Lögberg-Heimskringla - 28.07.2000, Síða 19

Lögberg-Heimskringla • Sérútgáfa • Föstudagur 28. júlí 2000 • 19
Fiction
Eccentric Islands
Bill Holm has generously agreed to share
something from his new book Eccentric
Islands with the readers o/L-H. The weli
known Ámerican-Icelandic author writes
eloquently with wit, insight, and the sliarp
eye of the outsider about several visits to
Iceland. His first visit took place in 1979
when he travelled to Iceland on a
Fulbright scholarship to teach American
Literature. It was at the same time a pil-
grimage to the land ofliis ancestors to dis-
coverfor himself what truth, if any, there
was in the mytli from his childhood in
Minneota, Minnesota—“this myth of the
proud unbending farmer intellectual hurl-
ing improvised sarcastic poems (in perfect
rhyme and metre) into the howling sea
wind. A boy could do worse than have tliat
slightly fantastic and completely impracti-
cal mythic seed planted in his brain, ”
I have chosen a short piece from his
introduction to the trip as well as a part
where he writes about his experiences on
a farm in the district his grandfather
Sveinn Jóhannesson emigrated from to
America. —G. Isfeld
Bill Holm
Minneota, MN
So Bill Holm asked the Fulbright
Commission to send him slowly
away by water. He bought a red
used Ford Pinto, a car then drastically
cheap because of a potentially exploding
gas tank, packed it with books, a clavi-
chord, two half gallons of Rebel Yell
bourbon, a goose feather coat, and his
felt-lined Arctic Pac boots—good for
saving your toes from amputation down
to fifty below. He booked passage on the
Bakkafoss (Bakka Falls—all Icelandic
Steamship Company boats are named for
the country’s oversupply of scenic
cataracts), leaving from Portsmouth,
Virginia a few days before Christmas.
The Pinto disappeared into a sealed
freight container, and Holm found him-
self in a two-room suite on the main
deck, the only passenger (and the only
true foreigner) on this mostly hamburg-
er-patty-Wonder-bun, and smuggled beer
cargo ship. This was more luxurious than
his grandparents’ probably steerage tick-
ets on a three-masted British schooner in
1878, but it was the best he could do to
honour their journey west.
The few surviving old-fashioned
turf farrns are now museums,
national relics to remind the Icelanders
of their own history, and sometimes to
shock foreigners who cannot imagine
literature being made in these crowded,
disease-ridden, clammy little hovels.
The Icelanders might respond to that
puzzlement by saying: how else or
where else do you imagine that true lit-
erature about human beings is made? In
drawing rooms? In formal gardens? At
beach resorts? The baðstofa of a turf
farm makes a perfectly satisfactory “rag
and boneshop for the heart”—and the
imagination.
After about 1920, farms began to be
built of concrete, but the general princi-
ple of architecture remained the same.
Animals, humans, hay, tools, all togeth-
er in a row, one door opening to the
other, the smells and the warmth of the
one keeping the other company.
Gilsárteigur was the real McCoy, a gen-
uine vintage Icelandic farm; the horse
barn connected to the house, the old
sheep barn underneath (the house was
built on a small slope). Two of
Snæþór’s (the old farmer’s) children
farmed there, living in separate wings
of the big rambling farmstead, sister
Gunna and her husband Jón, brother
Bjössi and his wife Salla. The thirteen-
year-old sister Kidda lived there, and
two little boys working for the summer:
Siggi and Guðmundur, both twelve or
thirteen. The farm boasted several hun-
dred sheep, all named and recorded in a
book of sheep genealogy, a fine herd of
Icelandic ponies with their shaggy
manes and no-nonsense faces, a few
wandering chickens, and a dependable
old brown cow who furnished the fami-
lies’ milk and cream to whip for pan-
cakes.
Into this melange of Icelandic
speakers arrived the thirty-seven-year-
old Holm, erstwhile poet, professor of
American literature and piano thumper
who had spent his first decades trying to
escape manure and hay on a farm in
western Minnesota, and who possessed
a twelve-to-fifteen word workable
vocabulary of Icelandic, a pocket dic-
tionary, good intentions, and, suddenly,
a sense of deep terror and lone.liness at
the prospect of what he had gotten him-
self into. The family welcomed him
with fine unsentimental warmth, fed
him coffee and a pancake or two, and
showed him to his room, a small bed
built onto the wall of a steeply gabled
room. The bed, about 5 1/2 feet long
and nanow, had an Icelandic eiderdown
dúnsœng (quilt) folded at one end.
Holm was (and is) a heavy, broad-
beamed fellow 6 feet 5 inches long.
Gunna looked him over quizzically, and
said (in Icelandic, of course), “We did-
n’t know you were so damn big.” Holm,
trying to be polite in his pidgin
Icelandic, butchered a sentence or two
in an awkward attempt to set her at ease
and reassure her of his gratitude. Mohr
sipped a little coffee, ate a pancake or
two, watched Holm fumble for words,
and soon left for the airport, Reykjavík,
and Europe. On the way to town he told
Holm once more that he was crazy, but
added, “This might be one hell of an
experience.” So it was.
Holrn had done his best since child-
hood to forget the rhythm of farm life—

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