Iceland Melting

Story Read by: Ms. Myles, in the comfort of her living room.

Finally back in Reykjavík I was invited to go to Kristin’s girlfriend’s house and met her girlfriend’s mother too. Though it was raining that day (as it did every day for two weeks straight on the second trip) the plan was that we would all go to the country and pick blueberries. It seems this was a typical event. Everyone knew the appropriate gear for this adventure and my friends Glenn and Thorhaldur were game and of course Thor knew Kristin, he called her Stina as everyone bent over the low bushes in the gray rain. I think we are too late said Kristin these bushes have been picked but a cry of success from over there sent a pair then three in that direction. I had my notebook out and each time the rain struck a letter it would smear aesthetically. I became glad. And blueberry picking seems to be an Icelandic national sport—have you ever picked blueberries Eileen well yeah there was a pond near where I was a kid no those were raspberries but the interlocutor had moved on because everyone was head down over bushes and rocks in the horrendous rain and in exactly the same way that the wand had passed over the bar my friends were gone and a bunch of sentimental Icelandic people were laughing and talking among themselves picking blueberries in the rain as they did in the early fall all their lives. No to be truthful nobody had done it for a few years. You should really think about coming at Christmas Eileen, said Thor. You’ll walk through Reykjavík and look through the windows and every house is the same. All the teevees are on watching the same shows and all the people at the table. He smiled and he continued to walk vigorously towards wherever we were going but his smile was a little grim.

Because this is Iceland too. This sameness and the sameness that is about to change. Or maybe not. It might be sameness that it will return to. The nation of constant migrators has been receiving waves of immigrants from Poland mostly and Eastern Europe in general and many Muslims I believe. I think Icelanders though are a little bit like poets who are by and large good at being alone. On the world’s second-biggest island (next to the British Isles) in the middle of nowhere. Thor says Icelanders look like this. He makes a dumb cow face. You can pick an Icelander out. They stare at you. It is not an urban face. We are not sophisticated people. I’m thinking that one laughs at one’s family, one’s tribe, as a kind of solidarity. The nicknames we call ourselves when we are together are how we knot the blood ties of family. The violence of these words in other people’s mouths never sits the same. So… what if you had a whole language to yourself. Not just a few words. Because nobody speaks Icelandic except the people here and when they meet each other round the world. It’s such a specific kind of belonging. The only thing that has remotely reminded me of it is this piece I read in the Times about these children of gay parents forming support groups as they came of age because the singularity of their conditioning in its shocking encounter with the less forgiving edges of the world needed articulation in early adulthood so they could know what it was they were about as opposed to simply how they grew up. The writer of the article said that these kids were more like an immigrant group, that they had a specific kind of “nationality” among themselves, a gift of a sort that needed to be known as opposed to being liberated from. No one is asking Icelanders to assimilate. Not yet. When you look at a culture that has developed on its own with its own unique resources there’s been a question, certainly during its decades of affluence, of whether it will become a theme park of white difference or a laboratory for how the world could change. If it has a chance. There’s an even implicit hopefulness in the fact that Iceland is still growing. The word that means how the continents separated is occurring to Iceland’s very landmass continually and around the edges of the island islands have sprung up and disappeared even since the 70s. There were volcanic eruptions in the 18th c. that created darkness over much of the country and volcanic ash blew to Europe and it caused massive crop failure and starvation. What is sometimes called the Little Ice Age may have begun in Iceland. The first “Irish Potato Famine” could have been triggered by this. The connected and the disconnectedness of landmasses on our planet is part of our planet’s history. My history. It’s very stirring to see. One can visit Vestmannyear Island today and walk up a hill to a house partly covered by lava and partially excavated. The upside of this thermonuclear activity is that large thermo plants nestled in the mysterious green landscape pump underground hot water to every house in the country providing a cheap and clean boundless source of heat. Even the front steps of homes in Reykjavík are ice-free because local design decrees that this same hot water runs under the city’s steps. Tourists are told repeatedly to stop buying bottled water at least here where nothing you could buy except when you are buying the exact same thing is as good as Icelandic water which is about the best in the world coming fresh down the mountains every day. These things are told to you in an almost dour fashion, like yes my tits are huge, I’ve heard that all my life, because people are used to their national strangeness being synonymous with some of the most uniquely untouched circumstances in the world. And still tourists go missing every year. They hike across glaciers without guides and the glaciers are actually full of holes. You have to know them I’ve been told. I heard about a dog falling down one and they could hear it barking for a couple of days but they couldn’t help it. They kept throwing down meat with sleeping pills embedded but the dog was too freaked to eat. It’s hard for people to grasp that someplace so close to the rest of Europe could be suddenly dangerous. For hundreds of years those mysterious highlands surrounding the glaciers were where criminals, “outlaws,” were sent. One might survive on berries and roots and whatever creatures lived out there. There be stories of a man or a woman who’s survived for forty years in the highlands alone or that there were tribes of people living like that. They’re a little bit like Irish tinkers, but off-road. I guess now they call them travelers.