Oraefi

by Ófeigur Sigurðsson

  Every time I looked at the survey map of Öræfi, my thoughts turned to Captain Koch. Koch was extremely popular in Öræfi, and lived on people’s lips long after his passing, as Sigurður told me in Tvísker when he saw me with the maps. He was tough and tenacious, qualities Icelanders could appreciate in foreigners; little annoys an Icelander more than a whiny traveler. He principally earned admiration by staying for many weeks in a tent on Skeiðarársandur during the coldest months, enduring sandstorms and terrible weather; he set up cairns and took measurements. Captain Koch’s first acquaintance with Iceland was difficult, said Sigurður, but he never showed any fussiness. One time, he accompanied his guide to the Skeiðará during a surge; there was a storm from the north and a hoar frost. The guide went into the river first and it crashed right over him so he was soaked through by the time he hit the other bank. Koch did not care to ride the long way drenched so he tore his clothes off and tied them behind him and the horse swam across the Skeiðará in the raging northern weather with him naked on its back; for the rest of the day Koch rode in dry clothes, warm, while the guide shivered with cold and wet and rime. Sometimes his path would be completely impassable due to sandstorms, and the horses couldn’t eat because the feedbags were full of sand, so they loitered there hungry and trembling for days on end, the surveyors keeping up a steadfast shoveling because their sleeping quarters risked falling into the sand; the tents were torn open, and the sea came far up into the estuary, meaning the men couldn’t drink the water. Their mouths and noses filled with sand and their provisions spoiled. When the weather subsided, they could go back to measuring, every day they had to ride the estuary and rivers and glacial floods on the sand, and it was rough hardship, and then snow came, but it was barely a bother compared to the sand’s buffets. People wondered how Captain Koch was so efficient and quick to learn the conditions, and they were delighted his adoption of and love for the Icelandic horse. After that, Captain Koch went up Öræfajökull to survey and lived there in a tent for 6 weeks; he had with him an Öræfing draftsman and guide, Þorstein from Skaftafell, a brave man who was an experienced traveler. Koch made his first attempt to use horses on the glacier there, but it did not go well because of the heavy going and the snowmelt, it was largely awful weather, a cheerless retreat. Koch was unable to get the horses up to the high glacier, and he had to seek out supplies from the camp store down below the glacier when provisions ran short; during that trip he couldn’t make it back to the tent the same day due to the inclement weather, and Koch and Þorstein got rained on, then a darkening blizzed, and they lay out exposed all that night, thoroughly wet, lying in hay sacks; it seemed impossible humans could have survived such a thing, and the newspapers in the South wrote about it enough that it became well known.

  The stories surrounding the military survey map are a gold mine for my doctoral thesis, I thought there in the cable car, place names are symbols, I told myself, and a shiver ran through me, I was overjoyed, it was nothing less than an awakening there in the car and I instinctively quit hauling myself, stopping halfway across the water. The cable car dipped deep and slow, holding me and the horse I’d named Fuck-red, Fuck for short. Place names as Symbols, I noted in my notebook there in the bouncing cable car with Fuck, nothing more, I stared at those words, place names as symbols, a complete world had opened for me as I finished writing these words, place names as symbols, I said out loud there in the bouncing cable car above the thundering glacial water, there for the first time I realized that there was a real chance of finishing my thesis. I’d grown afraid that the trip to Mávabyggðir was a cloak for my lack of imagination and my regrets and absence of research, but even if I didn’t finish the thesis, the searching and discovering mattered to me above all, the process of being in motion, increasing my range, with uncertainty as my constant light … all of a sudden, I felt unsafe there in the cable car above a floating death, cold and beautiful, felt fearful of the symbols, of the world beyond the symbols, a streaming glacial water running with symbols, with place names … there was probably nothing beyond the symbols but the universe in all its emptiness and fortune of oblivion. I put my hands to my head and yelled; my pen fell down into the water. Fuck bolted, I yelled out like Munch’s The Scream there in the cable car above the symbolic glacial waters, the sun reddening the eastern sky and turning the glacier into swelling blood, the gray-green glacier bulging under me, and Fuck and I were bouncing about in the open air terrified by the void behind the symbols … I hauled us across in a flurry and threw my body onto the dirt of the other bank to calm myself.

  Shortly afterward, I fetched the rest of the horses, one by one; on each crossing, I received some inspiration. On the second, the Belgian symbolism became more prominent in the landscape; on the third journey, the way names cloak things; on the fourth trip, how naked symbols are; on the fifth journey, I involuntarily wrote Einar Jónsson without really knowing who that was. By the time I had finished moving myself, the horses, and my trunk across I was greedy for ideas, I went back alone in the car, hauling myself out over the river, ready with pencil and notebook—but nothing happened. Perhaps I lacked a horse, so I went to get a horse and bring it out in the cable car and wait for inspiration. I switched the pencil out for a pen, but nothing happened, except some rather unremarkable twittering from the world of ideas which soon passed … I tried to concentrate on the twittering but it was utterly meaningless. I grew uncontrollably sad, full of hopelessness.

  In the most desolate place on earth, where once there had been a glacier out past Breiðármerkurfjall but now there was nothing except filed-down scree and rocks, gray, dark, cold, there in the shadow of the mountain as though on the bottom of the ocean, I went past a sign. Although I’m usually a sucker for signs, I felt compelled to avoid reading this one. I’m not going to read the sign, no way, I said to myself, I’m going to go past the sign, pretend I cannot see it, I wasn’t going to go through desolation and wasteland to do something so despicable as go and read a sign. Perhaps it’s a sign about Kári Sölmundsson’s farm? I thought. No, Sigurður from Tvísker had told me about that, no way you can trust a sign in such a situation; what could possibly be on a sign in a place like this. Recently, there was a glacier here; now it’s retreated, leaving just gray, red, and blue, no place names, nothing could have happened here, nothing could be so remarkable to look at that it required a sign, not here in this place no one visits, a place without stories, it probably says there was a glacier here, something like: Nothing has ever happened here. I don’t need to read the sign, I know what it says, the sign is absolutely foreseeable, I’ll just go past it, absolutely ignore it, since nothing remarkable is written on it, it says nothing I don’t already know. I plodded toward the sign and looked angrily at it:

  “PRAISE TO THE LORD”

  BY THE BIG ROCK

  ON THE SLOPE

  SIGURÐUR BJÖRNSSON

  WAS SAVED

  FROM AN AVALANCHE

  8TH NOVEMBER

  1936.

  THE FLOOD TOOK SIGURÐUR

  BY THE HILLOCK

  AT THE TOP OF THE SLOPE.

  HE THEREFORE FELL

  212 METERS

  AND STOPPED 28 METERS

  BELOW THE GLACIER,

  IN A HOLE

  A STREAM

  EKED—

  BACK THEN THE GLACIER

  REACHED THIS HIGH.

  That cheered me. I looked up. Fog had settled on the middle of the slopes and the gray of the rock the glacial tongue had lain across had taken on infinite tones, glistening matte and foggy, moist and warm, hard and friendly, gray and colorful. All of this touched something lost inside me; joy trickled through me. An excited joy, full of anticipation. The joy of life. Walking alone amid the glacial deposits became life’s highest pleasure. Picking up a pen and a notebook out in nature: pure happiness. What happened to the place names here when they went under the ice in the Middle Ages? I noted the sign down in my notebook. Would it be possible to dig the place
names up out of the old sources, paste them back into nature? How painful it must have been, seeing the glacier crawl over Kári Sölmundsson’s farm and destroy the earth. Icelanders today willingly drown their wilderness, The Regular had told me, dunking their highlands and uninhabited areas under water, flooding them with dams to create cheap electricity for criminal foreign corporations and for murderers and misanthropes and those who loathe nature and life itself, as he so mildly put it; what became of the place names in the lakes the dams made? I noted, perhaps they’re in the bottom of some drawer somewhere at the Place Name Institute, have they lost all meaning having lost their utility? They’re forgotten, they’ve disappeared into the archive’s dark cubbyholes, dropped out of everyday linguistic use, no longer part of descriptions, vanished from maps … yet even if place names lose their usefulness, they don’t lose their aesthetic value, in the archives, on obsolete maps, in old books; the country itself is a manuscript, that’s the essence of toponymy, I noted, pleased with myself there by the sign. I need to contact the Place Name Institute and ask what’s happened to all the names that got drowned by corrupt politicians in cahoots with foreign criminal enterprises, the lost children of nature, it’s somewhat unclear whether there is an institute still working on behalf of all the place names, probably it got closed down before the country was drowned, generations have learned that landscapes would be worth little if they weren’t named something, and that made it possible to discard the place name registry and drown the country … but place names survive … Place names rise from the depths, I noted down, standing by the sign.

  Palm Sunday, 13th April. Temperature: 2 degrees. The wind in the east. Unbudging fog, now and then seeming to lighten slightly, to get sucked down into gullies and ravines, sucked up into cliffs, dragged off the mountain. I had brought a map of the glacier, it was all white, nothing to see on it except a unique, transitory contour line, no place names, no land. The symbols of time, I also noted down, there by the sign, the site of time, the place names of time … Topo-time … the phrase came to mind in English, for some reason, I noted it down, Topo-time, in my notebook, tópótími in Icelandic, topozeit … better in German, I thought, topozeit … it would be best if the term settled into its German form within the academic community. I allowed myself to dream, sitting there on the trunk by the sign, topozeit, I repeated it a hundred times to myself and each time the concept deepened, I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but had a feeling, that’s how it always goes in creative studies, intuition, it was something big, important, you can build on the concept, for example: topozeitgeist … I knew that topozeit and topotime and tópótími were something crucial, a new concept, a key to mysteries, the essence of my doctoral thesis, its expectation and solution, if I managed to do the groundwork for this new concept, lay out this concept of mine, Topo-time could become well-established within toponymy, then later within philosophy, sociology, history, the whole of the humanities, and finally more widely in scholarship, then the media, on into popular language, in the end everyone will begin saying topotime this and topotime the other, politicians will say that an idea would be subject to topotime in the budget bill; there was true topotime in the news from the South this weekend, the renowned regional reporter from the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service would say; hardly anyone would be able to express themselves without mentioning topotime—but by then it wouldn’t be possible for topotime to make any headway, I thought beside my trunk at the sign, the concept would have long become distorted, divorced from its origins, toponymers would long have ceased using topozeit and topotime, scholars in general would have quit using the term, individual writers and politicians and lawyers would make a show of topotime but that, too, would be on the decrease; everyone would be done getting drunk on the topotime concept, and it would enter oblivion, never completely understood, although the concept would have completed the definite process all words and concepts and phenomena go through over a longer or shorter period of time, topotime would have gained life-experience, it would persist, as a place name does, a resolute thought in human history, a place name inside language; indeed, after the term has long been forgotten, and someone feels that humanity is wading into a new error, there would be this low whisper: topotime … topotime … and then the whispering would get a bit louder: topotime, topotime, and soon scholars and writers would again compete to say topotime ahead of one another because all of a sudden, everyone is saying topotime, in time and out of time; all this I noted in my notebook by my trunk at the sign near the foot of Breiðármerkurfjall.

  Also this: in my mind, I see Kári Sölmundarson in the smithy whetting his weapon while Sigurður from Tvísker comes down the chimney head first. They have a lot to discuss. Sigurður had used the name Káratindur, after Kári Sölmundsson, for a peak approach that had recently surfaced from under a glacier in these parts; in fact, Sigurður from Tvísker is the greatest toponymist in Iceland, although no one appreciates that fact; he’s the poet of the land, he roams far and wide about the mountains in his scholarly pursuits. Many cliffs have come to light since global warming caused the glacier to dwindle, since agriculture, since the population explosion … Sigurður is to thank for the names that can now be found on new maps: Heljargnípa, Drangaklettur, Hellutindur, Sveinstindur, Sveinsgnípa (both after Sveinn Pálsson, who went out onto Öræfajökull in 1794 and whose name had not been given to anything this whole time, this topotime), Tindaborg, Hvannadalshryggur, Dyrhamar, Súlukambur, and Veðrastapi, all now well-known place names that people believe have existed since olden times, though some aren’t more than thirty years old. There was a beautiful crag or ridge which recently emerged from the glacier, right next to Káraskeri, named after the Tvísker brothers: Bræðrasker.

  I stepped out onto the glacial tongue and held my breath. At first the ice was full of grit, easy to cross, suiting the horses, with their spiked horseshoes, and the trunk; I myself was wearing spikes, and went at an oblique angle up the so-called Mávabyggðarönd, the streak of boulders extending from Mávabyggðir down to the lowlands, scree the glacier has scraped out the mountains, the best signpost providing there isn’t much fresh snow. It lay there, quite clear, while I was on the advancing glacier; a maze of clefts and ice-prisons lay right in front of me, I needed to thread myself along a narrow channel, deep blackness on both sides as hundreds, if not thousands, of geese flew up in an arrow, high in flight on the way to the blue sky above their nesting ground, they were newly arrived, like thousands of other birds heading northwest during the past few days. Beyond the land, the sun broke through the clouds, sending rays of light beaming down to the moving ocean. I heard many small streams underneath me in the glacier, it was spring, trickling water everywhere. The fog still sat on the mountains, but on the glacier, there was light inside the fog, and I expected it to be bright once I reached high altitude, expected I would head up through the clouds. My route up the glacier would pass thousands of those singular “glacier mice,” the moss balls that roll about the glacier. An existential shiver traversed me as I walked out into the white wasteland: I was heading to meet my youth, lost for sure yet still pregnant with meaning for me. It was snowing and the wind ramped up, coming from the northeast, slanting against me, and soon the streak disappeared and everything turned white, I might direct my heading any which way in this wind, I was barely able to see the compass, there was nothing to aim at, I could hardly see out my eyes. I wandered about alone snowblind and in snowlight, constantly needing to break the ice which clung to me, the ice-spatterings which hampered the horses, these horses are so hairy and unique and but tremendously resolute, yet I regretted having taken them onto the glacier, perhaps I would have to shoot them like Captain Koch had if they gave up dragging the trunk, but I had of course clean forget to bring a gun along with me. A person compiles appendixes until he breaks down under them, I thought in my snowblindness, your baggage is your self. Captain Koch and Dr. Wegner took six tons of hay and fodder to Grænlandsjökull for the sake of
the horses, I had two hay sacks for mine, which the rear horse carried.

  I could not find us a direction forward. I switched over to skis and felt the going was better. I could not make headway so I changed over to snowshoes. I was worried about the horses, they had sorrowful expressions, who was I to drag these creatures onto the glacier, but maybe they are happy getting a break from Runki from Destrikt, I thought there on the glacier, perhaps their sadness is really an expression of pleasure, probably they miss the torment, it’s the same with humans as horses, I didn’t know how much time had passed, I had probably been going for many hours, I was forced to stop regularly, often and for short periods, to get myself a mixture to drink and a bit to eat, to give the horses their feed bag, but it was difficult to stop, only a little further, just a little further, I told myself time and time again in the snowblindness, it will be interesting to see how I fare with my toponymical research in the blindness. When I finally stopped, I realized the frost had spread via my sweat to my flesh, I did some Müller technique to limber up and prevent the shivers plaguing me. I gave my beasts of burden a frozen tart from Vienna; best practice in the cold is to have something frozen, I told them, fire against fire, frost against frost, that is a Tyrolean trick. They were feverish for the sugar, inhaling the tart.