Lögberg-Heimskringla - 25.09.1992, Blaðsíða 2

2 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 18. september 1992
Postcard,
continued from page 1
north, near Akureyri, and my grand-
mother from Hofi in Hjaltadal, to
meet and marry in Winnipeg and
eventually move up to Gimli on the
shores of Lake Winnipeg to raise their
family in the first Icelandic town in
North America.
My mother was the only one of
their children to marry an English
Canadian (Irish, but diluted by five
generations). I offered my history
apologetically to Icelandic relatives I
had never met, trying to explain my
lack of the language. My mother had
never encouraged me to leam because
she wanted to gossip freely with her
sisters during the summers I spent as a
child in Gimli — but I studied Anglo-
Saxon and Old Norse so that
redeemed me somewhat, and enabled
me to understand what I read if not
what I heard.
Notwithstanding, I feel comfortable
in Iceland, homey even, surrounded
by the sounds of a language I associ-
ate with love and security: “It is short
comfort to pee in one’s boots.”
“Yow, yow,” said my grandfather (I
think Iceiandic for yes is spelled já,
but everyone says yow, to rhyme with
wow), when I first flashed this
proverb. “That would be the shep-
herds.”
That memory made me scan the
furzey horizon for their keepers
whenever I saw sheep, of which there
are a passel (not as many as in New
Zealand, though). I never saw a shep-
herd, cold or dry. The sheep were on
their own. Icelandic sheep give the
phrase ‘wild and woolly’ fresh perti-
nence — and oh, the flavour! Of
course I bought an Icewool sweater
and ate lamb — the best lamb I have
ever tasted anywhere. AIso the best
fish.
I altemated lamb, fish, lamb, fish
every night for three weeks and never
tired of them, though I have eaten nei-
ther since, because they won’t taste
the same. For a Western Icelander
(the designation for Canadians whose
ancestors came from Iceland), it’s not
merely a case of deja mange. It’s a
memory of sights never seen, lives
never lived, and a gut response to an
astonishing harsh, frozen, shining cul-
ture never polished.
It took twelve days in a Mercedes-
Benz bus to drive up and down and
around the entire island on a some-
times rocky and never more than two-
lane ring road completed only within
the last five years. The south-eastern
section was the last to be finished,
wending as It does through a bleak
Gimli INL makes plans
The 1992-93 season began with a
regular meeting on September 9,
1992. Beside the usual agenda items,
the membership heard from Peter
Bjomson about the tentative projects
being discussed by the Youth Group
of the League, also an up-date on the
activities of the main INL Executive
and the favorable response to the
fund raising campaign.
Under new business an item for
consideration was raised. This was
the need to preserve our history by
talking to seniors in the community
and recording this on either audio or
video tape. Further discussion about
this proposal will take place.
A committee was stmck to plan for
the 1993 Convention of the Icelandic
National League which will be held
in Gimli on April 23-25, 1993.
Plans were also made to receive a
guest speaker from Iceland — Paul
Richardson, director of the Icelandic
Farm Holiday Association. He will
talk about Iceland in general and
about how to use farms to see the
whole country and get closer to the
people. Those who would like to find
their roots in Iceland or visit the
country for the 50th anniversary of
the republic would be most interested
in the presentation. He will be
accompanied by Thordis Eiriksdottir,
manager at the Farm Holidays
Association and Einar Gustavsson,
director of Icelandic Tourist Board in
New York.
Mr. Richardson will speak and
show a slide presentation at 7:30
p.m., October 1, 1992, in the multi-
purpose room, Gimli High School.
Everyone is welcome.
The meeting came to a conclusion
with the drawing of names for the
1992 raffle. Winners were: lst prize -
Icelandic sweater - Amelia
Thordarson, Gimli; 2nd - Afghan -
Lorne Anderson, Gimli; 3rd -
Beverage set - Bev Stevens, Gimli; 4th
- Icelandic mitts - Pat McKenzie,
Leduc, Alberta; and 5th - “Framfari”
book - Rosevelt Thompson, Gimli.
D.N.

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terrain still not recovered from the
eruption of a volcano three centuries
ago.
In Canada I had leamed that we
owe our Icelandic heritage to the
eruption of a volcano in the late nine-
teenth century, and had thought
somehow that it was a rare event. Not
so. The island is volatile. Dyngjuföll
empted in 1875, covering a huge area
in the north and east with volcanic
ash and driving people from their
homes coincidentally with an erup-
tion of immigration that sent disgrun-
tled, hungry Europeans to the New
World. If the sheep could have left,
they would have too, because
Icelandic volcanoes are seldom still
and neither sheep nor anything else
may safely graze on the tentative
lichen searching to soften lava rocks
even after a hundred years.
No one had told me that. The 45
minute drive from the airport at
Keflavík to Reykjavík, where almost
half of Iceland’s 250,000 people live,
made the dark side of the moon look
inviting. We passed over an ancient,
timeless, unforgiving, barren land-
scape. The city, by surprising contrast,
is a place where old meets temporary.
Reykjavík, set in the country with the
oldest parliament in Europe, founded
in 930 A.D. (and the only country in
the world to adopt Christianity by an
act of parliament), looks new and
makeshift.
Evidently lava rocks are unsuitable
building material and there are no
trees in Iceland. (A massive tree-
planting program, bringing in Alaska
pines and birches, has barely begun to
have an effect.) In the not-so-long-ago
olden daýs, houses were made of sod.
I went through a nine-room sod
manor, a museum, and thought of the
Masai hut made of manure bricks that
I had crept through — not so differ-
ent, but for the climate. Sod doesn’t
last as long as stone. Later houses
made of corrugated iron rusted almost
instantly. Not until this century, when
poured concrete and concrete blocks
were developed, have any buildings
Holtasel farm in the shadow of Fláajökull, a
tongue of Europe’s largest glacier,
Vatnajökull.
lasted fifty years, with stucco finishes
that require frequent patching and
painting — every few years. The oldest
commercial building in Reykjavík was
built in 1855 (by my great grandfather,
Robert Tergesen) and has just been
designated a heritage building, simply
for the virtue of lasting that long. The
city planners are going to remove the
large front windows and restore it to
its original ugly appearance.
The questions begin to arise: How
could people live in this country?
And why? For beauty? For hot
springs and cold lakes, green mead-
ows and black mountains, reckless
waterfalls and relentless glaciers, fire
and ice? Those are reasons? I think
they stay, have stayed, not for the
carefree lightening of the spirits for
almost twenty four hours on a sum-
mer’s day but expressly for the dark-
ening, huddling assertion of the spirit
in the gloom of the winter-long night.
I’ve been imagining those people shiv-
ering in their sod houses in the dark-
ness telling each other stories to keep
terror at bay — and writing them
down, to last, on leather pages bound
in scarce wood. I’m reading all the
sagas now, finding out who I am, at
last. Tip of the iceberg.
Copywright: BettyJane Wylie, 1992
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