Oraefi

by Ófeigur Sigurðsson

  A strange fact, one I’ve never seen it discussed, is that Gunnar from Hlíðarenda’s dog had a Biblical name, Sámur, at a time when paganism reigned in Iceland, Dr. Lassi writes, Sám, or Samuel, God’s name in Hebrew; Sámur may also have come from medieval Persian studies, the dog being dark in color because Sam is an ancient Persian legendary character translated as sá myrki, the dark one; Nordic Vikings, the so-called væringjar, wandered far and wide in Iran and learned the indigenous language in order to conduct business and talk to kings, being merchant vikings who believed in the free flow of money; today, it’s quite the opposite, I must interject at this point, Dr Lassie wrote, today’s banksters, free-market vikings, can’t talk any languages, have no courtesy, and never travel; in Icelandic, sámur is sometimes used instead of other words for black, dark, or even unclean, as it is in Persia; it can be intimately related to the Turkish-Mongolian word shaman or spirit doctor … Could it be the Nordic people sought sheep in Persia and brought them home to breed? Dr. Lassi’s report questioned; merino sheep were at one time found in the mountains of Persia, they originally lived in highland pastures and avoided human interference; they are famous for the quality of their wool, they have wool that does not prickle, it’s said, the merino sheep brought over for breeding in the 18th and 19th centuries caused the psoroptes ovis disease, and the species died like flies, precipitating a tough crisis, a famine … So the third possibility concerning this Sámur of ours, the one I personally think most likely, is that his name comes from the original Indo-European word meaning one, einn, which later became the verb sameina, to combine, the German word sammeln, to gather together as one, and so a perfectly chosen name for a herder … aren’t we used to knitting scarves from dog hairs? I asked, instinctively connecting Bernharður’s scarf and these canine thoughts, don’t we comb dogs in the country? I know hair and wool require very different treatment or is it the case that the wool from wild sheep is different from other wool? …These days, people have other things to do with their time than comb dogs, said Runki from Destrikt, shocked, although it’s something people get up to on the farms where everyone is stressed-out, heh …The wool of a wild sheep is denser, said Fippi from Núpstaður quietly, softer, stronger and warmer and more useful, wild sheep is in all respects better than domesticated sheep.

  I’m wearing underwear, I said, then hesitated, leaving my sentence hanging. The Tvísker brothers looked at me because they are attentive listeners and intelligent and courteous men, but they didn’t meet my eyes like some louts, they instead gazed down to the ground with composed expressions, waiting for what I wanted to say, the district veterinarian, so they might consider it. I’m wearing underwear made from merino wool, I said to the men, finally, which I got from my wife as a Christmas gift. I asked for this underwear especially because my wife cannot abide wool and always gives me something worthless as a Christmas gift, this underwear was advertised clearly as Icelandic apparel and I thought it was time for Icelanders to be making their own underwear again as they had done for 1100 years until they became new-monied plebs; that Christmas Eve, however, I discovered this special Icelandic underwear is made with Turkish wool and sewn in China, it was written absolutely shamelessly on the label under the declaration about it being Icelandic clothing, I got angry with the clothes and threw them away in the corner, and my wife was angry about that, it’s all so different from the good old country which we in the older generation recognize, it took me time to be reconciled to these thin, artificial tatters, I told the men, but now I’m proud of these quality goods, a luxury, they don’t itch you underneath and thus I can hardly believe merino wool caused the disease in the 18th century; I quickly unfastened my pants and allowed the farmers to finger the wool that did not prickle, to feel how soft merino is … Oh-ooh, it cannot be high quality wool unless it prickles, said Flosi from Svínafell.

  I grew amazed at the fellowship between the one who went by The Regular, his friend Kiddi, and the dwarf who fell unconscious in the lobby. Those three came into the hotel room the night I was getting ready for the trip, they seemed to know the patient, Edda the ranger was with them, hanging out with The Regular. Freysnes is your home now, my one-legged friend, just like Freyvangur, The Regular said to Bernharður there on his death bed, smiling as if he had looked forward to saying this, you can lay here as long as you want and read, not everyone has it this good, all you have to do is be, so what if one of your legs has been sawed off, what does that matter? I would give both legs to get to stay in a country hotel for a few months … one-legged and one-buttocked, dear friend, a gelding, that’s what you’ve transformed into, both a spiritual gelding and a physical gelding, that’s why you are a superman, I’d just enjoy this, the insurance company is going to pay your hotel costs or the state or the travel agency or the embassy or some other damn place, even though it’s all one what you are doing with your doctoral thesis, that you went up to Mávabyggðir, that’s not really remarkable here, in fact, nothing is remarkable in Öræfi, said The Regular, it’s not remarkable that Dr. Lassi amputated you here in the hotel in Freysnes, it’s not at all remarkable or surprising that you’re alive, you’re just not at all remarkable, so you can entirely relax, Bernharður my friend, and don’t think you’re someone special.

  The Regular laughed and Bernharður smiled. We all wanted to comfort Bernharður, I pointed out he’d have a nice view out the window if he sat up, he should be able to enjoy it while we were out getting the sheep, although it’s a disaster seeing the lupine on the glacier moraine, seeing how the desolation which emerges from under the glacier cannot be enjoyed and left to heal in peace, that’s a sad sight, being as it is, what do people really have against rocks? are people scared of rock? does the brightness of the rock remind the multitude of death? is the rock a remembrance of death? … man thinks he loves nature, but he really hates nature, he only loves what is cultivated by human hands, the forest, the meadow, the field, he merely tolerates grass, level meadows, the earth is subsumed by animal feed, not by kindness and caring but murder and cruelty, the farmer is no pillar of society, said The Regular by the window, the farmer is a hangman, a state-sponsored land-hangman and a tormentor of beasts, it’s entirely evident everywhere, the farmer rips apart the land and drains the moorland and destroys birdlife, he blames the mink in the ditches for the death of the birds, but it’s the farmer who kills the birds with the ditches, the farmer kills both the mink and the birds, he shoots the foxes, the farmer kills all the animals, he dries the land where it’s supposed to be wet, floods the land where it should be dry, he cultivates meadows and fields to destroy nature with their monotony, eliminating animal species that have been there a million times longer than man has been on earth, it’s agriculture that’s destroying the earth, both its spirit and its work, greed, it’s all becoming clearer and clearer, evolution and progress is what destroys the earth, the agriculturalist thinks that he is keeping humanity alive but he’s actually eliminating it, it cannot last forever, the economy is cracking, epidemics will gush out, nature will burst apart, we must manage to learn from this, not even the farmer can live on his production or, rather, he cannot live on his destruction, although he considers himself the prerequisite for life on earth, he’s remunerated by the State for killing animals and the ecosystem, all so he can buy tractors and quad bikes and many cars and jeeps and trucks and excavators and backhoes and bulldozers and combine harvesters and all kinds of other devices that cost trillions and which he uses to destroy the land, he can build the largest house in the country, and that provides him cover for torturing animals, intelligently-raised creatures appear senseless to him, property and materials, money, cattle, and if the farmer loses a lamb he loses his money, he blames everything else, fox, mink, the weather, he finds the money he lost within the State, he finds it in the slaughterhouse, said The Regular at the hotel window in Freysnes, if I lose five thousand crowns on the heath, I don’t require the State to pay me back, if a raven steals my wallet, I don’t shout w
hining to the media and demand the State provide compensation, it’s really the State that has destroyed the land and killed all the animals, the farmer is only the State hangman … indeed, some farmers have become forest farmers and been given State subsidies to plant trees which destroy the undergrowth, added The Regular, still at the window, they get poison from the State to kill the moorland and heaths to plant alien trees that destroy all the undergrowth, they call themselves good and think they are doing good when they are doing evil, State reforestation is a god in a community like the Ministry of Agriculture, the critic of reforestation or of the Ministry of Agriculture is taken and burned at stake, he’s met with fury and ferocity, such criticism is not welcome in society, the lamb is sacred, the only free creature in the country, it is everywhere, the Icelandic lamb is holier than cows in India, if you drive into a lamb and lose your child in the ensuing car accident, as has often happened, you get fined for running into the sheep and have to pay the farmer for his damaging loss, a lamb that was on the way to the slaughterhouse; how easy it was in an unforested country to impress on the nation that forestry was an advance, people are afraid of panoramas and beauty and feel ashamed they live in a treeless country, their impression is that culture lives in the trees like monkeys, that a treeless land is an uncultured land, that there are no mysteries, no treasures, no fairy tales, no castles, people are ashamed of living in such a poor country, such an uninhabitable country where no forests grow, it is true that the weather here is plenty good enough for forest, little matter when Skaftafell was sold, said The Regular at the window in Freysnes, when Ragnar performed his unexpected work abolishing eleven hundred years of his family history in Skaftafell, reaching all the way back to settlement, the Icelandic Forest Service fought hard to buy the earth at Skaftafell so they could breed a new forest there, with foreign pine trees and fir trees; if they’d succeeded, the Director of the Forest Service, working for the State, would have destroyed one of the largest natural pearls on earth, yet Ragnar didn’t want an exotic new forest but to protect the land in its natural form, so that future generations could enjoy staying in this magnificent nature, so Ragnar sold the State the land on the condition that everyone was given equal access to the estate and that everyone could enjoy the beauty in perpetuity, as far as human power can achieve, Ragnar stipulated in the condition, said The Regular, one eruption like 1362 and everything would be a wasteland again, that’s the beauty, that’s why I come to Öræfi every year because true beauty is perishable, I’m incomparably grateful to Ragnar for opening up the area to the public and making such a big sacrifice which stretched back to Settlement, because what is beauty? The highest quality? Everyone has the right to enjoy nature, without beauty this world would be unbearable, everything would be empty, gray and dead, many people, of course, have no sense of beauty and are spiritless, they cannot enjoy it except as a way to the balance their own delights and greed, many find an unknown force drives them to destroy nature like, for example, the Director of the Icelandic Forest Service, who offered Ragnar a fortune under the table, an amount of money that none of his relatives all the way back to Settlement had ever seen before in one place, as if he had found the gold ship, it was the public’s tax money the Director was waving about, with this sort of money you can do whatever you want, Ragnar, said the Director, you’ve slaved away enough here in this vegetation-poor country, these miserable Wastelands, go to the Canary Islands and enjoy life in your family’s bosom, you’ve never been anywhere, now’s your chance, take this money and enjoy your twilight years in peace and calm, save your relatives from the daily grind and invite them to drink with you at Klöru Bar in the Canary Islands, where the Minister of Agriculture and many other change makers enjoy the nightlife, you can do that too, the Director said to Ragnar in Skaftafell. I don’t want to suffocate the land, said Ragnar, alter it with imported plants and human hands, Sitka spruce, Russian larch, Alaskan aspen, but to have Icelandic trees, birch and rowan, willow bushes, the existing forests …These are racial prejudices! cried the Forestry Director, you are standing in the way of developing our national mentality, Ragnar, I’ll take this to the newspapers, how you’re standing in the way of the future, it reminds me of the nationality-cleansing by the Third Reich, will there be a crystal night in Skaftafell? Sitka spruce and Alaskan aspen grew here before the ice age and the leaves of such trees have been found in the wasteland, you know that well, these trees have the right to be here, like the Jews in Israel …Well, fellow, said Ragnar, I hadn’t thought I would accept a bribe and sacrifice the land, only wanting to protect nature as it is, everyone ought to get to come to Skaftafell and enjoy its nature, I had no plan to sell the beauty. This angered the Forestry Director, who wanted to shut the country down and went so far in his plans for revenge that an entire army of men and women all across the country does nothing but plant trees, said The Regular by the hotel window in Freysnes, it was the Director of the Icelandic Forest Service’s revenge, and this army carries out its idiotic propaganda in the media on behalf of reforestation, everyone becomes a fool for reforestation, people are afraid of rock and sand, of everything that gives insight into nature, they want to dress the country in foreign clothing, they have even got scared of the wind because it threatens economic identity, sitting under shelter is a sign of prosperity, sitting under shelter and stuffing oneself, said The Regular, the wind has become the nation’s chief enemy, and the Icelandic Forest Service plants and plants trees to shelter and protect the economy, the wind is poverty, reforestation is supposed to rescue us from the humiliation of wind gusting around homes and cottages—but forests provide only shadows and mud, nothing else, and isn’t there enough of that in human nature? asked The Regular, the whole nation has gone crazy for reforestation and mad for shadows and mud, the nation has become shadow and mud, there’s nothing but planting another and another tree so you can be happier, and soon ten thousand trees, twenty thousand trees around your summer house, five hundred thousand trees, ten million trees, an idiotic fear of death is nowhere more obvious than in all this reforestation, planting trees in a straight line, making quadratic forests, is that supposed to be civilized? asked The Regular at the window, these square forests are evidence their purpose is to fight nature, to fight themselves, reforestation destroys vegetation, the worst thing you can do is imitate nature because that’s impossible, reforestation amounts only to self-denial and self-destruction, unless people really believe they’re restoring the forest that was here during the Settlement, with poplar and spruce, and thereby regaining their ego? Do we need to timber the land from mountain to shore with square forests? For shame, I always feel happiest out on the hearth in a hearty breeze, said The Regular at the window, trees are for man alone, a man gets caught up in this hell like underwear in a zipper; a wide expanse is meant to look back at a man, what about untouched beauty? untouched nature? Isn’t that the world’s best quality today, getting to enjoy God’s creative work, the number 1 artist! …What is the Director of the Icelandic Forest Service doing, strutting about improving on God’s creation (number 1 artist!)? …They ought to shut down the Icelandic Forest Service, as soon as possible, and establish the Icelandic Neglect Service instead, in order to protect nature the way it is so we can learn from it how the world works; that won’t happen with reforestation and the cultivation of meadows and sheep and pork farming and fur farming; eroded soil gives us an insight into life, lava and black sand make one drunk with poetic joy, eroded soil, lava and black sand provide insight into life as a creation, and everyone wants to struggle against this insight into the creation of life … alas, I guess I’m like the thistle, I’m most content with barren trails … let’s not talk about lupine, my dear Bernharður, said The Regular at the window, it’s a plague, a lost war we’re waging against ourselves, I grow infinitely sad when I see lupine or even hear about it, lupine is a blue sorrow, a sign of our self-esteem, a low self-esteem, the lupine itself is such a beautiful plant, magnificent, but it’s abused for dest
ructive purposes like the reforestation, used against the heath and the marsh and nature in its entirety, it was the Director of the Icelandic Forest Service who brought lupine to Öræfi 50 years ago, we weren’t in any mystery about it, lupine has already wrecked many more regions than the miserable eruption of 1362, but she does so quietly, lupine behaves exactly like a virus, a cancer, exactly like man, it squeezes itself in and destroys everything from within and a million-fold; an attempt was made to conceal the rock when the bridges opened in 1974, to hide the glacier-waves, memorials to every glacier that has stretched out its tongue, to hide the sand, to hide the heaths and the gravel beds, to hide these monuments to time and nature’s power, filthy children, the waves are unrecognizable and impassible because of lupine, you can no longer go on a walking tour of the waves and skerries and examine the rock as you did in the old days, said The Regular at the window. The Tvísker brothers have tried various methods to eradicate this nasty plant and recover the old heaths but without success, the seed is stored in the ground for at least half a century, like a lost tent hidden in a glacier, the lupine springs up unexpectedly all over the place, disperses with terrible speed, kills and destroys everything that exists, both vegetation and desolation, as pyroclastic flow reveals in slow motion … Everything that’s called cultivation … cultivation is anti-nature, anti-life, anti-God, all this reforestation and sheep farming and horticulture, first and foremost I’m opposed to all cultivation, said The Regular at the window of the hotel in Freysnes, I am all in with God and nature, humans, animals, plants and rocks and glaciers and the wind; I’m all for the wasteland.

  The badger-faced moorit sheep was being debated below the cliffs, Dr. Lassi wrote in her report, what sheep could this have been, did anyone know they had failed to bring such a creature home from the mountain during the round-up last fall? Was this a wild lamb? Was it really so long-legged? Some people thought that the sheep they were trying to get from the National Park must have its roots in the Núpsstaður forest, must never have been domesticated, they were descended from the famous wild sheep of Núpstaður, which stayed out all year round for centuries, perhaps from the Settlement, wild sheep that were never housebroken or fodder or cultivated in any way but lived freely in birch forests at the glacier’s foot and up in the mountains, the wild sheep was always a special breed, said the men, tall and sedulous and plump, notorious for being able to disappear when someone was trying to get it. It was always considered a delicious sheep with a good flesh. Too much feed and attention only yields lazy, indifferent sheep, the way all Iceland’s sheep have become, indifferent, I said there under the crag, Dr. Lassi wrote, indeed, there’s still a few of the very ancient leader sheep about, sheep which are so wise and weather-aware, with an excellent sense of direction, sturdy and daring, the leader sheep is a genuinely unique species of lamb, and it’s found nowhere in the world except Iceland, because there were attempts to eliminate it, it’s in our nature to eliminate everything special, but fortunately that didn’t happen, so-called leisure farmers saved the stock, which is indeed peculiar, these long legs, a slender, stretched face, thin wool, intelligent-looking eyes, I’ve always found the leader sheep to be almost a mix of goat, dog, and Nordic Studies professor, I said there under the cliffs’ shadow, wrote Dr. Lassi. The leader sheep has a built-in barometer that makes it an excellent meteorologist: if a storm is coming the next day, the leader wether refuses to leave its shelter, the leader sheep heads across to the mountains, gathers the herd, finds its way in snow-fog to the upper heath, through the weather, blindly, it breaks its way through snowdrifts and the sheep follow after in a streak, leading men and creatures safe and well to shelter and pasture; little copper balls jingle on their horns to maintain constant focus, the leader sheep is studious but hardy, good for the going, erect and nimble and accompanied by its herd, better in all its qualities than the lazy, cultivated sheep. The wild sheep is fat and shy, the leader sheep is lean and gentle, the lazy sheep is ugly and annoying, Dr. Lassi wrote in her report. The badger-faced moorit ewe Runki from Destrikt chased disappeared and wasn’t seen again, not at first, showing up later in an entirely different place, which seemed miraculous, the wild sheep is so talented it can hide itself in lava tubes and lead men out on lone journeys, can return to the slope and head them out to the cliffs, where they fall to their death, their bellies bursting so that the entrails scatter far and wide over the rock, and it’s hard to clean up the trash, and it’s best to let the fox lick it up and clean the rock.