Oraefi

by Ófeigur Sigurðsson

  My mother lay in the City Hospital for 2 weeks, I said, and had to undergo three operations on her head. Flugleiðir, the Icelandic airline, offered to fly my family out so we could come watch over her, grandfather and grandmother went, I was left back home with my father. My mother took all the newspaper stories home with her, they were very accurate and detailed about the events, thanks to the magistrate in East Skaftfell district, Friðjón Guðröðarson, she did this because my father asked her to. She was a changed person when she came home, said my father, he said that repeatedly over the years, sometimes it seemed to me that he was the one who had changed, not her. I later pored over all this data.

  The brothers met me at Tvísker: Hálfdán, the ornithologist; Helgi, the inventor; Sigurður, the author; and Flosi, the glaciologist. They were determined I should travel on horseback, pulling my oversize trunk behind me. Where are you headed exactly? they asked. Up into Mávabyggðir, I said. And you’re planning to take your trunk up to Mávabyggðir? Yes, that’s the plan, it has all my tools, everything I need. You’re clearly mindful of Captain Koch, said Sigurður, but no one has traveled through Öræfi with as much baggage as he did, the size of your trunk notwithstanding.

  I was invited onto the farm and the brothers set out numerous cakes on the kitchen table, a sponge cake, a Christmas cake, a layer cake, assorted other kinds I didn’t even know the names of. I was able to fish out of my trunk a Viennese cream cake my mother had baked and I set it on the table; it was pretty crushed because the cake plate had broken under the weight of all my books. That doesn’t diminish the taste, Sigurður said. We had the best cake party, rabbiting on about sundry issues, mostly old, lost things. It was time well spent.

  I didn’t want to accept accommodation with the Tvísker brothers, having already inconvenienced and troubled them enough; they probably have lots of guests stay with them, lots of ignorant people like me, inquisitive travelers. The time has passed when you can walk up to someone’s farm for food and shelter; these days, people just want to be left in peace to watch TV, free from strangers, they don’t want other people around, they don’t even want themselves there. But Tvísker is more like a college than the home of farmers, inventors, and scientists: all sorts of ignorant folk compete to ingratiate themselves, wanting to see their collections and milk their knowledge. I decided to overnight in my trunk, having got permission to park it on the farmyard. Before I went outside, however, I was not able to restrain myself from doing what Kiddi had said I ought to, that is, get Hálfdán to show me his insect collection, which he did very happily, pleased by my interest, I could have spent many hours in front of those glass cases, all the beetles and butterflies mounted to the backing with tiny needles, their little machine-written labels displaying the Icelandic and Latin names. Hálfdán showed me his invention, an insect suction device, and gave me a demonstration; it was a small device Hálfdán had thought up in his younger years when he was just beginning to collect insects. They often got damaged when put in a tin, so he constructed a clear plastic jar with two rubber tubes through the lid; you bend one of the tubes down to the tiny creature and stick the other into your mouth and suck, so the creature gets sucked down through the lid; at the end of the suction pipe inside the jar there’s a filter so you don’t inhale the insect, and then you can examine the insect close up and safely in the jar before returning it to nature unscathed or adding it to your collection. After that, he accompanied me out to the farmyard. It had begun to get dark, the weather cold but calm. He showed me his light trap under the mountain ash on the east side of the house, checking what it had caught, various remarkable things. Then we walked back. I said good night and crawled into the trunk like a larva. I felt good. I enjoyed snuggling up to myself on my soft mattress, wrapped in my down comforter amid my books, feeling the cold from outside. I wrote down in my diary everything that had happened that day. In the morning, I had been to Sandfell, the next destination east of Svínafell, which looks beautiful though the sources in my trunk deem it ugly; when we were at Hálsasker, near Sandfell, The Regular told me about the bare, scant vegetation and the place’s gray tones, which few have appreciated, at least until recently, when a sign with information about the place was installed. Sandfell dates back to the Settlement but it’s deserted now, The Regular said, a woman settled there because her husband was lost at sea on the way over to Iceland, her name was Þorgerður and she was a woman of strong resolve. In Sandfell there is an old cemetery with a single great rowan tree in which two ravens nearly always sit, croaking. Once, a beautiful cluster of houses stood there, the last in the traditional Skaftafell style; all the others had been demolished and levelled to the earth, turf houses and gabled farmhouses, and when the rivers were bridged and the road continued past Sandfellsbær and the president was planning a visit in his fancy car, a fire was set on Sandfellsbær, and the structures were flattened by bulldozer because people were ashamed of them, there hadn’t been enough progress, and thus the last idiosyncratic construction methods in all of Öræfi were destroyed, right as we were celebrating 1100 years of settlement in the country, right as the ring road opened. We burned up and tore down anything old, flattening everything, to let the present see itself. But 1974, the year we attempted to please the president of the republic with a fire set by the Ministry of Agriculture at Sandfellsbær, our anniversary year during which we levelled the ruins with a bulldozer, that was a special year through Europe, a year dedicated to conserving houses; people didn’t realize that the president was an archaeologist and a former Icelandic park ranger; needless to say, the gesture didn’t suit him especially well. Twenty years earlier, before he became president, he’d rescued the turf church in Hof from destruction; today, this small church is the most precious gem in Öræfi, one of the most beautiful churches in Iceland. Objects and relics that weren’t destroyed in the fire or by bulldozer and might be used for farming got scattered across the region and disappeared; for example, the altar from Sandfellskirkja ended up as a cabinet in an outbuilding; it’s no longer in use, has vanished. It wasn’t long ago that ancient houses existed in Sandfell and Svínafell; it was said they dated to the 11th century, much larger than was later customary, built from old red spruce, or so Eggert and Bjarni say in their Travelogue, these structures were preserved and restored through the centuries until Progressives set fire to them, flattened the ruins, smoothed turf structures into meadows to produce grass to produce animals to industrialize farms—and now nobody knows where those big, ancient halls stood. After 1974, Sandfell has been so haunted that no one gets any peace there for any length of time. One time, there were road workers in tents near the rowan tree and the two ravens were extremely uneasy; that night, everyone woke up to resounding hoofbeats, but couldn’t see anything in the night. The following day people asked around, but nobody had been traveling during the night, never mind several people on horseback; it was something supernatural. Nowadays, many tourists come by bus to read the sign, said The Regular there in Hálsasker, the main reason people travel is to read signs, he said, on the sign at Sandfell you find information about how remarkable this place is and how remarkable the destroyed house was. There’s ample parking. There’s human shit in the cemetery, people crap among the graves because there’s no toilet at the sign everyone is reading, all those millions of tourists shitting out on the land all the burgers and fries they felt compelled to eat. Runki from Destrikt was surprised by all these white flowers in the cemetery he did not recognize, he thought they were newly-discovered plants, he was going to call Hálfdán and let him know of this remarkable find, but when he walked into the yard, he saw it was toilet paper fluttering on the graves in the wind.