Oraefi

by Ófeigur Sigurðsson

  The old farmers, Flosi from Svínafell and Muggur from Bölti and Jakob from Jökulfell, had all of a sudden become Tourist Service Farmers and Regional Rescue members and had ill accepted their lot. They tootled about the beach and slopes in the tank and herded sheep, no matter what Runki said. Öræfings are used to heavy vehicles; during World War Two all kinds of powerful off-road vehicles came into being (nothing advances technology better than war); pictures of this apparatus appeared in newspapers and magazines and some of them spread east into Öræfi, which gave rise to the idea that it might be possible to get such a vehicle to Skeiðarársand, the most rugged place in all the Nordic countries. A debate took place and a parliamentary resolution was agreed; a large barge with caterpillar tracks was brought in and transported east over the sands. This astonishing machine was christened Water Dragon, a name soon simplified to the Dragon; it puttered across rivers and was able to ferry large commodities, implements, and building materials. Afloat, the belts functioned like oars, but it was difficult to control, taking considerable practice to master the Dragon. In the wake of this, Jón from Austurbær brought the first car to the region and, taking his lead from the Dragon, he placed empty barrels under the car and floated it across the river. The Dragon reigned over the beach in the years after the war until modernity arrived in the form of bridges, killing off culture entirely. The Dragon got worn down traversing the sand and was costly to run; it did not provide public transportation and was chiefly used to search for the treasure ship that was supposedly somewhere on the sands.

  The Tvísker Brothers came to the meeting at Freysnes—Hálfdán, Helgi, Sigurður, and Flosi—even though they didn’t own cattle and aren’t farmers but self-taught scientists; they were planning to use their trip to collect insects, count birds, observe plants, and measure the glacier. Hálfdán is a naturalist, Helgi an inventor, Sigurður a scholar, and Flosi a glaciologist. Then there was Fippi from Núpsstaður, crossing Skeiðarársand in his old Willis, made in 1953, an SUV that has lasted half a century because it doesn’t have a computer in it, Dr. Lassi wrote, computers have destroyed modern cars, every year brings ever greater luxury and ever more junk.

  Some claimed the wild herd belonged to Fippi from Núpsstaður, who welcomed the damage to the National Park, that these were the notorious wild sheep from Núpsstaðurskógar’s forests. Fippi wasn’t inclined to respond, having told people a thousand times already that the whole herd population was annihilated in a blizzard from the north and by blinding weather and by falling from the cliffs above the farm; they were all killed at once in the late nineteenth century. These days, a great flood of travelers can be found about the farmyards of Núpsstaður, with tourists wandering off in all directions and popping up at the windows. People come to see the old houses and the chapel dating back to the sixteenth century and the hundred-year-old hermit Filippus Hannesson, the son of the rural mailman Hannes Jónsson; tourism has transformed him into a museum exhibit. Fippi felt he couldn’t refuse to go on the round-up; you never know where you stand with a wild beast, he said, sarcastically, though it’s probably not a wild beast after all, but a very everyday animal. The wild Núpsstaðarskógar herds were quite special, a highly evolved stock, the report continued, they would stay out grazing in the mountain woods the whole year round, and were on the glacier, too, for centuries, perhaps as far back as the Settlement—there were rarely humans about and the animals lived their lives undisturbed in the wilderness, growing fat, sizeable animals yet less well-built than other sheep, because their organs never grew larger than standard lambs’ organs; they were noticeably long-legged, typically multi-colored, mottled, thick-necked and big-horned, they had abundant wool, so thick it never dangled down or lagged like wool on today’s adult sheep. Heavyset, they were uncontrollable because of their cautiousness; it was hard to catch them, they would leap onto the glacier, jump in rivers, and dive off cliffs to certain death rather than fall into human hands. The farmers in Núpsstaður would only allow themselves to seek a single sheep for food, and they did so for centuries, making the hazardous journey, an adventure, in harmony with nature. When I briefly visited Fippi, wanting to inquire about the wild herds so that I could write an article for Agricultural News, he said that so much nonsense had been said and written about the wild animals of Núpsstaður that I might as well just write whatever I felt like, giving me poetic license where his animals were concerned. Though the plan was to write a scientific report for Agricultural News, the idea popped into my mind that I should write a novel about the wild herd. But how do you write a novel about wild sheep? I thought, as I stood with Fippi in the farmyard. We locked eyes. Fippi is, like his father Hannes the rural mail carrier, oddly short and slim. People were often amazed to see the Willis on the sands: it would seem empty and gave rise to numerous ghost stories. Tourists often turned up at the Skaftafell Visitor Center greatly disturbed after going out to see the sands, not so much because they’d been caught in a sandstorm in a rental car whose paint was stripped off by the weather, but because they’d met the old Willis in the dark, yellow and red and bearing the number Z221 and with no one behind the wheel!

  At Núpsstaður, the last town before you go out onto Skeiðarársand, is Lómagnúpur, a sheer rockface rising 700 meters from sea level, wrote Dr. Lassi in the report; rational, intelligent men grow fearful and awestruck in his shadow, for inside Lómagnúpur lives the giant Járngrím; he appears to people who perish on the sand. It’s said that men are doomed if they merely see him; below Lómagnúpur raging whirlwinds whip up and noone is worthy of mercy. One time, the farmer at Núpsstaður was fetching water in pails down in the mudflats under the overhang, but as he came back up with his full pails a whirlwind whipped up and swirled him up in the air, face-to-face with the rock’s highest edge, then twirled him about and around and downward, slow and slower still until he was standing in front of his cowshed door, not a drop lost from his buckets.

  Fippi’s father, Hannes Jónsson, the rural mail carrier in the Skaftafell area, was known across the land as a heroic traveler, a man as modest and humble as Núpsstaður men tend to be, making nothing of the mortal danger he was placed in by his hazardous journeys across sands and glacial rivers and glacial scree; such stories had to be dragged out of him, like leading a ram to slaughter; he was tortured into writing about his journey over the glacier when the Skeiðará flooded in 1934, an enormous flood; at the time, Hannes was in Öræfi and wanted to cross the sand to deliver his mail and get back in time for Easter, but the sand was practically impassable because of the swelling water, so he detoured across the glacier while the flooding was at its peak, gushing so much water and glacial material and so many icebergs that the Skeidará measured forty kilometers wide across the sand, tumbling along carrying icebergs the size of apartment buildings like little ice cubes; telephone poles were washed away and even the highway, everything in the river’s way. Hannes went above this roaring glacial scree, right over the ebb, with the flood booming under his feet across the ice which had turned blood red from the ash columns steaming off the glacier as it towered over the mailman, all flecked with lightning and glare and flashes and thunderous booms and raining sand; the whole time large pieces would break off the glacier around him and where he’d just this second stepped peat-gray flumes flecked with cudbearred spouted up in the mist. New cracks opened everywhere about him; he had to crawl between them amid the raucous noise, hearing all kinds of murmurations, but he safely crossed with his deliveries, traversing the sands and rivers and glaciers and mountains and forests between Skaftafell and Núpsstaðarskógar, a journey which took eighteen hours and meant he could return home by Easter Sunday. More than once he was prevailed upon to write an account of this journey, and you have to read between the lines in his narrative, which is known by different titles: Minor Incidents during a Pleasant Journey or An Unremarkable Hike.

  Freysnes lies between Skaftafell and Svínafell, Dr. Lassi’s report explains at the end of the regional descriptio
n, since the report was intended for both academic and popular audiences. No-one had lived in Freysnes since that fateful year, 1362: the ruins of dwellings lay about Freysnes for all time, or at least until they were leveled to the ground by a bulldozer one fine winter’s day, and today no one knows where the ruins are. More than that: the ruins are a source of shame in the region. Ragnar, the farmer at Skaftafell, sold his land to the State in 1966 so that Skaftafell could become a National Park and so the Icelandic population, not just farmers and their friends and family, could enjoy its natural beauty, an unsurpassed beauty, and it was agreed it should belong to the populace—in fact, Skaftafell’s beauty should belong to humanity as a whole, said Ragnar. Everything was changing and few people kept up the traditions. Farming was declining even as tourists started streaming toward Öræfi now the Skeiðará had been bridged on Iceland’s National Day, 1974, completing a ring road around the entire country; that year marked 1100 years since Settlement and there were magnificent celebrations. Farming wasn’t to be allowed within the Park, for it does not suit the tourism industry; the hotel in Freysnes was designated for those who didn’t want to, or couldn’t, camp in tents within Skaftafell National Park, such as the elderly and the elegant; Freysnes’ beauty is comparable to Skaftafell’s. And now all kinds of little houses stand in ancient Freysnes, dotted around the big structure, which has wobbled on its foundation: decorated, furnished prefabs and containers tourists can use, Dr. Lassi wrote; Icelandic ingenuity can change trash skips into hotels.

  Documents flooded into the hotel room in the form of books and magazines while Bernharður slept. The chronicles record that one morning in 1362 Knappafells glacier exploded and spewed over the Lómagnúpur sands and carried everything off into the sea, thirty fathoms deep: deposits of large rocks, water flumes, sand floods, volcanic detritus, falling rocks, and gray mud left behind desolated sands. The Province was destroyed, all its people and creatures annihilated; no sheep or cattle survived, no creatures left alive anywhere in the province around the glacier, both the historical chronicles and contemporary accounts agree, volcanic material fell everywhere, surging in such great abundance out to sea that ships could not navigate; the corpses of people and animals washed up on beaches far and wide, alongside debris and other rubbish; the bodies were cooked and tender and the flesh so loose on the bones it fell apart. This was the most destructive and fatal volcanic eruption in the history of Iceland, one of the greatest tephra eruptions anywhere on Earth in the last millennium; the eruption surprised everyone with its so-called gusthlaup, the latest scholarly theories contend in a back issue of Nature Studies, Dr. Lassi wrote, sweaty with excitement at the surge of evidence the interpreter dumped onto the table beside her, seventy farms were destroyed in one moment that morning, a gusthlaup rushing with tremendous speed down the steep mountainsides, taking with it seventeen churches copiously furnished with books, vestments, bells, chalices, and other belongings; nothing survived of this thriving civilization. Beauty and fertility instantly turned forbidding and barren in this storm of destruction, the area now a gaping wound; even the place names were scraped off the land, and everything had to be named fresh when the settlements snuck back in fifty years later, humans bedding down on the new land like fragile plants; Hérað, the Province, became Öræfi, the Wasteland; Klofajökull became Vatnajökull; Lómagnúpssandur became Skeiðarársandur; Knappafellsjökull became Öræfajökull; Knappafell became Hnappavellir; Tvísker became Kvísker … N. B: I should put that in a table as a convenience to readers of the report, Dr. Lassi had written, the amputation of place names and their transformation—you’ll like this, Bernharður, you place-name-pervert! Dr. Lassi said, loud and clear.

  What the hell is a gusthlaup? Dr. Lassi asked the interpreter, I keep writing this damn word in the report, taking it from the accounts that stream in here, but I have no idea what a gusthlaup is! The interpreter replied that she didn’t know what gusthlaup meant. Get Hálfdán from Tvísker! Dr. Lassi ordered the interpreter, he’s down at the meeting, no, Hálfdán is the ornithologist … Sigurður! Fetch me Sigurður, or whichever of the brothers is the geologist? Just get any of them, they must all know the word, they’re so learned, these people, and it has to be clear in the narrative.

  No area has ever endured such an extensive natural disaster as Hérað did in 1362, Dr. Lassi’s report says, drawing on her sources, fire came up from the glacier, bringing a torrent of burning ash that destroyed all the farms and wiped out the countryside. What’s called a pyroclastic flow, or gusthlaup, sparkling clouds of poison together with masses of staggeringly hot air rushing down the mountain slopes in the first hours of the eruption, burning everything in an instant, damaging anything living. Oxygen was used up; flesh burnt away. Exactly what happened to Pompeii in ancient times happened to Hérað in 1362 … a gusthlaup …The Province became Öræfi—the Wasteland … violent fires melted the glacier and ice water ran down the mountain across the plains carrying burning sludge … Legend has it that a lone shepherd on Svínafell heard a crack, then another crack and then said he would not wait for the third crack but rushed boldly up to that part of Svínafell known as Flosihellir, the place he kept his swine, a hairy boar, broad-shouldered and with human intelligence; the boar discovered a cave where large truffle mushrooms grew, and the storm spewed over the countryside and water and mud flowed over everything and over half the mountain and up to the cave, gray and discomforting; the shepherd and his boar alone survived the disaster, gobbling up the truffles in Flosihellir for six months straight, making them quite dyspeptic. When people later investigated the region, they saw that everything on the mountain had burned up and a meter-thick layer of toxic ash lay over it; a lizard-green haze hovered still, and in it long worms swam, the Annals say, the steam debilitated the searchers’ pupils so they saw everything upside down and contrary to what anyone else saw; this continued for a long time, and what was gray and black seemed friendly and green. Butter drips from every blade of grass, the new settlers said, as a new beauty sprang up.

  What is it exactly that happens in a gusthlaup, Interpreter? Dr. Lassi asked the interpreter, it is incomprehensible to me, yet Dr. Lassi did not wait for a response, dashing onward in her writing, Interpreter constantly running to fetch books and sources and maps all throughout the hotel … Here it is! shouted Dr. Lassi and papers and documents swirl up in the air …The sources say a gusthlaup results from an explosion in a crater, some resistance is required causing the debris to storm down the side of the volcano, not straight up in the air … but what is the gust? Interpreter … ! What do we make of the gust!? Ask those Tvísker brothers about the gust … no, here it is, there’s an article in Skaftfellingur about it, let us see … gust is basically lahar fire-cloud, what the French scientists call nuées ardentes, that’s the gust in gusthlaup, a plume of smoke and mud, heavy with a burning eruption of gravel and fiery gas, and the gust—the flow—descended the mountain on its fatal journey, destroying everything before it, all the buildings in the Province, all the people and all living creatures, laying waste the whole area in an instant. No one had time to flee, no one knew what was coming and no one knew what had happened, everything became petrified, cast in molds in an instant as ash and friable pumice fell over everything, covering the dead in a dusty veil. Everything lay motionless for fifty years—and then a new settlement began! Dr. Lassi said aloud at the same time as she wrote it in her report.

  Who originally settled Öræfi!? Dr. Lassi asked the Interpreter, that must be in my report, my Interpreter, I was even thinking that it would be neat to start the report with it, what do you think? … Isn’t that neat? …Wasn’t it Ingólfur Arnarson!? I’ll be damned, that’s ideal! Dr. Lassi enthused, how exceedingly elegant that the report begin with the first settler in Iceland. This report of mine will appear in countless magazines and be translated into many languages, Dr. Lassi remarked to the Interpreter; it will garner international attention. Ingólf landed at the place which is now called Ingólf’s Head
… that’s how a report like this should start, my dear Interpreter, said Dr. Lassi, how does Landnámabók put it? Where is Landnámabók, The Book of the Settlement, when one needs it? Back home up on a shelf! What use is it there? Surely there’s not a copy in the hotel? It should be here at the hotel, every hotel should have Landnámabók in the bedroom drawers and not the Bible, for Landnámabók is the Icelandic Bible … from now on I will always travel with Landnámabók on me! Dr. Lassi said, it is simply common sense! And good mental health, Interpreter … a damn powerful opening for this report! … But Ingólf the settler did not settle in Öræfi, and it wasn’t called Öræfi at the time, it wasn’t called anything, as far as is known, Dr. Lassi wrote, unless some Irish hermit called the area something. Ingólf stayed here one or two winters, along with his retinue; he had thrown his chieftain’s pillars overboard, as was the custom, and ordered his servants to find where the columns had come ashore. It was beautiful to look out upon what is now Öræfi, for the province was blessed in its weather, woods flourished and tall grasses and people weren’t in favor of going to find the columns, they wanted to stay in the region, and the area was soon given its distinguished name, Hérað, because butter dripped from every blade here where there’s now sand and desolation, where once there was a little glacier and enchanting valley a sinister glacier crawls its desolating way. Back then, seals slept calmly on the shore amid the driftwood; out on the promontory there was an abundance of birds and eggs, fish in the sea, trout in the rivers and water. The Province was paradise, and so there was some disappointment when the pillars were discovered at Reykjavík, though the warm hot springs somewhat enticed the sensualists among them. It’s an unfortunate thing, said Karli, Ingólf’s slave, traversing a bountiful region merely to build on an inhospitable headland; in Reykjavík cold winds blow, it’s all bare gravel and naked ridges and insistent drizzle. This stubborn settler’s household lamented leaving the area, which was still nameless, regretted adhering to the high pillar tradition, giving their fate to the roll of a dice—what sort of nonsense this religious idiot believes, the slaves muttered among themselves, not understanding their chieftain’s actions; the slaves got angry with the gods and the gods got immediately angry back at them, their anger a thousand-fold—and so a curse has lain on the land and its inhabitants ever since, the region scattered widely with supernatural spirits, harbingers of the gods’ anger, the scourge of men; horrors often bombarded the country, settlements were destroyed time and again by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods, especially in the South, close to Ingólf’s original settlement. But Ingólf’s steadfastness saved his progeny from a cruel fate: he followed the gods’ will, abandoned the fertile slopes and fair ground at the foot of the glacier and took the sparse, unprotected land near Reykjavík, Dr. Lassi wrote, cribbing generously from her sources, not giving the slightest thought to quotation marks, because in 1362 Öræfajökull annihilated Hérað. Believe you me, serfs, I chose to leave Norway, said Ingólf. Don’t talk to us about choice, said the slave Karli, you can shove your pillars you know where. Ingólf settled up at Arnarhvoll from where he looked sadly across the fjord; he did not feel like beating the slave. Go, then, Ingólf said to Karli, take a maid as a servant, go settle some land, build a farm, multiply, go fish for happiness with greed’s leaky net—but never return to me unless you are ready to die.