband."

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAYS SIX & SEVEN APRIL 19-20, 2005 CONT'D - (26)

After visiting the National Forest,

we returned to Egilsstadir. At the Shell station we had a traditional Icelandic hotdog, which we shared between us, along with some French fries and a side of pizza. We ordered the ham, shrimp, and banana pizza.

Hey, it was on the menu.

It wasn't bad.

But I doubt that I'll need another one before our next trip to Iceland.

You've got to experience these things once, at least.

The traditional hotdog is of lamb; it comes with ketchup, mustard, and crunchy deep-fried pieces of breaded onion on the bun. I liked the hotdog too much, and the crunchy onion bits. It tasted pretty much like a hotdog. The difference that stood out the most: how long it was; in this country we'd try to call it "a foot-long hotdog." In Iceland it's just the hotdog.

We sat at our table eating hotdog and fries, pizza, drinking our soda. At a table near us four Icelandic Twenty-somethings were sharing a couple of pizzas. Other tables were filling up with workmen, or with couples, people having pizza or "the fisherman's burger," which is a hamburger in a bun with an over-easy fried egg on top of the meat. This burger-with-egg was a common menu item across the island, though it wasn't always called the fisherman's burger. The Twenty-somethings at the near table were chattering away; it was obvious they were good friends. The interesting thing about their conversation was that some of it was in Icelandic, some of it in English. And I don't think they were putting on a show for us; they didn't seem to notice us at all.

After we finished eating, we stopped at the Esso station towards the other corner of town, inspecting it to see what was the same as what we have in America, and what was different; and, of course, we had to get an ice cream bar, strictly for the purpose of research, mind you.

We returned to our room and I crashed, tired from the day's drive. M. read and watched TV and eventually turned out the lights a little later than I turned out mine, as is her custom.

***

April 20, 2005
Mary and I walked early, for half an hour. Went to breakfast at the hotel at 8:00 a.m. It was another lovely un-American breakfast. Today I knew not to put the sour milk on my muesli when what I wanted was skim milk to go with the brown sugar.

During breakfast I saw an older man and a younger man, a professor and his student I presume, introduce themselves in English to an older man at another table, who apparently was "the famous professor from Switzerland." The three men took their breakfast together. I think they were talking about agriculture or forestry in Iceland.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY SIX APRIL 19, 2005, CONT'D - (25)

Once again we were dazzled

by the hardiness and the ingenuity of the Icelanders. Much of the display in the museum at Egilsstadir would remind you of pioneer America, and of the hardships the pioneers endured. We did notice that the exhibit used exactly the same photographs of women separating cream and of husband and wife grinding manure that we'd seen at Hofn. I'd say Egilsstadir's museum had a little more of the spit-shine professionalism that some people like, yet it also retained some of the down-home, local charm that I prefer.

There's one image from the museum in Egilsstadir that I cannot dismiss. It is permanently locked in my mind. It is of a device, the front part of which looks something a muzzle you'd slip over a dog's nose and jaw to keep it from barking or biting; the back part of it is a wooden handle that you'd use to hold the device; and between is a piece of metal shaped not unlike a skullcap, except it had a bolt running freely through it. At butchering time, this allowed one man to kill sheep BAM. With one hand you pull the muzzle over the sheep's nose, pull the device back tight so the piece of metal with the bolt is positioned on the sheep's forehead, and BAM with the hammer in the other hand you slam that bolt hard and drive it into the sheep's forehead. Instant death so rudely come. If you've ever had to hit a runt pig in the head with a hammer, you know how it feels to deliver this kind of death.

Once we finished touring the museum, we still had afternoon ahead of us, so we drove south on Highway 931 along Lake Lagarfljot to see Iceland's National Forest, the largest woods in the country. The area has been protected since 1907 in a country that lost 95% of its trees in its first thousand years of settlement. Of the trees which remain, those in the National Forest, we from Wisconsin might in an unkind moment speak of them as scraggily. The largest tree we saw here was no more than a foot across at the base. The rest were lesser trees of three types. Only the evergreens appeared somewhat familiar. The deciduous trees were shrubby, branched, and somewhat squat versions of the Idea of Tree. The third and most populous tree reminded me of our tamaracks, a tree with needles like an evergreen, but it loses that greenness every year and has to re-bud in the spring. On first impression, the National Forest looked to us like it was mostly dead trees, but up close you could see buds beginning to form.

We climbed and climbed in the forest, and got a lovely view of the lake and the forest from our high vantage. There's a Forest Service Center on the grounds, a school, a hotel, and other facilities. The largest building had been a manor house in the last century.

The big lake across the road from the National Forest, Lagarfljot, is reputed to have its monster, called Lagarfljotsormurinn ("The Lagarfljot serpent"), something akin to the Loch Ness monster; oh, yes, "there are many stories of a monster in the lake," our Guide says. We didn't see it.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY SIX APRIL 19, 2005 CONT'D (24)

By the time we'd reached the point

that we had to choose between more driving the long way along the fjords, as Tom originally intended, or taking a more direct route to Egilsstadir through the mountains, we chose to take the mountain route. Is it possible to get your fill of beautiful seaside cliffs and crashing waves? I'm here to report that the answer is YES. I was starting to want to see us make some progress along our route. At one point, we'd spent half an hour or forty minutes and ended up where we'd started out, except we were on the other side of a small stretch of water, the fjord. We drove down into the town of Breiddalsvik for a last good-bye to the ocean; then we headed through the mountains to Egilsstadir. It was good-bye to the lovely eastern fjords of Iceland, but I wanted to see some miles behind us. Where I come from, you could always see yourself putting miles behind you; you couldn't see that here.

*

Let it be said that Iceland has real mountains as well as seaside cliffs. In some terrain, it was hard to tell that one was not somewhere in Montana. On the other hand, I've never yet had to shift down to first gear climbing a mountain pass in Montana on the state's most major road. I had to put it in first a couple times on the way through the mountains to Egilsstadir. And of Iceland's major road, Highway 1, sometimes you call it a "major road" out of kindness. One thing I didn't know about Iceland that I know now: ninety percent of the bridges on the country's major highway are one-lane bridges. And another thing I know now is that great stretches of Highway 1 are gravel road, and some stretches you'd call "dirt road;" I'd estimate that about twenty percent of Highway 1 is unpaved.

We saw scenery to take your breath away, of course. I won't delay us with a description of the mountains and valleys and rivers, the rock and shove and shimmy of this landscape, but simply say it was drop-you-mouth-open-in-wonder beautiful. And rugged, which is why there are "Emergency Shelters" for stranded travelers located on certain mountain passes; and these shelters are marked on the maps, which suggests that they are sometimes needed.

At length we arrived in Egilsstadir. We registered at our hotel. The woman at the desk in the hotel called the museum to see if it was open. "The caretaker is sick," we were told. "They'll try to find a replacement so you can tour the place."

The door to the museum was unlocked when we arrived with entrance fee in hand, but there was no replacement at hand to take our money so we simply wandered among the exhibits. At one point the archivist from downstairs came up and assured us we were welcome to see the exhibits "and, no, you don't have to pay the admission fee." So we continued to wander among the exhibits on our own.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY SIX APRIL 19, 2005 - (23)

Just out of Hofn we encountered

roadwork on Highway 1. One thing you notice: in Iceland they are not concerned about the size of their tools, with how big their toys are. The cranes and bulldozers and trucks are big enough to get the job done, but not any bigger. Apparently there is no driving need here to outdo each other by having equipment that is bigger-faster-better. With the possible exception of SUVs and 4-wheel drive vans that get driven into the mountains, which are bigger-better-faster than anything I'm accustomed to.

When I say "roadwork," that's a bit of an understatement. There were bulldozers and trucks working the road where it went up the side of the mountain. It wasn't at all like when you encounter roadwork on an interstate: "Merge Left." There was no other lane but the one they were working on, and there was no other route but Highway 1. Fortunately our vehicle had 4-wheel drive and fortunately it had enough umph to climb the big rock we had to go over-under-around-or-through. I don't like playing Gonzo in the Rental Car, but we did survive our first experience with Iceland road construction.

Farther on, we pulled off Highway 1 road where we thought the crossroad led to the canyon we been told about the day before, but we found a four-foot ditch across the road before we found the canyon. So we turned back to Highway 1, but not before a dog at the house along the side road barked at us going one way, and was still barking at us as we came back.

We drove along the sea all of the morning and into the afternoon. The sea, the ocean, the North Atlantic. The great blue darkness rolling limitless to the south, our right.

We stopped at Djupivogur hoping to see the Langabud museum, but everything was locked up tight. We drove up and down and across town sidewways to get a good long look at the community. It's a village of 375 people at the mouth of Berufjordur. There was a nice harbor with fishing boats and several factories for processing fish; this, trading, and farming, are the sources of income in the area. We saw a grocery store, a gas station, a restaurant or two, but not much in the way of businesses for a tourist to look in on during this off-season. We were soon underway again.

For lunch we stopped in view of another g-damn waterfall. Yeah, it has come to that. To the tourist in Iceland, the waterfall becomes as ocean is to the fish. Soon enough you just don't notice the waterfalls. Your spirit may need them but you cannot think too much about them. You cannot process the reality of them after a while. At least that might be the case if you had grown up in the great middle flatness of the USA where even one of these throw-away falls in Iceland would be a source of great wonderment; yet eventually the sky-full of waterfalls becomes too much to comprehend.

We ate our bread and cheese and some little plum tomatoes for lunch, and shared a Diet Pepsi we'd bought at the grocery store in Djupivogur. As with the soda in Mexico, the Diet Pepsi here is adjusted to the local taste, and seems slightly wonked to an American. Neither better than our version, nor worse, just different.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAYS FIVE & SIX APRIL 18 & 19, 2005 - (22)

Mary and I went to supper at a quiet

bar and restaurant on the Main Street in Hofn. And traffic on Main Street was quiet, too, as we ate. Mary ordered a bowl of soup which had a a tomato base, with lamb, potatoes, and carrots as major ingredients. She also got a couple piece of a whole grain bread with a crunchy crust.

I ordered the pan-fried salmon. I got a small salad and some deep-fried Icelandic potatoes. These are small spuds, and they tasted as if they'd been deep-fried in butter rather than any ordinary oil. The salmon was seared on each side and it had steamed itself thereafter. With the salmon there was a bit of sauce of the side, something like our French-onion dip, and a couple slices of lemon.

We kept marveling at the food in Iceland. We weren't eating in fancy places but ordinary little mom & pop operations, and still the food was terrific. Of course, I suppose you could say that everyone in Iceland is born knowing how to cook fish, and it has mostly been fish that I've ordered.

*

The one thing I've been wanting to mention but have forgotten a couple of times now: except for Highway 1 which circles the island, every road in Iceland is an "end-of-the-road." This is the perfect place to visit for someone who collects end-of-the-road experiences. You turn off Highway 1 and you don't drive very far before you are reminded what a fragile life raft the island is for its inhabitants. You have to admire a people who can hang on by their fingernails the way these Icelanders do; and yet they seem upbeat to a fault. I can tell you that if I have to endure too many more days of this wind, I will not be the least bit upbeat. Yet everyone we've dealt with has shown us amazing good cheer.

*

We're back in our room at the guesthouse. I've got the geothermal radiator cranked to the max. As Mary is writing postcards, she is wrapped up in her bedding, trying to get warmed up. And soon I shall wrap myself similarly.

We have a long day's drive tomorrow, to Egilsstadir. The woman at the library told us about a lovely little canyon up at the edge of the glacier that we could hike. She said, "It's not a big canyon such as you have in America, but it is ours and it is lovely." It is exactly the sort of thing one should go to another country to see - that which is "ours and lovely." She wasn't bragging, just pointing us in the direction of a little jewel.

***

April 19, 2005

Underway in the morning with the promise of some sun. The notion of light just breaking through greyness. A hard wind still blowing, with the occasional raindrop. Before we left Hofn we stopped at the grocery store which had the bakery we hadn't been able to find yesterday. We got ourselves some treats for our picnic. Every day we have breakfast at the guesthouse before we leave, then one of our other meals is a picnic, and one we eat in a restuarant.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY FIVE APRIL 18, 2005 CONT'D - (21)

We arrived at the museum in Hofn

about ten minutes before the curator would be there to open it for us. We warmed ourselves sipping a cup of coffee we'd picked up at the Esso station. As we waited, we saw a young woman walk up to the entrance of the museum and hug the lee of the building. No, it turns out she wasn't the curator we'd been waiting for, but an artist with the same appointment for the museum that we had. She is from Holland and has been living in northern Norway and has received a grant to tour Iceland for a month. She would be touring for another couple of weeks yet, and her visit to the museum, like her visit to the country entirely, was intended to serve as a source of inspiration for her art. Most of her work is paintings, but she thinks she is going to start doing some sculptures and "installations."

I told her I was a poet and she asked if I were famous. Mary and I both laughed at that. I think she understood that I'm not so famous. Her work is starting to become known in northern Norway.

I'd be interested to see what kind of art her visit to the museum inspires, but I'm afraid I've been brought up not to ask a young lady what her name is, but to wait for her to volunteer that information, especially in a foreign country. So I'm afraid I don't know her name. In the natural history room of the museum, I did see her photograph some of the rocks that were on display. When I looked into the case later, I saw shapes in there that would surely inspire me if I were a visual or plastic artist. I know she also took a photograph of a large piece of weathered baleen, too.

The visit to the museum in Hofn differed from our visit to that at Skogar. Here the curator did not give us a tour, indeed he spoke English with difficulty. He is Hofn's naturalist, not its linguist, for one thing; the woman at the library had told us we could ask him nearly any question about Iceland's birds and he would know the answer. Here there were many photographs of Icelanders at work, churning butter, harvesting hay, grinding manure. Grinding manure? Yes. The wife would load the manure into the grinder, the husband would crank the handle. I'm assuming that "grinding" helps obtain a more even layer of nutrients when the manure is spread on the fields.

If one thing stands out for me about the museum in Hofn, it is the way many of the displays focus on the human element, on the Icelanders' struggle in the harsh environment. Again, as at Skogar, this was not brag, but fact, and it was presented with humility. The place had a local, home-made feel about it. There was none of that professional spit and shine which gets set down any ol' where; you see that in too many museums these days, the materials on display removed from the context of the lives around them. Here, Icelandic life was throbbing.

Downstairs, with me thinking Mary wanted it and Mary thinking I wanted it, we bought a CD of a local choir singing traditional Icelandic hymns. The curator opened the display copy of the CD and showed us a photograph of the choir inside; "this is my father," he said, pointing to one of the singers, "and this is my mother." What Mary and I were both interested in was traditional folk music; hymns don't exactly fit the definition. I will say, however, if I must listen to them, let them be traditional Icelandic hymns.

When we finished at the museum, the rain was still raining; the blow was still blowing. We offered the artist a ride back to her quarters so she wouldn't have to walk home in the rainstorm. She was staying at a house only a block or so from our guesthouse. She was glad for the ride.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY FIVE APRIL 18, 2005 - (20)

Wind and rain all day, and a mistiness

hanging about everything. We had breakfast about 9:00 a.m. There were a few things on that table that most Americans would recognize as breakfast. Not the tomatoes, probably. Not the various luncheon meats and cheeses. And most of us don't eat muesli. Yet Mary and I were starting to like this Icelandic fare.

We walked at the Skaftafell finger of the glacier, a good and vigorous walk, if wet and windy. The sight of the ice up close was overpowering. It took my breath away. It immobilized me. Looking at the aquamarine of the ice was like looking back in time a thousand years, ten thousand years. Mary had to take me by the arm.... "Come on, Tom...." This wasn't my first glacier but it was my biggest. I was awe-stuck.

We drove east towards Hofn. The mountains and the glacier hung in mist on our left; and angry North Atlantic was to our right. Along the way we stopped at Glacier Bay - briefly - and got wetter and colder looking at icebergs in the lagoon. You call it "calving," when an iceberg breaks off, as if Vatnajokull is a cow, an immense white cow. There was mist and fog enough that we couldn't see the glacier through the curtain of it. The chunk of ice in Glacier Bay that was nearest to us was at least ten car-lengths in size. You would look at the icebergs with no point of reference and they didn't look so big; but when you compared iceberg to car and car to iceberg, you said "Oh, goodness."

We arrived early in Hofn, about 2:30 p.m., and registered at our guesthouse. The window of our room overlooked the harbor, which was just across the street from the parking lot. "Hofn" means harbor, so when you say "the harbor in Hofn" you're saying "the harbor in Harbor." There were eight or ten fishing ships - boats - in the harbor; and the harbor was well-protected, with only a lazy roll to the water.

We drove to Hofn's Information Center downtown, found it where it was supposed to be, right in the Library. The woman who came to the desk to help us did not speak any more English than we speak Icelandic, so she quickly called another woman from a back room who did speak English very well, who was very helpful. She showed us information on a couple of places we might like to see, assuming the wind and the rain cease and desist. She also arranged for us to visit a museum in town, which was closed for the season; after she made a phone call, she told us a fellow would meet us there at 4:00 p.m.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY FOUR APRIL 17, 2005 CONT'D - (19)

Glaciers create their own weather,

you know that, right? That the swarming mists and the blown sky about the mountaintops associate themselves with the massiveness of glaciers. We'd seen the phenomenon to a lesser degree farther west at the Myrdals-Jokull glacier, and now we were seeing it on a massive scale as we approached the Vatnajokull.

Our accommodations for the night were at the Hotel Skaftafell at Freysness, which is a wide spot in the road near where the Skaftafellsjokull finger of Iceland's largest glacier shows itself. The sign above the door says only "Hotel," but we'd found the right place. The same young lady who took our registration also served us supper. This is something we saw again and again across the island - you don't have just one job and that's what you do; rather, you do some of everything, you do it all; they don't pay you to sit down. So our hostess assured us we didn't have to worry about the wind, for our room is on the most protected end of the hotel. "And after supper would you like to move your car to the protected spot near the hotel laundry? To protect it from the gravel and grit that is being blown about...." The reason part of the roof of the hotel has shingles of a different color? The old shingles were blown away last summer when a tornado came through, "which is a very unusual occurrence for us." She smiled and served Mary the cod with green, red, and yellow peppers that she'd ordered and brought my butterfried local trout with almond slivers and tiny shrimp. I had coffee and Mary had tea and we shared a bowl of ice cream for dessert.

And, for the second night, we were tired.

And we went to bed.

And tomorrow would be another day, another set of wonders. We had to sleep so we could decompress and process and make room for more of Iceland.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY FOUR APRIL 17, 2005 CONT'D - (18)

Somewhere in there, among the plains of kames,

the blows of black sand, and the eerie terrain of the troll land, we stopped along the roadside to examine a huge cairn and hundreds of smaller ones. It seems that in 983 A.D. an earthquake or volcano in southern Iceland destoryed a farm at that site, and ever after travelers have stopped to add a rock to the cairn marking the spot, in memory of that unlucky farmer and to bring the traveler good luck on his journey. Or at least that's what I thought the custom was. We were going down the road again when Mary read to me that travelers passing here the first time don't just add a rock to the pile, they start a cairn of their own. Do you suppose my Fates will once again forgive my ignorance? If past experience is any indicator of furture performance, the answer is No, they will not forgive my ignorance.

To the east of Eldhraun, we stopped at Dverghamrar, the "dwarf crags" and basalt columns where a school girl sent out to fetch the cows home for milking became entranced by singing she overheard - dwarves or trolls, singing a familiar hymn. As a result of this girl's report to her family of what she'd heard, we can be confident that the beings who inhabit those dwarf crags are Christian, or so the sign at the site told us.

There was more desolation and desert to come, but we also saw the oldest church in Iceland, at Nupsstadur. It was built in the 1700s, I believe, more in-ground than above ground, with only its front and a small notion of its grass-covered roof showing. There was a house and several old farm buildings at the site, too, which is set along cliffs from which another pretty little waterfall was dropping its water. Or trying to drop its water, as some of it was blown skyward and backwards, the little river caught up in its own eternal cycle of sin and redemption.

Later I learned that a couple of brothers, "the siblings of Nupsstadur," both of them nearly a hundred years old, lived at the farm until recently. Or perhaps they still live there, though we didn't see any indication of that. There didn't seem to be any life in the house as we walked about the yard examining the church and the other buildings. And the brothers' legendary hand-painted red and yellow 1950 Willys jeep, registration number Z-221, was not anywhere in evidence.

In former times, the farmer at Nupsstadur guided travelers from the west across the desolation to the east. Such guidance was needed, for here there was a shifting delta of rivers draining from Iceland's largest glacier, Vatnajokull; and there were hidden quicksands; and, of course, Iceland's winds could blow your cries for help far out to sea or high up into the mountains.

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY FOUR APRIL 17, 2005 CONT'D - (17)

Now - when I wrote about the lava desert

that my nephew Chad took us to on our first afternoon in Iceland, I had no experience of lava deserts. So once again I spoke before I knew what I was talking about. I was writing out of my ignorance, forgive me. That stretch of desolation Chad showed us only looked like desert. A true desert lies farther east along Highway 1, east of Vik, north and northeast of Kotlutangi, the southernmost point of the island. The Myrdalssandur desert is some 450 square miles in size, created by volcano and changing glacial rivers.

At the west edge of the Myrdalssandur stands a farm, Hofdabrekka, which has been inhabited by a ghost. Says our Guide:

"Some centuries ago a certain Joka was the lady of the house. It was said that she got so angry at one of the farmhands for making her daughter pregnant that after her death she haunted him and the farm for years."

East of the Myrdalssandur is Eldhraun, "Fire lava." The flow of lava from the 1783-1784 eruption covered 350 square miles of southern Iceland and is considered the largest spread in the world from a single eruption in historical times. "The dusty hard times" followed that eruption, a period of famine and disease for the island. "More than 9,000 people died," our Guide says, "approx. 20% of the Icelandic nation. This was one of the heaviest blows to the population of Iceland since the settlement in 874."

We passed Eldermessutangi, the "Fire Sermon point" west of Kirkjubaejarklaustur where, during the eruption of 1783, our Guide says, the Rev. Jon Steingrimsson delivered his famous "fire sermon" and the advancing lava "miraculously stopped" before it reached the church where he stood preaching. "It is common belief that it was due to his prayers that the lava-stream stopped," we're told.

This whole stretch of Myrdalssandur and Eldhraun is a blur for me, literally and figuratively. Literally it was a blur because of blowing sand. Figuratively it was a blur because, while it was differentiated landscape, it became for me one vast stretch of desolation, and without looking at the map I couldn't swear that Myrdalssandur was west of Eldhraun, and I couldn't swear that it was not.

Yes, we saw heaps of material that appeared to be miniature moraines and kames like those found in Wisconsin's Kettle Moraine, only smaller. Miles and miles of them.

We saw black sand desert where a 55 m.p.h. wind picked up that sand and blasted it at the windshield and the finish of the car. Chad had told us about "white-out conditions" in Iceland; in the blow of that black sand, we were experiencing a taste of "black-out conditions." The road looked as if snow were drifting across it, black snow. The sand was piling up in drifts from the edge of the road and coming across. In such conditions, you have to think you are not even a cinderspeck in God's good eye.

A third kind of landscape was the hump and shove of lava flow. Some stretches of that lava were raw and bare and nothing grew there. Other stretches of it was covered with a thick layer of moss, which softened the lava's angular sharpness and made it look like a field of well-worked and rounded boulders. It was still angry chunks of broken lava beneath the moss, but that's not what it looked like. Mary called this landscape "troll land," and it stretched as far as the eye could see to the north and south, for mile after mile after mile.

To be continued....

THE ICELANDIC SAGA: DAY FOUR APRIL 17, 2005 CONT'D - (16)

Oh but today how the wind

was blowing atop Dyrholaey. Twas not a good day for seals to be coming ashore. Twas not fit out for man nor beast. Yet such a rush of adrenaline, to be in Iceland when Iceland is being what it is. The wind and the sideways rain are part of what Iceland is and we took joy in being blown about. Make no mistake, Iceland is a lovely island; and its harshness is part of that loveliness. If you don't like the world as it presents itself, you can go to Disneyland. I'll take the wind and the rain.

We drove back down the switchback of roadish notion from the top of the Dyrholaey cliff to the plain below, grateful that we didn't meet any traffic because we'd have had to pull over onto the outside edge of the road and there really wasn't much outside edge to pull onto.

Before we'd ascended the cliff, we'd seen several pairs of eiders and a couple pair of Mallards. When we came back past them, we saw that they'd moved into the lee of the cliff and had hunkered down.

Coming back out towards Highway 1, we passed a cluster of farms which included Dyrholar, home of Kari Silmundarson of Njals Saga. In Iceland, there's a story at every turn of the road, and some of them are famous stories indeed.

From Dyrholaey we could see the pillars at Reynisdranger, which is where we headed next, to the black sand beach along there, the surging, pounding ocean crashing angrily at it. I was hypnotized by the waves coming in. Mary had to forcibly lead me away. "Look," I'd say, "another one. Look, another one. And there's another one!" The cover of our Guide shows a girl and her puppy at the black sand beach with one of the pillars in the background. That's where we were. We also saw advertisements in Icelandic magazines and on television which use that beach and those pillars as background. We were there.

Along our way east from Dyrholaey and Reynisdranger we passed through Vik, a relatively-new community of about 300, where commerce wasn't established until 1890. Among the oldest buildings standing in Vik, according to the Guide, is a store that had been built

"in the Vestmann Islands in 1831 and subsequently moved to Vik in 1895 to serve as J.P.T. Bryde's general store. It is hard to find older timber houses elsewhere in the south of Iceland, except perhaps the old House ("Husid") at Eyrarbakki."

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY FOUR APRIL 17, 2005 CONT'D - (15)

There are elves in Iceland,

and hidden people, and trolls, and ghosts. The elves are like us, but invisible to us; says the Guide:

"They are kind to those who do them no harm. In ancient times elves were honored and thought to live in heaven, but now mostly live in large rocks, hillocks and crags. Icelanders, whether local farmers or Ministry of Transport engineers, tend to avoid doing damage to 'known' dwelling places of elves or the hidden people, with whom they have become somewhat confused in latter years."

In his autobiography, Halldor Laxnes, Iceland's Nobel Prize-winning novelist, says of the hidden people:

"... though I had no positive profession of belief in the hidden people it would never in the world have occurred to me to doubt their existence; though I didn't see them, I saw them all the time. Whoever believes in the hidden people sees the hidden people."

Trolls are of two kinds - the cruel creatures; and the "loyal trolls," who repay kindness with kindness "and are often versed in the magical arts."

And Halldor Laxnes again, on ghosts; he says the belief in ghosts is

"the true faith of Icelanders and has survived other religions in the country, not only the belief in Thor, but even the Catholic church, which banned haunting on pain of broken bones and torn tendons."

If you spent very long on this island, like Mary you might say: "Every stone in Iceland has a story." Every hill and mountain and valley does. Every fjord and farm.

Dyrholaey is in the Myrdalur region of Iceland, the southern-most part. Like the rest of the island, the Myrdalur region has its folk-tales. One tells of "The Woman and the Sealskin." At times there are many seals to be seen offshore in the area and, as our Guide dutifully informs us, "God mercifully allows them to come ashore once a year, shed their sealskin and make merry in human form until morning." While out walking one day, a farmer in Myrdalur

"came to the mouth of a cave and inside the cave he could hear merriment and dancing, while outside lay many sealskins. He picked one up, took it home, and locked it in a chest. Later that day the man passed by the same place. A pretty young woman sat outside the cave, stark naked and weeping bitterly."

You guessed it. It was this woman's sealskin that the farmer had taken home. As things happened, the farmer would marry the woman, and they would have seven children. "She was submissive to the man but was reserved with others and often sat looking out to sea," we're told. Years later, while the rest of the family was at church on Christmas, the woman found the sealskin hidden in the chest. When the family returned to the house, the sealskin was gone, "and the woman too." The farmer had lost his wife, but thereafter whenever he rowed out to fish, "a seal often swam around his boat and it seemed to have tears in its eyes." And when the farmer's children wandered along the beach, that seal "often tossed up to them many-coloured fishes and pretty shells. But their mother never came ashore again."

To be continued....

THE ICELAND SAGA: DAY FOUR APRIL 17, CONT'D - (14)

We found our way to the Skogafoss,

quite a mighty waterfall that drops 180 feet and is wider than the main falls at Seljalandsfoss; it created quite a swirl of mist about it, and rainbow colors. The river rumbled away through a black lava gravel. Says our Guide: "Legend has it that the settler Thrasi hid his chest of gold under Skogafoss." All that has been recovered is the handle of the chest the gold was in, and that's up at the Museum.

We ate our picnic lunch with a view of the waterfall - limpa bread and cheese, little plump tomatoes, half a sweet roll each, a shared cup of skeer.

Water falls. That's what it does in Iceland: it falls and falls. Before the afternoon was done, Mary and I would be saying to each other "Look, dear, another pretty waterfall," just as in the wilds of Manitoba, Canada, Mary had taken to saying, with more than a little resignation, "Look, dear, another pretty little lake."

There were waterfalls where the water never reached the ground; these interested us the most. The wind would catch the water as it came off those cliffs, would blow it upwards and backwards in a great rush. The water disappeared into the air; the stream never hit the ground; nothing of it escaped the insistence of the wind.

*

Dyrholaey is a bird sanctuary right on the ocean. That's one description.

Another description: Dyrholaey is a sea-side cliff with 55 m.p.h. winds shearing flat the top of it.

The Guide says Dyrholaey is

"a cape or headland 110-120 m high, with perpendicular cliffs on the southern and western sides and a narrow rock rim with an arch-shaped opening through it protruding into the sea. Boats and even small planes can pass through the arch.... Dyrholaey is a nature sanctuary."

We drove the switchback road to the top of the cliff, and up there we walked well back from the edge because the wind could blow you three steps one way or the other in the blink of a good-bye-hope-you-can-fly. We'd hoped to see puffins here, but if there were puffins about they were too smart to expose themselves in these winds. We did see seagulls, a large, cliff-dwelling variety that seems common in the area, and they were mostly hugging their nests.

There is a light-house atop Dyrholaey and as we passed it, we stopped to stand in its lee, all the while knowing that when we stepped out into the wind we'd go flying sideways. Which, of course, is exactly what happened.

The narrow rock rim with an arch-shaped opening through it? Sure, a small plane could pass through it, but you'd be a damn fool try it on a good day and it'd be suicide to do it in weather like that we were experiencing. As with mushroom hunters, there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.

Farther off than the arch, the rock pillars that you can see from Dyrholaey, "came into existence when two night trolls went to tow a three-masted vessel ashore," our Guide says. "They took longer than they expected and were caught in the rays of the rising sun, and so they and their ship were turned to stone."

Night trolls, of course, have to get back into the mountain before dawn, or they turn to stone. Everyone in Iceland knows that.

To be continued....