The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2006, Qupperneq 33

Vol. 60 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
75
moving in a column of silence so profound
as to command reverence.
All of a sudden, our guide is issuing
directions, advising us to fan out on the
meadow. Each is to find his or her own
way to the top. From experience, she says
that is what works best at this point. The
infamous Icelandic wind is picking up,
however, and several times I surrender to
its force. But the others all seem to be rush-
ing ahead effortlessly and it soon becomes
obvious that they won’t come down until
we join them at the top. I really don’t think
I can make it. After all, this is the same
wind, our leader has told us, that once blew
a flock of her grandfather’s sheep off the
very cliff towards which we are headed.
And then, like some quiet miracle, it
happens.
I stand up. My husband gives me his
hand and suddenly I am not just walking
but running uphill towards a lofty mead-
ow, atop a cliff that until today meant
nothing to me. For the past month I have
been searching unceasingly for one thing
above all - that ineffable spark of spirit
which makes me Icelandic. I expected to
find it in Horgardalur , in the barren valley
of my grandfather’s ancestral farm. I
looked for it in Seydisfjordur, the post-
card-pretty village of my grandmother. If
not in either of those places, I felt certain of
finding it at Thingvellir, the sacred parlia-
mentary plains of this ancient country.
After all, it was there in 1930 that my
grandfather, by then a Canadian, had
returned to deliver an address for the cele-
bration of Iceland’s millennial.
But the land and the latitude clearly
has something else in mind for me. Weary
but exhilarated, I let myself sink into the
thick grass at the summit. I have climbed
1500 feet, and it is here on Hornbjarg, the
most northern point in Iceland, that I have
finally found my Viking heart.
Margaret at the top.