Summertime: Sitting on a blanket outside Talknafjörður playground

The Playground

I want this weekend to last forever. The word’s from Guðmundur Böðvarsson’s poem float seem to float about in the windless air:

One summer’s day

One summer’s day more.

This is the kind of summer day that Icelanders dream about in long, cold winters. This is the kind of summer’s day that they compose poems about. The chuckling of the brook washing down the mountainside, the soft pash of sunlight swamping my breast and face with light. The grass is lush, its leaves are rubbery and strong. Each cell is tough with life.

The sky is a pate of blue, the mountains are no longer the ice-violet I had come to find normal but a soft green-grey. The veins of snow are receding every day – they are just lacings now. The absolute clarity of the air, the purity of the sunshine the chill, naked view: it is something to strike wonder deep within.

This weekend has been a kind of gift from God, a gift after the later part of last week which was lacerated with sadness and tension. From out of that hell a heaven has miraculously appeared as abruptly as the dormant heads of Icelandic flowers in the botanical garden. The pastoral atmosphere that now surrounds me is the symbol of this metamorphosis, the long winter of the heart is over and now it is time to play.

For the past few days I have been chauffeured around the Westfjords from hotpot to hotpot, sinking into deep bubbling lagoons of bliss, fed, watered and looked after. It is enough to make me laugh a thousand times over. Out of the icy shame of last week, this flower has budded. I see blessings everywhere. The birds chirrup in the trees, the roads are clear and safe and possibilities for exploration seem endless. I am coming to really know this region. Yesterday, surfing along the road on the way to Isafjörður and watching the wavelets scissoring the coastline, I suddenly felt awash with great rippling sensations of happiness. I was completely sober. This was genuine euphoria: my whole body was alive and pulsing with happiness. Andrea was coming, I was going to meet Valentine, it was Saturday night, we were all going to go to the hot pot together. Everything was potential, fun, and full of the heady reckless abandon of summer frolicking. I was free and at liberty to enjoy nature’s bounty in one of the most beautiful places in the world.  The midnight sun did not set for me that night, light and life and were everywhere.

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.