The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Qupperneq 47

SPRING / SUMMER 1995
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
157
Author Bill Holm
Photograph by Per Breiehagen
tive, animal rights, low-fat, small planet, 12-
step, vegetarian food foolishness.
Stefansson was a life long defender of fat
meat — drinking the broth with his boiled
fat mutton, and living a vigorous life till 83,
doing everything current medical supersti-
tion tells you not to do. When Bellevue
Hospital had him dine on nothing but meat
for a year for a scientific study, his only re-
quest was to be allowed an occasional whis-
key with his fat soup and mutton. Praise to
him! and to his feisty book, Not by Bread
Alone.
Stefansson was a true Icelandic
biblioholic. He could not resist owning
books — 20,000 in his Polar collection,
3,000 on Iceland, and God knows how
many others. He filled endless New York
apartments and almost bankrupted himself
storing and tending his books. He couldn’t
live without them. Why should he? Books
are what make us human — the reading,
writing, collecting and loving of them. Not
guns, not money, not television, not ma-
chinery. Books. For an Icelander, whether
in the new or old world, they are not a habit
but a genetic code.
By Arnes, not far from the big lake, there
sits a little monument, a white stone and a
small black statue of Stefansson in his arc-
tic parka, as useful north of Gimli as on
Ellesmere Island. The inscription on the
white stone is the last sentence of his auto-
biography, what Isak Dinesen would call a
“motto.” “Whatever others may think after
reading these pages, I know what I have
experienced, and I know what it has meant
to me.” There is joy and courage in that
sentence. It could only have been said —
with anyjustice — by an extraordinary man.
And so he was. It is an honour for me to-
night to present this posthumous award to
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, to his widow Evelyn,
his helpmate, his partner, his love, for the
last 20 years of his life, and an extraordi-
nary woman in her own right. For all the
western Icelanders, and for our ancestors
on their North Atlantic rock, I am hon-
oured to present you this award.
I can’t resist closing by reading you one
of my own poems that Stefansson had no
use for. I hope he would have liked it
though. He began as a boy ambitious, like
so many Icelanders, to be a poet. But the
arctic caught him, and he made his own
kind of poetry — the poetry of fact, science,
adventure. This poem, Advice, is for the rest
of us — who stayed home and only imag-
ined the north. Stefansson danced with the
black-haired woman. Praise to Him!
Someone dancing inside us
has learned only a few steps;
the Do-Your-Work’in 4/4 time,
the ‘What-Do-You-Expect’ Waltz.
He hasn’t noticed yet the woman
standing away from the lamp,
the one with black eyes
who knows the rumba,
and strange steps in jumpy rhythms
from the mountains of Bulgaria.
If they dance together,
something unexpected will happen;
if they don % the next world
will be a lot like this one.