Oraefi

by Ófeigur Sigurðsson

  Our drive takes us next up to Skaftártunga, a soft tongue in an area of high volcanic activity, beautiful countryside made plump from fertile ash where there are extensive pastures; Eldgjá erupted there in 934, opening up a hundred-kilometer long fissure in the ground between two glaciers which became the greatest lavaflood in recorded history, and after that Katla awoke and began to erupt, destroying settlements, changing the weather all across the earth, causing harvests in Europe to fail because of the cold; lakes froze in Persia and men dropped like flies in many parts of the world. Eldgjá is the earth’s genitals, The Regular said into the bus’s microphone, with Katla at one end, an enormous hump, and Lakagígar at the other end, from where much stuff has spewed forth, these awful women are quite capable of laying waste to the earth and feeding a new Earth in one fell swoop, so you can just imagine where on the body of Mother Earth we find ourselves situated. One time, Kiddi and I were on the bus in winter passing under the Tunga and had to stop at Eldvatn to put chains on the bus because of the snow and icy roads: at the end there were very steep slopes and sharp bends and a rusty bridge but the lake wrestled its way along … Eldvatn, The Regular said into the microphone, have you heard about little Sigga who swam across Eldvatn? Ten-year-old Sigga was entrusted with getting an urgent message to the nearest farm; there was no one at the ferry dock and Eldvatn was a morass of mud, gray from clay, thick and ugly and scabrous due to glacial activity; it sounds completely implausible, but little Sigga floundered over with the message and no one understood how. Then, another time, when little Sigga was at Svínafell in Öræfi, one early autumn, men were standing about in the farmyard and looking up into the mountain where a starving lamb was stuck on a very steep and narrow rock belt; no one had ever been up there and no one remembered if any of the sheep had gotten itself there before the round-up; after having watched closely and intently and for a long time, everyone was heading to sleep; it was a draining activity, looking up at the rocks, and then they got to their feet bright and early to see whether anyone from the farm would be so foolhardy to risk their life for the blessed creature; but in the dawn men adopted new positions in the farmyard in order to be able to look up to the mountain for the sheep amid the grooves; they were astonished to see she had gone, most of them felt an embarrassing relief at the idea the sheep had fallen to her death, because then they could go back in to get a second cup to drink before applying themselves to something else instead of putting their lives and limbs in danger, but look! said The Regular into the microphone so that we startled, little Sigga who swam across Eldvatn was coming down the slope leading the sheep before her and no one could understand how; since that time this impassable route has been called Siggurák and little Sigga who swam across Eldvatn has been immortalized in significant place names which are kept in a drawer in a filing cabinet in the Department of Place Names, The Regular said, standing up and nodding to me, the toponymy student who sat back across two seats, his gams thrown into the aisle. The sheep’s throat was immediately cut, rather than allowing her to live, a reward for escaping starvation. That’s exactly how it is these days. When Kiddi and I took this green bus when we were little, people on it were heading to the farms, there was still life in the rural areas, the bus stopped here and there and you could see the people who lived on the farms, traveling on the bus or meeting their relatives by the road; now, you never see the people who live in rural areas taking the bus, you never see country folk anywhere, there’s no one on the bus heading home to their farms, it’s just the occasional tourist using the bus …Well, said The Regular, next we’re going to drive over Skaftárhraunið from the Laki Craters, it burned in 1783, the largest lava flow in written history, an eruption that caused the deaths of millions of people around the world, from Britain to Japan; harvests failed in Europe and Asia, there was a revolution in France, the Mississippi River froze, something which had never happened since the Ice Age. A toxic haze of sulfuric acid lay throughout the northern hemisphere for years, it was called móðuharðindi, the breathless famine; Jón Steingrímsson the Fire Priest wrote about it in Complete Writings on the Síða Fire, often called the Book of Fire, a contemporary report on the incident; you, Bernharður, should translate it into German or Viennese some time because it’s a brilliant report, the most extraordinary thing ever written here in Iceland, it will admittedly be an imperfect translation of the complete writings of Jón the Fire Cleric because he was a great stylist but you’re probably something of a stylist: most anyone who could fled Síða when the eruption happened, but Jón stayed to help the people, and he conducted the so-called Fire Sermon as lava approached the church; the lava stopped before the sermon. Katla burned Tungu, Laki burned Síða and the mother’s whole body suffered …After this, we’ll stop in a shop at Kirkjubaejarklaustur where the Fire Cleric held his famous Mass, not in the shop itself, there were of course no shops back then, though today shops are the countryside’s faith, its cultural centers; the fire sermon was declaimed in a large timber church … you’re grabbing a hot dog!? … goddamn it!

  Hello, hello—followed by the microphone scraping—one two one two—we’ve reached Síða where Lómagnúpur gnaps out there on the sand, controlling the limits of fate, this great rock head … this great rock head … Hello? …Yes this great rock head was ground out by an ancient sea and the raging of bygone weather! … only the fortunate are still sane once they’ve passed Lómagnúpur which looms over the traveler, which casts death’s shadow over him, making man a mere trifle in existence, The Regular said over the microphone … here, too, we find Núpstaður, the last town before we drive onto the Skeiðarársandur. Here was where the road used to end, there by the waters, and you had to be escorted across on horses that were suited to water, at Núpstaður the tourist industry managed to change older brothers and self-respecting people into freaks and exhibition pieces, but that’s another story, one so sad I can’t think about it … here Öræfi in all its glory appears across the sand and the water … and just then I suddenly fell asleep, an uncontrollable sleep, says Bernharður; I dreamed the giant Járngrím had stepped out of the rock Lómagnúpur and stabbed downward with his staff, the road between his legs; the bus ran under his groin out across the sand, he called my name and his voice was cold and deep, then he said Worm Serpent something and seemed to want the dwarf dead too, even all poets, he spoke an old language I didn’t understand, and when we drove onto the sand, I felt like I was traveling over the open flesh of the earth, that we were viruses in the bus seeking admission in order to drag our mothers to death, the glacial rivers were red as blood and viscous, the surf from the waves striking rocks visible like a dragon’s ridged back, the blurry steam snaking up, turning the sky black and yellow while the glacier glowed with the humidity, the bus will meet its end on the sand, I thought in my dream, we’re all going to die … through my drowsiness I could hear The Regular had the microphone on and was speaking about paradise, how Skeiðarársandur was paradise, the foundation of life and destruction, that Skeiðarársandur was real country, the sand was the revelation of the world, its essence, the spiritual particles of the world stripped bare … Here you can see a great wonder, The Regular said into the microphone, and I woke up in an instant, in the middle of the sands a new forest springs up where human intervention never could, he continued, it’s like a fairy tale, it’s reason enough to abolish the Icelandic State Forest Service, Skógrækt, immediately, to throw the Director of the State Forest Service into prison for crimes against nature, in large areas birch trees are emerging, they come from the seeds of Bæjarstaðarskógur, the most beautiful forest in Iceland, with full-grown birch trees, with distinctive, upright trunks, and light enough to use for shafts, like spear shafts and pointed staffs, the region’s name comes from the nature of Bæjarstaðarskógur. Skaftafellssýsla, this perfect forest on Skeiðarársandur will be destroyed in the impending jökulhlaup and come to nothing, and in that sense perfect.

  I looked out the window of the bus at Öræfi; how
colossal this glacier is, I thought, the mountains seem small next to it, though they are large and tall and terrible; one sees how under this marvel miniscule houses nap; people live in them, steadfast beneath this snow-covered threat.

  Here you see an old refuge hut, The Regular said, associated with a sad story everyone tries to forget. Back when the rivers were the greatest obstacles and the locals accompanied tourists across the sand, they read streams, the rivers were like an ever-changing text across the sand, one that constantly needed to be reviewed, they read the waves striking the rocks in the stream, used that to ascertain the state of the bed at that moment, saw whether it was sandy or made up of large stones, they assessed the depth and force of the stream from the current, and in this way they found a way across, for the rivers had no fords, changing permanently, never the same, discussing Heraclitus’s river philosophy, ideas proposed and debated for how to cross, fierce arguments flowing back and forth all day, ways across being tested out; everything was bound up with nature’s uncertainty, and so the people of the water developed their knowledge and culture, but that’s now come to an end with the bridges over the rivers, the fixed fords over ordinary rivers are nothing like this, there was solid knowledge and certainty and no need to wonder, the people of the water saw what others did not see, death approaching on the one hand, a way across on the other; however, a reading knowledge of the language of currents saved many lives each year, the lives of tourists who would otherwise have gotten into danger—but that language is now extinct … and here we are rushing across an elevated road over a bridge over a river without noticing, crossing the Skeiðará, the greatest destroyer in any of the Nordic countries, The Regular announced over the bus microphone as we drove onto the bridge, she is the head of the Öræfing beast, rarely mentioned by name, they made their knowledge of her into a sport and a science and then an art, she floods approximately every 10 years, the last big flood was in 1996 and was jokingly called the television flood, it sent out a message via a brutal eruption after which a colossal amount of water collected in the glacier; foreign reporters flocked to Iceland, but the Skeiðará flood still had not happened weeks later, the correspondents and videographers grew tired of waiting and went home disappointed, then the Skeiðará flooded, routing everything before it with its incredible burden of ice and mass of water, the road vanished as though it had never existed and with it all the elegant bridges across the sand, everything returned to ancient times, and I remember thinking it terribly entertaining, as domestic reporters and freelancers gave detailed accounts of the disaster and sold their copy around the world, the Skeiðará becomes an ocean when it floods, and large blocks calve from the glacier and they rush out onto the sand, borne by the water, when the flood subsides icebergs stand on the sand and can take years to melt, once they are gone they leave so-called ker or “pots” in the sand, places that are hollow under the sand, dangerous quagmires, many men and horses have sunk in these pots and in bygone times the route across the sand meandered between such craters, The Regular said over the bus’s microphone, and one more thing I’d like to tell you, Bernharður, you must understand, there are so-called channels formed in glaciers, rock belts formed by the glacier moving, you need to know these things: streaks on the advancing glaciers, current-born sediment in the glacial water, kettle pots on the sand. Knowing that, you should always be able to cope.

  Then we were suddenly at the Skaftafell Visitor Center; I jumped up and dashed out, making for my trunk which was in the bus’s luggage compartment, I’d fixed off-road tires to my trunk for the trip to Iceland, I had thought about staying in the trunk, because there was plenty of room, inside I would have had the enormous quantity of books purchased at Bragi thanks to The Regular’s guidance. I also had with me a large sail-canvas tent so I could set up a table and chair and sit down to write and work on my research. I’d taken pains to be well prepared, not wanting to be like some travelers in Öræfi about whom The Regular had told me: not long ago a twenty-six-year-old tourist from the UK went hiking on Hvannadalshnjúk, the highest peak of Öræfajökull, the highest peak in the country, one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world, wearing just jeans and a leather jacket and without provisions; the farmer’s wife at Hof insisted the man pack a lunch but he refused, saying he was going to live on berries, he’d heard Iceland boasted an enormous quantity of berries, but first of all not a lot of berries grow out on the glacier and secondly he was traveling in mid-January, and berries appear in late August, the farmers warned him, told him that at this time of year the weather was evil, the next day they were slammed by a blizzard and the tourist vanished immediately, a search got underway, everyone was called out, a helicopter searching the glacier, many groups of hikers, three snowmobiles called Gusi, Grendill and Kuggur, several snow sleds, the armored dragon itself ferried men between places in hostile weather, the search conditions were terrible, rescue teams from throughout the South, two hundred people, they all looked but the man in the leather jacket was nowhere, a few days later the weather dropped and the snow thawed and the farmer over at Hof was taking out the trash and found him dead below the road. Yet it’s common to never find bodies, because many fall into the cracks and end up a microscopic redness under the glacier, disappearing, though anything metal surfaces from under the creeping glacier a long time later, flattened like a pancake; and so, said The Regular, I let you buy all these books in Bragi so you will not end like all the rest, so you can read up before you go out onto the mountain, these days everyone has such sophisticated equipment but no knowledge, in the past, the equipment might have been so-so but the knowledge was greater, when Kiddi went up to Hvannadalshnjúk on Öræfajökull with regional farmers, he did head across in sneakers and jeans, he had thermal underwear with him and put it on over his clothes when he was getting cold on the glacier, because he could not bear the thought of taking off the jeans in the cold to put the underwear underneath, and he didn’t think the equipment was poor, the expedition manager, said Kiddi, he was in rubber boots.

  I went to the countryside with Kiddi whenever I could, The Regular said, standing in the car park at Skaftafell, Kiddi always just calls Öræfi the country, want to come to the country with me? Kiddi would ask, yes, I’d say and we would go to the country. I began calling Öræfi the country, it quickly became my only country, although strictly speaking it wasn’t mine, I didn’t have a country, but Öræfi provided the youthful adventures that shaped me as a person for life … I remember when I first came here: I had never been on such a long journey, and when Öræfi faced us across the sand, it was an utter demarcation of the world, glaciers, mountains, canyons, forests, plains, sands, the shore, the sea. First, we went with Kiddi’s grandfather to the sheep barn to attend to the sheep, it was a rustic structure with piled walls and gables out on the plain amid overgrown rocks which dated back to the catastrophic floods of 1362; it was constructed out of beach driftwood and has since been torn to pieces, with nothing good set in its place. While his grandfather fed and watered the animals, Kiddi wanted to show off for his new friend, peeling away from the spot in a jeep and reeling around the barn; by one of the corners he drove over a stone boulder and the car pitched onto two wheels and he drove like that too long, I thought, he was leaning toward the slope at the bottom of which I stood, looking up, amazed by it all, Kiddi looking back at me from the jeep’s window, concerned, concentrating, I saw it was even odds that either the car would overturn and he would roll down the slope toward me, or else, as happened, the car would thump back down onto its tires, Kiddi drove in a circle and returned the car back to the sheep barn, I came running, we were both scared and sheepish and ran giggling in to help his grandfather attend to the livestock. Because of everything we were laughing so much that we couldn’t hold onto the bundles of hay but Kiddi’s grandfather did not understand what the hell had gotten into us, although he didn’t interfere. Next we walked along the beach, with a rifle and a shotgun we’d pilfered from the farm, we borrowed the jee
p from Kiddi’s grandfather, because it was small and light the jeep glided across the wet sand well whereas larger SUVs sometimes sank like sugar cubes in coffee, swallowed up, no trace of them ever seen again, the sand was deathly sweet, if you could make a cross-section scan of Skeiðarársand it would be like a hazelnut chocolate bar, I’m just realizing this now, given all the cars and ships in the sand, many kinds, Kiddi always drove the jeep at lightning speed, and sometimes it jumped and we were slung about like two dice in a tupperware, we drove around like this and walked the shore all day, we jabbered on about girls in school, who had the largest breasts, that sort of thing, we jabbered about bands and jabbered about movies, we ran along the shoreline and played with the two dogs who were along with us, we bowled with the spherical floats from fishing nets, we pulled ropes up out of the sand and got burns on our palms, we threw cans into the air and lobbed stones at them, we fooled around, we opened a small bottle we found and tried to analyze its bitter salt taste, was booze, we drew caricatures in the sand, we laughed and lazed about on driftwood logs, we composed little rhymes, Kiddi came up with the words and I arranged them into verses, we saw a group of tiny sanderlings on the beach, we had the idea to shoot at the birds from long range in order to kill some without damaging them too much, because we wanted to stuff a bird and put it in our collection, a sandpiper, but how to kill it without damaging them too much? I asked, by shooting them from long range, Kiddi said, I considered Kiddi a tremendous naturalist and tried to learn as much as possible from him, Kiddi collected and blew eggs, he had a huge egg collection housed in several large ski-boot boxes; he’d lined the boxes with cotton and marked the eggs with tiny handwritten labels, and I myself started to collect eggs and blow them and transplant them into cardboard boxes, just like he did. Kiddi had learned the method off Hálfdán from Tvísker, Kiddi gathered eggs and then Hálfdán helped him, I gathered eggs and Kiddi helped me, Kiddi collected skulls and I collected skulls, Kiddi collected bird feet and stood them taut on corks with pins to fix them in their proper shape, as Hálfdán taught him to do, and I collected bird feet and did the same thing, Kiddi collected skeletons and I collected skeletons, Kiddi collected insects like Hálfdán but that’s where I drew the line, I couldn’t imagine collecting bugs, I was too spoiled for that, being raised in Reykjavík. Kiddi studied theory with Hálfdán from Tvísker who was generous with his knowledge and treated little Kiddi as an equal, taught him handcrafts and explained his own work, inducted him into study, and Kiddi shared the knowledge he got from Hálfdán with me, The Regular said there in the carpark at Skaftafell, not without pride, Hálfdán is the greatest ornithologist and entomologist and botanist who ever lived and he’s completely self-taught, which makes all the difference, there have been several great natural scientists in Iceland and Hálfdán is one of them, at the beginning we should mention the poet Eggert Ólafsson and also Bjarni Palsson landphysicus, they pioneered modern natural science, then Ólaf Olavius, also your doctor friend Sveinn Pálsson, Jónas Hallgrímsson the poet, the poet Benedikt Gröndal, followed by Þorvald Thoroddsen and Dr. Helgi Pjeturs though they quarreled about móberg tuffs and breccia rock, a reasonable dispute, and next Bjarni Sæmundsson after whom the research vessel was named, then Hálfdán from Tvísker and then Kiddi and finally me. So you see how short the thread is between me and Eggert Olafsson, Hálfdán taught me through Kiddi, Bjarni Sæmundsson taught me through Hálfdán and Kiddi, Dr. Helgi Pjeturs taught me through Bjarni Sæmundsson, Hálfdán from Tvísker and Kiddi, Þorvald Thoroddsen taught me through Dr. Helgi Pjeturs, Bjarni Sæmundsson, Hálfdán from Tvísker and Kiddi, Benedikt Gröndal taught me through Þorvald Thoroddsen, Dr. Helgi Pjeturs, Bjarni Sæmundsson, Hálfdán from Tvísker and Kiddi, Jónas Hallgrímsson taught me through Benedikt Gröndal, Þorvald Thoroddsen, Dr. Helgi Pjeturs, Bjarni Sæmundsson, Hálfdán from Tvísker and Kiddi, Sveinn Pálsson taught me through Jónas Hallgrímsson, Benedikt Gröndal, Þorvald Thoroddsen, Dr. Helgi Pjeturs, Bjarni Sæmundsson, Hálfdán from Tvísker and Kiddi, Ólaf Olavius taught me through Sveinn Pálsson, Jónas Hallgrímsson, Benedikt Gröndal, Þorvald Thoroddsen, Dr. Helgi Pjeturs, Bjarni Sæmundsson, Hálfdán from Tvísker and Kiddi, Bjarni Palsson landphysicus taught me through Ólaf Olavius, Sveinn Pálsson, Jónas Hallgrímsson, Benedikt Gröndal, Þorvald Thoroddsen, Dr. Helgi Pjeturs, Bjarni Sæmundsson, Hálfdán from Tvísker and Kiddi, and Eggert Ólafsson taught me through Bjarni Pálsson, Ólaf Olavius, Sveinn Pálsson, Jónas Hallgrímsson, Benedikt Gröndal, Þorvald Thoroddsen, Dr. Helgi Pjeturs, Bjarni Sæmundsson, Hálfdán from Tvísker and Kiddi, and so I feel often like I’m talking to Eggert Ólafsson when I’m talking to Kiddi, though I didn’t think that back then because we didn’t have a clue who Eggert and Bjarni were, we were only eleven, but when I think back … I pointed the gun at the middle of the group of sanderlings on the beach and fired, after the report I ran with Eggert to the target, small sanderlings writhed about fatally wounded, some with only one foot, others with one wing, bleeding and carrying themselves lamely. Swelling with fear and excitement I fired another shot immediately on the run from close range in order to end this heap of suffering on the sand, after the second pop there were no birds, just a hole in the sand and feather ribbons wafting slowly through the air like artificial snow … silence on the sand … Eggert Ólafsson was angry with me, Bjarni Pálsson, because I had destroyed the raw material for stuffing, because I had been so excited, unable to control myself, you never have any self-control, Bjarni, said Eggert; moreover, in the excitement I’d handed him a loaded, cocked rifle and Eggert looked down the barrel and was lucky not to receive a ball through his head, which would have been an irreparable loss for the nation in future … for all this, Kiddi got angry and Hálfdán too and all the other natural scientists were pissed at me for not being suitably scientific.