Leave-taking: Embracing a New Chapter

Our final day has sunk

From the sky to the salty main.

That moment will never return

Which once has been.

From ‘Our final day has sunk’ by Halldór Kiljan Laxness,

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In the end I left Iceland almost as suddenly as I arrived there. Hard work was pushing my nerves to the hilt and I wanted to bed down for my PhD.

Somehow I missed the homeland, but more than the homeland itself, or friends or even family, I missed the language. I missed the easy way of talking with people, the easy way of laughing.

In the end it was a strangely twisty road that led me to where I am now, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Cardigan Bay. After two weeks in Manchester I turned down the PhD there and moved to Wales, a place I felt would make me more happy.

I suppose I was following the heart’s way in the hope that like Frost, one day I will be able to claim:

I took the [road] less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

It feels difficult now for me to distil what exactly I learnt from my brief time in Iceland. In a way it felt like a dream, a kind of Auden-like picaresque. Then there was that magnificent ending, that night of meetings, that made the whole of my future seem to glow.

I suppose I felt ready for the next adventure, to throw myself back into academia and writing. I longed for space to read and think. You can track my progress on my new blog about life in Wales and contemporary nature writing, but I’ll also keep a record here.

Here is something I wrote on the bus back, it completes the circle:

Transformation and change are the essence of life. Every essential thing is a dream as J said. I will meet my dreamer, the one I found in a pile of snow                on the edge of the glacier in the middle of the arctic tundra. Onwards, to another new life.

If love is a lie, a fallacy; then one of the basic pillars of existence falls down. We can still be engineers of each others balanced contentments.

A whiteness like the unfolding of a new page birds out upon my brain. Every word is new. Let’s connect new synapses, let’s reshape our realities. Let                    the car and the leaf hold hands.

 

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Once Upon a Snowy Night

It’s almost midnight: the point at which I must definitely turn off the lights and sleep. Yet, my feelings and thoughts are still quite disturbed by what happened last night. It felt like entire ages passed by in one evening, a night which in its decadence and sheer extremities made a fitting goodbye to Iceland, for now at least. To try and set it all down now, coherently, seems like an almost impossible task. Every moment contained so many subtexts and an audience, for once, capable of understanding all of them.

The setting as he pointed out to me was like a ‘fairy story’, a ‘fairy story of Iceland’. B had driven across along four by four tracks through the central highlands, to a small mountain refuge hut beside Europe’s largest glacier. It wasn’t an easy journey, but it was vigorous, brisk, active. I’ve never been in car that swooped and lurched like that, more like an animal than a machine, swimming through rivers – with water creeping half-way up the car chasse – diving around sculptural lava fields, outcroppings and ridges of rock. However, B made it look easy and setting his brows into a frown he ferried us – like a demented Sharon – across these rivers of rock.

Somehow the elements conspired to do something very strange that day, something almost alarming for this advanced a date in July. It snowed. It snowed, ‘hounds dogs feet’, large swollen snowflakes, that were large and flat enough to sit on the palms of the hand like leaves. The mountain refuge was built in the crook of a small double-ridged mountain near Vatnajökull glacier. We could see the enormous shattered semi-translucency of the glacier gleaming nearby – a sheet of ice stretching off as far as the eye could see. Then, if you looked closely enough, far out in the distance you could make out a band of black. It was fresh lava field forming according to B, or ‘God’ as I jokingly referred to him the whole weekend, owing to his omniscience.

So we had snow, ice and also fire, I thought as I peeked at the small spindles of smoke threading into the air far away. The ground was on fire here. Snow rolled out of large grey clouds, iron blue mountains were striped in snow. Roseates of red rock bloomed on coarse black lava field. There are no polarities or sets of paradoxes that can compass the contradictions of the landscape in Iceland’s central Highlands, its air of playfully disturbed reality, the juxtaposition of colours, textures, elements. Anyway, to this blasted desolate lava desert B the bold had driven us, with a grim determination that seemed at moments almost hysterical, certainly a little strange. As he drove, I sat beside him in the front passenger seat and spun David Brubeck records. I suppose I was flirting with him. I couldn’t help it. He is the kind of man that I think almost every woman would be attracted to, though three quarters of them would hate to admit it.

Then the night. He was already drunk before we had finished the French onion soup starter. After the volunteers went to bed we went to join a travelling couple who were eating behind us. The ‘Welsh couple’ seemed unassuming at first, but it turned out that they weren’t Welsh, not even really English. At first I thought she liked B, her eyes were doing the whole shiny thing whenever she looked at him. Heck, maybe she did, I’ll never know. Was I jealous? Honestly, a little.

What happened next? I think I better write a poem about it, but I will do what I can to create an impression now. Imagine how good wine tasted to my lips – because of the heavy import duties and my own poverty I hadn’t drunk wine for months. We had bottles of wine that evening, a glut of wine, that glowed from the table top to my eyes like lusty jewels to a thief. One green bottle, then several later, it turns out that the company was very articulate: 2 PhDs, one soon-to-be doctor and one IT professional. It wasn’t just about education, it was language itself, the exhilaration of trading ideas, letting them ping about the empty wooden-panelled canteen and thud dully against the snowy glass of the windows. I hadn’t spoken English like this for months. I was in heaven and rushed upstairs to get my copy of Bernard Scudder’s translated edition of Skaldic Verse in English. So we had poetry, B insisted on reading it in Iceland and English, saga verse that stole moments in time, transporting us back via a wormhole in the snowy sky to ancient battlefields and the reception halls of kings. I remember the head ransom poem, Iceland’s equivalent of A Thousand and One Nights – a very beautiful testament to the power of verse. In this case it saved the writer’s life, and in unmanning him of his pride (he sung praises to his enemy’s battlefield prowess), also cemented it. Poetry segway-ed towards that all important discussion of Iceland itself; its strangeness, its beauty, its ‘wildness’. I think that in a wine-jumbled way I told them everything I had learnt in the past four months about this fabulous country and the sweet wine-candy made me feel like a queen of words.

Then a strong hand pouring glasses of Chivas Regal, more secret and sad conversations about the passing of time and marriage. Cigarettes, first one in ages. That old sweet familiar sensation of poison. Crunch of snow beneath feet. Every kind of truth was uttered. It was like a dream.

What next?

Quite childish actually, but touching too. The childish sensation of touching hands, oddly solemnly.

Things were traded and bartered that night. It was more than just words. Worlds and loves were made and lost in the snow.

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.

The Reykjanes Peninsula

‘A ewe on the road’ by Nigel Johnson

Before embarking on my last work camp with SEEDS, I managed to book a week off to enjoy a round-the-island road trip with a friend from Belgium, Alverro, and my father, along the  route number 1.

Although many exciting things happened to us on the trip and we managed to spend some time in the north and north-east – the only part of Iceland that was entirely unknown to me at that point – I want to write about our experiences in the Westfjords and especially on the Drangsnes Peninsula.

Unlike other parts of Iceland, where driving in the summer along mainly empty roads allows you to make quick progress even if you do obey the strict 90 km/h speed limit, in Westfjords the going is always slow. This is mainly because long stretches of the coastal road are unasphalted gravel tracks but also because the coastal road keeps faithfully to the waving fringes of the jagged land mass (a shape the Lonely Planet describes as a ‘lobster’s claw’), torturously bending & weaving around the deep fjords.

I was already familiar with the stretch from the Flokulundar hot-pot to Isafjörður as I have driven it with Marina only a few weeks before. After the 6 km single-lane tunnel that acts as the formidable rite-of-passage-way to Isafjörður, the road was quite new to me. My guidebook ranked the Reykjanes Peninsula route north of Isafjörður as one of the most attractive stretches of driving in Iceland – and I was not disappointed. This was one of the least inhabited parts of the Westfjords and that is already one of the most remote regions of Iceland.

Our four-by-four Toyota scooted along merrily under bridges carved through rock, along a road elevated just above sea level, so that the Atlantic ocean was always to our left: glittering, pensive, elephant-grey. North of us, and every moment drawing nearer, was the fabled Hornstrandir Peninsula, an outstretched arm of the Westfjords that is now entirely uninhabited and has no roads at all. The only human beings that ever cross that peninsula go by foot and intrepid and courageous they are as even in summer very deep snow lies in that desolate, blasted peninsula and there are no shelters or places to buy provisions.

For weeks now, my mind had been enchanted by the magical name of the Hornstrandir; I wanted desperately to go there, especially when I discovered that they have an arctic fox research centre where volunteers and hardened scientists rub shoulders together in a brave crusade to  track the movements of the twitchy little mammals. However, at that point it wasn’t practicable, especially as the only means of transport there and back was a ferry from Isafjörður which was very expensive (about £70 each way).

Yet, winding about the highly picturesque comb-like undulations of the Reykjanes peninsula, I could enjoy Hornstrandir from afar. All I could really make out were the misty silhouettes of vast, snow-covered mountains. Nearby, there was that continual glittering disc of water, fields of ceramic blue lupins and a moody overcast sky. It leant the whole landscape a romantic, dramatic appearance; I was reminded of Exmoor, all that rooty soil, rock and silence. At one point Alverro made a call to stop. Go back, he cried, you won’t regret it!

Hotel Djupavik

‘Beside the old herring factory, Djupavik’ by Nigel Johnson

But of course we hadn’t booked. We didn’t want to be that kind of traveller, we wanted to be spontaneous, free, a real if unconventional band of road-trippers. The waitress’s face was a contortion of apology. I’m sorry she said, just as the rain really bucketed down outside, but this evening we are fully booked! It was the iron men; because of a competition in the nearby area they had swamped the hotel.

In the end we were rescued by a kindly elderly couple who lived in a house next door, behind the old herring factory. They put us up for the night. Though in my bravura I had initially suggested camping out in the derelict factory, with the blasting winds and thunderous rains, Alverro and I eventually thought better of it and co-opted my father’s twin room. In the end we all managed to squeeze in, sharing two beds between us, top-to-tailing like sardines.

The next morning we devoted ourselves to discovering what the Lonely Planet describes as the ‘strangely seductive town of Djupavik’. The LP was right: there was something both seductive and surprising about this tiny town – though town doesn’t seem quite right either, more like a cluster of houses. Other than Hotel Djupavik with its hearty portions and old-world atmosphere, the town’s real asset is the vast, derelict herring factory which dwarves everything else surrounding it on the edge of the fjord. When we passed Drangsnes and I told them we were going to Djupavik, one of the old men I spoke to shook his head: plenty of ghosts there, I tell you! I thought nothing more of the comment until we started circumnavigating the vast factory complex. It had clearly been abandoned, perhaps the waters had been overfished, but soot deposits and scarring to the building told another story. It seemed there had been a fire here. Whether the fire began in the main building or one of the enormous drums that they used to farm and store the fish, was impossible to say. We saw a sign that read ‘Contemporary Photography Exhibition’ and dutifully followed the path. I couldn’t believe it. Here, in the middle of nowhere, almost at the edge of the world, at the most westerly point of Iceland where very soon the road just stops, pointing out the closest that anyone can get to Hornstrandir by car, here they were hosting a photography expo.

‘Like a Berlin expo’ by Nigel Johnson

We clambered inside and walked about in amazement eyeing up needle-sharp nature photography and some conceptual art projects. In the eerie, semi-haunted atmosphere of the deserted factory, with slanting lights and echoes everywhere, you would be forgiven for thinking that you were in Berlin. It was so cosmopolitan. I wondered who was behind it. I inspected a pamphlet and found out: it was a young German man who worked at Hotel Djupavik. I was astounded, it must have taken him years to put together a gallery like this.

Storm at Talknafjordur in the Westfjords

08.06.2015

The droplets of water tumbling from the gutters of our rooftop are as large as fresh water pearls. Strings of rain smack against the windows, thick as the  guano that we saw yesterday smearing the cliffs of Latraberg. The Fjord is completely misted over though I can see across to the other side, the fierce gusts of wind that have been stirring the treetops ceaselessly since last night continue unabated. The dear little starling that has its home in the birch trees  behind out school building looks noticeably disconsolate. It has fluffed up its feathers but it is still as wet and soggy as a drenched pup. Everything that can move is moving: the swings in the playground outside, the normally calm fjord waters, the buoys marking the peripheries of the fish farms and lobster pots. There is a storm in Talknafjordur today.

The nattering of rain against the window, its endless rapping and the swelling whooshes of wind stirring up the cloud-filled fjord even further, caused such a racket that almost none of us could sleep last night. And it’s summer! Imagine, almost mid-June, yet apart from the light — ever-present as it is — we could be in Iceland’s deepest, darkest winter. This storm somehow feels more severe than the storms that you experience on land or even in the mountains, positioned as we are on the tip of the most westerly bit of land in Europe. This feels more like a storm at sea. We are the first land the elements have encountered in their mad dash across the Atlantic since Canada. The air has become ocean, it has become cloud, logic is disturbed, the elements are confused.

Prose Explaining Poetry: The Reykjavik Botanical Garden

The Botanical Garden: Moving to Erikshuis

By David Stanley from Reykjavík, Iceland

One of the most significant things to happen to me in Iceland was something I could not have planned: it was moving to Erikshuis. This ‘house’, a large wooden cabin turned SEEDS community building became something much more to me over the month that I lived there than a temporary residence: it became a kind of historical minefield of myth and memory, a safe haven away from the overly-touristed streets of central Reykjavik and eventually a source of creative inspiration. Erikshuis at first appealed to me purely on its own merits as a community accommodation; I knew nothing of the story that lay behind it. This story was pieced together over time, and largely thanks to information provided to me by the staff working at the Botanical Garden. As the history of the house unravelled itself, my admiration for it grew. It became as monumental to me for the characters that inhabited it and the lives it staged over time, as the sprawling mansions you find in Marquez novels or Steinbeck’s rattling prairie houses.

So what made it so special? As a building in its own right it had bundles of charm. It was large enough to sleep twenty people in an assortment of dormitory rooms and the raised ground floor level had a spacious community kitchen with a large wooden table at its centre and comfortable living room. It was clear that the building had seen better days, the floor noticeably slumped in places and the wood and furniture all bore a faded, though rustic look. As well as peeling paint and depreciating floors, the building had been used excessively by short and long-term volunteers since SEEDS took it over. It was full of the evidence of these mainly creative camps: strings of paper art and cuts outs, tattered atlases lining the walls, old photographs bearing witness to great former times blue-tacked up on the pine panelling. I realised that Erikshuis’ shabby-chic aesthetic did not meet all of the volunteer’s expectations; but for me its partial degradation and even structural incoherency was all part of its charm. It made it feel like a house, a place that had been lived in and loved. It bore like an old war veteran, the traces of all the campaigns and personalities that had found a safe-haven beneath its rafters.

However, the house itself would mean nothing to me if it hadn’t been built where it was. It was located on the fringes of the municipal botanical garden, in a large park on the capital’s west side. Due to the spill-over from the Botanical Garden and the persevering efforts of a gardener long ago, the house was surrounded by trees. Their branches chequered the overgrown lawn and small meadow outside and cast shadows against dormitory windows. Those of you who have been to Iceland will know how exceptional this is. Iceland is a country with astonishing natural scenery, but comparative to its size, very few trees. The sad plight of Iceland’s treeless demesne was brought home to me during a workshop I attended in April, presented by a representative from the Icelandic Forestry Association. This association committed to re-foresting the island, had been set up philanthropically by the Danish government fifty years ago. I imagine they wanted to encourage their remote Scandinavian satellite state to cultivate or reinstate their own native forest. As well as being a matter of national honour, it was also seen as one of the key strategies to combat one of Iceland’s biggest environmental threats: soil erosion.

The researcher leading the presentation claimed that there was evidence from the past suggesting that Iceland was once abundantly forested – he estimated 40% forest coverage, especially in coastal areas. However, now Iceland is the least forested country in Europe with a paltry 0.3% coverage of native forest and woodland. What happened?  Over-exploitation of the island’s forestry resource by settlers. It is a familiar story; heedless of their rapacious consumption of natural resources over a period of hundreds of years, Icelandic settlers depleted the native tree stock. It was not replenished. Now the only native trees to be found in Iceland are mangled prototypes of the Icelandic silver birch: gnarled, tangled and shrub-like. Due to its harsh and tempestuous climate it takes a long time for trees to grow in Iceland and the settlers did not plant as much wood as they cut down for timber to survive the long, dark Icelandic winters.

In Miklabraut or the town centre I found myself missing trees and parks. The stern grandeur of the fjord landscape was dazzling but it was not homely, I wanted leaves and branches; something more pastoral. But at Erikshuis there were trees and lots of them. In fact the cabin was surrounded by them and discretely tucked away in a back corner of the botanical garden I found a kind of quiet contentment in my environment that was singularly lacking on the busy Miklabraut thoroughfare.

Over the weeks that I spent volunteering at the Botanical Garden, brushing away protective layers of leaves from hibernating shrubs, pulling the slick white bulbs of various invasive species from the rich black soil, yet more nuggets of information about the house floated in my direction. It turns out that a recent project by the Reykjavik City Council to drain the valley upon which the Botanical gardens and Erikshuis rested, was unsettling the foundations of many of the older buildings. It also materialised that Erikshuis as well as the small bungalow named Laugatunga in which our volunteer group took our lunch and midday break, belonged to the Botanical Gardens as they were bought up by the city council years ago. Who were the owners before the sale? Well, as the director informed me, the original owner of Erikshuis was a man called Erik who built the house himself. He was a very educated man and a pioneer in botanics and gardening. Indeed it was the greenhouses that he erected in the extensive grounds of Erikshuis with the help of his wife and children, that provided the impetus for the foundation of the state-funded botanical gardens project itself.

What did he grow in the greenhouses? I was curious, knowing as I did how late Icelandic flora and fauna is to bloom and how short-lasting the flowering period is when they have budded. Bananas, replied Gurðer. I couldn’t believe my ears. Bananas! In Iceland? In the 1930s and 40s! It was an incredibly story. Gurðer smiled. Yes, Erik was the first biologist in Europe to try and grow bananas in greenhouses. My brain was racing, I couldn’t believe that my beloved Erikshuis was built by that man and that the foundations of the greenhouses still visible beside the office of the botanical gardens were his own pet project. Somehow – I can’t remember where now – I managed to see some photographs of the House in its heyday, when Eric lived there. It was in a much better condition then, immaculately presented with an arbour of roses arching about the front entrance. And his daughters! They were clearly middle class girls, the Icelandic land-owning class, yet they looked delightful, with bouncy shoulder-length hair and sparkling white pinafores. Apparently after Erik died his daughters continued to look after the greenhouses and their father’s pilot projects.

After I had seen the photographs and metabolised the story, I returned to the house with even more relish than before. He seemed such a powerful symbol somehow, did Eric, a pioneering and ambitious man undaunted by the environmental constraints of his time. He made beautiful places and devoted his time to realising unimaginable projects. He was an idealist in the best possible sense of the word.

On Photography: Snaefellsness Peninsula

A Weekend Away, May 2015

Gamla Guesthouse; Grundafjordur

I am lying on my bed after a shower, snatching some moments on my own to write about the events of the day before I sink into a deep and much needed sleep. The view outside my window is astonishing – the iconic Kirkjufell mountain is in full view from the first floor of the guesthouse. Now it is a dark, lumpy silhouette and its pinnacle is wreathed in blue-grey mist just wafted in from the sea. The long sunsets which Iceland is famous for at this time of year have not failed me this evening. The line where the Atlantic Ocean meets the sea at this northerly altitude is a smudge of rose pink and lemon yellow – a platter of Turkish delight veiled by reams of inky blue cumulus.

The Kirkjufell mountain is one of the most recognisable landmarks on the Snaefellsness peninsula. It has a stumpy trapezoid shape that reminds me a bit of a Roman sandal, yet it is also lined with a fine horizontal strata of snow. Its striking form and size is reminiscent of a volcano, yet its situation is oddly domestic, occupying the innermost part of the fjord like a manor house. The flat land which surrounds this pretty fjord allows the eye to travel easily across the small town of Grundafjordur, whose lights (now that it is almost dark) glimmer from the other side of the bay. Occasionally the star-white lights of incoming road vehicles dazzle, but this is not frequent as Snaefellsness is not exactly central London. In fact, though its proximity to Reykjavik means that it is probably one of the most easily accessible destinations from the capital, it is still one of the harshest and most barren peninsulas in Iceland. Certainly in winter, the rugged mountainous terrain and savage weather beat off the madding crowds.

To the Lighthouse: Playing the Tour Guide

Reykjavik Lighthouse

 An Outing to the Seltjarnarnes Peninsula, 17^th April 2015

Today the plan to go to Hvergerdi with the Kosovan group fell through, so as a last minute change of plan I decided to take them on a long walk to the Reykjavik lighthouse. The walk – which follows the gnarled edge of the Reykjavik coastline out onto the windswept peninsula – normally takes about an hour from the town centre. As we set out and approached the black rubix-cube outline of the Harper concert hall, the weather was not promising. A thick blanket of cloud hung low over the capital, submerging the pinnacles of the Esja mountains in the far distance, so all you could see was the arms of the ice-blue range fading off into the sea.

Journey to the East Fjords: Dieter Roth and Dorothy Iannone

Day Three

The Streets of the Seydisfjordur

We woke up to a white world – snow lay twenty centimetres deep on everything: the pavements, car bonnets, rooftops. Though it was beautiful it also rung a little warning bell in my mind: even in Iceland snow showers shouldn’t be falling in May. It was highly unusual and probably the result of climate change. It reminds me that one month on the verdict was officially out; the winter of 2014-15 had been one of the hardest in Iceland for over thirty years. Anyway, despite the snow we all felt it was high time to begin exploring the town. I had a little treasure hunt of my own that I wanted to follow up on. Funnily enough, the preceding day, as we were braving the mountain pass, a thought had occurred to me. The thought has its origins in a gallery retrospective that I had visited in Berlin in 2014, all about the life and work of the avant-garde American artist Dorothy Iannone.  Well, I vividly remember reading one of her graphic novels whimsically named ‘An Icelandic Saga’. The saga described a love story between the painter and her Swiss lover Dieter Roth whom she first met with her husband in the 70s. Leaving everything behind in America, Dorothy decided to live with Dieter in his artist residence in Iceland for several years. I remember reading elsewhere in the gallery that though this passionate love story was eventually to come to an end and Dorothy pick up sticks and live elsewhere (India I believe), she always remembered Dieter as the true love of her life. He must have been a very charismatic man. Anyway, en route to Seyðisfjörður, a small outpost in the east with a reputation for attracting artists and craftspeople, I caught myself thinking: I wonder if this is where Dorothy and Dieter lived together. It’s where I would have chosen, if I had been them. Reyjavik was too obvious, too mainstream. They wanted to disappear from the eye of the world; to devote themselves just to each other and art. Where better than here? A place entirely cut off from the rest of the world, nestling in the side of a mountain and looking out towards Norway.

On a hunch I asked the receptionist at the hostel, who, amazingly confirmed that Dieter did indeed live in the town with Dorothy. He continued to live there after she left him and many of his family members still lived there. I asked her if she knew him personally, she shook her head. It was before my time, she said. But people always said that he was a difficult man; brilliant but hard. I asked her what happened to him. Her eyes met mine, he drank himself to death. There is a video, he filmed it, filmed the whole thing. He filmed his death. I shuddered, it must have been a terribly painful and lonely way to die. Do you know where they lived together? I asked her. Yes, by the old harbour, in a small house there by the water’s edge. If you get lost, just ask, everyone in town knows it. I thanked her and then left with the others. After visiting the town church and idling along in snow-laden streets I decided to leave the others and head for the old harbour. I wanted to be alone there.

Seydisfjordur Church

Two people passed by: black figures in the snow, there was a little girl too I remember. They both looked at me curiously, standing in someone’s front garden looking out towards a solitary brown cabin with a small jetty at the waters edge.

Dieter’s House: At the End of the Jetty

There wasn’t a sound to be heard, except the soft brushing of the snow and the uncertain tread of my feet. Streets and roads no longer existed, it was just trial and error. There was something about the little cabin, modest, romantically situated, which filled me with sadness. I tried to imagine their love there; their absolute and total insularity from the rest of the world. They were both such fiercely talented people, yet their lives must have been full of silence. I thought of the way that Dieter killed himself. I had to turn away. I walked slowly back to the guesthouse.

Dieter’s Cabin: Detail

The others were excited when I met them again. We have just been to the Skaftfell Café – it was full of interesting artist prints etc. They asked me if I had found Dieter’s cabin, I nodded. Actually, if you want we can go back there, there were quite a lot of artist books on the shelves. Back out we went. While I had been filling in the missing puzzle pieces of Dieter and Dorothy’s life, so had they. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a line of Dieter’s colour etchings and prints hanging up on the wall – though there was nothing of Dorothy’s there.

Dieter’s Prints in Skaftfell, Centre for Visual Art

The prints were interesting, full of contorted, biomorphic forms swirling with body parts. They were both, after all, erotic artists, or at least artists who frequently used the body as a metaphor for other ideas and themes. In Dorothy’s work particularly, sex is always there: in a dark, magical, transcendental sense; an emblem of the self, of the absolute, of the deep life that exists within.

Detail of Prints: Mangled Bodies

I flicked open a hard-back. It was a collection of the love letters they sent to one another, mostly type-written. There were cursory, brief, full of the short-hand and sweet little names that lovers use with each other. It felt almost too close, too revealing. I closed the book and looked outside: it was still snowing.

As the nursery rhyme has it, what goes up must come down. We knew that to get home that evening we needed to ford the terrible summit once more. If it was scary before, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like up there now: it hadn’t stopped snowing once since last night.  And it was getting on: already midday. We all knew we had to get moving and leave Seyðisfjörður though we were enjoying ourselves. I looked at our pitiful vehicle parked outside: it was a car designed for cities and highways, not deep snow and icy roads, but we had no choice. Luckily for us an American couple from the hostel were also leaving that afternoon. We decided to team up. As they had a robust 4×4 they would lead the way and we would follow behind. As we slowly ascended the mountain leaving the town behind us, I had my first real experience of tough Icelandic driving conditions. The blizzard was thick and visibility was very bad, aside from the yellow markers that threatened to disappear into piles of snow, the road was impossible to see. We drove very slowly, following marker by marker. At its worst points, we could only see one marker ahead of the car. At one moment, the 4×4 was forced to stop as our brave American couple couldn’t see the road ahead of them at all: it was just a huge wall of white, might as well have been an avalanche for all we knew.

Driving in the Snow: On the Way Down

That journey seemed to last forever, all the while my eyes were trained on the distance, watching out for oncoming vehicles. None came. We were probably the last cars to make it that day, before the road was deemed impassable. When we got down to Egilsstaðir we had great trouble fixing a homeward route as the excellent roadconditions.is website was quickly narrowing down our options: roads all around us were on ‘yellow’ alert i.e. slippery but still passable. More and more were becoming red or ‘impassable’. At one point, we were forced to turn back on a very difficult ‘yellow’ road because a huge snow drift had made it impassable at one end. It was very dispiriting to turn back after 40 minutes of driving and return to Egilsstadir along a road that was already testing our driver and vehicle to its absolute limits.

The Lake at Egilsstadir

Anyway, I don’t want to speak about cars and driving anymore. You get the picture. However, because of Dieter, delays and snow we didn’t arrive to our final destination for the road trip – a farm with Jacuzzi – until very late that night. Then midnight dip beneath the stars, soothed us into shape for our pillows and a long, deep night’s rest.

Leaving the East Fjords