by Clara Parkes
A few minutes later, another cry, more clicking. Then another cry, and another, until the cry became a joke because the sheep, they were everywhere.
The landscape had become vast and rugged, with nothing but raised roads and irrigation ditches to suggest where one property might end and another begin. Regardless of where we looked or whose property it may have been, we found sheep. Everywhere. These furry skin tags on the landscape, plump little marshmallows dropped from on high, upon closer inspection they all revealed themselves to be sheep. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to where they were roaming or how they managed to get there.
Like loitering teenagers, the sheep stood alone or in small clusters. The more remote the terrain, the warier they were of our approach. They’d wait until we were within grabbing distance to turn and run, their wooly behinds going rumpety-bumpety-bump away from us, until they felt it safe to stop, turn around, and stare.
Sheep may be among the most common animals on the island today, but when the early Vikings arrived, they also brought goats. Eventually they realized that they needed a fattier diet than the goats provided, so sheep gained favor. But the goats never quite left. Today, their biggest predator is the angry farmer who doesn’t appreciate having his hay bales torn open and devoured.
One woman is doing her best to preserve and grow Iceland’s native goat population. Her name is Jóhanna, and we reached her Háafell farm just before lunch. Her herd has the oldest native goat genes in all of Nordic Europe, dating back to those same early Viking settlers. Not only do these goats provide meat and milk, but they also grow—as does their cashmere cousin the Capra hircus laniger—a delicate undercoat of extraordinarily warm, fine fibers. The herd isn’t nearly large enough yet to provide fibers for yarn production, but she hopes one day it will.
After a brief walk in the pasture, where Helen disappeared yet again to snap the best photographs, we assembled in a low cinderblock building for lunch. Jóhanna had set out a pretty table of cold cuts, thin slices of hearty black bread, slabs of butter, small chunks of goat’s milk cheese, stacks of cookies, yogurt, and a pitcher of goat’s milk, fresh from the udder. A tiny vase held roses from her garden.
I watched our group politely bypass the cold cuts and make a beeline for the butter. We were like termites with the butter, devouring every ounce of it wherever we went. I don’t know if it was empirically better or if it was the allure of being away from home and throwing all dietary rules out the window, but the butter in Iceland tasted better, we’d all agreed on this.
We also doubled up on the chocolate-covered digestive biscuits. Jane from Seattle poured me a tall glass of lukewarm goat’s milk, which I accepted with a smile that concealed deep regret. That morning’s breakfast of dried fish dredged in butter, and the subsequent bouncy road, had left me feeling a little off.
Shooing flies off our plates, we listened to Ragga translate for Jóhanna. She didn’t have a licensed commercial kitchen, so she couldn’t sell any of the milk or cheese we were eating. Instead, she used the goat’s milk for her own homemade skincare products. Which meant that after lunch, we dutifully lined up to buy jars of creams and lotions and salves that promised to restore our youthful complexions.
Back in the bus for another hour of bouncing, we reached a tiny home-based shop run by some old friends of Ragga’s. Ducking as I passed through the small entryway, I sniffed a musty smell and glanced to my right to see something white in a bowl of brilliant red. A freshly severed sheep’s head. They carved buttons from the horns, and I didn’t ask what would happen to the rest.
We were shown their handcrafted wares, things like beautiful felted wool slippers and the carved sheephorn buttons. Fingering the wad of fiber in my pocket, I glanced at Ragga. She raised an eyebrow and pointed under a low shelf at the end of the room. My pulse quickened.
This farm participated in a small fiber cooperative that’s little known outside of Iceland. Instead of selling their wool to Ístex, they pool it together and ship it to the same scouring plant that Ístex uses, but with different scouring instructions. They prefer to keep the water at a lower temperature, helping preserve more of the natural oils in the wool. I suspect Ístex has its fibers scoured at the temperature it does because they understand, probably rightly, that mainstream consumers aren’t as enamored of the smell of sheep as knitters are. But it was impossible to deny that these lightly scoured fibers had a much more tender, succulent feel while retaining that telltale sheep fragrance. The fibers are then spun by Ístex into Plötulopi-styled yarn, which each member of the cooperative is allowed to sell.
Plötulopi is as close to knitting with a sheep as you can get. Its barely twisted, wisplike strands of fiber are usually held together in pairs to knit a garment. On its own, the yarn may be fragile, but as soon as it’s knit up, you have a fabric that wears like steel. The other Icelandic yarns are presented in more conventional skeins or hanks, but Plötulopi comes right off the carding machine in disks or “cakes.”
Beneath the counter that day, they had just a few cakes of brilliant white. The rest were a heathered gray, chocolate brown, and a relatively rare jet-black. In another room, they had large mesh bags of scoured, unspun roving for sale. Happier than a pig in swill, I returned to the bus and stuffed my own bags in the luggage hold. To be fair, I had told the others why this yarn was so special, and I didn’t grab it all.
The sun was about to set as we finally pulled into our hostel for the night. The squat cinderblock structure stood within roar’s distance of the ocean. We looked up just in time to catch a rainbow spanning the entire sky, uninterrupted, from mountains to sea. A second rainbow appeared inside the bigger one.
Tucked into my narrow twin bed, I slept well that night. All around me, the comforting sounds of a hostel: the opening and closing of doors, hushed voices, footsteps on linoleum. Our muddy boots were neatly lined up on mats outside each door. Rain battered the roof all night. The wind huffed and it puffed, but it did not succeed in blowing us down.
Over breakfast the next morning, Helen from Rhode Island got it in her head that she wanted to ride one of Iceland’s famous, pony-sized horses while she was here. She’d looked it all up on her iPad. She had the name of the place, the times, the fees, all of it. She just needed Ragga’s assistant, Fanney, to make the call.
“Would anyone else like to go horseback riding?” came the question as Fanney pulled out her phone. What the hell, I raised my hand.
And so a smaller group of us piled into the bus and headed up the road a few miles to a horse farm. Beautiful little Icelandic horses were saddled and brought to us in a barn that was cleaner than most people’s houses. One by one, we were led to our horse and helped onto it.
“Mine is moving!” cried Nanci from her horse. “Are they supposed to move?”
Two steps out of the barn, Nanci declared she was done. “I’m not ready for this!” And it was a good thing she did get off, because a few minutes later, passing through jaw-droppingly stunning scenery, someone made the mistake of suggesting that we go into a trot. Now, normal horses have just three gaits: walk, trot, and gallop. But the Icelandic horse breed has two additional gaits, tölt and skeið. While the tölt is allegedly very smooth and comfortable, it’s also known for its sudden acceleration. And we weren’t going into a mere trot, no. We were going into a tölt.
“Ready?” came the call from up front. My horse moved and I flew high into the air, feet out of the stirrups, butt out of the saddle. Only by some miracle did the saddle and stirrups return to greet me on the way down. Another leap, another miraculous save, over and over again, until—thank God—we slowed to a walk. Nobody else seemed to be in any state of distress. They were all smiling, relaxed, reliving childhood dreams of riding their own ponies off into the sunset.
Of course, I’d been given the horse with an eating disorder. While the other horses sauntered along just fine, mine wanted to stop at every bush, every bit of remotely edible brush. At first I did as told and yanked h
im back up, spurring him forward. Then I decided to strike a deal with him. “Okay, fella, I’ll let you eat this stuff if you promise not to kill me before this ride is over. Do we have a deal?”
Apparently he listened, because an hour and three jarring and perilous tölts later, he safely deposited me back at the stable. But the day’s adventure was far from over. After a quick stop to retrieve the rest of the group, including one person who was refusing to come out of her room (Ragga’s training as a psych nurse came in handy), we hit the road again, this time for a remote field up the road. There, locals had assembled around a large, splintery wooden pen. They stood and chatted while, inside, hundreds of nervous sheep wondered what was going to happen next.
In Iceland, the sheep are allowed to wander as far and high as their hooves will take them during the summer months. All too soon, September rolls around and the farmers must retrieve their sheep. They’re rounded up, herded down the slopes, and ushered into these penned areas no bigger than a city house lot. Each sheep is identified by a number on its ear tag and sent back to its home for winter.
This annual tradition of rounding up, sorting, and sending sheep home is called réttir, and it’s why we’d come. There were no introductions, we just walked up to the pen, exchanged shy smiles, and stood.
Our task was to go inside and start “catching” sheep, which I assure you sounds far easier than it actually is. We were to grab their horns, raise a leg over their (sometimes dangerously high) backs, and straddle them tight while reading the number on their ear tags, finding someone who knew where that sheep went, and then escorting the reluctant sheep over to that pen.
Réttir is for neighbors, family, and friends. Our tour bus was an anomaly, a gently accepted intrusion into a local ritual. People perched on the rails and talked in clusters. Toddlers were lifted into the pen and walked around by their parents. Children caught the smaller ones. More experienced farmers did the task with panache, often grabbing a single horn and straddling the sheep so swiftly that it didn’t realize what had happened. We were perhaps slightly less graceful, but we caught on quickly and did our part.
I hadn’t been looking forward to this portion of the trip. I did not want to participate in traumatizing the animals. (Yes, I eat meat. I realize the hypocrisy.) But upon closer examination, there didn’t appear to be any real damage. This was simply sorting. The sheep were not violent or mean, nor were the people. The animals protested, we asserted, and eventually everyone got squared away. I’ll confess it felt unexpectedly pleasant to interact with the animals in such a physical way, to touch “living wool” while gazing into the eyes of the creature growing it.
I went for the shorter ones, lest a taller sheep take me for a ride. I also picked the ones with horns, for the same reason you’d choose a bicycle with handlebars instead of one without. I learned quickly that if you didn’t hold the horns firmly with both hands, the sheep would wiggle their heads side to side, digging their horns into your thighs.
The overnight rain had made the ground muddy and slippery, and occasionally I had to stop and catch my breath. A few of us had already taken tumbles. “I am really, really sorry about this,” I said to a particularly frisky young guy while I rubbed his cheek. “I promise, all I’m trying to do is get you over there. . . .” (I pointed, and I swear he looked.) “Once I do, it’ll be over.” They had very intelligent eyes. I knew they were sizing us up, too, figuring out which of us they could outrun.
The whole scene was like an Iceland tourist commercial. As if on cue, a beautiful young girl and her handsome father appeared on horseback and began giving friends rides. A cluster of equally beautiful people stood against one fence, colorful patterned lopapeysa after lopapeysa on adults and children alike. These walking advertisements for Iceland were, in fact, local sheep farmers and their families. One particularly tall, slender blonde woman drew our attention. She was breathtakingly beautiful, a dead ringer for Heidi Klum. Helen from Rhode Island sauntered over to snap a picture and reported back with a satisfied whisper, “She’s wearing makeup.”
We were too shy to approach people directly or ask to see their sweaters up close, so we teamed up to do walk-by shots of different sweaters. “You do the front of the yoke,” we agreed, “and I’ll go from behind to get the back detail.” And so, across multiple cameras, we managed to capture the most memorable designs on display that afternoon.
As the day wound down, it was time to return the sheep to their farms. A few were loaded onto the backs of trucks, but most were sent home in a much simpler way: The farmer and his family lined up outside the gate, creating a long sort of human tunnel to direct the stampede. They opened the door, and out the sheep went, running rumpety-bumpety-bump, guided by their human sheepdogs.
We followed the last group on foot to a neighboring farm where we’d been invited for a réttir party. It turned out to be the horseback-riding family’s farm. The wife was none other than our Heidi Klum lookalike. We traipsed up a muddy driveway, past the farmhouse, and toward the barn.
An overwhelming smell of urine hit us the moment we stepped inside. Not just a gentle unpleasantness but a putrid, full-on stench of stagnant urine. This was, after all, a barn.
The inside had been swept and tidied for us, boards placed between the tops of empty pens to form makeshift tables. A buffet had been set out: cheeses, lamb pâté, a few kinds of salads, some cheerfully frosted cakes, all clearly homemade. We were starving.
At the end of the buffet, a woman handed us each a small paper cup into which she ladled some of the famous Icelandic meat soup. The bright yellow broth held a few diced carrots and a small wad of lamb on the bottom. I sniffed it, but all I could smell was the barn.
Timidness overtook us. There wasn’t much mingling of the groups. We mostly stood in our various social clumps, sipping our soups, waving gnats off our slices of cake. Behind me, a gray-haired woman swayed back and forth on a folding plastic chair while playing haunting tunes on the accordion.
Outside, the light was just beginning to dim. The smell, though still noxious, wasn’t quite as bad anymore. I’d grown enchanted with the ancient ritual of it all, the remote otherworldliness of where I was and what I was experiencing. At which moment pretend-Heidi’s teenage son skulked past me, iPhone in hand, metal music screeching from his earbuds.
On the way back to our hostel, Reynir turned off the main road and up the hill back toward our morning’s horse farm. Just beyond it was a quiet mineral pool adjacent to the town elementary school. Ragga had arranged for it to stay open, and we had the place all to ourselves.
One by one, we filed through a side door and into a small room. The door closed behind me and my eyes adjusted to the dim light. I glanced around and realized what had just happened. I was trapped. The moment I had feared and dreaded was now upon us.
The only way out was to get naked.
When I’d first heard about this part of the agenda, I yelled an emphatic, “Oh hell no!” and threatened to pull out of the trip entirely. My friend Cirilia, a wisp of an Audrey Hepburn, had tried to reassure me that while it was indeed awkward, it wasn’t that bad. Of course it wouldn’t be for her. But I come from a long line of profoundly private people. I don’t even like undressing for my doctor.
Iceland’s pools are fed from the abundant, mineral-rich, geothermal springs. To keep the water clean without contaminating it with too much chlorine, they have devised a system whereby everybody must scrub-a-dub-dub all orifices before getting into the pools. Bigger facilities have a paid monitor who stands there, all day long, watching the proceedings and issuing a warning if you haven’t sudsed up sufficiently. (Just think about that the next time you want to complain about your own job.)
This being a tiny pool, there was no such monitor, nor did we even have a chart (as the bigger pools in Reykjavík apparently did) illustrating the specific areas of concern that we were to scrub. But we were still to strip naked, line up at the two showerheads on the other end of the room, squeeze
the soap dispenser once or twice, and scrub. Only then would we be allowed to put our bathing suits back on and head to the pool.
There were no stalls, curtains, or cubbies in this room. It was a cinderblock rectangle with nothing but hooks on the walls and sagging wooden benches along three sides. There was nowhere to hide.
Everyone else had taken vaguely protected spots along the wall. With a heavy sigh of capitulation, I put my things down right in the middle of the room and did it. Starting with my shoes, then socks, upward I went, until I had removed every piece of clothing from my body. I even took off my glasses, hoping that my own blindness would magically extend to everyone else. I stripped buck naked in front of women—friends, students, fans, admirers—who had paid for the Clara Parkes Iceland Experience. Boy were they getting it.
We all stepped carefully lest we bump into someone, and wouldn’t that be awkward. It was hard to know where to look. I glanced to one side just in time to get a full-on display of boobage. I overcorrected by looking to my left, where, oh dear, a woman was bending over. I yanked my head back to center and just looked straight ahead, trying not to. . . . Wait, was that a bruise or a tattoo I spotted? If only I hadn’t taken off my glasses.
Emboldened by my act (or eager to get it over with), I led the pack to the shower and pressed the red button. A fine mist of lukewarm water sprayed from high above. I squirted and sudsed, flapped my arms and legs to make it perfectly clear what I’d scrubbed, and then I stepped aside for the next person. Who, with the rest of the line, was standing right there pretending she hadn’t watched what I’d just done.
The only thing less graceful than stripping in front of a room full of women is putting on a bathing suit when you’re sopping wet. I fumbled and stumbled and nearly fell facefirst into some particularly bountiful cleavage before finally managing to yank everything up and tie the straps. This was my karmic revenge for what I’d done to those sheep today. I’d been grabbed, tagged, and sorted. Having lost my final shred of pride, I headed for the pool.
