An Icelandic Shepherd: What a Wall Means

to stay human is to break a limitation

– from The Beauty of a Husband, Anne Carson

This journal entry concerns the work we were doing on my final ‘work-camp’ in Iceland – constructing a dry-stone wall at the top of a 500m ‘mountain’, often in very difficult weather conditions. Our hosts during this period included a district manager called Thorvaldur and his brother. The men had grown up beside the mountain and were putting us up in the traditional-style cottage where they had been born. The cottage and mountain were located in a very wild and desolate area of eastern Iceland.

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What does a photograph mean? A wedding photograph? What does a stone mean? Or a wall? Nothing if you can’t read the signs. There are signs everywhere and people who can read them, but lots of them can’t. Most of us don’t ever really take the time to really observe the things that surround us in ordinary life, but for some people that’s all they ever do.

Take Thorvaldur for instance; he is a very quiet man. He spends most of his time, I realise now, doing what we do every day, but for amusement and for, yes, love. What we call work, even hard labour, is for him just another morning’s jaunt up the mountain. What is he looking for? That I will never know. He is like a sheep. By that I do not mean that he is a follower, rather that his silent manner, his wide, roving eyes with their huge discy blue irises, remind me of a sheep. His way of looking at his feet as he trudges up the mountain, the way he laughs at jokes only he hears, the way he casts his eyes up towards the sky and out across the heath, are not behaviourisms that you can learn. They are acquired, acquired from long experience of life outside of the comfort of the place most people call home. They are outside, even, of language. For Thorvaldur, even Hverhagi – a place that he clearly adores, and will always be his final resting place – is not really his home. His home is the moor and heathland outside, it is the rocky mountainside, the mossy bank. Tap water will never be the good enough, only the pellucid water from the gurgling brook so fresh that you can still taste the rock in it, is real water, and thus, inherently good for you.

His quest with us up the mountain each day to the stone-yard, is at heart a very mysterious business to me. It represents a journey he has done a thousand times before. It is a recapitulation, a ritual, a repetition; but it is also an open process, which admits for new possibilities. Each time I walk behind him, up another invisible mountain trail that only he can see, he points out new things to me: do you see that patch of light green grass? That’s what they used to turf houses with in the old times. They were rush grasses. Do you see these light patches? He pointed to clearly visible patches of nude scrubby mountainside, denuded of moss, flowers and shrubs. That’s were the reindeer have eaten the grass. Do you see this plant? He points in a particular direction at the ground, I must kneel to discover what he wants to show me, a microscopically small, furry item of flora. The sheep love it, so it is very difficult to find. If you let sheep onto a new piece of land, it is always the first thing they eat.

His understanding of this place, his habitat, it almost total; or at least as complete, I guess, as one person can understand that land in which he was reared. He is his father’s son; the shepherd, the husbander, the odd-job-man; not like his brother, PhD in Civil Engineering. I can only guess at how suffocated F must have felt here; outgrowing the place as quickly as his adolescent feet pushing up against the bedposts. Two brothers could not be more different. Yet they are both very powerful men, with enhanced spheres of influence. One is rural, the other is a kind of bucolic academe. I am writing at his boyhood desk. A desk he must have towered over. On the shelves by his bed, the books that have survived the pogrom of literature that lies trussed up in cardboard boxes in the pantry, makes for some curious reading: I see some classics, A Short History of Nearly Everything, for instance, other titles, strictly historical, biographies of Churchill and Roosevelt. He has a politician’s winning way. A big smile, inviting strong arms. He is urbane, natural and capable.

I seem to have gone off on a tangent. I suppose what I meant to write about was the realisations that I have been having on the mountainside: about education and what the wall means. One morning I called it the purest metaphor for teamwork I knew. I think this poeticism was lost on everyone but Maisa who is not one to miss a subtlety. What we are dong on the wall is anti-modern. It is in a way mad. I could write an essay about this wall, about the cost of moving one rock, about how it almost appears to me now to be genuinely the most beautiful structure I have ever seen. I begin to understand why people want to build the houses that they live in. Nothing can be as beautiful as the thing you build yourself and with those you love. Each brick means something, it has cost something. It has a literal blood price, a toll.

Feet up in the Old Farmhouse: A Memory

I was resting in the farmhouse after a hard day’s work on the wall. I had just finished baking a chocolate cake for the group. I was tired but my head was buried in a book: in Carson’s book. Suddenly a line ‘like peacocks stepping into the kitchen of God’, sparked-off a memory that was so luminous that I quickly went to write it down. The memory concerns an evening in Suffolk, where I had been on summer holiday with a school friend. We were returning by foot to her cottage after an evening of good company, by a long, old track by the sea. The night was delicious, spiked with gorse and stars, wild and fragrant. It was cold but we had plenty of layers on. It felt like life had never been so good. 

A Memory: The walk back from Southwold to Walberswick at night.

It was a hard cold winter night. The stars were hard as flint, the air was smoke-fired, full of burnt wood and drifting fog. Because of the darkness and the brightness of the stars, the sky felt like a magnificent tent above our heads.

In was a fen landscape, a water world sliced through by river estuaries, bogs and shallow lakes; filled with glossy moraines. River and canal boats lilted in the tidal waters. I could smell the sea, and hear the silence that sleepy night-filled birds leave behind them.

It was the end of the summer – the promise of autumn awaited. We were at the tremulous edge of something. The hip-flask passed between pinking cold fingertips.

We carried on walking along the flat salt-marsh, past silhouettes of low scrubby trees cowed against hedgerows and dry stone walls. Fields without cattle. I remember the sensation of feeling at that moment that apart from us, no one else existed in the entire universe. I remember the fuzzy orange tips of cigarettes and the sound of three pairs of feet grinding lightly into the night. Go softly, tread softly.

Adolescence. Alcohol fumes, whisky sluicing down the throat and warming the stomach. Good friends. Sex: pale lambent as a bonfire. That summer was a beginning and an ending. The end of innocence and a leap towards adulthood or a new kind of life. But still the sensation of invincibility and security of knowing that nothing could touch the utterly beautiful pact of faith that existed between her and I, was a kind of bridge vaulting me towards the sky and the glittering stars themselves.