Names for the Sea, page 32
I pore over the map, looking for family walks that might sate some of my longing for altitude. On the other side of the fjord, there’s a track that runs along the hillside, past deserted farms to the beacon on the northern tip of the peninsula. We set off, driving over the causeway in Akureyri that almost bisects the airport’s runway and has, Guy notes, a petrol station positioned exactly where an over-shooting plane would crash into Route 1. Then we follow the road along the peninsula until it ends at the fish-processing plant in the village of Grenivík (population 300). Large wooden houses are scattered along the seafront in Grenivík, and the grid of roads takes us past the school, nursery school, swimming pool, church and museum. There is one shop, which is also the petrol station and the café. I go in to buy chocolate to use as an inducement to co-operation on the walk. Sixteen years ago, these village shops had a range of American snacks, Icelandic dairy produce and sliced bread. The only fruit Kathy and I ate was blueberries we picked from the hills. In Grenivík there is olive oil, salami, artisanal cheese and a whole cabinet of fruit and vegetables, including aubergines, kiwis and grapes. Now, I think, approaching the till, here and now in Grenivík I’m going to speak Icelandic, actually say the words, but before I open my mouth the cashier greets me in English. How did you know I was foreign, I ask her, a question I asked myself all of last year and never dared to voice. She smiles, looks from my hiking boots to my dark hair. Well, I don’t know you so you’re not from round here, she explains, so I speak English.
We park in front of the fish-processing plant, and try to allay Guy’s Londoners’ anxiety about parking regulations and traffic wardens, the nearest one of whom may be an hour’s drive away in Akureyri and is almost certainly not working a Saturday afternoon in August, because Icelanders really don’t care that much about parking. We set off along the track. The fjord, full of the deep blue from the top of the sky, sparkles below us, and the hill rises steeply to the east. Cotton grass, buttercups and miniature gentians bow with the grasses and reeds along the path. There are patches of shade, dark as water spilt on cloth, on the mountainside across the fjord, but we are flooded with sunshine. The smell of wild thyme and summer rises like incense from the warm turf. There is a house between the path and the water, a concrete cube mostly covered with peeling pink paint. It has 1960s steel-framed double glazing and a warped wooden front door with an inset glass sunburst. An approximate garden spreads to the north. It looks deserted, and I begin to fantasise about buying it, coming here alone to wander the hills and write, and en famille in summer for the children to run wild and mess about in boats, but as we approach we see curtains in the windows and a table in the garden. Someone else’s life, and Anthony is muttering about what it would be like in winter. (Fabulous, I think. An unparalleled view of the Northern Lights, and no expectation that anyone should do anything other than stay inside reading and eating and watching the sky.)
After the pink house, the track narrows, and soon the only habitation we can see is across the fjord. Broad streams cross the path; Tobias wants to do the stepping-stones on his own. We go northwards across the bright day, Max far ahead, making his own relationship with the place, Tobias lagging to pick buttercups and drop stones into pools. The path leads on, out of sight around the headland, and I want to follow it so much that it feels as if my feet can’t break the rhythm of walking and stones, but the sun is high, south of the zenith because the solstice was weeks ago and here on the Arctic Circle we can already feel the planet’s tilt. Soon people will want lunch and lunch is in the car. We stop. Anthony and the children pick blueberries, Guy stalks us with his camera, and I sit on a high rock, circled by ravens. I can see to the end of Akureyri’s long fjord from here, out to the Arctic sea, and back to where the town is a sprinkle of glitter at the foot of mountains dusty in the sunlight. The hills over Eyjafjörður, above the fishing town of Dalvík where one of last year’s students remembered her father taking the milk to market on a horse-drawn sledge, are mottled like batik fabric with snow. The water ruffles no more than crêpe paper, currents marked on its surface like lines drawn with a finger on misted glass. I can hear the questioning note of a plover moving across the hillside above me, whinnies from the herd of Icelandic ponies browsing the grass on the headland below, the putter of a fishing boat moving down the fjord towards the sea.
I have made everyone excited about going to Mývatn. I remember a landscape so strange that Kathy and I spent days trying to find a vocabulary to talk about it, where impossible lava formations congregated around boiling mud and unnaturally coloured steaming pools. As we drive, I worry that maybe it’s not as startling as I remember, maybe I’ve exaggerated the effect on a teenager seeing her first volcanic landscape. We pass through a bit of the Peak District and down through the Alpine foothills. The horizon opens around us as we enter the plain, and there’s what looks like a stationary tornado on the horizon. Steam. Then there are more plumes of steam, blossoming out of the rock in the distance, and mountains like giant slag-heaps of cinnamon and turmeric, and in the foreground a lake bluer than the sky, which appears to have piles of fresh grass-cuttings floating around on it. Islands, some just big enough for geese to nest. We’re starting with the Dimmuborgir, lava formations that I remember as vaguely reminiscent of Mount Rushmore, towering rock presences rising out of the ground. The smell of sulphur seeps into the car. There are signs to the Dimmuborgir, which I’m sure weren’t there sixteen years ago, and then a car park and a visitors’ centre, which also wasn’t there. There are marked, roped trails through the lava, where Kathy and I wandered around sketching and pointing things out to each other, getting pleasurably disoriented as we couldn’t tell one clump of birch scrub, one stone giant, from another. But the children have no tolerance for wandering and getting lost, and the loos at the visitors’ centre are a good thing, and the groups of Spanish and German tourists, I remind myself, have as much right to be here as we do.
The Dimmuborgir are still strange. The furrows and caves of lava fields are familiar now, seem to me like the Icelandic version of the crazy-paving of fields and hedges that lighten the shoulders of expatriate Brits in holding patterns over Heathrow, the hallmark of home ground. But the Dimmuborgir are vertical, like melting sculptures and buildings, growing tall as houses out of ashy ground and birch scrub. They are black as tarmac, gravity-defying as Gothic stonework, shaped in a way that reminds me of edifices, of dinosaur skeletons, but remains abstract. One, Anthony points out, has a Norman arch. Another is a bit like a giant cactus. Trails wind around them, through low birch bushes filtering the sun. We have been collecting silences on this trip, and stand still to listen. Bees, midges. Birds. Other birds. Birch leaves, sensitive to the breeze. Laughter from the Spanish group who passed us earlier. Can we add it to the collection of silences? No. There is an underlying rumble, the same noise you hear on Saddleworth Moor from the M62 and high in Heiðmörk from Route 41 and on Bodmin Moor from the A30 It’s not, I know, reasonable to drive to a place and then resent the sound of traffic.
On, and up to Krafla. There’s more steam, some of it coming from the chimneys of a geothermal power station that bestrides the road like a medieval city gateway. Higher and higher, up a valley of desert sand and red mud, part-filled with a frozen river of black lava, and then it looks as if a giant has poured golf-course-green grass down the hillside, and there are sheep grazing, and then another lava spillage. Steam churns from every pore in the ground. The car park at the top is almost full, and there’s a queue at the coffee booth and another at the loos, and when we get out we hear the roar again, louder and lower because we’re closer to it than we were in the Dimmuborgir. It’s not traffic but the ground, the rumble of the planet’s rumination.
We set off, across a meadow of crowberries, over turf a brighter green than elsewhere and studded with harebells and gentians, towards the steam and sand. From up here, more mountains come up, and more, rising out of a fjord that is filled with black lava, not blue sea. My brain reads the landscape as water and mountains, with islands in the fjord, very much like what we saw in Eyjafjörður, but it’s not water. We cross the lava flow, like walking across a runway or a motorway between the meadow and the boiling mud, and then take the path around the volcano’s cone, towards a smaller crater. The wind is sharp up here and Tobias and I have cold hands. We hold them in the steam, happy to find that, unlike at Hveragerði in winter, it’s hot enough to help, and then Tobias discovers that the rock is warm to the touch. He lies down on it, pleased. The stone feels like unglazed stoneware, and has the warmth and roughness of hefty pots waiting to be glazed. I put my hand into a crack in the rock, a few inches wide, and steam condenses on it immediately. It’s toaster rock, says Tobias, and starts trying to put other things down it. A piece of paper comes out wet. He drops a piece of lava down the crack and becomes convinced that he’s made it steam more, and then we all start playing with the toaster rocks, warming our hands, wondering what we could cook, poking it with stones. Tobias suggests that if he takes some back to Cornwall and drops it down a hole, steam will start to come out there too, and begins to imagine his friends’ pleasure at this discovery in the school playground. The crater above us looks like pictures of the mouth of hell, a gaping hole with human figures obscured by billowing steam. We follow the path to the top, where there is a formation of rocks in something like sandstone, vaguely reminiscent of a Barbara Hepworth and bearing no apparent relation to the lava or the sand. It’s like standing on the mountain’s prow, overhanging the inland sea of black lava, the fertile plains around the lake and the sulphurous steam still rising from the crater, which erupted about the same time as the birth of Christ.
On the last day, we go as far north as possible, to the edge of the island. Akureyri is at the foot of the Tröllaskagi peninsula, and a new tarmac road runs all the way around the edge, to the towns of Dalvík, Ólafsfjörður and Siglufjörður. Ólafsfjörður and Siglufjörður, separated by two headlands with multiple peaks almost a kilometre high, are linked by two tunnels that were finished last year. Before that, I guess, poring over the map, the quickest way in and out was probably by boat. Weather permitting. There was no road at all into Siglufjörður until 1967, only a mountain pass open for a few weeks most summers. Guy, who’s enjoying the madness of Icelandic roads, is eager to go through the tunnels. I, mindful that so far all the fears about Icelandic health and safety that I tried to dismiss as paranoia have been justified by research, would rather trust Guy’s driving over the mountain pass than Icelandic engineering through a seven kilometre tunnel. I am outvoted.
The road climbs out of Dalvík, and up and up, clinging to the side of the cliff. There’s no safety barrier. There’s Grímsey, I say, pointing out to sea where the grey lump on the horizon must be Iceland’s northernmost island, forty kilometres offshore, inside the Arctic Circle and home to ninety people. Don’t look, I add to Guy. I’m not, he says. You look, here’s the tunnel.
There’s an orange flashing light at the entrance. Guy stops. We see no road signs or instructions. Guy inches forward. The tunnel is single track and barely lit at all. What if something comes the other way? It will come slowly, I suppose, says Guy, going up to second gear. Anthony wants to back up. Guy refuses to reverse out of a tunnel onto the edge of a cliff. We go on. There are headlights coming towards us, not slowly, and a bay hacked out of the rock on our right. Guy pulls into it, and a cement truck roars past with a few inches to spare. I swear. Max bounces with delight in the back. I get it, says Guy. The orange light meant that oncoming traffic has priority, so when we see headlights we run for the next passing place and get out of the way. He pulls in again and we wait while a large jeep comes the other way. Another jeep comes up behind. Guy edges forward. Another car comes behind and our passing place is full, but there’s a fourth vehicle trying to get in. The oncoming jeep passes and Guy, watching in the mirror, gasps as it grazes the car that couldn’t fit into the passing place. I close my eyes until the pale sunlight of Ólafsfjörður shines on my face.
The buildings of Ólafsfjörður have trickled in between the mountains. There’s a spacious graveyard in the middle of the village, between the harbour and the houses, and behind it the school, campsite and swimming pool. The houses are large and detached, most with mid-century dates set in concrete over the front doors. It’s the first time I’ve seen dates from the mid-1940s so emblazoned, but the war years brought sudden prosperity to Iceland’s fishing villages and it’s not surprising that there was a building boom. We drive on a gravel road up the valley, where farms hang on the hillsides, and park beside a white, red-roofed church, sheltered by a crowd of rowan trees. A track winds up from the church, past a farm and over the lip of a higher valley slung between two mountains. We set off. The farm’s wheelie-bins are strapped with broad webbing to wooden stakes set in concrete. It’s calm today, but remembering the winter storms in Reykjavík I think that there must be many days on which collecting the bins at all out here is an act of heroism. The farmhouse is the usual white concrete bungalow, but attached to it, reaching the full height of the roof and doubling the house’s footprint, is a glass room in which trees brush the walls and roof. An indoor garden? The hothouse smell of growing plants and coddled flowers would be like the breath of God on this hillside in the middle of winter. Above the farmhouse, there’s a cluster of summer houses, each with a hot tub on its wooden verandah. A woman sits in the sun knitting outside one of them, chatting to a man who is simmering in the tub, leaning his head back with the sun on his face and the blue sky over him. What about one of those, I ask Anthony, and to my surprise he says yes. But only once the children have grown up, he adds, and only in summer. We’re up above the roofs of the farm now, and into the higher valley. The map confirms that there are no dwellings up here, but the track is broad and well-graded. There would once have been higher farms, and feet that walked this path week after week. A river rushes through a gorge. Birds call. We stop and listen to the valley, and then turn back to the car for lunch.
I sit in the back for the long tunnel to Siglufjörður. People who live here must have no nerves at all, and when the tunnel ends I understand why. Siglufjörður has been piped into the valley bottom. The buildings balance on a few hundred metres of steeply sloping ground, with the fjord in front of them and sheer cliffs blocking half the sky behind. The mountain’s slopes are fenced and propped above the town, presumably to hold back landslides when the snow melts in spring. There are docks built out into the dark water, and corrugated iron houses on a grid pattern up the lower slope. We park in front of the Herring Era Museum and walk into the town. The big thermometer on the harbour says it’s nine degrees, but there’s a wind coming straight from the Arctic ice sheets and it feels much colder. Siglufjörður doesn’t feel entirely Icelandic to me. There’s something provisional about the relationship between the wooden and corrugated iron buildings and the cliffs, as if the geological time of the mountains and sea hasn’t meshed with the town’s history. Some of the houses are newly painted in shades of duck-egg and lavender-grey, with olive trees on the window-sills framed by Marimekko curtains. Summer houses. Others have sagging grey net curtains and warped wooden doors. Several are empty, with hand-written notices in the windows saying Til sölu and giving a phone number. There is a shoal of fishing boats in the harbour, bigger and higher specification than the ones we see in Cornwall, but only a few tourists wandering the streets. We come to the main street which reminds me of Gold Rush towns in Colorado. Most of the buildings have steps up to wooden verandahs in front of plate-glass windows. A few of the shops are still in business – a baker; a fishmonger, with signs in English and German because it’s unlikely that the locals need to buy fish; a menswear shop with grubby plastic mannequins in the window, and at the top of the street a small supermarket. In between, there are shops converted into houses or standing empty. At the harbour end of the street, washing secured to a line across the street between upstairs windows snaps in the wind like the sails of a disordered ship. The top of the street ends in a flight of broad steps leading to a white wooden church that seems too big for the town. There’s a music school – every Icelandic town has a music school – and a Folk Music Centre and a primary school on two storeys that looks big enough to house all the inhabitants of Siglufjörður and Ólafsfjörður and probably Dalvík as well. There’s a swimming pool, and a campsite positioned where the village green would be in England, tenanted only by a Belgian couple shivering over a Primus stove. We’re all cold, and head for a café in a converted fish shed, the size of several barns, on the harbour-front. Icelanders are sitting outside, drinking beer and soup. Inside we find a huge, dim wooden space like an inflated chalet. When we ask for coffee the waitress starts grinding beans, and the bathrooms have beaten copper basins and soap scented with green tea and orange blossom, as if we were in an expensive part of London or New York. The tunnels aren’t big enough for lorries; the marble counters and swan’s-neck taps must have come by boat.
The Herring Era Museum (Iceland’s largest maritime museum, winner of a Luigi Micheletti award for the most innovative museums in Europe) explains Siglufjörður’s Wild West air. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Norwegian fishing fleets, which were bigger and better equipped than those of colonial Iceland, began to appear in Iceland’s northern coastal waters. They were following the herring, and needed local labour to clean and salt the catch on shore before it could be sold internationally, mostly to the poor of northern Europe for whom the cheap protein was a godsend. The herring sheds were built for salting and pressing the fish, and people needing work began to move to Siglufjörður, which has a deep and sheltered natural harbour with immediate access to the open sea. (I begin to recognise parts of this story; fishing towns in the westernmost parts of Cornwall also grew during a late nineteenth-century herring boom, and we sometimes have coffee and cake in converted fish-processing sheds in St Ives and Penzance too.) Icelandic speculators started to buy the new boats and equipment for themselves, and during the First World War, when international fishing was disrupted and Europe’s need for imported foods urgent, Icelandic herring production in Iceland overtook that of the Norwegians. Some people say that the herring boom was the economic foundation of Icelandic independence. It lasted almost a century, with the highest ever catches in the mid-1960s generating half of Iceland’s annual export income. The population of Siglufjörður rose to about 10,000. Herring are migratory, appearing in the North Atlantic in summer, and in 1969, after years of over-fishing, they didn’t come. That was it, the end of the Herring Era. The people and the money left Siglufjörður. Fishing continues, on a much reduced scale, and the harbour is deep enough for cruise ships. The decision to build the tunnel last year was a decision to do whatever was necessary to sustain these remote villages, and it is typically Icelandic that a remote community of barely 1,000 people has an internationally renowned museum and a café where they grind coffee beans. I hope it’s enough.
