Names for the Sea, page 31
It’s raining again in the morning. We go to the pool and laze in a jacuzzi watching the clouds eddy around the mountains and Max running up the stairs, goose-pimpled in the wind, and swooping down the slide, and running up and swooping down, until he’s hungry and we’re hot. It’s still raining. We saunter through the village. Unusually for Iceland, there are few houses built in the last twenty years, and a core of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century buildings, most of which have been meticulously restored, mostly by people who live in Reykjavík and summer here. There are several craft shops and cafés, and three small museums, but the town itself feels like a museum, like some of the villages near my parents’ house in the Peak District that have sold themselves until they turn into self-parodies, where it’s easier to buy a hand-carved wooden Christmas tree ornament in July than a pint of milk. Most of the houses, even around the edges of the village, look like summer houses; Pétur says that in winter, there are days when the entire peninsula is cut off by snow. I think I might prefer it then.
Guy, who is joining us for the rest of the trip, arrives from the airport with a hire car. It’s still raining. We go round the museums, slowly, making the most of each one. Max likes the Volcano Museum, I linger in the Norwegian House, the restored home of a nineteenth-century merchant and scholar who both managed royal Danish estates in the region and campaigned for Icelandic independence. The wooden house is large even by modern Icelandic standards, and must have seemed like a cathedral when surrounded by one-room turf huts. William Morris would have felt at home; there is wood-block wallpaper in shades of duck-egg and storm-grey, polished wooden floorboards and some ornately carved furniture. There are walls of books, including Danish translations of Dickens and Walter Scott, and a music room with a piano. The family lost six of their eleven children in infancy; culture was no protection against the pain of mid-nineteenth-century Icelandic life.
We go up the hill towards the paddle-steamer building, which turns out to be the Library of Water. So many people have told me I must see this that I’m predisposed not to like it. It’s some kind of avant-garde art installation, I gather, with a writing residency attached.
The entrance reminds me of some of the 1960s library buildings I’ve used. There are concrete steps, a glass door, and then a rubber-floored atrium where visitors are asked to remove their shoes and put on white towelling slippers. An American couple are protesting about the slippers, which have been worn by other people, and Tobias shoots past them in his socks and begins to run around. Don’t worry, the curator tells me, children love it here. I step forwards and am silenced. The building has been hollowed out and filled with glass columns containing water from each of Iceland’s glaciers. Even in the rain, light spills not so much across the floor as through the air, as if the building is only a frame for water, glass and air. There are two tables with chessboards in the curved window, and I stand there for a while, looking out at the ordinariness of fishing boats and wet roads and tourists, getting ready to approach the columns again. There is a ping, like someone tapping a glass with a fork to silence wedding guests. Tobias has discovered that the columns make xylo-phone noises when touched. He runs, weaving between the columns, dodging his own reflection so that a running boy flickers through the room, the kind of visual stereo you get in front of a shop window full of televisions. I grab him as he makes for another one. Could we possibly come back later, I ask the curator? Without the children, when things are quieter? Of course, she says. I can stay open late for you if you have some special reason. I’m not sure I do, really, but Guy wants to take photos and I would like to try to write about this space, and in Iceland that’s enough. We return at closing time. When Ragnheiður hears that we know Pétur, are staying in his house, she lets us have the keys and leaves us to play there for as long we like.
I wander between the columns. They look like giant test tubes, reaching from the floor to a white ceiling more than twice an adult height. The floor is rubber in shades of parched earth, terracotta, sand, the red of volcanic soil. Light comes through the glass and the water making lenses of each container, so you see columns of sea, rock and sky with a white bird falling through the water, a red roof and rocks refracted from one column to the next. I can’t decide if the columns are actually lit from below or if it’s just the alchemic relationship between sky, water and glass producing a kind of fission. I expected to find it peaceful here out-of-hours, but it’s not. The columns have things to say to each other, are in a conversation that develops with the changing light. They feel like a forest, like a thicket, with a forest’s sense of unseen eyes. Ragnheiður joked when she discovered we knew Pétur that we could spend the night here if we wanted, but I wouldn’t. It would be like spending the night in a cathedral or in the Black Forest, a place that belongs to other presences after hours.
I sit on the floor, at the columns’ feet. A fly in one of the windows buzzes like a plane taking off. The islands held in the columns in front of me are a mirage. The sea reflected there has the texture of velvet, the rocks are cut from lichen-dyed felt and stuck on. A seagull falls upwards on the other side, but the sea isn’t moving there. The glass tubes gather like people at the kind of party where you stand up with a drink, reflecting each other’s reflections. On the other side of the room, Guy sits on the floor, his camera peering, appearing in four or five places at the same time. I remember travelling with Kathy, the way we could find a place and pace it, sit in it, be in it, until we were ready to go.
We set off early the next morning. We’re going all the way along the peninsula today, creeping around the glacier’s feet. We pass farms in the glacial plain behind the town, and then turn west, across a lava field called Berserkjahraun. Berserkers were Vikings who went into trance-states of indiscriminate and uncontrollable violence, usually in battle, and this lava field is named for two berserkers in Eyrbyggjasaga who were killed here by being boiled in a bath-house built over a geothermal spring. Behind Berserkjahraun is a mountain of dark rock, a black cone reaching from the shore far into the sky, where it seems to close in on another dark mountain to the south. The road runs over a causeway between the two. We go over another causeway, and there is a scattering of farms with green in-fields along the bottom of more of those black mountains. The day passes through landscapes that simply don’t make sense, mountains the mind can’t read. It’s like watching God in the act of creation, passing through fells of bare naked lava and rock, like seeing the world before it was finished. We’re on day four of Creation, moving back towards day three, a world made of sky, fire, earth and water with none of the complications that came later. The mountains are red, as if the cinders haven’t yet cooled, or the black of embers, carved by valleys where it seems that if you watched long enough, you’d see that the rock is still flowing. The elements are translated here: what is solid looks liquid, rock like water, earth like fire.
We stop in a fishing village called Ólafsvík for lunch. There is a local museum, on the first floor of the building that used to house the town’s bar, where we look at old toys, butter churns and agricultural equipment. There are mincers with handles to wind and cast-iron balance scales of the kind still in use in my mother’s kitchen. We go down the wooden ladder to what is now a craft shop and café on the ground floor, where I wander around stroking the knitwear, and the others stand in the doorway, watching a large fishing boat come in. All the garments, jumpers in heavy wool and hats, scarves and mittens in lacy einband lopi, have labels with a woman’s first name and an Icelandic phone number in biro. I look up to where a group of women sits around a table in the café, knitting. There are two girls of about ten and twelve behind the counter, setting out coffee on a tray. I wander over, carrying a sweater I like, and one of the knitters catches my eye. I made that one, she says. I look inside and admire her thoroughness in catching down the yarn she was carrying over. It’s like a knitters’ secret handshake – she smiles and we start to discuss Icelandic increase technique and lacework. I try on the sweater, and Ragga, its maker, tells me that she and her neighbours have established a crafting co-operative. They knit at home, and together in the café, and in summer the visitors come and buy. Ragga takes me over to the table while her daughter wraps my sweater. None of the women is using a pattern, and most of them are doing intricate work, with lace stitches and cabling and multiple colours. I think of the weekly Knit Club I’ve joined in Cornwall, where we don’t distract the person doing a cable row and all watch when Jo’s knitting a particularly complicated bit of lace, and soggy photocopied patterns jostle the glasses on the table. Novices. Amateurs. In Ólafsvík they can set the thumbs on lace mittens while recounting what Halla says Jón did after she broke the news. . . It’s just traditional piecework, I remind myself, glossed a little for the tourists, but even so I linger a little as Tobias tugs my hand in the doorway.
We go on to the end of the road, and then get out and walk to the lighthouse at the end of the peninsula. There’s a different geology here, a glacier of older, black lava calving onto a beach populated by purple-grey pebbles, each round and sensual as an egg, shiny as marble. I steal one. Waves scribble the length of the shore, and Arctic terns scold overhead. The lighthouse speaks of harder weather, its windows arrow-slits doubly barricaded, the door tunnelled like the entrance to an iglu. Today the sun warms our backs and midges cloud the reeds.
We turn back, across the plains between the mountains and the sea, down the other side of the peninsula. Farms are scattered here, on a blanket of flat green fields spread at the feet of the volcanoes. I begin to see how the sagas might make a new kind of sense here. You would end locked in feuds with your neighbours in a place where you can always see them, always know what they are doing, and never see anyone else, where impassable mountains surround a glacier behind you and the Arctic sea laps your fields in front of you. One berserker would go a long way.
*
We leave Stykkishólmur for Akureyri, Iceland’s ‘second city’ with a population of 17,000, 5,000 less than our Cornish ‘small town’. Kathy and I were in Akureyri for her nineteenth birthday, sixteen years ago. We blew some money that could have been spent on food on swimming pool entry, and spent most of the afternoon in a jacuzzi, looking at patches of snow on sunbathing mountains and watching fishing boats going up and down the fjord. It was our favourite town, with a high street of early twentieth-century wooden shops and cafés, and gardens foaming with flowers and trees that don’t grow anywhere else in the country.
To drive from Stykkishólmur to Akureyri feels like passing through geological time. We take a gravel road around the coast, bumping and leaping through an exaggerated Alpine landscape with a few Norwegian fjords cut-and-pasted around the foothills. There is no other traffic, no people, but grass and blueberry bushes and low birches massing on the hillsides. Streams glitter across the valley in the sun. The fjord is full of swans, and sometimes sheep wander into the road. Birds call. We go on, and up, and up, and down, Guy driving and the rest of us watching the land as if it’s some kind of new technology we’ve never seen before. At last, an hour and a half from the last settlement, there’s a farmhouse between the road and the sea, with net curtains in the window and a swing set and trampoline on the grass. How do you think they get their post, I ask, thinking about internet book shopping. How do the kids get to school, asks Anthony. What if you run out of milk? Max looks up from his book and says ‘cows’. The Alps end, and with them the summer. Now we’re in the Scottish Lowlands, among rolling grey hills. There are herds of cows and low, white farmsteads, and it’s early spring, bright and cold, and then the gravel ends and we see ahead the junction that the Sat Nav has been promising for the last twenty-five miles. We find ourselves leaving the coast and climbing into North Yorkshire, where it seems to be November. Fog swirls around the car, and visibility drops until Guy is following the reflective marker-posts along the side of the road. They’re twice the height of the ones in North Yorkshire, tall enough to reach up through winter’s snow. When the fog clears we have left Earth altogether. The road is winding down a long, broad valley, and on both sides there are battlements, walls, of black rock, too near the vertical to be mountains but higher than the most ambitious skyscraper. These sky-closing fells doodle gargoyles and curlicues of what must be lava along the skyline, such fantasies of wrought iron that they can’t possibly stay up. Guy pulls off the road and goes to lie in the middle of Route 1, taking photos.
And so we go down the hills to Akureyri. The town has spread in sixteen years, eating up a couple of outlying villages, and there’s the familiar growth of half-built apartment blocks and housing estates spilling up the valley. The apartment I’ve booked turns out to be in one of these unfinished suburbs. It reminds me of the Big Flat in Garðabær, the same show-home ambitions surrounded by the same unfinished shells. Nonetheless, after ten days of living in quaint, provisional spaces designed for fewer people to spend less time than we are doing, soullessness is fine. While the children dash out to play on the grass, all three grown-ups wander around opening cupboard doors and marvelling at the washing machine, which says ‘hello’ when you open its door, and the dishwasher, which has a light inside and shines a red beam onto the floor when you switch it on because it’s so quiet that otherwise you wouldn’t know it was running. There is underfloor heating, granite counters, new IKEA furniture and bedding, candle-holders that still have their price-labels. I remember Matthew saying that he felt implicated in the kreppa because he rejoiced in the fruits of commerce when they came to Iceland, and stop playing with the white goods. Pétur doesn’t have a dishwasher. His summer house doesn’t even have a washing machine.
I look out at the children, who are rolling down the grass bank that screens the ground-floor flats from the road. Between and behind the new buildings, the windows are filled by mountains patched with snow not far above the town’s roofs, mountains whose peaks are high enough to shape the clouds. Below the town, there’s a fjord that glimmers black under the grey hills as night draws on. By the time the children are asleep – after ten, because timings are slipping and because even to our British parenting it seems wrong to send them to bed when there’s sun slanting across the grass and Icelandic children running and laughing around the gardens – darkness is falling. It’s August. Night is back. The brightest days are already over, and there’s a breath of autumn on the night air.
Akureyri is as pleasing as I remember. The town was built by the Danes at the beginning of the twentieth century, and within the New-Jersey-style periphery there’s an old, European town centre. Red and blue clapboard houses crowd the harbour, and there’s a pedestrianised main street lined with shops and cafés. Cruise ships call; Max identifies one that visited Falmouth just before we left. I remember that when I discussed a possible trip with some of my students last year, they were ambivalent about Akureyri’s colonial architecture, seeing the newer, mall-centred urban sprawl as the face of modern Iceland and refusing to be nostalgic for an era of cold, hunger and social inequality. Middle age looms; I like the painted shop-fronts.
We go to the pool I remember from Kathy’s birthday. It’s been developed into a complex of pools, built to recognise that babies need to bobble in peace while toddlers splash, that children old enough to want to dive are not old enough to see the point of lane-swimming. A group of people in their eighties sit under an artificial waterfall with hot water playing on their necks and shoulders. It’s the seven ages of man in aquatic form. Taking myself off for some proper swimming in the lanes, I notice that there’s a similarly lavish playground, offering a trampoline and electric cars for the children to drive, beside the unfenced water. I remember reading last year that the number of child drownings in public swimming pools was falling.
The days are blue and bright, the air so clean that distances are hard to judge. Looking across a valley is like looking down through clear water and not knowing if the rocks are pebbles within reach or boulders ten metres down. Sun and shadow play across the hillsides, and there are mountain tracks leading up to the sky. I know we are not equipped. I know four-year-olds don’t climb real mountains. I know that Guy has city shoes and a suede jacket, that this is a family trip with picnics and swimming and time to play with toy cars before supper. I haven’t done any real climbing for years, not since I moved to the south of England and started having babies, but those paths call me. Vaðlaheiði, Fjósatungufjall, Stórihnjúkur. Sunrise and sunset happen behind the mountains and we see them reflected in the sky. There are valleys in Iceland where winter is extended by weeks because the horizon is so far up the sky, villages in the shade for all but a few weeks of summer, and mountains named for the day the sun falls behind them.
